Language gives us the ability to focus on any judgment. Written language lets us examine and re-examine our thoughts. Language gives us the ability to question and to focus on what we don't know. Dennett mentions that words are thinking tools. I think that this is a major understatement. I want to point out that the written word is the greatest tool for improving our thinking. Scientifically minded -- conscientious thinkers use notes. In addition, the writen word enables a civilization to accumulate and pass on an ever increasing number of facts. Because of writing, each generation starts off knowing more.

I loved Dr. Daniel Dennett, very sad to hear about his passing, I would have loved to meet him, he was my absolute favorite, an intellectual giant, a legend, true sage, heard he was also very kind gentle person, huge loss to civilization, I will watch tons of his lectures in the next few weeks in his memory, I made a playlist of his lectures and interviews for myself to work through, listening to Dr Dennett lectures would be my idea of Heaven 1:01:20

It seems there is a difference between definitions of "free will". On the one hand people can talk about the ability to make a decision based on options available, and then being accountable for the decision they make. On the other hand there is the question of whether an idea, or a choice could have originated in an individual absent any outside influences. The later has more to do with originality, while the former has to do with choice and accountability. The accountability question is sometimes addressed as a question of whether a person had any degree of freedom from emotional responses, physiological conditioning, and priming. A very good case can be made that when it comes to whether it is moral to punish someone for a decision they have made in the absence of a complete history of how they made that decision and why, that absolute free will is an illusion and that it is not ethical to punish someone for a decision they made without taking into account the criteria and the circumstances. But I also think that there is a good argument to be made for holding someone accountable for acts of evil which I define as knowingly and not arbitrarily, or in anyway accidently doing something that will harm someone and doing so knowing it is wrong. In that case, the no free will argument does not hold in my opinion.

This Q&A was really excellent. One of the best I've seen in a public talk.

@jerrylandon909

2 жыл бұрын

I know im randomly asking but does anybody know of a way to log back into an instagram account? I somehow forgot the login password. I appreciate any assistance you can give me

Daniel dennett is a deep thinker helped me with additional system of tools , ❤️ his talk

Talk starts at 3:40

@rajashreegandhi4879

2 жыл бұрын

we need more kind people like you in this world

Different kinds of thinking tools. For example, different kinds of lenses, an extension of a receptor organ. A mirror used as a periscope. Thinking tools that facilitate effector organ efficiency. Is a thinking premise a thinking tool? Yes, I think a very powerful one.

Those audience questions were great. Usually there one cringy dude asking about something irrelevant, but today they were all sharp, varied and interesting

...Additional thanks, you probably couldn't imagine the indirect benefits, access to to this type of thinking provides...useful in application in "real-life" as well as in theory.

The explanation for the Flynn effect is brilliant ! What would mankind be without thinking tools ?

@LazyIRanch

3 жыл бұрын

Republicans.

Great talk.. one correction;p around 0:40:49 the speaker mentions 100-200 million neurons in human brain on average, while the real number is about 86 Billion! Hope he picks it up some day.

@achraf7416

4 жыл бұрын

i think the 86 billion is the number of connections these neurons can make but im not sure !

wonderful. at 57:40 he uses a rather and it was a false dichotomy - good eye Dennet

34:30 - Oh, I initially understood Lottery B as saying that the winning ticket is chosen, _publicly communicated_ and put in a safe, before tickets are sold ... So in that case, I thought, you _still_ have some chances to win, (maybe even more than for Lottery A): you may be the first who's able to organize a successful heist!

Do all newer videos offer the speech to text stuff now?

Dan Dennett knows computer science!

@charlesqwu

Жыл бұрын

He knows "cloud computing" very well!

I do consider sentience and consciousness distinct, because sentience is not a hard problem (at least, not unless you mystify it by invoking qualia). Thermostats are sentient, in the sense that they sense and adjust their internal state in response to their senses. If they had a representation of their internal state (including that representation itself) and could enter an infinite regress, they would be sapient... and MAYBE conscious.

