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Interview

Minds & Machines

How does the brain work? One of the world’s leading figures in philosophy of mind is Daniel Dennett, who describes himself as a cognitive scientist, and who is deeply interested in the development of artificial intelligence. Tim Madigan recently interviewed him for Philosophy Now.

In your latest book Brainchildren there is a chapter entitled ‘Self-Portrait’, in which you state that one must have a theory of intentionality before attempting to develop a theory of consciousness. This seems central to understanding a lot of what you’ve been doing over the years. Can you;

(a) explain in layman’s terms what ‘intentionality’ means to you? And

(b) explain in layman’s terms why we have to understand this before attempting to understand consciousness?

Does consciousness depend on intentionality, or is it the other way around? Intentionality is just aboutness, the way one ‘thing’ can be ‘about’ another ‘thing’ – a map of Dublin is about how the streets are laid out in Dublin, and War and Peace is about (among other things) Napoleon in Russia – and right now my thoughts are about this answer, and so are yours. The last case seems to many people to be ‘original’ or ‘fundamental’ or ‘intrinsic’ in a way the others aren’t. They are merely cases of ‘derived’ intentionality, derived aboutness.

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