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Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

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Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#41

Post by altruios »

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…

So this leads down to some interesting consequences.

If everything is determined by biology, and biology is determined by chemistry, and chemistry is determined by physics (quantum or classical). The next question is: "from where does 'choice' come from? if the sum of each part contains none to begin with, how can it emerge without 'proto-choice properties'?"

The conclusion from this view must be one of two:

1) That 'choice' is an unfounded axiom, an illusion of subjective qualities that we misinterpret as our 'will'.

2) Though if we do have 'will', and ability to exert control via choice, and not be controlled by physically determined processes... perhaps that is this notion of 'chance/random' which we seem to have to deal with.

A consequence of point 2 is that if that is our ability to choose, how can we choose better than the baseline 'random' as we apparently do?

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#42

Post by Quailman84 »

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…

I think most of the philosophers Dennett is engaging with aren't suggesting that the mind is magical or mystical, but simply that subjective phenomena (thoughts, perceptions, etc) cannot be fully explained in exclusively physical terms. To give a popular argument, you can imagine a scenario where somebody has completed a perfect and complete explanation of the physical processes of human color perception. Would this explanation grant a reader who had never seen color an understanding of what it is actually like to see the color red? The argument goes that if you can't explain something in purely physical terms, then that thing isn't purely physical in nature.

Just because something isn't physical doesn't mean that it is mystical or magical; it is just a different kind of Stuff. The idea that only physical things exist is intuitively pretty compelling to me, but I've found arguments to the contrary to be much more convincing.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#43

Post by sooheon »

_wire_ wrote: post #23
rexpop wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> The thesis being there's no me there

I think the thesis is "me" is complex.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#44

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

altruios wrote: post #41
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…

So this leads down to some interesting consequences. If everything is determined by biology, and biology is determined by chemistry, and chemistry is determined by physics (quantum or classical). The next question is: "from where does 'choice' come from? if the sum of each part contains none to begin with, how can it emerge without 'proto-choice properties'?" The conclusion from this view must be one of two: 1) That…

> The next question is: [ ... ]

Dennett has you covered there too. His book "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" is a must-read on this topic.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#45

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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.)

> No less a scientist than Roger Penrose

This is argument from authority.

In Penrose's case, while his position is mildly interesting, most other scientists and philosophers interested in consciousness and mind/brain questions completely reject it.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#46

Post by sekh60 »

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.

If you want a grim take on this looking into the quantum immortality thought experiment. I can't remember who wrote it, I think maybe Chalmers, but the idea is that while the experiencer is immortal, they will still accumulate injuries, old age, etc. It would not be a very pleasant immortality.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#48

Post by beder »

cvoss wrote: post #2

I 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 stopp…

Agreed, Dennett hit all of the high points of the who-am-I philosophy in a really entertaining story. It also reminded me of a great Greg Egan story, Learning To Be Me:

https://philosophy.williams.edu/files/Egan-Learning-to-Be-Me...

This is focused on just one aspect of the philosophical dilemma, and both Dennett and Egan touch on the horror of it in delightful ways.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#49

Post by sooheon »

Loved this story. Surprised to find how simple and straightforward his writing is here, when in discussions on free will he was much more obfuscatory. Is it due to the difference in difficulty between posing interesting questions and giving good answers?

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#50

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

N0b8ez wrote: post #21
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exp…

Sign conventions are not arbitrary in trajectory planning, though. You'll get very different results if you solve for a robot trajectory that moves from A to B while minimizing motor energy consumption, than if you solve for maximum energy consumption. You'll notice the difference - it's a mistake you'll only make once!

If we have some internal decision-making process that pushes us to make decisions that minimize a pain metric, the sign we attach to the "pain" number will make a very big difference, both in internal state and resultant observed behaviour.

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