Daniel Dennett on Consciousness, Virtual Immortality, and Panpsychism | Closer To Truth Chats

Daniel Dennett discusses the nature of consciousness, if consciousness is an illusion, artificial intelligence and virtual immortality, and how he covers all of this in his book, Just Deserts: Debating Free Will, co-authored with Gregg D. Caruso.

Daniel Clement Dennett is a philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.


Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

© 2021 Closer To Truth

[colinviray]

volume/audio not great, just FYI (especially Robert's side)

[analoguedragon]

A student asked his philosophy professor: "How do I know that I exist?" "Who's asking?" the professor replied.

[ashercaplan]

I admire Dennett, but after several years of studying philosophy, I find that he's fairly narrow-minded. He says that "counter intuitive" views are good for science but then when the "new philosophers" give counter intuitive views against his, he says they're charlatans doing it for fame.

[aresmars]

Dennett rejects Panpsychism as embarrassing magical thinking that explains nothing. Why not say Materialism is also embarrassing magical thinking that explains NOTHING!

[peterstanbury]

Dennett up to his usual trick of straw manning opposing ideas. Idealism is not based on any kind of 'magical' thinking. It derives directly from the notion ( espoused as far back as 250 years ago by Kant ) that we have zero one-to-one perception of reality. Something akin to Donald Hoffman's 'user interface' is inescapable. In fact no neuroscientist argues that we see reality 'as it is'. It thus follows that as the user interface is the only means by which we know 'the ought to question whether what we observe really 'is' reality or not.

[Sonofsol]

He strawmanned the hell out of panpsychism here, seemingly deliberately making it sound more goofy than it actually is.

[danzigvssartre]

I loved reading “Consciousness Explained” as an undergraduate twenty years ago. It’s a great book, but I disagree with just about everything Dennett says.

[arifreeman]

'Pan-niftism' is a crap comparison and a straw-man. He already said that each neuron should be considered an agent. One could sidestep his argument in exactly the same way that he is sidestepping the idea that a particle, which can store some information, has an elementary type of agency or proto-agency.

He also often relies on appeals to 'common sense' when he calls things 'nonsense'. This is a failure to really address what he thinks is wrong with the argument.

[aaron]

"Illusion" is the wrong word to use in consciousness. It confuses things. I think Dennett is being obstinate using it. Wish he'd find a better description.

[zhugh]

I think Dennett is right in what he says about the lack of a continuous self. I don't think that I am the same person I was 20 years ago in any sense that matters. The only thing connecting current me to the "me" of 20 years ago is that I have some memories of the things that person did back then.

[wesboundmusic]

Very few animals "noticing their noticings". I liked that! (and it serves well as yet another paraphrase of the illusion of a persistent self. (reminds me of "object persistence", which is a concept we don't learn until later in infancy. Seems like the notion of a persisting self that notices its noticings –and rememebers them –offers an evolutionary edge. )

Another great moment – and as such new to me – was the problem of Theseus' ship. That philosophical problem that seems to emerge as soon as you have seemingly identical twins is greatly brought across in the movie "The Island" and that particular scene where the hitman needs to make a quick decision over taking out the duplicate, i.e. the "product", and not the real person/customer and needs to swiftly ascertain which is which ( or who is who). For anyone still intending to watch, I won't spoiler this scene. It's a great and IMHO underrated movie touching on some of the concepts from this interview and Prof. Darnell's book(s). Enjoyed this one again! (and 100% agree with the interviewee). Nice!

[johnbuckner]

what’s embarrassing is the conviction that A network of some sort of bio transistors create a type of software interface which could actually understand the hardware. Makes me think of Mario how to figure out its CPU

[georgegrubbs]

It's really not that much of a mystery if you step back and think about it objectively.
Basic fact: humans are Homo sapiens, a species that evolved from the Great Ape. We are closely related to chimpanzees and bonobos. We have orders of magnitude more brain power and complexity than our DNA cousins. We have much more complex speech. We are much more complex organisms that these cousins, but we are essentially great apes.

