Disagreement with Daniel Dennett about consciousness | Philip Goff and Lex Fridman

22 thoughts on “Disagreement with Daniel Dennett about consciousness | Philip Goff and Lex Fridman”

1. To be conscious is to hold an idea in a space within your mind. It’s not merely responding to stimuli or being entangled by another particle in the universe.

   You were not conscious when you’re on autopilot and arrive at a destination and don’t remember any of the events of the drive. You were responding appropriately to stimuli and navigating your environment the same way bacteria or other simple organisms do…impulsively and reactively without consciousness of the events.

   It’s only in the moment that you activate your mind’s eye to consider something…an object, a memory, a potential future given various decision…only in those moments are you “conscious.”

   And so consciousness is a trick our mind does when we consider something in mind space. Automatic reactions or impulsive behaviors are not consciousness.

   These are Julian jaynes’ ideas, not mine. But I think they are correct.

2. This clip makes my head go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr🤔😵

3. This guy is not a great philosopher. Dennett is a living legend and can justify his positions way better. The multiple drafts model is way deeper than panpsychism in its description and explanatory power.

4. Lex should interview Paul or Patricia Churchland if he wants a closer idea of consciousness.

5. Is there any kind of philosophy that matters besides analytic philosophy?

6. “What it’s like to be” isn’t an actual property of anything. That’s what these qualia cultists like David Chalmers don’t understand.

7. What makes a human being unique is that we have a story to tell in memory inside our brain.

8. Panpsychism is not a good hypothesis. It makes no predictions, it’s not falsifiable and it kicks the hard problem of consciousness down the road rather than explaining it. Positing that electrons have experience to explain how a dog can have experience is just restating the problem. The hard problem is that if the world is material than why is there experience at all? So why do electrons have experience? It’s just not useful at all.

9. I find Roger Penrose and Hammeroff's ideas the most intriguing, it incorporates a bit of a panpsychism ideas in a sense but it is also rooted in neuroscience. Which is basically that the microtubules in neurons act as an on/off switch for consciousness and that the cytoskeleton plays some role in each living cell having "awareness". It's basically a hypothesis, but it is one that can easily be explored scientifically through testing, I would really like to see where research into this goes.

10. panpsychism is so silly

11. How can an "explanation" of consciousness just assume it at a lower level? There's 0 explanatory power in that.

12. Consciousness is aware that you are aware while it silently just observes. Consciousness is therefore the very sole of the universe just as gravity is.

13. Dennett has been dismissed a long time ago, he still salty Searle has laid out thoroughly how silly Dennett's views on consciousness are.

14. 🙄

15. Cats are not soul-less robots. Cats are Gods.

16. Definitions typically dont help in these discussions. We are trying to find explanatory power. For example : q) how did this TV come into being? A) I define TV as the pressing of buttons. Did that fucking explain anything? Q) How is it that human conciseness came into being? A) I define consciousness as the firing of neurons. WHAT! That’s as arbitrary as saying I define conciseness as the wiggling of my left big toe. That has no explanatory power. Im not saying Searles arguments are right, but they certainly show we can define consciousness how we’d like, but I need a way to explain how I achieve understanding or intentionality. I also think Searle has a knockdown argument against formal systems being conscience.

17. Stupidest model of consciousness I've ever seen. You've never experienced anything outside of your NERVOUS SYSTEM. There are parts of your body you can't feel because there are no NERVES there.

18. “It depends what the meaning of the word “is” is.”

19. If you’ve never heard Dan Dennett describe consciousness, do yourself a favor and search for it. It’s extremely convincing.

20. Panpsychism is intriguing if you take your impressions of your own consciousness at face value, like that there is a self that experiences. Then, you’re committed to putting experience into reality at the base level of matter. Dennett’s illusionism just says concs. isn’t what we think it is, so the experiencing self isn’t quite real, but imagined.

21. Thank you for this recording! My questions are, did homunculi exist at the time of panspermia? Does the Cartesian theatre exist in some functionality in every possible Being? Are homunculi and Cartesian theaters ontologically indiscernible and inseparable? If qualia doesn't exist, what explains the bedrock of the Twin Earth problem? Why does atheism protrude through Dennett's work, and what is his most panpsychic work of philosophy? Is the Tetragrammaton a panpsychic Being and/or entity? Are Cartesian theaters discovered or invented? What does it mean for the homunculi to possess multiple ontic levels? Why does the qualia of every possible Being possess an indiscernible haecceity and/or quiddity? Finally, why does epiphenomenalism seem to depend on a panpsychic existential quantifier according to thinkers like Whitehead and Chalmers?

22. How would a hamster have a subjective experience? You only have subjective experience because of language. A hamster has no idea it even exists!

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