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Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology By Daniel Dennett In this lively and incisive collection of papers, philosopher Daniel C. Dennett offers a comprehensive theory of mind set forth in seventeen essays, united by an extensive introduction. An important book for cognitive psychologists, neurophysiologists, computer scientists, those interested in linguistics and in artificial intelligence, and epistemological philosophers. This new synthesis, by the author of Content and Consciousness, should be of seminal interest to theoreticians in many contiguous fields. It should appeal strongly to non-specialists. And it should become standard student fare for courses in philosophy of mind and in theoretical issues in psychology. |
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Consciousness Explained By Daniel Dennett Consciousness is notoriously difficult to explain. On one hand, there are facts about conscious experience – the way clarinets sound, the way lemonade tastes – that we know subjectively, from the inside. On the other hand, such facts are not readily accommodated in the objective world described by science. How, after all, could the reediness of clarinets or the tartness of lemonade be predicted in advance? Central to Dennett's attempt to resolve this dilemma is the "heterophenomenological" method, which treats reports of introspection nontraditionally – not as evidence to be used in explaining consciousness, but as data to be explained. Using this method, Dennett argues against the myth of the Cartesian theater – the idea that consciousness can be precisely located in space or in time. To replace the Cartesian theater, he introduces his own multiple drafts model of consciousness, in which the mind is a bubbling congeries of unsupervised parallel processing. Finally, Dennett tackles the conventional philosophical questions about consciousness, taking issue not only with the traditional answers but also with the traditional methodology by which they were reached. Dennett's writing, while always serious, is never solemn; who would have thought that combining philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience could be such fun? Not every reader will be convinced that Dennett has succeeded in explaining consciousness; many will feel that his account fails to capture essential features of conscious experience. But none will want to deny that the attempt was well worth making. |
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Content and Consciousness By Daniel Dennett In this, his pioneering book, Daniel Dennett sets out clearly what he believed constituted a genuine analysis of the mind. He begins by introducing a distinction between personal and sub-personal levels of explanation. At the sub-personal level explanation is mechanistic and physiological, formulated in terms of brain events and neural networks and concerned with the nuts and bolts of how sensory input is transformed into behavioral output. At the personal level, however, mental phenomena and purposive actions are explained through categories properly descriptive of the activities of persons, rather than the activities of systems within the brain. |
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Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting By Daniel Dennett Anyone who has wondered if free will is just an illusion or has asked 'could I have chosen otherwise?' after performing some rash deed will find this book an absorbing discussion of an endlessly fascinating subject. Daniel Dennett, whose previous books include Brainstorms and (with Douglas Hofstadter) The Mind's I, tackles the free will problem in a highly original and witty manner, drawing on the theories and concepts of several fields usually ignored by philosophers; not just physics and evolutionary biology, but engineering, automata theory, and artificial intelligence. In Elbow Room, Dennett shows how the classical formulations of the problem in philosophy depend on misuses of imagination, and he disentangles the philosophical problems of real interest from the "family of anxieties' they get enmeshed in - imaginary agents, bogeymen, and dire prospects that seem to threaten our freedom. Putting sociobiology in its rightful place, he concludes that we can have free will and science too. Elbow Room begins by showing how we can be "moved by reasons" without being exempt from physical causation. It goes on to analyze concepts of control and self-control-concepts often skimped by philosophers but which are central to the questions of free will and determinism. A chapter on "self-made selves" discusses the idea of self or agent to see how it can be kept from disappearing under the onslaught of science. Dennett then sees what can be made of the notion of acting under the idea of freedomdoes the elbow room we think we have really exist? What is an opportunity, and how can anything in our futures be "up to us"? He investigates the meaning of "can" and "could have done otherwise," and asks why we want free will in the first place. We are wise, Dennett notes, to want free will, but that in itself raises a host of questions about responsibility. In a final chapter, he takes up the problem of how anyone can ever be guilty, and what the rationale is for holding people responsible and even, on occasion, punishing them. |
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Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness By Daniel Dennett In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett embarks on the audacious task of explaining human consciousness. He sets his sights even higher for Kinds of Minds, attempting to provide a more general explanation of consciousness. But don't be put off: the book is short, easy to read, and makes a good introduction to Dennett's richly interdisciplinary oeuvre. While beginners will appreciate Dennett's appeals to intuitive moral considerations to emphasize the importance of investigating consciousness, there is much in the book to hold the attention of readers already familiar with his previous work. At the beginning of Kinds of Minds Dennett asks, "What kinds of minds are there? And how do we know?" These two questions – the first ontological, the second epistemological – set the agenda for the book. Intuitions untutored by theory are not capable of answering these questions, Dennett argues, making it necessary to pursue insight from the evolutionary point of view. Accordingly, subsequent chapters are devoted to phylogenetic speculations about agency and intentionality, sensitivity and sentience, and perception and behavior. Particularly charming is the series of squiggly amoebas – the Darwinian, Skinnerian, Popperian, and Gregorian creatures – that illustrates the hierarchy of cognitive power. In the final chapter, Dennett returns to the original two questions, ending not with their answers, but, he hopes, with "better versions of the questions themselves." |
