Daniel C. Dennett, 1998
I. Philosophy of Mind
Chapter 1. Can Machines Think?
Chapter 2. Speaking for Our Selves
Chapter 3. Do-It-Yourself Understanding
Chapter 4. Two Contrasts: Folk Craft versus Folk Science, and Belief versus Opinion
Chapter 5. Real Patterns
Chapter 6. Julian Jaynes's Software Archeology
Chapter 7. Real Consciousness
Chapter 8. Instead of Qualia
Chapter 9. The Practical Requirements for Making a Conscious Robot
Chapter 10. The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies: Commentary on Moody, Flanagan, and Polger
II. Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life
Chapter 11. Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI
Chapter 12. Producing Future by Telling Stories
Chapter 13. The Logical Geography of Computational Approaches: A View from the East Pole
Chapter 14. Hofstadter's Quest: A Tale of Cognitive Pursuit
Chapter 15. Foreword to Robert French, The Subtlety of Sameness
Chapter 16. Cognitive Science as Reverse Engineering: Several Meanings of "Top-Down" and "Bottom-Up"
Chapter 17. Artificial Life as Philosophy
Chapter 18. When Philosophers Encounter Artificial Intelligence
Chapter 19. Review of Allen Newell, Unified Theories of Cognition
III. Ethology, Animal Mind
Chapter 20. Out of the Armchair and into the Field
Chapter 21. Cognitive Ethology: Hunting for Bargains or a Wild Goose Chase
Chapter 22. Do Animals Have Beliefs?
Chapter 23. Why Creative Intelligence is Hard to Find: Commentary on Whiten and Byrne
Chapter 24. Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why
IV. Standing Back
Chapter 25. Self-Portrait
Chapter 26. Information, Technology, and the Virtues of Ignorance
French discusses the operation of a computer program, the Tabletop model,
capable of deciding on the degree of similarity or "sameness" of
different things.
Dennett, quite rightly, understands the fundamental importance of this issue
of degree of similarity to the essence of intelligent behavior.
The greater part of Newell's book seems to be devoted to the discussion of
his work with a reasoning system called Soar. Dennett takes from this
discussion a number of interesting observations pertaining to the progress
of AI in dealing with mind and of philosophers' responses to that progress
(or lack of it).
Preliminary to a discussion of animal beliefs, Dennett defines belief in such
a way that all knowledge is belief. Believing something is the same as knowing
it. Other than a puzzling detour which, as far as I can tell, deals with the
nature of abstraction, most of the remainder of the chapter is concerned with
justifying the strict position that belief equals knowledge
.
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