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Daniel DennettIntuition pumps and other tools for thinking

Chapter 1: Introduction

Other thought experiments are less rigorous but often just as effective:little stories designed to provoke a heartfelt, table-thumping intuition

Yes, of course, it has to be so!about whatever thesis is being defended.I have called these intuition pumps. I coined the term in the first of my

public critiques of philosopher John Searles famous Chinese Roomthought experiment

Chapter 2: Making mistakes

Better to make as many good mistakes as possible Cant go through life without any mistakes whatsoever

Some basic tools for thinking:

Rapoports rules

To give as charitable an interpretation to someone elses arguments How to compose a successful critical commentary:

o 1. You should attempt to re-express your targets position soclearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, Thanks, I wish Idthought of putting it that way.

o 2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they arenot matters of general or widespread agreement).

o 3. You should mention anything you have learned from yourtarget.

o 4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word ofrebuttal or criticism.

Sturgeons Law

Sturgeons law is usually put quite crudely: 90 percentof everything iscrap

Occams razor

The idea is straightforward: dont concoct a complicated, extravaganttheory if youve got a simpler one (containing fewer ingredients, fewerentities) that handles the phenomenon just as well.

Occams broom

Inconvenient facts are whisked under the rug by intellectually dishonestchampions of one theory or another

Using lay audiences as decoys Using lay audiences to ensure that others are able to understand exactly

what you are trying to say, particularly as you have to explain these ideas

to them explicitly

Rathering

Rathering is a way of sliding you swiftly and gently past a false dichotomyThe surely operator: a mental block

The use of the word surely to make an assertion that the author hopeswill be accepted by the reader without any justification

Rhetorical questions

Attempting to answer rhetorical questions might be to ones benefit,particularly if an intuitively unobvious answer can be thought of

Deepity

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A proposition that seems both important and true, but only achieves thiseffect because of its own ambiguity

Tools for thinking about language

This shared property, the meaning (of the two sentences in theirrespective languages), or the content (of the beliefs they express), is acentral topic in philosophy and cognitive science. This aboutness that, for

example, sentences, pictures, beliefs, and (no doubt) some brain states

exhibit, is known in philosophical jargon as intentionality , an unfortunate

choice as a technical term, since outsiders routinely confuse it with the

everyday idea of doing something intentionally

Having knowledge as a matter of degree (e.g. the statement daddy is adoctor might be understood by a child in different degrees at different

stages of their lives)

Sellars (1962, p. 1) famously said, The aim of philosophy, abstractlyformulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense ofthe term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.

The manifest image is the world as it seems to us in everyday life, full ofsolid objects, colors and smells and tastes, voices and shadows, plants and

animals, and people and all their stuff: not only tables and chairs, bridges

and churches, dollars and contracts, but also such intangible things as

songs, poems, opportunities, and free will. Think of all the puzzling

questions that arise when we try to line up all those things with the things

in the scientific image: molecules, atoms, electrons, and quarks and their

ilk. Is anything really solid?

I proposed folk psychology as a term for the talent we all have forinterpreting the people around usand the animals and the robots andeven the lowly thermostatsas agents with information about the world

they act in ( beliefs ) and the goals ( desires ) they strive to achieve,

choosing the most reasonable course of action, given their beliefs and

desires.

The intentional stance is the strategy of interpreting the behavior of anentity (person, animal, artifact, or whatever) by treating it as if it were a

rational agent who governed its choice of action by a consideration

of its beliefs and desires.

How do we interpret the behavior of an entity?o The physical stance is simply the standard laborious method of thephysical sciences, in which we use whatever we know about the

laws of physics and the physical constitution of the things in

question to devise our predictions.

o The designed stance: 1. that an entity is designed as I suppose it to be, and 2. that it will operate according to that designthat is, it

will not malfunction.

o the intentional stance , a subspecies of the design stance in whichthe designed thing is treated as an agent of sorts, with beliefs and

desires and enough rationality to do what it ought to do given

those beliefs and desires. Its applications to a chess move:

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First, list the legal moves available to the computer when itsturn to play comes up (usually there will be several-dozen

candidates).

Now rank the legal moves from best (wisest, most rational)to worst (stupidest, most self-defeating).

Finally, make your prediction: the computer will make thebest move.

o The personal/Sub-personal distinction At different levels of distinction, the individual body parts

can be said to have different levels of human-like capability

o A cascade of homunculi Homuncular functionalism

The AI programmer begins with an intentionallycharacterized problem, and thus frankly views the

computer anthropomorphically: if he solves the

problem he will say he has designed a computer thatcan [e.g.,] understand questions in English. His first

and highest level of design breaks the computer

down into subsystems, each of which is given

intentionally characterized tasks; he composes a

flow chart of evaluators, rememberers,

discriminators, overseers and the like. These are

homunculi with a vengeance. . . . Each homunculus in

turn is analyzed into smaller homunculi, but, more

important, into less clever homunculi. When the

level is reached where the homunculi are no more

than adders and subtractors, by the time they needonly the intelligence to pick the larger of two

numbers when directed to, they have been reduced

to functionaries who can be replaced by a machine.

The particular virtue of this strategy is that it pulledthe rug out from under the infinite regress objection.

According to homuncular functionalism the ominous

infinite regress can be sidestepped, replaced by a

finite regress that terminates, as just noted, in

operators whose task is so dull they can be replaced

by machines. The key insight was breaking up all thework we imagined being done by a central operator

and distributing it around to lesser, stupider agents

whose work was distributed in turn, and so forth.

o Wonder tissue The term wonder tissue is a thinking tool along the lines of

a policemans billy club: you use it to chastise, to persuadeothers not to engage in illicit theorizing. And, like a billy

club, it can be abused. It is a special attachment for the

thinking tool Occams Razor and thus enforces a certainscientific conservatism, which can be myopic.

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However, it does seem to be a tool which is used to simplyacknowledge that we cannot have the ability ot understand

what is ahead

o Using registers as a simulation to understand how computerswork