Daniel Dennett and His Intuition Pumps
Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" has inspired me, at last, to write a book. Maybe. I'd call it "Better Intuition Pumps" (BIP). 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. "Pump