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Then you got my gist: That's how I feel about this Dennett tale. Why did he choose this idiom, why does his thesis seem to betray premise? The thesis being th

by _wire_ 2y ago

Then you got my gist: That's how I feel about this Dennett tale. Why did he choose this idiom, why does his thesis seem to betray premise? The thesis being there's no me there, the premise being the narrative authority of the tale. Someome told the story. To my reading, Dennett id clearly is capable of comprehending the irony of his position, so the tale as a whole is a sort of sound of one hand clapping (which can be done by many people by beating their fingers against the palm of the same hand). Dennet may be attempted to use pointed obfuscation to reveal to the reader that the man who determines he is no one is still someone. But Dennett himself appears to treads indelicately on the edge of becoming a god or oracle of his own purvey. He welcomes me to his domain while at the same time distancing himself from the human commons. I read his posture as cultish. From here I ask myself, as a cultist, what is Dennett's orthodoxy? Techno-feudalism? Transhumanism? If the job of the philosopher is to form questions, why are the questions he's begging so debasing of a commonsense status of the individual and substitution of the corporate? I can't figure it out, but I don't want to follow it on Dennett's own terms, so I offered some alternatives that work better for me. Thanks for taking a moment to reply to my post.

sooheon 2y ago
> The thesis being there's no me there I think the thesis is "me" is complex.
rexpop 2y ago
Then you got my gist. No, it's just your syntax is unparseable. Try using more words. Try breaking some of your sentences into multiple sentences. > If the job of the philosopher is to form questions, why are the questions he's begging so debasing of a commonsense status of the individual and substitution of the corporate? "If the job of the philosopher is to form questions" is a good clause, but "the questions he's begging" is a confounding noun-phrase. Firstly, because I am not sure what "begging" means in its position, here. You said he was forming questions, but now he's begging them? Or are you suggesting that he begs the question--a frequently misused and almost universally misunderstood rhetorical fallacy? I personally shy away from using this idiom, and I certainly don't understand its use here. The main thrust of your question--"why are the questions so debasing of status"--simply doesn't parse. How does a question debase status? Does it impugn some aspect of the subject? What status, anyway? Social status? Battery charge status? What is a "commonsense status?" I have never heard of such a thing. Is it like marital status? "...and substitution of the corporate" is an entirely mind-boggling clause. Substitution of what with what? Not clear. Substitution of the individual with the corporate? Are we stuffing blue jeans and boots with incorporation papers filed in Delaware? Are we removing suggestion boxes from front offices, and instead accepting only faxed complaints from others' back offices? I have no idea what is going on in your view of the world. I have no idea what you are talking about. > you got my gist No, I 100% did not. My introduction to Daniel Dennett in undergraduate philosophy left me with only a faint impression of the guy's "brain in a vat" thought experiment. I think it's a reasonably accessible question about how we relate to our perceptions, eg are we looking at things, or are we only thinking about them with all-encompasing clarity? How much of what we see is simply the noise of our sensing apparatus, or an entirely false signal of our sensing apparatus? A decent respite from the sort of existential vertigo this induces might be "The Construction of Social Reality" in which John Searle reminds us that we can easily take a shared external reality as axiomatic, eg "There is ice and snow at the top of Mount Everest." Anyway, for my sake, please make more sense. Maybe re-read some juvenile literature and remember what it is to explain things plainly to minds steeped in other contexts.

by _wire_ 2y ago

sooheon 2y ago

> The thesis being there's no me there I think the thesis is "me" is complex.

rexpop 2y ago

Then you got my gist. No, it's just your syntax is unparseable. Try using more words. Try breaking some of your sentences into multiple sentences. > If the job of the philosopher is to form questions, why are the questions he's begging so debasing of a commonsense status of the individual and substitution of the corporate? "If the job of the philosopher is to form questions" is a good clause, but "the questions he's begging" is a confounding noun-phrase. Firstly, because I am not sure what "begging" means in its position, here. You said he was forming questions, but now he's begging them? Or are you suggesting that he begs the question--a frequently misused and almost universally misunderstood rhetorical fallacy? I personally shy away from using this idiom, and I certainly don't understand its use here. The main thrust of your question--"why are the questions so debasing of status"--simply doesn't parse. How does a question debase status? Does it impugn some aspect of the subject? What status, anyway? Social status? Battery charge status? What is a "commonsense status?" I have never heard of such a thing. Is it like marital status? "...and substitution of the corporate" is an entirely mind-boggling clause. Substitution of what with what? Not clear. Substitution of the individual with the corporate? Are we stuffing blue jeans and boots with incorporation papers filed in Delaware? Are we removing suggestion boxes from front offices, and instead accepting only faxed complaints from others' back offices? I have no idea what is going on in your view of the world. I have no idea what you are talking about. > you got my gist No, I 100% did not. My introduction to Daniel Dennett in undergraduate philosophy left me with only a faint impression of the guy's "brain in a vat" thought experiment. I think it's a reasonably accessible question about how we relate to our perceptions, eg are we looking at things, or are we only thinking about them with all-encompasing clarity? How much of what we see is simply the noise of our sensing apparatus, or an entirely false signal of our sensing apparatus? A decent respite from the sort of existential vertigo this induces might be "The Construction of Social Reality" in which John Searle reminds us that we can easily take a shared external reality as axiomatic, eg "There is ice and snow at the top of Mount Everest." Anyway, for my sake, please make more sense. Maybe re-read some juvenile literature and remember what it is to explain things plainly to minds steeped in other contexts.