Robert Wright & Daniel Dennett (2003)

[@yp77738yp77739]

Both an exquisite conversation and exquisite irony of the phonetic variety. Wright tries so tirelessly to ultimately be proven wrong! Both smart cookies though and a complete joy to listen to. In fairness to Wright he’s trying to prove an impossibility, was always going to be uphill.

[@mcnallyaar]

I forgot what a joy this conversation is. Bob is so insistent and persistent! I think this my third time watching this.

[@nickoneill3461]

Dennett does a nice job describing how epiphenomenalism is incoherent at any level of organism including a lizard

[@SFDestiny]

Wright does a nice job of totally expressing incoherence. Sad, really. It seems to be important to him, as though Wright needs to prove his own reality

[@saritajoshi1737]

Actually i feel he completely failed at that and his view on consciousness is born out of delusion. Almost as if he is a philosphical zombie. i have never seen a philosopher making such absurd claims about nature of first person experience. No wonder his view on consciousness is not taken seriously.

[@ConvictedFelon2024]

@@saritajoshi1737 His view is not taken seriously? His work on philosophy of mind has been cited numerous times in scientific and philosophical papers. He's one of the luminaries in the field (along with John Searle, David Chalmers, and some others), and for good reason. It's on the cutting-edge of scientific inquiry, though, so _of course_ it's going to be controversial. But that in itself in no way undermines his authority in the entire enterprise.

[@JB-kn2zh]

@@ConvictedFelon2024 he denies subjective experience, or else uses a bunch of word games to obfuscate the entire problem. the problem is this: a thermostat takes in information about heat and uses it to make a decision. so does our brain. but we consciously experience heat. does a thermostat also consciously experience heat? why or why not? if yes, then that's basically panpsychism. if not, you need to explain why or how. The only third option that you can take is to deny that subjective experience exists, which dennet sometimes seems to do, but which is patently wrong because you and I are currently subjectively experiencing things. It reminds me of the shakespeare quote that goes along the line, "even a philosopher can't withstand a toothache with patience." Go put your hand on the stove and tell me if you think your experience of it is the same experience a thermostat would have in a house that was burning down. After all, your brain's heat sensors are just super sophisticated thermostats.

[@jps0117]

I'm watching this in 2022. I guess this was the genesis of Bob's disdain for Dan LOL.

[@mikevieira8583]

Love Robert's book Evolution of God, so checking this out.

[@annalyon8443]

I have been interested in imagined deities, ideas that assume justice and kindness, the function of brains, consciousness, since I was about 5 years old. Didn’t have the words at that age. These questions mattered before they became personal, but they became personal as I observed the life of my brother, brain damaged at birth (cord choked him, as attendants preferred a breach birth in a small town hospital..., and what he accomplished with the devotion of my mother’s attention, and the staff at the Gatchell School in Atlanta, GA.

[@mcnallyaar]

52:19 SHIBBOLETH

[@jonseltzer321]

Dan Dennett made a fatal flaw in his consciousness argument. He described consciousness as a competition of different parts of the brain where there is a winner and losers in the different parts of the brain. That argument makes a key mistake - it fails to identify feedback in that process. If there is not effective feedback resulting in an update in the environment of that competition then there is not consciousness. A computer, no matter how brilliant, does not know what to modify the environment in which ideas compete. In all cases the computer relies on it's human creators to define the updated environment. This is why I don't think we're on our way to artificial intelligence that likely to surpass our ability to define the right environment for decision making.

[@SFDestiny]

around 53:00 "what it's like to be you" seems to have at least 2 senses. There's the access to all your "alien" incoming sense data. And there's the incoming sense data in relation to previous experience. The first interpretation is trivial and common. Wake up after a mean bender. Nothing feels familiar. What is this mass in my mouth? Oh, it's a tongue. It must be my tongue. It feels alien, but people have tongues. This must be my tongue. I can only HAVE a me in this context-dependent meaning. Hence, neither interpretation of "what it's like to be you" is coherent. Hence Dennett wins again.

[@utubeyahoo4444]

Love Bob. He can sure stick to his guns. Didn't impress me with talking more than his guest though. It seems that you can sum up Bob's consciousness argument as the feeling that consciousness is special/mysterious...something more than can be explained by explaining the super complex brain. People have lots of feelings, so not a good foundation for a theory.

[@fmvalada]

16:43

[@davidlevy4291]

Lol this is funny. Good form fellas.

[@edcottingham1]

Amazingly, Dennett does not grasp the meaning of determinism. And, sorry, no half loaves. If the entire world and everything in it is made of "stuff," known or unknown and forces, known or unknown and people and their brains and every interaction that they have had with the world (including their interior world), then everything about the world and its future is inevitable. The fact that there might be some agents imagining that they are going off-script and changing the unfolding future, well, they themselves would just be part of that inevitable future. There is no free will; the future is determined, although unknowable. The maintenance of our sanity requires that we live our daily lives embracing the illusion of fee will, an illusion I am very happy to share in. But, intellectually, I know that it is an illusion.

[@ExsoLam]

You're mixing descriptions/levels of description, and missing the point about indeterminism not making a difference to whether arguments for free will are good. You're also wrong that any collection of "stuff" and "laws" gives classical ideas of determinism which is why they brought up quantum indeterminism.

[@edcottingham1]

Muddled at about eight minutes in on the subject of "design." Both of them agreed that evolutionary steps are designed although neither would concede a designER. It seems that they are saying something like the incremental, evolutionary steps were designed by evolutionary process. To me, there cannot be design without a designer, some entity with a particular result in mind that puts together the bits to make it happen. Evolution is merely the selection according to fitness of some random genetic accidents while rejecting those that do not advance fitness of the organism to make copies of itself. I am sure that both of these men understand these matters better than me so I am perplexed that they perhaps allowed a twinge of modesty to throw them off base here.

[@saritajoshi1737]

Daniel.. please give up lol. I don't understand how can anyone take him seriously. He simply doesn't understand what nagel meant when he said "something like to be a bat" and he is making a case that most people don't truly understand. Its actually YOU who doesn't get it.

[@ExsoLam]

He knows exactly what Nagel meant, Nagel thought it had more meaning than it does.

[@shoncloud7598]

As smart as smart people can be, never forget we all can be dumb. Diennett in minute 19 says we don’t have a good word to counterpose “avoider”. What would it be? He proposes perhaps “probalafier”? And continues as if this is a baffling question or a great gap in our lexicon. What possible word could be that which aims at the good? Lol. Uhm it’s “achiever”, Daniel. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

[@ExsoLam]

Avoiding and achieving aren't opposites, intent is the point. You can achieve avoidance

[@saritajoshi1737]

Daniel is making dumb argument when it comes to consciousness. Its actually funny. He conception of consciousness is plain wrong. Someone should put him on LSD and reveal to him what consciouness actually is.