Talk starts at 0:03:35 (if you want to skip the introduction)

Is there a video for this?

I read into both of them on the subject, and then I came across a ten minute video of Dennett talking total sense on the matter. Sam Harris clarified nothing for me- just made me frustrated. Then I watched a Steven Pinker one minute discussion on it, and it made sense.

Interesting talk... the right side comes out. There is of course a link between his belief in freewill and his belief in punishment. If all our actions are determined, then who do we punish? Determinists like myself, believe, we don't punish any one, since no one intends to be bad since who decides what is "good"?

Is Lee's Elucidation an intuition pump? LE: A finite number of words must be made to represent an infinite number of things and possibilities. Irving J Lee, language Habits in Human Affairs, 1942.

19:45 "I've installed an app on your necktop." lol

It may not flow off the tongue right, but I bought and enjoyed the book.

The roots of the word have been defined[3] as follows: super- "above", cali- "beauty", fragilistic- "delicate", expiali- "to atone", and docious- "educable", with the sum of these parts signifying roughly "Atoning for educability through delicate beauty." According to the film, it is defined as "something to say when you have nothing to say". from Wikipedia lol

The collective interests of a society, effectively "the law" is our approximation of defining what is good. Not "believing" in punishment doesn't quite make sense, it's akin to finding a broken cog in a machine and not replacing it on the grounds of determinism. Dan the man I think tries to make this distinction at around 46:00. Regardless of why people chose to act as they do their behaviour still defines them; and their bahaviour should still be held accountable in this respect.

6:00 Dan, bad thinking practices also filter down.

I realized Dan Dennett was a tool when i saw him trying to argue with Ray Kurzweil that computer software had not developed in the last 20 years because Microsoft word was more-ore-less the same program, and thus logically computers would never reach sentience at least in the next 100 years.

Either consciousness is an idea (distinct from the idea of consciousness, which is a model of a model), or consciousness is something innate. The former is the idea presented by Hofstadter and Dennet in The Mind's I, and by Hofstadter in I Am A Strange Loop (or rather, the idea that consciousness is a particular kind of idea with particular properties, as opposed to a specific idea). I don't see how the other approach makes sense.

Was that Thunderfoot sitting down at 2.15?!

I need a second, third, and fourth 'like' button for this video

Yes

If the algorithm for calculating a percentage is best as a public good, so too are computer algorithms. The problem with permitting free software copying, however, is that it is a flawless copy. When our ancestors copied their neighbors canoe, their accidental variations either improve or impair the design, thereby exploring the possibility space zeroing in on an optimal design. This process of error-ridden copying is NECESSARY, so the appropriate law regarding software is one that permits absolutely your right to copy anything you see... but you must do so by reverse engineering, or starting on your own with the tools you have at your disposal.

Dennet did pronounce it as "Touring" I think. To my ears anyway :-)

I love dennett. Everything made sense. Except for the free will stuff. He's clearly afraid something horrible would happen to society and the law if people came to understand that free will doesn't really exist. I don't share his fear. Most people denying free will seem very sensible grounded individuals. And the reasons they give are much better than the strawman Dennett presents here. I think his fear took him over and much intelligent people have many ways of rationalising their fears to themselves. His compatibilism never really took off outside of academia, and that's probably for the better. Not in the least for all his own other work. It's all genetics and memetics, and the self is a benign user illusion... but it has free will? It is not needed to make this move. But it is very hard to change your mind on something you've written and published a book about. I think his slight of hand on the free will thing will be soon forgotten and all his amazing work on consciousness, the self, religion, evolution and memetics will live on for a long long time. Thank you dennett for being an inspiration for generations to come. You've been thinking.

