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KINDS OF MINDS

Toward an Understanding of Consciousness

DANIEL C. DENNETT

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

-iii-

The Science Masters Series is a global publishing venture consisting of original

science books written by leading scientists and published by a worldwide team of

twenty-six publishers assembled by John Brockman. The series was conceived by

Anthony Cheetham of Orion Publishers and John Brockman of Brockman Inc., a

New York literary agency, and developed in coordination with BasicBooks.

The Science Masters name and marks are owned by and licensed to the publisher by

Brockman Inc.

Copyright © 1996 by Daniel Dennett.

Published by BasicBooks A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book

may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For

information address Basic Books, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022-5299.

Designed by Joan Greenfield

ISBN 0-465-07351-4 (pbk.)

99 00 01 ❖ /RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5

-iv-

CONTENTS

Preface

vii

1 What Kinds of Minds Are There?

1

1

Knowing Your Own Mind

3

We Mind-Havers, We Minders

Words and Minds

8

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The Problem of Incommunicative Minds

12

2 Intentionality: The Intentional Systems Approach

19

Simple Beginnings: The Birth of Agency

19

Adopting the Intentional Stance

27

41

The Misguided Goal of Propositional Precision

Original and Derived Intentionality

50

3 The Body and Its Minds

57

From Sensitivity to Sentience?

57

The Media and the Messages

65

73

"My Body Has a Mind of Its Own!"

-v-

4 How Intentionality Came into Focus

81

81

The Tower of Generate-and-Test

The Search for Sentience: A Progress Report

93

From Phototaxis to Metaphysics

98

5 The Creation of Thinking

119

Unthinking Natural Psychologists

119

134

Making Things to Think With

Talking to Ourselves

147

6 Our Minds and Other Minds

153

Our Consciousness, Their Minds

153

Pain and Suffering: What Matters

161

169

Further Reading

Bibliography

175

Index

180

-vi-

PREFACE

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than

answers. I haven't begun by insulting myself and my discipline, in spite of first

appearances. Finding better questions to ask, and breaking old habits and traditions

of asking, is a very difficult part of the grand human project of understanding

ourselves and our world. Philosophers can make a fine contribution to this

investigation, exploiting their professionally honed talents as question critics,

provided they keep an open mind and restrain themselves from trying to answer all

the questions from "obvious" first principles. There are many ways of asking

questions about different kinds of minds, and my way--the way I will introduce in

this book--changes almost daily, get. ting refined and enlarged, corrected and

revised, as I learn of new discoveries, new theories, new problems. I will introduce

the set of fundamental assumptions that hold my way together and give it a stable

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and recognizable pattern, but the most exciting parts of this way are at the

changeable fringes of the pattern, where the action is. The main point of this book is

to present the questions I'm asking right now --and some of them will probably lead

nowhere, so let the reader beware. But my way of asking questions has a pretty good

track record over the years, evolving quite smoothly to incorporate new discoveries,

some of which were provoked by

-vii-

my earlier questions. Other philosophers have offered rival ways of asking the

questions about minds, but the most influential of these ways, in spite of their initial

attractiveness, lead to self-contradictions, quandaries, or blank walls of mystery, as I

will demonstrate. So it is with confidence that I recommend my current candidates

for the good questions.

Our minds are complex fabrics, woven from many different strands and

incorporating many different designs. Some of these elements are as old as life itself,

and others are as new as today's technology. Our minds are just like the minds of

other animals in many respects and utterly unlike them in others. An evolutionary

perspective can help us see how and why these elements of minds came to take on

the shapes they have, but no single straight run through time, "from microbes to

man," will reveal the moment of arrival of each new thread. So in what follows I

have had to weave back and forth between simple and complex minds, reaching back

again and again for themes that must be added, until eventually we arrive at

something that is recognizably a human mind. Then we can look back, one more

time, to survey the differences encountered and assess some of their implications.

Early drafts of this book were presented as the Agnes Cuming Lectures at University

College, Dublin, and in my public lectures as Erskine Fellow at Canterbury

University, Christchurch, New Zealand, in May and June of 1995. I want to thank the

faculty and students at those institutions, whose constructive discussions helped

make the final draft almost unrecognizably different, and (I trust) better. I also want

to thank Marc Hauser, Alva Noë, Wei Cui, Shannon Densmore, Tom Schuman,

Pascal Buckley, Jerry Lyons, Sara Lippincott, and my students in "Language and

Mind" at Tufts, who read and vigorously criticized the penultimate draft.

