Hume's Strange Inversion of Reasoning (Daniel Dennett)

thank you for coming thank you for waiting I apologize for the delay but it was unavoidable ah so let me tell you about Humes strange inversion first I want to give you all a shared experience that I want to discuss with you so just stare at the white cross don't let your eyes move just stare at the white cross a few more seconds don't let your eyes move and that should be long enough do you see it yes I apologize for the symbolism but I didn't have time to prepare an alternative so you would probably agree with me that you're having a flag afterimage how about this sentence that the lowest Reds short red stripe is intersecting the black cross let's do it again so that you get a chance to think about that sentence so there's the original stimulus and do not move your eyes just stare at the fixation point and that should be long enough okay now everybody is there anybody here who has not had that experience of the American fly okay so you're all having a flag after image how about this the shortest the lowest short red stripe is intersecting the black cross do you agree was that how it was for you okay so now here's what I want to know what are you talking about you're talking about a red strike something real or something that seems to be real something red where is it where was it it wasn't on the screen it wasn't on your retina and there was lots going on in your brain but none of it was a red stripe no it wasn't in the brain wasn't on the screen wasn't in your eye now Leibniz very simple and uncontroversial law of identity says that if a is identical with B then whatever is true about a is true about B and vice-versa very simple principle but it makes a difference here because it means that if a is a red stripe and nothing in the brain is a red stripe then nothing in the brain is identical to that red stripe which if it's real has to be something else and that leads to dualism if there is no physical red stripe anywhere then there must be a non-physical red stripe somewhere this is I think the simplest argument for dualism and in some ways the best because it brings out the challenge to materialism I as a materialist have to face this challenge I have to say this you are experiencing a red stripe but there is no red stripe that you are experiencing you are experiencing a red stripe but there does not exist a red stripe that you are Varian Singh I have to make sense of that if I want to be a materialist it only seems to you that you are experiencing a red stripe actually let me revise that it only seems to you that there is a red stripe that you are experiencing you are experiencing a red stripe but it seems to you that there is a red stripe that you're experiencing and that has got to be false now it looks as if we can talk about that red stripe that red stripe we can talk about which red stripe so it seems to behave quite liken like a real thing and of course we can think about it we can direct our attention to it to it what I'm doing here is trying to enliven the sense that the tug of dualism is very strong it's very tempting to think that since we can talk about that stripe and since it isn't a physical red stripe it must be in some other non physical realm and yet Here I am saying now it doesn't have to exist at all it seems that it is a thing for us as good as any other thing in our experienced world and yet it does not exist that is fairly counterintuitive materialism is counter intuitive but then all the great advances in science are counter intuitive and take some getting used to and I'm going to go through three great counterintuitive moves now and this is I've already been over this way we need to explain the non-existent phenomenal property of being read and it cannot be what it seems to be compare these two remarkably similar structures they're similar in shape their artifacts made by animals the one on the left is a termite castle the one on the right as you probably know is gaudi's famous Church in Barcelona the Sagrada família thank you they are so similar and yet they're fundamentally different in their design and construction but one on the left is designed and constructed by termites there's no architect termite there's no boss termite they don't have any blueprints they don't have any plans it's built by quite mindless labour you might say this is a bottom-up construction with no boss no hierarchy of intelligent designers Gaudi on the other hand is just the opposite a brilliant intelligent designer a genius with blueprints and manifestos and explanations he's got this thing all figured out in his head first and then he's ordering his second-in-command around who's ordering the third and the fourth and he's ordering everybody around this is top-down design and construction as good an example as you could find so here are two very similar structures built and designed in two fundamentally different ways and why do I bring this up because I want to point out something which is really quite marvelous and strange this is a elapsed time photo micrograph of neurons in action I'll let this one run a bit they don't move as fast as this in actuality but you see them groping around trying to make better connections you have several hundred billion of those between your ears now think how is consciousness possible human brains are basically like termite colonies which are not conscious the termite colony is made of maybe even a million termites mindless little bugs running around doing their mindless little things and not a single one of them knows anything about the larger project that they're about well your brain is really like a termite colony in that way it's composed of several hundred or several maybe twenty billion little neurons and each one of them is not even as smart as a termite and yet their action produces Goudy how do you get a Gaudi type consciousness out of a brain which is like a termite colony you might think that you could get a large Gaudi shaped entity which was about as smart as a termite colony or maybe even a little smarter but where would the consciousness come in where would all that