Daniel Dennett Making Tools For Thinking Summary
In Daniel Dennett’s, Making Tools for Thinking, he speculated about three primary topics that supplemented the argument involving metarepresentation. He predominantly just offered his insight on different areas such as florid metarepresentation, thinking about thinking, etc. in order to bring about more questions and requested further investigation. Throughout his discussion regarding florid metarepresentation, he offers several examples, including a pride of lions executing an ambush and also an example of a child’s thought process when exclaiming “Snake!” at the sight of a snake. The first example, the pride’s ambush, is indirectly an exact example of florid representing, or deliberate representing. In this instance, the subject(s) are purposefully
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Throughout this section, Dennett heavily relies on studies involving chimpanzees who are able to have beliefs about beliefs, but he wonders does this indicate they can think about thinking? This relates to the content we have recently been covering in class on how complex organisms must be in order to have consciousness/to think. Numerous animals are capable of thinking based on the instincts embedded with them (e.g. when my dogs are hungry, they think of where to go or who to beg for food instead of resorting to instinct of eating the first thing in sight thanks to conditioning). This theory that thinking comes from a genetic background ties into Dennett’s next question about whether or not an organism is only able to develop competence to use representations from the social world. This is not the case in my opinion because we must start to learn and must have some sort of capability to piece together information once we are born which solely improves and becomes stronger or more efficient as we are exposed to the outside world. Using representations is more complicated, but it stems from the basic ability of being able to learn and absorb information. This thought builds on to Dennett’s final section, Machines Made from Found Objects, which concludes his
Throughout this section, Dennett heavily relies on studies involving chimpanzees who are able to have beliefs about beliefs, but he wonders does this indicate they can think about thinking? This relates to the content we have recently been covering in class on how complex organisms must be in order to have consciousness/to think. Numerous animals are capable of thinking based on the instincts embedded with them (e.g. when my dogs are hungry, they think of where to go or who to beg for food instead of resorting to instinct of eating the first thing in sight thanks to conditioning). This theory that thinking comes from a genetic background ties into Dennett’s next question about whether or not an organism is only able to develop competence to use representations from the social world. This is not the case in my opinion because we must start to learn and must have some sort of capability to piece together information once we are born which solely improves and becomes stronger or more efficient as we are exposed to the outside world. Using representations is more complicated, but it stems from the basic ability of being able to learn and absorb information. This thought builds on to Dennett’s final section, Machines Made from Found Objects, which concludes his