Tufts University

December 20, 1995

-viii-

CHAPTER I

WHAT KINDS OF MINDS ARE THERE?

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KNOWING YOUR OWN MIND

........

Can we ever really know what is going on in someone else's mind? Can a woman

ever know what it is like to be a man? What experiences does a baby have during

childbirth? What experiences, if any, does a fetus have in its mother's womb? And

what of nonhuman minds? What do horses think about? Why aren't vultures

nauseated by the rotting carcasses they eat? When a fish has a hook sticking through

its lip, does it hurt the fish as much as it would hurt you, if you had a hook sticking

through your lip? Can spiders think, or are they just tiny robots, mindlessly making

their elegant webs? For that matter, why couldn't a robot--if it was fancy enough--be

conscious? There are robots that can move around and manipulate things almost as

adeptly as spiders; could a more complicated robot feel pain, and worry about its

future, the way a person can? Or is there some unbridgeable chasm separating the

robots (and maybe the spiders and insects and other "clever" but mindless creatures)

from those animals that have minds? Could it be that all animals except human

beings are really mindless robots? René Descartes notoriously

-1-

maintained this in the seventeenth century. Might he have been dead wrong? Could it

be that all animals, and even plants--and even bacteria--have minds?

Or, to swing to the other extreme, are we so sure that all human beings have minds?

Maybe (to take the most extreme case of all) you're the only mind in the universe;

maybe everything else, including the apparent author of this book, is a mere mindless

machine. This strange idea first occurred to me when I was a young child, and

perhaps it did to you as well. Roughly a third of my students claim that they, too,

invented it on their own and mulled it over when they were children. They are often

amused to learn that it's such a common philosophical hypothesis that it has a name--

solipsism (from Latin for "myself alone"). Nobody ever takes solipsism seriously for

long, as far as we know, but it does raise an important challenge: if we know that

solipsism is silly-- if we know that there are other minds--how do we know?

What kinds of minds are there? And how do we know? The first question is about

what exists--about ontology , in philosophical parlance; the second question is about

our knowledge--about epistemology . The goal of this book is not to answer these two

questions once and for all, but rather to show why these questions have to be

answered together. Philosophers often warn against confusing ontological questions

with epistemological questions. What exists is one thing, they say, 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. I agree that this is good general advice, but

I will argue that we already know enough about minds to know that one of the things

that makes them different from everything else in the universe is the way we know

about them. For instance, you know you have a mind and you know you have a

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brain, but

-2-

these are different kinds of knowledge. You know you have a brain the way you

know you have a spleen: by hearsay. You've never seen your spleen or your brain (I

would bet), but since the textbooks tell you that all normal human beings have one of

each, you conclude that you almost certainly have one of each as well. You are more

intimately acquainted with your mind--so intimately that you might even say that you

are your mind. (That's what Descartes said: he said he was a mind, a res cogitans , or

thinking thing.) A book or a teacher might tell you what a mind is, but you wouldn't

have to take anybody's word for the claim that you had one. If it occurred to you to

wonder whether you were normal and had a mind as other people do, you would

immediately realize, as Descartes pointed out, that your very wondering this wonder

demonstrated beyond all doubt that you did indeed have a mind.

This suggests that each of us knows exactly one mind from the inside, and no two of

us know the same mind from the inside. No other kind of thing is known about in

that way. And yet this whole discussion so far has been conducted in terms of how

we know--you and I. It presupposes that solipsism is false. The more we--we--reflect

on this presupposition, the more unavoidable it appears. There couldn't be just one

mind--or at least not just one mind like our minds.

WE MIND-HAVERS, WE MINDERS

........

If we want to consider the question of whether nonhuman animals have minds, we

have to start by asking whether they have minds in some regards like ours, since

these are the only minds we know anything about--at this point. (Try asking yourself

whether nonhuman animals have flurbs. You

-3-

can't even know what the question is, if you don't know what a flurb is supposed to

be. Whatever else a mind is, it is supposed to be something like our minds; otherwise

we wouldn't call it a mind.) So our minds, the only minds we know from the outset,

are the standard with which we must begin. Without this agreement, we'll just be

fooling ourselves, talking rubbish without knowing it.

When I address you , I include us both in the class of mind-havers. This unavoidable

starting point creates, or acknowledges, an in-group, a class of privileged characters,

set off against everything else in the universe. This is almost too obvious to notice,

so deeply enshrined is it in our thinking and talking, but I must dwell on it. When

there's a we , you are not alone; solipsism is false; there's company present. This

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