wonderful phenomenology happen in a brain made out of little mindless elements how do human brains achieve global conscious comprehension using local competences without invoking an intelligent designer the temptation of course is to go with Descartes and say well they couldn't so there has to be a miraculous mind a racecar 'get hands in there that does the consciousness and does the gaudi job leaving the termites to just push the buttons pull the strings that won't do I'm going to try to answer this question and I expect you will not even understand that let alone accept it and I can't hope to convince you that my answer is right that would take me a week maybe if I was lucky but maybe I can at least get you to understand the thesis and see that this is a proposition that might be the answer to this question and it's a in itself a rather surprising so here's the answer by downloading virtual machines that give them super powers so you have all this this huge army of unintelligent termite like neurons and somehow they download in virtual machines that give them the powers of a Gaudi that's the answer now how what on earth does it mean I'm going to try to sketch out a route to that perspective I'm going to start with familiar philosophical topic ontology I'm going to then talk about affordances which I will explain to you I'm going to talk about fun expose idea of the own wealth or environment I'm going to talk about Humes strange inversion and Wilfrid Sellars manifest images a lot of content here and some of it is no doubt unfamiliar to you finally we get to consciousness so this is a map of where I'm going and I'm going to do this via Bayesian predictive coding so by the time we're through you will have heard about all my heroes Darwin touring bayes hume cellars and Gibson so what is a strange inversion some years ago I published the paper about Darwin's strange and version of reasoning I'm also going to talk about Touring's strange inversion of reasoning and then human so you get three strange inversions and they're all related as you will see and it's easiest to understand them if I start with Darwin one of my favorite passages of criticism of Darwin was written by a man named McKenzie published in 1868 and I will read it again in English and the translators I hope can more or less keep up in the theory with which we have to deal absolute ignorance is the artificer so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system that in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine it is not requisite to know how to make it mckenzie put that in capital letters in the original to emphasize it this proposition will be found on careful examination to express in condensed form the essential purport of the theory and to express in a few words all mr. Darwin's meanings who knew by a strange inversion of reasoning that's where the phrase comes from seems to think absolute ignorance fully qualified to take the place of absolute wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill exactly he's right that is what Darwin is doing this is Darwin's message and it is strange today it is hard for many people still to accept it in the United States roughly half the population still cannot accept Darwin's strange inversion now what about Touring's strange inversions yeah pushing the wrong button here's a picture of pre Turing computers they're wearing dresses computers were people that's what a computer was this was a job what are you I'm a computer they often had studied mathematics and university and they were hired by the thousand to do computing for industry for government and so forth so before Turing a touring in the old days computers had to understand arithmetic this was a technical job they had to appreciate the reasons for what they were doing took training and touring recognized that this was simply not necessary it wasn't necessary so now in order to see this let's compare Darwin's strange version with Touring's here's Darwin again in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine it is not requisite to know how to make it here's Touring's in order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is touring realize that you could make a computer a mechanical machine computer which could do all the work of a human computer without any understanding without an even knowing what arithmetic is the two of them together then discovered what is in itself a strange inversion of reasoning and it's my new slogan and it is competence without comprehension think think of how counterintuitive that is why were you why do you come to university to gain comprehension why so that you may be competent in your life our understanding these days is you get comprehension in order to become competent and here's Darwin and touring in their different ways then oh no that's backwards computation I mean competence comes first and comprehension is composed out of competence comprehension is the effect competence is the cause that's a strange idea let me just make sure you're clear about what I'm saying here Darwin was saying the competence to create the biosphere all the wonders of nature required no comprehension the process of natural selection has no understanding at all doesn't need it touring comes along as says the competence to do arithmetic does not require you to understand arithmetic and if you can do arithmetic and conditional branching you can compute anything computable so there really is a similarity between there to understanding or mind or consciousness or intention is an effect not a cause it's an effective competence of many competences not the cause of them now we're ready for Humes inversion which is central to my talk here today and this concerns our experience of causation Hume said what we actually experience is a and then B a and then B a and then B inconstant conjunctions this he says causes a feeling of expectation in us notice he was anticipating Pavlov he was saying basically that causal regularities conditioned us Pavlovian conditioning to have an expectation just like Pavlov's dog salivating that feeling he says we then misinterpret as an impression of