Intuition Pumps And Other Tools For Thinking (2014) - Plot & Excerpts
This book missells itself, and has its flaws, but it's worth reading if only to encourage the reader to turn a critical eye on Dennett's own arguments.Let's get one thing out of the way, an Intuition Pump is a thought experiment as far as I can see, and giving it another label (something Dennett's denigrates in other thought experiments - see his relabelling of Mr Puppet as Captain Autonomy) changes nothing other than the rhetoric. It's all a case of My Pump Pumps Harder Than Yours, and it's a bit cheap.And another thing: this in no way contains "70 ways to make you think better". A few generic philosophical tools at the start are fine, but the rest are specific thought experiments to prove or disprove a point, or deconstructions of another philosopher's argument. It's a quality set of disparate points, coalescing around meaning, evolution, free will and consciousness.There's a lot of begging the question going on here - the Puppet / Autonomy label a case in point: Dennett correctly identifies the unsubtle characterisation of a person in a free-will thought experiment, but then seeks to prove his case by doing just the same. His central thesis is also curiously void at heart: I get his analysis of ever more complex "thinking" machines and how they could be equated to our own brains, with comparable levels of thought. But all it does is set up a comparison: why make the jump and say they must be the same? Why does this tell us anything about what consciousness is? It might do, but it can't get further than saying "I've shown you a similar system, a computer, which has the same theoretical structure as your brain. We can't see the consciousness in my example, so... you see...? *pump pump* There! I have explained consciousness!"The thing is, I get everything he says and I sorta (to borrow his convenient fuzzy phrase) agree. But I end up not thinking he's really solved anything.He also has a frustrating habit of falling into the same rhetorical tricks as ones he painstakingly and smugly criticises others for using. For example, he spends a while constructing and example of humans constructing robots to house their cryogenic bodies, giving those robots instructions and degrees of autonomy. Fun. He then declares "but what I have shown you is no different to genes using our bodies to replicate!" Really? I see some parallels, and they're sorta similar, but so?It's like trying to nail down jelly. Yes, I see what you've shown me, but every time you get close to a key issue, you sorta wobble, sorta allow the nail in, and then sorta ignore it.This may be the key problem with all this sorta comparisons and thought experiments. If you're minded to agree, you see the example and agree with it. If you disagree, you'll either pick it apart (if you can) or say that it's all. All well as far as it goes but it doesn't *prove* the point.I did like his "anything you can do, I can do meta. I can do many thing meta than you" line. Alas, this only inspired me to think of e whole thing as this: A Metaphor? Yes, fine, but what's a meta *for*? I'm very critical of philosophy in general, but Dennett seems to be one of the few philosophers doing it (mostly) right. The book consists of a vast collection of small thinking tools for sousing out comprehension from complex concepts -- most of them are silly, but it's likely beneficial to skim through the first half of the book to see if any of them work for you. What I found most fascinating, however, were the last few chapters. One was on "what is it like to be a philosopher" (apparently very circle-jerky; no big surprises there), and the other on "use the [thinking] tools; try harder" which is a good call to action for finding a use for critical thinking in ways which turn out to actually be useful.I'd recommend this book to people with philosophical inklings but who distrust the field, and then I'd tell them to head over to lesswrong.com and see if any of it sticks. The rest of you -- those on-board with Dennett and those with no interest in philosophy -- stay away and go read Kahneman; it'll be a better use of your time.
What do You think about Intuition Pumps And Other Tools For Thinking (2014)?
If you have red other Dennet's you don't need to spend your money on this one.
—cindy
