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Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

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Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#21

Post by N0b8ez »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #14
gosub100 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Consider whether we should define electrons to be "positive" or "negative": there isn't any fact of the matter, it's merely a convention. But it doesn't seem like experiencing pain works this way: pain feels a particular way. If pain is just a mathematical entity, there shouldn't be any particular way that it feels, since it's just a symbol.

Maybe we're deeply wrong about our intuitions, and actually no conscious experience is happening in the brain at all, despite the brain having an incorrect model about itself which predicts this (and causes it to make utterances claiming that it has experiences). That's the school of thought known as eliminitivism. Under this view, all suffering is a myth, in the same way that luckiness and angels are.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#22

Post by filipezf »

pfdietz wrote: post #19
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…

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.

I have entertained the idea (if you believe in the quantum many worlds) that everyone will experience themselves as aging to infinitely old age, because in the parallel worlds, well, you don't exist.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#23

Post by _wire_ »

rexpop wrote: post #18
_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.

Then you got my gist:

That's how I feel about this Dennett tale.

Why did he choose this idiom, why does his thesis seem to betray premise? The thesis being there's no me there, the premise being the narrative authority of the tale. Someome told the story.

To my reading, Dennett id clearly is capable of comprehending the irony of his position, so the tale as a whole is a sort of sound of one hand clapping (which can be done by many people by beating their fingers against the palm of the same hand). Dennet may be attempted to use pointed obfuscation to reveal to the reader that the man who determines he is no one is still someone.

But Dennett himself appears to treads indelicately on the edge of becoming a god or oracle of his own purvey. He welcomes me to his domain while at the same time distancing himself from the human commons. I read his posture as cultish.

From here I ask myself, as a cultist, what is Dennett's orthodoxy? Techno-feudalism? Transhumanism?

If the job of the philosopher is to form questions, why are the questions he's begging so debasing of a commonsense status of the individual and substitution of the corporate?

I can't figure it out, but I don't want to follow it on Dennett's own terms, so I offered some alternatives that work better for me.

Thanks for taking a moment to reply to my post.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#24

Post by llamaimperative »

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.

It shouldn't be that hard: you don't like suffering, right? There you go! Those numbers/matrices are bad because they feel bad.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#25

Post by euroderf »

adonovan wrote: post #8
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…

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.)

Lee Smolin (a physicist) argues that all this talk of determinism (as opposed to free will) has a real impact on people, leading to fatalism and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, and that this has real impact on prospects for public policy responses to the crises we as a species face.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#26

Post by gosub100 »

llamaimperative wrote: post #24
gosub100 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It shouldn't be that hard: you don't like suffering, right? There you go! Those numbers/matrices are bad because they feel bad.

so all thats necessary for someone to inflict pain is to claim they personally enjoy it?

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#27

Post by persnickety »

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 brain is part of you, but not the whole you, so it's different by definition. Same goes for the body. Now that they are split, the distinction is only more pronounced.

The narrator goes on to investigate how and whether the difference is actually supported by subjective feelings.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#28

Post by llamaimperative »

gosub100 wrote: post #26
llamaimperative wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't be that hard: you don't like suffering, right? There you go! Those numbers/matrices are bad because they feel bad.

so all thats necessary for someone to inflict pain is to claim they personally enjoy it?

No, they need to convince a large portion of society that it's good enough to allow. So far the arc of human history has shown this to be a difficult argument to make at scale and at length.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#29

Post by burkaman »

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…

I don't think there's any assumption, and later on he explores your point of view as well:

> The matter was not nearly as strange or metaphysical as I had been supposing. Where was I? In two places, clearly: both inside the vat and outside it. Just as one can stand with one foot in Connecticut and the other in Rhode Island, I was in two places at once.

But this also has problems that he gets into. If the brain and body are both "you", and one is destroyed, do you not exist anymore? Do you half exist? What if your brain gets a new body or your body gets a new brain, or both at the same time? I thought the whole point of this story was to challenge the assumption that your brain and body are both "you" by imagining different scenarios that make that difficult to believe, not to just assume it isn't true. I also didn't think it made any arguments or conclusions, it's just following an interesting thread and seeing where it leads. It's supposed to be thought-provoking, not persuasive.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#30

Post by gosub100 »

llamaimperative wrote: post #28
gosub100 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so all thats necessary for someone to inflict pain is to claim they personally enjoy it?

No, they need to convince a large portion of society that it's good enough to allow. So far the arc of human history has shown this to be a difficult argument to make at scale and at length.

but "they" don't exist to the agent inflicting pain. "they" are just a number, by definition. Just the result of a calculation...

Edit: or if you dont like that explanation, why should a consensus of a calculation have any more merit than an individual calculation?

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