Daniel Dennett Dissects a Bad Thought Experiment | Big Think.

Daniel Dennett Dissects a Bad Thought Experiment
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Schrödinger's cat. The prisoner's dilemma. The trolley problem. These are brand names as much as they're philosophical thought experiments. Philosopher Daniel Dennett explains the importance of concocting an attractive package in which to wrap your argument. At the same time, Dennett warns that this can backfire and, to demonstrate, he dissects one of his "favorite bad thought experiments," an investigation of free will based on the sci-fi film "The Boys From Brazil."

Five weird thought experiments to break your brain - Big Think ›
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIPT:

Daniel Dennett: Scientists and philosophers like to think that they're very sober, rational people who are above the need to advertise. And yet, if you look closely you'll see that they often go to great lengths to come up with a vivid memorable term, a label for their theory or a name for it that will stick in people's head. In other words, they're trying to develop a brand name or advertising or trademark for their view. And we should recognize that's a good thing to do if you're going to run an example or if you're gonna run an argument -- try to make it as easy as possible for the audience or the reader to keep track of the elements.
Don't call them A, B, C, D and E. Call them Bill and Arthur and Freddie and so forth. But, of course, that can backfire on you, too. Or it can be misused. One of my favorite bad thought experiments -- bad intuition pumps is one in a very influential paper by Greene and Cohen published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society on what neuroscience tells us about free will. And this is The Boys from Brazil. And in this thought experiment we're to imagine -- it's inspired by the hokey science fiction film The Boys from Brazil about some evil doctors who clone Hitler and they're trying to make Hitler clones. But in this telling they create a human being who's been designed by their evil intentions to live a life of crime -- to do evil things.
But just as rational as anybody else, he's very much controlled. He's sort of a designed psychopath. And they call him Mr. Puppet. And they describe Mr. Puppet and Mr. Puppet goes out and commits a crime. And they appeal to the readers ....

[codegeass]

You guys seem unable to understand the video, his point was not to disprove anything. He was impartial towards showing if the guy should be held morally responsible or not. He just wanted to show that the wording of a thought experiment can greatly show how you perceive it. 

[MrAndreaCaso]

Dennett is the living proof that philosophy still matters. Understanding the pitfalls of language and logic, philosophy provides you with a framework. I like both Sam Harris and Dan Dennett and their "fight" is a joy for those who wish to understand more about how we can improve our thinking skills far beyond our empirical knowledge. Thank you, Dan!

[dakotabiggs]

This isn't him making some big point, it is his response to the wording of thought experiments which can change the meaning of the thought experiment, he is not making any huge philosophical claim... people really are not seeing that

[glamdrag]

He's just pointing out that thought experiments are better when they're made as objective as possible by removing suggestive language like 'hitler clone', 'mister puppet' and 'evil doctors'.

I don't really get why people are getting all worked up over this video...

[AureaPersona]

LOL at all the dislikes who from people who don't get the point of the video. Maybe small think is for you :)

[ThePeaceableKingdom]

Provide 77% of a transcript. Then just give up?
Why? Just lazy, or is it a comment on the material? Or is it some calculated 'engagement' strategy?
0_o
Hmm...
maybe BigThink is engaging in some antisocial behavior...

[TheEmperorGulcasa]

He spent the entire video using a really long and convoluted analogy to explain something pretty simple.  I get the feeling that he thinks he's smarter than he is.

[bodyboarding]

Instead of providing an argument for the existence of free will, Dennett has again committed the appeal to consequence fallacy (argumentum ad consequentiam). I think he has come to accept that free will is merely an illusion but is concerned about the implications of this notion becoming widespread. Moreover, Dennett created a false dichotomy by arguing "either we have free will or nobody is accountable for anything". Individuals should not be imprisoned for punishment/justice, but rather as a deterrent and a way to segregate potentially dangerous individuals from society. 

[Shermingtan]

I really don't understand why people have such a huge problem with determenism. The most succesful prisons are the ones actually trying to rehabilitate their prisoners instead of merely punishing them. We should focus on that and keep improving the system of rehabilitation. That's why the knowledge of determenism is so important, you know people are forged by their dna and surroundings. And with this understanding of why someone is the way he is, you can actually help him and the society he lives in. You can even be proactive with certain groups that have a high chance of causing harm.

And that's why the argument "If determenism is real then we cannot punish people" does not work. Crimes have a high chance of creating more crime and suffering. And in the year 2015 we try to rehabilitate instead of simply punishing "evil" people.

[JRibs]

I read his latest book, Thinking Pumps and Tools for learning. He is being very nuanced in his argument, which is that framing a thought experiment for philosophical and scientific concept or situation should avoid some particular flaws that are common in intuition pumps. It's a nice read and is much more humbling than this video may come across as. Combining philosophy and science results in frustration for many people.

[FEARBAD]

There is no "free will". What we are and what we become is a matter of luck. There is no good or bad, it all depends on the subjective perspective. Labels are not beneficial to humanity since it makes people concentrate in things that make us different instead of the things that make us equal, that includes labels like christian or atheist. There should only be one label...human. 

