Preview
  • Kinds of Minds

  • Toward an Understanding of Consciousness
  • By: Daniel C. Dennett
  • Narrated by: Daniel Henning
  • Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (40 ratings)

Access a growing selection of included Audible Originals, audiobooks, and podcasts.
You will get an email reminder before your trial ends.
Audible Plus auto-renews for $7.95/mo after 30 days. Upgrade or cancel anytime.

Kinds of Minds

By: Daniel C. Dennett
Narrated by: Daniel Henning
Try for $0.00

$7.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $17.19

Buy for $17.19

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

Combining ideas from philosophy, artificial intelligence, and neurobiology, Daniel Dennett leads the listener on a fascinating journey of inquiry, exploring such intriguing possibilities as: Can any of us really know what is going on in someone else's mind? What distinguishes the human mind from the minds of animals, especially those capable of complex behavior? If such animals, for instance, were magically given the power of language, would their communities evolve an intelligence as subtly discriminating as ours? Will robots, once they have been endowed with sensory systems like those that provide us with experience, ever exhibit the particular traits long thought to distinguish the human mind, including the ability to think about thinking?

Dennett addresses these questions from an evolutionary perspective. Beginning with the macromolecules of DNA and RNA, the author shows how, step-by-step, animal life moved from the simple ability to respond to frequently recurring environmental conditions to much more powerful ways of beating the odds, ways of using patterns of past experience to predict the future in never-before-encountered situations. Whether talking about robots whose video-camera "eyes" give us the powerful illusion that "there is somebody in there" or asking us to consider whether spiders are just tiny robots mindlessly spinning their webs of elegant design, Dennett is a master at finding and posing questions sure to stimulate and even disturb.

©1996 Daniel C. Dennett (P)2019 Recorded Books
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What listeners say about Kinds of Minds

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    25
  • 4 Stars
    9
  • 3 Stars
    4
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    1
Performance
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    20
  • 4 Stars
    8
  • 3 Stars
    4
  • 2 Stars
    2
  • 1 Stars
    2
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    23
  • 4 Stars
    7
  • 3 Stars
    4
  • 2 Stars
    2
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.