The Tug of Dualism (Daniel Dennett)
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- Опубликовано: 7 окт 2024
- A clip of Dan Dennett discussing what he takes to be one of the simplest and best arguments for dualism in a talk a few years back called "Hume's Strange Inversion". Note, this is a version of a previous upload.
#Philosophy #Dennett #Mind
This is why I HATE Dennett's materialism. He treats it like people are born dualist and have to be enlightened about the brain. Baloney. Everyone comes out of the womb a materialist. Ask any child old enough to speak, "Where are your thoughts?" They'll tap their forehead. They're not dumb. They're not going to say, "Well, technically they go into my pineal gland and out to another realm where my soul also resides..."
Materialism is the default theory. We're born with that assumption. Dennett likes to point out that Aristotle didn't know what the function of the brain was back in ancient Greece (which was true, but the things that Aristotle was wrong about can fill a library and often do), but he ignores the fact that Hippocrates said, "Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears." Ancient Greek warriors knew the helmet was the most important piece of armor. They had people with head injuries. They knew that your brain was the one organ (apart from the heart, perhaps) that one could not live without. Eyes, limbs, and other organs were expendable.
People have suggested the brain as the answer since the beginning of time, but the question isn't what but how.
[edit][oh, and he could've just said "Imagine a red line" at the beginning and saved us the optical illusion stuff, but it's still kinda cool.
I think you're wrong to assume that we're born with materialism, that it's the default. On the contrary my goodsir!
The human mind, without a robust scientific education (something that was not at all commonly available till recent history) seems to quite naturally conceive of and/or accept theism/deism/spiritism. It has a wide and gut-level appeal to our species. Yes, people with direct experience and investigation (Ramachandran, physicians, and warriors on a battlefield) "know" that brain = person and that therefore death is "the end" and to imagine a god-person "out there" is ridiculous and fantastical.....but does their understanding get re-iterated and built up as a social/civilizational belief or conviction? No. You have to have rituals and good feelings and social pressure to make that kind of thing happen.
Observable/discoverable reality simply isn't appealing to "the masses". We are creatures of willpower and inspiration, of mindstuff; and that mindstuff responds to magical thinking like a fish to a wriggling worm on a hook. Kinda bums me out to be honest.
@@ManDuderGuy I can assure you that when you were an infant crawling on the floor, you were thinking as a materialist would. There's the floor. There's the ba-ba. There's mommy or daddy.
What you WEREN'T thinking was: Hmm... I wonder what my mind is, and how that works with the objective world I see before me. THAT you learn later. You always had consciousness, your just weren't conscious of it, if you follow my meaning.
Trying to reframe the question of consciousness as one of science vs. religion is missing the point. Yes, a lot of people turn to the idea of God to explain the gap between the physical and mental qualities that they grow to realize are seemingly mutually exclusive, but the problem isn't resolved by taking sides against religion. The problem is resolved by solving the problem. How does our brain produce consciousness?
@@thaddeusroberts2393 I hear you, I appreciate your clear communication; and I'll respond to your re-iterated first point further by saying that the human mind, once it develops further, DOES go toward magical/spiritual thinking once it becomes more capable of pondering life/death/finitude/meaning/consciousness and all that. It's sortof an inevitable development in the mind, and I don't mean to automatically say it's "dumb and wrong", but I believe that what we call religions (supernatural or not) are essentially "mental tools" that we use to help us cope with the burden of our advanced/mutated conscious human mind.
To your final point: I can only agree that we do not understand what we call consciousness. I suppose we may be unable to without big leaps forward in computing and maybe the help of AI. To even be able to map out the whole thing as a purely physical process, and create "minds" or duplicate them or make them eternal....that notion actually terrifies me even though I'm a materialist/atheist type. I "believe" it's true but I'm afraid that that sort of knowledge would destroy us.
What I have no appreciation for is when our imaginations run wild and people start filling in these spaces of ignorance with gods and god-men and spirits and whatnot. Being willing to just say "we don't know" is the only honest approach in many situations.
Ya feel me homeslice? Hollerback if you feel like it, I'm all ears.
