Dennett Intuition Pumps
<p>Jan 19, 2010 2:18 PM  (below is from 1995... Consc Explained  (away!).
 
Intuition Pumps.... stories that philosophers leave behind .. their REAL legacy...
like Plato's cave;  Descartes evil demon.
 
forget all that logic and analytic stuff ... its ridicul technical and not that impt.
 
first used intuition pump in a derogatory sense... applied to Searle's Chinese room...
just a story.
 
Idea of Consc as a VIRTUAL MACHINE ... nice intuition pumbp...
Try thinking abt the idea that we have software in our heads...
Its a virtual machine in the same way that a word processor is a VM.
Bells start ringing and people start seeing things.
(he seems to like the VM concept).
 
He lives Oliver Selfridges Pandemonion  (pan-demons) ..   Me me me!  I can do it.
 
AI researcher Doug Hofstadter  jumbo archictecure is related to pandemonium.
Old fashioned AI is trictly top-down... regimented... no room for fooling around.
Mother Nature doesn't work that way ...  better is... the more the merrier ...
let's have a big party and we'll somehow build this thing.
A PLETHORA of semi-independent agents!!
 
 
As technology changes, we change. As computers evolve, our philosophical approach to thinking about the brain will evolve. <b>In the history of thinking about the brain, as each new technology has come along it's been enthusiastically exploited: clockwork and wires and pulleys back in Descartes's day,</b> then steam engines and dynamos and electricity came in, and then the telephone switchboard. We should go back earlier. The most pervasive of all of the technological metaphors people have used to explain what goes on in the brain is writing — the idea that we think about the things happening in the brain as signals, as messages being passed. You don't have to think about telegraphy or telephones, you just have to think about writing messages.
The idea that <b>memory is a storehouse of things written is already a metaphor,</b> and even a bad metaphor.
 
<b>The basic idea of computation, as formulated by the mathematicians John von Neumann and Alan Turing, is in a class by itself as a breakthrough idea. It's the only idea that begins to eliminate the middleman. </b>What was wrong with the telephone- switchboard idea of consciousness was that you have these wires that connect what's going on out at the eyeballs into some sort of control panel. But then you still have that clever homunculus sitting at the control panel doing all the work.
 
The only idea anyone has ever had which demonstrably does get rid of the middleman is the idea of computers. Homunculi are now O.K., because we know how to discharge them. We know how to take a homunculus and break it down into smaller and smaller homunculi, eventually getting down to a homunculus that you can easily replace with a machine.
 
Right now I'm working on how you get rid of the Central Meaner, which is one of the worst homunculi. The Central Meaner is the one who does the meaning.
 
The problem is, How did the Conceptualizer figure out what to tell the language system to say? The linguists finesse the whole problem. They've left the Central Meaner in there, and all they've got is somebody who translates the message from mentalese into English
 
 
What about the person who said it? Did he mean it? Well, ask him. The person who said it will say, "Well, yeah, I meant it. I said it. I didn't correct it. My ears aren't burning. I'm not blushing. I must have meant it." He has no more access into whether he meant it in any deep, deep sense than you do. As E.M. Forster once remarked, "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" The illusion of the Central Meaner is still there, because we listen to ourselves and we endorse what we find ourselves saying. Right now, all sorts of words are coming out of my mouth and I'm fairly happy with how it's going; every now and then I correct myself a bit, and if you ask me whether I mean what I say, sure I do — not because there's a subpart of me, a little subsystem, which is the Central Meaner, giving the marching orders to a bunch of lip-flappers. That's a terrible model for language.
 
Pandemonium makes a better model: Right now, all my little demons are conspiring; they've formed a coalition, and they're saying, "Yeah, yeah, basically the big guy is telling the truth!"
 
 
At least in the eyes of academics, science has won and religion has lost. Darwin's idea has banished the <b>Book of Genesis to the limbo of quaint mythology</b>. Sophisticated believers in God have adapted by<b> reconceiving God as a less anthropomorphic, more abstract entity </b>— a sort of blank, <b>unknowable Source of Meaning and Goodness.</b> Some unsophisticated believers have tried desperately to hold their ground by concocting creation science, which is a pathetic imitation of science, a ludicrous parade of self-delusions and pious nonsense. Stephen Jay Gould and many other scientists have rightly exposed and condemned the fallacies of creationism. Darwin's idea is triumphant, and it deserves to be.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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