This is related to his ongoing work in folk psychology which is basically the.centerpiece of eliminative materialism. The idea is that physicalism is metaphysically "true".
So ideas like love and hate, curiosity and boredom simply don't have real states associated with them and are therefor not "real" because reality is only available to stuff we can model reductively. Which seems totally bizarre to me because material reduces to fields and then we have pure math and suddenly we aren't avoiding falling rocks, we are solving equations and the stupid bomb explodes in our face and all we can do is laugh at our determination to nail experience down long enough for us to.get a good look at it once we realize that is impossible and misguided.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LpJSeLY8cWs
Dennett's Intentional Stance
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#123 
by BWE » Jul 22, 2014 8:02 pm
I just watched that video and it was the wrong one. I'll try to find the right one
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#124 by SpeedOfSound » Jul 22, 2014 8:33 pm
BWE wrote:This is related to his ongoing work in folk psychology which is basically the.centerpiece of eliminative materialism. The idea is that physicalism is metaphysically "true".
So ideas like love and hate, curiosity and boredom simply don't have real states associated with them and are therefor not "real" because reality is only available to stuff we can model reductively. Which seems totally bizarre to me because material reduces to fields and then we have pure math and suddenly we aren't avoiding falling rocks, we are solving equations and the stupid bomb explodes in our face and all we can do is laugh at our determination to nail experience down long enough for us to.get a good look at it once we realize that is impossible and misguided.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LpJSeLY8cWs
I think the eliminative program is horribly misunderstood. Along with Dennett and the Chuchlands.
My post: http://www.rationalskepticism.org/philo ... l#p2049478
touches on this and it is not an easy thing to explain. What exactly is being eliminated?
It's the idea that our generalized reduction to qualia or 'what it is like' or 'bats' is flawed. Experience is not reducible in this way.
What it does not do is eliminate conscious content. I insist that conscious content is unique on a galactic scale for every moment of our lives. That no two sets of content are likely to have ever played out the same in our individual lives or in the collective lives of every conscious critter in the multiverse.
Once that is understood and deeply adopted the rest of this game becomes about the science and wrangling phenomena in such a way as to sensible map the two domains.
(it always ends up about C doesn't it?)
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#126 by BWE » Jul 22, 2014 8:51 pm
It may be. But simply tossing folk psychology seems pretty misguided to me. I just look at it all as different ways to model the same thing. Models all have purposes. When you can identify the purpose, you understand the model imo.
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#127 by SpeedOfSound » Jul 22, 2014 8:54 pm
zoon wrote:,,, May I point out here that this is exactly what mirror neurons in monkey brains do? ...
I can still hit you under there, with my shoe!
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#128 by SpeedOfSound » Jul 22, 2014 9:00 pm
Mistake or not a good video. I think she called her husband a chimp.
In the first part she alludes to my biggest axe to grind, the multiple mechanisms that add up to being conscious.
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#129 by SpeedOfSound » Jul 22, 2014 9:10 pm
BWE wrote:It may be. But simply tossing folk psychology seems pretty misguided to me. I just look at it all as different ways to model the same thing. Models all have purposes. When you can identify the purpose, you understand the model imo.
Folk psychology is the domain of discourse. The thing we would like to figure out. It's a myth like any other and certainly works well. Sweeping it under the carpet will create no understanding at all.
BTW. Myth to me is not quite the ordinary usage. More like model. Myths persist precisely because they work.
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#130 by BWE » Jul 22, 2014 10:12 pm
SpeedOfSound wrote:
Mistake or not a good video. I think she called her husband a chimp.
In the first part she alludes to my biggest axe to grind, the multiple mechanisms that add up to being conscious.
Yeah, and he gave the typical strawman objection to reductionism and responded with the ideologically pure response too. I have a lot of respect for what they do, but IMO neuroscience is a physical model (and should be) and so has no real place suggesting interpretations for our poetic and emotional lives. Those interpretations are simply at a different level. Neither more true nor more false. Just physical rather than poetic.
Here's an assertion I doubt I can defend. Art is about metaphor. Science borrows metaphor from art. Thus art defines our world and science follows in a type of collection or applied use of those metaphors.
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#131 by BWE » Jul 22, 2014 10:14 pm
SpeedOfSound wrote:BWE wrote:It may be. But simply tossing folk psychology seems pretty misguided to me. I just look at it all as different ways to model the same thing. Models all have purposes. When you can identify the purpose, you understand the model imo.
Folk psychology is the domain of discourse. The thing we would like to figure out. It's a myth like any other and certainly works well. Sweeping it under the carpet will create no understanding at all.
BTW. Myth to me is not quite the ordinary usage. More like model. Myths persist precisely because they work.
Robert Pirsig called that the culture's mythos and that's always seemed appropriate to me.
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#132 by BWE » Jul 22, 2014 10:19 pm
I can't find the one I was thinking of. Maybe it was her ted talk. I'll have to look later. But regardless, I think it's important to view information, any information, in the context of what decisions you might make that it might influence.
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#133 by SpeedOfSound » Jul 22, 2014 10:20 pm
BWE wrote:SpeedOfSound wrote:
Mistake or not a good video. I think she called her husband a chimp.
In the first part she alludes to my biggest axe to grind, the multiple mechanisms that add up to being conscious.
Yeah, and he gave the typical strawman objection to reductionism and responded with the ideologically pure response too. I have a lot of respect for what they do, but IMO neuroscience is a physical model (and should be) and so has no real place suggesting interpretations for our poetic and emotional lives. Those interpretations are simply at a different level. Neither more true nor more false. Just physical rather than poetic.
