Dan Dennett Notes
- carpentry, tools, bare hands, bare brain,
- words, prosthetic, tools of thinking
- numbers, diagrams, maps
- great melodies of philosophy, stories, vignettes, memorable, intuition pumps- not formal arguments- little stories
- serious thinking is interpersonal, challenging each other with our ideas
- andrew wiles, fermat last theorem- everyone wants to prove him wrong, but can’t- darnit, he’s got it
- chance has painted a thin covering of life
- human technology- terrible power, we now wield the paintbrush- we have the same genes, so it’s not genetic- it’s thinking tools
- did evolved tools make smarter, or did we evolve to become smart enough to make tools? yes. co-evolutionary
- reductio ad absurdum- the great crowbar of thought
- we imply ^ using rhetorical question. implied reductio
- surely alarm (a little bell should ring. ding! weak point in argument- author not bothering to argue)
- downloaded an app to your necktop (new talent/capacity)
- art is a thinking tool/intuition pump
- termite mount, sagrada familia- clueless mindless termites, bottom up, no boss, no blueprint, no heirarchy
- both natural
- the great tree of life (get a t-shirt)
- eukaryote, cambrian explosion
- she accomplished with her words what she claimed to accomplish surgically- she disabled him with her words- how is it exactly your own recent pronouncements- neuroscience shows free will is an illusion- why isn’t that just doing wholesale what she did retail- why isn’t that dangerous/irresponsible- well, what’s the difference? stop that bandwagon, or it will start doing some real damage.
- positive programming
- if determinism is true your lottery tickets were chosen in advance- so what? determined to have good luck on some occasion and bad on others- there’s no difference between determinism and indeterminism
- temper our conviction
- cosmic unfairness of determinism (what about cosmic unfairness of indeterminism?)
- thinking tools- gadets, devices, apps- reverse engineer them, take them apart, turn all the knobs build your own
- chinese room- successful as a persuader for 30 years- spent many hours explaining why it is not a good intuition pump- it’s defective. if you don’t understand how computers really do their work- you don’t get it. rudely dismissive of systems reply. you have to be computer literate to understand why chinese room thought experiment is defective. their eyes glaze over. they hate the idea that AI is possible. they love the fact that a berkley professor that has conclusion that strong AI is impossible. they like the conclusion, don’t bother me with the details. don’t bother me with nitpicking. used to hold that in contempt- anti-intellectual attitude. caught self doing it too. i find the copenhagen interpretation of modern mechanics ugly, offensive. i don’t want it to be true, accepted.
- no two neurons are alike, have different agendas- they are computing, but they’re willful selfish interacting slaves but not the way your laptop computes. emulating all of that in silicon is possible in principle but really unlikely. the brain is orders of magnitude more complicated than we thought just a few years ago. so don’t hold your breath.
- thinking tools -> prosthetic improvement over faulty tools.
- we’re lousy at probability, naturally. we’re exponential discounters of future events. that’s just wrong, it’s a fallacy, but nature has built as that way. we have lots of foilbles, little cognitive glitches. danny kahneman. we CAN pick slow, we can overcome the natural limitations of our brains. more civilized, more rational. the fact you ask this question- recursive loop- we can be indefinitely critical. collective irrationality, solutions & workarounds.