Daniel Dennett Dissects a Bad Thought Experiment | Big Think.
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- Опубликовано: 17 янв 2015
- Daniel Dennett Dissects a Bad Thought Experiment
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Schrödinger's cat. The prisoner's dilemma. The trolley problem. These are brand names as much as they're philosophical thought experiments. Philosopher Daniel Dennett explains the importance of concocting an attractive package in which to wrap your argument. At the same time, Dennett warns that this can backfire and, to demonstrate, he dissects one of his "favorite bad thought experiments," an investigation of free will based on the sci-fi film "The Boys From Brazil."
Five weird thought experiments to break your brain - Big Think ›
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DANIEL DENNETT:
Daniel C. Dennett is the author of Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Breaking the Spell, Freedom Evolves, and Darwin's Dangerous Idea and is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and a grandson. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996. Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, was published in 2005. He co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981 and he is the author of over three hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
Dennett gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987.
He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Daniel Dennett: Scientists and philosophers like to think that they're very sober, rational people who are above the need to advertise. And yet, if you look closely you'll see that they often go to great lengths to come up with a vivid memorable term, a label for their theory or a name for it that will stick in people's head. In other words, they're trying to develop a brand name or advertising or trademark for their view. And we should recognize that's a good thing to do if you're going to run an example or if you're gonna run an argument -- try to make it as easy as possible for the audience or the reader to keep track of the elements.
Don't call them A, B, C, D and E. Call them Bill and Arthur and Freddie and so forth. But, of course, that can backfire on you, too. Or it can be misused. One of my favorite bad thought experiments -- bad intuition pumps is one in a very influential paper by Greene and Cohen published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society on what neuroscience tells us about free will. And this is The Boys from Brazil. And in this thought experiment we're to imagine -- it's inspired by the hokey science fiction film The Boys from Brazil about some evil doctors who clone Hitler and they're trying to make Hitler clones. But in this telling they create a human being who's been designed by their evil intentions to live a life of crime -- to do evil things.
But just as rational as anybody else, he's very much controlled. He's sort of a designed psychopath. And they call him Mr. Puppet. And they describe Mr. Puppet and Mr. Puppet goes out and commits a crime. And they appeal to the readers ....
To read the transcript, please go to bigthink.com/videos/daniel-de...
You guys seem unable to understand the video, his point was not to disprove anything. He was impartial towards showing if the guy should be held morally responsible or not. He just wanted to show that the wording of a thought experiment can greatly show how you perceive it.
Thank you. Finally someone who understood the video.
Yeah dude. That’s exactly what he’s says 5:59 we don’t need you to repeat it.
Dennett is the living proof that philosophy still matters. Understanding the pitfalls of language and logic, philosophy provides you with a framework. I like both Sam Harris and Dan Dennett and their "fight" is a joy for those who wish to understand more about how we can improve our thinking skills far beyond our empirical knowledge. Thank you, Dan!
This isn't him making some big point, it is his response to the wording of thought experiments which can change the meaning of the thought experiment, he is not making any huge philosophical claim... people really are not seeing that
To be fair Dan Dennett is an unusual philosopher in that he tries to carefully frame things in a way to change our intuitions about them. This is a fairly uncommon strategy among philosophers, who tend to be more straight ahead, "your argument needs a movement from A to B to work, but A is false, and even if it weren't, the move from A to B is not logically valid". When i first started reading his essays it took me a long toime to understand what he was doing. he's not going for the knockdown argument. He's framing things in a way to get us to think about them in a certain way.
He's just pointing out that thought experiments are better when they're made as objective as possible by removing suggestive language like 'hitler clone', 'mister puppet' and 'evil doctors'.
I don't really get why people are getting all worked up over this video...
I read his latest book, Thinking Pumps and Tools for learning. He is being very nuanced in his argument, which is that framing a thought experiment for philosophical and scientific concept or situation should avoid some particular flaws that are common in intuition pumps. It's a nice read and is much more humbling than this video may come across as. Combining philosophy and science results in frustration for many people.
I think that what really sits unquestioned at the core of this thought experiment is what we mean by personal responsibility. It is misguided, I think, when questioning the nature of free will, to talk about personal responsibility or personal accountability.
I remember when discussing determinism as an argument against free will with my peers in my philosophy class that they were very concerned about what absolving people of the concept of free will would do to the legal system. "Don't blame me, blame my upbringing." etc etc. This kind of thinking is an example of the pursuit of justice with no thought as to the underlying reasons we have as a society for adhering to its principles.
