This time the Dawdler’s examine Daniel Dennett’s book “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking” (2013). Regardless of all that, these two tools think they think. Topics explored are philosophical zombies, Occam’s Razor, black boxes, and sorta operators.
Do you smell that? It’s the sweet potpourri of Dennettian thinkadinks.
-Dawds
00:08:24 – Thinking Tools
00:39:32 – Folk Psychology, etc.
00:51:21 – Heterophenomenology and Zombies
01:15:01 – The Tuned Deck and Two Black Boxes
01:39:09 – Ryan does not Understand Dennett
1 Comment
Tomasz · November 18, 2018 at 5:34 pm
I read Dennett’s Pumps quite some time ago and managed to forget all about the black boxes – thanks for reminding me! I had some loose thoughts about it, which suggest something is still missing from his picture. I think we can say the boxes sorta converse and understand only thanks to their having been built by people who took part in the bigger conversation/civilization to which the facts refer. For the databases could just as well be about Game of Thrones trivia. Or even simply True/False depending on whether the string was an odd/even number.
Better yet, you could just as well take a database of equal number of Chinese statements and assign Red/Green reactions. What is the conversation about then? What if I write a novel set in an alternative-history China corresponding to those new facts? Are the boxes now talking about both databases at the same time? I think there is no meaning there without physical connection to the world (even if indirectly through an engineer who puts the boxes together). And although I disagree with Searle, I think this is the only salvageable part of his Chinese room – when people pressed him during his Google talk to prove that he understood English, he said it’s merely to distinguish semantics from syntax. Off to listen to your episode on him now!
P.S. Thanks for the follow 😉