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Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

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Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#11

Post by gosub100 »

haswell wrote: post #6
jhbadger wrote: post #5

Earlier 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…

> 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…

I'm certain this topic has been addressed many times, but I can't see how to reconcile basic morality with "it's just a calculation". Tell me I should not inflict pain on sentient beings while subscribing to the belief that pain is simply one particular result of a massive mathematical calculation. It's literally just a number/matrix.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#12

Post by dkz999 »

smeej wrote: post #9
cvoss wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 as…

Is someone with a cochlear implant dead? How about someone using a BCI to move a mouse? Or a locked-in patient?

Is there a minimum number of organic connections we need to be alive?

How would you convince this person that their 'I' has died?

I think these questions are exactly along the lines of the question this story begs.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#13

Post by somenameforme »

haswell wrote: post #6
jhbadger wrote: post #5

Earlier 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…

> 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…

All possible explanations for existence have a 'well okay, but what created that' issue. Whether you start with a God, or with a quantum fluctuation, one is left asking - okay well what created the God, or what created the void in which quantum mechanics (and who created such a system to begin with) burst forth. There is no answer to these questions, because regardless of the story - it always ends (or in this case, begins) in the same very uncompelling way - 'Well it just always was.'

In any case, the mystical and physical are not fixed. Imagine explaining the consequences of relativity to a skeptical individual of times past. Think of his response to the notion that time itself is a variable and can move at different rates for different people in different circumstances. It sounds like absurd mystical sci-FI nonsense. Except it's real, so now has been promoted from the mystical to the physical.

So what a skeptic of today would label "mystical" will almost certainly change over the centuries and millennia yet to come. Scarcely more than a century ago, state of the art transport was a horse, computers did not exist, quantum physics did not exist, relativity did not exist, human flight was widely believed to be impossible, and so on endlessly. It seems unlikely in just a century that we've even scratched the surface of knowledge yet to come, let alone meaningfully penetrated into it.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#14

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

gosub100 wrote: post #11
haswell wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm certain this topic has been addressed many times, but I can't see how to reconcile basic morality with "it's just a calculation". Tell me I should not inflict pain on sentient beings while subscribing to the belief that pain is simply one particular result of a massive mathematical calculation. It's literally just a number/matrix.

Perhaps you're not over-valuing pain, but under-valuing numbers. There's no reason to think that morality can't or shouldn't center around minimizing a pain metric. That would put it in line with any other trajectory-planning-under-constraints problem. Once you've done a bit of work in trajectory optimization, you start to feel the numbers come alive, and develop a visceral feeling for them. I wince when I see a car scrape to the edge of its traction limit as it rounds a corner at high speed.

Nature itself plans trajectories to minimize action, the integral of a Lagrangian: it's literally just a number, but it decides the motion of molecules and galaxies. What's wrong with a moral system based around minimizing a pain integral, subject to constraints? Still just a number. But one that can easily take an important position in our decision-making, and find a deep-seated place in our minds as well.

Of course, we probably ended up with morals in the first place as a distillation of game-theoretic heuristics, which helped us trust and cooperate with each other, which would have been an evolutionary benefit. But as with anything else, we're accountable to the drives that evolution left us with, not evolution's reasons for putting them there. The morals are in our minds, not in nature, but either way it's numbers all the way down.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#16

Post by vaidhy »

Here is the part I completely lost the thread - Right at the beginning..

> “Yorick,” I said aloud to my brain, “you are my brain. The rest of my body, seated in this chair, I dub ‘Hamlet.’” So here we all are: Yorick’s my brain, Hamlet’s my body, and I am Dennett.

Why is the brain or the body different from "I"? There seems to be an unstated assumption that your ego is different from your physical manifestation and I did not see anything to substantiate that. This is a religious argument and I could not make sense of the arguments following it.

Maybe there is already an assumption that I missed.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#17

Post by andoando »

haswell wrote: post #6
jhbadger wrote: post #5

Earlier 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…

> 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…

>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.

This is exactly my objection. I fully believe were mechanical machines, fully believe in determinism, I think human behavior /thoughts will fully be explained mechanically etc but I cannot find any way to deny consciousness or qualia and reduce them to physical properties (lest we augment our definition of physical to include consciousness as a fundamental property. I also contest the notion that doing so would be "mysticism" or any less scientific than having added "mystical" properties like force/energy and randomness into the standard model of physics). It seems the motivation for this has far more to do with desperately trying to cram everything into materialism than following sense.

Until one can give any kind of plausible explanation as to how feeling/qualia can become an emergent property of matter, it is a complete mystery. My thoughts are it is impossible as they are completely orthogonal and complimentary properties. Qualia is the experience of going through the physical process. Pain is the experience of having this mysterious thing called force acted upon pain receptors hooked up to a working neural system. The physical description can explain exactly what happens, but yet it leaves us with an experience that has no physical description. How can that be?

Lastly, there will always be unanswered questions or presumptions in science (how did the universe emerge? what makes up energy?), so while the attempt to do is formidable, the presupposition that consciousness must be explained by science is nonsensical.

Dennet's eliminative materialism isn't some well accepted philosophical position. In fact, its one the most rejected. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5042 https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlation...

We just had a long discussion about this if you're interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254047#40257234

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#18

Post by rexpop »

_wire_ wrote: post #15

[flagged]

No offense, but your whole post made not one lick of sense.

Starting with your first assertion that "It's a quality of every story that any one of its parts could be embellished to the fullness of the whole tale."

No. Not at all. Stories aren't crystals or pure fractals.

But after that refutable statement, nothing else even made enough sense to argue with. You may as well have been speaking a foreign patois.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#19

Post by pfdietz »

haswell wrote: post #6
jhbadger wrote: post #5

Earlier 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…

> 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…

Another unstated assumption is that one necessarily exists. After all, every last experience we have ever had has been with ourselves being there, experiencing it.

This leads to the idea that we will cease to exist to just be unbelievable, as it's contrary to everything we have ever experienced. From this I think we get the idea of some essence separate from our biology and the idea of its continuation after death.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#20

Post by zehaeva »

vaidhy wrote: post #16

Here is the part I completely lost the thread - Right at the beginning.. > “Yorick,” I said aloud to my brain, “you are my brain. The rest of my body, seated in this chair, I dub ‘Hamlet.’” So here we all are: Yorick’s my brain, Hamlet’s my body, and I am Dennett. Why is the brain or the body different from "I"? There seems to be an unstated assumption that your ego is different from your physical manifestation and I…

The statement of the argument is classic Dualism. I am pretty sure that Dennett is setting up the scene in order to poke holes in the said argument.
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