You could say that someone shouldn't go to prison because it's "not their fault" in the sense that their actions are a result of their desires which are a result of their environment but to do so would be to misjudge what the purpose of prison is. It's in the name: "correctional facility". It serves the purpose of trying to get people who have done bad things from not doing bad things in the future (and also to act as a deterrent, keep violent people off the streets, etc.). Something prison is not trying to do is acting as a kind of abstract retribution on deserving individuals.
Which is why personal responsibility is a poor topic to even be considering when discussing matters of the self.
So are you saying prison was never meant to serve as "punishment?" Or that no one "deserves" to be in prison? Or did I miss that point entirely?
***** I think the point is that whether or not a person should be held responsible or whether or not he is deserving of punishment for his actions is irrelevant to the question of free will.
Free will is about what caused your actions in the first place. What we choose to do about the consequences should make a difference.
***** even if we coukd conclude that a personal is not really accountable for their actions it still makes practical sense to restrict them so nobody else has to suffer at what would be this person's predisposition
***** The point is that the concept of personal responsibility is flawed in terms of determinism. Think of a human as a machine. When a car breaks down, you don't take it into a mechanic because it deserves to have its spark-plugs replaced as punishment (I don't know anything about cars). You do it so that the car doesn't break down in the future.
Same thing with prison. To view it as punishment for the deserving is merely an abstraction on what prison's actual usefulness is.
JakeFace0 So then should anyone ever be punished for their actions? According to determinism. Or is that an extreme view of determinists?
I get what Dan is saying (I quite like Dan), but I am not sure I agree that the 'evil scientists' who 'designed him to be bad' was irrelevant. There wasn't really a justification from Dan for removing that key point. He goes on to make a bunch of other changes that did not really affect my judgment on the matter, but that first piece of the puzzle so casually swept under the rug without explanation, that was key. It was almost like the rest of his changes were simply a smokescreen to bury that first major change.
The thought experiment, as I understood it, was to show how your behavior can be out of your control to some degree. The evil scientist in the experiment is a metaphor for the 'bad DNA' or 'bad formative experiences' that we as humans (particularly as children) don't have control over.
Removing the metaphor for predeterministic influences on behavior seems to be ignoring the main thrust of the point. Yes, if we remove that and run with the rest of the experiment without it you will end up with a morally ambiguous situation - ie, what you have without any predeterministic influences on behavior. That is my concern with this dissection. It is more of an amputation than a dissection, it doesn't examine all the pieces by changing them, it removes pieces that I would consider vital to the experiment.
I thought he was just trying to make the thought experiment as objective as possible by removing suggestive language like 'hitler clone', 'mister puppet' and 'evil doctors'.
"The thought that Mr Puppet is not fully responsible depends on the idea that his actions were externally determined. Forces beyond his control constrained
his personality to the point that it was ‘no surprise’ that he would behave badly. But the fact that these forces are connected to the desires and intentions of evil scientists is really irrelevant, is it not? What matters is only that these forces are beyond Mr Puppet’s control, that they’re not really his." -D D
I do not think the neuroscientist were trying to make a point a geneticly ingeneerd 'people/robots' :) The point was on free will and responsability in regard to the incapability of people to truly choose who they become; that they are largely made by forces beyond their control.
P.G. Burgess On the contrary, I think that to some degree the neuroscientist was speaking - at least partially - on genetics, chromosomes, etc. We already know with a good deal of certainty that there are genetic and biological components which factor into aggression, antisocial behavior, etcetera. This is one of the things that neuroscientists (and indeed, psychologists in general) are interested in when discussing free will in the context of the brain and how it functions. While neuroscientists certainly take an interest in the plasticity of the brain and how that can shape behavior, they are also very much interested in abnormal biological differences which result in abnormal behavior. To note, I haven't read the paper Dan is referring to.
The point is this: someone can be born, through less-than-random chance, with some biological component that makes them more prone to violence. We then proceed to treat these people as if this wasn't the case - citing free will. We, as largely healthy individuals, obsess over the idea of free will, while merrily traipsing through life with genes and a brain which is simply conducive to lawful, non-violent behavior.
The neuroscientist is saying this; alright, if we can't seem to get past the idea of (effective) random chance giving an individual a predisposition for violence, then what if the cause of that predisposition was a human (this evil scientist).
The point is that we tend to follow the track of human agency. Under normal circumstances, we look at the violent criminal and say, 'You are the last link of the chain of human agency, therefore it started with you, and it is your fault.' We ignore the biological component because we have difficulty accepting that something as vital as control over aggression could be outside of what we comfortably call 'free will.'
The scientist (whether evil or not) allows us to track human agency back a step further.
