soul, reason, thought towards understanding consciousness,
Daniel S. Dent. Translated from English: Tamar Amit. Scientific editing: Shahar Dolev.
Science series, Hed Artzi Publishing House, 158 pages, NIS 67
Enoch Ben Yami
23/05/2001
Daniel Dent has been publishing his research in the field of philosophy of mind for more than thirty years, and he is one of the well-known philosophers in the field in the world that reads and writes English. The book before us, his last book so far (originally published in 1996), presents the entirety of his thought on the subject of the intellect.
Dennett's book was originally called "Kinds of Minds", and this is indeed its main subject: presenting different types of mind or soul, with different degrees of sophistication. The question with which the book opens is "Which creatures have a soul?" Dennett also raises the question "How can it be decided if any production has a soul?" These questions, according to him, are not only of theoretical importance, because from a moral point of view our attitude towards a creature with a soul should be different from our attitude towards a creature without a soul.
Dennett returns to the moral question in the last pages of the book, when he claims that he harnesses his previous theoretical conclusions to the discussion. He distinguishes on the same pages between pain and suffering, and the criteria for suffering are, according to him, behavioral. From this he concludes that animals less developed than us do feel pain but do not suffer like us.
Whatever the acceptability of this conclusion may be, it does not rely on the previous discussion, and therefore the moral discussion is only apparently the framework of the book. As is evident in the body of the book, Dennett's interest is mainly in the theoretical discussion of types of intelligence. There is of course nothing wrong with a purely theoretical discussion, and Dennett's attempt to equate his discussion with moral importance leaves a taste of unnecessary apologetics.
Another problem with the book is that Dennett tries to achieve several contradictory goals in it. On the one hand, the book should present the entirety of his thoughts on the philosophy of mind even to a reader who is not at all familiar with, and is not even versed in, contemporary philosophy of mind. Since Dennett deals with many subjects, a rather detailed book had to be written. On the other hand, Dennett tries to write a book whose dimensions will also be attractive to a non-professional reader, and he also tries to avoid detailed repetition of topics he expanded on in other writings. Finally, Dennett also tries to respond to the criticisms leveled against him
Previously.
Due to these conflicting trends, the book in front of us is flawed in various respects. The presentation of some of the things - for example, Dennett's words on consciousness (p. 125 onwards) - is so concentrated that it will be obscure to those who are not already familiar with Dennett's views on the subject. Dennett's need to single out a section for "original and derived intentionality" will not be understood by those who do not know that many philosophers have found the Achilles heel of Dennett's approach on this subject (and by the way, in my opinion, Dennett's attempt at an answer in the book before us is a failure).
On the other hand, the expansion on intentionality as a "cost" in contrast to intentionality is unnecessary for a philosopher who has minimal familiarity with the field, but also for the general reader it is technically unnecessary burden in the framework of such a short book (and there is a weakness in the Hebrew translation here: the confusion between intentionality and intentionality - intentionality - from which Dennett warns, is not repeated in the Hebrew, and it would have been appropriate for the translation to refer to this in a note). So in his attempt to appeal to a diverse audience of readers, Dent wrote a book that does not fit any of the groups
his destination.
After the first part, in which he presents the purpose of the book, he continues by presenting his views on intentionality systems. First he describes an elementary biological system: supermolecules in general, and viruses in particular. He shows how it is natural to describe them as trying to achieve goals, when we use basic psychological terms to do so. From here he generalizes: we can adopt in relation to different entities what he calls the "intentional position", according to which we describe them as rational beings who choose their course of action based on the consideration of their beliefs and desires. This position, Dennett argues, is optional with respect to things as simple as an alarm clock, almost necessary with respect to the chess-playing computer, and inevitable when we reach man.
Of course, when we describe the alarm clock in this way, one is inclined to say that we are describing it as if, and only as if, it were an intelligent being, while at least man is intelligent in himself. But according to Dennett's method, there is no fundamental difference between a clock, a virus or a person when it comes to realizing their intellect: the difference is only in the degree of convenience or fertility in adopting the intentional position. This opinion is obviously problematic, and as mentioned above, Dennett tries to deal with the criticism leveled at his claims due to this conclusion.
