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Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

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Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#31

Post by smeej »

dkz999 wrote: post #12
smeej wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know how many, but that doesn't keep me from knowing it's more than zero.

"Convincing a person that their 'I' has died" is a category error, like a married bachelor. Corpses can't know they're dead, and anything simulating life for the corpse isn't a person to convince.

There might be some other entity deserving of rights that does exist. I'm not about to argue that only persons deserve rights. I don't think a horse is a person, but I do think it has a right not to be abused. There's a meaningful discussion to be had about what rights the corpse and simulation ought to have in this circumstance.

But "convincing a person their 'I' has died" is self-contradictory. Being able to put the words together in a syntactically coherent sentence doesn't make the idea possible.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#32

Post by llamaimperative »

gosub100 wrote: post #30
llamaimperative wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well no, the agent's model of the other person is just data, but this model is so convincing that most people don't perceive it as such and they're thoroughly convinced of the realness of the other person.

Consensus matters because if people around you disagree with you they will kill you or put you in prison. At rock bottom this is how all laws and ethical norms are created.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#33

Post by card_zero »

filipezf wrote: post #22
pfdietz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Saying that something will happen across the multiverse is stating a certainty, so long as it's physically and logically possible. Every absurdly unlikely thing will happen in that sense. Everybody will, somewhere (and somewhen) become purple with flashing yellow spots. That's very different from saying "I expect to experience this happening", which is a statement about what's probable.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#34

Post by Animats »

jhbadger wrote: post #5
datavirtue wrote: post #4

Hmmm...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…

People get into philosophical trouble with this because humans have a hard-wired system for what's part of your body and what isn't. That's a survival trait. Problems with that system cause phantom limb syndrome, self-injury, and other body-model disorders.[1]

We're looking at a protection system from the inside. Brains are internally interconnected distributed systems, but we're evolved not to feel that way. Trying to reconcile that drives philosophers and theologians into inventing dualism, souls, and other hacks to explain the concept of a unified mind. That goes back at least two millennia and hasn't helped much.

Brains are distributed systems. They have features to drive them towards eventual internal consistency. Failures of those features underlay schizophrenia and similar disorders. Has neuroscience explored eventually-consistent system theory yet? That might be useful.

[1] https://wolpertlab.neuroscience.columbia.edu/sites/default/f...

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#35

Post by Animats »

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.)

Rudy Rucker points out, in one of his SF books, that free will and random number generators are the same thing.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#36

Post by persnickety »

smeej wrote: post #31
dkz999 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know how many, but that doesn't keep me from knowing it's more than zero. "Convincing a person that their 'I' has died" is a category error, like a married bachelor. Corpses can't know they're dead, and anything simulating life for the corpse isn't a person to convince. There might be some other entity deserving of rights that does exist. I'm not about to argue that only persons deserve rights. I don't think…

Do you consider non-persons have an "I"? I presume you do, because otherwise there wouldn't be anyone to deserve rights.

In that case, the question is still valid: how would you convince the non-person "I" that the "I" is dead?

(I can see how the original "person I" might be dead after such a change, but it doesn't really make the premise invalid.)

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#37

Post by jhickok »

andoando wrote: post #17
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…

>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 properti…

I think this (qualia) is certainly the heart of the issue, and I personally go back and forth from some kind of quietism (or some kind of mysterianism), and some kind of illusionism. The latter position I would have found utterly topic-changing for the better part of 2 decades, but now I am finding it more plausible as I lose confidence in first-person reports and a series of related phenomena (documented by people like Eric Schwitzgebel).

I'll also add the eliminative materialism is probably not the precise position to describe his views on consciousness. You could be the polar opposite of Dennett, like a Jerry Fodor, and still be a staunch anti-realist about consciousness (a view that I think Fodor even entertained). I take EM to be an assault on folk psychology, which may or may not include qualia, and illusionism is probably the better term for his position on qualia.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#38

Post by ChrisClark »

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…

Are you sure this is a simulation of life? All the story is talking about is longer nerves, brain still connected to the body, it's just slightly further away.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#40

Post by haswell »

andoando wrote: post #17
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…

>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 properti…

I should add that I’m agnostic as to the actual reality of things, and a perspective that has felt useful to me is to remind myself that the fields of science are a map, and that there are portions of the map that are just completely undefined. We know there’s a terrain to explore, but haven’t made much progress in increasing the fidelity of that portion of the map. What I do know is that the fundamental Christian version of beliefs leaves a particularly shaped imprint on the psyche, and my relationship with what I thought myself to be started shifting/expanding when I started diving deeper into these unexamined “mystical” notions and having those notions confront the scientific view. That confrontation is what leaves me agnostic.

As the map gets better and better, it’s seen as more and more acceptable to look at that map as if it provides ultimate answers. But it still has nothing to tell us about primordial existence.

Consciousness sits in the same category of unexplained and possibly unexplainable.

Who knows. Maybe all matter truly is conscious and the spectrum of available conscious states scales with the complexity of the matter’s configuration. In either case, I don’t feel that a purely mechanical explanation is necessarily relevant to the question people often claim it answers.

Looks like a good thread. Thanks.

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