Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness

What kinds of minds are there,and how do we know? The first question is about what exists - about ontology, in philosophical parlance - and the second question is about our knowledge - about epistemology. The aim of Kinds of Minds is to answer these questions, in general outline, and to show why these two questions have to be answered together. What exists is one thing, and what we can know about it is something else. There may be things that are completely unknowable to us so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limits of what there is. But we know enough about minds, Dennett argues, to know that one of the things that makes them different from everything else in the Universe is the way we know about them.

Daniel C. Dennett is Director of the Center of Cognitive Studies, and Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at Tufts University, Massachusetts.