It ought to be telling that suddenly, with this additional human agent, the entire intuitive outcome of the thought experiment changes. Whether a scientist 'created' a monster or whether semi-random chance 'created' a monster *should* be irrelevent, and yet society has difficulty reconciling the two. Why Dan chooses to dismiss that - the additional agency, whether evil or not - is beyond me. Which was the point of my original post.
TheCakeAintNoLie Removing a human agent (a doctor, whether evil or not) and replacing it with random chance, is not simply removing suggestive language. Free-will is all about agency, and how we perceive fault is all about agency. It is disingenuous to say that 'random chance' is a functional equivilent to 'guided agent.' The appropriate thing to do would have been to say 'a doctor' instead of 'an evil doctor.'
There's a difference between 'turning the dials' and hitting the dials with a sledge hammer until you no longer have to worry about them.
MouseAndShiraz
Perhaps i m missing something but i agree with you, and as far as i can tell, you agree with dennett... the original story is a bad intuition pump, because the tweaking should be irrelevent.. but isnt because f.i. the usage of the 'evil doctor' colours our view of the question.
As dennett states, it is not about disproving the outcome...but showing a bad intuition pump.
LOL at all the dislikes who from people who don't get the point of the video. Maybe small think is for you :)
there is no small think :(
What, that changing how the case is presented makes us think differently about it morally? I got it, it just doesn't change anything in me. I still think there really isn't such thing as "free will". Still, there need to be consequences for doing bad things to make them unfavorable from game theory's perspective. This video really had no informative value for me, thus the dislike.
Also, "dislikes who from people"? *giggles*
LOL at the person who thinks intelligence is derived from agreeing with a video
***** I don't seek any validation, nor am I insecure in any way I could think of. Adding the title just shows what my channel is all about if somebody is interested. You don't need to be. Unnecessary tautology with the word "just" and statement like "you noob" don't help your cause of attempting an Ad Hominem attack.
I really don't understand why people have such a huge problem with determenism. The most succesful prisons are the ones actually trying to rehabilitate their prisoners instead of merely punishing them. We should focus on that and keep improving the system of rehabilitation. That's why the knowledge of determenism is so important, you know people are forged by their dna and surroundings. And with this understanding of why someone is the way he is, you can actually help him and the society he lives in. You can even be proactive with certain groups that have a high chance of causing harm.
And that's why the argument "If determenism is real then we cannot punish people" does not work. Crimes have a high chance of creating more crime and suffering. And in the year 2015 we try to rehabilitate instead of simply punishing "evil" people.
I think it all boils down to just how skilled those evil doctors are. There's also a question of what emotions they tap into, and exploit - anger? greed? lust? Depending on their skills, plus the role they play in raising this child afterwards, they could be completely responsible, as Captain Autonomy would be insane.
This is like the Framing effect (Kahneman e Tversky).
It is only a bad thought experiment in the sense that it is constructed to support a view that you don't agree with, for instance, the deterministic view of human behavior. Every thought experiment is an analogy to make a problem simpler or, as you said, more intuitive. Whether the thought experiment supports a correct view of the world is another matter. The important thing is to be aware of these possible biases as you analise a problem.
I feel like the game changer is tha fact that "Mr Puppet" is artificially designed to commit evil, whereas "Cpt. Autonomy" is 'in a situation where he might be prone to behave antisocial"; in the end mr Dennet just put a lot of attention on details he himself claimed to be irrelevant, to change one that is vital to the whole reasoning, if I got that right..
Nonetheless an interesting video
+nopatone
That was his whole point...
They claimed they were irrelevant, he's pointing out that they aren't.
So you're agreeing with him. Changing these terms leads to a different conclusion.
Ironically Dennett says the first example leads to people intuitively agreeing with determinism, where as his modified example probably doesn't. But isn't the notion that people can be manipulated into thinking a conclusion further support for determinism?
only thing i got was that If you name your subject Mr Puppet or Captain Autonomous you create preconceptions about your case in order to convince people...right?
That's actually really interesting how the wording changes what the intuitive outcome becomes!
I don't understand one aspect of this dissection.
He says that "the fact that this person was created by evil scientists with evil intent is irrelevant", but I thought that was the core concept of the example, which would be the primary reason for any exemption of responsibility.
How can you dismiss this important clause?
I get it. It ventures on the obsurd to state someone is not responsible of their own actions, it was their circumstance. Well anyone could use that ad infinitum for anything to the beginning of time. For example blaming the fact that he was born in the first place as the reason why he was there to commit the crime. Not to mention the fact to put blame on a circumstance would indicate the need to correct or punish the said circumstance which cannot be done since it was already done. Like blaming the thought of murder as the criminal and not the criminal who holds the thought. Now in his example you could blame the creator of said killer, but only for a different crime such as the person who hires another to kill for them.