@@ManDuderGuy I feel you. And yeah, people tend to use a supernatural explanation like God when they are confronted with something they can't explain. It's a cop-out.
Anyways, nice talking with you.
@@thaddeusroberts2393 Gahblessya.
The most difficult part of the problem is to explain what consciousness is and how it arises out of the brain activity. We have the same problem with matter (what is it exactly and how did it come to being out of nothingness ?). And are we sure that human beings can explain everything that exists in our universe ? Can we explain why Dennet who is a materialist, believing that only matter exists, has spent his whole life trying to understand consciousness ? Why did he do that ? Shouldn’t he be just trying to feed his body and copulate, like all animals do ? What is it that drives him towards this weird activity called philosophy or science ? Why do human beings look for more ? What makes them different from other animals ? Materialism is good and useful but it covers only a very small part of human existence. There are so many things essential in our existence that materialism is unable to study and explain ! There is a fact that nobody can deny : a human being is a body and a mind/consciousness. He interacts with the world around him physically and spiritually/emotionnally.
It's interesting how eliminativist/illusionist arguments for phenomenal consciousness take the intuitive pull of dualism and then jump off at the last second. They don't really want to say that phenomenal properties are beyond the realm of physical science, but at the same time physical science can't account for them. Therefore, they must be illusory.
I like John Searle's view, that the red stripe can be causally but not ontologically reduced to brain activity. I don't think we can get around the fact that the red stripe has a different way of existing to physical objects (it's not good enough to say "it doesn't exist" when we can all experience it) and yet we have very good reasons to believe it is caused by bog standard physical molecules doing their thing, in the form of a brain. I think we should be able to achieve a physicalist theory of how come it is *like something* to be a brain one day, but Dennett sure has hell hasn't come up with it.
"caused by bog standard physical molecules doing their thing" could be a Searle quote.
Dan thinks there is no red stripe, but that there is a belief that there is a red stripe. Brain falsely interprets complex patterns of neural activity as phenomenal properties. It thinks there is red somewhere there. As Dan claims: there is no red, brain just believes that red exists.
It's quite similar how optical illusions seem real even though they are illusions. Even when you know how they work.
Dan argues that red colour doesn't exist, what exists is the belief that red colour exists. This is what is encoded in our neurology and physiology. Brain misintreprets complex patterns of neural activity with: "there is something red out there", while it doesn't really exist at all. What exists is a belief about the colour, not the colour itself. There is no red on your retina, in the brain or in the outside world, as he argues in the video.
Consciousness in that sense is a brain's user illusion of itself. Brain doesn't need to know how it works to function in the world. It can believe there is something red out there because that's practical. But, we shouldn't take it with a face value and literally believe it. Brain was made to survive, not to see the world how it actually is. Think you can trust your introspection as reliable? Optical illusions are a good example of how they seem very real to the brain, but how things seem, doesn't reflect reality.
In the context of user illusion, we can take the following example. When we move the document to the recyling bin on a computer, that process is represented as an icon moving on the screen. However, this isn't to be interpreted literally. It's just a representation of the complex process happening inside of the computer (removing something from the computer memory). The process of removing the document from the computer memory isn't actually moving the icon to the recycling bin. That's just representation, not what's actually going on.
Of course, one doesn't need to agree with Dennett.
Dennett's point is what is reduced to the brain activity isn't the red stripe, but the belief that there is a red stripe.
That belief is encoded in the brain, not the red stripe itself.
@@dariomiric2958 Yes, and the argument that my *experience* of a red stripe is merely a belief that I'm having an experience of a red stripe is "the silliest thing I've ever heard in my life" (Galen Strawson, I think).
I know what it's like to believe something, for example I believe that the earth is round, and I believe that a person, not a bot, wrote your comment. The language of "belief" is completely missing the target when it used to try to account for experience (qualia).
My visual experience is always a live translation of the state of the physiology of my eye balls. Some subset of my rods and cones are firing while looking at the original image. The longer I look at the original image, the longer it takes for those rods and cones to adjust to the blank image.
Yes, but the crucial thing is that none of it involves there being a red stripe anywhere.
