The issue with this post isn’t that no one here is interested in consciousness. That would be a strange blind spot for people thinking about improving their own rationality, which entails knowing more about the mind.
What’s wrong here, at least for me, is that this is a hatchet job. It takes only one sentence to say “I assert that consciousness is real, and h17y fails to account for it”. Say that, and expand with what conclusions you arrive at from there. If you’re going to critique Dennett, at least make more than a half-hearted effort to extract some insight from his books.
A worthwhile critique of Dennett’s views would require a guardedly sympathetic examination of his claims. You need to internalize the claims, which means you can convincingly, in your own words, reproduce Dennett’s actual reasoning, and then point out where that reasoning fails.
A worthwhile critique would use Dennett’s own tools: the Tower of Generate-and-Test, which is a key ingredient in constructing “stuff that thinks” from “stuff that doesn’t think”; the Intentional Stance, indispensable to find shortcuts through the vast number of reductionist layers you’d have to traverse from atoms to mind; the Multiple Drafts hypothesis, which shows how to dissolve the questions “when does this thought become conscious” or “which parts of me are conscious”; the User Illusion model of consciousness, which explains why the sense of being conscious is adaptive, and its cousin the Self as Center of Narrative Gravity.
This is what I’d like to see—a post (or if necessary a sequence) introducing these individual thinking tools, showing what work they do in Dennett’s hands, where they touch on topics relevant to this community, and possibly explaining where they fall short.
I think that posts like this still serve a purpose. The problem with this topic is that people have very different intuitive ideas about what would constitute a “solution” to the problem of consciousness. Remarkably, that’s true even in a community like ours, which is comparatively homogeneous in terms of approaches to philosophical questions.
This means that any post that is useful to a broad section of the readers here will need to understand the different approaches to the question. The only way to gain that understanding is to see the approaches in action and to see how they react to the other approaches. The OP helps to bring that about. It brings us closer to the point where someone can give a “guardedly sympathetic examination” of the other approaches used here.
The problem with this topic is that people have very different intuitive ideas about what would constitute a “solution” to the problem of consciousness. Remarkably, that’s true even in a community like ours, which is comparatively homogeneous in terms of approaches to philosophical questions.
The issue with this post isn’t that no one here is interested in consciousness. That would be a strange blind spot for people thinking about improving their own rationality, which entails knowing more about the mind.
What’s wrong here, at least for me, is that this is a hatchet job. It takes only one sentence to say “I assert that consciousness is real, and h17y fails to account for it”. Say that, and expand with what conclusions you arrive at from there. If you’re going to critique Dennett, at least make more than a half-hearted effort to extract some insight from his books.
A worthwhile critique of Dennett’s views would require a guardedly sympathetic examination of his claims. You need to internalize the claims, which means you can convincingly, in your own words, reproduce Dennett’s actual reasoning, and then point out where that reasoning fails.
A worthwhile critique would use Dennett’s own tools: the Tower of Generate-and-Test, which is a key ingredient in constructing “stuff that thinks” from “stuff that doesn’t think”; the Intentional Stance, indispensable to find shortcuts through the vast number of reductionist layers you’d have to traverse from atoms to mind; the Multiple Drafts hypothesis, which shows how to dissolve the questions “when does this thought become conscious” or “which parts of me are conscious”; the User Illusion model of consciousness, which explains why the sense of being conscious is adaptive, and its cousin the Self as Center of Narrative Gravity.
This is what I’d like to see—a post (or if necessary a sequence) introducing these individual thinking tools, showing what work they do in Dennett’s hands, where they touch on topics relevant to this community, and possibly explaining where they fall short.
I think that posts like this still serve a purpose. The problem with this topic is that people have very different intuitive ideas about what would constitute a “solution” to the problem of consciousness. Remarkably, that’s true even in a community like ours, which is comparatively homogeneous in terms of approaches to philosophical questions.
This means that any post that is useful to a broad section of the readers here will need to understand the different approaches to the question. The only way to gain that understanding is to see the approaches in action and to see how they react to the other approaches. The OP helps to bring that about. It brings us closer to the point where someone can give a “guardedly sympathetic examination” of the other approaches used here.
Good observation! Evidence, perhaps, that unknown differences in experience contribute to the disagreement?