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Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

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Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#81

Post by pavel_lishin »

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.

Near the end of Dennett's essay, this is exactly the story I was thinking of.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#82

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

adonovan wrote: post #66
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 was…

Yes it is. You sought to bolster the mention of Penrose's almost-certainly ridiculous consciousness-is-quantum ideas by starting with an implicit description of his rank as a scientist.

Had you started with: "There are a handful (and I do mean a mere handful) of scientists, most of them with no background in either brain or computation science, who think ...." and then later mentioned Penrose, you'd be right.

But you chose to lead with his nominal status derived from his life as a talented and (rightfully) celebrated mathematician, thus attempting to improve the otherwise less than marginal status of the quantum-centric view of consciousness with his authority.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#83

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

altruios wrote: post #69
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

IMO, Dennett's book is a tour de force review of many others' writing about free will combined with what he considers his own contributions to the philosophical ideas around it. It is a relatively easy read, but also profound, and (again, IMO) he dispenses with your "The only free will that matters is: can we defy physics..." quite thoroughly and effectively.

Reading the back cover is certainly not an adequate way to assess the contents (not that it ever is, but is certainly is not in this case).

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#84

Post by longdustytrail »

eyeundersand wrote: post #3

Amazing thinker. His collaborative book with Hofstader, The Mind's I, has left a profound impression.

There’s a passage in there about Nagel’s “what is it like to be a bat” which has fundamentally changed my worldview ever since I read a shitty OCR version on a blogspot. I ended up buying the book and enjoyed it even more.

I just googled it and it’s still up, the formatting is terrible so it’s kind of hard to follow but i recommend it anyway: http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-l...

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#85

Post by jhickok »

andoando wrote: post #79
jhickok wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, the…

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

Normative pain means there are a set of beliefs and actions that are attached to certain states that carry connotations of goodness, badness, etc. I would consider this usage the cousin of projectivism, where we project moral properties onto physical states of affairs.

>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".

I think this is a good point, but I do see a lot of illusionist and panspychist arguments as attempting to hollow out the middle ground positions. Thus Chalmers "If I were a physicalist I would be a illusionist". I think the arguments can still be interesting if it leaves us with a dichotomy.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#86

Post by ywain »

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.

This was a very enjoyable read. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#87

Post by lIl-IIIl »

malux85 wrote: post #64
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 stuf…

> 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?

There's a text adventure game that has exactly that as a game mechanic. I don't remember what it is called, I want to say it's "A Mind Forever Voyaging" but reading about it on Wikipedia makes no mention of this.

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#88

Post by lIl-IIIl »

persnickety wrote: post #65
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…

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

Right, here is Daniel Dennet's answer, from the story: "For as the last radio signal between Tulsa and Houston died away, had I not changed location from Tulsa to Houston at the speed of light? And had I not accomplished this without any increase in mass? What moved from A to B at such speed was surely myself, or at any rate my soul or mind — the massless center of my being and home of my consciousness."

Re: Daniel Dennett: 'Where Am I?'

#89

Post by n4r9 »

Quailman84 wrote: post #71
n4r9 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> you have caused them to actually perceive the color red

Perhaps pedantic, but I'd argue there is no perception going on, since the senses are not involved.

> the important part is that you are making them experience redness firsthand

To me the important part is this: knowledge of the experience of redness can be transferred to a someone, without them going through the process of seeing redness, but purely by means of changes to their neural states. Framed this way, it is not so difficult to swallow that similar neural changes could also happen in response to reading or being told about seeing the colour red.

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