Q&A - If Brains are Computers, Who Designs the Software? With Daniel Dennett

Daniel C Dennett answers questions from the audience following his talk on cognitive science and the view of the brain as a computer.
Watch the talk here: • If Brains are Computer...
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[@MarkBesaans]

As a systems analyst I have experienced that "a picture paints a thousand words". These are thoughts without words. We draw pictures and model the information because the words get in the way.

[@alexandrugheorghe5610]

I thought it's pretty difficult to read and understand Wittgenstein but sometimes I do have the feeling that the ideas from Daniel Dennett are quite challenging as well in trying to get the bigger picture and the implications of approaching the brain like that especially regarding the memes. One very good lecture, thank you.

[@MilitantPeaceist]

Just fantastic. Thank you RI & Thank you Daniel.

[@FreeMan-ej6mj]

0:14 - There is a hierarchy of informational structures. For example, ink is the carrier of words, and words are the carrier of ideas. Maybe ideas are carrier for something like archetypes or something else. But words are memes and ideas are memes. Ink is not a meme, but knowledge how to make an ink is a meme. They are different kinds of a memes.

[@the_feature_selector859]

Thank you for this great content.

[@mrvocabulary6794]

Why do you always leave so little time for questions? These are often salient constituents of the talkt itself.

[@nicholaijones]

anyone have a link to the microemotion writings Dennett coauthored?

[@n3r0z3r0]

Me too please.

[@LeonhardEuler1]

Microemotions do make an appearance in this book (coauthored by Dennet), so I suppose that is what he was referring to: Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-engineer the Mind

[@JamesPetts]

The idea that all control in the brain is regulated by micro-emotions appears to be fundamentally the same as that espoused by Jeremy Bentham when he wrote that all human action is ultimately controlled by pain and pleasure.

[@lepidoptera9337]

No, not really. Approval by others in ones family/group/tribe is another large part.

[@JamesPetts]

@@lepidoptera9337 How is that distinct from regulation by micro-emotions? In other words, how but by making the subject feel happy at approval and unhappy at disapproval can such approval/disapproval act as a mechanism of control?

[@Fastlan3]

you in fact can turn off the college and throw them away. But emotions and/or repercussions/restraints help decide such isn't OK.

[@frechjo]

I don't want to work with you ever... But yes, I was looking for this comment.

[@schumachersbatman5094]

General Artificial Intelligence is not practically possible for the following 'deep and profound' reason: they must be either our tools or our colleagues and they can't be our colleagues if we can turn them off.

[@davidxu9566]

This comment has approximately nothing to do with artificial general intelligence.

[@schumachersbatman5094]

Well this was Daniel Dennetts reasoning on AI in this video. I don't endorse it but I like all the little reasons people come up with to show that "true AI" is impossible.

[@tinnitusthenight5545]

Weird how that guy at the end tells the Buddhist turtle but changes the setting to be academic thus removing any religious implications from it.

[@VagabondStar]

If Michio Kaku and Walter White were one person

[@nishru1000]

you guys who say God doesn't exist are equally funny to those who say it does. ;)

[@quietackshon]

Dennett is a smart man, and he will never give you a definitive answer. I'd like to know what he means by singularity, is it just about computing? My understanding of the singularity is, it is the culmination of the sciences feeding off each other. Were our brains always designed to be conscious or is conscious an emergent property of the brain? Are all our higher mental functions emergent properties of our brain? At what point does something become conscious and who decides? When people like Dennett say impossible, I think they mean "impossible in their lifetime", which for Dennett will probably be true.

[@DustinRodriguez1_0]

The reason no one wants to study emotion is because no one wants to learn about it. Do you, reader of this comment, want to have it explained to you that the joy you felt at your daughters wedding was an electrochemical process in the associative matrix of your neurons resulting in a flood of dopamine thanks to a lifetime of conditioned responses? WHATEVER answer is arrived at will be greeted by the public in exactly the same way the public greets an explanation of rainbows based on diffraction and reaction of light through water droplets. They don't want to hear about it. They think that any explanation rooted in the physical world of reality cheapens the experience, destroys its value, etc. It doesn't do any of those things, of course, but people would protest that it is not "JUST" whatever you prove it to be. That 'just' comes from wide social anti-intellectualism and certainly isn't going away any time soon, it's only been growing since World War I. As important as they are to people, people definitely do not want to learn that their emotions are primarily rooted in their physical body, not their abstract mind, and the result of trained conditioning which, should they find their emotional responses problematic, is titanically difficult to change and not entirely up to the individual. We know that people who experience total facial paralysis go through a predictable emotional journey, and certain emotions are removed from their lives. Anger is a big one. Their ability to "get angry" is reduced as their ability to express it in their face is lost. They will still subjectively 'think angry thoughts', for a time, but eventually that stops, and they find themselves not able to be angered. Then, they start having difficulty remembering what being angry felt like. Eventually, they lose the ability to recognize anger in the faces of others. They're fascinating cases to read about, and they make it easy to see the real ties between the body and the mind... but those ties are at odds with what people want to believe about their emotions. There are some topics our society is not ready to be reasonable adults about, and those will not get studied by scientists who value their careers.

