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Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

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Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#51

Post by sooheon »

beder wrote: post #48
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.

Yes! I absolutely loved Egan's idea of the Jewel, and of course it turns out Dennett predates him by about a decade.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#54

Post by quonn »

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.

And it isn‘t just a number. A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something.

It would be honest to admit that we don‘t know why consciousness subjectively feels like anything. Pointing to complexity or integrated information doesn‘t explain this at all. It‘s easy to imagine a complex process that doesn‘t have a subjective experience.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#55

Post by buffalobuffalo »

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…

This appears to be the logical build up to his critique of the Cartesian Theater . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#56

Post by lIl-IIIl »

I remember when first reading the story thinking, that I can resolve the question "Where am I" easily because of my experience with video games.

When I play a first-person video game, and someone behind me looks at my screen and asks me, "Where are you?", I don't say "In a chair playing a game". I say "I'm in such-and-such room on a space station" or whatever.

This made me think that "Where am I" depends on the spatial coordinates your inputs (eyes, ears) are picking up. In an every day case it's wherever my eyeballs are, in a video game case it's the setting of the video game, and Daniel Dennet's case it's wherever his eyeballs are.

This works for videogames but not TV. So the brain must be able to control the inputs.

This also works for the "Tom and Dick switch brains" thought experiment in the story. After the switch, Tom is wherever the eyeballs that are communicating with his brains are, which is to say wherever Dick's body is.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#57

Post by _wire_ »

persnickety wrote: post #27
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.

I find the existence of the "narrator" to be utterly debasing of the thought experiment.

Apply Dennett's deconstructions to the author and ask yourself why are you interested in this thesis of indeterminacy of the self when you've already a priori accepted and endorsed Dennett's existence though your consideration of his story on its own terms. Simply apply the same logic you used to accept the source to acceptance of yourself.

Is the dislocation of Dennett's brain from his body a genuinely marvelous feature of the scenario when the scenario is just in your own mind, already a totally displaced manifestation of Dennett's?

Maybe you are not sure that Dennett exists (apparently he actually doesn't) in which case what's going on in this thread: Is it all thoughts from no one mechanically clicking in the machine of "your" own mind?

How can there be a reasoned discussion of a topic the author himself has totally debased?

More troublingly, this response is no more meaningful, don't bother trying to respond because there's no one to respond to! Yet you're stuck with the chaotic intrusion from no one to no one.

If Dennett somehow transcends his scenario, of which there is universal agreement on this forum that he does because even in death his existence is unquestioned, this whole scene is a fright.

Ultimately, why will you allow his scenario to debase your own commonsense, unless there's a greater wisdom of the self to be learned and mastered?

Maybe there is!

So let's look at Dennett himself: he happily maintained he was Dennett his entire life and is consummately well known as such.

QED

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#58

Post by persnickety »

_wire_ wrote: post #57
persnickety wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I find the existence of the "narrator" to be utterly debasing of the thought experiment. Apply Dennett's deconstructions to the author and ask yourself why are you interested in this thesis of indeterminacy of the self when you've already a priori accepted and endorsed Dennett's existence though your consideration of his story on its own terms. Simply apply the same logic you used to accept the source to acceptance o…

Sure, the story places you from the start with the assumption that there was someone who has been split in the first place.

But why does the topic have to be about any more than that? The question is not "is there a Dennet?", but "what locates a person?". What's there about it that prevents reasoned discussion?

When I try to rely on my common sense, I fall into ruts already described in the story, which Dennet the author clearly shows aren't worth much. Seems my common sense deserves some debasing.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#59

Post by smeej »

persnickety wrote: post #36
smeej wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

No, I don't think nonpersons have an "I," because that requires a level of self-reflective awareness that's incompatible with their nature. Being or not being a "thou" is a characteristic of persons, which is why I said it's a category error.

Keep in mind, this is all in the context of why I don't find the article compelling. It's because I disagree with one of the fundamental premises of its proposed hypothetical situation, one so fundamental that the thought experiment is dull without it.

I'm not here to change your mind. I'm just explaining why I don't find the thought experiment interesting. Suspension of disbelief about some core thing you believe to be true about the world is fun for the sake of science fiction stories, but it's dull for the sake of philosophical thought experiments.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#60

Post by gosub100 »

quonn wrote: post #54
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.

And it isn‘t just a number. A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something. It would be honest to admit that we don‘t know why consciousness subjectively feels like anything. Pointing to complexity or integrated information doesn‘t explain this at all. It‘s easy to imagine a complex process that doesn‘t have a subjective experience.

> A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something.

so it's not "just a calculation"? I am NOT trying to make a joke/reference to Clinton, but I think in these philosophical conversations, we have to step back even further and question what our definition of "is" is.

Again, I'm a CS grad who has never taken philosophy, so I'm sure this has been explored to death by people who own this field. But there's absolutely a point in philosophy where you can't even rely on "what is true": slamming my fingers in the doorway IS painful (to me), but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe. Just as Einstein proved, two observers can experience different realities, fundamentally, two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door).

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