User:Mirjam Dissel/annotations
The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud)
The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 42-45 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 09:46 PM
A reminiscence of the concept of the dream that was held in primitive times seems to underlie the evaluation of the dream which was current among the peoples of classical antiquity.1 They took it for granted that dreams were related to the world of the supernatural beings in whom they believed, and that they brought inspirations from the gods and demons. Moreover, it appeared to them that dreams must serve a special purpose in respect of the dreamer; that, as a rule, they predicted the future.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 45 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 09:48 PM
dreaming in classical times: predicting future and related to world of supernatural beings.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 45 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 09:50 PM
dreaming in ancient times: predicting future and related to world of supernatural beings.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 53-55 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 09:52 PM
Aristotle was acquainted with some of the characteristics of the dream-life; for example, he knew that a dream converts the slight sensations perceived in sleep into intense sensations (òne imagines that one is walking through fire, and feels hot, if this or that part of the body becomes only quite slightly warm'),
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 62-64 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 09:55 PM
Further, it accounted for the main impression made upon the waking life by the morning memory of the dream; for in this memory the dream, as compared with the rest of the psychic content, seems to be something alien, coming, as it were, from another world.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 68-69 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 09:59 PM
co-operation of superhuman spiritual powers on the inexplicable nature of the phenomena of dreams (Haffner).
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 69 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 09:59 PM
haffner
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 70-73 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 09:59 PM
distinct reminiscence of the undisputed belief in the divinity of dreams which prevailed in antiquity; and for some thinkers, the mantic or prophetic power of dreams is still a subject of debate. This is due to the fact that the explanations attempted by psychology are too inadequate to cope with the accumulated material, however strongly the scientific thinker may feel that such superstitious doctrines should be repudiated.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 73 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 10:01 PM
why there were still people/psychologists explaining dreams through the divine.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 102-3 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 10:10 PM
2 The relationship between dreams and disease is discussed by Hippocrates in a chapter of his famous work.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 116-17 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 10:13 PM
that they are intended as a substitute for some other thought-process, and that we have only to disclose this substitute correctly in order to discover the hidden meaning of the dream.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 117 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 10:14 PM
dreams have a meaning
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 116-17 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 10:14 PM
they are intended as a substitute for some other thought-process, and that we have only to disclose this substitute correctly in order to discover the hidden meaning of the dream.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 117 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 10:16 PM
dreams have a meaning, dreams are a substitute for other thought processes that can be uncovered.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 118-20 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 10:19 PM
The first of these methods envisages the dream-content as a whole, and seeks to replace it by another content, which is intelligible and in certain respects analogous. This is symbolic dream-interpretation;
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 130-32 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 10:23 PM
The second of the two popular methods of dream-interpretation entirely abandons such claims. It might be described as thècipher method', since it treats the dream as a kind of secret code in which every sign is translated into another sign of known meaning, according to an established key.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 118 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 10:24 PM
symbolic dream interpretation
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 120 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 10:25 PM
symbolic dream interpretation
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 119 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 10:26 PM
sy
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 119 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 10:26 PM
symbolic dream interpretation
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 132 | Added on Sunday, February 19, 2012, 10:27 PM
decipher method
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 147-48 | Added on Monday, March 05, 2012, 05:39 PM
I must insist that the dream actually does possess a meaning, and that a scientific method of dream-interpretation is possible.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 148 | Added on Monday, March 05, 2012, 05:41 PM
dreams indeed have a meaning according to freud, and they are scientifically explainable
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 168-70 | Added on Monday, March 05, 2012, 05:47 PM
I have noticed in the course of my psychoanalytical work that the psychological state of a man in an attitude of reflection is entirely different from that of a man who is observing his psychic processes.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 170 | Added on Monday, March 05, 2012, 05:50 PM
