Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness (Science Masters)

by Danile C. Dennett (Author)

• New

  Illustrated
  1997

  $25.63

  Combining ideas from philosophy, artificial intelligence, and neurobiology, Daniel Dennett leads the reader on a fascinating journey of inquiry, exploring such intriguing possibilities as: Can any of us really know what is going on in someone else's mind? What distinguishes the human mind from the minds of animals, especially those capable of complex behaviour? If such animals, for instance, were magically given the power of language, would their communities evolve an intelligence as subtly discriminating as ours? Will robots, once they have been endowed with sensory systems like those that provide us with experience, ever exhibit the particular traits long thought to distinguish the human mind, including the ability to think about thinking? Dennett addresses these questions from an evolutionary perspective. Beginning with the macromolecules of DNA and RNA, the author shows how, step-by-step, animal life moved from the simple ability to respond to frequently recurring environmental conditions to much more powerful ways of beating the odds, ways of using patterns of past experience to predict the future in never-before-encountered situations. Whether talking about robots whose video-camera eyes give us the powerful illusion that there is somebody in there or asking us to consider whether spiders are just tiny robots mindlessly spinning their webs of elegant design, Dennett is a master at finding and posing questions sure to stimulate and even disturb.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1996

  $5.88

  What kinds of minds are there,and how do we know? The first question is about what exists - about ontology, in philosophical parlance - and the second question is about our knowledge - about epistemology. The aim of Kinds of Minds is to answer these questions, in general outline, and to show why these two questions have to be answered together. What exists is one thing, and what we can know about it is something else. There may be things that are completely unknowable to us so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limits of what there is. But we know enough about minds, Dennett argues, to know that one of the things that makes them different from everything else in the Universe is the way we know about them.