rationalstabs
Very interesting debate about God, evolution, free will, consciousness and death.
Daniel Clement Dennett is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Dennett is also a noted atheist and advocate of the Brights movement.
Robert Wright is an American journalist, scholar, and prize-winning author of best-selling books about science, evolutionary psychology, history, religion, and game theory, including Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, The Moral Animal, and Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information. He is a visiting scholar at The University of Pennsylvania and Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation
Source
Robert Wright interviews Daniel Dennett (full)
Seems Wright makes for an interesting conversation that doesn't make you wanna kill yourself. Why is that? Because he seems to actually be interested in figuring things out and thinking beyond the ways of the morons who advocate for god's 'obviousness' and then try to use it as an argument. funny how after all those videos with morons arguing for religion and god, we have essentially a 'one of us' type guy talking with some 'giants in their field' and we are delighted! like a neighborhood with no good restaurants and then one ok place opens up and does really well.
@27min Wright seems to be talking about what Bertrand Russell spoke of. That what the universe is made of, when arranged one way, is matter and energy, and arranged another way, is thought and experience. This would be consistent with the idea that miracles do not happen, but there is more to the universe than simple material. This also explains consciousness nicely because it affirms consciousness rather than insisting that it can be broken into pieces and put back together again like a car and then not being able to do so. how does thought come from dead matter? this is the question that we are all trying to answer.
Robert is obsessed with the difference between 1st and 3rd person perspective. It is the source of his position about epiphenomenalism and a non-physical agent. Dan does not find the difference between 1st and 3rd person perspective sufficient to motivate belief in epiphenomenal non-physical agents. Dan's position is that non-supernatural causation, being all that there is, must be sufficient to explain 1st person perspective. Thus, for Dan, it is acceptable to speak in 3rd person terms about the 1st person perspective. Robert believes that Dan's acceptance of 3rd person language as sufficient to explain 1st person perspective is a sign of ignorance or dissonance or subterfuge. Robert believes that Dan is ignoring the fundamental difference between 1st and 3rd person perspective. But Dan insists that the source of Robert's trouble is the perceived necessity of epiphenomenal non-physical agency. Dan thinks that the source of Robert's trouble is rooted in the 1st person experience itself — it is tempting to experience oneself as a non-physical agent. But for Dan the truth of the matter is that the 1st person perspective, more specifically consciousness, JUST IS the non-supernatural process in action.
da da dan dan!!!
Dennett cannot explain mind, because mind is subjectivwe and Dennett is a materialist, who believee that everything is material, hence objective.. Duh.
Programs don't survive in their original form though, they're copied to the new HD… there's a serious problem here if you're hoping to live on in a new body.
"There isn't a single verb for trying to get good things" says Dan, as opposed to "expert avoidance" of bad things…(which latter could be applied to the often maligned capacity of far-sighted people and organisations to see future challenges, like say climate change or peak oil, and make alternative futures come into being)
Dan (mercifully) rejects probabilifier, enhancer… as labels for the aspect of human intelligence which tries to take maximum advantage from predicted opportunities.
How about "Optimiser"? (some might say, "Capitalist" or "Speculator"! [sigh])
The ability to make accurate predictions is certainly a marker of human success, and we like doing it in play as well as in earnest, witness horse racing and other making of bets on non-random outcomes.
9:43 did Dennett say we have more brain cells before we are born and then there is a tremendous pruning? Can anyone tell me if that is the case.
Tis interviewer is complete wanker in my opinion. Why the fuck is he going over questioning evolution line of questioning? Evolution is a FACT! Nuff said.
He is a complete tosser who is pigeonholing the great Daniel Dennett who cleatly does not want to be there listening to this twat. I am turining off now. At this rant. 12 minutes in
Right around the 47 min mark helps to clearly explain the difference between these two.
Anyone else feel Dan is trolling so hard right now with epiphenomenalism? Great interview!
Does Bob EVER smile
Don't think I've seen it yet on anything ever seen with him. Seems like a nice enough guy that just is way serious. Maybe a bit too much.
Robert Wright – party animal.
Very interesting! Mainly when consciousness is explained.
"I'll declare victory and go"
You dumbfounded the other guy with how stupid and pointed your claims are, that isn't victory.
"I don't wanna hear that" – Robert Wright 😀
talking about CONFUSION
how about Daniel shows and tells you what it is to be him…………you will need to believe him and you will need to stop putting words into his sentences or thoughts and you will need to accept that what he is saying is the truth. Something that in this interview will never work or in this life for this matter.Very few people accept what they hear or see without trying to change it. Maybe I have to learn to do that one day
wright, lol
Very interesting interview, although Mr. Dennett is very smart gentelman and philosopher, when I comes to domain of consciosuness and explaining it, again and again I'm really dissaponted how insufficient his explanatory power is.
