Buku ini merupakan terjemahan dari buku bahasa Inggris berjudul Kinds of Minds. Terjemahan Indonesianya kurang luwes dan sulit dicerna pada banyak bagiannya.

Dennett wasn't exactly young when he wrote this but the energy is palpable. As the introduction states the book is about questions, but they're very good questions, even if by now they've been repeated often.

"This book began with a host of questions, and -- since this is a book by a philosopher -- it ends not with the answers, but, I hope, with better versions of the questions themselves." p 168.

One of my favorite non-fiction books. But I'm biased, since I'm interested in the subject. It cleared my thoughts about consciousness by showing me which ideas / questions even make sense or not and why. I watched lectures by Dennett before reading, so I knew what I was getting into.

This book was written as part of a series of science primers for those readers who probably have a college degree, but not in a field of science. Dennett is a philosopher, so what is he doing writing a book in this series? Well, Dennett is one of the new wave of philosophers from the late 20th century who look not to the history and tradition of philosophy for grounding conjectures and arguments, but rather to science for such grounding. Indeed, throughout this short volume, Dennett mentions very few philosophers - Descartes, Plato, Sartre, Searle, Ryle - and each for no more than a couple of sentences and most just to say that they were wrong. Most of the references for his arguments come from computer science, biology, and psychology (note, this is psychology we are talking about here and not the pseudoscience of psychoanalysis). Dennett warns the reader up front that this book is about questions rather than answers. As Dennett sees it, consciousness is the most difficult existing philosophical problem. Philosophers "know" that it is there in some sense, but do not yet know what it is. Dennett argues that this problem exists because the usual questions used to address the problem are either poorly worded or begin from the wrong assumptions. This book, then, is an attempt to work out what the right questions might be, or at least what the basis for formulating the right questions might be, which explains this book's subtitle of "Toward an Understanding of Consciousness."

Dennett starts by working on the assumptions. First, according to Dennett whatever consciousness might be, it must arise from the natural and material development and life of being human. In essence, consciousness must of necessity be a product of evolution by natural selection. Second, according to Dennett, since consciousness either involves intentionality or the appearance of intentionality, any inquiry into consciousness must start from what he calls "the intentional stance." In pursuit of the first assumption that consciousness is derived from natural selection, Dennett walks the reader through the development of the increasing complexity of minds in evolutionary history, from mere sensitivity through various stages such as self/other recognition, simple problem solving, choice, future orientation, symbolism, and language. In the process, he gradually separates humans from other animals to show that it at least appears, with no compelling evidence to the contrary, that only humans have full consciousness, though other species even down to fairly basic levels have "minds" of some sort. Dennett is aware of the controversy of that position and takes a little time to address counterarguments. In philosophy, the more controversial assumption is the second, that of the intentional stance. Basically, Dennett argues that we determine whether something other than ourselves has a mind, and thus potentially has consciousness, by ascribing reasons to its activity. Thus, we assume that there is an intention to the actions, and thus some kind of thought process for the action. Dennett is aware of the major objections to the argument from the intentional stance. He dismisses, for instance, solipsism. He also states that he knows that the intentional stance may be convenient rather than actual. He argues that its convenience, its utility, still makes the intentional stance highly useful for orienting thinking toward deriving the right sorts of questions by which to determine the nature of consciousness. He also shows that there is no compelling argument against the intentional stance, which means that while it still might possibly not be true in an absolute sense, it is true enough in the immediate sense to get us started on thinking about consciousness in the right way.

Dennett as a writer is refreshing to read compared to most other philosophers. Dennett strives as much as possible not to weigh down his explanations in jargon, and to use plain language. He provides brief and accurate summaries where needed, and spends only small space in arguing against some other position. Dennett is very careful to state where he is asserting something and where he is simply exploring possibilities. Probably because the book is meant to be a primer rather than a fully developed argument, there some gaps in the presentation. Dennett assumes quite a bit about evolutionary development, skipping from one "advance" in mental states to another and assuming just that the change happened. He does not really show how it happened (perhaps that is not possible given the fossil and geological records), and assumes that any development is an "answer" of a kind to an imaginary abstract problem in nature. It could be argued that this is taking the intentional stance too far by reading intention into nature itself. While it is plausible that consciousness developed in nature the way he says it developed, there is more than a little of "just take my word for it" in these parts of the presentation, which are begging for more and better substantiation.

In the end, Dennett has for the most part accomplished his goal with this book of arguing in favor of rethinking the kinds of questions that are going to get us toward understanding consciousness. He has provided mostly sound arguments for believing he is on the right track toward what those questions might be and how we might go about answering them.

