The concepts of meaning and intentionality play a central role in understanding animal and human intelligence, and they are crucial for creating artifacts with intelligent behavior and robust autonomy in real-life scenarios. The Intentional Dynamical Systems Symposium IDS'04 was held in Memphis, Tennessee, April 26-27, 2004, and it gave a forum to researchers working on the intensively developing interdisciplinary area of dynamical approaches to embedded cognition, based on self-organized development of autonomous systems. The present issue contains selected papers from the symposium addressing dynamical aspects of intentionality and intelligent behavior. All papers have been carefully peer reviewed to meet the standards of the journal. Contributions to this issue cover neuro-physiological foundations of human cortical dynamics, computational neuro-pharmacology and hippocampal modeling, development of KIII models for cognitive map generation, utilization of KII and KIII sets as logical gates and associative memories for odor recognition, evolutionary development of control for autonomous robot, and incorporating emotional representations in interactive robots.