Well done, I really enjoyed this.
It seems to me that science has already answered this question. A portion of behavior can be attributed to genetics. A portion can be attributed to past and current environment. A portion cannot be accounted for by these two things. It is that last portion that we can sometimes use to, over time, overcome the other two. Call it free will or a box of chickens, it doesn't matter because it lets us have the same effect to overcome our circumstance.
Saying someone shouldn't be held responsible doesn't mean that their behavior wasn't wrong. We want those behaviors fixed, or removed from society, and part of the process is stripping away the sentimentality associated with the idea of "free will".
3:11 -- In the video, he doesn't say why the evil scientists' intent is irrelevant. I suspect that he does provide an argument in written form somewhere, but here, it's just a statement, and it's not self-evident. If someone designs a machine to cause harm and it then causes the harm it was designed to cause, we'd blame its designer and/or its users, not the machine. The question then becomes, is there a fundamental difference between a person designed to be a criminal by conscious intention, and someone who happens, through no-one's design, to have criminal tendencies. It might be true that there's no difference, but it's not *self-evidently* true
I'm not a philosopher, but if I were to challenge the original argument (insofar as I understand it -- not having read the original), I'd start by asking, what's the moral difference between Mr Puppet and the scientists who designed him -- presumably they too have certain genetic predispositions and they too were influenced by their environment. So in what sense are they responsible for their actions (including the creation of Mr Puppet), whereas Mr Puppet himself is not?
Yep. I’m guessing he assumes that because the person would be effectively the same exact thing in each scenario that the scenarios are equivalent. But that’s just a certain interpretation of consequentialism which is absolutely NOT something you can just assume is true without justification.
Even by stripping all the "intuition pumping" details, the argument is the same. At 3:41 he says "An indifferent environment happens to produce an individual who, with high probability, will engage in some criminal activities." Nowhere in that statement is the culpability of the subject demonstrated, even if his name "happens to be" Captain Autonomy.
Just the fact that he's called mister puppet is already begging the question.
Very interesting look at these kinds of things. A few words can sway a moral compass.
Point is in no way shape or form are people that aren't literally fucking broken mentally, psychopathic, the whole nineyards, ever rationally free from behaving morally and ethically. It is binding simply because you have the ability to choose. If you remove the ability to choose then yes, this person is just a robot that needs to be switched the fuck off because all the other people who aren't robots are getting murdered by him or her. Now, there are circumstances like The Stanford Prison Experiment that make people do extremely out of character stuff and those situations are in FACT extremely dangerous, they are fundamentally dangerous, remember that. Just the person you are talking to can sometimes change the way you behave. The reality is that we are both deeply affectable and autonomous. We both make decisions and are influenced by decisions.
Well, say a person was born with a condition which made him or her see all old people as monstrosities. In that person's perspective, killing the old people/ monstrosities would be seen as a heroic deed, whereas others would perceive it as evil. You see, evil does not understand that its evil is evil.
Instead of providing an argument for the existence of free will, Dennett has again committed the appeal to consequence fallacy (argumentum ad consequentiam). I think he has come to accept that free will is merely an illusion but is concerned about the implications of this notion becoming widespread. Moreover, Dennett created a false dichotomy by arguing "either we have free will or nobody is accountable for anything". Individuals should not be imprisoned for punishment/justice, but rather as a deterrent and a way to segregate potentially dangerous individuals from society.
Dennett is wrong. The thought experiment as he described it was a thought experiment. It is a test/explanation of moral reasoning, and as such, it is only useful if it puts your moral reasoning to the test. The whole point of the thought experiment is to SEE IF YOU CAN imagine a hypothetical scenario in which your moral reasoning doesn't seem to hold up. Using "irrelevant" details to create the scenario doesn't make it a bad thought experiment. In fact, if one can show that all you have to do is change immaterial details about a situation in order to cast doubt upon a moral belief that was thought to be common sense, then it is a very good thought experiment because it shows there is more discussion that needs to be had.
Since most people consider it self-evident that crime must be punished, "The Boys from Brazil" is a good moral thought experiment because it challenges that notion. It certainly doesn't prove conclusively that crime shouldn't be punished, but it shows that the prevailing moral belief deserves more consideration than most people give. Dennett's version of the thought experiment, which is designed to provoke a response that most people already think is the right one, is a bad thought experiment because it only provokes the same thoughts most people have anyway.
