From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Tue Nov 20 2001 - 00:47:39 MST
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dennett2/dennett2_p2.html
<<DANIEL C. DENNETT: THE COMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
[DANIEL C. DENNETT:] If you go back 20 years, or if you go back 200 years,
300 years, you see that there was one family of phenomena that people just
had no clue about, and those were mental phenomena — that is, the very idea
of thinking, perception, dreaming, sensing. We didn't have any model for how
that was done physically at all. Descartes and Leibniz, great scientists in
their own right, simply drew a blank when it came to trying to figure these
things out. And it's only really with the ideas of computation that we now
have some clear and manageable ideas about what could possibly be going on.
We don't have the right story yet, but we've got some good ideas. And at
least one can now see how the job can be done. Coming to understand our own
understanding, and seeing what kinds of parts it can be made of, is one of
the great breakthroughs in the history of human understanding. If you compare
it, say, with our understanding of life itself, or reproduction and growth,
those were deep and mysterious processes a hundred years ago and forever
before that. Now we have a pretty clear idea of how it's possible for things
to reproduce, how it's possible for them to grow, to repair themselves, to
fuel themselves, to have a metabolism. All of these otherwise stunningly
mysterious phenomena are falling into place...>>
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