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Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

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Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#61

Post by smeej »

ChrisClark wrote: post #38
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…

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.

The brain has been severed from the body, and a new type of connection spliced in to replace it. Even if this happens one connection at a time, by the time none of the originals are remaining, all that remains is a simulation of life.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#62

Post by n4r9 »

Quailman84 wrote: post #42
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 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…

> Would this explanation grant a reader who had never seen color an understanding of what it is actually like to see the color red?

Suppose that you were to manually fire neurons in this person's brain, so as to exactly simulate the brain's response to red-frequency photons hitting the retina. Would this give them such an understanding? I would guess that most people would say yes. So one can learn subjective experiences without needing the perception to actually occur. In some sense the subjective experience is physically encoded in the details of the neural intervention.

The interesting question is where is the line on the spectrum between verbal explanations and direct neural intervention, at which such an understanding becomes impossible to impart?

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#63

Post by persnickety »

smeej wrote: post #59
persnickety wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

I don't intend to convince you or get convinced. To me, the answer depends on the purpose of the question.

I'm curious now instead why you'd grant rights to entities that don't have an "I". Isn't that pointless? Or is it a mistake on my part, i.e. maybe there's no "I" but there's still a "you"?

In the "you" case, do you think the thought experiment could be reframed as an attempt at answering the question "where is the you?"?

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#64

Post by malux85 »

lIl-IIIl wrote: post #56

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 spati…

Yeah I was thinking the same thing - but more generalised to just “sensory input”

The fact that our brains and sensory input have been tightly coupled since forever basically means we don’t have a framework for perceiving these in different spatial coordinates simultaneously.

But then I was thinking what if our sensory input was split up? My eyes in one location, seeing stuff, my ears in another location hearing stuff, my mouth in another location tasting stuff, then my notion of self switches back to wherever the brain is, but where was that transition? It’s not clear to me :/

I was more interested in the dual minds at the end of the blog post though, musing on the Ship of Theseus type problem of at what point do the two minds become distinct after desynchronisation?

That got me to thinking about how much biology alters the mind too - e.g. when he mentioned that his body was drinking alcohol would his mind get drunk (I think no, presumably because only nerve impulses are being transmitted) but then does he feel the other effects of alcohol? Rapid heartbeat, hot flushes? Can you have an adrenaline induced panic attack using such an interface?

If the sensory duplication is severed can they re-merge at any point in future even if they diverge a lot? How does the interface resolve conflicting brain outputs? Just issue the dual signals? What of conflicting signals go to the heartbeat control nerve?

Great article! Made me think a lot!

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#65

Post by persnickety »

lIl-IIIl wrote: post #56

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 spati…

What if you're playing a game and someone pulls the chair from under you?

Do you remain in the game, unresponsive?

Do you prove that you were indeed on the chair all the time?

Or do you get forcefully pulled out from the game to the floor?

What if you play a game at a LAN party while chatting with others in the same room?

What if you put the loudspeaker on in the LAN room to order a pizza? What will you answer to the question of "where are you?"?

I think the answer is closer to "you're in all of those places, to differing extents, depending on who asks". Yes, it feels useless, but attempting to figure out one ultimate answer feels even more useless to me.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#66

Post by adonovan »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #45
adonovan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> This is argument from authority.

No, it isn't. An argument from authority would be me claiming that X is true because Penrose says so. The parent poster had said "I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology." To which I responded with a data point: a highly respected physicist (indeed, an authority) who professes to be, essentially, a Cartesian dualist. I wasn't even claiming that X is true.

HNers do seem to love casually slinging claims of logical fallacies at each other.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#67

Post by haswell »

gosub100 wrote: post #60
quonn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe

What do you mean by "just a calculation" here, and how does everyone else's experience of pain apply?

You seem to be implying that for everyone who is not the 1st person subjective experiencer of pain, the only possible representation of that pain is some form of "calculation". You seem to further imply that this reduction somehow says something specific about the nature of pain itself. Am I reading this right?

Sure, you could choose to use some process of calculation as one way to measure pain, but this isn't the only way to conceptualize it, nor is it the only way that people experience it.

e.g. mirror neurons are interesting to consider. We have in our brains these neurons dedicated to experiencing what we observe others experiencing. We cringe when we see someone suddenly become involved in a painful accident. We recoil when we see something horrific. The nature of what the observer experiences is almost certainly very different than what the person in pain is experiencing, but there's a shared experience for those in proximity.

Whatever pain is or isn't, the fact that its effects can be localized to a single person and the fact that it may be calculable in some way seem unrelated to each other.

> two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door)

You hurting your finger in the door and me not feeling the exact thing you experienced are independent facts about the state of the world when the door slamming occurred. Mutual exclusivity seems misapplied here.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#68

Post by andoando »

jhickok wrote: post #37
andoando wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 l…

Funny enough I completely agree with the eliminative take that folk psychology can be reduced to physical processes. I dont think beliefs, desires, hopes and dreams are all require any kind of consciousness.

Where I disagree completely is qualia. Dennet makes some arguments about how any attribute/description we can ascribe to qualia is contradictory. As I see it, a failure to describe it with language has no bearing on the fact that it exists as a mental phenomenona.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#69

Post by altruios »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #44
altruios wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've give it a read. But if it's just rehashing John Locke's prisoner dilemma of perceived choice vs actual choice...

I'm talking about objective reality, not subjective experience. The free will I'm interested in knowing if it exists or not is one we (in theory) could possible eventually measure (a difference in what physical processes say we should do and what we actually do). I'm interested in 'actual' free will, the ability to do what you would otherwise not.

Illusionary free wills are boring to discuss - as they are merely redefining our experiences in terms feed-back systems... which obviously exist - but that's not free will, that's our understanding and knowledge about observable systems.

The only free will that matters is: can we defy physics, or are we subjects of physics from now until the end of time. Are we free to choose the actions or is physics determining the actions we take. Are we in control of our lives or is the universe and we just lie to ourselves to keep on keeping on?

If everything is run by physics - that make you physics' sweet submissive.

edit: reading the back cover - the idea's of control vs freedom and elbow room are familiar, and in my opinion entirely misguided from the point I raise above... a feedback-system that allows you to control results is not a good definition of free will. What free will in that case is: is being able to choose anything in response to that feedback system... which has yet to be shown to be the case... and good arguments argue that it is impossible.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#70

Post by jhickok »

andoando wrote: post #68
jhickok wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Funny enough I completely agree with the eliminative take that folk psychology can be reduced to physical processes. I dont think beliefs, desires, hopes and dreams are all require any kind of consciousness. Where I disagree completely is qualia. Dennet makes some arguments about how any attribute/description we can ascribe to qualia is contradictory. As I see it, a failure to describe it with language has no bearing…

I've long-described myself as an eliminativist about everything but consciousness :) I think there were some really interesting attempts to save classic architectures that were purpose-built to save the folk conception (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/97814443104...), but ultimately I think we don't have the sort of neural architectures that support such a view.

Out of curiosity, have you read any of the newer attempts to vindicate the view that most now call illusionism? I doubt you will find it compelling, but leastwise it serves as an update with some pretty new arguments and fresh blood. You might find it amusing: https://philarchive.org/archive/KAMHCY-2

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