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Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

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Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#71

Post by Quailman84 »

n4r9 wrote: post #62
Quailman84 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 experie…

If I'm understanding your thought experiment correctly, you are saying that you could stimulate the right part of the brain to cause the person to have an experience of seeing the color red without actually perceiving something red. I think that it would be right to say that they would have gained a more complete understanding of what it is like to perceive the color red, but that's only because you have caused them to actually perceive the color red—that perception just didn't reflect reality. I think we could argue about the definition of "perception", but the important part is that you are making them experience redness firsthand.

If you ask me, there is nothing short of direct firsthand experience that will allow you to understand what it is like to see the color red.

Here's some further reading on that argument, if you're interested: https://iep.utm.edu/know-arg/

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#72

Post by macrolime »

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 you perceive is a kind of virtual reality similar to a video game. It's just constructed based on sensory input, but still has a coordinate system and a point of view, like the camera location in a game engine. Electrically stimulating certain regions of the brain can change the point of view, leading what is called an out-of-body experience. You may wonder how it is that you can move the camera location without moving the eyes. That's because the sensory input creates a kind of 3d model and just like you can imagine what if would be like to see the room from another angle, you can also "hallucinate" it.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#73

Post by rexpop »

_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…

Then you got my gist.

No, it's just your syntax is unparseable. Try using more words. Try breaking some of your sentences into multiple sentences.

> 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?

"If the job of the philosopher is to form questions" is a good clause, but "the questions he's begging" is a confounding noun-phrase. Firstly, because I am not sure what "begging" means in its position, here. You said he was forming questions, but now he's begging them? Or are you suggesting that he begs the question--a frequently misused and almost universally misunderstood rhetorical fallacy? I personally shy away from using this idiom, and I certainly don't understand its use here.

The main thrust of your question--"why are the questions so debasing of status"--simply doesn't parse. How does a question debase status? Does it impugn some aspect of the subject? What status, anyway? Social status? Battery charge status?

What is a "commonsense status?" I have never heard of such a thing. Is it like marital status?

"...and substitution of the corporate" is an entirely mind-boggling clause. Substitution of what with what? Not clear. Substitution of the individual with the corporate? Are we stuffing blue jeans and boots with incorporation papers filed in Delaware? Are we removing suggestion boxes from front offices, and instead accepting only faxed complaints from others' back offices? I have no idea what is going on in your view of the world.

I have no idea what you are talking about.

> you got my gist

No, I 100% did not.

My introduction to Daniel Dennett in undergraduate philosophy left me with only a faint impression of the guy's "brain in a vat" thought experiment. I think it's a reasonably accessible question about how we relate to our perceptions, eg are we looking at things, or are we only thinking about them with all-encompasing clarity? How much of what we see is simply the noise of our sensing apparatus, or an entirely false signal of our sensing apparatus?

A decent respite from the sort of existential vertigo this induces might be "The Construction of Social Reality" in which John Searle reminds us that we can easily take a shared external reality as axiomatic, eg "There is ice and snow at the top of Mount Everest."

Anyway, for my sake, please make more sense. Maybe re-read some juvenile literature and remember what it is to explain things plainly to minds steeped in other contexts.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#74

Post by altruios »

haswell wrote: post #67
gosub100 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 some…

> 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.

That is an assumption, and a dangerous one at that. What you speak of is a kind of 'empathy', a feeling of emotions by Proxy... not everyone actually has that... some people don't cringe at other's pain, for some: their pupils dilate.

That's a tangent to the current discussion, but yeah... some 'calculate your pain', other's 'calculate the pleasure your pain cause in them'...

But to add to the discussion, pain isn't localizable to one person, not always, at least... so is emotion/feeling mappable a calculation of the neurons? (maybe/probably)

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#75

Post by smeej »

persnickety wrote: post #63
smeej wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I think an "it" can have rights. I'll go back to the horse. It has a basic natural right not to be beaten because it's a creature that can experience pain, not because it's an "I."

The legal system (at least in the U.S.) seems to need to call something a "person" in order for it to have rights (e.g., corporations), but I don't think the legal system is the origin of rights.

"I" and "thou" go together as references to personhood, so I wouldn't distinguish between the two. (And I'm mostly using "thou" here instead of "you" to show I'm referring to the concept rather than you personally. The "I/Thou" philosophical concept also has precedent of using the term.)

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#76

Post by vaidhy »

persnickety wrote: post #58
_wire_ wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 au…

The funny thing is, we already have some experiments that do answer this. There was an experiment where two people wore glasses that projected other's physical view point and IIRC, it led to identity and gender confusion. (Unfortunately, I am not able to find that experiment link now).

It seems like we have solid evidence that your brain maps your body, but the map is in your brain. You is the brain as it exists now seems to be a reasonable starting point and I would expect the philosopher to poke holes starting from that.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#77

Post by haswell »

altruios wrote: post #74
haswell wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 some…

> 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. That is an assumpt…

My point wasn't to claim that everyone experiences empathy in the same way, or even that everyone has it, but to point out that pain can't be reduced to "calculations". It's a low resolution substitute for a deeply complex interplay of physical, biological and social phenomenon.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#78

Post by gosub100 »

haswell wrote: post #67
gosub100 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 some…

>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".

Not exactly. I'm showing the abusrdity of people who think that the brain is just a computer and that its results: "just a number" fly in the face of their reality of experiencing pain. If it's just a number, why don't they slam their hand in the door and show us?

> You seem to further imply that this reduction somehow says something specific about the nature of pain itself. Am I reading this right?

By their own definition, "the nature of pain itself" is just a number, just a result of a huge calculation of trillions of neurons with substantially higher numbers of networks. The terrifying sound, the facial expressions, the visceral "gut-feeling", thats all just pattern recognition (on your behalf), there's nothing more to it than a calculation, right?

> Mutual exclusivity seems misapplied here.

technically correct but only because we could, in theory, both inflict pain on ourselves simultaneously using the doorway.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#79

Post by andoando »

jhickok wrote: post #70
andoando wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the link. Do you understand what they mean by "normative" pain? I cant make sense of it.

The first argument given for illusionism is merely stating physical processes are strongly anagaolous to mental pheneomena. Ok agreed, but this is equivalently supports a panpsychic view. It just states "if one adds anomalousness as a premise for illusion, and then further assumes that illusionism is a possibility, then we have strong evidence of illuionism". Huh?? Cant one make the exact same argument for panpschyism? If one adds a premise that physical properties are anomalousness with conscious experiences, and then one supposes that the possibility of panpsychism is evidence for panpsychism then we ought to believe in panpsychism. Besides, what about a synonymous relationship between two things denotes one is illusionary and a product of the other? All this does is show that a singular criteria of illusion is met.

The second argument is even more bizarre. It starts with the premise that consciousness/conscious phenomena can be explained fully by physical properties (but not right now, but science will obviously explain it surely, one day). Is this so obviously true that zero words are given to it's justification?

Then the rest of the article is an argument to how one cannot treat the "obviousness" of experience so casually...

It doesnt seem to me that illusionists actually deny conscious phenomena. More so, they call it an "illusion" and claim this makes the hard problem equivalent to the easy problem. i.e it becomes reducible to giving it a physical explanation. But if all is meant by "its an illusion" is "its really just a physical process", it doesnt grant any useful pathway. It seems very circular.

All this makes me really wonder if some of us truly are p zombies and thst the illusionists have managed to figure out a test for it.

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