He spent the entire video using a really long and convoluted analogy to explain something pretty simple. I get the feeling that he thinks he's smarter than he is.
I think it is undeniable that a person is a product of their environment given that there are, when taken to their roots, no other factors that effect what makes that person. However I still believe people should be held responsible, despite them not being responsible. Holding people responsible for their actions by incentivising those actions that benefit people while disincentivising those which cause harm requires the idea of responsibility to exist. This incentivisation and disincentivisation is also part of an environment which produces more people who do those actions that benefit people than there would be otherwise, making people and their lives better. In other words use the idea of responsibility not because on an individual level it is the "correct" thing to do but because responsibility is about what it changes in society to bring about a better future; It is not, as many people seem to think, about the past.
thanks dan and bt good vid thanks for posting :)
I'd say the more depressing thing is that, in reality, people use their free will to choose not to exercise it
It's funny that he talked about the effort by scientists/philosophers to come up with catchy "trademark" phrases and such since he has attempted to re-label the term "thought experiment" as "intuition pump". Near the end, his example assumes that a Harvard graduate would somehow never manage to learn societies general moral and legal expectations. This is, of course, gibberish; nowhere on the path to (or through) Harvard is likely to meet the "morally indifferent" qualifier of the original thought experiment. I'd expect better than a Straw Man from such an accomplished thinker.
The original experiment combines environment with born as. assumes evil will remain. A manufactured evil is a product of its creators if no original thoughts.
Do we still have people going around claiming no-one's really responsible for the things they do because the environment caused them to do it? Steven Pinker dealt with this over ten years ago in his 2002 book "The Blank Slate: The modern denial of human nature" and I've yet to see anyone address his arguments there.
There is most likely no 'you' apart from the 'environment.' You *are* the environment. Does the ocean have a choice in when it brings the tide?
I feel this argument completely skirted the issue.
Pay close attention to 5:59
Responsible? No. Should you be held responsible, aka punished? Yes. Punishment is there to either remove you from society, or to correct your character which is what actually determines your actions.
The topic aside, I wish philosophers controlled their verbiage. Dennett just spent six minutes telling us that the way you frame something influences how people perceive it, which is an unnecessarily long time for a simple concept.
What matters is what the person did is a consequence of his past and the laws of nature. That's why he is not morally responsible. And Dennett even agrees but then goes on to redefine free will and moral responsibility.
But the trouble is most people just assume he means we have free will and moral responsibility in the ordinary sense just about everybody believes in.
I find it hilarious that you think he’s not morally responsible just because his actions are “based on his past and the laws of nature” lol. Ok, so what WOULD his actions have to be based on in order to make him morally responsible? Is there anything in your mind that would make him morally responsible? If not, then moral responsibility is a nonsensical concept in your mind, and the fact that his actions are “based on his past and the laws of physics” are completely irrelevant. Even though you just said that was “what matters” 😂
No one can pay for crime done, it has been done, the murder victim is dead, nothing will reverse that fact, no amount of punishment will. Therefore punishment is moot. The only thing one can do which has tangible benefits is to convert that murderer into a productive member of society. That is the purpose of civilized judicial systems like the Norwegian one.
There is no "free will". What we are and what we become is a matter of luck. There is no good or bad, it all depends on the subjective perspective. Labels are not beneficial to humanity since it makes people concentrate in things that make us different instead of the things that make us equal, that includes labels like christian or atheist. There should only be one label...human.
Well of course the original pump's intuitive conclusion was wrong. The conclusion is that this being of compulsive evil-doing is not responsible for his actions is absurd. Programmed or not, either by nature (cloned to do evil) or by nurture (set in an environment that fosters evil behavior), it doesn't matter - the crimes come from the individual, therefore the individual must be put in a position where the crimes are either no longer possible or highly unlikely, IE, prison or some sort of social rehabilitation or some other practical repercussion that is adequate to the crimes committed.
As opposed to all those other thought experiments that are 100% bias free and not created to provoke a particular intuition on which to expose a person to a different way of thinking?
I think people should be considered responsible for their actions, and discouraged from evil.
This guy is flawless at making a point.
It actually doesn't matter if he is "responsible" or not. If he commits crimes and murders people, then he is a danger for the rest of us and thus we should jail him. It's actually not harder than that.
While I can admire Dennett's writings and some of his philosophy I have such a hard time listening to the man. He has this plodding cadence like he is struggling to form thoughts that he should've already had some notion of before hand. Now, if he is really developing ideas off the cuff, perhaps I can forgive his snail's pace but I don't think this is the case.
