Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking

471 Pages·2013·3.94 MB·English

by  Daniel C. Dennett

I P
NTUITION UMPS
AND OTHER
TOOLS FOR THINKING

D C. D
ANIEL ENNETT
Dedication

FOR TUFTS UNIVERSITY, MY ACADEMIC HOME
CONTENTS

Cover
Title Page
Dedication

Preface
I. INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS AN INTUITION PUMP?
II. A DOZEN GENERAL THINKING TOOLS
1. Making Mistakes
2. “By Parody of Reasoning”: Using Reductio ad Absurdum
3. Rapoport’s Rules
4. Sturgeon’s Law
5. Occam’s Razor
6. Occam’s Broom
7. Using Lay Audiences as Decoys
8. Jootsing
9. Three Species of Goulding: Rathering, Piling On, and the Gould Two-Step
10. The “Surely” Operator: A Mental Block
11. Rhetorical Questions
12. What Is a Deepity?
Summary
III. TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT MEANING OR CONTENT
13. Murder in Trafalgar Square
14. An Older Brother Living in Cleveland
15. “Daddy Is a Doctor”
16. Manifest Image and Scientific Image
17. Folk Psychology
18. The Intentional Stance
19. The Personal/Sub-personal Distinction
20. A Cascade of Homunculi
21. The Sorta Operator
22. Wonder Tissue
23. Trapped in the Robot Control Room
IV. AN INTERLUDE ABOUT COMPUTERS
24. The Seven Secrets of Computer Power Revealed
25. Virtual Machines
26. Algorithms
27. Automating the Elevator
Summary
V. MORE TOOLS ABOUT MEANING
28. A Thing about Redheads
29. The Wandering Two-Bitser, Twin Earth, and the Giant Robot
30. Radical Translation and a Quinian Crossword Puzzle
31. Semantic Engines and Syntactic Engines
32. Swampman Meets a Cow-Shark
33. Two Black Boxes
Summary
VI. TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT EVOLUTION
34. Universal Acid
35. The Library of Mendel: Vast and Vanishing
36. Genes as Words or as Subroutines
37. The Tree of Life
38. Cranes and Skyhooks, Lifting in Design Space
39. Competence without Comprehension
40. Free-Floating Rationales
41. Do Locusts Understand Prime Numbers?
42. How to Explain Stotting
43. Beware of the Prime Mammal
44. When Does Speciation Occur?
45. Widowmakers, Mitochondrial Eve, and Retrospective Coronations
46. Cycles
47. What Does the Frog’s Eye Tell the Frog’s Brain?
48. Leaping through Space in the Library of Babel
49. Who Is the Author of Spamlet?
50. Noise in the Virtual Hotel
51. Herb, Alice, and Hal, the Baby
52. Memes
Summary
VII. TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS
53. Two Counter-images
54. The Zombic Hunch
55. Zombies and Zimboes
56. The Curse of the Cauliflower
57. Vim: How Much Is That in “Real Money”?
58. The Sad Case of Mr. Clapgras
59. The Tuned Deck
60. The Chinese Room
61. The Teleclone Fall from Mars to Earth
62. The Self as the Center of Narrative Gravity
63. Heterophenomenology
64. Mary the Color Scientist: A Boom Crutch Unveiled
Summary
VIII. TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT FREE WILL
65. A Truly Nefarious Neurosurgeon
66. A Deterministic Toy: Conway’s Game of Life
67. Rock, Paper, and Scissors
68. Two Lotteries
69. Inert Historical Facts
70. A Computer Chess Marathon
71. Ultimate Responsibility
72. Sphexishness
73. The Boys from Brazil: Another Boom Crutch
Summary
IX. WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A PHILOSOPHER?
74. A Faustian Bargain
75. Philosophy as Naïve Auto-anthropology
76. Higher-Order Truths of Chmess
77. The 10 Percent That’s Good
X. USE THE TOOLS. TRY HARDER.
XI. WHAT GOT LEFT OUT
Appendix: Solutions to Register Machine Problems
Sources
Bibliography
Credits
Index

Copyright
ALSO BY Daniel C. Dennett
PREFACE

Tufts University has been my academic home for more than forty years, and for
me it has always seemed to be just right, like Goldilocks’s porridge: not too
burdened, not too pampered, brilliant colleagues to learn from with a minimum
of academic prima donnas, good students serious enough to deserve attention
without thinking they are entitled to round-the-clock maintenance, an ivory
tower with a deep commitment to solving problems in the real world. Since
creating the Center for Cognitive Studies in 1986, Tufts has supported my
research, largely sparing me the ordeals and obligations of grantsmanship, and
given me remarkable freedom to work with folks in many fields, either traveling
afar to workshops, labs, and conferences or bringing visiting scholars and others
to the Center. This book shows what I’ve been up to all these years.
In the spring of 2012, I test-flew a first draft of the chapters in a seminar I
offered in the Tufts Philosophy Department. That has been my custom for years,
but this time I wanted the students to help me make the book as accessible to the
uninitiated as possible, so I excluded graduate students and philosophy majors
and limited the class to just a dozen intrepid freshmen, the first twelve—actually
thirteen, due to a clerical fumble—who volunteered. We led each other on a
rollicking trip through the topics, as they learned that they really could stand up
to the professor, and I learned that I really could reach back farther and explain it
all better. So here’s to my young collaborators, with thanks for their courage,
imagination, energy, and enthusiasm: Tom Addison, Nick Boswell, Tony
Cannistra, Brendan Fleig-Goldstein, Claire Hirschberg, Caleb Malchik, Carter
Palmer, Amar Patel, Kumar Ramanathan, Ariel Rascoe, Nikolai Renedo, Mikko
Silliman, and Eric Tondreau.
The second draft that emerged from that seminar was then read by my dear
friends Bo Dahlbom, Sue Stafford, and Dale Peterson, who provided me with
still further usefully candid appraisals and suggestions, most of which I have
followed, and by my editor, Drake McFeely, ably assisted by Brendan Curry, at
W. W. Norton, who are also responsible for many improvements, for which I am
grateful. Special thanks to Teresa Salvato, program coordinator at the Center for
Cognitive Studies, who contributed directly to the entire project in innumerable
ways and helped indirectly by managing the Center and my travels so effectively
that I could devote more time and energy to making and using my thinking tools.
Finally, as always, thanks and love to my wife, Susan. We’ve been a team for
fifty years, and she is as responsible as I am for what we, together, have done.

DANIEL C. DENNETT
Blue Hill, Maine
August 2012
I P
NTUITION UMPS
AND OTHER
TOOLS FOR THINKING