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Combining 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.
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KINDS OF MINDS Toward an Understanding of Consciousness DANIEL C. DENNETT A Member of the Perseus Books Group -iii- The Science Masters Series is a global publishing venture consisting of original science books written by leading scientists and published by a worldwide team of twenty-six publishers assembled by John Brockman. The series was conceived by Anthony Cheetham of Orion Publishers and John Brockman of Brockman Inc., a New York literary agency, and developed in coordination with BasicBooks. The Science Masters name and marks are owned by and licensed to the publisher by Brockman Inc. Copyright © 1996 by Daniel Dennett. Published by BasicBooks A Member of the Perseus Books Group All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Basic Books, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022-5299. Designed by Joan Greenfield ISBN 0-465-07351-4 (pbk.) 99 00 01 ❖/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 -iv- CONTENTS Preface 1 What Kinds of Minds Are There? Knowing Your Own Mind We Mind-Havers, We Minders Words and Minds The Problem of Incommunicative Minds 2 Intentionality: The Intentional Systems Approach Simple Beginnings: The Birth of Agency Adopting the Intentional Stance The Misguided Goal of Propositional Precision Original and Derived Intentionality 3 The Body and Its Minds From Sensitivity to Sentience? The Media and the Messages "My Body Has a Mind of Its Own!" vii 1 1 3 8 12 19 19 27 41 50 57 57 65 73 -v- 4 How Intentionality Came into Focus The Tower of Generate-and-Test The Search for Sentience: A Progress Report From Phototaxis to Metaphysics 5 The Creation of Thinking Unthinking Natural Psychologists Making Things to Think With Talking to Ourselves 6 Our Minds and Other Minds Our Consciousness, Their Minds Pain and Suffering: What Matters Further Reading Bibliography Index 81 81 93 98 119 119 134 147 153 153 161 169 175 180 -vi- PREFACE I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers. I haven't begun by insulting myself and my discipline, in spite of first appearances. Finding better questions to ask, and breaking old habits and traditi