Possibility & Result of Representing Intentions in the real world.
Although Intentions are our own, it is not usual to represent Intentions as expressible items. The reason being whenever we want to express an intention it has to be adequately expressed for the immediate audience's understanding. In doing that the intention is translated into an action[interesting!] and has to be expressed in a way suitable- or attuned to audience's background, bias and previous knowledge.
This very exercise however can make the original intention being misrepresented, misunderstood -i.e. generate unintended consequences.
This discussion is to elaborate on the role of intentions in our personal and social life and social engineering and possibly find an optimal way to represent intention for our understanding.
The motivation in doing that has originated from the discipline of requirement analysis and role of language in building software. This field is not yet being formalised to a great extent; however the role of words and languages in our daily life is so vast that a simple rule of expressing intention and its subsequent transformation for different audience group is some thing that can possibly be addressed at best as a psychological discipline. Intention invariably needs the 'attention' or 'focus of the mind'. The psychological behaviour of the act of focusing [& perceiving an intention] and act of carrying out an action[i.e. expressing an intention ] in real world can be related in an interesting way. Action is something that creates a series of consequential focus -in possibly different minds -and as such an action can be conceived as a collection of focus [with perceived intentions] from different people in the immediate audience group. This series of focus can be conceived as a flow of focus. If we do that, the series of focus can possibly be given a name which would express the original intention. Question is if we follow this as a discipline, are there any generic simple intentions [ i.e. intentions that give rise to all other intentions]that is common across all human mind -that can be expressed in one common human language-without being misrepresented? Does the presence of such intention indicates that different human being are constantly trying to communicate with each other? Does the absence of such intentions is just the limitation of the language or culture or is it an indication to far more undiscovered traits of human mind ?
If you subscribe or oppose or want to add to this point of view of intentions and reality please respond and leave your comments.
So let us make this bold assumption that intentions are real entities that has some structure albeit in-visible to human eye-but nonetheless governed by the natural laws of some kind just like every organic element of this universe is goverened by. If this structure is real it has some organic dependencies to other entities that are visible to human eye.The justification of the postulation is the notion that in reality every structure has some dependency with every other structure in reality.
If that is the case then we can see that intentions are manifestation of mind that exists in organic beings and intentions make the life real for these organic beings.This also means intentions have the power to change the reality of these organic entities.So how do we represent intentions and its relation to our human life in general. How does intentions and scientific view of humanity merge together?
In software field when we use the term flow, we refer to a certain kind of dynamism involving data. Usualy a flow of data will have a source and a target. The source and target are different from the data itself. We can say that the source and target are in the category of meta-knowledge about the data. In the same way flow can also be taken as a meta-knowledge about the data by giving it a name and other properties like categories e.g. "month-end flow", or "vertical flow" etc. The concept of meta-knowledge or knowledge about knowledge may sound meta-physical. However in computer science we donot have a luxury of treating meta and ordinary things as two different kind of things. In computer both the meta and the ordinary takes some casual bytes to represent them. However the human mind that interprets those bytes treats them differently and that they do must to write any thing that we know as software programs.
In the initial days of computer software writing computer scientists were trying to find a machine that can possibly come up with a means to manipulate this meta data to do more interesting thing than running a pre-coded program.
In physics and other sciences, we donot usualy categorise the flow of things and the things in a common category. We treat things as disctinctly different from flow of things. We explain flow by bringing external factors like gravity,force,curvature in space etc etc.