causation caused by something out in the world a property of the external world we think we're let me put it this way when you see an apple it's because light bouncing off the Apple goes into your eye and causes you to see an apple to say it quickly the most natural thing in the world is to say when you see causation it must be because light bouncing off the causation goes into our eye and causes us to see causation says no no that's wrong there's nothing out there visible causation is not visible in that sense you can't bounce light off causation what you have to understand Hume said is that we're taking judgment and phenomenology and we're turning them inside out the phenomenology of causation grows out of the judgment of causation rather than the other way around so here's what here's what you actually experience a and then B a and then B a and then B this causes you to see a causing be a causing be a causing B and an irresistible metaphor for this is that we project the anticipatory feeling out and attach it to the object Hume himself speaks of this we seem to see causation right before our eyes now this is an illusion Hume says but it's a benign illusion I'm going to give you some other examples of Humes strange inversions here's what he says by the way he talks about the minds great propensity to spread itself on external objects this he says is a misattribution an attribution error if you like but it's a great propensity of the mind I'm going to give you some more examples it's not the case that we like honey because it's sweet that's the everyday way of thing about it it's really more than honey is sweet because we like it what do I mean here's the bad theory first there was sweetness and then we evolved to like sweetness that's wrong there was no sweetness before we liked it just wrong sweetness was born with the evolved wiring here's glucose if you theorized by about sweetness by looking very very carefully at the structure of glucose this is hopeless you'll never find sweetness by studying the chemical structure of glucose it's not there if you want to understand sweetness you won't find it out there you need to study the brain and evolution to understand the existence of sweetness just as a sort of parody let me give you the pre inverted theory of sweetness okay you will notice it has a certain echo of Darwin here God sees that we should adore glucose because it's high in energy so he sprays glucose with sweetness fog what's that I don't know but it's something that it's a miracle don't ask sweetness fog causes people to experience sweetness which causes them to decide they love those sweet things with all the glucose in them and that's how God made sugar sweet what's wrong with this story is it has one cause too many forget the sweetness fog we don't need that you just wire up the brain so that the glucose will trickle trigger a desire a label desire call it the sweetie sweet yummy label or something like that as long as you're wired up that way then God's purposes are met you're going to go for the glucose whenever you see it and that's why it's sweet and as Hume said about causation we project the experience and we think of the sweetnesses being out there in the honey when it's really a reflection of our felt desire to have some more of this yummy stuff a benign user illusion we know what sexy is for it's to reward us for all the time and effort we need to spend mating in order to propagate the species that's why sexy exists but there's nothing intrinsically sexy about this I mean it may seem as if there's something intrinsically sexy about this but if it does that's another one of those illusions now if there were something intrinsically sexy about this we would have a real problem evolution would have a real problem how to get chimps to mate well how could you solve that problem well hallucination no you don't need to explain it that way you don't need to go to that trouble all you have to do is wire up chimps to like that look there's nothing intrinsically sexy about that look to us certainly but there is two chimpanzees because of the way they're wired it stands to reason that we adore babies because they are cute no it's sort of the other way around because we find them cute we want to cuddle them and care for them but actually that's just about backwards we want to cuddle them and care care for them and that causes us to see them as cute and we we can we can study and it has been studied what it is about the facial proportions that triggers this nothing intrinsically cute about those facial proportions but they trigger a whole series of emotional reactions in us and then we see the cuteness out there Walt Disney Studios is a master of making cute faces I went looking on the web I forgot to put it in here on another PowerPoint I have a cute alligator if you draw it right it's it's just as cuddly as any teddy bear so here are three strange inversions they have something in common in every case they mistake effects for causes they think that comprehension is the cause of competence or they think that there's a something out there that's our cause of our perception of causation and so forth okay so now that you've had the inversion you're ready to follow the rest of this route and I'm going to start with ontology in my youth there were elevator operators and like the computers pre Darwin they had to be trained to do what they did and in fact I was able to locate on the web a World War two vintage training manual for an elevator operator and here's a page of it and it goes on for pages and pages lots of very explicit rules to follow says things like say please wait until car stops if passengers attempt to alight from or enter while it is still leveling etc pages of rules so now I want to walk you through the job of turning this manual and a human operator into a computer driven elevator of the sort that every elevator is nowadays so suppose the elevator manufacturer takes the rule book and gives it to the software engineers and says this this is what I want the elevator to do I want it to follow these rules so the software engineers take the rulebook and they