The Limits of Understanding – Dennett Vs Chomsky

41 thoughts on “The Limits of Understanding – Dennett Vs Chomsky”

1. Biologists, and scientists in general, need to stop ignoring social issues. All I can think of listening to this is that Dennett needs a slap in the face, becasue he's arguing with one the most important human rights activists of all time. Since Dennett has an audience of his own, and unquestionably knows what Chomsky's real dedication is, he should instead be focusing his efforts on his true responsibility (as a public intellectual) which is doing what he can (a lot, with his large reputation and audience) to bring awareness to the crimes of our time. All of which should take precedent over abstract philosophical arguments.

2. make believe

3. Dennet has become too militant and illogical to accept the obvious. lol

4. I don't get Dennett's position – natural language can be shown to be insufficient in its ability to prove all potential statements in a rich enough system (as per Godel)… so that immediately eliminates natural language (and mathematics as well). So, what is left? Intuition falls well short of satisfying what it means to "understand" something – worse, as Chomsky states, much of what we understand is abstracted out of "reality" and converted into theorems.

5. dennet's like a fish who cannot speculate about the existence of things that are outside the water

6. Dennett ignores one important fact, that today, with the given conditions of most human beings, science has a lot left to do or figure… which is open to speculation rather than bold claims …

7. Agree with Chomsky that our real limitations exist withe respect to understanding of metaphysical rules.

8. Dennett, the positivist, ought to don the mantle of humility and healthy skepticism, neither of which he has ever been willing to even consider. Reductionism leads to a Flatland mindset that flies in the face of most empirical phenomena. Empirical, as experience, is ONLY the experience of……………………………….matter.

9. Does Dennett play chess?

10. Plato, Descartes, and Chomsky address epistemology and ontology- the nature of thought and the symbol. Plato proposes that our works are thrice removed from the truth of form. Dennett is a positivist – what you see is what there is. Descartes put in motion our Western critical thinking with the example if the ball of wax. The wax appears to be a solid. The positivist would conclude that the wax must be a solid because it looks solid. Descartes applies heat to the wax causing it to become a liquid. Dennett's positivism reaches a roadblock. We are taught by Descartes to explore the nature of things. Chomsky critically examines and tests the limits of our assumed reasoning methods not unlike Plato, Descartes, St. Augustine, Dante, Marx, etc.

11. Saying that there must be a trajectory through "bookland" that will make you understand any given thing is similar to saying that even if you don't speak Chinese or Arabic, it must be possible to write a book in Arabic that will make you understand Chinese.

12. I always want to be impressed with Dennett and almost (always?) never am.

13. The idea presented (and at least provisionally rejected, to his partial credit) by Dennett @ 2:04, that certain answers can't be had for reasonable questions, presumes reality is decidedly not a logical system, and that its operations can't be verified in a straightforward manner amounting to the scientific method. If such a refutation of logic is true, then it's a self-referencing paradox for it to hold in a non-logical system. In effect it would confer a psychological "messiah" status on its believer, as what else could explain the coincidence of its truth in the absence of a logically straightforward reality. Chomsky's apparent confusion @ 5:23 over something as simple as "the interaction of objects" admits of confusion (intentional or genuine?) over the equivalence of attribution (perception) and causality, an equivalence long since proven by quantum mechanics. What is the cause of Chomsky being an expert on anything if he's correct, ie that the world is not intelligible? He can't say what it is, since "perception" is simultaneously the basis of his authority, and the cat he can't let out of the bag as the very causality he can't seem to wrap his mind around.

14. It's baffling how someone as intelligent as Chomsky can sound like such a moron and apparently believe he's making a rational argument.

15. Chomsky, a 9/11 GATEKEEPER

16. dennet is a little out of his league with chomsky

17. Wow, I've only been seriously thinking about free will for about three months and I have a strong feeling I already understand it better than Chomsky. It's irrational to say that people who say there isn't any free will must still "believe" in it, or why did they write a book about it? If there were no free will, once they realised this, they had to write a book about it (given all the other causal conditions). We have all sorts of secondary delusions about what it would mean if we didn't have free will. Check out 'Trick Slattery, Breaking the Free Will Illusion, for a great introduction.