Tough crowd, jeez.
You've got a point, I also have some trouble following his speech. But you gotta keep in mind that he is an old man after all. He needs a longer pause every now and then.
I can sum up this video in two words. Connotation matters.
its basically an argument for the legal system to consider the notion of free will even if there is no free will in the scientific ontology, okay, well i agree its time to consider psychological and sociological and yes also biological knowledge as far as to how to fulfill philosophical vision not how to consider psychological/sociological/biological in order to justify one vision over another, yes accountability as it stands today is dependent on free will but neither accountability nor free will is a vision
that should guide the law
Those details do make a difference..took six minutes to get to that point but yeah
Opening statement is completely empty. The scientific method is to be as clean as possible but we don't actually make that statement about ourselves. Quite the opposite if you consider that we have others check our work constantly and long before we go to the wide public with it.
And anybody who ever did a scientific project will know that advertising it when going public is a central part of writing your article. We certainly aren't above it, however, most of us (by my experience) don't enjoy clouding the actual work with colourful words as much. Most would rather stick to the precise description because it is easier to be accurate when you don't try to promote something. You also have no need of repeating yourself, which is annoying but central to advertising.
If you try to put something out there without having memorable names your boss or bossboss (who usually is closer to marketing than to scientific research) will hold you back and make you insert advertising.
Did it have anything to do with the rest of his talk? And what was the intent of his talk? Too much err for me to follow him.
Provide 77% of a transcript. Then just give up?
Why? Just lazy, or is it a comment on the material? Or is it some calculated 'engagement' strategy?
0_o
Hmm...
maybe BigThink is engaging in some antisocial behavior...
ThePeaceableKingdom All good theories, but there is no conspiracy. There is a character max for the description field on RUclips. Find the full transcript here: bigthink.com/videos/daniel-dennett-on-thought-experiment-details
Big Think
Lol! I wondered if it was something like that.
I didn't expect there was any conspiracy.
Thanks for the link. Much appreciated. I find it easier sometimes to follow an author's written words than their spoken talk. It turns off those details of sound and cadence "which presumably are ad lib and shouldn't make a difference but make a huge difference into how we think about this person and their ideas"... so to speak...
(Which is not to diminish Dennett's skills as an orator. It's more a confession of my own idiosyncratic weaknesses...)
Big Think Thanks.
He may be responsible, but that doesn't make him the _cause_ of his acts.
This type of problem is only relevant to those who haven't bothered to learn there history or there definitions. Responsibility and culpability (deserving of blame, for those who won't look it up) has effectively been a solved issue. I don't feel the need to say any more, if your interested in this any and every law book ever works fundamentally with this issue. I suppose those that focus on punishment only do so fleetingly but it is still there.
The two divergent stories (and that is what they are, most things are, realy) are not the same in the slightest, details matter. Always have and always will. Just because Green and Choan has stated there theory applies as an analogy to the way the brain works does not mean the circumstances are irrelevant. Dennett's re-telling is a farce.
I love how people don't actually understand his argument so they dislike
please explain it to us better, because to me, Noam Chomsky is 10times easier to understand and less boring. And that's saying a lot
upublic What I gathered from it was actually really simple and kinda..."Duh"-ish. It's how the situation is portrayed effects what conclusions you're going to come to. If you stripped away the labels and looked at what the meaning is instead of the message its given in, things will be seen differently. In this case, Calling the genetically engineered bad guy "Mister Puppet" automatically gives the reader a sense that he's not in control and thus not responsible, if you renamed him "Captain Autonomy" it paints a different picture, same as if you put him in different situations in the story, whether he's stabbing someone 90 times or simply not stopping a trolley from hitting someone when he could. None of that information matters for what the problems really supposed to make you think about, but by giving that information, you're creating a bias that could have potentially been avoided.
why are these just ads now?
This was really great. Thank you for enlightening me!
So his argument is that Cause and Effect are Irrelevant? What a strange Philosophy.
Pretty definitive proof that a hypothetical can't refute another hypothetical. Asking "shouldn't he be held responsible" seems to be all that is sufficient in Dennett's mind to justify the existence of free will (a concept utterly and systematically debunked by Sam Harris).
Pardon me for wasting your time, but I am rather curious. What is your thought on what causes consciousness and do you have any peer-reviewed/credible evidence to support it?
Consciousness seems to be a byproduct of a sensory system, Michio Kaku has a good bigthink vid on this idea I can link if you're curious.
As far as peer-review, it's difficult to put authority behind this idea: those honest about the science behind our current understanding will admit we simply don't really know what it is.