study the rules and the first thing they do is they turn it into something called pseudocode which is sort of halfway between source code and everyday language you can I made up a sort of example here you get the idea if the car is empty then go fetch and here's the definition of fetch if you get a call input then if the floor number is higher than the current floor number then go up until call floor equals current floor etc open door and you can imagine working out all the conditionals all the rules in this laborious way then you turn that into source code in whatever language you're you are writing your program in and source code as some are any of you programmers you know what source code is it's you can read it it's made for human beings and for computers you feed it to a compiler so you can still see the rules sort of dimly through the code in the source code those are called comments and they are inert they are not read when the when the compiler sees that parenthesis it keeps going to let sees the next parenthesis it doesn't try to execute or compile that code it's just for us just for the come just for the computer programmers and the people that are fixing and reading and interpreting the code now as I say source code is quite explicit representation of rules commenting the code renders the rules more explicit but comments are inert they're not part of the machinery at all they're just an interpretation that's along for the ride then what you do is you put the code through a compiler and turn it into into object language or machine code and that's where you get down to just zeros and ones what you feed the CPU and that's what makes the computer program run and when you get to that code the rules have disappeared there's no longer any explicit representation of rules it is next to impossible to interpret in fact if you give object language code to even a very good software engineer they'll usually find it just about impossible to decompile that is to reverse engineer the code figure out what the code does sometimes I think it is well I'll never say impossible but it's extraordinarily unlikely that you would be able to interpret that code and yet when you put it on the chip and put it in the elevator all the rules are followed so I've taken a little time with this example because I want you to understand that it's possible for a system to obey an elaborate set of rules and yet the rules are not represented in the in the machinery at all and yet the rules are followed very important point and what this gives us is the ontology of the elevator and what sets wealth from the engineer's perspective as they're designing the system they ask what does this elevator need to discriminate what what matters to the elevator what do we have to detect in order to do the work what discriminators do we need well we need one for wait is somebody calling is the door closed is the door open there's a quite a large list of things that have to be discriminated by the control system that gives you the elevators ontology it is a list of affordances for the elevator to speak Gibson speak affordances in the language of JJ Gibson are those things in the world that an organism can use a chair affords sitting a cup affords holding holding liquid and drinking a door is an affordance for entering and leaving windows or for looking out of and so forth JJ Gibson importance book ecological approach to visual perception now we theorist three observers can see that a certain ontology is well exploited by the elevator designers by the way I was presenting this example at a meeting in London recently and a former colleague of mine pointed out that when she was working in California Xerox PARC they actually faced a problem of designing an a complicated elevator system for a large bank of elevators in a building which where they were trying to optimize the behavior of the elevators and they finally figured out the only way they could do it is by including in the ontology of each elevator in effect itself so I am here this is me there's the other elevators they had to build in a sort of egocentric component to make the code work which I thought was fascinating in the language of font you exclu this is the own vault of the elevator it's the set of affordances that it is designed not by evolution but by designers by elevator designers to detect when I say well is that really the elevators ontology well an elevator is a pretty simple thing but in a sense yes it is that's the elevators ontology so the system's will melt is an engineering concept not just an ecological concept it lists the carriers of significance for the agent find work skills one of his best examples was the tick the little blood sucking insect that falls and lands in your head tics are not that much more complicated than elevators actually they're pretty simple but he could talk about the ohm belt of the tick in exactly this sense no assumption of consciousness so we're nowhere near consciousness yet we're only on the road to consciousness there might be in my terms a sub personal level in the elevator but there's not really a personal level in the elevator it's not it's not like anything to be an elevator not yet there is a user illusion for elevator passengers it's as if there was a person there that you were talking to maybe or directing by your route and pressing but there's no person there so okay now we're ready to move along from veldt and hume strange inversion to the manifest image and we're approaching consciousness Wilfrid Sellars was a great American philosopher and I think his most important paper was published back in 1962 and in it he introduced his distinction between the manifest and the scientific image the manifest image is the world we all live in it's the world that includes affordances of all kinds sweet sexy cute funny colors solidity causations freewill other minds it's the world of people in their projects it's the set of affordances that we rely on in our daily life the scientific image is molecules atoms electromagnetic radiation and so forth in almost every cases our detection of a property in the manifest image a