Big Thinkers - Daniel Dennett [Philosopher] (2 of 3)

[TheSultan03]

OMG! They found K9! If they take him apart Doctor Who will be pissed.

[hamnose]

hmmph. It's common knowledge that the function of the brain is to filter data. It's been known since like, forever, that active vocabulary is limited to about 6000 words whether a person's a retard or a genius. Even salesmen know that personality is not unique. Nothing here to shake the mind. I take a dump on Kaku Dawkins Toffler and all the rest of you "big stinkers". This is pop philosophy for fanboys.

[TheSultan03]

@hamnose , The ancients believed that the brain was for cooling blood. "take a dump", sure makes you seem intelleictually inferior. I find that many people insult what they cannot fully grasp. If you feel you are more intelligent, and have more vivid and intresting ideas, write a book. If you have a tenth of the sales of any of their books you might have a leg to stand on.

[hamnose]

@TheSultan03 Yeah and not to put her down but Lady Gaga is more popular you fucking dingbat.

[TheSultan03]

@hamnose You are obviously an infantile ,mentally stunted, self inflated fool. Reply all you want, you are below me and I will be ignoring you going forward. For your own sake, you should acknowledge how stupid you come off.

[hamnose]

@TheSultan03 For your own sake you should have thoughts of your own. Go fuck yourself.

[wishshewaswithme]

nice idea,i like it and am priverlaged to here it,but i may disagree,i believe im a star/angle/soul/bio-unit/cupid­..!!!

we have advance threw four diamentions conscouses And i believe my consconce

is in the mainframe thats why im here.

there only one reality and one consconce projected from the sub atomic thoughts of the stable parameters of uknown calculas secret letters and numbers man has not evolved he is a high-tech savage.

man is building GOD ,And one day i believe are leader will be HAL

[jakepinoywolrd85]

what the hell daniel dennett's arguments are really senseless it does not cause or make anything progressive or beneficiak at all! why do we even ponder on these things? it's completely useless!!!!

[Tom45931]

@jakepinoywolrd85 knowledge of how parts of the brain work are harnessed in useful things as diverse as auto-pilots, translation software, face recognition, airport security and tracking of planes to prevent collisions.

[PktMma]

Blunic, if there was no philosophy there would be no science. Philosophy creates science and every scientist needs to be a philosopher to some extent.

[spase667]

Why... why was he putting snow on the stove?

[applesauces789]

I don't like his philosophy. "It's just not there". Gosh, It's so nihlistic.

[Alexdurrant7]

@applesauces789 Does that make it untrue?

[theocean1973]

i can't believe i didn't notice the change! consciousness sucks!

[ViperRob42]

that image test totally got me, damn lol

[knowwaie]

@Blunic Right, liberal philosophy. I think Al Gore has a masters in it.

[knowwaie]

Hah, he even says it himself at the end of this video. Philosophy is what you do when you don't know what the right questions are. So he's saying philosophy is actually useless, in light of mechanical processes.

I, for one, am insulted. As i'm sure any philosopher would be. Philosophy is the answer to his riddle. The ability to question is one of our many peculiar features, assuming we're mechanically programed to conform to our environment. Rebellion is opposite of mechanical.

[magic4fact]

@knowwaie - "Philosophy is what you do when you don't know what the right questions are. So he's saying philosophy is actually useless, in light of mechanical processes." That is completely specious reasoning. He is saying nothing of the sort. You (deliberately or not) skipped the key word of the quote: "YET". He is saying philosophy is the search for the right questions. Where do you get the notion that he is saying philosophy is useless from??

[knowwaie]

Philosophy is useless from pure naturalism. This is why there is no place for it in our society. Are there even any careers that require a philosophy degree? Philosophy has not been profitable since ancient Greece.

Dennett speaks mainly of physiology, and he is refuting a philosophical concept. Life itself is a philosophical concept. Dennett is saying that life is not at all, but only a mechanical illusion. Neurology, Biology and physiology have no place for philosophy or even psychology.