Interessant boek waarin Dennett je goed doet nadenken over wat een ziel is. Door vanuit verschillende standpunten de vraag aan te halen of dieren wel een ziel hebben en indien ja, welke wel en welke niet en waarom. Ook vanaf wanneer een foetus een ziel heeft. Als filosoof doet hij de luisteraar de juiste vragen stellen.
Zeer interessant. 3 sterren omdat enkel boeken die ik absoluut aanraad 5 sterren krijgen. Deze is interessant voor wie zich met die problematiek wil bezig houden.

يستخدم داينيل دنييث اسلوب العلم و الفلاسفة لكي يوضح كيفية تكون الوعي في الأنسان .
فيبدأ رحلته من الكائنات البسيطه مرورا بالانباتات و الحيوانات الى الانسان حيث اللغة و المعاناة قفزت فيه لمرحلة متطورة من الوعي .

الكتاب لا يجيب عن الاسئلة مثل (ماهو الخط الفاصل بين الكائنات التي تمتلك الحساسية و بين الكائنات التي تمتلك الأحساسية ؟
ماهو الفرق بين الالم و المعاناة ؟ ماهو الوعي ؟...) لكن يعطيك طرق جديدة في التفكير :)

Easy to chew, hard to swallow. my mind too foggy to comprehend this book.

Fascinating, but offensive if you like dogs. Basically, you start at the bottom and build up---when did the multicellular organism attain the ability to "think"? At some point. Using Dennett's well-argued theories of ever-increasing complexity, he comes to the sticky conclusion that animals, dogs for example, can't feel as much pain as we humans do. Is this true? Maybe.

Daniel Dennett is a crisp, clear thinker who explains his ideas and categorizes with precision, but the book failed to hold my interest in the second half.

Another round from Dennett attempting his best materialistic explanation of the mind. This seems to be his main goal in life. To cut to the chase I would recommend "From Bach to Bacteria and Back" as it is newer and more convincing than this book. The main message of this book is that we should stop anthropomorphizing things, or at least be more self-aware when we do. Specifically, around the experiences of animals. He argues that questions like "what is it like to be a spider, bat, etc" makes a huge assumption, viz that being the creature in question is like anything. He has some interesting thought experiments to feel this out. For example, were your arm to get amputated and you brought it to the doctor to slap it back on you should the doctor give both you and the amputated arm pain killers? Were we to find something so big and complicated in the wild we would probably assume that it would be wrong to dice it up as it would appear to have nerves, etc. etc. Furthermore, if the amputated arm DID feel pain how would it communicate it? The example obviously has gaps, considering that there is "no brain" for the arm, but is the presence of the brain where we assume pain comes from? He then uses the example of rolling over in your sleep to relieve pain or discomfort on your limbs. Do you experience this pain? The big difference between animals and humans (according to Dennett) is language. All creatures receive information through their senses, but his idea is that this information is tokenized in a storable form vis-à-vis words. Consider words to be additional layer on the operating system that allows a system to start labeling nodes in the brain that were just "instinct". [I'm going into non canon examples here, but I think he would agree] Consider various things we all do out of habit, like driving. Have you ever driven a common route and been so up in your head that you were a little surprised when you pulled into work? You were functioning on a sort of auto pilot, much like your heart, digestive system, and most other functions in your body do 24/7. Is it "like" anything to be your heart? Maybe? but we don't offer it the same affordances when it is on the surgery table as we would a cat. Now say that as you are driving your 'attention' comes back to driving. You experience driving, what is it that you are doing when you are experiencing? Perhaps no more than tokenizing incoming visual/audio/olfactory data from related nodes inside your neural meat case to words that act as a sort of post it note to various states. He isn't trying to argue that we should treat living things as automata, but his point is there probably won't be some clean line between organisms that experience human like pain and ones that don't. In fact, I think he would go so far as to say the evidence is indicating that no animals experience pain "like" we do. Another example from the book was a Rhesus Macaque monkey was observed to have one of its testicles bitten off in a fight, but showed few signs of pain and the next day was observed mating again (what a chad), but does that mean Rhesus monkeys don't feel pain? Probably not, but they definitely don't feel pain in that one scenario the same way as humans, which is surprising given their other human like behaviors. He also had a quote in talking about perceptual biases that was worth sharing

"Spatial scale also shows a powerful built-in bias; if gnats were the size of seagulls, more people would be sure they had minds, and if we had to look through microscopes to see the antics of otters, we would be less confident that they were fun-loving."

Not an airtight case for anything, but at the same time it doesn't claim to be. The goal is to bring up questions that make us a little less sure about our assumptions. Also why is it when animal cruelty is brought up, it is mostly stories about dogs or other domesticated animals? He thinks that our domestication has actually turned them mentally closer to humans than other animals. Again debatable, but interesting.

A short little work exploring, from a philosophical perspective, the possible differences between human minds and other possible minds, including the minds of other creatures on the planet. Dennett provides lot of good references for further reading.

Not that this was a bad book, but it’s not really obvious what Dennett is trying to say here.