when talking about the content of one's dream, there were very different outcomes, depending on the attitude of the participants: critical or observant and open-minded
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 175-78 | Added on Monday, March 05, 2012, 05:55 PM
In self-observation, on the other hand, he has but one task -- that of suppressing criticism; if he succeeds in doing this, an unlimited number of thoughts enter his consciousness which would otherwise have eluded his grasp. With the aid of the material thus obtained -- material which is new to the self-observer -- it is possible to achieve the interpretation of pathological ideas, and also that of dream-formations.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 178 | Added on Monday, March 05, 2012, 06:02 PM
unlike the critical state, where thoughts are suppressed before they are even perceived, the self-observer has an the possibility of receiving an flow of NEW thoughts enter the consciousness.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 189-203 | Added on Monday, March 05, 2012, 06:11 PM
In a certain passage in his correspondence with Körner (for the tracing of which we are indebted to Otto Rank), Schiller replies in the following words to a friend who complains of his lack of creative power: `The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint which your intellect imposes upon your imagination. Here I will make an observation, and illustrate it by an allegory. Apparently it is not good -- and indeed it hinders the creative work of the mind -- if the intellect examines too closely the ideas already pouring in, as it were, at the gates. Regarded in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant, and venturesome in the extreme, but it may acquire importance from an idea which follows it; perhaps, in a certain collocation with other ideas, which may seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable link. The intellect cannot judge all these ideas unless it can retain them until it has considered them in connection with these other ideas. In the case of a creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude. You worthy critics, or whatever you may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators, the longer or shorter duration of which distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely' (letter of December 1, 1788). And yet, such a withdrawal of the watchers from the gates of the intellect, as Schiller puts it, such a translation into the condition of uncritical self-observation, is by no means difficult. Most of my patients accomplish it after my first instructions. I myself can do so very completely, if I assist the process by writing down the ideas that flash through my mind.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 203 | Added on Monday, March 05, 2012, 06:13 PM
schiller on how to have a creative mind by removing the watchers from the gates of intellect and let the ideas pour in and assess them later at once, when you can see them in relation to one another.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Bookmark Loc. 203 | Added on Monday, March 05, 2012, 06:13 PM
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 203 | Added on Monday, March 05, 2012, 06:14 PM
schiller on how to have a creative mind by removing the watchers from the gates of intellect and let the ideas pour in and assess them later at once, when you can see them in relation to one another, instead of judging ideas too fast and too severely at the gate.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 322-23 | Added on Monday, March 05, 2012, 06:41 PM
In 1885 it was I who had recommended the use of cocaine, and I had been gravely reproached in consequence.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 431 | Added on Monday, March 05, 2012, 07:06 PM
finished dream analysis.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 438-39 | Added on Wednesday, March 07, 2012, 07:26 AM
the content of the dream is thus the fulfilment of a wish; its motive is a wish.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 439 | Added on Wednesday, March 07, 2012, 07:26 AM
the meaning of a dream, it fulfils a wish and that is the motive in dreaming.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Highlight Loc. 478-79 | Added on Wednesday, March 07, 2012, 07:33 AM
When the work of interpretation has been completed the dream can be recognised as a wishfulfilment.
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The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud) - Note Loc. 478 | Added on Wednesday, March 07, 2012, 07:33 AM
after interpretation you realize that dream = wishfulfilment
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The Third Meaning (Roland Barthes)
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The Third Meaning (Roland Barthes) - Highlight Loc. 8 | Added on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, 01:21 PM
Were it necessary to find a mode of analysis for it, I should turn to the first semiotics (that of the 'message');
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The Third Meaning (Roland Barthes) - Note Loc. 8 | Added on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, 01:21 PM
first meaning of an image
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The Third Meaning (Roland Barthes) - Highlight Loc. 10 | Added on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, 01:24 PM
referential symbolism:
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The Third Meaning (Roland Barthes) - Highlight Loc. 10-11 | Added on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, 01:25 PM
diegetic symbolism:
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The Third Meaning (Roland Barthes) - Highlight Loc. 12 | Added on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, 01:25 PM
Eisensteinian symbolism
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The Third Meaning (Roland Barthes) - Highlight Loc. 13-14 | Added on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, 01:25 PM
historical symbolism,
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The Third Meaning (Roland Barthes) - Highlight Loc. 15-17 | Added on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, 01:25 PM
Taken in its entirety, this second level is that of signification. Its mode of analysis would be a semiotics more highly developed than the first, a second or neo-semiotics, open no longer to the science of the message but to the sciences of the symbol (psychoanalysis, economy, dramaturgy).
