Minds are complex artifacts, partly biological and partly social. This book collects together the essays of Daniel Dennett on the philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence and cognitive ethology that appeared in journals from 1984 to 1996.
From Scientific American
Dan Dennett is a big man. He takes up a lot of space in the physical, intellectual and academic worlds. I have never heard anyone wonder that he is the Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University; he lives up to it. He produces books like Kinds of Minds and Consciousness Explained. He has already had a special issue of Philosophical Topics devoted to his work and a collection called Dennett and His Critics from Oxford University Press. And there are many critics; he is in no majority that I can detect, yet everyone professionally concerned with minds takes notice of what he says. He is in fact a cult figure, which is strange because the song he sings is not a pop song but an extended aria. It requires attention, but it rewards the reader with that most valued commodity, interest: he changes people's minds--about minds. I first met his thinking attached to that of Douglas Hofstadter in The Mind's I. Hofstadter I knew as the author of the wonderful Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid; this chap Dennett I hadn't heard of (bear in mind that I am an English reproductive biologist). But I then bought his essays, Brainstorms. Essayists I enjoy. And here was an addition to my list, with the persuasiveness of Peter Medawar, the style of Lewis Thomas, the personal touch of Isaac Asimov. Now he has produced this new collection, as diverse as ever but with two major themes: consciousness in people, machines and animals; and thinking about consciousness in people, machines and animals--metaconsciousness? (He quotes Hofstadter: "Anything you can do, I can do meta.") He claims the book is to make essays that originally appeared in, for example, the journal Raritan more accessible. One, from Poetics Today, is a nice piece on his experience of field ethology with vervet monkeys, which should be read by all who think that some animals, especially primates, must have minds like ours. In addition to these difficult-to-find essays, Dennett included some of his better-known position statements. For example, "Real Patterns" (from the Journal of Philosophy) asks about the transactions and transformations that begin with regularities in visual fields, or sounds or odors, and that result in beliefs and opinions--changes in the structure of a mind. He believes, as most of us now do, that the "mind" is a diverse set of tools for perceiving and thinking. (In this regard, he devised the image of pandemonium, many demons--computer-speak demons--offering items that compete for attention.) Thus, the changes that occur are disparate, diverse, very rarely affecting all of the "me." Indeed, the essay "Real Consciousness" picks up on critics of his disbelief in such a "unitary" consciousness. Too many philosophers, it seems to Dennett, still want "definitions"; they want to play with counters that have defined values, even in studies of the mind. When such philosophers play in science gardens like physics, this works. Definitions abound: an electron is a well-defined concept. Dennett shows in many of these writings, especially in "Do-It-Yourself Understanding" and "Self-Portrait," that biology isn't like that. "All mammals have mammal mothers," for example, but it isn't an infinite regress, as these philosophers might claim: there is a finite but indefinite history of mammals. Nearly all biological concepts have such blurred edges, nearly all biological processes are effective but inefficient, and we biologists work with them without difficulty and without persnickety definitions. Biology is like "discovered" engineering, and reverse-engineering thinking is needed to understand the whys and wherefores of animal and human behavior. And too many philosophers believe in their own introspections. Dennett uses the "frame" problem, so difficult to access by introspection, as his demonstration of introspection's failure. When we deal with anything, we unerringly isolate the problem, the issue, what we are doing, from the irrelevant universe of possibilities that surrounds it. Our robots can't do this yet, perhaps because we can't see how we do it. Dennett's example is beautifully down-to-earth: the problem of getting a midnight snack from the fridge. All the givens, all the unknowns, all the assumptions--about the stickiness of the slices of turkey for the bread, say--are very difficult to locate by introspection; nevertheless, one "just goes and gets a sandwich." Sifting Wheat from Chaff Only in another piece, about programming such detail into a robot, does this miraculous ability of our brains get exposed. Nobody knows how we do this. All animals do it. They don't get caught up, as stupid robots do, listing all the unproblematic things ("That tree probably won't move, that rock probably won't move") and what might happen to the problematic ones ("That bird might fall on my head"). Dennett looks at R1-D1, R2-D1 and their kin--clever R2-D2, of course, has solved this. Like R2-D2, animals just get on with their business and exclude the irrelevant. A simple basis for this could be that nerve cells habituate, so that even uncomplicated creatures don't "see" trees and rocks, and most animals have tuned-down senses, so that what excites them is specially tuned-for and therefore probably important. Dennett calls this decoration of the important sense impressions "salience." I think he could usefully relate this emphasis of significant items to his arguments about qualia. Qualia, such as "redness" and "the smell of bacon," are decorations of the perceptions in the mind, which were transduced from light-frequency and molecules in the air. Dennett takes on qualia in two essays. One, about Hard Questions of consciousness, invokes zombies, and it is a failure for me. Zombies are imaginary people who are identical down to molecules with the rest of us but who don't have qualia; they react to red light, but they don't see "red," as we do, inside their heads. This imaginary exercise somehow shows some philosophers, but not Dennett or me, that consciousness (as qualia) is "not materially rooted." Dennett gets very highbrow about this nonsense and invents zimboes, a kind of improved-model zombie, and makes a lot of comparisons with other people's models to show