Nice association fallacy there there dan :T the fact that the legal system in the soviet union was de jure predicated on the idea that criminals need treatment, not retribution, does not discredit the idea any more than it discredits airplanes, or the theory of gravitation, or in fact, representative democracy, which the soviet union, de jure, was. Anyway. Good talk. Disagree with some stuff, but I can clearly see where he comes from on those topics and i think he barking up the right tree even on those so it's alright in the end.

search youtube for the below Evening Deep Conversations at Creative Innovation 2011 (Part 3)

Thanks for pointing that. The dash isn't necessary, and you may have noticed I got the 'e' on the end in my initial comment. But faire enough, you got me faire and square. Douche.

Is that Peter Norvig introducing him?

That's akin to saying that (for instance) the discovery of large prime numbers is not a property of the sieve of eristophanes, but is instead a property of doped silicon. It also implies that if we are unknowingly the product of a simulation, we cannot possibly be sentient or sapient. Both arguments seem to be manufacturing unnecessary and inconvenient divisions for the sake of the defense of the notion of authenticity.

He doesn't say "memes", but he means it: transferable, mutable, reflexive, rhetorical constructs/devices: installable software for the human mind.

If ideas cannot be self-aware, then where does self-awareness come from? What part of our mind is self-aware but not constructed out of ideas? Alternately, if self-awareness is an idea, and other ideas leverage that idea as a tool for reacting to their own structure, how does that differ from the ideas being self-aware without a separate component? These questions are trivial and are left as an exercise for the reader :-)

Oh, well thanks for summing it all up, genius. Clearly you know what you are talking about and no further study on your part is required.

21:09 Did he say TEACHED?

Cause and effect = determinism

I got to 19:27 then realized i have no idea what he is talking about, errm what was the point?

16:13 "It would be embarrassing."

The notion of "free will", when examined with intellectual rigour, is easy to dismiss but we still have many who confuse e.g. choices with preferences, ideas , desires, plans with intentions, and determinism with inevitability in relation to responsibility. Dennett feeds on such confusion yet , despite his reputation, reveals nothing new. A judge or jury determines responsibility by inference or evidence of "intention" and would justifiably regard a defence of inevitability as absurd.

I am not challenging the idea that not all conscious creatures are sentient. Sentience is necessary but not sufficient for sapience. However, sentience does not have to be reality-based for it to count as sentience. Ideas, in their own purely simulated arena, interact with each other and with sensory information. Saying that ideas cannot be sentient is like saying that watching television isn't a form of seeing.

Computers favorite color is probably dark grey, not much work but atleast it still feels alive.

Well, do brains? How do you know? It's a hardware/software question. Anyway I was just saying that in everyday experience when you see different people succeed of fail at problem solving it's almost never because one has a brain that computes better. Maybe occasionally. But in most situations the more successful person has a thinking tool (an idea) or more that the other person hasn't heard of or mastered.

This is one of the first techniques you learn when you begin to program, weird that they tried to pass it off as their own.

Well, you said ideas HAVE consciousness. That they are themselves conscious. This means they are aware and can experience the world and are sentient. And I wasn't saying that consciousness is exclusively sentient - your "if feelings are all you have" rebuttal wasn't a claim I made. Ideas are not sentient. So whether consciousness is an idea or an innate process, ideas are not it. And if you're challenging the idea that not all conscious creatures are sentient, I'm open to the counter ex.

What is luck but the opinion of an event? And my opinion of it is determined, by my genes and my environment.

0:49:49 It may just be a matter of semantics, and how you choose to define terms like sentience and consciousness, which are not strictly defined scientific terms. But if you assume that consciousness means "Like Humans", then yea, it's only gonna apply to humans.

Smart people, to the extent the term makes sense, don't think with their brains. They think with their ideas.

Yes, actually. Ideas have consciousness. Nothing else does, so far as I can tell.

50:00

If want want something in life you have to cause it.

"Oh, well thanks for summing it all up, genius." You dare take that stance after chiming in with the rhetoric of your first post? Surely you troll...

