Philosophy Overdose
A clip of Dan Dennett discussing what he takes to be one of the simplest and best arguments for dualism in a talk a few years back called “Hume’s Strange Inversion”. Note, this is a version of a previous upload.
#Philosophy #Dennett #Mind
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Any optometrists in the audience want to chime in on this one?
There Are Four Lights~! 🧑🏼🦲
I wouldn't say that what I'm seeing is a red stripe in the same way I would see it if it was actually there, but I get the point of dualism trying to sneak in
Isn't everything we see and feel just a psychological impression of a phenomena?
It's interesting how eliminativist/illusionist arguments for phenomenal consciousness take the intuitive pull of dualism and then jump off at the last second. They don't really want to say that phenomenal properties are beyond the realm of physical science, but at the same time physical science can't account for them. Therefore, they must be illusory.
Bill Maher will say this phenomenon is the "woke mind virus" in action. Bill Maher will say, "Yes, there used to be racism. Racism still exists here and there. But what you, woke liberal, are experiencing is merely an echo of racism. The racism doesn't exist. There is no racism in your brain. It only seems like racism to you, and that has to be false." Just as technology is counterintuitive, and takes getting used to, the argument to not use the technology is automatically made manifest. The argument against materialism becomes self evident, and a Bill Maher is born. Bill Maher would say, "Let's get rid of materialism all together, because clearly it isn't real. It's just mind games".
I like John Searle's view, that the red stripe can be causally but not ontologically reduced to brain activity. I don't think we can get around the fact that the red stripe has a different way of existing to physical objects (it's not good enough to say "it doesn't exist" when we can all experience it) and yet we have very good reasons to believe it is caused by bog standard physical molecules doing their thing, in the form of a brain. I think we should be able to achieve a physicalist theory of how come it is like something to be a brain one day, but Dennett sure has hell hasn't come up with it.
“[I]f I encountered people conveying a message I thought was so dangerous that I could not risk giving it a fair hearing, I would be at least strongly tempted to misrepresent it, to caricature it for the public good. I’d want to make up some good epithets, such as genetic determinist or reductionist or Darwinian Fundamentalist, and then flail those straw men as hard as I could. As the saying goes, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it." – Daniel Dennett
"Consciousness Explained (away)", by Daniel Dennett.
Rigorous and incisive buildup and then a most tenuous and untenable conclusion, which is basically: my contention is correct because it shares a quality with other great proven things!! I am a materialist myself but this reasoning sounded typically like creationist and religious flacious blabber.. of course this reaction of mine pertains merely to this excerpt and perhaps during the rest of the lecture Mr Dennett presented some more solid reasoning points, in which case this video has done him a disservice..
This is why I HATE Dennett's materialism. He treats it like people are born dualist and have to be enlightened about the brain. Baloney. Everyone comes out of the womb a materialist. Ask any child old enough to speak, "Where are your thoughts?" They'll tap their forehead. They're not dumb. They're not going to say, "Well, technically they go into my pineal gland and out to another realm where my soul also resides…"
Materialism is the default theory. We're born with that assumption. Dennett likes to point out that Aristotle didn't know what the function of the brain was back in ancient Greece (which was true, but the things that Aristotle was wrong about can fill a library and often do), but he ignores the fact that Hippocrates said, "Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears." Ancient Greek warriors knew the helmet was the most important piece of armor. They had people with head injuries. They knew that your brain was the one organ (apart from the heart, perhaps) that one could not live without. Eyes, limbs, and other organs were expendable.
People have suggested the brain as the answer since the beginning of time, but the question isn't what but how.
[edit][oh, and he could've just said "Imagine a red line" at the beginning and saved us the optical illusion stuff, but it's still kinda cool.
'I apologise for the symbolism.'
Humans infuriate me sometimes.
damn… anyone got dualism number?
firstly all 5yos are physicalists. whats counterintuitive is going against this normalcy of living with this faulty awareness and instead constructing at least a perfectly single-pointed concentrated awareness, in order to then actually get down to the business of refinely observing the phenomenon we are seeking to investigate. in other words the opposite of what such clowns and 5yos are telling you to do. we know the neural correlates of concentration and know the difference between a standard person capable of 2 seconds of sustained attention, and trained concentrators who remain for hours uninterrupted by sensory data. you no longer have any excuse.
secondly positing mass-energy in which 'seeming' exists/emerges requires WAY more magical thinking than dualism (as if his argument that dualism necessarily follows has any merit anyway). as chomsky explained newton destroyed the notion of the body and the world as a machine in his attempt to solve the mind-body problem, namely by demonstrating that the notion of the body as a machine is fundamentally incoherent, which has only shown to be the case and gotten worse and utterly nonmachanistic as time has gone on, making dennett void of any meaning from the beginning.
My visual experience is always a live translation of the state of the physiology of my eye balls. Some subset of my rods and cones are firing while looking at the original image. The longer I look at the original image, the longer it takes for those rods and cones to adjust to the blank image.
Vey powerful respectful personality speaking something very deep and different and of course difficult to understand. Now if a is equal to b then b can not necessarily has to be equal to b is abstract non commutation kind of thing .Therefore a is always the ruler in all circumstances and b is happy to be ruled is existence whether science dominating or God is okay for we the people.
The most difficult part of the problem is to explain what consciousness is and how it arises out of the brain activity. We have the same problem with matter (what is it exactly and how did it come to being out of nothingness ?). And are we sure that human beings can explain everything that exists in our universe ? Can we explain why Dennet who is a materialist, believing that only matter exists, has spent his whole life trying to understand consciousness ? Why did he do that ? Shouldn’t he be just trying to feed his body and copulate, like all animals do ? What is it that drives him towards this weird activity called philosophy or science ? Why do human beings look for more ? What makes them different from other animals ? Materialism is good and useful but it covers only a very small part of human existence. There are so many things essential in our existence that materialism is unable to study and explain ! There is a fact that nobody can deny : a human being is a body and a mind/consciousness. He interacts with the world around him physically and spiritually/emotionnally.
wait is that it? I was waiting for the argumentation but he just states that it isn’t there? just simply that.
Way too many videos of interest, but not enough time to view. Up-setting.
Ammm yeah but why dualism? It's at least reductive to a minimum of 3 fundamental aspects or variables . The conscious that it is trying to "observe"/experiment/measure the phenomenon/object and the context/matrix/unverser/container that allows the two previous to interact…
Dennett's argument here vanishes in a puff of pseudo-logic. Just because something is counterintuitive does not mean it is true, or even that it is more likely to be true. "1 + 1 = π" is counterintuitive, but clearly false (unless you permit unusually large values of "1"). Materialism, at least the kind Dennett is defending, requires a rather naïve faith in the validity of one's perceptions of "reality."
The red stripe in the monitor is information (not physical) manifesting in a physical medium.
The information that constructs the red stripe exist and doesn’t follow any physical law.
As the information manifests in a physical medium. Our conscience manifest in a physical medium.
Dualism is true .
Simple ———Electrical post-activity of retinal cells in the retina
Was this published in print anywhere?