[@mangoo2215]

الترجمة بليز

[@Silly.Old.Sisyphus]

words are memes, but not all memes are words, and neither memes nor words are constants - for example, the meme of "deep learning" has very little to do with the memes of either "deep" or "learning".

[@bojankotur4613]

Discworld! There's only one very large tortoise!

[@cem_kaya]

what is a meme

[@andrejhromin6398]

Interesting lecture with very little arguments for somewhat extraordinary claim that brains are computers. To my mind this sounds as yet another reductionist modern day analogy for a brain based on technology. Years ago it was oil and pumps and today it's a computer. Computers don't feel, they don't guess, they don't doubt and they don't have intention!!! Could this be just another effort to toss the consciousness out of the room?

[@frechjo]

No man, you are looking it the wrong way around. We know we have this things we call "feelings", "consciousness", "thought", "personality", etc. We know they relate with our brains and inner juices. We are pretty convinced the relation is that they are phenomena in that substrate. We try to make models that explain how those things come to be. This analogy is a model to explain that. Maybe you are more comfortable with some view that they have nothing to do with each other. That goes against a lot of findings in medical science, but let's pretend it doesn't. What's the alternate explanation for the mind? "Computers don't feel, they don't guess, they don't doubt and they don't have intention!!!" Some time back, you could have said that computers can't recognize images, can't prove theorems, can't play chess better than a human... That they don't doesn't mean they in principle can't. I don't see anything so unavoidably unique of our minds that can't be genuinely reproduced.

[@andrejhromin6398]

fede .. your argument is just false dichotomy. The fact that I can not explain consciousness does not make you (and Dan) right. You make it sound like it's either this (Dan's idea) or that (an explenation I should provide). But that's a logical fallacy .. I don't have to have an explanation in order to conclude that presented analogies are just reductionist wishfull thinking.

[@frechjo]

Hm... I don't see the false dichotomy. I'm saying your argument about the limitations of what we've seen computers do is not a valid one. I asked for an alternative explanation, because rejecting a model as too reductionist implies there's something it doesn't capture. I was curious (and making assumptions, I confess ;) for what could it be that it doesn't capture. It's not an alternate model I meant to ask, but what's the exact nature of the shortcomings. If anything, my objection to the analogy would be that it's a bit misleading and open ended. It uses the term computer, but in a way in which a lot of systems could be thought of as one: a termite colony, cellular biochemical processes, social phenomena... All things that can themselves be thought of as computing by analogy, but not as easily by definition. An analogy should serve to explain, and if it's too wide and unconstrained it explains only wide and undefined things, like "in principle, consciousness and any other phenomenon of the mind should be reproducible by an analog system of the brain processes". It doesn't say anything about the ways or the difficulties to actually do it.

[@AmericanBrain]

You have not really understood the lecture and need to go through it again. Do that - then confirm and confirm the nuances and newness you now glean.

[@mutleyeng]

he may be right, but his justification for why he felt the singularity would never happen was pretty pathetic

[@theway5258]

He is too old and rigid in order to predict a new possible future.

[@theway5258]

@@whatever12643 good, so come out from your prison

[@JS00023]

God is the designer. That's the most reasonable explanation since information had to come from somewhere.

[@ToxopIasmosis]

"most reasonable" lmao

[@bizzee1]

Who/what designed the alleged God? I know, it's turtles all the way down.

[@MilitantPeaceist]

"since information had to come from somewhere" Did you watch the same lecture as I did? How does 'God' fit into a 'bottom up' design?

[@illyavogel1660]

I want you to get serious and think about this for a second or for the rest of your life. Why do you believe in the God that you believe it? While its is possible that you just happened to stumble upon the teachings of this said God in your life, I'm willing to bet that you were raised to believe in this God. So the point of this is that you only believe in this particular God because your family taught you to. Most Christians come from Christian families, Muslims from Muslim families. Dont just run to confirmation bias, question everything around you. Everyone is just a product of their environment and you will never be truly free until you understand this.

[@bizzee1]

Illya, Exactly! I was raised in a Christian family, and I believed what my parents believed. Noting that there has been much bloodshed in the name of religion and wanting to prevent more such bloodshed, I asked myself, "Why do I believe in the Christian God?" Could it be that I believe that what I believe about gods just because I was raised to believe it? I noticed that the vast majority of believers in gods didn't believe what I believed, but did believe what their parents believed. So, since humans in general have proven themselves to be such poor god detectors by believing in such a different and wide variety of gods (even if there are any gods at all) without even coming to a consensus, I concluded that the most reasonable explanation for deity belief is that it is merely a handed down superstition. So, let's all stop the bloodshed over this silly superstition of god belief already!