18. the winner …. Chomsky! Dennett contradicts himself too much.

19. Dennett strawmanning it up. No, just because we have the ability to "ask questions" doesn't automatically mean that there are no limits to our ability to ask questions. He's just saying "Well clearly we're capable of understanding any question, so what's stopping us from understanding any answer?" No, you idiot, there are almost certainly questions that are themselves beyond our ken, not just answers. You can't just go "humans are the smartest animals on Earth, therefore they've attained the maximum possible level of intelligence in the entire universe, therefore the whole universe is ultimately intelligible to humans". That's nonsense.

20. Dennett is full of shit, he really is. I like the guy but why is he so dishonest?!
    The question is not whether you can comprehend the answer in natural language, it is whether you can KNOW the answer to be true.
    Big difference so stop straw manning, it is beneath you Dennett.

    Chomsky 1 – Dennett 0

21. Chomsky's part is expanded on in "The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding", if you want to listen to the rest.

    IMO, Chomsky takes the ironic stance of refuting his own position in order to demonstrate his point, although the refutation is limited. In other words, he does show that humans are limited, but our limit comes from our desire to wish that things were some other way than what we conclude they must be. The free will debate is the ultimate expression of this. It is very satisfying to hear him express the exact free will paradox I've thought about in my own head for years: everything must be random or pre-determined (or random within pre-determined limits). There's no conceivable in-between. And yet, he denies the obvious conclusion: free will cannot be what most people conceive of it. Instead, he just asserts that "nobody really believes free will is an illusion. … there just must 'really' be an explanation out there that we just can't understand (like rats can't understand prime numbers)…(maybe)". Well, I have no problem with the "maybe" part, but that borders on inaction. There is even an obvious way to proceed, and to suggest that our inability to properly define free will as most people "feel" it should be defined just means that we are emotionally attached to some imagery, sensory or emotional experience, or otherwise incoherent concept which has no actual bearing on what "free will" really means. Thus, we are left with the functionalistic obligation to simply redefine free will in terms of social responsibility or accountability or some other such idea. And what's wrong with that? Thus, free will exists, even if everything is random within pre-determined limits. There's no contradiction if you just properly and objectively define free will.

    This isn't just some abstract point, either, but has real bearings on our social dynamics, which is why if I were to dialogue with Chomsky I'd try to win him over to this point. The fact that free will, for instance, can only be meaningfully grasped in terms of randomness within deterministic limits means that our social policies should be geared with this in mind. Punishment merely for the satisfaction of the wronged against the transgressor should be recognized as nothing more than hedonism, and our social mores, folkways and morals/ethics should be geared within all this in mind and in proportion to the violations committed with specific goals in mind. They should not be based on some abstract notion of "accountability of free agents" but rather on the recognition that people have free will and yet their actions are logically necessarily explicable by things out of their control.

    And yet, just as I said above, humans are emotional (illogical) creatures. We have an area of the brain or a function of the brain that reasons, and we have another area or function that is baseless and emotional, and causes us to obscure the obvious conclusions. And in fact, much of our pleasure and meaning in life comes from the exercise of the latter. So we don't delete our human nature; we just must find the proper synthesis of the two realms for our continued survival.

    So again, to recapitulate, Chomsky asserts humans may be biologically limited, like rats are regarding prime numbers, and tries to give the analogy of our understanding of free will as a possible parallel. He suggests it may be the case that the so called "free will dilemma" is simply a biologically incomprehensible problem for humans, rather than simply accepting the obvious conclusion that free will is basically misconstrued by most people. He does this for an obvious reason: he is personally (emotionally) uncomfortable with the idea that free will is somehow controlled by other things. He just wants to go with some incoherent notion of free will and call it "unintelligible", rather than accept the obvious conclusion.

