## Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking ### Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking ![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/default-book-icon-6.71d9a01814f7.png) #### Metadata * Author: [[Daniel C. Dennett]] * Full Title: Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking * Category: #books #### Highlights * often of the form reductio ad absurdum,1 in which one takes one's opponents' premises and derives a formal contradiction (an absurd result), showing that they can't all be right. One of my favorites is the proof attributed to Galileo that heavy things don't fall faster than lighter things (when friction is negligible). If they did, he argued, then since heavy stone A would fall faster than light stone B, if we tied B to A, stone B would act as a drag, slowing A down. But A tied to B is heavier than A alone, so the two together should also fall faster than A by itself. We have concluded that tying B to A would make something that fell both faster and slower than A by itself, which is a contradiction. (Location 194) * This self-conscious wariness with which we should approach any intuition pump is itself an important tool for thinking, the philosophers' favorite tactic: "going meta"—thinking about thinking, talking about talking, reasoning about reasoning. Meta-language is the language we use to talk about another language, and meta-ethics is a bird's-eye view examination of ethical theories. As I once said to Doug, "Anything you can do I can do meta-." This whole book is, of course, an example of going meta: exploring how to think carefully about methods of thinking carefully (about methods of thinking carefully, etc.).3 He recently (2007) offered a list of some of his own favorite small hand tools: wild goose chases tackiness dirty tricks sour grapes elbow grease feet of clay loose cannons crackpots lip service slam dunks feedback (Location 249) * course, as the old saw has it, when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and each of these tools can be overused. (Location 267) * Another reason why scientists are often suspicious of theoretical discussions conducted in "mere words" is that they recognize that the task of criticizing an argument not formulated in mathematical equations is much trickier, and typically less conclusive. (Location 291) * The middle ground, roughly halfway between poetry and mathematics, is where philosophers can make their best contributions, I believe, yielding genuine clarifications of deeply puzzling problems. (Location 311) * In the first section that follows, I present a dozen general, all-purpose tools, and then in subsequent sections I group the rest of the entries not by the type of tool but by the topic where the tool works best, turning first to the most fundamental philosophical topic—meaning, or content—followed by evolution, consciousness, and free will. A few of the tools I present are actual software, friendly devices that can do for your naked imagination what telescopes and microscopes can do for your naked (Location 328) * We have all heard the forlorn refrain "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!" This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appreciate it as a pillar of wisdom. Any being, any agent, who can truly say, "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!" is standing on the threshold of brilliance. We human beings pride ourselves on our intelligence, and one of its hallmarks is that we can remember our previous thinking, and reflect on it—on how it seemed, on why it was tempting in the first place, and then about what went wrong. I know of no evidence to suggest that any other species on the planet can actually think this thought. If they could, they would be almost as smart as we are. (Location 435) * them—exploit with amazing results. (I don't expect to incur the wrath of the magicians for revealing this trick to you, since this is not a particular trick but a deep general principle.) A good card magician knows many tricks that depend on luck—they don't always work, or even often work. There are some effects—they can hardly be called tricks—that might work only once in a thousand times! Here is what you do: You start by telling the audience you are going to perform a trick, and without telling them what trick you are doing, you go for the one-in-a-thousand effect. It almost never works, of course, so you glide seamlessly into a second try—for an effect that works about one time in a hundred, perhaps—and when it too fails (as it almost always will), you slide gracefully into effect number 3, which works only about one time in ten, so you'd better be ready with effect number 4, which works half the time (let's say). If all else fails (and by this time, usually one of the earlier safety nets will have kept you out of this worst case), you have a failsafe effect, which won't impress the crowd very much but at least it's a surefire trick. (Location 477) * That is the ideal, but we don't always live up to it, human nature being what it is. One of the recognized but unsolved problems with current scientific practice is that negative results—experiments that didn't uncover what they were designed to uncover—are not published often enough. This flaw in the system is famously explored and deplored in Feynman's "Cargo Cult Lecture," a commencement address he gave at Caltech in 1974, reprinted in Feynman, 1985. (Location 524) * Here are a few to consider. You decide. The French neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux and I once debated neuroscientist Sir John Eccles and philosopher Sir Karl Popper about consciousness and the brain at a conference in Venice. Changeux and I were the materialists (who maintain that the mind is the brain), and Popper and Eccles the dualists (who claim that a mind is not a material thing like a brain, but some other, second kind of entity that interacts with the brain). (Location 548) * How to compose a successful critical commentary: 1. You should attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way." 2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement). 3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target. 