Daniel Dennett and His Intuition Pumps
Dennett's book is a lovely "intuition pump" in its own right, but it cries out to be rewritten, refuted or at least challenged.
In other posts, I'll flesh out possible chapters in BIP, but I can outline some main points here.
Dennet champions as "Scientific" discipline for the study of mind, which he calls heterophenomenology "H". The idea is that anything important about the mind can be learned from the "outside", through experiments, interviews etc. The data "H" works with is the set of observable, documented "observations" along these lines.
My problem with H is that it doesn't actually study the mind. Dennett is making the assumption that the mind is, for all intents and purposes, the brain. But one would think this is exactly what he needs to prove.
"Pumps" sets up a false alternative. Either the mind is the brain or the mind is something "inside" the brain or somehow associated with the body, like a "soul" or "homunculus". Why are those the only alternatives?
His mistake seems to be assuming his conclusion. To escape this mistake, we need to take a closer look at what a "mind" is. I happen to have one that we can examine as closely as time permits. Mine.
Here is the first "Better" Intuition pump. Consider the "mind", M, to be identical to the first-person experience of the Universe. This makes no assumption about the brain or, for that matter, a "soul". Moreover, we can use H techniques to investigate this mind in as much depth as we wish.
My discussion of M will show that it is not possible, even in principle, to determine anything of interest about M using H. In particular, H studies brains not minds.
A second BIP is the "Xombie". This is related to Dennet's "philosophical Zombie", a fascinating creature that is identical in all respects to a human being except he lacks the experience of being human. There is "nobody home". If you think that such a being is impossible, you are, according to Dennet, a victim of the "Zombie Hunch". You think that there must be something other than what shows "from the outside". Dennet challenges the reader by saying that this is "just a hunch" and needs proving. Otherwise, the default view is H, which assumes that we can never tell the difference between a Zombie and a person with "real" experience of the world.
I hold that Dennet's Zombie is interesting only in a rather trivial way, by proposing a way to "build" a Zombie in a particular way - a Xombie. The difference between a Xombie and a Zombie is that we specify in principle how the Xombie manages to "fake" consciousness. In summary, we imagine a robot that is exposed to he totality of human experience of the world from "birth". The Xombie can fake having a "mind" because we maintain that the mind itself is M, the totality of first person experience of the Universe. Thus, our Xombie is, by definition, "conscious".
Then, the question boils down to whether we could, in principle, actually build such a robot. This question veers of into what we might call "garden variety philosophy" as we look into things that make up an "M-like" mind but may be hard to implement, even in principle. Here are a few things in my mind that may be hard to implement:
- I know that fish don't wear hearing aids
- I may mistakenly believe that Napoleon was King of Spain
- I don't understand the math of General Relativity and I know I don't
My suspicion is that the "boundary" between the known Universe of M and the "known unknowns", the "unknown unknowns" and so forth may be hard to model.
IBM's "Deep Blue" tells us that such things may not be as hard as they look.
But of course, we are still left with the suspicion that our robot doesn't have a real experience of the world. He has no real "first person" - he just fakes it. But at least we have a better idea of what he's faking: a deep, intimate, long-term relationship with the Universe. In other words, the Universe itself plays a large (perhaps indispensable) role in a "mind". The brain is just a detail.
There are other things to say about H. What, exactly, are the "results" of H - the theories, generalizations and hypotheses that make H a "Science". A Science is not just a menagerie of curious phenomena. What is H about? If H leaves out what I regard as the most important aspect of M (the Universe), what is it studying? My position is that you can't make generalizations about "minds" because they are by definition unique. Any generalization you make will be about brains, "typical" human behaviour etc. Is it really meaningful to talk about what people on average claim to experience? Haven't you left the baby out with the bath water?
A simple example can suffice. Ask our subjects to describe the first time they made love. It's hard to imagine that that all the "H-data" in the world would come close to "investigating" the real, personal experience of the individual, which is, after all, what we are supposed to be investigating.
I'm sure Dennet is familiar with this objection, but I'm not sure he is aware that there are an infinite number of objections like this. In fact, the infinite "space" of M is precisely the most impressive feature of M itself. This "space" can be explored by H, but such an exploration leaves theories of the brain far behind.
Another BIP is "Object Oriented" design (OOD), which would replace Dennet's lame chapter that tries to explain how computers work. OOD explains everything about computers from the microscopic structure of memory to the emergent structure of the group mind - the Internet - and everything in between. It is perhaps one of the most powerful set of memes ever invented. It as a subset of human language that has he advantage of being totally unambiguous and "mappable" to the "real world". With OOD in hand, one can ask interesting questions about how the Internet acquires something like an M-type mind. OOD can be used to explore complexity and emergent phenomena.
Another BIP comes from self-organizing structures, which would complement Bennett's chapter on the game of Life. Besides being built entirely out of OOD components, the Internet is also self-organizing.
So, computers and the Internet are worth including as "imagination pumps" in their own right.
It would be worth discussing whether a living thing is "sorta" an OOD creation. I'd say it's not and the differences may turn out to be fundamental - in other words, it may be impossible to build a carbon-based living thing following only OOD principals. If true, this would be hugely interesting. There seem to be serious problems with any attempt to "model" living cells, organelles, synapses and tissues using OOD ideas. These also happen to reveal some objections to the idea that a living thing is, in some sense, a "machine". Does this mean that there is some fundamental obstacle to building a machine mind.
Finally, Denett's books tend to present a rather simplified view of the brain. His "neurons" and "genes" are almost mythical creatures, no much different from demons. They are philosophical constructions - "memes", with almost all real behavior of brain tissue left out. What do we learn when we introduce real brain structures into Dennet's discussions? Is there a simplified version of the real brain that could serve as an "imagination pump"? Would it be useful to keep in mind that Dennet's discussions that seem to talk about the brain, using words that seem to refer to real things may trick us in the same way that Astrology tricks us by talking about real stars?
There seem to be quite a few publications around that describe real brain function. Worth a look. At first glance, we see a lot of OOD-based concepts.
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