Dennett, Daniel - kinds of minds by toward an understanding of consciousness

Author:toward an understanding of consciousness
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-02-03T21:46:47+00:00

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capacity to use general information they obtain from their environments to presort their behavioral options before striking out. How does the new information about the outer environment get incorporated into their brains? By perception, obviously. The environment contains an embarrassment of riches, much more information than even a cognitive angel could use. Perceptual mechanisms designed to ignore most of the flux of stimuli concentrate on the most useful, most reliable information. And how does the information gathered manage to exert its selective effect when the options are "considered," helping the animal design ever more effective interactions with its world? There are no doubt a variety of different mechanisms and methods, but among them are those that use the body as a sounding board.

THE SEARCH FOR SENTIENCE: A PROGRESS REPORT

We have been gradually adding elements to our recipe for a mind. Do we have the ingredients for sentience yet? Certainly the normal behavior of many of the animals we have been describing passes our intuitive tests for sentience with flying colors. Watching a puppy or a baby tremble with fear at the edge of an apparent precipice, or a rat grimacing in apparent disgust at the odor of supposedly toxic food, we have difficulty even entertaining the hypothesis that we are not witnessing a sentient being. But we have also uncovered substantial grounds for caution: we have seen some ways in which surprisingly mindlike behavior can be produced by relatively simple, mechanical, apparently unmindlike control systems. The potency of our instinctual responses to sheer speed and lifelikeness of motion, for instance, should alert us to the genuine--not merely philosophical--possibil-

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