The intentional stance
by Daniel C. Dennett · first published 1987
24% recommend76% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Explains how we can sensibly attribute beliefs and goals to systems like thermostats or computers, a framework central to thinking about minds and AI; recommended for readers of philosophy of mind.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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Fsck. I hadn't thought of it that way. Thank you, great point. This era has me hankering to reread Daniel Dennett's _The Intentional Stance_. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance We've developed folk psychology into a user interface and that really does mean that we should continue to use folk psychology to predict the behaviour…
on “ChatGPT Plugins” ↗> And I'd say you're just telling yourself a retroactively edited story that there is a singular subjective experience in order to make sense of our own thoughts and behaviours So look, "The Intentional Stance" is for me one of the most important books I've ever read in this general area, and I totally buy all the stuff Dennett and others have built up around the idea that what we are conscious of is an edited,…
on “What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?” ↗You might want to read “The Intentional Stance” by Daniel Dennett, a philosophical treatise basically on how we usefully ascribe desire or intention to inanimate objects and phenomena as a mental model (for example, saying that “The thermostat tries…
on “Mass and angular momentum, left ambiguous by Einstein, get defined” ↗…explanations of conscious experience and semantics from a materialist's perspective, Hofstadter and Sander's 'Surfaces and Essences' and Minsky's 'Society of Mind' and 'Emotion Machine' are great. Dennett's 'Intentional Stance' is also relevant - discussing how we can sensibly talk about material systems as having intention. Bear in mind that dualism is the more 'natural thought' in historical terms, and even hardcore materialists…
on “MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award” ↗…anthology edited by Douglas Hofstadter Edited by Douglas Hofstadter & Daniel Dennett you mean ;-) Daniel Dennett's philosophical writings on consciousness/AI and religion are also very approachable. His "Intentional Stance" is a classic IMHO. I've not read all of his later stuff - but Consciousness Explained is also very good. (His four Fs definition of life always cracks me up - fight, flee, feed, and... mating...),
on “Surprisingly undervalued books” ↗For the discussion of your category 3 you might enjoy Dennett’s influential book, The Intentional Stance, which discusses how people reason from models like “the thermostat tries to keep the temperature between X and Y”). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance
on “Supercomputer analysis of Covid-19 leads to new theory” ↗> Plenty of popsci journos write as if nature is intelligent and driven by some purpose. You might want to read “The intentional stance” by the famous philosopher Daniel Dennett. This is a pretty useful analytic approach for many problems (e.g. we commonly say things like “the thermostat tries to keep the temperature within three degrees…
on “Elephants born without tusks in ‘evolutionary response’ to poachers (2021)” ↗You might enjoy Dennett’s “The Intentional Stance” for some enlightening exploration of this metaphor, e.g. “The thermostat tries to keep the temperature between 67 and 69” not only makes sense but is a useful way to think of it even when we don’t believe…
on “Feathers are one of evolution's cleverest inventions” ↗…discipline. If you take the word "computer" out of the sentence this statement is likely backwards. Putting the word computer back in doesn't change that. Look, for example, at Dennett's seminal book, "The Intentional Stance" for a philosophical discussion of the expressive and reasoning power behind statements like "The thermostat tries to keep the temperature at 60 degrees".
on “AI Is an Ideology, Not a Technology” ↗Did Dennett back off from his intentional stance? Consciousness seems important to explain and predict behavior in practice.
on “Zombies Must Be Dualists: Zombies and Our Philosophy of Mind” ↗…possible to me that the whole experience of "reasoning with concepts" is not actually what we do at all, but merely what we experience when we do something else. Essentially, some variant on Dennett's intentional stance but applied to ourselves.
on “The Principles of Deep Learning Theory” ↗Astonishing that she mentioned Dennett and yet does not discuss his Intentional Stance (or at least it does not come up in this book review) a rather significant philosophical exploration of the topic of claimed or modeled agency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance
on “The Difference It Makes” ↗…indistinguishable. > Free will or no free will, we really can't know the difference. So it's best to behave like you have a free will, and own your own actions as far as you can. Dennett calls this the "intentional stance", ie. that any system of sufficient complexity should be treated as if it were acting with intent.
on “Photons, Quasars and the Possibility of Free Will” ↗It probably makes no sense to talk of a virus having a strategy. I don’t agree with all of his stuff but the point of Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance” is basically that attributing mental states to things is just a pragmatic matter. If it helps us understand virus behavior better to treat them as if they have strategies (which implies mentation), then…
on “Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe Covid: study” ↗There are two possible things going on: 1. actual anthropomorphizing, that is ascribing distinctly human motivation to a non-human actor 2. in Dennett's words, "taking the intentional stance", that is choosing to describe and understand an active entity in the world as if it had intentions. We do (2) with other people all the time, without much to really back it up. I don't consider such…
on “Dogs are good models for human psychiatric disorders, study argues” ↗