[JakeFace]

I think that what really sits unquestioned at the core of this thought experiment is what we mean by personal responsibility. It is misguided, I think, when questioning the nature of free will, to talk about personal responsibility or personal accountability.
I remember when discussing determinism as an argument against free will with my peers in my philosophy class that they were very concerned about what absolving people of the concept of free will would do to the legal system. "Don't blame me, blame my upbringing." etc etc. This kind of thinking is an example of the pursuit of justice with no thought as to the underlying reasons we have as a society for adhering to its principles.
You could say that someone shouldn't go to prison because it's "not their fault" in the sense that their actions are a result of their desires which are a result of their environment but to do so would be to misjudge what the purpose of prison is. It's in the name: "correctional facility". It serves the purpose of trying to get people who have done bad things from not doing bad things in the future (and also to act as a deterrent, keep violent people off the streets, etc.). Something prison is not trying to do is acting as a kind of abstract retribution on deserving individuals.
Which is why personal responsibility is a poor topic to even be considering when discussing matters of the self.

[nopatone]

I feel like the game changer is tha fact that "Mr Puppet" is artificially designed to commit evil, whereas "Cpt. Autonomy" is 'in a situation where he might be prone to behave antisocial"; in the end mr Dennet just put a lot of attention on details he himself claimed to be irrelevant, to change one that is vital to the whole reasoning, if I got that right..
Nonetheless an interesting video

[MouseAndShiraz]

I get what Dan is saying (I quite like Dan), but I am not sure I agree that the 'evil scientists' who 'designed him to be bad' was irrelevant. There wasn't really a justification from Dan for removing that key point. He goes on to make a bunch of other changes that did not really affect my judgment on the matter, but that first piece of the puzzle so casually swept under the rug without explanation, that was key. It was almost like the rest of his changes were simply a smokescreen to bury that first major change.

The thought experiment, as I understood it, was to show how your behavior can be out of your control to some degree. The evil scientist in the experiment is a metaphor for the 'bad DNA' or 'bad formative experiences' that we as humans (particularly as children) don't have control over.

Removing the metaphor for predeterministic influences on behavior seems to be ignoring the main thrust of the point. Yes, if we remove that and run with the rest of the experiment without it you will end up with a morally ambiguous situation - ie, what you have without any predeterministic influences on behavior. That is my concern with this dissection. It is more of an amputation than a dissection, it doesn't examine all the pieces by changing them, it removes pieces that I would consider vital to the experiment.

[ugolomb]

3:11 -- In the video, he doesn't say why the evil scientists' intent is irrelevant. I suspect that he does provide an argument in written form somewhere, but here, it's just a statement, and it's not self-evident. If someone designs a machine to cause harm and it then causes the harm it was designed to cause, we'd blame its designer and/or its users, not the machine. The question then becomes, is there a fundamental difference between a person designed to be a criminal by conscious intention, and someone who happens, through no-one's design, to have criminal tendencies. It might be true that there's no difference, but it's not *self-evidently* true

[DxsPro]

Ironically Dennett says the first example leads to people intuitively agreeing with determinism, where as his modified example probably doesn't.  But isn't the notion that people can be manipulated into thinking a conclusion further support for determinism?   

[OmniphonProductions]

It's funny that he talked about the effort by scientists/philosophers to come up with catchy "trademark" phrases and such since he has attempted to re-label the term "thought experiment" as "intuition pump".  Near the end, his example assumes that a Harvard graduate would somehow never manage to learn societies general moral and legal expectations.  This is, of course, gibberish; nowhere on the path to (or through) Harvard is likely to meet the "morally indifferent" qualifier of the original thought experiment.  I'd expect better than a Straw Man from such an accomplished thinker.

[barncats]

Is an individual SAC, part of a greater machine, with a greater purpose?

Recycling all parts, old & new,  fixing, updating information & calculations, till machine fully repaired.

No parts or materials lost. Held accountable? Yes all parts repaired & salvaged. What is a SAC compared to a part in a machine?

SACs malfunction but can be Fixed & Salvaged. If a part in a machine does not sense it's error, miscalculation,  or warning of impending error that it is malfunctioning regardless of programming error.

Simply reprogram. So that the part then can use, internal sensors with updated & logical data. If not simply store part until new data can be uploaded or part fixed.

Capable of Understanding the whole Universe? From Single life forms mind & view? Depends? Are they alone floating in space? Need more views?

SACs two programs to choose. Destroy or Build. Or is it two programmers? Or does the SAC get to choose between just two programs? Is one program, what not to do, and another what to do, and when, and how to do it? Maybe SACs need both programs harmonizing? Is it all these answers?

So if SACs can be poisoned,  infected by toxins, get damaged,  grow old, decay, and malfunction, they can be healed, educated and given immunities and antidotes.

Your robotic vacuum cleaner that doesn't always register a wall? A TV with a busted Cable input? Radio with bad antenna? Just because a machine senses work, doesn't mean its programming does.

SACs have little memory & slow processors. Yet their memories can not always be wiped clean & run, but they can always get simple & better programming updates. All just metaphor. I hope I made sense and am not malfunctioning.

 

[ShawnsterVideos]

Does a correlation exist between the use of pronouns and the probability of straw-man argumentation?

Because I've never heard Prof Dennette speak in such generic terms as he has here. What was his point... to tell us his favorite bad-thought-experiment, by saying "them" and "they" who have it all wrong?

Did I miss his supporting evidence?  Seems like Dennett dissected nothing. Did he blather so much vagueness in his past?

[GregoryEvansRacing]

Well of course the original pump's intuitive conclusion was wrong. The conclusion is that this being of compulsive evil-doing is not responsible for his actions is absurd. Programmed or not, either by nature (cloned to do evil) or by nurture (set in an environment that fosters evil behavior), it doesn't matter - the crimes come from the individual, therefore the individual must be put in a position where the crimes are either no longer possible or highly unlikely, IE, prison or some sort of social rehabilitation or some other practical repercussion that is adequate to the crimes committed.