dennett

Daniel Dennett

[|behaviourism and the inner environment]
 * Learning can be viewed as self design.** //There doesn't appear to be a more powerful way to think about **design** than thinking of it as an evolution wrought by generate and test!//

[|Dennett's Creatures]


 * Darwinian creatures** are created by random mutation and selected by the external environment. The best designs survive and reproduce.


 * Skinnerian creatures** can learn by testing actions (responses) in the external environment. Favourably actions are reinforced and then tend to be repeated. Pigeons can be trained to press a bar to receive food.

Skinnerian creatures ask themselves, "What do I do next?"


 * Popperian creatures** can preselect from possible behaviours / actions weeding out the truly stupid options before risking them in the harsh world. Dennett calls them Popperian because Popper said this design enhancement "permits our hypotheses to die in our stead". This is Dennett's enhancement of behaviourism. Popperian creatures have an inner environment that can preview and select amongst possible actions. For this to work the inner environment must contain lots of information about the outer environment and its regularities. Not only humans can do this. Mammals, birds, reptiles and fish can all presort behavioural options before acting.

Popperian creatures ask themselves, "What do I think about next?"


 * Gregorian creatures** are named after [|Richard Gregory], an information theorist. Gregorian creatures import mind-tools (words) from the outer cultural environment to create an inner environment which improve both the generators and testers.

Gregorian creatures ask themselves, "How can I learn to think better about what to think about next?"

Words / language are necessary to sustain long predictive chains of thought, eg. to sustain a chain or combination of pattern recognition. This is true in chess, for example, where the player uses chess notation to assist his memory.

With respect to tools. Tools may have come before language. The evolution of the hand with an opposable thumb is an early "inbuilt" tool, in combination with erect posture. It has been shown that those things happened before the increase in brain size. See Engels, Gould. This observation, however, does not refute Dennett's proposition of the primacy of language in contributing to intelligence. Tools can be a fundamental building block and language still primary.

Learning from mistakes is an important and hard to learn part of this process. To learn from mistakes one has to be able to contemplate them and language / communication assists that process. For example, by being told by someone else you have made a mistake.

Finally, we have **Scientific creatures** which is an organised process of making and learning from mistakes in public, of getting others to assist in the recognition and correction of mistakes.

[|Dennett, Kinds of Minds, Chapter 5] 9. So here is how a newborn //H. sapiens// turns into a //person.// She’s born with a brain that associates impressions and sorts them into patterns – just as Hume argued. She’s a Popperian creature, but all she can model are those situations for which natural selection pre-designed her. (That is, she can figure out how to get around in her physical environment, how to manipulate the emotional responses of her parents, and a few other limited things.) People are constantly talking to her. She repeats what she hears – at first without these words having any meaning for her. But her brain will automatically look for patterns of association between the strings of words and circumstances that matter to her. She eventually allows her to start talking to herself. The language itself, which she inherited from her culture, stores information about a rich network of types of situations so she doesn’t have to learn them; they just come along with her language.

10. Some of these types of situations are //social// situations. Learning her culture through its language partly involves learning what’s expected of her by others. In learning this, she learns what to expect from herself. But she also discovers that her culture leaves many options. How is she – still just an infant, though now a talking one – to choose amongst these? Initially, she doesn’t; she just randomly walks through her option space. Some of the options she initially chooses by accident will be associated with her //by others//, and these others will think of those options as things she `likes’. They’ll say so. She’ll say so to herself. Gradually, a network of narratives about her personality will become true //just by being told.// Other people will expect her to be consistent, since otherwise she’s difficult to predict and can’t readily be involved in group projects. She responds to this pressure by telling herself consistent stories about herself, making her past choices precedents for her present and future ones. She thereby becomes predictable to others //and to herself.// And thus, gradually, she narrates herself into being, in just the way that a novelist narrates a character in a book into someone whose general set of words and actions and habits `fit together’ as someone we can come to understand.