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Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness By Daniel Dennett Consciousness puzzles scientists and philosophers as much as it baffles the rest of us. Elusive, enigmatic, and difficult to define and probe, consciousness has a peculiar quality that rouses people to insist that somehow it differs from the rest of the physical world and that there is something unique about each person's subjective experience. Enter Daniel Dennett, a philosopher who directs the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. In his provocative book, he explores several hot debates over whether consciousness can ever be explained – such as our inability to objectively study subjective experiences or qualia, the impenetrable properties of sensations. Despite our stubborn feelings that consciousness involves something extra – a spirit, soul, miracle or magic – Dennett contends that consciousness is no more than an intriguing but inadequately explained aspect of neural activity. Consciousness is often celebrated as a mystery, he writes. I think this tradition is not just a mistake, but a serious obstacle to ongoing scientific research that can explain consciousness, just as deeply and completely as it can explain other natural phenomena: metabolism, reproduction, continental drift, light, gravity and so on. Like a persuasive magic show, consciousness fools us into believing that the brain's seamless illusion is real, even though consciousness is a purely biological phenomenon. To make his point, Dennett works through various thought experiments. One involves imagining a perfect zombie that exactly replicates a person's perceptual and neural processes. Should there be any real difference between the zombie and the conscious person, he wonders? He also attacks the claim that a mechanistic theory of consciousness could not explain such a difference, if it existed. Another thought experiment involves imagining Martian scientists studying human consciousness. In principle, he says, Martians should be able to observe and inspect the mechanisms underlying earthly conscious experiences and, in some sense, grasp what it is like to be human. In time, Dennett believes people will realize that third-person methods of the natural sciences suffice to investigate consciousness as completely as any phenomenon in nature can be investigated. Like vitalism – the 18thcentury belief that some inexplicable force animates living creatures – consciousness will ultimately yield to scientific explanation. |
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The Intentional Stance By Daniel Dennett How are we able to understand each other in our daily interactions? Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, Daniel Dennett asserts in this first full scale presentation of a theory of intentionality that he has been developing for almost twenty years. We adopt a stance, a predictive strategy of interpretation that presupposes the rationality of the people – or other entities – we are hoping to understand and predict. The 10 essays included here represent the vanguard of Dennett's thought, push his theories into surprising new territory, and reveal fresh lines of inquiry into fundamental issues in psychology, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary theory as well as traditional issues in the philosophy of mind. |
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A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination By Gerald M. Edelman and Guilio Tononi A woman senses that a room is light or dark and is aware that she has made it so. A photocell senses the same thing without awareness. The difference is consciousness – something everyone recognizes but no one can fully explain. Edelman (director of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego) and Tononi (a senior fellow there) propose what they call the dynamic core hypothesis to explain the neural basis of conscious experience. "This hypothesis states that the activity of a group of neurons can contribute directly to conscious experience if it is part of a functional cluster, characterized by strong mutual interactions among a set of neuronal groups over a period of hundreds of milliseconds." They call such a cluster the dynamic core because of "its ever-changing composition yet ongoing integration." In telling their tale, the authors describe brain structure and function, review earlier efforts to explain consciousness and come to a discussion of higher-order consciousness – the kind that humans have. "Our position has been that higher-order consciousness, which includes the ability to be conscious of being conscious, is dependent on the emergence of semantic capabilities and, ultimately, of language. Concomitant with these traits is the emergence of a true self, born of social interactions, along with concepts of the past and future." |
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Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind By Gerald M. Edelman In this challenging, exhilarating leap by a disciplined and original mind, Nobel Prize-winner Edelman (medicine, 1972) throws a neurobiological line between two ships – mind and matter – in the stormiest of scientific seas. In his defense of the biological component of mind, Edelman (The Remembered Present ) disposes of cognitive and behavioral theories of consciousness. To take up the slack, he extends current developments in brain neuroscience well into speculation. He is far too modest in stating that his goal is "to dispel the notion that the mind can be understood in the absence of biology," for the book is a near-kinetic series of critiques and proposals to connect physics and psychology. The "Harmonies" section draws on other disciplines – philosophy, linguistics and psychiatry, among others – to entwine these tendrils of thought into a "unified theory" of mind. |
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Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection By Gerald M. Edelman Neural Darwinism is a fine example of Edelman's broad, bottom-up approach to how nervous systems get themselves organized, store information, and create new behavioral patterns. It should be read by neurobiologists, developmental biologists, the cognitive cognoscenti – including the artificial intelligentsia – and by and those hopeful technologists who are flocking to the banner of neural-like networks as an alternative way of shaping up smart machines. It is very easy to pick out an unphysiological assumption or unfulfilled prediction in a work with the breadth and depth of Neural Darwinism. On such a pretext, many readers will rationalize laying this admittedly difficult book aside, unfinished. Yet those who persevere may come away feeling, "The brain really could work that way," not only because Edelman's assumptions are usually close-to-physiological but because he frames the issues in ways that have been repeatedly successful, in stochastic and Darwinian contexts, in revealing emergent properties. If you are concerned with the questions Edelman addresses, this book may well be worth your time. |
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