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The Third Meaning (Roland Barthes) - Note Loc. 17 | Added on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, 01:27 PM
second meaning of an image, symbolic one, goes further than the semiotic first meaning
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The Third Meaning (Roland Barthes) - Highlight Loc. 30-32 | Added on Tuesday, April 17, 2012, 01:35 PM
By contrast with the first two levels, communication and signification, this third level - even if the reading of it is still hazardous - is that of signifiance, a word which has the advantage of referring to the field of the signifier (and not of signification) and of linking up with, via the path opened by Julia Kristeva who proposed the term, a semiotics of the text.
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The Third Meaning (Roland Barthes) - Highlight Loc. 48-49 | Added on Wednesday, April 18, 2012, 11:11 AM
the obtuse meaning appears to extend outside culture, knowledge, information; analytically, it hassomething derisory about it: opening out into the infinity of language, it can come through as limited in the eyes of analytic reason;
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The Third Meaning (Roland Barthes) - Note Loc. 49 | Added on Wednesday, April 18, 2012, 11:12 AM
third meaning can be named obtuse, as opposed to obvious.
Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett)
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 63-67 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 11:32 AM
Can spiders think, or are they just tiny robots, mindlessly making their elegant webs? For that matter, why couldn't a robot--if it was fancy enough--be conscious? There are robots that can move around and manipulate things almost as adeptly as spiders; could a more complicated robot feel pain, and worry about its future, the way a person can? Or is there some unbridgeable chasm separating the robots (and maybe the spiders and insects and other "clever" but mindless creatures) from those animals that have minds? Could it be that all animals except human beings are really mindless robots?
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 107-8 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 11:35 AM
Membership in the class of things that have minds provides an all-important guarantee: the guarantee of a certain sort of moral standing. Only mind-havers can care; only mind-havers can mind what happens.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 153-57 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 11:46 AM
It is beyond serious dispute, however, that you and I each have a mind. How do I know you have a mind? Because anybody who can understand my words is automatically addressed by my pronoun "you," and only things with minds can understand. There are computer-driven devices that can read books for the blind: they convert a page of visible text into a stream of audible words, but they don't understand the words they read and hence are not addressed by any "you" they encounter; it passes right through them and addresses whoever listens to--and understands--the stream of spoken words. That's how I know that you, gentle reader/listener, have a mind. So do I. Take my word for it.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 199-200 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 11:51 AM
We know that people the world over have much the same likes and dislikes, hopes and fears. We know that they enjoy recollecting favorite events in their lives.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 200-203 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 11:52 AM
We know that they all have rich episodes of waking fantasy, in which they rearrange and revise the details deliberately. We know that they have obsessions, nightmares, and hallucinations. We know that they can be reminded by an aroma or a melody of a specific event in their lives, and that they often talk to themselves silently, without moving their lips.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 263-71 | Added on Thursday, May 24, 2012, 11:30 AM
At the Artificial Intelligence -15- Lab at MIT, Rodney Brooks and Lynn Andrea Stein have assembled a team of roboticists and others (myself included) to build a humanoid robot, named Cog. Cog is made of metal and silicon and glass, like other robots, but the design is so different, so much more like the design of a human being, that Cog may someday become the world's first conscious robot. Is a conscious robot possible? I have defended a theory of consciousness, the Multiple Drafts Model ( 1991), that implies that a conscious robot is possible in principle, and Cog is being designed with that distant goal in mind. But Cog is nowhere near being conscious yet. Cog cannot yet see or hear or feel at all, but its bodily parts can already move in unnervingly humanoid ways. Its eyes are tiny video cameras, which saccade--dart--to focus on any person who enters the room and then track that person as he or she moves. Being tracked in this way is an oddly unsettling experience, even for those in the know. Staring into Cog's eyes while Cog stares mindlessly back can be quite "heartstopping" to the uninitiated, but there is nobody there--not yet, in any case.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Bookmark Loc. 308 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 02:31 PM
