Comment by vidarh

> Do you deny semantics and intentionality are features of the human mind?

I deny they are anything more than computation. And so your original argument was begging the question and so logically unsound.

> The point is that computation as we understand it in computer science is purely syntactic

Then the brain is also purely syntactic unless you can demonstrate that the brain carries out operations that exceeds the Turing computable, because unless that is the case the brain and a digital computer are computationally equivalent.

As long as your argument does not address this fundamental issue, you can talk about "aboutness" or whatever else you want all day long - it will have no relevance.