11. Thus we use language to author ourselves, assisted by many co-authors as we grow up. When do infants become //people//, then? There’s no magic moment or threshold; they just gradually change from being native-born Popperian creatures to being culturally spawned Gregorian creatures.

Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness (1996) - notes, Bill Kerr
Ch 1 What Kinds of Minds Are There? Ch 2. Intentionality: The Intentional Systems Approach Ch 3. The Body and its Minds Ch 4. How Intentionality Came into Focus Ch 5. The Creation of Thinking Ch 6. Our Minds and Other Minds

solipsism - Descartes - how do we know there are other minds? common sense but it can't be proven ontology - what exists epistemology - knowledge we think that we are our minds each of us knows one mind from the inside - no other thing is known in this way we belong to the privileged group of mind havers this raises a moral question - treating other things that might have minds but we suspect not, eg. other animals some animals are regarded as special by some - there is outrage at the demand of proof of their specialness we cannot fathom other animals Cog (Brooks robot) appears to be sentient because of its eye contact, etc. Wittgenstein, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" rebuttal: It might be that adding language to a lion's "mind" would be giving him a mind for the first time! evolution - from no mind to mindful creatures
 * Ch 1 What Kinds of Minds Are There?**

3 stances - physical (eg. rock), design (eg. alarm clock), intentional (eg. cockroach) these 3 stances to different objects are useful! the intentional stance has its place in our thought
 * Ch 2. Intentionality: The Intentional Systems Approach**

meaning of intentionality (different from the stance) - aboutness, representation, aiming an arrow deliberately vague? What I think about "some person" will be different to what someone else thinks about "some person"

confusing other intentional systems is one goal of intentional systems, eg. rabbit and fox

propositions are entities by which we measure beliefs

mentalese

"What does sentience amount to, above and beyond sensitivity?" (85)
 * Ch 3. The Body and its Minds**

the functionalism argument (89-96) What makes something a mind is not what it is made of but what it can do This is true of spark plugs, hearts, it had seemed obvious that minds process information (gather, discriminate, store, transform, process) functionalism (abstraction) seems to make things easier by focusing on doing but functionalism can lead to confusion the Myth of Double Transduction first the nervous system transduces light, sound, temperature and so forth into neural signals second in some central special place it transduces these trains of impulses into some other medium, the medium of consciousness Descartes thought this happened in the pineal gland How could mere nerve impulses be the stuff of consciousness? Doesn't there have to be a central something to take in, transform and appreciate all the information? The idea that the network itself could harbour consciousness seems absurd.

"my body has a mind of its own" heart transplant / brain transplant - funny! tendency to treat the mind / brain as the body's boss Nietzsche - "more reason in the body than in your best wisdom" if our bodies already have minds then why do we need additional minds


 * Ch 4. How Intentionality Came into Focus**

Tower of Generate and Test Darwinian creatures Skinnerian creatures (sea slugs) Popperian creatures (all vertebrates) - "What do I think about next?"

phenotypic plasticity Skinner underestimated ABC learning associationists (Hume) behaviourists (Pavlov, Skinner, Donald Hebb) connectionists

sentience - no such extra phenomenon

Gregorian creatures - tool use (two way) - "How can I learn to think better about what to think about next?" Capgrass delusion

joke about behaviourists - in their opinion nobody has opinions second order intentionality - beliefs about beliefs human thinking requires talking, secret keeping, complex environments
 * Ch 5. The Creation of Thinking**

objects to think with - offloading cognition into the environment language - getting the right bird when you need it


 * Ch 6. Our Minds and Other Minds**

know how consciousness - some mental content wins a competition language enables humans to wrestle concepts (cat, snow) away from real life entities and manipulate, play with them we have a problem of assuming that other animals have a stream of reflective consciousness - "what is it like to be a bat?" implies falsely that a bat know what it is like dogs have been selected for generations for their human like responses to human behaviour

[|The Role of Language in Intelligence] - lecture 1994

[|Tower of Generate and Test]