Books by author: Daniel Dennett

I read Consciousness Explained at a good time, relative to my progression of thought regarding intelligence and AI. I'm not terribly interested in the holy wars that accompany this kind of thing, and I'm quite happy to side with Dennett's "explanation" of consciousness. I'm a little troubled by the sheer number of people who insist that there are ineffable qualities without which there would be no life, intelligence, consciousness, etc. It's too bad that most of those people will never pay attention to Dawkins, Minsky, and Dennett.

Dennett is fun to read. He seems to think of himself as simultaneously a philosopher and an outsider to the philosophical community. This book is great when he's talking about his own ideas, but I found it quite boring where he analyzes the relations of his ideas to those of other philosophers (what did I expect out of a philosophy book?!). I recommend Consciousness Explained somewhat more highly (I got more out of it).

This book is an excellent collection of readings on the nature of mind. Very few of these ideas are new to me at this point, but for someone just beginning to think about the philosophy of mind, this book would be a good starting point. The most frustrating thing is that the pointers to further reading are all out of date; there is fifteen years worth of new material available now.