purpose or telos: how it explains how brains (and souls) really work

If you really want to understand how brains work ("to create mind", a certain level of consciousness), I claim that the best starting point today is the open access paper Werbos, P. J., & Davis, J. J. (2016). Regular cycles of forward and backward signal propagation in prefrontal cortex and in consciousness. Frontiers in systems neuroscience, 10, 97. (It reviews the big picture, and cites lots of further sources.)

Why should you believe me?

Quick answer: this paper was a major watershed for the TELEOLOGICAL approach, which assumes that the brain is not just any old complex systems, but a system evolved to serve ultimate values or TELOS ....

Here is what I posted this morning to a neuroscience discussion list, where one of the people wants to understand brains as "intentional shystems":

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in·ten·tion·al·i·ty

/inˌten(t)SHəˈnalədē/

Learn to pronounce

noun

1. the fact of being deliberate or purposive.

   • PHILOSOPHY

     the quality of mental states (e.g., thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) that consists in their being directed toward some object or state of affairs.

   
   

Getting past your debate with Shiva (which I leave to you two).. it is important to ask "What is the REALITY behind this word 'intentionality'?" That is perhaps less a matter of choosing a definition, and more a matter of how we understand reality.

The word "intentionality" in SOME version is of central importance to neuroscience. The behaviorist approach of BR Skinner has largely been limited and put on a leash in the study of human psychology, but in neuroscience there is still a dominant tendency of many people to study the brain "without using their own mirror neurons." Many people model the neural networks of the brain as if the brain were any old complex system, the same mathematics they would use to model the motion of clouds or pond scum. Some people even imagine that sheer complexity is enough to produce intelligence/consciousness/mind, in a way which suggests that a pond full of scum without soul should be more conscious than a human brain. 

The alternative approach, which needs to guide neuroscience more than it now does, is the frank out-of-the-closet TELEOLOGICAL approach. 

Teleology is not exactly the same as intentionality. People talk about "intentionality" in neuroscience more than "teleology," because the word "intentionality" seems softer. But some of us are not called to be softies. The issue is important, and we need to be clear about it.

I would claim that we cannot begin to understand how brain-level consciousness works without accounting for the central role of TELOS or purpose. And yes, the paper by Werbos and Davis (which anyone can find easily via scholar.google.com, if you know to click on the usual three lines) expounds that approach, reviewing a lot of the work building up to it. 

In technical terms, what is the difference between intentionality and teleology?

In discussions with the usual fuzzy world, I wouldn't try to make that distinction, because the conflict between goal-free affect-free psychology and BOTH of these related ideas is a more urgent issue here and now. Why obsess on conflicts between good guys, when both are being marginalized (in computational neuroscience at least) by a great mass of affect-free zombies?

But in discussions within the realm of good guys... I remember a great debate on "intelligent systems" led by Albus and Meystel (famous in parts of AI and robotics) which I contributed to.

A key debate: are intelligent systems (minds) systems which learn to achieve GOALS, TARGETS... (intentionality)... or do they maximize some measure of happiness or telos (teleology, the tradition from Aristotle to Bentham to Von Neumann and Raiffa)? I still support the SECOND position. Goals are a big part of human life, just as "predictive analytics" and pattern recognition are, but they are SUBSYSTEMS, subordinate to the larger teleological system which they evolved to serve.  

I see no reason to believe that souls or noospheres are any different. I say that after rather intense exploration both of the phenomenon and the history of the explorations of others. Even the Lagrange-Euler equations which Jack and  others have discussed for centuries are a special case of the more general Von Neumann/ Bellman systems for maximizing or minimizing a utility function over time. Without a firm grasp of the ever-present issue of purpose, one can never really engage with any of these realities in a deep way. 

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(The Werbos and Davis paper maps the mathematics of optimization systems to specific structures, and shows how real-time empirical data from a couple of the key parts of the brain fit with that mathematics.)