A very good summary of his thoughts on consciousness. The book I would recommend to the layman.

The book starts with very interesting questions concerning the mind. And it also ends with more or less the same questions, but formulated differently with some categories. Doesn't contain any science. Very disappointing.

I like Daniel Dennett a lot, but I don't like this book.

Vad skall man säga?

Ställer frågor, men kommer inte fram till några tydliga svar.

Intressantast blir boken när han diskuterar djurens eventuella medvetande/lidande kopplat till etik. En lätt vidröring av ämnet djurrätt även om det inte på något sätt är bokens fokus.

Känns ibland som han drar förhastade slutsatser...utan att det leder någonstans.

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

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.

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.

Si ya leíste bastante Dennet no vas a encontrar mucha novedad. Si todavía no leíste, es una linda introducción, porque se para desde un lugar un poco más intuitivo y un poco menos "estoy totalmente loco y pienso que la conciencia no existe". Me resultó entretenido.

Dan Dennett wrote a fairy tale. No really.

It begins a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away (think about it). And it's a beautiful story about minds...all kinds of minds.

Dennett tell us a story through space and time that explains not only the evolution of minds from simple molecules, but of the evolution of minds in the developing human. Along the way he tackles intentionality and representation, and the importance of relative time frames and language. Not only does he explain difficult philosophical concepts, but he explains them in such an easy accessible manner that before you realize it's happened, you've learned a concept that philosophy students spend countless hours studying.

Dennett is masterful at storytelling, and in this book his style of writing really shines.

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A few quibbles.

His story is mostly told from the standpoint of evolution, and I think it's dangerous to overgeneralize both evolved functionality and behavior from an evolutionary standpoint. It's a difficult story to tell, precisely because so much of it is dark to us.

Dennett believes, and makes a strong case for, the fact that language is absolutely necessary for thought and representation. That without words you can't have concepts, and without concepts there is nothing going on, on the inside. I spend a lot of time thinking about the relationship between language and consciousness, and I think Dennett certainly makes some very valuable points, but the fact is...we have no idea what it's like to be a creature of our prospective intelligence, but without a way to create structured symbols to represent concepts. Also, from a neurophysiological standpoint, I'd argue representation IS possible without language, though it's a degraded form of it.

But I will say, even with as much as I've read in this field, Dennett surprised me with a few examples and arguments that might have to make me rethink some concepts in Philosophy of Mind/consciousness that I took for granted.

Thank you Dan, always a pleasure.

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.

Read it in one long sitting and enjoyed it very much. I was a big fan of Dennett as a teen and I'm trying to revisit some of his writings and ideas. The concepts he proposes are always well explained in the sense that it is understandable to the general reader, which I highly appreciate in philosophical works. I'm not expert enough to judge the proposed ideas ... but sometimes I have the feeling Dennett dismisses certain ideas a bit too shruggingly (cf. qualia eliminativism) even though I can think of serious rebuts. On the other hand, these more razor-type philosophers always helped to advance the field by making others reconsider their higher-order ideas (Dennett: chmess) and throw out certain esoterica.

This book is easy to read, but hard to digest. Because of Dennett's deceptively easy style, there is absolutely nothing that you cannot understand in this book. However, you must ask yourself whether the question you had when you opened the book, that is, about what can be called a mind and what can't, is answered when you finished the book. For me, it wasn't.

And I think this is because Dennett actually did not answer the question. At the opening of the book, he poses two questions before us: 1) what kinds of minds are there (ontological question), and 2) how do we know it (epistemological question). Dennett kind of answered the first question, but not the second question.

He starts with the three stances we can employ in predicting what is going to happen, i.e. physical, design, and intentional. To predict what's gonna happen with a falling apple, we employ the physical stance. (Our ancestors did employ the intentional stances, notably in Animism.) To predict what a machine will do, we take the design stance. To tell what an animal will do, we employ the intentional stance.

But intentionality simply means one thing is about something else. Intentionality is aboutness. Despite the word employed, it does not include any intention. While mere intentional system is sensitive, true minds are sentient. To define mind from the perspective of functionalism, we must define what the mind does. Mind does process information.

Finally, in chapter 4, we are introduced to the four kinds of creatures (minds). Darwinian creatures acts as their genes are designed. A Skinnerian creature follows the tactic of trial and error. A Popperian creature employs inner simulation instead of blind trial and error tactics, thus letting its simulation die in the stead of its actual body. Finally, a Gregorian creature uses mind tools to augment its DB, thus enlarging the capacity of its mind lab. Of course, the best mind tool is language.

However, I am confused about Dennett's conclusion on the scope of minds. Determining the scope of minds is important because it bears moral implication. If we treat a creature with a mind as if it is a mindless creature, it is a sin, as Dennett declares. So, does our dogs have minds? I think Dennett's answer is no. If so, it follows that animal tests are morally acceptable. A fish with a hook in his mouth will not feel the pain we imagine.

This is a super interesting book with a fantastic reading experience. However, we might end up with our thirst unquenched. At least, my questions were not answered.

My final verdict is that you must read this book once or twice. I read it twice, because I could not grasp the whole structure with just one go. I believe I will be reading it for the third time soon enough. And in the meantime, I will be reading another Dennett with relish.

I love books about consciousness. This one could not hold my interest. I got about 20% through and returned it.