Regarding consciousness, it cannot be an illusion. We must be conscious to experience an illusion. I hope you see the issue there.

Consciousness arises from physical matter organized in a specific way, along with a complex of energy, chemicals, and electricity. If you understand the complex brain processing of vision, audition, olfaction, taste, and touch, then you should not have trouble understanding how consciousness arises in the brain.

Regarding subjective first-person experience (qualia), that is the brain making use of the senses internally to create an experience of say "red" or of "smelling banana" or whatever. It is all done by the brain.

Regarding free will, evolution has provided Homo sapiens with the capability to interrupt deterministic processes that are leading to certain decisions and actions - we can interrupt the process and change the direction (that is, change our mind). That said, we are constrained by our genetics, our upbringing, our life experiences, and any biases at the time of decisions. Within those constraints, we have limited free will.

No such thing as "virtual immortality." Panpsychism is not true within common understanding of consciousness.

Just my take on things -- not a philosophical argument.

Now, the task is to determine how the brain does all this. That is, lay out the circuit diagrams.

[raffriff]

'Illusion' as Dennett uses the term should not be taken to mean 'deception'. As he explains in this video with his 'desktop illusion' metaphor, consciousness is a special _representation_ of reality, a 'user interface' that is compact and easy to think about. This helps us to survive. In the same way, the user interface of your phone or computer is a benevolent 'illusion' – it is a way of looking at the underlying data.

The activity of the 'unconscious' mind-body system, including its torrents of sensory input, is _vastly_ more complex than the conscious mind can perceive, or needs to know about.

The Freudian idea of the unconscious as a primitive beast is mistaken – the unconscious is (in some ways, not all) wiser than the superficial stream of consciousness that we confuse with our SELVES. As the ancients said, "Listen to your heart".

[maxmudita]

Jesus Christ he makes my head hurt 😞
"Bag of tricks"? Kuhn times the square root of last year's argument. "They don't like it when I say illusion" - That's because it doesn't add anything to the table, but ol' man Dennet. "Natures bag of tricks...", huh? Then who's being tricked? Boomer says what?

[Alex-vfyw]

Agree with lots of stuff Dennet says but... Not sure he understands "the first person wiew"... If you upload someone's mind/brain/ neurons to some machine, his answer is that that machine/another body/whatever would have OUR first person wiew!? Maybe he knows better but sure doesnt resonate with my wiews.

[ronnie]

The failure that is going over and over again, is that if you make a perfect copy of yourself into something totally different as a computer, you copy the data, but not the program that it is running on. Even if we have all the data, we don't know anything about the human operating system itself, what drives interactions between neurons so that we become aware of ourselves and implement and use knowledge and experience on a physical layer ( setting as a base, that who and what we are is our brain ). And the interactions from our brain with our eyes, our skin, our organs, the complexity of it all is something we totally don't understand and therefore the idea of copying an amount of data in a computer is a human being is far too much a simple idea. Biological matter like hormones and tissue cant be one on one replaced with silicon based memory and processors. Like Einstein once said, Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

[fabiankempazo]

edit: lol, I should have finished the video first. :D later he even mentioned those points and even theseus ship. funny that he used the same picture :D

to the point: AI & Consciousness & Immortality: I think he is missing the point, that those AI is not "me" but just a copy of me. If I die, than I am still dead. There only exist something that is perfectly identicly to me. the idea that it is still me is imo a kind of metaphysical thinking. imagining, that there is a metaphysical I that is immortal and appears again and again. It is like Theseus ship. following materialism there is not really an "I". There is just a programming that makes "me". and it could exist theoreticly twice at the same time. so the immortality is useless if it consideres just a copy of my programming.

[theloveofreading]

Another closer to truth video that I can't hear.

[_g_r_m_]

BUT how do we know that Daniel Denett is not a philosophical zombie tricking us to think that philosophical zombies doesn't exist just so he can be famous?
(just kidding, read his book "Consciousness explained" it's an amazing book).