Here's an assertion I doubt I can defend. Art is about metaphor. Science borrows metaphor from art. Thus art defines our world and science follows in a type of collection or applied use of those metaphors.
I invert that and for me science and physicalism expand and enhance my poetic and artistic experience. I see no clear lines. I let the universe subsume humanity and knock on the box trying to extend humanity. I have a poetic perspective on the universe but the universe writes that poem.
Can't defend that either. But I do so try
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#134 by zoon » Jul 22, 2014 10:52 pm
DavidMcC wrote:zoon wrote:
As Dennett says:Dennett Content and Consciousness p40 wrote:The task of avoiding the dilemma of Intentionality is the task of somehow getting from motion and matter to content and purpose – and back.
I think, in evolutionary terms, the simplest guess is that early animals with brains set up models of their bodies in the world in order to control those bodies better, then later animals with bigger brains can (through gradual evolution) extend those models in order to reverse engineer what another conspecific’s goals are. For example, if a monkey (a large-brained animal) already has a well-developed system in its brain for modelling and controlling its arm and hand when it reaches out with the goal of picking something up, then when it sees another monkey reaching out towards an object, the watching monkey can reverse engineer the model and work out quickly that the other monkey’s goal is to pick that object up. May I point out here that this is exactly what mirror neurons in monkey brains do
...
Re my bold - what makes you think that it's as complicated as that? Mirror neurons simply allow the monkey to imitate what it sees, without necessarily understanding why the action is occurring.
There’s a good deal of evidence that mirror neurons fire in response to the goal of the animal carrying out the action, rather than to the action itself, as Wikipedia says:
Wikipedia wrote:Many studies link mirror neurons to understanding goals and intentions. Fogassi et al. (2005)[51] recorded the activity of 41 mirror neurons in the inferior parietal lobe (IPL) of two rhesus macaques. The IPL has long been recognized as an association cortex that integrates sensory information. The monkeys watched an experimenter either grasp an apple and bring it to his mouth or grasp an object and place it in a cup.
In total, 15 mirror neurons fired vigorously when the monkey observed the "grasp-to-eat" motion, but registered no activity while exposed to the "grasp-to-place" condition.
For 4 other mirror neurons, the reverse held true: they activated in response to the experimenter eventually placing the apple in the cup but not to eating it.
Only the type of action, and not the kinematic force with which models manipulated objects, determined neuron activity. It was also significant that neurons fired before the monkey observed the human model starting the second motor act (bringing the object to the mouth or placing it in a cup). Therefore, IPL neurons "code the same act (grasping) in a different way according to the final goal of the action in which the act is embedded".[51] They may furnish a neural basis for predicting another individual’s subsequent actions and inferring intention.[51]
It seems likely that mirror neurons are important in social cognition, but it’s not at all clear exactly what they are doing. Human Theory of Mind certainly requires much more than picking up the goals of specific actions, and only actions which one can carry out oneself. Mirror neurons do remain a striking example of evidence for the kind of brain activity which the Intentional Stance / Theory of Mind needs – in Dennett’s words: “getting from motion and matter to content and purpose”.
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#135 by zoon » Jul 22, 2014 10:53 pm
SpeedOfSound wrote:zoon wrote:SpeedOfSound wrote:I think the main theme for Dennett is that the intentional stance gives us predictive power that no other method avails us. That would be TheoryOfMind territory. As a model it's well-honed and incredibly useful.
Now if we want to take it further and worry it for it's truth value we have problems. It's not about that. It's a useful myth nearly as useful, and most certainly more often successfully used, than our myth of atom-balls.
So far I do not see what anyone could criticize Dennett for.
Dennett is already discussing “intentionality” and a stance which is compatible with evolution and “carries a minimum of metaphysical baggage” (page 19 C and C) in “Content and Consciousness”, published in 1969, well before any of the current work on Theory of Mind (Premack coined the term “theory of mind” in 1978; Robert Gordon’s article on simulation theory was in 1989). As you say, it’s basically the same idea, but I haven’t come across Dennett saying that the intentional stance consists of using one’s own brain processes to predict others. Instead, he speaks of assuming rationality in the other person, e.g. page 21 of the Intentional Stance:
...
He actually says what I said he said on page 23.'it gives us predictive power we can get by no other means'
Yes, I agree with you he’s on to the same idea; and as you both say there’s an excellent evolutionary reason for our seeing others in terms of intentionality and purpose.
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#137 by SpeedOfSound » Jul 22, 2014 11:13 pm
Classifying a neuron by presumed function is bad. Misleading. We don't need this kind of trouble in the public's perception of neuroscience.
Why did you hide under a chair when you said it? Yup!
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#138 by zoon » Jul 22, 2014 11:53 pm
SpeedOfSound wrote:
Classifying a neuron by presumed function is bad. Misleading. We don't need this kind of trouble in the public's perception of neuroscience.
Why did you hide under a chair when you said it? Yup!
I hid under the chair because you had expressed an aversion to mirror neurons, which I still don’t entirely understand. Aren’t they like Hubel and Wiesel’s single neurons in the brain which fired when particular patterns were shown to the animal? It doesn’t necessarily mean that they are in themselves different from other neurons, just that they come at the end of particular sequences of processing. Do you consider the experimental findings of the mirror neuron researchers interesting, but you think they should have presented them differently, or do you find the experiments useless?
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#139 by BWE » Jul 22, 2014 11:55 pm
I think mirror neurons are pretty solidly in the functional category by now.
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Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
#140 by SpeedOfSound » Jul 23, 2014 12:03 am
BWE wrote:I think mirror neurons are pretty solidly in the functional category by now.
Nope. They are not.
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