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 799-822 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 02:45 PM
Suppose we come across a robot trundling a shopping cart through a supermarket and periodically consulting a slip of paper with symbols written on it. One line is: MILK@.5!GAL if P <2!QT\P else 2!MILK@QT What, if anything, is this gibberish about? We ask the robot. It replies, "That's just to remind me to get a half gallon of milk, but only if the price of a half gallon is less than twice the price of a quart. Quarts are easier for me to carry." This auditory artifact emitted by the robot is mainly just a translation into English of the written one, but it wears its derived meaning on its sleeve, for our benefit. And where did either of these meaning on its sleeve, for our benefit. And where did either of these artifacts get their derived intentionality? From the clever engineering work of the robot's designers, no doubt, but maybe very indirectly. Maybe these engineers formulated and directly installed the cost-conscious principle that has spawned this particular reminder--a rather boring possibility, but one in which the derived intentionality of these states would definitely lead back to the human designers' own intentionality as the creators of those states. It would be much more interesting if the designers had done something deeper. It is possible-- just on the edge of technological capability today--that they designed the robot to be cost-sensitive in many ways and let it "figure out," from its own "experience," -53- that it should adopt some such principle. In this case, the principle would not be hard-wired but flexible, and in the near future the robot might decide from its further "experience" that this application was not cost-effective after all, and it would buy milk in convenient quarts no matter what they cost. How much design work did the robot's designers do, and how much did they delegate to the robot itself? The more elaborate the system of controls, with its attendant information-gathering and information-assessing subsystems, the greater the contribution of the robot itself, and hence the greater its claim to be the "author" of its own meanings--meanings that might, over time, become quite inscrutable to the robot's designers. The imagined robot does not yet exist, but someday it might. I introduce it in order to show that within its world of merely derived intentionality we can draw the very distinction that inspired the contrast between original and derived intentionality in the first place. (We had to "consult the author" to discover the meaning of the artifact.) This is instructive, because it shows that derived intentionality can be derived from derived intentionality. It also shows how an illusion of intrinsic intentionality ( metaphysically original intentionality) could arise. It might seem that the author of a puzzling artifact would have to have intrinsic intentionality in order to be the source of the artifact's derived intentionality, but this is not so. We can see that in this case, at least, there is no work left over for intrinsic intentionality to do. The imagined robot would be just as capable as we are of delegating derived intentionality to further artifacts.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 839-42 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 02:50 PM
The task of a mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valéry once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the -57- future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 844-48 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 03:10 PM
The earliest replicators, the macromolecules, had their needs and developed simple- - relatively simple!--means of achieving them. Their seeking was just so much random walking, with a suitably configured grabber at the business end. When they bumped into the right things, they grabbed them. These seekers had no plan, no "search image," no representation of the soughtfor items beyond the configuration of the grabbers. It was lockand-key, and nothing more. Hence the macromolecule did not know it was seeking, and did not need to know.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 1045-46 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 03:32 PM
The term "cybernetics" was coined by Norbert Wiener from the Greek word for "helmsman" or "steerer."
