快猫短视频

The Dennett Quartet by Daniel Dennett, MIT Press, $60, ISBN 0262540916

PHILOSOPHY is to science as pornography is to sex, geneticist Steve Jones
once quipped. If so, I鈥檓 afraid it鈥檚 time to reach for the top shelf. These four
volumes of philosophical essays, seductively boxed with a sexy little index,
show that in a career spanning more than thirty years, Daniel Dennett has been a
veritable factory of impure thoughts.

Many of them, inevitably, concern the relationship between real intelligence
and the artificial stuff. Can a computer have beliefs and desires? Well, of
course it can. Humans, pigeons, chess-playing software, we鈥檙e all what Dennett
would call 鈥渋ntentional systems鈥�. We all hold information and have certain
goals. When it comes to explaining or predicting how such systems behave, only a
fool would ignore this common ground.

Yes, yes, I hear you protest, but can a machine have real beliefs and real
desires? In Dennett鈥檚 view, it鈥檚 a misplaced question: 鈥淲hether one calls what
one ascribes to the computer beliefs or belief-analogues or information
complexes or intentional whatnots makes no difference to the nature of the
肠补濒肠耻濒补迟颈辞苍.鈥�

What makes Dennett鈥檚 gritty pragmatism so captivating is that it goes hand in
hand with a deep distrust of many 鈥渃ommon-sense鈥� views of the mind. Dennett
argues that biology doesn鈥檛 own the rights to self-awareness, hence his
famous鈥攁nd contentious鈥攂elief that there is no reason why computers
could not be conscious.

The genesis of this thinking, and much else besides, is thoroughly mapped out
in these essays. Dennett is not the kind of philosopher who gets tangled up in
infinite regressions and other abstract conundrums. He also writes like a
dream.

So don鈥檛 be bashful. Take a large brown paper bag and go to a bookshop where
the staff don鈥檛 know you. You won鈥檛 be disappointed.