[brancron]

@knowwaie Finding the right questions is one of the hardest parts! That's a noble role for philosophy to play! But philosophy can't be end of any inquiry, i.e. you can't end on a philosophical assertion--ultimately you're trying to make a statement about what is or how things are, which is a scientific statement.

[knowwaie]

Unfortunately, because of the recent mass brainwashing you'll probably never understand that there are things that science is not capable of knowing and it is in those things where philosophy exists. The reason why philosophy is becoming so worthless is because science effectively destroys ideologies with theories.

Put it this way, if science was strictly biased toward any ideology then everything would be interpreted, scientifically, within that ideological spectrum. It's called brainwashing.

[brancron]

@knowwaie Luckily, science isn't ideologized. As for philosophy, it is not a theory, nor a doctrine, but rather an activity--a clarification of thoughts. It is science's handmaiden.

What is it that science is incapable of knowing and philosophy is? Truth considers the way things are; and in this domain science has a lot to show for itself while philosophy has nil. That is to say, from your perspective philosophy is a failure, while from my perspective it is a useful behind-the-scenes player.

[knowwaie]

How is this guy a 'big thinker'? He has yet to even make any philosophical statement, how is he a philosopher? He's speaking primary about physiology.

If we had explained everything physically, neurologically and mechanically, as he believes we are, then philosophy is no longer useful or necessary. Philosophy itself presupposes a system of logic independent of our 'mechanical' functions, one that we don't naturally posses. Logic is not a mechanical function of our minds.

[ashburnhouse]

@knowwaie Ha Ha.

[knowwaie]

Wouldn't this be detrimental to his case? This demonstrates that we only see objects that we are actively conscious of.

[fjoo]

what's the music in the background here? Anyone knows? :] ( 0:20 - 1:00 )

[faerydhhlo]

True Free energy devices exist,But Elite controllers don't want ppl to be free from the costs of energy,Find this technology at LT-MAGNET-MOTORdotCOM ,Big change is comming soon!

[phriendlyphool]

what isn't there doesn't have to be explained...it just isn't there

[ManyInfiniteComments]

Im glad Daniel Dennett has moved philosophy back to its core, except this time around its reflective of reality rather than speculation. He is not afraid to dwell on multiple subjects to build a coherent view of who and what we are....

[aryah47]

sry typo: ... that science could have existed without philosophy ...

[aryah47]

bahramf, I don't know how the claim that science could exist without science could be checked (nor its exact meaning), but isn't it a simple historic fact that scientific method came from Bacon (and Ibn al-Haytham etc), and has in general been intertwined with the empiricist philosophers, and issues tackled with the problem of induction etc are epistemological questions? You seem to have already admitted the historic institutional overlap, so I don't understand on what basis do you draw the line

[mystisme]

i saw at first the little road was missing maybe a just got lucky to see it at first

[dgdfhfghgfhgfgffjhj]

Unfortunately, they ruined this effect because they wanted the flash to match Dennett's words.

The real experiment actually has a slightly longer period of the "mask" than the images (I think 260ms vs 240 ms), so it's about 1/4 second on and 1/4 off.

This video hacked it with only about 1/10 of a second "off" flash. I also thought the "path" image was the worst of the examples he used at his TED talk on consciousness (not the religion one), which has several worth seeing.

[cyaninkblot]

It's K9!

[MrBlamemeforit]

Wouldn't it be nice if you could make a truly concious being with machines?

[flemmasterj]

I love Daniel Dennett. His definition of philosophy as the posing of questions to be answered scientifically is beautifully put. The scientific follow-through is too often missing in philosophical discourse, when philosophers think that presenting a problem is the only goal.

[bahramf]

Philosophy is NOT science.

[flemmasterj]

I agree. I just like his formulation that philosophy is (or should be) the business of posing the right questions. My post is a criticism of philosophy. The idea is that when one is engaged in answering a question, one should be engaged in scientific activity. If not, then one is either not a scientist, or the wrong question was asked, one that maybe can't be answered scientifically. Philosophy is too often caught up spinning its wheels trying to answer questions for which it has no methods.

[dgdfhfghgfhgfgffjhj]

Philosophy is not "a" science, but it is part of all science. Sometimes it is the easy part, sometimes it is the hard part. For evolution, philosophy was the hard part.

