Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'
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Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'
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Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'
#2I love the accessibility of presenting this very complex philosophical thought experiment in the form of fiction. He walks you through some of the analysis you need to be making in the beginning,
with the narrator-philosopher basically teaching you, but as the story goes on, you are increasingly left to your own devices to unpack the consequences of the increasingly bizarre scenario. By the end, it's completely stopped being a lecture and is just an entertaining story, but still no less instructive because of the way it captures your imagination and makes you want to work through the ideas.
Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'
#3Amazing thinker. His collaborative book with Hofstader, The Mind's I, has left a profound impression.
Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'
#4Hmmm...I don't find this compelling, at all.
Perhaps the notions are so pervasive that they were integrated into my mind and way of thinking early on due to the initial popularity of this writing?
Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'
#5Hmmm...I don't find this compelling, at all. Perhaps the notions are so pervasive that they were integrated into my mind and way of thinking early on due to the initial popularity of this writing?
It's a bit like how Francis Crick, after he left DNA research and went into neuroscience, wrote a book called "The Astonishing Hypothesis" with the premise that the mind is nothing magical but simply the product of all those neurons in your brain, even if we don't understand yet exactly how. Lots of people (including me) thought "well, of course, what's so astonishing about that?", but I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology.
Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'
#6Hmmm...I don't find this compelling, at all. Perhaps the notions are so pervasive that they were integrated into my mind and way of thinking early on due to the initial popularity of this writing?
It's a bit like how Francis Crick, after he left DNA research and went into neuroscience, wrote a book called "The Astonishing Hypothesis" with the premise that the mind is nothing magical but simply the product of all those neurons in your brain, even if we don't understand yet exactly how. Lots of people (including me) thought "well, of course, what's so astonishing about that?", but I guess there are people who st…
> I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology
There's a gap between accepting that the mind is ultimately made up of neurons firing and what it feels like to be a mind made up of neurons firing.
Depending on one's upbringing, they likely hold deep unexamined beliefs - bedrocks of thinking - that more or less boil down to: the mind feels like some mystical thing. People can believe in the science of biology and conceptually understand that they're the product of long spans of evolution while still feeling like the mind is quite a mystical and mysterious thing.
And it can be hard to cut through this feeling without intentionally uprooting those unexamined beliefs. I know this from personal experience. My upbringing involved the deep conditioning of a religious world view that instills these mystical ideas. I left it behind in my late teens. It wasn't until my mid 30s that I started to deeply appreciate how embedded those feelings were, and even though I didn't believe them when examining them rationally, I realized they were still there in my underlying thought processes, influencing my interpretation of everyday things.
So I wouldn't say it's just that people "still believe the mind is some mystical thing" (although this group does exist), but that "the default mode of experience for many people is the one that feels mystical".
Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'
#7Hmmm...I don't find this compelling, at all. Perhaps the notions are so pervasive that they were integrated into my mind and way of thinking early on due to the initial popularity of this writing?
Interesting! Not compelling because you already have your own answers to the questioned posed? Or perhaps not compelling because you don't find the questions to be interesting/relevant?
The value of this story, in my opinion, isn't just that these are neat things to think about. There are deep unanswered questions here that challenge how we understand the connection between materialistic science and a non-materialistic belief in "self", and push the limits of theories of ethics. For example, right up to the very end it keeps throwing new questions at you, such as "What is justice when 'two' people have identical claims on a fundamental right? Namely, which of them gets to keep the body? Which of them gets the estate? Which of them is married?"
Dennett's story is a powerful instigator of thought on these topics.
Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'
#8Hmmm...I don't find this compelling, at all. Perhaps the notions are so pervasive that they were integrated into my mind and way of thinking early on due to the initial popularity of this writing?
It's a bit like how Francis Crick, after he left DNA research and went into neuroscience, wrote a book called "The Astonishing Hypothesis" with the premise that the mind is nothing magical but simply the product of all those neurons in your brain, even if we don't understand yet exactly how. Lots of people (including me) thought "well, of course, what's so astonishing about that?", but I guess there are people who st…
No less a scientist than Roger Penrose is (arguably) in that camp: his excellent “The Emperor’s New Mind” is about the paradox of free will in a mechanistic universe, and the question of where among the laws of physics might consciousness fit. (Spoiler alert: the collapse of the quantum wave function has a different character from all the other laws.)
Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'
#9Hmmm...I don't find this compelling, at all. Perhaps the notions are so pervasive that they were integrated into my mind and way of thinking early on due to the initial popularity of this writing?
Interesting! Not compelling because you already have your own answers to the questioned posed? Or perhaps not compelling because you don't find the questions to be interesting/relevant? The value of this story, in my opinion, isn't just that these are neat things to think about. There are deep unanswered questions here that challenge how we understand the connection between materialistic science and a non-materialist…
I don't find it compelling because I don't buy the premise, that a person whose brain has been separated from his body is anywhere at all. A simulation of life isn't life, and that's all this is. You have, on the one hand, a corpse relieved of its brain being used as a puppet, and on the other, a brain kept firing in a vat.
It's popular to think of "ourselves" as a sort of "ghost in a machine," and we particularly assume the ghost resides in the brain, but I don't think that's what people are at all. I don't think either our brains or the rest of our bodies are separable from our selves.
That's not to say you can't validly discuss how to treat the body and/or the brain, but I think the person here, the I, has died.
Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bit like how Francis Crick, after he left DNA research and went into neuroscience, wrote a book called "The Astonishing Hypothesis" with the premise that the mind is nothing magical but simply the product of all those neurons in your brain, even if we don't understand yet exactly how. Lots of people (including me) thought "well, of course, what's so astonishing about that?", but I guess there are people who st…
No less a scientist than Roger Penrose is (arguably) in that camp: his excellent “The Emperor’s New Mind” is about the paradox of free will in a mechanistic universe, and the question of where among the laws of physics might consciousness fit. (Spoiler alert: the collapse of the quantum wave function has a different character from all the other laws.)
That is a rather tenuous thing to base an argument (and a book) on. Quantum wave collapse is not understood at all, to the point there are physicists who deny collapsing even happens.