Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

כריכה קדמית
W. W. Norton & Company, 5 במאי 2014 - 512 עמודים
“The best new book I’ve read.”—Richard Dawkins, New York Times Book Review

Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun.

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett’s most successful "imagination-extenders and focus-holders" meant to guide you through some of life’s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will. With patience and wit, Dennett deftly deploys his thinking tools to gain traction on these thorny issues while offering readers insight into how and why each tool was built.

Alongside well-known favorites like Occam’s Razor and reductio ad absurdum lie thrilling descriptions of Dennett’s own creations: Trapped in the Robot Control Room, Beware of the Prime Mammal, and The Wandering Two-Bitser. Ranging across disciplines as diverse as psychology, biology, computer science, and physics, Dennett’s tools embrace in equal measure light-heartedness and accessibility as they welcome uninitiated and seasoned readers alike. As always, his goal remains to teach you how to "think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions."

A sweeping work of intellectual seriousness that’s also studded with impish delights, Intuition Pumps offers intrepid thinkers—in all walks of life—delicious opportunities to explore their pet ideas with new powers.

 

תוכן

What Is an Intuition Pump?
1
A DOZEN GENERAL THINKING TOOLS
17
Making Mistakes
19
Using Reductio adAbsurdum
29
Rapoports Rules
33
Sturgeons Law
36
Occams Razor
38
Occams Broom
40
Genes as Words or as Subroutines
214
The Tree of Life
217
Cranes and Skyhooks Lifting in Design Space
218
Competence without Comprehension
232
FreeFloating Rationales
234
Do Locusts Understand Prime Numbers?
236
How to Explain Stotting
238
Beware of the Prime Mammal
240

Using Lay Audiences as Decoys
42
Jootsing
45
Rathering Piling On and the Gould TwoStep
48
A Mental Block
53
Rhetorical Questions
55
What Is a Deepity?
56
Summary
58
TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT MEANING OR CONTENT
59
Murder in Trafalgar Square
61
An Older Brother Living in Cleveland
65
Daddy Is a Doctor
68
Manifest Image and Scientific Image
69
Folk Psychology
73
The Intentional Stance
77
The PersonalSubpersonal Distinction
86
A Cascade ofHomunculi
91
The Sorta Operator
96
Wonder Tissue
98
Trapped in the Robot Control Room
102
AN INTERLUDE ABOUT COMPUTERS
107
The Seven Secrets of Computer Power Revealed
109
Virtual Machines
133
Algorithms
140
Automating the Elevator
143
Summary
148
MORE TOOLS ABOUT MEANING
151
A Thing about Redheads
153
The Wandering TwoBitser Twin Earth and the Giant Robot
157
Radical Translation and a Quinian Crossword Puzzle
175
Semantic Engines and Syntactic Engines
178
Swampman Meets a CowShark
180
Two Black Boxes
184
Summary
197
TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT EVOLUTION
201
Universal Acid
203
Vast and Vanishing
205
When Does Speciation Occur?
244
Widowmakers Mitochondrial Eve and Retrospective Coronations
247
Cycles
252
What Does the Frogs Eye Tell the Frogs Brain?
256
Leaping through Space in the Library of Babel
258
Who Is the Author of Spamlet?
260
Noise in the Virtual Hotel
267
Herb Alice and Hal the Baby
271
Memes
274
Summary
277
TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS
279
Two Counterimages
281
The Zombic Hunch
283
Zombies and Zimboes
288
The Curse ofthe Cauliflower
296
How Much Is That in Real Money?
299
The Sad Case ofMr Clapgras
302
The Tuned Deck
310
The Chinese Room
319
The Teleclone Fall from Mars to Earth
330
The Self as the Center of Narrative Gravity
333
Heterophenomenology
341
A Boom Crutch Unveiled
347
Summary
352
TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT FREE WILL
355
A Truly Nefarious Neurosurgeon
357
Conways Game of Life
359
Rock Paper and Scissors
370
Two Lotteries
375
Ultimate Responsibility
393
Summary
406
The 10 Percent Thats Good
425
Sources
445
Credits
461
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מידע על המחבר (2014)

Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor Emeritus at Tufts University and the author of numerous books, including Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Breaking the Spell, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and Consciousness Explained. He lives with his wife in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

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