"...I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now…" Thank Goodness!
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After decades of enthusiastically following AI’s development, Dennett published a brief, unequivocal essay in The Atlantic earlier this year, “The Problem With Counterfeit People,” arguing that “creating counterfeit digital people” — known as deepfakes — could “destroy our civilization. . . . By allowing the most economically and politically powerful people, corporations, and governments to control our attention, these systems will control us.” Humanity’s future, he believes, depends on strict regulation: he wants every AI-generated thing to have some kind of watermark, so we can tell the difference between fake and real. Meanwhile, he’s taken to warning about the gaps in our understanding of the algorithms that drive machine learning. “Don’t worry about whether it is conscious or not, don’t worry about whether it’s alive or not,” he told me. “Worry about the fact that it can replicate and hence evolve independently of us. That’s what’s scary, because you can’t predict the mutations.”
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“I think that my career has been all about opening philosophers’ minds to the facts they need to know if they are going to avoid the great foible of philosophy, which is mistaking failures of imagination for insights into necessity.”
He paused again, then said he particularly liked the last part of that sentence. “Your imagination is not gonna get any better if you don’t get out there and learn stuff,” he said. Then he repeated one of his more famous lines: “What you can imagine depends on what you know.”
“So maybe,” I asked, “you occasionally need to replace the footing on the barn?”
“Yeah,” he said…
https://downeast.com/arts-leisure/philosopher-daniel-dennett-on-the-illusion-of-consciousness/
Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soulhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul
Dennett versus Searle https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-consciousness-an-exchange/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
…If we can’t say exactly how we think, then how well do we know ourselves? In an essay titled “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” the philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that a layer of fiction is woven into what it is to be human. In a sense, fiction is flawed: it’s not true. But, when we open a novel, we don’t hurl it to the ground in disgust, declaring that it’s all made-up nonsense; we understand that being made up is actually the point. Fiction, Dennett writes, has a deliberately “indeterminate” status: it’s true, but only on its own terms. The same goes for our minds. We have all sorts of inner experiences, and we live through and describe them in different ways—telling one another about our dreams, recalling our thoughts, and so on. Are our descriptions and experiences true or fictionalized? Does it matter? It’s all part of the story.
Stories aren’t real, and yet they’re meaningful; we tell different stories about our minds, as we should, because our minds are different. The story I tell myself about my own thinking is useful to me. It helps me think, by giving me a handle on my mind when thinking gets slippery. The other day, I got stuck on a problem that troubled me. So I went for a swim, hoping to think it through. I wore a wetsuit against the cold water, and at first focussed only on the sensation of cold, and on steadying my breathing. But eventually I warmed up and relaxed. I treaded water a little way out from shore, buoyed by the waves, and prepared to think about my problem; I turned my mind toward it while I watched a seabird float nearby. Nothing happened for a while. I watched the bird, the clouds, the silver water. Then I sensed a thought in need of expression, as I’d known I would. I cleared my throat while the bird flew away. ♦︎
How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/16/how-should-we-think-about-our-different-styles-of-thinking
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