Nice little metaphors, nice easy read.

Raises very potent questions but answers almost none. Dennett is content with showing 3-4 potential ways of looking at any question and then telling us that to go beyond is a challenge even for modern science.

The arguments are smooth and the book gives a good evolutionary understanding of the way we frame thoughts and ascribe consciousness. The model of mind that Dennett has created is a bit dated for me, but I enjoyed the long range perspective he brought into it. the section on dogs was probably the best part for me.

PS. References to Susan Sontag is becoming overwhelming in books I read and I guess I will end up ordering one of her books soon.

Solipsism is the philosophical idea that one's own mind is all that exists. Solipsism is an epistemological or ontological position that knowledge of anything outside one's own specific mind is unjustified. The external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist.

Video from the Cog Project

Some really interesting stuff in here. Some Cephalopods show more sentience than say, rhesus monkeys, opening up the moral questions again.

The only reason I gave 4 stars is that the version I was reading has quite the translation. For a very short book during a busy schedule, I managed to not pick this book often because I don't really like how the translator translates this book. It's sometimes tedious and hard to digest, with a lot of literal translations that just don't go well in Indonesian.
But despite the translation, I can officially say I am in love with Daniel C. Dennet and I am putting his other books on my reading list.
This might be the first book about consciousness that I have ever read, and I picked the right book. Dennet introduces a lot of concepts in a really friendly and not intimidating way, so much so that I can use these newly introduced concepts almost immediately in my day-to-day life. I have always known that consciousness is still something unprovable but the way that Dennet elaborated this idea has really brought that statement to a whole new level for me in an inconclusive way, and that's very philosophical of him. This type of writing and teaching is the one that I like, the one that manages to bring you to think from all perspectives but never really concludes itself. You are the one who's responsible for your subjective conclusions at the end of the ride (Yuval Noah Harari also writes like this. If you haven't read Sapiens already, go read it now!!).
The book also emphasized the implications of consciousness relative to morality, and that leads to animal rights discussions which I also really love.
Go read and love this book if you are into science and philosophical discussions about the kinds of minds.

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.

Setiap bab meninggalkan tanda tanya. Sepertinya memang dibuat seperti ini.

Buku ini adalah terjemahan dari buku Kinds Of Minds yang terbit tahun 1996. Lalu apakah maksud dari Minds yang diterjemahkan menjadi akalbudi (penulisannya disambung)?. Apakah ini untuk membedakan dengan makna akal budi versi KKBI yang sekedar memaknainya sebagai pikiran sehat ? Atau kata "pikiran" sebagai terjemahan bahasa Indonesia pada kata Minds dirasa tak tepat sasaran? Entahlah.
.
Buku ini adalah buku filsafat. Filsafat tentang akal budi, pikiran dan kesadaran. Layaknya filsafat, permasalahan utamanya adalah penyatuan atau keselarasan makna yang termaksud dengan bantuan kata-kata, atau bahasa. Kita tak mungkin mendiskusikan sesuatu selama kita tak sepakat dengan sesuatu yang sama tersebut dari awal. Biru yang saya maksud adalah warna biru yang sama dengan kata biru dalam pemahaman anda. Kata "biru" mencakup makna yang sama dalam pemikiran kita berdua, baru bisa kita diskusikan.
.
Buku ini sebenarnya sangat menarik. Ada begitu banyak hal yang menggugah saya, mulai dari maksud akal budi itu sendiri, batasan moral yang kemudian menjadi tertuduh ketika kita berbicara soal kesadaran pada makhluk non manusia. Begitupun gagasan penulis berupa Menara-bangkitkan-dan-Tes dalam menguji atau menentukan skala kognitif organisme ataupun artefak.
.
Membaca buku ini seperti mendaki gunung, makin lama makin berat dan membuat tersengal-sengal. Hampir menyerah di 1/3 awal. Satu paragraph yg kadang menghabiskan satu halaman penuh cukup membuat kepala mengepul. Ketika otak kelelahan mengikuti alur buku ini, pembenaran yang paling gampang adalah menuduh penerjemahnya tidak becus.