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 1073-88 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 03:39 PM
The medium of information transfer in the nervous system is electrochemical pulses traveling through the long branches of nerve cells- -not like electrons traveling through a wire at the speed of light, but in a much-slower-traveling chain reaction. A nerve fiber is a sort of elongated battery, in which -73- chemical differences on the inside and outside of the nerve cell's wall induce electric activities that then propagate along the wall at varying speeds--much faster than molecule packets could be shipped through fluid, but much, much slower than the speed of light. Where nerve cells come in contact with each other, at junctures called synapses, a microeffector/microtransducer interaction takes place: the electrical pulse triggers the release of neurotransmitter molecules, which cross the gap by old-fashioned diffusion (the gap is very narrow) and are then by old-fashioned diffusion (the gap is very narrow) and are then transduced into further electrical pulses. A step backward, one might think, into the ancient world of molecular lock-and-key. Especially when it turns out that in addition to the neurotransmitter molecules (such as glutamate), which seem to be more or less neutral all-purpose synapse crossers, there are a variety of neuromodulator molecules, which, when they find the "locks" in the neighboring nerve cells, produce all sorts of changes of their own. Would it be right to say that the nerve cells transduce the presence of these neuromodulator molecules, in the same way that other transducers "notice" the presence of antigens, or oxygen, or heat? If so, then there are transducers at virtually every joint in the nervous system, adding input to the stream of information already being carried along by the electrical pulses. And there are also effectors everywhere, secreting neuromodulators and neurotransmitters into the "outside" world of the rest of the body, where they diffuse to produce many different effects. The crisp boundary between the informationprocessing system and the rest of the world--the rest of the body-- breaks down.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 1130-38 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 03:48 PM
One cannot tear me apart from my body leaving a nice clean edge, as philosophers have often supposed. My body contains as much of me, the values and talents and memories and dispositions that make me who I am, as my nervous system does. The legacy of Descartes's notorious dualism of mind and body extends far beyond academia into everyday thinking: "These athletes are prepared both mentally and physically," and "There's nothing wrong with your body--it's all in your mind." Even among those of us who have battled Descartes's vision, there has been a powerful tendency to treat the mind (that is to say, the brain) as the body's boss, the pilot of the ship. Falling in with this standard way of thinking, we ignore an important alternative: viewing the brain (and hence the mind) as one organ among many, a relatively recent usurper of control, whose functions cannot properly be understood until we see it not as the boss but as just one -77- more somewhat fractious servant, working to further the interests of the body that shelters and fuels it and gives its activities meaning.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 1238-55 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 04:48 PM
The fundamental idea of letting the environment play a blind but selective role in shaping the mind (or brain or control system) has a pedigree even older than Darwin. The intellectual ancestors of today's connectionists and yester- -85- FIGURE 4.2 day's behaviorists were the associationists: such philosophers as David Hume, who tried in the eighteenth century to imagine how mind parts (he called them impressions and ideas) could become self-organizing without benefit of some all-too-knowing director of the organization. As a student once memorably said to me, "Hume wanted to get the ideas to think for themselves." Hume had wonderful hunches about how impressions and ideas might link themselves together by a process rather like chemical bonding, and then create beaten paths of habit in the mind, but these hunches -86- were too vague to be tested. Hume's associationism was, however, a direct inspiration for Pavlov's famous experiments in the conditioning of animal behavior, which led in turn to the somewhat different conditioning theories of E. L. Thorndike, Skinner, and the other behaviorists in psychology. Some of these researchers--Donald Hebb, in particular-- attempted to link their behaviorism more closely to what was then known about the brain. In 1949, Hebb proposed models of simple conditioning mechanisms that could adjust the connections between nerve cells. mechanisms that could adjust the connections between nerve cells. These mechanisms--now called Hebbian learning rules--and their descendants are the engines of change in connectionism, the latest manifestation of this tradition. Associationism, behaviorism, connectionism--in historical and alphabetical order we can trace the evolution of models of one simple kind of learning, which might well be called ABC learning. There is no doubt that most animals are capable of ABC learning; that is, they can come to modify (or redesign) their behavior in appropriate directions as a result of a long, steady process of training or shaping by the environment.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 1256-61 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 04:49 PM