property that is properly internal or effective functionalistic and hence it's an action tendency remember hume strange inversion we misinterpret an inner reaction as an outer cause this is built right into how the manifest image works in us we projected into the manifest image we see we sense the sweetness out there in the honey the sexiness out there in the hottie the the solidity in the table the color and so forth it's a very natural metaphor and it cannot be literal we're not literally projecting anything anywhere the way my slides are being projected on the screen well then what does it literally mean here's where Bayes comes in Bayesian predictive coding is the latest enthusiasm in cognitive science cognitive neuroscience and I think it deserves the enthusiasm that it is engendering it is the idea that Bayes theorem and the Bayesian networks that can be built relying on it explain features of how the nervous system is organized in a very fundamental way and give us a better model of what goes on in nervous systems then we've had heretofore first of all it makes everything statistical as opposed to just boolean if that means something to you I'm not going to take the time now it's late to explain that every affordance that we detect yields a predictive action tendency let me see if I can it sets up a sort of forward model let me see if I can give you an example when we see the front of a cup we expect to see its back if we walk around it we expect that it can afford carrying liquid we expect that it can afford grasping and lifting if a hottie is sexy and a baby is cuddly a cup is holding and we think we see the holiness of the cup in the same way we think we see the color taste the sweetness and so forth and how is this accomplished in our brains by a Bayesian network that is already anticipating the grasping of the cup already anticipating the moving around already making conditional predictions about what should happen if you turn your head a little bit like this we're designed by evolution to perceive as many affordances as possible we should have anticipation about everything that matters to us and the anticipation is important because time is flying by and we're acting under time pressure our whole lives the whole point of having a brain is to anticipate the future that's what brains are for for anticipating the future using experience of the past well among the things that matter to us and that are always present in our environment is ourselves we're in our own ontology in addition to our expectations we have expectations about our expectations about our expectations and so forth when we see a baby we not only feel the urge to reach out and cuddle we expect to feel that urge our satisfaction of that expectation confirms our perception of cuteness in the baby the satisfied expectation of our expectations is the projection that Hume speaks of we have an anticipation when our anticipation is met aha yes feels right that's that is the projection so I want to update you very slightly about the minds great propensity to spread itself on the internal objects because we do that too and now finally I'm ready for my punchline about the red strike the familiarity of an object in your perceptual field is constituted by the lack of prediction error in response to the hierarchical layers about bound signal that is to say thanks to the fact that your color system has been fatigued by staring at that at that cross when your brain does not get a negative reply to its red signal it treats the red prediction is confirmed and it stays confirmed in so that's what makes it an object in your world this tacit confirmation is what licenses entry of a new object to be considered talked about and so forth so if you're really interested in this and I hope I will have provoked you a little bit you want to learn about Bayesian predictive coding you want to look at the work of Carl frist and others there's a paper coming out this year in behavioral and brain sciences by the philosopher Andy Clark called whatever next which is his I think brilliant introductory exposition of these ideas finally to say a word about phenomenal consciousness Ned block is the philosopher who was claimed to draw a distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness how many of you are familiar with this purported distinction okay a few well I'm at this late time I'm not going to be able to spell out the whole thing but maybe you can get some flavor of this I'm just going to tell you a little anecdote about an event in Ned Locke's life well first I'll say this about it he says there's two kinds of consciousness there's access consciousness that's when you as a subject and and all of the functional parts have access to certain information in your in yours a perceptual stream then that's access consciousness you can report it you can respond to it embarrass it but then phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness is some state of just enjoyment of qualia or something like that and here's an event that happened once he had just been in a laterality test now as you know you have two hemispheres of the brain left and right and because of the optic chiasma they're crossed so that the left brain sees the right half of visual space and the right brain sees the left half of visual space and if you're looking at a fixation point like that white cross and a word is flashed in the left or the right field and you have to make a judgment about whether it's a word or not you will be better judging the words in one of the Hemi fields and if you're strongly lateralized for language in the left hemisphere then when words appear in the right hemifield you'll be quicker and more accurate in saying yeah that's a word or no that's not a word then if it's flashed in the opposite hemifield this is a very standard test it's used all the time to discover how strongly lateralized how strongly specialized your brain is for language most of you are strongly lateralized left that is to say your left hemisphere your left Broca's area etc etc this is dominant for language your right hemisphere has a subsidiary role I'm a left-hander