[ykoshy]

there would be NO defined sciences without philosophy. Logic, rigour, analysis, dialectics - it's the FOUNDATION of all sciences

[bahramf]

Of course it's not. The physical world is not logical. Rigor and all the rest are not things only philosophers know how to do. All academics practice them you moron.

[ykoshy]

The sciences have advanced those pratices but they wouldn't exist without the philosophical tradition, logic IS philosophy and is used by the sciences, you moron.

[bahramf]

Logic is not philosophy. It's a very small branch of philosophy. Of course those practices would and have existed without the philosophical tradition.

[bahramf]

Are you a philosophy student because you haven't learned much.

[ykoshy]

The earliest known/most influential writings on Logic were by Aristotle and the dialectics were invented by pre-Socratics...before the three sciences (biology, physics, chemistry) were defined, students were taught PHILOSOPHY as the umbrella of all sciences. Okay, you're right ''philosophy IS NOT science'' in the same way Alexander Graham Bell IS NOT a telephone...one wouldn't exist without the other.

[bahramf]

Just because philosophy predates natural science does not make it a precursor or the mother of the natural sciences.

That was a bad way to teach science. We don't teach it that way today. You're right in so far as scholars were not pigeon-holed into disciplines up until a few hundred years ago, but aside from that science could exist without and apart from philosophy.

[dgdfhfghgfhgfgffjhj]

One reason "philosophy" has a sad reputation is because, unlike many other fields, people insist on repeatedly studying really old and failed parts of it.

In chemistry/physics/etc, we tend to dump the bad stuff, but in Philosophy it is preserved as dull literature.

Another reason is that "good" philosophy often becomes "common sense" AFTER some philosopher had to twist his brain and argue for it, and now everyone forgets that ideas like elements started out as philosophical conjecture.

[bahramf]

All good points dgdfhfghg...

[kingsleykillz]

@dgdfhfghgfhgfgffjhj Well said. 

[nyblake]

@dgdfhfghgfhgfgffjhj

It's not exactly that it's studied as the truth. The failed parts of Philosophy are touched on in introductory undergraduate classes like "The History of Philosophy". If anything, in those such classes, it's taught where Philosophy has failed and how to learn from these failures--not to repeat the failures.

If that's why Philosophy has a sad reputation, then the reasoning is even more sad than why the field has such a reputation.

[Abandonedmachine]

@dgdfhfghgfhgfgffjhj

Philosophy, as a branch of intellectual pursuit, stands in a totally different relation to its past than the sciences. First of all, there really aren't any right or wrong answers, just good or not-so-good argumentations.

If philosophy were to dump the "bad" stuff (i.e. history of philosophy) there really wouldn't be much left since it's really hard to decide upon what is 'contemporary' and what isn't.

[Gungfuwarrior]

How fantastic, what he says at the end. Philosophy is what you do when you don't know the right questions to ask. I don't care what people say about Dennett & I admit he has his flaws, but the insight he does come up with is gold.

[julebakst]

Just out of curiocity, what are the flaws of Dennett which you are admitting? :-)

[prhughes0]

The demonstration around 2:15 makes clear that, given all the highly "significant" objects in the scene (ship, bridge, woman, etc.), the highly irrelevant lower-left (low color- and brightness-contrast) landscape are "under-reported".

Basically, a magician's trick; and very instructive, experientially.

[AzoreanProud]

Consciousness, its very complex, look at the use of psychoactives as LSD, DMT, Mescaline, Iboga, etc.

The theory Mind at Large.

[crambo0349]

Awesome!

[jakepinoywolrd85]

@crambo0349

fill in this region built up in your head not noticing small tiles now tell me what makes sense? oh, it does , cuz u can say anything in philosophy !!!!!

[Tom45931]

@jakepinoywolrd85- yes you can get away with saying a lot in philosophy, but Dennet is also an AI expert and knows a thing or two about neuroscience, what he was saying makes sense. You don't see a whole picture, you have a vague idea of it, and whenever you need to update your idea you just move your eyes. It is fairly simple to demonstrate this with blind-spot tests and other optical illusions.