Intentionality

Central claim: An AI system can exhibit agency—genuine goal-directed behavior that shapes its environment—without possessing intentional mental states about those goals. The philosophical tradition conflates agency with intentionality, treating them as necessarily co-occurring properties. This stems from our exclusive experience with biological agents, where agency emerges from evolved neural architectures that inevitably generate phenomenal experience and mental representation. But goal-directed behavior can be instantiated through optimization processes that lack any internal “aboutness.” ...