I'm not strongly lateralized language is more evenly distributed in the activities in my brain but most people are strongly lateralized left so block had just been in this test and he told me as it was interesting said oh I was very interesting he said and you know I noticed the following thing the words on the left appeared blurry compared to the words on the right and I said oh that's very interesting that what I want to know is this which is it did it that you had trouble seeing the words because they were blurry or did they appear blurry because you notice that you are having trouble seeing them and he thought about it he realized he couldn't tell the difference he could not distinguish these two hypotheses and of course what I'm suggesting is the latter is more likely to be the truth we don't have to have an image rendered somewhere and then D focused and then that be the cause of our perception of our impression of blurriness that's like the sweetness fog it's one cause too many so I think the NED has a pre-darwinian pre-human pre-tour in g and view of the causation in the mind he thinks phenomenal consciousness is the causal basis access consciousness when in fact phenomenal consciousness is an effect of access consciousness not the other way around so what is real is ah it's just what I expected and just what I expected to expect an effective judgement not a cause hence not prior to or independent of access consciousness oh my you know I think I've run out of time too many slides what do you what do you think should I carry on a bit more because I I have another I have another bit to go because there's my answer which I promise to explain to you the Descartes solution was an immaterial mind a race car get hands I'm proposing a naturalistic solution which is an informational soul what's it made of it's made of information not Cartesian dualism but the dualism of hardware and software which I take to be an unproblematic dualism how could an informational soul evolve how could we see our minds as software well I want to say that words will do as a exemplar of what I'm talking about I want you to think of words individual words as virtual machines how many of you believe that words exist what are they made of Adams's sounds words are abstract things they are in the same category with software I gave a talk on this at Harvard not so long ago and an eminent philosopher said yeah I don't really think that software exists I said really so how did Bill Gates get rich if software doesn't exist software exists I think but it it doesn't weigh anything it's patterns of information and words are the same sort of thing my colleague ray jackendoff says that words are semi autonomous informational structures with multiple roles to play in cognition I think that's about right but that's as good as a definition of a virtual machine they're like Java applets I don't have time to explain if you don't know what Java applets are oh my the beauty of Java which is running on your laptop every time you go on the web or just about every time is that people can write Java code without knowing what the hardware is on your on your device it'll run on Macs it'll run on PCs it'll run on on Linux machines because in each case there's a virtual machine called the JVM which you have installed on your laptop or your computer and it then runs other virtual machines applets on top of it so words or virtual machines and they run on different things that are like the java virtual machine for instance all of you have the RVM the russian virtual machine i don't some of you have the evm the english virtual machine which i have the interpreter is translating things for the RVM while I'm speaking in English pussy's got both virtual machines very well installed the virtual machine for your native language creates multiple micro habits in your brain words nobody designed very few words are designed by anybody they they're designed by evolution not genetic evolution but cultural evolution this is me medic evolution cultural evolution and they are installed by repetition I can see that I should have this would be a whole second lecture if we had the time and I could have developed these ideas more okay words have an amazing property they make possible the recessive transmission of information people are always talking about how wonderful it is that language permits us to comprehend things they seldom point out to me and equally wonderful in some ways more wonderful thing words permit us to transmit information that we don't comprehend we can learn a verbal formula that we only have understand we can pass it on to our neighbors our children and they can get the information it is not necessary that I as a transmitter understand the very words I'm saying this in turn this is turns out to be a very important property of cultural transmission it's what makes the tremendous explosive growth of human culture and transmission possible I'm going to illustrate this with the Stroop effect so now let me just go back what I want you to do is simply call out well this is a Russian audience so this will be difficult but the colors of the symbols you see blue red green right do it again this is the Stroop effect for English speakers this is very hard they stumble but if you don't know English it should be just as easy as the previous test this is clear sign of whether or not you have the EVM installed in your brain if you have it installed in your brain it creates a habit which is very hard to overcome how about this one if you speak Greek you're going to stumble if you don't you'll have no top trouble words aren't the only virtual machines we install words are memes that we can pronounce or lots of other memes cultural items that we install virtual machines that for other purposes they provide they give us micro habits of thought that changed the functional architecture of the brain and this is what gives our brains with their termite like parts the powers the same thing gives our brains powers that gives our laptop powers software thanks for your attention one of our system focuses in establishing the key issue to the standing 