Alex Spevak Sorry for the late response. Thank you for giving me your thought. I have always assumed that consciousness is a byproduct or emergent property of the complex natural interactions among the vast number of neurons and their synaptic connections in the nervous system based on the direction that the information that we have gathered so far has given us.
Even though I have already seen Michio's video, I would like to thank you for at least giving a suggestion. However, I fear that using this video might cause me to commit the logical fallacy of appealing to authority, which happens a lot among people from different positions toward this subject. This is why I was wondering if there is any peer-reviewed/credible sources in order to reduce the level of biased dispositions, cherry-picking, unreliable accusations, etc.
But I suppose your right that it would be difficult to put authority behind this since we still only have a little understanding of how the brain fully works, so it would make sense to say that we currently don't know yet. Sorry for rambling on and thank you for taking your time. If there is anything else you want to tell me, go right ahead.
Alex Spevak Excuse me, are you able to read my comment? The reason why I am asking this is because lately no one has respond to my comments and I am starting to worry that there might be something wrong with my account that is preventing others from reading my messages.
***** Well, I'm able to read that one, yes. I thought that at least in this conversation we came to a satisfying conclusion.
Either you agree with free will or you don't. Adjectives do not matter. Both of this thought experiments are silly. The more important question is that even if people do not have free-will, should we punish them anyway (my opinion is yes). After all deterrents are part of 'the environment' and alter people's behavior even if they don't have free will. People behave so much like they have free will it becomes incredibly useful to think of them like they do and treat them like they do. Maybe it isn't worth noting, but I will anyway: whether free will actually exists in every argument that I've seen has always come down to semantics.
“The more important question is that even if people do not have free-will, should we punish them anyway (my opinion is yes).” It's not just semantics. It matters because some people needs to be punished and others needs treatment. Certainly, your way of view is more utilitarian, but not humanitarian at all.
PS. Sorry for my bad english.
Ignacio Benavides And would the imposition of free will alter this? No. The right response is the same regardless of whether people have free will.
Is an individual SAC, part of a greater machine, with a greater purpose?
Recycling all parts, old & new, fixing, updating information & calculations, till machine fully repaired.
No parts or materials lost. Held accountable? Yes all parts repaired & salvaged. What is a SAC compared to a part in a machine?
SACs malfunction but can be Fixed & Salvaged. If a part in a machine does not sense it's error, miscalculation, or warning of impending error that it is malfunctioning regardless of programming error.
Simply reprogram. So that the part then can use, internal sensors with updated & logical data. If not simply store part until new data can be uploaded or part fixed.
Capable of Understanding the whole Universe? From Single life forms mind & view? Depends? Are they alone floating in space? Need more views?
SACs two programs to choose. Destroy or Build. Or is it two programmers? Or does the SAC get to choose between just two programs? Is one program, what not to do, and another what to do, and when , and how to do it? Maybe SACs need both programs harmonizing? Is it all these answers?
So if SACs can be poisoned, infected by toxins, get damaged, grow old, decay, and malfunction, they can be healed, educated and given immunities and antidotes.
Your robotic vacuum cleaner that doesn't always register a wall? A TV with a busted Cable input? Radio with bad antenna? Just because a machine senses work, doesn't mean its programming does.
SACs have little memory & slow processors. Yet their memories can not always be wiped clean & run, but they can always get simple & better programming updates. All just metaphor. I hope I made sense and am not malfunctioning.
Wittgenstein said it better. It's cute when empiricists try to philosophize and obfuscate ideas that have already been handled by their betters.
Yeah I can't agree with Dennet on this one. The only thing he need have said is, if this person has the ability to be as rational as any other human being as was said to be the case in the original example. They would know that society views those things as wrong and that they shouldn't do them. If the scientists have created a person that is this way, than all parties are responsible. The "scientists" that did it, as well as what they created.
these details alter the experiment too much. The point was made that they designed a monster. It could be the worst environment imaginable. Good or bad a crime.
Vinegar is quite healthy.
Intuition pump? Does the concept of a thought experiment really need Dennett's new branding? What point does the new label serve aside from the man's own claim to it? Regardless, if were speaking in terms of freewill as opposed to determination based in causation, which packaging aside we definitely are, no one regardless of circumstance is freely responsible for their actions. Dennett has no real refute of the central concept. This is 6 minutes of self promotion and defensive deflection.
Big Think? More like Big Stink.
I don't understand what just happened.
Every decision you've made in your entire life has led up to this exact moment in this place and time, reading this comment.
