Kάθε νέο άρθροBook: Daniel C. Dennett – Kinds of Minds
Posted by Διαγόρας ο Μήλιος στο 2007/08/04
Daniel C. Dennett – Kinds of Minds
| Audiobook (abridged)  |
Paperback |
A pretty interesting book, addresses questions such as what is consciousness, what kinds of creatures have minds, how do we know whether an animal exhibits intentionality or sensitivity, how do we know whether it is capable of experiencing pain or agony, etc, all in quite simple language suitable even for young audience. I listened to the…
… abridged audiobook version, which was nicely narrated by the author. You can read what amounts to practically a little digest of the book at Wikipedia.
Quote from the book:
A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.
And another passage from the book, which I personally found very interesting:
Consider pain. In 1986, the British government amended its laws protecting animals in experiments, adding the octopus to the privileged circle of animals that may not be operated upon without anesthesia. An octopus is a mollusk, physiologically more like an oyster than a trout (let alone a mammal), but the behavior of the octopus and the other cephalopods (squid, cuttlefish) is so strikingly intelligent and-apparently-sentient that the scientific authorities decided to let behavioral similarity override internal difference: cephalopods (but not other mollusks) are officially presumed to be capable of feeling pain-just in case they are.
The duration of the audiobook was 3 hours and 31 minutes.
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SimonSays said
Personally, I grew up in Greece witnessing the utter and complete abuse that octopuses go through on their way to becoming the glorious delicacy that they are. However this social conditioning was rather difficult to transmit to others once I left. Anglo-Saxons often have a hard time even entertaining the notion of eating such a creature, especially when you tell them it was beaten repeatedly against a rock and hung to dry on a clothesline before being served on your plate :-)