    In the end, it could very well be the case that humans have biological limitations in terms of their comprehension of the universe. However, we would never know if this were actually the case or if it was the case that no organism could possibly understand certain problems even in principle. Rather than suggesting: "It's as if there are questions we will never be able to know the answer to," it's more like (as Dennet says here): "Asking questions does not lead to any real understanding at all, period (whatever 'real understanding' means)". Or it could be that everything will be explained, and in way that humans can grasp. I see no reason to accept or reject any one of these suggestions.

    I actually have my personal views on things like "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and don't consider that a particularly difficult question to answer. Due to that fact, I don't think the idea of "brute facts" necessarily is a problem, so I'm not necessarily sympathetic to Chomsky's position.

22. It almost makes me cry how much I love and respect Chomsky. All these questions I struggle with, he so easily explains them with facts and examples. He's brought so much light to my dark world.

23. Dennett knows Chomsky is levels and leagues beyond him, and that's the only thing he's right about in this context

24. Gotta go with chomsky on this one, dennets argument is incredibly weak and simple. What about the things we dont know or understand the questions to? we have senses that are clearly limited, what about things out of our senses reach?

25. YOU WONDER WHY AMERICANS ARE FILTHY LIARS AND GENOCIDAL IDIOTS? READ THIS' Fabricio Guido' POST!

    Fabricio Guido'<—hillbilly faggot! Dennett doesn't have any responsability[S.I.C.] to do shit (at least no more than you and me or any random Joe on the street). Don't put responsabilities[SIC] upon the soulders of famous/important people.

    This Guido-Idiot-Fool thinks Dennitt is a philosopher? Dennitt is not a philosopher.
    Being predicated on a total fallacious deconstructionist illogical attack on reality, you might now go wipe the shit off you goy asshole, creeping thing.

    He's a philosopher, so he does philosophy, the same way a salesman sells stuff. If anyone is responsable{SIC} for being human rights is everyone independently of what they do or who they happen to be. If he's well known that's irrelevant.

26. Talk, talk and never really answered the question.

27. Apart from the "organic brain has limits" argument. Some of the limits of science are financial and engineering limits; I heard one CERN Physicist claim they would need a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way to be able to get to a more fundamental structure of atoms. Another limit is that it's not sciences business to answer particular questions: Logical/mathematical , political, aesthetic, economical, ethical, methodological questions are not science but philosophical. The wide world of questions is much bigger than just science. I get the feeling from some prominent Philosophers/scientists that science is the only tool in the world of any use (scientism). I don't like it, it's too religious for me.

28. WHAT WOULD WOODEN HEAD DIM LIGHT BULB DENNETT SAY ABOUT NORTH KOREA GETTING A PEACE TREATY AFTER 66 YEARS OF BEING AT WAR FROM AMERICAN NOT EVER ALLOWING A TREATY?
    The signed Armistice established a "complete cessation of all hostilities in Korea by all armed force"[2]
    that was to be enforced by the commanders of both sides. The armistice
    is however only a cease-fire between military forces, rather than an
    agreement between governments.[31] No peace treaty was signed which means that the Korean War has not officially ended.

29. Hypothesis non fingo

30. It's a false Dichotomy. There aren't all the other animals who can't understand any questions on the one hand and us human beings who can understand every possible question on the other. There are just different animals with different conceptual ability.

    There are different humans with different conceptual ability. There are certainly some humans which can't understand everything about the universe, i fucking know some of them. In fact I am one of them, have you ever tried to read a physics text book? good fucking luck.

31. What's inside a locked box? I understand the question. I can only guess the answer.

32. This is a mix of the Dunning–Kruger effect in effect… combined with Dennets limit of understanding. Actually rather funny, that he sets it up like this.

