Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds

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MIT Press, Feb 17, 1998 - Philosophy - 430 pages
A new collection of wide-ranging essays from one of cognitive science's most distingushed figures.

Minds are complex artifacts, partly biological and partly social; only a unified, multidisciplinary approach will yield a realistic theory of how they came into existence and how they work. One of the foremost workers in this multidisciplinary field is Daniel Dennett. This book brings together his essays on the philosphy of mind, artificial intelligence, and cognitive ethology that appeared in inaccessible journals from 1984 to 1996. Highlights include "Can Machines Think?," "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies," "Artificial Life as Philosophy," and "Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why." Collected in a single volume, the essays are now available to a wider audience.

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Contents

Speaking for Our Selves
31
DoItYourself Understanding
59
Folk Craft versus Folk Science and Belief versus
81
Real Patterns
95
Julian Jayness Software Archeology
121
Instead of Qualia
141
Commentary
171
The Frame Problem of
181
Several Meanings
249
Artificial Life as Philosophy
261
Review of Allen Newell Unified Theories of Cognition
277
Out of the Armchair and into the Field
289
Hunting for Bargains or a Wild Goose
307
Do Animals Have Beliefs?
323
Commentary
333
Pain Suffering and Morality
351

Producing Future by Telling Stories
207
A View
215
A Tale of Cognitive Pursuit
235
Foreword to Robert French The Subtlety of Sameness
243
SelfPortrait
355
Information Technology and the Virtues of Ignorance
367
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About the author (1998)

Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor Codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds; Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness; Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting; Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (all published by the MIT Press), From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Mind, and other books.

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