30s you said many you yes yes oh I don't think I don't think you thought this was a strange inversion is that I think any universes to you she tossed with a flurry late strong named gertie I think if I think it's a camera to divert us contouring to achieve net intercept llamas in the US when we first encounter human we think this can't be right but then if we're lucky it becomes it grows on us in the same way in the same way we can do appreciate the Darwin concurring had it right ha ha ha Masha Rashmi Wilsonian honeymoon-elicious and mine we just reused cargo motion immediately those are on my model our consciousness is the software activity in the computer that is the brain and that's perfectly real it has its own temporal and spatial properties but they aren't the temporal and spatial properties that you experience subjectively but your experience of those properties is itself internal to the operation of that software how do I'm trying to think of a better way of putting that I can think of a long way of putting it but I'm trying to think of a short way in order to make sense of consciousness as a materialist you have to get rid of you have to break down the vision of consciousness as a show which happens is presented to an ego - what - an experience encoder or a self and recognize that the self and its show are in fact composed out of lots of activities which are spread throughout the brain and have their own time course and are not all synchronized in a single time a place or as I've often said there is no place in your brain where everything comes together where the soundtrack and the scullers and the motion and the smells and the tastes and the feelings all come together to be presented to you the mind that's a very compelling idea but it's just wrong there's no such place I call that the Cartesian theater and it doesn't exist instead all the work that you imagine being done and all the play that you imagine happening in that Cartesian theater all the enjoyment and the reactions to all of the contents that is all distributed around in space and time in other parts in other activities of the brain so there's no one place where the consciousness happens and the very idea of consciousness being a separate medium we're into which contents get transduced in order to become conscious that's that's a seductive mistake I don't know if that in short compass can answer your question at all but if not then maybe you can ask it again and I'll come up with a better way of answering it some construction machines water necessary consciousness if they enable the consciousness innocence okay what I'm asking is you're talking about words virtual machines for the conscious death and asking if declared was necessary or consciousness or many pokémon evolution of course idle and the evolution of the brain either at the border and we going on or operating 54 oh yeah I'm glad you asked that question because my view is unorthodox and controversial I think that human consciousness is much different from the consciousness of any other species including chimpanzees and dolphins and elephants well and dogs and cats the favorite comparison species and it is in the end its language that makes the difference it's not that consciousness is just consciousness of words it's not that consciousness is talking to yourself in natural language that's not my view my view is that a brain that has been shaped by the discipline of a language takes on a different functional architecture in particular it develops recursive competences that it otherwise would not have and this creates functional paths in the brain that simply don't exist in other animal brains these functional paths which are if you like software paths first not neuronal axonal paths they're chains of neurons interacting in ways this creates what some people call a global workspace and the global workspace permits different parts of the brain to contribute their specialization to ongoing issues and what that does is it enhances the power of a human brain by by orders of magnitude in the same way that if you have a laptop that doesn't have an operating system it's just about useless if it has an operating system but no software running on it it's still pretty useless as you put software on it you give it competences that it didn't have before you construct these competences out of rules out of out of informational regularities and it's the construction of all these virtual machines in our brains that enhances our powers and gives us the capacity to think about things that are distant in the past to think counterfactually to reflect on things in a way I think no other species can other species are very much bound to the moment in what they can react to I think and we tend to overestimate the the comprehension of other species they're very competent but they don't have the kinds of competence that generate very much comprehension to give you a very simple example I'd like you to imagine putting a plastic trash bucket on your head and climbing hand-over-hand up a rope just imagine doing this easy I deliberately chose objects that might be very familiar to a chimpanzee in a cage it's got a plastic bucket it's got a rope it can climb question could a chimpanzee imagine putting a bucket on its head and climbing the rope independently of happening to do that I think the answer is probably no not because it can't perceive a bucket or a rope but it can't put things together like that and the reason it can't is that it doesn't have the logical space that is given to it by the virtual machines that you get from having language now I asked you to do that I used words to create this project in your mind you could have asked yourself to do it and you wouldn't even have to use words you could just decide to imagine something silly and that was what you decided to imagine there's a whole realm of mental activities of this sort that I think require the sort of informational competences that you only get when you learn a language reason and consciousness and 72 do you believe in God I'll answer the second question first no that is to say there are thousands of