Why are assertions related to free will not prefaced by what, precisely, the speaker means by "free" and "will". "Freedom" requires the absence of restraint or constraints and "Will" refers to desires intentions or decisions . We are free to formulate an intention( i.e. decide) in order to satisfy a desire.It is self evident that intention frequently may not follow by the action required to achieve it. This demonstrates we have no free will. "Choices" and "Determinism" are irrelevant.

Furthermore, who is this 'we'? Is not 'I' an idea that we use to represent whatever idea happens to be talking through us at the moment? That's the model presented in Minsky's Society of Mind, and elsewhere. Even if we require some physical substrate, interpretation is not performed simply by the physical substrate but instead by patterns exhibited by the substrate. Disordered doped silicon, like scrambled brain, is inert.

Sachin Anshuman: About the number of neurons. I'm not up to that point in the vid yet, but possibly he said million when he meant billion, as 100 to 200 billion is now the usual number, with over 1.25 trillion synapses.

Towards a phenomenology of politics?

If you're making the argument that ideas are self-aware, have feelings, and can experience things, I think it's safe to say no one knows what you are talking about. If that's as far as you can tell, there's probably not much you can.

I really don't get why we "need" some kind of "free will" to want to act responsible in the perceived, highly unknown future... To me, free will is just a perception and it doesn't mean we get some kind of free ticket to act irresponsible. It makes no sense to say something like: "yeah, I did harm that person, but hey, I don't have free will!" Even if harmful behaviour can be explained, that doesn't make it justifiable. Determinism doesn't equal fatalism, like Sam Harris pointed out.

It's somewhat ironic that Dennett is "preaching to the choir" on the power of logical reductionism to provide tools of intelligent design, and Google's prerational bare-brain speech to text subtitles mispelled Turing as "touring."

The chance that one of us will ever get him is small but not impossible. We ALL assume that he is telling the truth in his speaches but we can never check it........can we? That goes for all the scientists and philosophers in the world. My idea of life is.............YOU DO NOT GET IT.......cauze: He can not explain it enough or ME I am to stubborn to get it.

"Try comprehending Dennett's statement" Timestamp: 39:40 and on. Perhaps you should re-listen to his statement more closely. He never even remotely suggested his statements reflected anything other than concepts. As I suggested, you are reading something that isn't there and/or perhaps what you wish were there. Again, he never defined free-market as it exists, only it as a purely chaotic concept which is extremely obvious does not exist. Moot.

Necktop LOL

Yeah, I kind of agree with you, although to be fair it wasn't really the point of his talk, and he has gone into the issue ad nauseum elsewhere, so I can cope with him being a bit flippant about it here. I think the issue - which he kind of touches on in his response - is that the term "free will" is basically an incoherent concept. Personally, I think we need to deconstruct that idea and replace it with a functioning alternative, rather than pretending it still works because we want it to...

Your hand contains nervous tissue, just as your brain does. If physical substrate is the origin of consciousness, doesn't that imply that your hand has consciousness (only in a smaller way than your brain)? I also disagree with the idea that your thoughts don't have families. Your thoughts may not have a human-style social structure, but ants and e coli have families. This model of thinking is called memetics, and it is well-known.

I think Dennet just doesn't know enough about patents to have a well formed opinion. As for Apple, at least they actually create products that use the ideas in their patents. These days a majority of lawsuits are initiated by patent trolls that do nothing but extort money from productive companies based up their claims to "ownership" of obvious or very broad ideas.

07:4o

"Free Market is NOT anarchy/dog-eat-dog/survival of the fittest, etc." Except Dennett never actually stated that the current state of free-market economy was, as you put, "anarchy/dog eat dog/survival of the fittest". He merely stated that it was dangerous to not place constraints on it, not that we in fact donot place said constraints. Try a little more care in your comprehension and you won't be caught with your pants down.

However, I don't see how consciousness relates to feelings. If feelings are all you have, you aren't sapient -- you are merely sentient (and that's easy; unless you subscribe to the chinese room interpretation, or have a belief in the validity of qualia, or subscribe to the idea of philosophical zombies, then plenty of simple systems are sentient but not sapient in the sense that they feel without second order self-awareness).