how silly the concept is. I didn't, and don't, understand how zimboes help disprove anything. Zombies can exist only in dualist universes; imagining them begs the very question they are set up to test. (In Figments of Reality Ian Stewart and I used the imagined "zombike" to debunk zombies: this is exactly like a regular bicycle, down to molecules, but the back wheel doesn't go round when you turn the pedals. A comparable argument would show, just as stupidly, that locomotion, like consciousness, is "not materially rooted," an ineffable hyperproperty of the system.) Another failed essay, for me, is the final one in the book, "Information, Technology and the Virtues of Ignorance." In it, Dennett contends that our moral obligations to act must become overwhelming with the increased information we all have. So, according to him, these obligations must be limited again--as they were in the past--by increasing our relative ignorance. This kind of thinking seems to me to be another example of the "frame" problem: we will construct little "relevant," framed moralities for ourselves by failure to consider most of the world's problems, even if we do know about them. There are some bonuses--including a wonderfully critical but just-persuaded account of multiple-personality psychoses, written with Nicholas Humphrey; a very positive response to the critics of Julian Jaynes's The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind; comments on artificial life (AL) as well as artificial intelligence (AI)--all good-tempered, often witty. Several of the essays tackle (and tackle very well) the issues of animal minds and our ability to think about them in terms of our own mind. Quotes from Moby Dick about whale vision being left-right separate softened me up for Thomas Nagel's question about what it's like to be a bat. Then I learn that rabbits' brains don't transfer learning across the midline--train them with the right eye, the left shows no response! Next I'm challenged by experiments with snakes, which use, apparently must use, three different sensory modalities to catch and eat prey: they hunt and strike only visually; they find the prey only by smell (even if it is squeezed in their own coils); and they find the head, to swallow the prey, by touch. I am not naive in these animal-behavior matters. I've kept many kinds of mammals: llamas, Chinese hamsters, polecats, bush babies and other creatures, like mantis shrimps and octopuses, that show considerable intelligence. And many snakes, big spiders, odd insects and fish, including the intelligent cichlids. Yet Dennett tells me a story that convinces me, about the "minds" of these creatures, which is different from what I believed 10 years ago. He takes my attention to places--experiments with rabbit-brain sidedness, for example--that decorate this new view with believability. He shows me how different minds are, even vervet monkey minds. Again he has got in among my prejudices and changed my mind; this new book has opened new areas of contention for me. This man improves my universe and yours. Enjoy him.
About the Author
Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. He is the author of Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2005, 2006) and other books.
Minds are complex artifacts, partly biological and partly social. This book collects together the essays of Daniel Dennett on the philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence and cognitive ethology that appeared in journals from 1984 to 1996.
From Scientific American
Dan Dennett is a big man. He takes up a lot of space in the physical, intellectual and academic worlds. I have never heard anyone wonder that he is the Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University; he lives up to it. He produces books like Kinds of Minds and Consciousness Explained. He has already had a special issue of Philosophical Topics devoted to his work and a collection called Dennett and His Critics from Oxford University Press. And there are many critics; he is in no majority that I can detect, yet everyone professionally concerned with minds takes notice of what he says. He is in fact a cult figure, which is strange because the song he sings is not a pop song but an extended aria. It requires attention, but it rewards the reader with that most valued commodity, interest: he changes people's minds--about minds. I first met his thinking attached to that of Douglas Hofstadter in The Mind's I. Hofstadter I knew as the author of the wonderful Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid; this chap Dennett I hadn't heard of (bear in mind that I am an English reproductive biologist). But I then bought his essays, Brainstorms. Essayists I enjoy. And here was an addition to my list, with the persuasiveness of Peter Medawar, the style of Lewis Thomas, the personal touch of Isaac Asimov. Now he has produced this new collection, as diverse as ever but with two major themes: consciousness in people, machines and animals; and thinking about consciousness in people, machines and animals--metaconsciousness? (He quotes Hofstadter: "Anything you can do, I can do meta.") He claims the book is to make essays that originally appeared in, for example, the journal Raritan more accessible. One, from Poetics Today, is a nice piece on his experience of field ethology with vervet monkeys, which should be read by all who think that some animals, especially primates, must have minds like ours. In addition to these difficult-to-find essays, Dennett included some of his better-known position statements. For example, "Real Patterns" (from the Journal of Philosophy) asks about the transactions and transformations that begin with regularities in visual fields, or sounds or odors, and that result in beliefs and opinions--changes in the structure of a mind. He believes, as most of us now do, that the "mind" is a diverse set of tools for perceiving and thinking. (In this regard, he devised the image of pandemonium, many demons--computer-speak demons--offering items that compete for attention.) Thus, the changes that occur are disparate, diverse, very rarely affecting all of the "me." Indeed, the essay "Real Consciousness" picks up on critics of his disbelief in such a "unitary" consciousness. Too many philosophers, it seems to Dennett, still want "definitions"; they want to play with counters that have defined values, even in studies of the mind. When such philosophers play in science gardens like physics, this works. Definitions