For many life-saving purposes (pattern recognition, discrimination, and generalization, and the dynamical control of locomotion, for instance), ABC networks are quite wonderful--efficient, compact, robust in performance, fault-tolerant, and relatively easy to redesign on the fly. Such networks, moreover, vividly emphasize Skinner's point that it makes little difference where we draw the line between the pruning and shaping by natural selection which is genetically transmitted to offspring (the wiring you are born with), and the pruning and shaping that later takes place in the individual (the rewiring you end up with, as a result of experience or training). Nature and nurture blend seamlessly together.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 1293-1305 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 04:52 PM
One of the ways Popperian creatures achieve useful filtering is by putting candidate behavioral options before the bodily tribunal and exploiting the wisdom, however out-ofdate or shortsighted, accumulated in those tissues. If the body rebels--for example, in such typical reactions as nausea, vertigo, or fear and trembling--this is a semireliable sign (better than a coin flip) that the contemplated act might not be a good idea. Here we see that rather than rewiring the brain to eliminate these choices, making them strictly unthinkable, evolution may simply arrange to respond to any thinking of them with a negative rush so strong as to make them highly unlikely to win the competition for execution. The information in the body that grounds the reaction may have been placed there either by genetic recipe or by recent individual experience. When a human infant first learns to crawl, it has an innate aversion to venturing out onto a pane of supportive glass, through which it can see a "visual cliff." Even though its mother beckons it from a few feet away, cajoling and encouraging, the infant hangs back fearfully, despite never having suffered a fall in its life. The -90- experience of its ancestors is making it err on the side of safety. When a rat has eaten a new kind of food and has then been injected with a drug that causes it to vomit, it will subsequently show a strong aversion to food that looks and smells like the food it ate just before vomiting. Here the information leading it to err on the side of safety was obtained from its own experience. Neither filter is perfect-after all, the pane of glass is actually safe, and the rat's new food is actually nontoxic--but better safe than sorry.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 1341-45 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 05:52 PM
But we have also uncovered substantial grounds for caution: we have seen some ways in which surprisingly mindlike behavior can be produced by relatively simple, mechanical, apparently unmindlike control systems. The potency of our instinctual responses to sheer speed and lifelikeness of motion, for instance, should alert us to the genuine--not merely philosophical--possibil- -93- ity that we can be fooled into attributing more subtlety, more understanding, to an entity than the circumstances warrant.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 1517-20 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 06:17 PM
A gradually changing clump of pixels moving against a more or less static background can change its shape and internal character radically and still be trackable, so long as it doesn't change too fast. (The phi phenomenon, in which sequences of flashing lights are involuntarily interpreted by the vision system to be the trajectory of a moving object, is a vivid manifestation of this built-in circuitry in our own vision systems.)
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 1568-75 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 06:29 PM
By installing dozens or hundreds or thousands of such circuits in a single organism, elaborate life-protecting activities can be reliably controlled, all without anything happening inside the organism that looks like thinking specific thoughts. There is plenty of as if decision making, as if recognizing, as if hiding and seeking. There are also lots of ways an organism, so equipped, can "make mistakes," but its mistakes never amount to formulating a representation of some false proposition and then deeming it true. How versatile can such an architecture be? It is hard to say. Researchers have recently designed and test-driven artificial control systems that produce many of the striking behavioral patterns we observe in relatively simple life- -109- forms, such as insects and other invertebrates; so it is tempting to believe that all the astonishingly complex routines of these creatures can be orchestrated by an architecture like this, even if we don't yet know how to design a system of the required complexity.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 1633-34 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 06:43 PM
The more pressing the reasons for reidentifying things, the more it pays not to make mistakes, and hence the more investments in perceptual and cognitive machinery will pay for themselves. Advanced kinds of learning depend, in fact, on prior capacities for (re-)identification.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Bookmark Loc. 1886 | Added on Wednesday, May 23, 2012, 10:27 PM