If there is no such thing as a physical substrate (and it's simulations all the way down), I don't see why that should impact my capacity to believe myself sentient or sapient. I see no reason to privilege physics over other internally consistent systems of determining causal paths, nor do I privilege matter over something that merely is indistinguishable from matter. After all, I wouldn't be able to tell.

Dennett is wrong that neuroscientists telling people that they don't have free will is the same as the surgeon telling the patient that they now control his decisions. The surgeon is taking on the responsibility of the patient's decisions, but no one is taking on that responsibility in the case of the neuroscientists using determinism to refute free will. The physical laws aren't conscious intelligent agents that care about you. You still have to take care of yourself even when you know the physical laws are controlling you. You don't have access to all the physical mechanics happening within and around you, so knowing you're being controlled by those mechanics should mean nothing to your decision making. It's an enormous fallacy to think that being controlled by physical laws means that you should give in to primal desires and emotions and disregard all responsibilities and consequences. As I have stated, nothing changes when you know you are controlled by physical laws because you lack knowledge of those processes and what they will bring. You have no choice but to continue on the presumption of free will even though it may not exist in an absolute sense. It's a useful illusion much like the illusion of color or cuteness.

@Stroganoffskji

8 жыл бұрын

+sexyloser Ok brainiac, if "free" will exist then what is its opposite? And you also seems to know what physical laws are, please enlighten us mortals because no one else on this planet know, we can only observe something and make it understandable by telling ourselves that it is a physical law, that ain't really existing nowhere but in our experienxe.

@momentary_

8 жыл бұрын

Victor Peterson I said free will doesn't exist, but the belief that it does is useful. You should read my comment more carefully.

Right. Sentience and sapience are distinct. I don't think sentience and consciousness are though. Re:reality-based. I guess you could argue that a mechanical robot in a story is sentient, and with regard to the story, that's true. But in the real world, there are no sentient or conscious ideas. They are imaginings that have no biological -or physical- structures that lend them the ability to be aware. Ideas do not interact with each other on their own. We interpret their interaction.

what a beautiful beard

Yeah, great opening joke.

The brain. No brain, no self awareness. My hand is not self-aware in an isolated system. If I formulate a thought, that thought does not carry on a life of its own from then on. It does not raise thought offspring and have a thought-family and go to thought-lawyer school and hangout on the weekends with its thought buddies. Nor does the number sevenlyninthing, even though I just thought of it, and it is now a thought.

Okay it goes like this, Dennett says we shouldn't say we don't have free will because it has implications regarding responsibility, but take a mountain, with a dangerous road near the peak and a road sign saying caution 10mph danger of falling to death etc., without the sign, lot's of people fall to their deaths, with the sign, far, far less do, but some see the sign and choose to speed anyway, now looking back at all the actors who do or do not die/speed in these scenarios, all of them lack free will, but the sign has an outcome, so let's say we have the court house and this murder who uses he was told no free will and brings neurologist to his defence etc., well the court would say, tough, it doesn't matter that you lack free will we are going to lock you up because 1. it will be a deterrent to others who might want to also murder (just like the road-sign is a deterrent for speeding) and 2. those it does not deter will need to be kept away from people anyway so they can't cause anymore harm (just like those who would ignore road sign). Furthermore, endorsing the lie (as Dennett is arguing from a point of there not being (necessarily) any free will) is short sighted as people build on ideas, so if people build on the idea that is the lie that we have free will then they are wasting there time and if the idea we have free will is a key or somewhat key component of an idea then the spreading of this lie damages these buildings to, in other-words to spread a lie is to spread bad foundations, where as the truth is a necessity to advance intellectually. Also it should be noted that this idea of defending something that is not necessarily true, because without it there would be moral consequences (violence, murder etc.) is exactly the same line the religious use, they say, religion should not be refuted or abandoned or else there would be no reason for people to act morally, there would be murder, violence in the street etc., so Dennett, uses the same kind of weak, baseless fear-mongering as the religious to defend what?, a word he likes?, because he on some level fears change?, I don't understand his motivation or how he could miss such fallacious reasoning.

