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Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness. Daniel C. Dennett. 184 pp. BasicBooks, 1996. $20.
At one point in his new book Kinds of Minds Daniel Dennett notes that "we [human beings] ... are believe alls. There is no limit, apparently to what we can believe." In Kinds of Minds, Dennett is out to convince us that mindfulness is an attribute that we may justifiably apply to nonhuman entities, and that in so doing, we will gain a more accurate view of our own minds. Should we believe him?
Dennett's approach to "mind" is evolutionary. That is, he assumes that human beings have minds but that there haven't always been minds. Hence, natural selection must account for our possession of "mindfulness." Of course, Dennett's rhetoric to the contrary, one needn't accept these initial assumptions. He states, "Now, it certainly does not follow from the fact that we are descended from robots that we are robots ourselves. After all, we are also direct descendants of fish, and we are not fish.... So something made of robots...