What a great interview. The push and pull between these two is exciting.
wright has to be one of my least favorite persons on earth, every interview i see with him tries to turn it into a debate, and when someone counters his argument he interrupts them with "i dont wanna hear that". Fuck you dude, either stick to the interview or debate and be ready for counter arguments.
Desperate xxxx
If the world is deterministic and someone "avoids" something, was the avoidance not inevitable?
in·ev·i·ta·ble
inˈevidəb(ə)l/
adjective
1. certain to happen; unavoidable.
The previous arguments were not "nothing is avoidable", it's the inevitability of things that were or were not avoided.
Damn Daniel! At it again with the Deterministic Materialistic Pseudo-explanations!
Consciousness is proof God exists. I think I am, therefor God is.
I love how in each interview, at some point, Wright admits that his only goal is to get the interviewee to admit that they are wrong. He couldn't care less about anything they are saying unless he can disprove it or they are acquiescing. He is no intellectual. He's just a child that thinks he's more clever than anyone else and needs to affirm it by bringing others down.
the example of pain as an epiphenomenal thing seems wrong to me as pain obviously has an effect on the organism.
Another video of Robert Wright looking around the room as if high on acid, in an attempt to appear thoughtful and wise. All the while failing to properly address the points of his interlocuter and doing his best to muddle the discussion whenever possible.
Love Daniels perspective. Look it's just not that complicated, sorry. You don't need to take that extra step.
I also think Daniel could have pushed harder when Wright started back peddling about there being different perspectives of God. If suicidal risks are the topic your perspective of God only need incorporate an afterlife for the actions to be truly meaningful in its relationship to God. Those two do not always go hand in hand, but they are normally packaged together. At least here in the US. Just saying well there are different conceptions of Gods does, in my eyes, not free a person from acting in a manner that they truly believe there is an after life. If you know there is an afterlife like you know there is a God you would treat this life as though you are just a passer by.
Dennett in his own book "Consciousness Explained" says that qualia (subjective experiences) doesn't exist. That's why his position on consciousness is so unintelligible. He's attempting to explain consciousness by explaining it away. At any rate, what I found most interesting about this entire interview is that Dennett appears to believe in a transcendent, platonic realm of values like the form of the good (which would appear to be at odds with his atheism).
You need to look at these Robert wright, for what they are , confrontational conversations, they are not suppose to be debates.
Sorry I meant to say they are not interviews.
Dennett said "human consciousness is very different from all other animal consciousness" . That is a totally insane statement.
Mr. Wright is an incredible obnoxious person.
don't worry Mr Wright, I was also like that in high school 🙂
you be better of interviewing A. Dugin then this Occam razor profane pragmatist..
"pursue" is an antonym for "avoid."
I swear so many of Robert’s interviews involve him trying to justify his theory of natural selection and purpose haha, great discussion once again!
I liked that Wright repeatedly challenged Dennett. It kind of walked me to a better understanding of Dennett's argument.
One could conceivably replicate all workings of a brain, say mine, in some advanced quantum computer. That process could essentially replicate, without need of outside stimulus, what it's "like" to be me, but for all "I" know that is what I am – a quantum simulation of some guy, of which perhaps there are billions. I think I am unique but I can't prove that, either. I like the concept of the film, "Moon" in which (spoiler alert) a man is on a moon colony mourning the vast distance to his girlfriend when in fact she is not his at all. He is a clone. The yearning is real, the feelings are real, but basically amount to nothing because the girlfriend and all memories of her are fake.
Mindblowing film, for a relatively low budget. That's the type of nightmare Wright is resistant to, and Dan seems to say, "Well, who cares?"
The more important question is: What is the self, and why do we believe it is private? What about a boundless self? Boundaries are a rational construct aimed at solving basic engineering problems: how to build a boat. It's based on the idea that there is water and there is air and if you fill a volume with enough air it will float, and it works, but look closer!
There is no boundary, but a gradient. There is a water-air interface where molecules interact, and on a deeper level it is a function of electromagnetism overcoming gravity – an ancient hoverboard! (In a way.)
Consciousness is just a concept. There is experience, there are sensations. Why must we believe anything about these things?
Our thinking has evolved to solve basic survival problems, and that means compartmentalizing, and that is essentially a product of a brain that's learned to live in a world where food is scarce and there is danger. We hunt and are hunted, thus our perception is a kind of "first person spear-er." Why must we assume the consciousness of hunter/hunted is the only manifestation of being?
There is me and you, us and them, good stuff and bad stuff, all judgments arising out of whether things will allow us to eat and mate or not. That is so limited, yet neither of these men seem to dare beyond these limited concepts.
The universe is a happening. It is an evolving process in which we are temporarily manifest as beings who feel they are separate somehow from all of it. That is a state of affairs that is changing as all things change and evolve.
Consciousness as we describe it will one day seem as alien as a triolbite in a prehistoric lake. What is that to us? What is it like to be a trilobite?
The higher beings will see us in much the same way: strikingly complex, yet so very simple.