Another discussion in this section, which I found interesting, is the attribution of thoughts, desires, etc. to animals. When we describe the thoughts of animals, says Dennett, we do so through our own concepts, the complex human concepts. Therefore we are forced to attribute to their thoughts more precision than they are capable of. Because of this, we sometimes fear that it is not at all justified to attribute thoughts to animals. Dennett presents the problem nicely, which also arises in other contexts in a similar way, and tries to deal with the skepticism it arouses.
In the third part, Dent discusses the body, ours and other organisms, and the ways in which mind can be attributed to the body. It presents the purposefulness and complexity of the activity of living bodies, and especially the dependence of the body's function on the materials from which it is built. Dennett claims that part of our mind is in our body, but in some cases this bodily whole is made distinct from our mind. It can be said in such cases, he continues, that the body has a mind of its own. There is no problem in these claims, or any innovation, if they are treated as metaphors. Literally, what is said in them is that physical factors limit our thinking and influence it in a purposeful way, when sometimes those factors prevent us from realizing our intentions. But Dennett, especially due to his views regarding intentionality, treats his claims not as metaphors but literally, and for that reason he presents them as an innovation.
However, Dennett continues to discuss the development of the mind beyond the physical mind. In the fourth part of his book he presents different types of intelligence. The basic intelligence is what he calls Skinnerian, after the behaviorist BP Skinner, because it is created through learning from trial and error, while interacting with the external environment. A higher level of intelligence is that in which the learning creature imitates or represents the external environment, and it tests its hypotheses against this imitation. In its interaction with the external environment, the creature acts according to the hypothesis that survived the internal experiment. As the philosopher Karl Popper put it,
From which Dennett borrows the model for this intelligence, we let our hypotheses die in our place.
The most developed type of intelligence that Dent discusses is called Gregorian, following the British psychologist Richard Gregory. Gregory pointed out that a well-designed device, such as a pair of scissors for example, is not only a product of intelligence but also an agent of intelligence: when you give someone a pair of scissors, you increase the likelihood that they will do certain intelligent actions. Not only is intelligence required to identify and operate a device,
It also potentially adds intelligence to its user. And among the most important devices that add to our intelligence, Gregory mentions words. The Gregorian beings utilize the wisdom inherent in the intellectual devices that others have invented, perfected and passed on.
In the fifth part, "The Creation of Thinking", Dennett shows how we overcome our mind's limitations to store information by storing the information in the outside world. This ability is to some extent also found in other creatures, but in humans it is a necessary and central component of his intelligence. "We keep 'indicators' and 'indexes' inside our minds," writes Dennett, "and leave as much of the actual data as possible in the outside world, in our address books, in our libraries" and so on. "The human intellect is not only not limited to the brain, but will also suffer from serious deficiencies if these external means are taken away from it, just like a short-sighted person who is taken away from
His glasses."
In the last part of his book, Dennett briefly presents the main ideas of his ideas about human consciousness, ideas developed in his book "Consciousness Explained." He concludes, as mentioned above, by discussing pain versus suffering.
In my opinion, Dennett's book is not a noteworthy contribution to thinking about the mind - the human or any other creature. The central ideas in it, by Dennett and others, have already been published earlier and in more detail and caution. The book is written with the pathos of innovation, full of up-to-date scientific and technological information from a multitude of disciplines, but its central claims hardly need this information. The manner of wording also sometimes creates an image of novelty by presenting already known opinions.
It is not for nothing that the excerpt of the review quoted on the back of the book is from the website of the virtual bookstore Amazon: Dennett's book had almost no echoes in the philosophical or scientific literature. This is in contrast to some of his previous publications, and especially his book mentioned above, "Consciousness Explained." If the editor wanted to publish Dennett's own book as part of the "Science, Masterpiece Books" series, it would have been better to translate the latter. I can only recommend this book to a philosophy student who is interested in a concise review of Dennett's thought.
Prof. Hanoch Ben-Yimi is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University
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