Customer Reviews

Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (Representation and Mind)

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This book has some very good papers and ideas, but one has to look a little hard. Those who are familiar with Dennett's more popular books will very likely find themselves quite lost. The ideas in "Consciousness Explained" or "Kinds of Minds" can be found, but the core of the book deals with intentionality, or the ideas Dennett laid out in his "The Intentional Stance". The collection of papers consist of otherwise hard-to find or rare reading, but in my opinion required reading for anyone seriously interested in Dennett's philosophy. There are some papers, however, that are out of context, like reviews or responses to critics, or forewords to other books.

The cream can be found in the papers "Real Consciousness", "instead of Qualia", "Real Patterns", "Cognitive Science as reverse engeneering", "Animal Consciousness" and his "Self-Portrait". Dennett lays bare his ideas on consciousness and qualia, and I have to say that his position as regarding qualia is clearly explained, and initially, seems quite plausible. But one still will feel Dennett goes too far in sayng that qualia are just the group of dispositions in the subject, thus denying their "qualish" quality, the red of redness per se. His paper, "Real Patterns" is quite simply the best defended and most coherent position on the reality of "folk-psichological" states, the ontology of things like beliefs, desires, and so on.

The papers deal with a multitude of subjects, including animal thought and consciousness, AI philosophy, cognitive science philosophy, and many great contributions to the philosophy of mind. I personally do not favour his positions in most subjects, but I cannot disagree with everything either. Dennett is allready one of the great contemporary philosophers, so it is worth trying to learn about his ideas, and I see no better place to start (or finish) than with this book.

This is an excellent compilation of Dennett's papers published in all the kinds of periodicals he likes to publish. If you like Dennett's work, go for it. However, this is no introduction to his work, and I think that readers unfamiliar with it would be a slightly out of context. If you're looking for an intro to his philosophy, you should really go for his "kinds of minds" at the science masters collection.

However, if you are already hooked (like me), you'll find some excellent, well-written, humorous, and intelligent essays that would otherwise demand a couple months (in a good library) to collect.

Clearly a "sequel" to Dennett's earlier "Brainstorms," this volume is an update collection of his thinking. The subtitle is pure Dennettian whimsy - "designing minds" - how many ways can you interpret that phrase. The minds within this collection are ours, those of machines, and of other animals. What part has evolution played in our mental elaboration? Is the mind a form of organic machine? This question has plagued philosophers for generations, but more intensely since the development of the computer. Much of the first section is devoted to clarifying the famous Turing Test - can a machine convince humans that it's "conscious"? Dennett's conclusion at this point is that it's possible but not likely practical. In essence, he doesn't care - it's simply not worth the effort.

An essay co-authored with Nicholas Humphrey is of wider practicality and social importance. Is the syndrome known as Multiple Personality Disorder [MPD] a valid psychological disorder? Dennett and Humphrey probed deeply into this issue, sharply aware of the medical and legal implications. The authors' resolution of the question is unique, but will not be surprising to those familiar with the Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness spelled out in Dennett's "Consciousness Explained."

Critics of "Consciousness Explained" are dealt with in a trio of essays. Dennett stresses that consciousness is an on-going phenomenon, not built up from a series of discrete events, as posed by some commentators. He repeats his objections to a "central processing location" in the mind, his appellation "Cartesian Theatre" restated anew.

Artificial Intelligence is a major interest of Dennett's and he devotes a significant portion of the book to the subject. He sees much of the work in AI as providing essential contributions to the understanding of consciousness. After dealing with the imponderables of the "frame problem" in AI, he seemingly enters a wholly novel area. He poses a fresh approach to thinking about Artificial Life through a geographic metaphor. It is one of his more thought provoking "intuition pumps."

In a new departure, Dennett also offers some autobiographical items for our consideration. His highly personalized account of witnessing the experiments with vervet monkeys in Kenya is an exemplary account of animal cognition. One of Dennett's strengths is his ability to deal with philosophical questions in an evolutionary framework.

It is always difficult to fix a "starting point" for those unfamiliar with Dennett's work. The best introduction to his use of evidence and logical thinking, not to mention the power of his prose, remains Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Some of his ideas on cognition and ethics appear there, but it doesn't cover his innovative ideas on cognition, which remains the foundation of his work. Consciousness Explained or The Intentional Stance are the better overtures in that field. This collection may not fit the bill, except that his incisive thinking presented here may lead to other, more definitive essays on his ideas. Still, the stature of Dennett's place in consciousness studies and philosophy are vividly displayed in this collection. If it's your first Dennett, you've chosen wisely. Follow up with his other works and discover what challenges he can pose. He is always a rewarding read.

I leafed through this now 12-year old book, withdrawn from stock and sold by a public library. There's no biographical info in my copy - a page has been torn out possibly by some reader irritated by such trivia - but MIT clearly plays some part. The evolutionary strategy needed to produce such books seems to need [insert elaborate qualifying sentences here]: (1) Amiable relationships with a list of people; some mature in the field, e.g. Putnam; some famous for other reasons, e.g. Chomsky; some conceded to be exciting, e.g. Hofstader. (2) Writing style has to be adapted to a paper - an issue must be raised, thoughtful comments made at the appropriate level, which are then unanswered - definite answers are to be deplored, for one obvious reason. (3) Technical stuff must be referred to only in an overview sense. There is for example almost nothing about actual computers or hardware in this book, which seems odd. Nor is there awareness of the real structure of the brain. (4) The outside world must be referred to occasionally, and always in a way suggesting no criticism of authorities. (5) A certain palette of references from the past is needed, such as Turing, and the 'Cartesian Theater'. (6) It's permissible to puzzle over animal behaviour, but not to suggest animals have much the same abilities as people, but can't easily put the into action. (7) Padding can be provided by games, models, toys, and puzzles - the 'game' of Life is an example, though for some reason nobody ever speculates how changing the rules would change the game.

I don't think computer-generated papers are quite possible yet, but they're working on it. Whether any form of civilisation will survive to provide readership is another matter.

Explore the philosophy of progressive, controversial author Daniel Clement Dennett as he takes you through a tour of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Fundamental analyzation of the human, animal and silicon mind. Delve deep into philosophy of thinking, then come back and build an intelligent robot!

In virtuoso fashion, culled by sullied verbosity of quintessential qualia paraded back and forth on tuesdays, the mind-brain link is here defined in what philosophers call "reductio grand piano" fashion. It's true that opiate receptors dance across cell walls with benzos in mind, forlorn of hope and ordering burgers at the local Ground Round, but where does this figure in the Chinese Room Argument that Searle keeps tossing about the battlefields of Kosovo just to attract attention? If Dennett could fly paper airplanes from the lecturn and bean his snoring grad students, would he? And would we not, therefore, be entitled to explore the neurophysiological link, say, the action potential/consciousness highway, and muddy it with rivers of synaptic conflation? I suppose we could, but I would recommend you follow this tome up with Searle's paper cup phantoms to see if the brain is just another machine or really a very smartly concealed bowl of potato chips.