33. Dennett is a turd-headed clown

34. You can't choose to do two thing, only one, thus no choice, and outcomes are already determined.

35. Chomsky always busy trying to make sense of things instead of criticizing other thinkers. That’s just another remarkable characteristic of this inspiring human being. BTW, in terms of this specific issue, Chomsky was clear (here and elsewhere): the thing is that some aspects of reality seem to be unintuitive to our senses (take the quantum world as a paradigm); it is NOT that our theories about them are unintuitive by definition, it is just that some aspects of the world may not be opened to human understanding as they would be if we were packed with other sensorial organs, different brain cells and, perhaps, different neurocomputational processes.

36. Don't know who this dweeb is but he can considered himself schooled by the mighty Chomsky!

37. Did Dennett say that we have language so we can understand the questions about the limits of human understanding?

    If so, this is like saying "I have a hammer so I have everything i need to build a house."

    Language, like every other human devise, is a tool which can be used for all sorts of purposes. However, Language, in an of itself, can tell us nothing about those things which words are incapable of expressing.

    I have a deep appreciation for Prof. Chomsky as he is largely responsible for the fact that I didn't have to go to Viet Nam when I graduated from high school in 1973. Similarly, Dennett helped me overcome the teachings of the doomsday cult in which I was raised.

    And sometimes I can fight though everything each of them talks about enough to understand at least some of what they're trying to say…I think.

    But it seems to me that the basic point is that while words may be able to answer some of the questions which can be asked using words, language will never be able to provide answers to questions which cannot be put into a linguistic context.

    To expect anything to the contrary is like asking a snail to tell you, in his own words, why he's so slimy.

38. To expand on one issue, Chomsky says that people who write books about the fact that free will is an illusion still write books as if they believe that free will exists, otherwise, the book is utterly inexplicable, given that such books cannot conceivably matter to anyone who can't possibly possess the ability to change anything at all, including their beliefs about free will.

    Which is undoubtedly a valid question.

    However, the same assertion applies to both atheists and/or theists.

    If god isn't real, there's no the point in trying to prove the case for nothing. Sure, some theists might persecute you for impugning their beliefs, but if god doesn't exist, or if creation emanates from and means nothing, there's no reason to argue about anything so trivial as one's own existence, to say nothing of god's lack of "realness".

    Similarly, if god is real but doesn't make his presence known in a manner that is utterly irrefutable, there's no point in serving a such a god, or reading books which were supposedly written about him.

    Napoleon Hill says there are three sides to every argument and the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle of the two poles.

    In much the same way it is not unreasonable to live and act as if both absolute theism and abject skepticism do not exist given that life itself happens here and now, in the timeless, space-less middle ground, which is necessarily inaccessible to any "ism".

39. Dennetts first argument was just completly wrong, Chomsky used the example of rats not being able to do a prime number maze, not that rats and monkeys can't understand democracy. The rats he referred to were shown through experiment to not understand the concept of the prime number maze, Chomsky then made the deduction, like any good sceintist would, that the limits of knowledge is species oriented, and that human beings 'could possibly' have the same limits in another form.

40. It's logically possible that the contingently evolved brain we have–or perhaps any mind with >n neuronal connections, say–just so happens to be sufficient, given enough time (not trivial, that), to comprehend the whole universe. It's unlikely. Chomsky wins. 

    Dennett confuses unlimited creativity within language with understanding. Both needn't be infinite if you're a Chomskyan. He's totally missing the point, probably because he doesn't like Chomsky. Seemed to be his problem with Gould, too.

    It's simple: my cat knows cans have food in them. He will never, ever figure out how to open it. He's strong enough; his cognitive capacity isn't there and never will be. I find it very hard to believe that some part of the universe is food-can for us in the same way. We may know things about it in that associative way…but we can't figure out how to open it up, cognitively.

    Again, sure, maybe by sheer chance, our brains can, given time, figure it all out. Doubtful.

41. The meaning of the question "what is consciousness?" is not transparent to me – I don't clearly understand it.
    It seems that the disagreement hinges on what we mean by understanding

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