This book is really more about what constitutes a mind than about different kinds of minds, and about the questions that need to be answered to determine whether something or somebody - an animal, an unborn child, a robot, whatever - actually has what we would think of as a mind or not. He talks about the differences between sentience and insentience and conscious and unconscious, and where and how to make the distinction between them.

Much more readable than Consciousness Explained, for which I have just a few chapters remaining. The breakdowns of the influence of language, intentionality, and capacity to conceptualize were a few factors I certainly hadn't fully considered in my brief exposure to this material. With a clarified focus on such phenomena, along with the recommended 'further reading' section at the end of the book, I definitely now have a baseline for future investigation.

Given it's 'to the point' nature, as compared to most of Dennett's other books, this would be on the top of my recommended list for those interested in his work and this particular realm of study.

Kinds of Minds is short and written in a style more casual than Daniel Dennett's other books. The first three chapters of this book mainly pose the question and prepare readers with the needed background knowledge (evolution, intentional stance, etc). The real thing starts in chapter 4, where Dennett proposes a classification scheme of creatures:
t- Darwin creatures: agents who have hard-wired designs.
t- Skinner creatures: agents who are born with reinforcers. They can rewire themselves after trial and error.
t- Popperian creatures: agents who can not only learn like Skinner creatures but also simulate the situation in their minds. They can pre-sort options before acting out.
t- Gregorian creatures: the subset of Popperian creatures whose inner environment is informed by designs in the outer environment.

Dennett then discusses why Gregorian creatures are a lot more intelligent than the other three sorts of creatures. He notes that the relationship between tools and intelligence is two-way. Not only does a tool require intelligence to recognize and maintain, but it also confers potential intelligence to its users by allowing them to exploit wisdom invented by other minds. For example, symbols allow Gregorian creatures to offload as much as possible their cognitive tasks into the environment itself, like when we use pencil and paper to calculate multi-digit multiplications. The offloading releases a creature from its brain capacity limit. It also allows technologies to be transmitted through the culture highways, instead of through the slow genetic pathway of inheritance.

Among the tools used by Gregorian creatures, words are the most powerful. They allow Gregorian creatures to represent thinking of minds in another format, thus opens the door for a mind to turn its analytic power into itself and ask questions such as "How to think better about what I should think about next?"

But what has led minds to climb on this tower of internal reflection? Dennett introduces us to a hypothesis that the development of self-consciousness is the product of an arms race of "intentional stance": if you're going to think about my thinking, then I am going to have to start thinking about your thinking of my thinking. A creature might begin to be sensitive to its own thinking because it needs to hypothesize what is going on in others' minds. Or, such sensitivity might be the byproduct of thinking about other's thinking.

Dennett also introduces the ethologist David McFarland's theory about the origin of self-consciousness. McFarland proposes that the need to communicate one's intention may have pushed creatures to seek clear-cut representations of their intentions. Once such representations are formed, they may convince the agent that it has these clear-cut prior intentions governing its actions. Just as thinking about one's own thinking may have come from the need to think about other's thinking, an agent's self-consciousness may have also come from the need to interact with other agents.

Like always, Dennett is full of insights and stimulating questions, such as whether suffering equals pain and "Are plants only slow animals?" But since the first half of the book repeats Dennet's previous works and the rest half is too meandering and sometimes off-focus, I am not giving it five stars.

I found the book at a thrift store a few weeks ago while on vacation from work so I thought I would give this Dennett book a read.

In all honesty this book wasn't written for me. The past four years I've been pouring over philosophy of mind articles/books, reading some books in cognitive science, and even diving deep in phenomenology, so I would say this book was a little elementary for my purposes.

However with all this being said the book itself is not bad at all and if anything a great book for people that are interested in getting into the philosophy of mind or the other cognitive sciences.

Short and much more accessible than most of Dennett's books, Kinds of Minds attempts to explore consciousness through biological and philosophical lenses. While he doesn't use the most advanced brain-scanning science to back up some of his beliefs, his intuitions are easy to follow. His conclusions are unsatisfactory, but his exploration is certainly worth a look.