@Philosophy Overdose Right, there is really only changes in my physiology caused by streams of photons of certain frequencies and amplitudes.
@@zusmthis doesn't solve the problem but complicates it. You must believe in photons, in matter, in many other things, laws of nature, but all this is done in ur mind. But then again if mind can see what doesn't exist sometimes, then how can you trust ur mind on other things mentioned before?
Besides it's philosophy, so its not about the explanation of the illusion on physical level.
The obvious flaw in his "argument" is here: that red stripe is still potentially out there; your access to it just expired. Use your phone camera with its color inversion filter and look at that flag through it, and you will find it again. By that initial staring exercise, you enabled the brain to access a fading snapshot of an "alternate" domain of experiencing that "mystery" out there, where the original inverted flag (with the green stripe) was another form of it. This experiment allowed a vision/version from another dimension of experiencing that image to leak through, giving us a temporary glimpse of other possible ways of experiencing it. the image itself is a construct created and manipulated by our brain mechanisms from the continuum of energy we are in. Color itself does not exist independently; it results from the interpretation and information processing regimes of the brain, which can be altered or changed indefinitely.
Dennett assumes there is a default or unaltered state of experiencing color, which is incorrect. consider a creature that experiences color differently from our mode of perception, or consider those who are colorblind. Our perception is technically "altered" by our own "customized" brain chemistry and mechanisms. Therefore, there is no default mode of being, perceiving, reality, or objective mode of perception. It entirely depends on our installation and settings of the apparatus of perception, which can have many levels and extensions too. A lagging thermal camera would show that entire room in another way. Does that mean we are hallucinating with it?
By Dennett's logic, the entire night sky would be nothing but an illusion. Why? Because what we're seeing isn't "out there" anymore. It's all just a sublime light show of quintillions of afterimages, each with its own time-delay. Some photons left their sources minutes ago, others have been traveling for millions of years. Yet each carries real, meaningful information about its source. This synchronized celestial screen of delayed data points exposes the flaw in labeling perceptions as "real" or "illusory" based on immediacy. The night sky isn't an illusion - it's an information-rich payload of photonic autobiographical memory of matter, as real and significant as any "present" perception. right? Dennett's argument falls apart when we consider the night sky as an information goldmine. Each single dot, whether eight minutes or millions of years old is a data-rich snapshot of its source. The flag's afterimage? a neural info-packet about the original stimulus.
This isn't about "immediate presence" - it's about information processing. Astronomers extract cosmic narratives from "outdated" starlight, just as our brains decode crucial data from afterimages. The delivery delay is irrelevant; the information itself is real and meaningful.
Our perception, be it of fading afterimages or ancient galaxies, is fundamentally about interpreting data, about what was/is/will going on. The value lies in the content and what it reveals, not in some arbitrary notion of "present out-there reality". Or consider that what we see as a bright star in the sky with the naked eye appears as an orb with rings through a telescope. When we return to naked-eye perception, that ringed orb becomes a star again. Which one is the reality of "Saturn"? None and both.
This exact staring experiment can be used to prove the exact opposite of Dennett's claim: that not only is consciousness not a fake, but all its various states and dimensions have some data about the encoded informational vortex we cognize and recognize as "stimulus".
The red stripe in the monitor is information (not physical) manifesting in a physical medium.
The information that constructs the red stripe exist and doesn’t follow any physical law.
As the information manifests in a physical medium. Our conscience manifest in a physical medium.
Dualism is true .
"Consciousness Explained (away)", by Daniel Dennett.
There Are Four Lights~! 🧑🏼🦲
🖖
Any optometrists in the audience want to chime in on this one?
Pretty sure this is info being processed in the occipital lobe. Gestalt psychology is full of little optical illusions like this.
@@sof553 Nah, this one's a lot sooner in the visual processing, and it's due to metabolic reasons. IIRC there's some chemical in the cones (retinal cells) that gets temporarily exhausted and you see the opposite colors instead.
@@luszczi does it work if you only stare at it for a second or if it is a black cross? Is it basically element of contrast or residual processing happening? Thanks
@@sof553 Going from memory, I just did some googling to find out more. If you search for "Complementary colours, after-images, retinal fatigue, colour mixing and contrast sensitivity", you'll get a very good resource for this.
