How to Think Like a Philosopher, with Daniel Dennett | Big Think Mentor | Big Think

How to Think Like a Philosopher, with Daniel Dennett
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Daniel Dennett, one of the best-known living philosophers and a professor at Tufts University, believes it's time to unmask the philosopher's art and make thought experimentation accessible to a wider audience. "How to Think Like a Philosopher," Dennett's five-part workshop, is a journey into the labyrinthine mind games played by Dennett and his colleagues

For the more utilitarian-minded, these are mental practices that will improve your ability to focus and think both rationally and creatively.

How to Think Like a Philosopher takes you on a guided tour through many of Dennett's favorite "tools for thinking." Along the way, he teaches you:

- The value of "intuition pumps" (or thought experiments) and how to use them.

- How to recognize common rhetorical tricks for manufacturing consent.

- Why free will doesn't always imply unpredictability.

- How to "twiddle the knobs" of thought, exploring alternatives and the conclusions they lead to.
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DANIEL DENNETT:

Daniel C. Dennett is the author of Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Breaking the Spell, Freedom Evolves, and Darwin's Dangerous Idea and is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and a grandson. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996. Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, was published in 2005. He co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981 and he is the author of over three hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

Dennett gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987.

He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Daniel Dennett: Intuition pumps are sometimes called thought experiments. More often they're called thought experiments. But they're not really formal arguments typically. They're stories. They're little fables. In fact, I think they're similar to Aesop's fables in that they're supposed to have a moral. They're supposed to teach us something. And what they do is they lead the audience to an intuition, a conclusion, where you sort of pound your fist on the table and you say, "Oh yeah, it's gotta be that way, doesn't it." And if it achieves that then it's pumped the intuition that was designed to pump. These are persuasion machines. Little persuasion machines that philosophers have been using for several thousand years.
I think that intuition pumps are particularly valuable when there's confusion about just what the right questions are and what the right -- what matters. What matters to answer the question. I think we're all pretty good at using examples to think about things and intuition pumps are usually rather vivid examples from which you're supposed to draw a very general moral. And they come up in many walks of life. Anytime you're puzzled...

[bigthink]

@ Jacob Harrison - Dennett's full workshop is available on Big Think Mentor - you can get full access and test the waters with a 14-day free trial (follow the link in the video description). Thanks for watching!

[ryanoneiljohnson]

After I found philosophy, my life starting to change. My thinking skill increases. I'm more quiet, observe & listen more. Philosophical topic that I interested into is existence. Purpose of individual's existence & essential meaning of life. My high school didn't teach me these. I'm learning it all by myself.

[crimron]

As an ex-philosophy student I have to say this is not the way to become a philosopher overnight. It takes training and practice if you will, as with maths or any other discipline. You see, thought experiments and the likes are tools. Tools for people who wish to examine reasoning, find truthful and untruthful statements, and deduct how certain convictions work. What holds these convictions together? Is the conviction legit? And last but not least: how can we use or alter those convictions to our benefit?

That's what philosophy is about in a nutshell I believe, and techniques may be practiced until you're fairly adept. I can assure you, not many people like to do this, or even see the importance of it. A quarter of all philosophy students attend their first lecture expecting to hear about mystic mumbo jumbo. When philosophy fails to meet that expectation they usually quit. Such a big chunk of people interested in philosophy stop because of this reason, that I believe among the general public the percentage will be much, much higher. Only few people wish to think like a philosopher, and even fewer actually can.

[penssuck]

What people can't seem to accept is that philosophy is a skill -- much like playing the piano -- so quite naturally you need good training and lots of practice to become remotely good at it. Instead of accepting this, they adopt the attitude that what they're doing -- the garbage they call thinking or reasoning -- is on par with what trained philosophers are doing.

[markomihajlovic]

So this was technically an intuition pump. :) The moral of the story is to give problems as much perspectives as you can think of. That's what turning the knobs is all about. I'm really glad that I've started to do all these things before I've even heard of this video. Guess I'm heading in the right direction.

[SunRiseInTheFuture]

To have people thinking and debating is my favorite part about this world.

[spectralv]

Sorry Ocelot, philosophy is and always will be relevant as long as we're still asking questions like "what value does this idea have or what is the right thing to do?" We can collect all the empirical data in the world but the conversation about how say...implementing eugenics is usually not one of scientific utility but rather ethics (which is philosophy)

[KiffDaddyKaine]

"I call them boom crushes because they explode in your face, " was the last thing I expected to hear from a philosopher lol.

[Jgoth]

I think a nice and simple way to put is "The purpose of life is a life with a purpose" I don't know if he was quoting but I first heard it in the lyrics of Immortal Technique.

[God_is_Justice]

I really needed to hear this right at this moment. thank you!

[methylDragon]

I emphasize.

"But it gets boring really fast."

So yes. Point conceded.

[vahagntumanyan]

The mass of the object does not add anything to its speed in free fall. Both you and the elevator would be falling down with the exact same speed, in weightlessness. If someone however pushes the elevator down (or pulls down, depends on point of view :), that is to say gives additional acceleration, only then hitting the roof of the elevator would be possible. One such setting would be if the elevator is a steel cage and there is a very strong magnet attached to the earth.

I've never pissed someone off when debating. I simply say: Screw you guys! I'm going hooome and then i win

[guillermoestrada]

Philosophy is God and God is Philosophy. Philosophy is the mother of all sciences and all theologies. Economics, sociology, psychology and many other sciences come from Philosophy even though some refuse to give her credit. Education is the only answer to our problems but, this Education- and not just a mere indoctrination, domestication or training- must be comprised of a thorough study of Philosophy and the Humanities as well of all theologies. If there is a God, such a God is Philosophy.

[CriMxDelAxCriM]

If you spend any time at all learning science and philosophy you will find a pretty cool connection. philosophy often informs science. it creates ideas and concepts that hundreds of years later end up being tested and proven by scientists. philosophy breaks creative ground for science to follow. it paves the way.

[dmannzz]

I agree with everything you say. I never said it was good or bad, i said it can't explain that it might be either good or bad in terms of it's ultimate usefulness for people in accordance to the rest of the universe that we can't mentally grasp. Which we know exists because we know there are things we don't understand. For example: why the universe, infinity, and pi. I don't really think 'thinking' outside of logic is very possible. I think our capacity stops at simply observing it as a function

[Dsertstrm]

Answering both of your comments, the answer is cause and effect.
Logic is what we use to explain it. Everything we know about reality is cause and effect. Without it, you can't predict anything, and we know things are predictable, all our science and technology is around to prove it.
Logic isn't good or bad, the same way I could say it's both. I say it's neither because it's neither of them specifically. Good and bad are only subjectively appliable, depending on our definitions of those terms.

[TheWeaksoup]

Logic is just a layer of our mind. It does not explain everything nor will ever understand the mind. There are things that is beyond our logic and sometimes we tap into that. Examples of this is creativity and insights. Also there's a branch of Buddhism that specifically train the mind for this.

[TheMohawkNinja]

That's called debating as war. That is a way of thinking like a philosopher in an argument (there's a TEDtalk on it), but there are also at least two other ways of thinking/debating.

[BariBariKawa]

If someone's willing to argue, there's the potential for learning to take place as long as long as the opposing sides can avoid getting too heated and taking personal shots at one another. As long as you have an open mind, no argument is without reason.
Also, the ego is a destructive thing when mishandled. Once a person reaches a certain level of awareness they become aware of the likelihood of there being others operating on a higher awareness than themselves. Everyone starts from somewhere.