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开 本: 32开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 平装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9780465073511
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.”
–Glenn Branch
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 behavior? 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.
What Kinds of Minds Are There?
Knowing Your Own Mind
We Mind-Havers, We Minders
Words and Minds
The Problem of Incommunicative Minds Intentionality: The
Intentional Systems Approach
Simple Beginnings: The Birth of Agency
Adopting the Intentional Stance
The Misguided Goal of Propositional Precision
Original and Derived Intentionality The Body and Its Minds
From Sensitivity to Sentience?
The Media and the Messages
My Body Has a Mind of Its Own! How Intentionality Came into
Focus
The Tower of Generate-and-Test
The Search for Sentience: A Progress Report
From Phototaxis to Metaphysics The Creation of Thinking
Unthinking Natural Psychologists
Making Things to Think With
Talking to Ourselves Our Minds and Other Minds
Our Consciousness, Their Minds
Pain and Suffering: What Matters
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