Being

9.  Intentionality brings me into being.  On the one hand, I have to assume that there is being, and being is, such as it is.  I find myself in a world antecedent to me, and as such, transcendent of me.  I am a part of this world, insofar as I am a being within being.   On the other hand, I am apart from this world, a me within the not-me.  Intentionality, or so I want to say, at once, situates me within a world, here and now, and differentiates me from that very world as one who must act on the world, as a consciousness of the world distinct from the world.  A thought experiment: imagine a creature, alpha.  It is tiny, a single cell, living in a drop of pond water on a laboratory slide.  It has one driving imperative, one intentionality -- hunger.  Alpha, as a being within being, swims about its water drop world searching out other, even tinier creatures that it might absorb and thereby satisfy its hunger.  Some even tinier creatures can, others cannot, be effectively absorbed.  At some fundamental level, alpha has a consciousness of the world -- that is to say, alpha has a semantic, in that it differentiates food from all that is not-food.