definitions of God I have yet to encounter one that I think I believe in I make I'll give you an example I was recently asked on a on a telling religious radio program in America and the interviewer said do you mean to tell me that you don't believe in a transcendent force that governs the whole universe and makes life possible and I said no no I do I do is it oh really you do I say yes I call it gravity now that is I don't think that's a definition of God but if it is and I believe in God but and I notice by the way that many people's definition of God is getting very close to the definition of gravity it's no longer a personal God it's no longer a God that intervenes or that you can pray to it's just some wonderful unimaginable force not unlike gravity no I so I don't believe in God now your other question was about reason and consciousness well the the concept of reason has been subjected to tug of war to sort of a tussle in the battles been pulled out of shape in many different directions over hundreds of years of philosophy Kant's Pure Reason Finland first of all I think I would say that any conscious being has to be what I call an intentional system that is an agent that has beliefs and desires and that conducts itself in a rational way it puts its information together in a rational way and then acts on the basis of its its needs and its wants and so there's an assumption of rationality built-in to the treating something from the intentional stance but not all intentional systems are conscious not in an interesting way and so I would say that in that sense of rationality not only are fish rational but clams are rational even trees are rational but they're not conscious but as organisms have ever more complex projects multi-dimensional extending in space and time rationality becomes a much more interesting constraint and it is in that interesting sense that as Aristotle would say we're the rational animal and and with that kind of rationality consciousness comes along and is pretty much the same thing so on the one hand I think there are rational systems that aren't conscious on the other hand I think that a sufficiently complex rational system is conscious in other words I think the concept of a zombie that is perfectly rational and competent and good company but isn't conscious I think that's first of all not just second but third and tenth level intentional systems consciousness involves the potential for indefinitely many embeddings of intentionality within the next order so that when we communicate you understand that I'm trying to explain something to you and I understand that my words will achieve their intended effect if you come to form in your mind certain ideas which I'm trying to impart to you and so forth this iterative loop is what communication is all about in a strong sense of communication and that involves higher-order intentionality certainly whether that's enough for consciousness is a controversial claim but I don't shrink from that controversy I am not persuaded by any of the arguments which claim that it is perfectly possible to conceive of a being that has order intentionality but is not conscious I think that that claim is covertly incoherent is subtly incoherent I think that if we believe our fellow human beings are conscious it's because we have so much evidence of their capacity to engage in this multiple level intentional interaction and when we encounter a human being that can't we begin to doubt whether this is a conscious human being interesting in this regard are very unfortunate people who have what's called locked-in syndrome they are not comatose they are not unconscious they are conscious but they cannot move their voluntary muscles they are except for I guess for their lungs or the breathing but they can't raise an eyebrow they can't communicate they can't even smile and yet it is now pretty clear that under some conditions their conscious how can we tell we can tell really only because of some techniques that were identified and pioneered by Adrian Owen who has learned how to read their brain activity when they imagine something very simple it's an elegant idea he took a locked-in patient and he says I want you to imagine that you're watching a tennis match the ball going back and forth back and forth back and forth he got their brain activity under those conditions in the visual cortex then he had them imagine other things which involved motion but not tennis and then he said from now on when I ask you a question if the answer is yes play tennis in your mind's eye and I can't remember what the answer for know was but then he tested this out and he communicated with them and established beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were able to communicate and that convinces everybody that they're conscious now the possibility of course exists that somebody would be in that state and we would never be able to devise any technique for engaging in communication so it is in that sense conceivable that somebody could be conscious even though they were no longer capable of engaging in that sort of activity but I think that that doesn't disprove the point I think it simply shows again how important to our understanding of what consciousness is is our sense that a conscious being is unless other league constrained in this way someone that can interact in this way does that answer your question

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 109,567

Rating: 4.7630105 out of 5

Keywords: Philosophy, Analytic Philosophy, Daniel Dennett, Dan Dennett, Philosophy of Mind, Consciousness, David Hume, Materialism, Physicalism, Dualism, Naturalism, Empiricism, Dennett, Fame in the Brain, Cartesian Theater, Mind-Body Problem, Functionalism, Qualia, Intentionality, Binding Problem, Unity of Consciousness, Perception, Phenomenology, Sellars, Darwin, Turing, Natural Selection, Epistemology, Intentional Stance, Reduction, Manifest Image, Intuition Pump, Ontology, Metaphysics, AI, Evolution

Id: wY9Xm5xgiEE

Length: 83min 10sec (4990 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2013

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