abound: an electron is a well-defined concept. Dennett shows in many of these writings, especially in "Do-It-Yourself Understanding" and "Self-Portrait," that biology isn't like that. "All mammals have mammal mothers," for example, but it isn't an infinite regress, as these philosophers might claim: there is a finite but indefinite history of mammals. Nearly all biological concepts have such blurred edges, nearly all biological processes are effective but inefficient, and we biologists work with them without difficulty and without persnickety definitions. Biology is like "discovered" engineering, and reverse-engineering thinking is needed to understand the whys and wherefores of animal and human behavior. And too many philosophers believe in their own introspections. Dennett uses the "frame" problem, so difficult to access by introspection, as his demonstration of introspection's failure. When we deal with anything, we unerringly isolate the problem, the issue, what we are doing, from the irrelevant universe of possibilities that surrounds it. Our robots can't do this yet, perhaps because we can't see how we do it. Dennett's example is beautifully down-to-earth: the problem of getting a midnight snack from the fridge. All the givens, all the unknowns, all the assumptions--about the stickiness of the slices of turkey for the bread, say--are very difficult to locate by introspection; nevertheless, one "just goes and gets a sandwich." Sifting Wheat from Chaff Only in another piece, about programming such detail into a robot, does this miraculous ability of our brains get exposed. Nobody knows how we do this. All animals do it. They don't get caught up, as stupid robots do, listing all the unproblematic things ("That tree probably won't move, that rock probably won't move") and what might happen to the problematic ones ("That bird might fall on my head"). Dennett looks at R1-D1, R2-D1 and their kin--clever R2-D2, of course, has solved this. Like R2-D2, animals just get on with their business and exclude the irrelevant. A simple basis for this could be that nerve cells habituate, so that even uncomplicated creatures don't "see" trees and rocks, and most animals have tuned-down senses, so that what excites them is specially tuned-for and therefore probably important. Dennett calls this decoration of the important sense impressions "salience." I think he could usefully relate this emphasis of significant items to his arguments about qualia. Qualia, such as "redness" and "the smell of bacon," are decorations of the perceptions in the mind, which were transduced from light-frequency and molecules in the air. Dennett takes on qualia in two essays. One, about Hard Questions of consciousness, invokes zombies, and it is a failure for me. Zombies are imaginary people who are identical down to molecules with the rest of us but who don't have qualia; they react to red light, but they don't see "red," as we do, inside their heads. This imaginary exercise somehow shows some philosophers, but not Dennett or me, that consciousness (as qualia) is "not materially rooted." Dennett gets very highbrow about this nonsense and invents zimboes, a kind of improved-model zombie, and makes a lot of comparisons with other people's models to show how silly the concept is. I didn't, and don't, understand how zimboes help disprove anything. Zombies can exist only in dualist universes; imagining them begs the very question they are set up to test. (In Figments of Reality Ian Stewart and I used the imagined "zombike" to debunk zombies: this is exactly like a regular bicycle, down to molecules, but the back wheel doesn't go round when you turn the pedals. A comparable argument would show, just as stupidly, that locomotion, like consciousness, is "not materially rooted," an ineffable hyperproperty of the system.) Another failed essay, for me, is the final one in the book, "Information, Technology and the Virtues of Ignorance." In it, Dennett contends that our moral obligations to act must become overwhelming with the increased information we all have. So, according to him, these obligations must be limited again--as they were in the past--by increasing our relative ignorance. This kind of thinking seems to me to be another example of the "frame" problem: we will construct little "relevant," framed moralities for ourselves by failure to consider most of the world's problems, even if we do know about them. There are some bonuses--including a wonderfully critical but just-persuaded account of multiple-personality psychoses, written with Nicholas Humphrey; a very positive response to the critics of Julian Jaynes's The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind; comments on artificial life (AL) as well as artificial intelligence (AI)--all good-tempered, often witty. Several of the essays tackle (and tackle very well) the issues of animal minds and our ability to think about them in terms of our own mind. Quotes from Moby Dick about whale vision being left-right separate softened me up for Thomas Nagel's question about what it's like to be a bat. Then I learn that rabbits' brains don't transfer learning across the midline--train them with the right eye, the left shows no response! Next I'm challenged by experiments with snakes, which use, apparently must use, three different sensory modalities to catch and eat prey: they hunt and strike only visually; they find the prey only by smell (even if it is squeezed in their own coils); and they find the head, to swallow the prey, by touch. I am not naive in these animal-behavior matters. I've kept many kinds of mammals: llamas, Chinese hamsters, polecats, bush babies and other creatures, like mantis shrimps and octopuses, that show considerable intelligence. And many snakes, big spiders, odd insects and fish, including the intelligent cichlids. Yet Dennett tells me a story that convinces me, about the "minds" of these creatures, which is different from what I believed 10 years ago. He takes my attention to places--experiments with rabbit-brain sidedness, for example--that decorate this new view with believability. He shows me how different minds are, even vervet monkey minds. Again he has got in among my prejudices and changed my mind; this new book has opened new areas of contention for me. This man improves my universe and yours. Enjoy him.
About the Author
Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. He is the author of Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2005, 2006) and other books.