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Dennett is a mainstream eliminitavist, his appeal is that he removes extra fluff around philosophical concepts like consciousness and the brain. In a world wher

• dudinax 2y ago
  Dennett wasn't particularly good at speculating, but then almost nobody is.
• pdonis 2y ago
  > Dennett is a mainstream eliminitavist He is often described that way, and even used the term himself sometimes, but he was not (and was careful to say that he was not) an eliminativist about everything. For example, he was not an eliminitavist about consciousness or free will. He believed those things are real--they just aren't like what many people think they are like; they don't have the properties that many people think they have. With regard to consciousness and free will, Dennett was a physicalist: he believed consciousness and free will are physical processes that obey physical laws. That does place limitations on what consciousness and free will can do, and I think an unwillingness to accept those limitations, to accept that those limited concepts of consciousness and free will are the only ones we can actually have, drove a lot of the opposition to Dennett, though his opponents did not explicitly admit it.
  • _akhe 2y ago
    > he's not eliminative with consciousness Feel like he is though, second only to maybe Michael Shermer, or AI investors (zing!) The definition: > Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. There's no way I'll find the video, but he said at one point in some interview almost exactly this: That most of the mental states we think we have don't really exist. I think it's also in his book Consciousness Explained (1991), but I didn't read it so can't be sure. I always thought this is what upset people so much about Dennett - the apparent total denial of experience. Yet this is an incredibly slippery slope! Anyone familiar with Chalmers' Hard Problem should intuit that there are "primitives" of experience that when put together make up the total experience. I agree that the Hard Problem is an accurate assessment of the issue, but given this "primitives" concept I agree with eliminativism in that "most" of the mental states we believe we have never existed, we were somehow "filled in". I'll namedrop 3 more philosophers: John Searle (Berkeley), Donald Hoffman (Irvine), Colin McGinn (London, Oxford) - all of whom have excellent content on YouTube that will blow your mind, and these are maybe the best I've heard from on the subject.
    • pdonis 2y ago
      > he said at one point in some interview almost exactly this: That most of the mental states we think we have don't really exist. I think it's also in his book Consciousness Explained (1991), but I didn't read it so can't be sure. I can't speak about whatever interview you saw, but in the book Consciousness Explained he does not say what you are describing. He says the same thing he says in one of his papers, I think it's "Real Patterns", which appeared in one of his later collections: Real consciousness does exist, but it is not like what many people think it is like. It does not have all of the properties that many people think it has. He does say that things with those properties don't exist--because nothing with those properties can exist. But he does not say that consciousness does not exist--just that it doesn't have those properties. > the apparent total denial of experience He doesn't say this either, although many of his opponents misdescribe him as saying that--because they cannot understand what he is actually saying. The only concept of consciousness they can grasp is the magical concept they have in their heads--I call it "magical" because it cannot exist if consciousness is a physical process working according to physical laws. And the latter kind of consciousness, the physicalist kind, is the kind Dennett describes and the kind he believed existed. So for opponents of his who can't even grasp that there is such a concept of consciousness, the only way they could interpret what Dennett was saying was that he was denying that consciousness existed. But that is a gross misrepresentation of his views: he was not saying that people don't have experiences or thoughts. He was just saying that those real things, when you actually do the hard work of figuring out how they work in accordance with physical laws, turn out not to have some of the properties that people thought they had before that hard work was done. This is no different from any other concept once we try to build an actual scientific understanding of it. > John Searle Whose Chinese Room thought experiment was debunked in The Mind's I (though that's hardly the only rebuttal that has been published), and I suspect that chapter in the book was written largely by Dennett, since he published other similar rebuttals later on.
      • _akhe 2y ago
        > he does not say what you are describing Starting to think you don't know Dennett, this is what he was all about haha. > John Searle debunked You're starting to reveal your lack of experience here. It's not something that can be debunked, it's just an observation and one that is widely considered foundational :) Not only that, but that's like from his youth, he's done a lot more interesting stuff since Chinese Room - this seems like you just quickly googled. I wish this was a better conversation, brush up!