The illusion of consciousness | Dan Dennett

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schiffern · 2023-02 · Recommendation

One can equally say, "Human brains only know that a neuron is activated by a pattern of axon firing in response to physical inputs from nerve endings." Does any of that change anything? Not really. >It doesn't understand credit card rewards Is this assertion based on anything but philosophical bias surrounding the word "understand"? >it understands how to compose an elementary word problem into algebra That's exactly how a human, who may or may not have understood rewards programs beforehand, would solve that word problem. Dan Dennett is informative here.[0] Yes, consciousness (even your own!) can just be a bag of tricks. [0] [VIDEO]

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serf · 2020-09 · Recommendation

it's not just that phenomenon. Daniel Dennett mentions an experience where a painting , with very little detail up-close, appeared to him to have all the detail of a photograph when viewed from afar[0]. It's not quite the same thing as the uncanny valley effect, for him it came about from his naive expectation of up-close detail being blown apart by his experience, when getting closer and closer to the painting, of realizing that the painting itself was almost incomprehensible up-close -- the detail was created by the way the abstract shapes created the illusion of detail from afar on a very large canvas. It was sort of an artistic physical version of rendering LOD tricks. He expresses it much better than I do, I recommend the TED talk or the Google talk where he highlights this example as a way to gain insight into what consciousness may be. [0]: [VIDEO]

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js8 · 2021-03 · Reference

This view of art, where the spectator is active participant and generalizes from incomplete information, reminds of the painting that Dan Dennett loves to talk about: [VIDEO]

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