Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds

Daniel Dennett is a "philosopher of mind" and has spent his career thinking deeply about human consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the question of just what this thing we call the mind is and how it works. This volume collects essays and articles of his that were originally published in various journals in the 1980s and 90s.

I picked up this book because I'd read some of Dennett's other work and found it very interesting (if sometimes a bit dense and slow going). I then let it sit unread on my shelves for the better part of two decades. Both of these things, I think, were mistakes.

Buying the book in the first place was a mistake not because it's bad -- it's not -- but because I really am not the intended audience for it. Some of show more these pieces are very accessible, but many or most of them were aimed primarily at his colleagues, so they tend to use a lot of specialized vocabulary and assume a lot of knowledge. I remembered enough from the previous Dennett books I'd read, and from a bit of other reading on these subjects, to muddle through, mostly, but some of it was frustratingly obscure to me. A lot of it also involved direct responses to the writings of others, and felt a little incomplete without the context in which they were published, or at least some familiarity with the work of the people he's referencing. (I did know a few of them -- such as Douglas Hofstadter and Thomas Nagel -- but only a few.) So, yeah, I'm definitely a bit too much of a layman to have gotten everything I should out of this, but I suspect that, for those who are more expert on these subjects, these snippets of decades-old academic conversations are likely to feel pretty dated. (Well, at least some of the artificial intelligence ones are, anyway. Although maybe not quite as much as one might expect.)

All of which isn't to say that I didn't get anything at all out of it. I quite enjoyed one or two of the more accessible articles, and even some of the ones I only half-understood were interesting, as far as I understood them. But I really should have stuck with his at least somewhat more popular-level books.

Rating: This is one of those things it's hard to know how to rate, as my experience of reading it and the author's competency at writing it are not at all the same thing. I guess I'll call it 3/5. show less

This was a real treat to read. A compilation of essays by Dennett about a good variety of topics, from neurosci to philosophy of language and everything in between.

Be warned, it's a bit tough for the layman, so I'd recommend Consciousness Explained first. But if you can handle it, this book is a gem. Good science, good writing, and just good overall.

Mind

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