Just google it

Disagree about Dennett´s notion about Stalin treating people instead of punishing. That is not a good example because Stalin punished millions of people with the most horrible ways, one of the worst was to send people to Gulag in Siberia. " The purpose of arresting innocent people was to destroy not only the opposition, but the idea of the rebellion itself." There are quite many documentaries about the topic.

Except that ideas don't have consciousness.

Inebriation Pumps And Other Tools For Drinking

This constant misrepresentation of “free market” is infuriating! Free market economic philosophy (eg Austrian School, CLASSIC liberals/libertarians) takes as a critical foundation strictly LIMITED use of State force, ie respecting contract/private property/prosecuting force or fraud- for the express purpose of NOT allowing coercive relationships. Bankers who collude with Government to get bailed out? -NOT FREE MARKET. Farmers/Auto Corporations who get subsidy legislation passed? -NOT FREE MARKET

A debate has gone on for generations between economists arguing for statism & a “managed” economy, & those of the laissez faire (“hands off”) approach. The former deride the latter as “social Darwinists” causing an entrenched capitalist class exploiting and underclass. THIS is the reflexive depiction of laissez fair Dennett is referring to. NOW look at ALL my prior comments. I don't disagree with his concept- however, his use of a completely unfettered market to illustrate it is crude and wrong.

And Dennet is simply wrong about patent and copyright law. It should not be based on the utility/function of the thing in question. That leaves far too much room for abuse of the system as we see with Apple. I think that if your invention or idea gets to the point that someone can copy it from the source material with resources of their own then it should be fair game period. Once it's been released into the world, you no longer have control of it and it's the peak of hubris to think you do.

Honestly, I could care less about your stance or education on "economics". This is about "consciousness". You made a statement that wrongly accused Dennett of something he didn't say, nor imply and that's that.

laissez-faire

Then he shouldn't make any pronouncements about it at all. And Apple IS a patent troll. Samsung and Apple go at it constantly, and to be honest it's just lining the pockets of their lawyers and is childish. It's a huge clusterfuck, so much so the courts have ordered them to lower the number of claims so it's more reasonably processed. I've also heard (not verified) that Apple has actually sued companies over patents the didn't even own first just to put them out of business or scare. Sheisty.

Thermostats are not sentient. That's saying that all chemical and physical reactions and the reagents involved are sentient, because they are responding to various conditions, and so they "feel." I feel your arguments are seriously misguided, and at this point, I think you're just trolling. I am done. Enjoy your weird land of thoughts.

@rzalo1195

3 жыл бұрын

😂😂😂🤣🤣

What if thinking tools were just feelings tools? Perhaps Daniel feels guilty for being selfish with his ideas so he's trying to encourage others to "think" on his level. Would the world truly be a better place if everybody were thinking the same way that he does?

Kendrick Lamar

Apple IS a patent troll...

Thank you , but not that useful in fact

Juxtaposing incremental algorithmic steps to "magic" is much more indicative of the lack of understanding and pretentiousness of the speaker than it is those that he refers to.

@arthurwieczorek4894

17 күн бұрын

The emergent as "magic", not to be confused with magic. What kind of emergence? Incremental logarithmic.

@stratmaster921

17 күн бұрын

​@arthurwieczorek4894 what is doing the computation? What is an algorithm with no one using it?

@stratmaster921

17 күн бұрын

@@arthurwieczorek4894 emergence is like randomness it doesn't really exist in a vacuum but is a quality of the observer not the observed

I think Intuition Pump is a crappy name

Daniel Dennet doesn't quite realize or at least state in his original talk that the free will he's talking about is NOT the free will that most people believe they have. He does a disservice to his argument by not clearly mentioning this the first time. For it to have to be coaxed out of him by the questions at the end is annoying. And his argument on punishment barely gets it's needed caveat.