@@luszczi great thanks
Simple ---------Electrical post-activity of retinal cells in the retina
The point isn't to identify the cause, there is a neurological foundation for everything we experience cognitively. The question is whether the subjective experience of a thing make it real if the thing has no material form (methinks)
@@peterkoulogeorge9501 yes real enough.lervels
Isn’t this true for color in general rather than just afterimages?
Vey powerful respectful personality speaking something very deep and different and of course difficult to understand. Now if a is equal to b then b can not necessarily has to be equal to b is abstract non commutation kind of thing .Therefore a is always the ruler in all circumstances and b is happy to be ruled is existence whether science dominating or God is okay for we the people.
The red stripe is real. It exists. A rock exists when we can all point to it. The stripe is no different.
I wouldn't say that what I'm seeing is a red stripe in the same way I would see it if it was actually there, but I get the point of dualism trying to sneak in
Ammm yeah but why dualism? It's at least reductive to a minimum of 3 fundamental aspects or variables . The conscious that it is trying to "observe"/experiment/measure the phenomenon/object and the context/matrix/unverser/container that allows the two previous to interact...
wait is that it? I was waiting for the argumentation but he just states that it isn’t there? just simply that.
Was this published in print anywhere?
Rigorous and incisive buildup and then a most tenuous and untenable conclusion, which is basically: my contention is correct because it shares a quality with other great proven things!! I am a materialist myself but this reasoning sounded typically like creationist and religious flacious blabber.. of course this reaction of mine pertains merely to this excerpt and perhaps during the rest of the lecture Mr Dennett presented some more solid reasoning points, in which case this video has done him a disservice..
damn... anyone got dualism number?
Isn't everything we see and feel just a psychological impression of a phenomena?
I think the flag illusion is in your retina.
That would be indirect realism/representationalism, no?
“[I]f I encountered people conveying a message I thought was so dangerous that I could not risk giving it a fair hearing, I would be at least strongly tempted to misrepresent it, to caricature it for the public good. I’d want to make up some good epithets, such as genetic determinist or reductionist or Darwinian Fundamentalist, and then flail those straw men as hard as I could. As the saying goes, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it." - Daniel Dennett
Is he implying that this is what HE does, or is tempted to do, or is this a criticism of someone or some institution that he’s describing? Because if he’s talking about himself, it’s a pretty strong indictment to put out about oneself. It’s an astonishing personal revelation.
firstly all 5yos are physicalists. whats counterintuitive is going against this normalcy of living with this faulty awareness and instead constructing at least a perfectly single-pointed concentrated awareness, in order to then actually get down to the business of refinely observing the phenomenon we are seeking to investigate. in other words the opposite of what such clowns and 5yos are telling you to do. we know the neural correlates of concentration and know the difference between a standard person capable of 2 seconds of sustained attention, and trained concentrators who remain for hours uninterrupted by sensory data. you no longer have any excuse.
secondly positing mass-energy in which 'seeming' exists/emerges requires WAY more magical thinking than dualism (as if his argument that dualism necessarily follows has any merit anyway). as chomsky explained newton destroyed the notion of the body and the world as a machine in his attempt to solve the mind-body problem, namely by demonstrating that the notion of the body as a machine is fundamentally incoherent, which has only shown to be the case and gotten worse and utterly nonmachanistic as time has gone on, making dennett void of any meaning from the beginning.
'I apologise for the symbolism.'
Humans infuriate me sometimes.
Way too many videos of interest, but not enough time to view. Up-setting.
Dennett's argument here vanishes in a puff of pseudo-logic. Just because something is counterintuitive does not mean it is true, or even that it is more likely to be true. "1 + 1 = π" is counterintuitive, but clearly false (unless you permit unusually large values of "1"). Materialism, at least the kind Dennett is defending, requires a rather naïve faith in the validity of one's perceptions of "reality."
He isn’t arguing that if it is counterintuitive, therefore it’s true. He is just saying that being counterintuitive doesn’t count against its truth. Whatever the argument is, it isn’t made on counterintuitiveness.