Kinds Of Minds: Toward An Understanding Of ConsciousnessCombining ideas from philosophy, artificial intelligence, and neurobiology, Daniel Dennett leads the reader on a fascinating journey of inquiry, exploring such intriguing possibilities as: Can any of us really know what is going on in someone else's mind? What distinguishes the human mind from the minds of animals, especially those capable of complex behavior? If such animals, for instance, were magically given the power of language, would their communities evolve an intelligence as subtly discriminating as ours? Will robots, once they have been endowed with sensory systems like those that provide us with experience, ever exhibit the particular traits long thought to distinguish the human mind, including the ability to think about thinking? Dennett addresses these questions from an evolutionary perspective. Beginning with the macromolecules of DNA and RNA, the author shows how, step-by-step, animal life moved from the simple ability to respond to frequently recurring environmental conditions to much more powerful ways of beating the odds, ways of using patterns of past experience to predict the future in never-before-encountered situations. Whether talking about robots whose video-camera "eyes" give us the powerful illusion that "there is somebody in there" or asking us to consider whether spiders are just tiny robots mindlessly spinning their webs of elegant design, Dennett is a master at finding and posing questions sure to stimulate and even disturb. |
Contents
| 19 | |
The Body and Its Minds | 57 |
How Intentionality Came into Focus | 81 |
The Creation of Thinking | 119 |
Our Minds and Other Minds | 153 |
Further Reading | 169 |
Bibliography | 175 |
Index | 181 |
Other editions - View all
Kinds Of Minds: Toward An Understanding Of Consciousness Daniel C. Dennett No preview available - 2008 |
Common terms and phrases
ABC learning activities adopting the intentional agent ancestors answer artifacts B. F. Skinner behavior beliefs and desires birds body brain Cambridge Capgras delusion chimp chimpanzee Clark's Nutcrackers cognitive concepts Connectionism consciousness Darwin's Dangerous Idea Dennett derived intentionality Descartes designed dogs effectors Elaine Morgan entities environment ethologist evolution evolutionary experience exploit fact Gregorian creature hence human idea imagine instance intelligence intentional stance intentional system internal kinds of minds label language light lives look macromolecules matter medium mental microagents mind tools mind-havers mindless molecules moral move natural nervous system nest Nicholas Humphrey organisms Oxford pain particular perspective philosophers phototaxis piping plover plants Popperian Popperian creatures prediction Press/A Bradford Book proposition psychologists question rationale reason representation robots self-replicating sense sensitivity sentience simple Skinnerian creatures sort species suffering suppose task things thought tion tional toad track transducers tures turn words
Popular passages
Page 57 - In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.
Page 27 - The intentional stance is the strategy of interpreting the behavior of an entity (person, animal, artifact, whatever) by treating it as if it were a rational agent who governed its "choice" of "action" by a "consideration" of its "beliefs
Page 78 - The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herdsman. Your little intelligence, my brother, which you call 'spirit', is also an instrument of your body, a little instrument and toy of your great intelligence.
Page 79 - Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage - whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your body.
Page 78 - — so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children ? But the awakened one, the knowing one, saith : " Body am I entirely, and nothing more ; and soul is only the name of something in the body.
Page 155 - Mental contents become conscious not by entering some special chamber in the brain, not by being transduced into some privileged and mysterious medium, but by winning the competitions against other mental contents for domination in the control of behavior, and hence for achieving longlasting effects — or as we misleadingly say, "entering into memory.
Page 17 - Perhaps the kind of mind you get when you add language to it is so different from the kind of mind you can have without language that calling them both minds is a mistake.
Page 151 - Now consider whether knowledge is a thing you can possess in that way without having it about you, like a man who has caught some wild birds — pigeons or what not — and keeps them in an aviary he has made for them at home. In a sense, of course, we might say he ' has ' them all the time inasmuch as he possesses them, mightn't we ? THEAET.
Page 19 - I notice something and seek a reason for it; this means originally: I seek an intention in it, and above all someone who has intentions, a subject, a doer: every event a deed - formerly one saw intentions in all events, this is our oldest habit. Do animals also possess it? As living beings, must they not also rely on interpretations based on themselves? The question "why?" is always a question after the causa finalis,9 after the "what for?
Page 151 - ... possess in that way without having it about you, like a man who has caught some wild birds — pigeons or what not — and keeps them in an aviary he has made for them at home. In a sense, of course, we might say he ' has ' them all the time inasmuch as he possesses them, mightn't we ? THEAET. Yes. SOCR. But in another sense he