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 2064-69 | Added on Thursday, May 24, 2012, 10:32 AM
Thanks to our prosthetically enhanced imaginations, we can formulate otherwise imponderable, unnoticeable metaphysical possibilities, such as the case of Amy the lucky penny, discussed at the end of chapter 4. We need to be able to imagine the otherwise invisible trajectory line linking the genuine Amy of yesterday with just one of the look-alike pennies in the pile--we need to draw it "in our mind's eye." Without such visual aids, internal or external, we would have great difficulty following, let alone contributing to, these metaphysical observations. (Does that mean that someone born blind couldn't participate in such metaphysical discussions? No, because the blind develop their own methods of spatial imagining, concerned, just as a sighted person's imagining is, with keeping track of moving things in space, one way or another.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 2082-86 | Added on Thursday, May 24, 2012, 10:40 AM
Most of what has been written about the possibilities of a "language of thought" as a medium of cognitive operations presupposes that we're thinking of a written language of thought--"brain writing and mind reading," as I put it some years ago. We can get a better perspective on how the advent of language might magnify our cognitive powers if we concentrate instead on why and how a spoken language of thought--an offspring of our natural, public language-might do some good work.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 2088-93 | Added on Thursday, May 24, 2012, 10:42 AM
There is no step more uplifting, more explosive, more momentous in the history of mind design than the invention of language. When Homo sapiens became the beneficiary of this invention, the species stepped into a slingshot that has launched it far beyond all other earthly species in the power to look ahead and reflect. What is true of the species is just as true of the individual. No transition is more astronomically -147- enabling in the life of an individual person than "learning" to speak. I must put the word in scare-quotes, since we have come to realize (thanks to the work of linguists and psycholinguists) that human infants are genetically predesigned for language in many ways.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 2152-55 | Added on Thursday, May 24, 2012, 10:59 AM
The trick is: getting the right bird to come when you need it. How do we do it? By means of technology. We build elaborate systems of mnemonic association--pointers, labels, chutes and ladders, hooks and chains. We refine our resources by incessant rehearsal and tinkering, turning our brains (and all the associated peripheral gear we acquire) into a huge structured network of competences. No evidence yet unearthed shows that any other animal does anything like that.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 2160-61 | Added on Thursday, May 24, 2012, 11:00 AM
A mind looks less miraculous when one sees how it might have been put together out of parts, and how it still relies on those parts.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 2164-65 | Added on Thursday, May 24, 2012, 11:00 AM
It's easy enough to see why a mind seems miraculous, when one has no sense of all the components -153- and of how they got made. Each component has a long design history, sometimes billions of years long.
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 2176-77 | Added on Thursday, May 24, 2012, 11:04 AM
They didn't need to know. Should we call this sort of unwitting use of representations "thinking"? If so, then we would have to say that these creatures were thinking, but didn't know they were thinking!
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Kinds of Minds (Daniel Dennett) - Highlight Loc. 2179-91 | Added on Thursday, May 24, 2012, 11:06 AM
We human beings do many intelligent things unthinkingly. We brush our teeth, tie our shoes, drive our cars, and -154- even answer questions without thinking. But most of these activities of ours are different, for we can think about them in ways that other creatures can't think about their unthinking but intelligent activities. Indeed, many of our unthinking activities, such as driving a car, could become unthinking only after passing through a long period of design development that was explicitly self-conscious. How is this accomplished? The improvements we install in our brains when we learn our languages permit us to review, recall, rehearse, redesign our own activities, turning our brains into echo chambers of sorts, in which otherwise evanescent processes can hang around and become objects in their own right. Those that persist the longest, acquiring influence as they persist, we call our conscious thoughts. Mental contents become conscious not by entering some special chamber in the brain, not by being transduced into some privileged and mysterious medium, but by winning the competitions against other mental contents for domination in the control of behavior, and hence for achieving longlasting effects--or as we misleadingly say, "entering into memory." And since we are talkers, and since talking to ourselves is one of our most influential activities, one of the most effective ways for a mental content to become influential is for it to get into position to drive the language-using parts of the controls.