This book is filled with Dennett's essays and wrapped in Edward Gorey.

This really happened.

This book has some worthy insights, and is good for understanding the popular psych view from the era it was written in, and has some nice insights on the author's psychological worldview on the nature of dreams, although I wouldn't recommend it to anybody generally--maybe for some specific academic purposes. Still, it is a better love-story than Twilight.

interesting....

Wonderful and fascinating collection of essays. My thoughts aren't in order enough to engage much with Dennett's "conclusions" here -- I would really need to sit down with each chapter and go through it slowly -- but that doesn't diminish my praise. His writing about the nature of cognitive processes, and how we talk about psychology & consciousness, is always careful, entertaining, thoughtful, and reflects a deep understanding of what philosophy can/should do in light of science and the way language works. Many of these essays are difficult to follow at times, but I think that is the nature of the subject matter. Dennett does a better job of making these questions accessible than any other writer I've read (and I think that reflects his understanding, not because he is simplifying things, though maybe that is because I don't properly understand other writers!). The whole book is great, particularly the sections on pain, mental images (why we should treating them as intentionalistic objects in a phenomenological sense), consciousness, and decision making/choice/creativity (enjoyed his use of the Valery model). I wish I understood some of the comments on Fodor/Ryle/Skinner better, and am still not clear on exactly what he is advocating for as the project of psychology + cognitive science. The ending chapters that took on more moral questions were all interesting and well-articulated, though I felt like they were potentially the most open to objection. Having now read two of his books I am fairly convinced I want to read all of them.

Not an enjoyable read at all. It suffers from serious academia-oriented writing with a dash of its time period to make it even more stale. Don't get me wrong, there are some important ideas in here, but it is so not reader friendly. Combine that with how old the material is now and I couldn't recommend it as a read unless one were doing specific research on the topic and just had to include it for the sake of completeness.