Minor side issue... Dennett made an error in considering the option of exonerating the 'guilty' person when he asked 'does this mean he is not responsible and shouldn't be punished?'
Responsibility and punishment are separate issues. Yes, a completely deranged person beyond self control is not responsible, he is irresponsible by definition. But, of course, you don't leave a violent psychopath on the streets.
I value the disagreement between Harris and Dennett a lot. Having different opinions is what has gotten us this far. However, when someone is as CLEARLY wrong as Dennett, they should admit it.... It boggles the mind how much he has missed Harris' point.
Does a correlation exist between the use of pronouns and the probability of straw-man argumentation?
Because I've never heard Prof Dennette speak in such generic terms as he has here. What was his point... to tell us his favorite bad-thought-experiment, by saying "them" and "they" who have it all wrong?
Did I miss his supporting evidence? Seems like Dennett dissected nothing. Did he blather so much vagueness in his past?
This really boils down to what you would consider being controlled. In one instance someone is built like an artificial intelligence might be made with restrictions and limits. The other is a human being with certain levels of certain hormones and neurons.
If you think that because as humans we are intelligent enough to understand how cause and effect dictates (to some degree) what occurs we are free from accountability you are sorely mistaken. Dennett has made a fine point here. The utter ridiculousness and arrogance of anyone who states definitively that free will does not exist is laughable.
First of all, in order to make such a declaration- that free will does not exist- one must concededly believe that he or she has every data point necessary in calculating whether or not an individual is entrapped within an endless progression of cause and effect. It is the same as claiming omniscience. By the way- if you believe that the linear and traceable quality of cause and effect is paramount and that free will is an illusion, then why do you not believe Thomas Aquinas when he uses the exact same argument to prove the existence of God?? Hypocrites... You know who you are!!!
How do you reason that god is, due to causality?! You have no proof what so ever to make that claim. It's all in your head. As for the free will part - I see that there may not be true free will due to the parameters of what and who we are. Even in trying to understand, by itself, is a parameter, with it's engendered limits. So this free will you talk about is probabilistic only within it's own limits.
Ron maest The causality arguement for Gods existence was introduced by Thomas Aquinas. I didn't make the claim, I was making a point. Yes, free will is a difficult term, but we are free (to some degree), and for accountability to be dismissed completely we must first understand all causal factors that end in an event. We cannot make limited observations and declare omniscience. To say 'free will does not exist' is like an archeologist picking up a pebble and saying "Our dig is complete!!".
The simple fact is that our understanding of what occurs, whether in the human brain or in the cosmos, is limited to such an awesome degree through sensory and cognitive parameters that we should be sure of only one thing; that we cannot know anything definitively.
This is why men like Dennett must continue to stretch the minds of men through thought experiments. All the while men like Sam Harris become arrogantly seduced by their own limited intellect and declare definitively that which can not be known.
thomas parisi
But you sort of defeated (or admitted) your own point about free will: "we are free (to some degree)". Do you really think 'to some degree' is truly freedom? Just because our perception makes us feel it is, it doesn't mean it really is. We are encased in our bodies, that right there limits us greatly. Is there an universal consciousness in all matter, even in what we consider dead? Is there a correlation in that as our own consciousness derives from this dead stuff? I think potential for that is there but it must reach a threshold (life) for it to be possible. It's like only when all the pieces in a watch are attached together (over-simplified, yes) does the thing arrive at being purposeful, for our intents. As for your criticism with Harris, that is what's great about different views and ideas. It is thanks to people like him, Dennett and others that we can have this conversation; and I'm glad for that. I get your concern of completely dismissing the point without the introspection you think it deserves, though. We can dig deeper into metaphyics (even then who's to say there's even actual depth to that) but from a more reality-based abstraction like our consciousness, free will will remain illusionary. Remember that if I lobotomized any region off your brain, you would not (necessarily) be who you are anymore. What would that say of free will?
Because the first cause argument isn't a valid argument. Moreover, if it were, it wouldn't prove anything more than that there was a first cause. That doesn't prove any god either.
TheLeftLibertarianAtheist That's my point. It isn't enough to validate the existence of God and it isn't enough to prove free will is an illusion. Either you believe in an inescapable progression of cause and effect that entraps each concurrent event within the parameters set by the previous moment- or you do not.
TLDW: Daniel Dennett - "The Brazilian boys thought experiment implicates that no person is responsible for immoral behavior. I don't think this is true and therefore conclude the thought experiment is bad."
i didn't understand the video b/c this guys is a horrible speaker. I'd rather drink vinegar than listen to him babel on.
This is the biggest straw man I have ever witnessed