Chapter 1 Intentionality and Foundations of Logic: a New Approach to Neurocomputation

In this work we start from the idea that intentionality is the chief characteristic of intelligent behavior, both cognitive and deliberative. Investigating the ''originality of intelligent life'' from this standpoint means investigating ''intentional behavior'' in living organisms. In this work, we ask epistemological questions involved in making the intentional behavior the object of physical and mathematical inquiry. We show that the subjective component of intentionality can never become object of scientific inquiry, as related to self–consciousness. On the other hand, the inquiry on objective physical and logical components of intentional acts is central to scientific inquiry. Such inquiry concerns logical and semantic questions, like reference and truth of logical symbols constituted as such, as well as their relationship to the ''complexity'' of brain networking. These suggestions concern cognitive neuroscience and computability theory, so to constitute one of the most intriguing intellectual challenges of our age. Such metalogical inquiry suggests indeed some hypotheses about the amazing ''parallelism'', ''plasticity'' and ''storing capacity'' that mammalian and ever human brains might exhibit. Such properties, despite neurons are over five orders of magnitude slower than microchips, make biological neural nets much more efficient than artificial ones even in execution of simple cognitive and behavioral tasks.