Daniel Dennett—Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

Daniel Dennett—Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking Chapter 1: Introduction  Other thought experiments are less rigorous but often just as effective: little stories designed to provoke a heartfelt, table-thumping intuition— “Yes, of course, it has to be so!”—about whatever thesis is being defended. I have called these intuition pumps . I coined the term in the first of my public critiques of philosopher John Searle’s famous Chinese Room thought experiment Chapter 2: Making mistakes  Better to make as many good mistakes as possible  Can’t go through life without any mistakes whatsoever Some basic tools for thinking: Rapoport’s rules  To give as charitable an interpretation to someone else’s arguments  How to compose a successful critical commentary: o 1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” o 2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement). o 3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target. o 4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism. Sturgeon’s Law  Sturgeon’s law is usually put quite crudely: 90 percent of everything is crap Occam’s razor  The idea is straightforward: don’t concoct a complicated, extravagant theory if you’ve got a simpler one (containing fewer ingredients, fewer entities) that handles the phenomenon just as well. Occam’s broom  Inconvenient facts are whisked under the rug by intellectually dishonest champions of one theory or another Using lay audiences as decoys  Using lay audiences to ensure that others are able to understand exactly what you are trying to say, particularly as you have to explain these ideas to them explicitly Rathering  Rathering is a way of sliding you swiftly and gently past a false dichotomy The “surely” operator: a mental block  The use of the word “surely” to make an assertion that the author hopes will be accepted by the reader without any justification Rhetorical questions  Attempting to answer rhetorical questions might be to one’s benefit, particularly if an intuitively unobvious answer can be thought of Deepity

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A proposition that seems both important and true, but only achieves this effect because of its own ambiguity

Tools for thinking about language  This shared property, the meaning (of the two sentences in their respective languages), or the content (of the beliefs they express), is a central topic in philosophy and cognitive science. This aboutness that, for example, sentences, pictures, beliefs, and (no doubt) some brain states exhibit, is known in philosophical jargon as intentionality , an unfortunate choice as a technical term, since outsiders routinely confuse it with the everyday idea of doing something intentionally  Having knowledge as a matter of degree (e.g. the statement daddy is a doctor might be understood by a child in different degrees at different stages of their lives)  Sellars (1962, p. 1) famously said, “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.”  The manifest image is the world as it seems to us in everyday life, full of solid objects, colors and smells and tastes, voices and shadows, plants and animals, and people and all their stuff: not only tables and chairs, bridges and churches, dollars and contracts, but also such intangible things as songs, poems, opportunities, and free will. Think of all the puzzling questions that arise when we try to line up all those things with the things in the scientific image: molecules, atoms, electrons, and quarks and their ilk. Is anything really solid?  I proposed folk psychology as a term for the talent we all have for interpreting the people around us—and the animals and the robots and even the lowly thermostats—as agents with information about the world they act in ( beliefs ) and the goals ( desires ) they strive to achieve, choosing the most reasonable course of action, given their beliefs and desires.  The intentional stance is the strategy of interpreting the behavior of an entity (person, animal, artifact, or whatever) by treating it as if it were a rational agent who governed its “choice” of “action” by a “consideration” of its “beliefs” and “desires.”  How do we interpret the behavior of an entity? o The physical stance is simply the standard laborious method of the physical sciences, in which we use whatever we know about the laws of physics and the physical constitution of the things in question to devise our predictions. o The designed stance:  1. that an entity is designed as I suppose it to be, and  2. that it will operate according to that design—that is, it will not malfunction. o the intentional stance , a subspecies of the design stance in which the designed thing is treated as an agent of sorts, with beliefs and desires and enough rationality to do what it ought to do given those beliefs and desires. Its applications to a chess move:

First, list the legal moves available to the computer when its turn to play comes up (usually there will be several-dozen candidates).  Now rank the legal moves from best (wisest, most rational) to worst (stupidest, most self-defeating).  Finally, make your prediction: the computer will make the best move. o The personal/Sub-personal distinction  At different levels of distinction, the individual body parts can be said to have different levels of human-like capability o A cascade of homunculi  Homuncular functionalism  The AI programmer begins with an intentionally characterized problem, and thus frankly views the computer anthropomorphically: if he solves the problem he will say he has designed a computer that can [e.g.,] understand questions in English. His first and highest level of design breaks the computer down into subsystems, each of which is given intentionally characterized tasks; he composes a flow chart of evaluators, rememberers, discriminators, overseers and the like. These are homunculi with a vengeance. . . . Each homunculus in turn is analyzed into smaller homunculi, but, more important, into less clever homunculi. When the level is reached where the homunculi are no more than adders and subtractors, by the time they need only the intelligence to pick the larger of two numbers when directed to, they have been reduced to functionaries who can be replaced by a machine.  The particular virtue of this strategy is that it pulled the rug out from under the infinite regress objection. According to homuncular functionalism the ominous infinite regress can be sidestepped, replaced by a finite regress that terminates, as just noted, in operators whose task is so dull they can be replaced by machines. The key insight was breaking up all the work we imagined being done by a central operator and distributing it around to lesser, stupider agents whose work was distributed in turn, and so forth. o Wonder tissue  The term wonder tissue is a thinking tool along the lines of a policeman’s billy club: you use it to chastise, to persuade others not to engage in illicit theorizing. And, like a billy club, it can be abused. It is a special attachment for the thinking tool Occam’s Razor and thus enforces a certain scientific conservatism, which can be myopic. 

However, it does seem to be a tool which is used to simply acknowledge that we cannot have the ability ot understand what is ahead o Using registers as a simulation to understand how computers work  