Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness

It's a fairly interesting read. Dennett employs philosophy, evolution, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to examine the nature of minds. Most irritating, however, is Dennett's arrogance. I found myself adding ' I would argue that' before every time he said 'it is', and adding ' and some people still do' when he said 'people used to think...". Dennett is one smart cookie, and really doesn't need to appeal to the power of persuasive language to make his points.

A nice, short book that examines the philosophy of mind, consciousness.
One theme is exploring what sets humans apart, and what we have in common with other animals.
Another theme is the moral issue of pain and suffering.
I wouldn't say this book is very mind-blowing, no outrageous conclusions are reached.
Instead, Dennett presents a useful re-framing of common questions, as philosophers are oft to do.
The book's thesis might be that consciousness, as we know it, inherits from the language instinct.
Dennett proposes our conscious self is a concept attributed to the dominating forces in our behavior.
These dominating forces themselves are concepts, too, and so a part of our linguistic development.

This is a short book which describes how we should expect to get minds from evolution and what kinds of minds evolution has created. I listened to the audio book with a friend, so this review is all from memory and I may get a few things wrong.

There are a few key ideas that I have taken away from this book. The first is the difference between lock and key type mechanisms and models. I’m forgetting which word he uses for the latter, but suffice it to say that there is a difference between a sense like smell, or any purely chemical cascade, and a sense like sight. In the former you have more of a look-up table; a chemical comes into contact with the system and the system has a predefined way of reacting. It is also based entirely on local dynamics -- you don’t need to sense anything far away. In the latter case you need models. It’s possible to have a look-up table for vision, but it would probably be prohibitively expensive and near useless. There are so many different situations that arise when you are observing distal visual cues in your environment that to be able to react to them quickly you likely need to model your environment. It is this switch, from being a thing that reacts (Darwinian/Skinnerian creatures) to being a thing that models (Popperian) that gets closer to the kinds of minds we humans have, and farther from the kinds of mind insects have.

The second idea is his famous intentional stance. This is in contrast to both the physical and design stance. All three are defined as different ways we predict our environment. When using the physical stance (e.g., physics or chemistry) we predict outcomes based on physical laws, when using the design stance (e.g., biological or mechanical systems) we predict outcomes based on design principles, and when using the intentional stance (e.g., other people) we predict based on mental properties. He notes that the intentional stance can be applied to most living things if we let time vary. For instance, watching a video of a tree growing in fast forward leaves us feeling as if it were ‘trying’ to go towards the light, that it ‘wanted’ the light, etc. However, trees do not have minds like ours. IIRC he explains that the speed which we (humans) need to react to our environment necessitates a mind like ours, but the slower pace which trees react in doesn’t. I am not totally compelled by his thoughts on this. To me it seems like trees don’t have minds because most of their computation is very localized, e.g., group of cells sense light over there, grow a little more over there. It doesn’t depend on a central system to execute orders because it doesn’t need to have a central intelligence. There is not much more to being a tree than avoiding growing into other trees, growing towards light, getting water, etc., all of which can be accomplished by local computation (as far as I can tell).

The final idea that I found interesting was how heavily landmarks factored into his ideas about intelligence and knowledge. He talks about how, much like in our external environment, we rely heavily on landmarks, e.g., a signpost which signifies something important, so too do we in our internal lives. The most common landmarks clearly arise in language. He claims that when babies babble they are generating these salient landmarks, getting ready via word repetition to assign them to something without having the conceptual connection already there. This was a novel idea to me, which is interesting since I have taken an entire course on language acquisition. To him, I think, all verbal thoughts serve as landmarks for concepts.

He also argues that language gives us the propensity to reason abstractly, which I of course don’t disagree with, but I tend to think people overstate the gains language affords us. It is not as though abstract reasoning was impossible before language, otherwise how does one acquire it? It seems like we have to have the ability to associate many slightly different kinds of rock with the word ‘rock’ when we’re developing language, which amounts to a mental representation of rock that is stable across many, which is what abstract reasoning is. Of course, we are a different species from, say, dogs, but I think this kind of capability is visible in many species. For instance, I think it is certainly plausible that some animals can have image like landmarks, much like we jump to a certain, specific mental image of a tree whenever we hear the word, of concepts they encounter frequently and can reason on this basis alone.

This was a super cool book and although I didn’t quite understand his thoughts about pain and suffering towards the end, I think he came up with many good handles for important concepts and is clearly a well thought and ingenious person. He’s also an engaging and fun writer, with many good intuition pumps along the way. I would highly recommend.

According to Daniel Dennett, even though we would like to think that non-human species are thinking beings, there are different degrees of sentience. In a nutshell, intentionality is what separates the higher order beings from those who are incapable of keeping secretes for example, verbal communication, and acquiring and reflecting on concepts. In combing through this question, he invokes everyone from Socrates to Skinner.

I think I'm going to have to listen to this one again. This book was my first introduction to thinking about consciousness and the definition of "mind". As such it was pretty good. I found a lot of the arguments compelling and convincing.

The ending snuck up on me--I was a little surprised when it finished, as I felt that we had barely scratched the surface of the topic.

Recommended for anyone interested in understanding how we can determine what makes an organism sentient.

Quick read with some interesting points about the differences between one animal and another ... and human animals, too. Instinctual minds, conditioned minds, behavior-based minds, and hypothesizing minds. Each of these are different levels and capable of different things, but also limited in certain ways.

The author has a nice piece about pain vs suffering which I particularly enjoyed. It especially went well with some other reading I've not too distantly read, such as Eating Animals. Puts an animals pain vs suffering in context. Although I'm not sure this is what the author intended, his point was applicable to complex minds making suffering capable.

I can’t get enough of Dennett and his writing. I find consciousness incredibly fascinating and I think there are very few people that can talk about this in a clear and helpful way.

Very thought-provoking. I began this book resistant to its message, as I had watched speeches by Dennett that had left me unconvinced. Specifically I had taken away from those presentations that to Dennett consciousness, or "mindhood", was nothing more than a byproduct of the organization of the brain, which, while potentially true, was dismissive of the subjectiveness of being, something separated from objective analysis by (to me) an unbridgeable chasm. I've heard it facetiously argued that perhaps those who utterly dismiss subjectivity and "qualia" themselves have no minds -- they are walking philosophical zombies.

Well the charge is false with Dennett, because he devotes a whole chapter to such concerns in this book. The contemptuousness held toward the subjective was entirely imagined on my part. Still, while I can agree that consciousness might be nothing more than a principle of organization, no amount of puzzling over it has ever allowed me to intuit such a result.

The main premise of Kinds of Minds is that, instead of an arbitrary cutoff between conscious and unconscious creatures, there is a fuzzy gradation, with the fundamental kinds of consciousness changing along the way. What's more surprising is the way he uses current science to actually flesh out reasonable guesses as to what some of of these kinds of consciousness might look like. He uses the same experiments and thought experiments to propose that human consciousness might be further removed from the animal kind than we tend to think, and that language is the key innovation that has endowed us with conceptual consciousness.

It's clear to me that my own tendency has been to extend the envelope of consciousness to a broader host of organisms than most people do. But when I think about it now I will be reminding myself that other animals are not just Humanity, Lite, but qualitatively different, in a way that may be difficult or impossible to imagine in anything other than a stretched analogy.

I read this because I very much like such imaginings, and I was not disappointed.