Dennett, Kinds of Minds, Chapter 5

1. The key difference between us and other animals is that we, but not they, think about our own thinking. How and why did this capacity evolve?

2. Answer: there are advantages to being able to think about the thinking of other people. If I can think about the thinking of others, then I can think about my own thinking. I can take the intentional stance toward myself – and thus I become a person (as opposed to merely an instance of the species H. sapiens).

3. Social animals gain by sharing information – but they also gain by (sometimes) lying. However, you can’t lie unless you can notice and keep track of a distinction between how things actually are and how someone could imagine them to be. Popperian creatures, since they form mental models, can adjust these so as to form false mental models.

4. But now: if you’re going to send information out about your own mental state, you’re going to need a publicly agreed set of categories for labeling these states. This means you’ll need a menu of labeling options. It will be digital – “I believe exactly this” or “I want precisely that” – and will thus compress the analog information that your brain uses. Now, since you take the intentional stance toward yourself, you’ll cause yourself to believe your own attributions! By taking yourself to have definite states of belief and desire you’ll cause yourself to actually have such states!

5. The evolutionary order of developments leading to the human mind goes:

- secret keeping

- talking

- thinking in intentional terms

6. Now, to get from talking to thinking, natural selection had to build creatures who’d `look inside’ themselves (like Descartes). How did this happen? Did a new structure in the brain have to evolve?

7. No. Once our ancestors could talk they automatically had the tool they needed to become Gregorian creatures.

8. Why? Because words are labels. Labels are extensions of a creature’s mind out into the world. Use of them saves you from having to keep track of things using your brain; you let the world do it for you.

9. So here is how a newborn H. sapiens turns into a person. She’s born with a brain that associates impressions and sorts them into patterns – just as Hume argued. She’s a Popperian creature, but all she can model are those situations for which natural selection pre-designed her. (That is, she can figure out how to get around in her physical environment, how to manipulate the emotional responses of her parents, and a few other limited things.) People are constantly talking to her. She repeats what she hears – at first without these words having any meaning for her. But her brain will automatically look for patterns of association between the strings of words and circumstances that matter to her. She eventually allows her to start talking to herself. The language itself, which she inherited from her culture, stores information about a rich network of types of situations so she doesn’t have to learn them; they just come along with her language.

10. Some of these types of situations are social situations. Learning her culture through its language partly involves learning what’s expected of her by others. In learning this, she learns what to expect from herself. But she also discovers that her culture leaves many options. How is she – still just an infant, though now a talking one – to choose amongst these? Initially, she doesn’t; she just randomly walks through her option space. Some of the options she initially chooses by accident will be associated with her by others, and these others will think of those options as things she `likes’. They’ll say so. She’ll say so to herself. Gradually, a network of narratives about her personality will become true just by being told. Other people will expect her to be consistent, since otherwise she’s difficult to predict and can’t readily be involved in group projects. She responds to this pressure by telling herself consistent stories about herself, making her past choices precedents for her present and future ones. She thereby becomes predictable to others and to herself. And thus, gradually, she narrates herself into being, in just the way that a novelist narrates a character in a book into someone whose general set of words and actions and habits `fit together’ as someone we can come to understand.

11. Thus we use language to author ourselves, assisted by many co-authors as we grow up. When do infants become people, then? There’s no magic moment or threshold; they just gradually change from being native-born Popperian creatures to being culturally spawned Gregorian creatures.