4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism. One immediate effect of following these rules is that your targets will be a receptive audience for your criticism: you have already shown that you understand their positions as well as they do, and have demonstrated good judgment (you agree with them on some important matters and have even been persuaded by something they said).3 Following Rapoport's (Location 605) * One of the least impressive attempts to apply Occam's Razor to a gnarly problem is the claim (and provoked counterclaims) that postulating a God as creator of the universe is simpler, more parsimonious, than the alternatives. How could postulating something supernatural and incomprehensible be parsimonious? (Location 672) * account of punctuated equilibrium: Change does not usually occur by imperceptibly gradual alteration of entire species but rather [my italics] by isolation of small populations and their geologically instantaneous transformation into new species. [1992b, p. 12] This passage invites us to believe that evolutionary change could not be both "geologically instantaneous" and "imperceptibly gradual" at the same time. But of course it can be. (Location 798) * Let us suppose we are going to insert into Tom's brain the following false belief: I have an older brother living in Cleveland. Let us suppose the cognitive micro-neurosurgeon can do the requisite rewiring, (Location 1029) * "I don't know his name," and when pressed he will deny all knowledge of this brother and assert things like "I am an only child and have an older brother living in Cleveland." In neither case has our cognitive micro-neurosurgeon succeeded in wiring in a new belief. In the first case, Tom's intact rationality wipes out the (lone, unsupported) intruder as soon as it makes an appearance. (Location 1034) * This science-fiction example highlights the tacit presumption of mental competence that underlies all belief attributions; unless you have an indefinitely extensible repertoire of ways to use your candidate belief (if that is what it is) in different contexts, it is not a belief in any remotely recognizable sense. If the surgeon has done the work delicately, preserving the competence of the brain, that brain will undo this handiwork as soon as the issue arises—or else, pathologically, the brain will surround the handiwork with layers of pearly confabulation ("His name is Sebastian, and he's a circus acrobat who lives in a balloon"). Such confabulation is not unknown; people suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome (the amnesia that often afflicts alcoholics) (Location 1041) * What this intuition pump shows is that nobody can have just one belief. (You can't believe a dog has four legs without believing that legs are limbs and four is greater than three, etc.)1 It shows other things as well, but I won't pause to enumerate them. Nor will I try to say now how one might use a variation on this very specific thinking tool for other purposes—though you are invited to turn the knobs yourself, to see what you come up with. I want to get a varied assortment of such thinking tools on display before we reflect more on their features. (Location 1051) * Some people have said that color is an illusion. Is it? Electromagnetic radiation in the narrow range that accounts for human vision (the range in between infrared and ultraviolet) is not made of little colored things, and atoms, even gold atoms, aren't colored. But still, color is not an illusion in the sense that matters: nobody thinks Sony is lying when it says that its color televisions really show the world of color, (Location 1081) * Sellars (1962, p. 1) famously said, "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." (Location 1087) * Umwelt is really an engineering concept; consider the ontology of a computer-controlled elevator, the set of all the things it needs to keep track of in order to do its job. (Location 1104) * Artists and philosophers agree on one thing: one of their self-appointed tasks is to "make the familiar strange."1 Some of the great strokes of creative genius get us to break through the crust of excessive familiarity, jootsing into the new perspective where we can look at ordinary, obvious things with fresh eyes. Scientists couldn't agree more. Newton's mythic moment was asking himself the weird question about why the apple fell down from the tree. ("Well, why wouldn't it?" asks the everyday non-genius. "It's heavy!"—as if this were a satisfactory explanation.) (Location 1152) * 1. "knows" the rules and "knows how" to play chess, 2. "wants" to win, and 3. will "see" these possibilities and opportunities for what they are, and act accordingly (that is, rationally). In other words, you assume the computer is a good chess player, or at least not an idiotic, self-destructive chess player. You treat it, in other other words, as if it were a human being with a mind. In still further other words, when you use folk psychology to anticipate and understand its moves, you have adopted the intentional stance. (Location 1196) * Your eyes don't see; you do. Your mouth doesn't enjoy chocolate cake; you do. Your brain doesn't abhor the stinging pain in your shoulder; you do. Your hand doesn't sign a contract; you do. Your body may be aroused, but you fall in love. This is not just a "grammatical" point, like the fact that we say, "It's raining," when there is a thunderstorm, not "the thunderstorm is raining." Nor is it just a matter of definitional convention. People sometimes ask, dismissively, "Isn't this just semantics?" which is taken to mean that nothing much hangs on how we "define our terms." But how we define our terms often does make a big difference, and this is one of those times. Our way of speaking about persons and what they can do and suffer is grounded in some important facts. (Location 1346) * brain, nothing my arms and hands could do counts as signing a contract. Pluck out my eyes and I cannot see, unless I get fitted with prosthetic eyeballs, which are not such a distant science-fiction fantasy. What if you start "amputating" parts of my brain? If you were to remove the occipital cortex while leaving my eyes and optic nerve intact, I would be "cortically blind" but might still have some residual visual competence (for instance, the famous condition known as blindsight). No doubt we could amputate a bit more brain and wipe out the blindsight, while still leaving you a life to lead. The tempting idea is that such a process of elimination, removing hearing, touch, taste, and smell, could pare down the brain to the ultimate headquarters of you—and that is where, and what, a person would be. Tempting but wrong. The brain's multitudinous competences are so intertwined and interacting that there simply is no central place in the brain "where it all comes together" for consciousness.1 For that matter, many of the competences, dispositions, preferences, and quirks that make you you depend on paths through your body outside your brain; the always popular philosophical thought experiment of the brain transplant (which would you rather be: the brain "donor" or the brain "recipient"?) is enabled by a very distorting idealization. As I once put it, "One cannot tear me from my body, leaving a nice clean edge" (1996a, p. 77). (Location 1355) * The small child sorta understands her own sentence "Daddy is a doctor," and I sorta understand "E = mc2." Some philosophers resist this anti-essentialism (see chapter 43): either you believe that snow is white or you don't; either you are conscious or you aren't; nothing counts as an approximation of any mental phenomenon; it's all or nothing. And to such thinkers, the powers of minds are insoluble mysteries because minds are "perfect," and perfectly unlike anything to be found in mere material mechanisms. (Location 1521) * idea, that brains come equipped with an internal language that they never have to learn—Mentalese, or the Language of Thought (Fodor, 1975, 2008)—is (Location 1616) * Bacteria have all sorts of remarkable competences that they need not understand at all; their competences (Location 1635) # Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking ![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/default-book-icon-6.71d9a01814f7.png) ## Metadata - Author: [[Daniel C. Dennett]] - Full Title: Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking - Category: #books ## Highlights - often of the form reductio ad absurdum,1 in which one takes one’s opponents’ premises and derives a formal contradiction (an absurd result), showing that they can’t all be right. One of my favorites is the proof attributed to Galileo that heavy things don’t fall faster than lighter things (when friction is negligible). If they did, he argued, then since heavy stone A would fall faster than light stone B, if we tied B to A, stone B would act as a drag, slowing A down. But A tied to B is heavier than A alone, so the two together should also fall faster than A by itself. We have concluded that tying B to A would make something that fell both faster and slower than A by itself, which is a contradiction. (Location 194) - This self-conscious wariness with which we should approach any intuition pump is itself an important tool for thinking, the philosophers’ favorite tactic: “going meta”—thinking about thinking, talking about talking, reasoning about reasoning. Meta-language is the language we use to talk about another language, and meta-ethics is a bird’s-eye view examination of ethical theories. As I once said to Doug, “Anything you can do I can do meta-.” This whole book is, of course, an example of going meta: exploring how to think carefully about methods of thinking carefully (about methods of thinking carefully, etc.).3 He recently (2007) offered a list of some of his own favorite small hand tools: wild goose chases tackiness dirty tricks sour grapes elbow grease feet of clay loose cannons crackpots lip service slam dunks feedback (Location 249) - course, as the old saw has it, when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and each of these tools can be overused. (Location 267) - Another reason why scientists are often suspicious of theoretical discussions conducted in “mere words” is that they recognize that the task of criticizing an argument not formulated in mathematical equations is much trickier, and typically less conclusive. (Location 291) - The middle ground, roughly halfway between poetry and mathematics, is where philosophers can make their best contributions, I believe, yielding genuine clarifications of deeply puzzling problems. (Location 311) - In the first section that follows, I present a dozen general, all-purpose tools, and then in subsequent sections I group the rest of the entries not by the type of tool but by the topic where the tool works best, turning first to the most fundamental philosophical topic—meaning, or content—followed by evolution, consciousness, and free will. A few of the tools I present are actual software, friendly devices that can do for your naked imagination what telescopes and microscopes can do for your naked (Location 328) - We have all heard the forlorn refrain “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!” This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appreciate it as a pillar of wisdom. Any being, any agent, who can truly say, “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!” is standing on the threshold of brilliance. We human beings pride ourselves on our intelligence, and one of its hallmarks is that we can remember our previous thinking, and reflect on it—on how it seemed, on why it was tempting in the first place, and then about what went wrong. I know of no evidence to suggest that any other species on the planet can actually think this thought. If they could, they would be almost as smart as we are. (Location 435) - them—exploit with amazing results. (I don’t expect to incur the wrath of the magicians for revealing this trick to you, since this is not a particular trick but a deep general principle.) A good card magician knows many tricks that depend on luck—they don’t always work, or even often work. There are some effects—they can hardly be called tricks—that might work only once in a thousand times! Here is what you do: You start by telling the audience you are going to perform a trick, and without telling them what trick you are doing, you go for the one-in-a-thousand effect. It almost never works, of course, so you glide seamlessly into a second try—for an effect that works about one time in a hundred, perhaps—and when it too fails (as it almost always will), you slide gracefully into effect number 3, which works only about one time in ten, so you’d better be ready with effect number 4, which works half the time (let’s say). If all else fails (and by this time, usually one of the earlier safety nets will have kept you out of this worst case), you have a failsafe effect, which won’t impress the crowd very much but at least it’s a surefire trick. (Location 477) - That is the ideal, but we don’t always live up to it, human nature being what it is. One of the recognized but unsolved problems with current scientific practice is that negative results—experiments that didn’t uncover what they were designed to uncover—are not published often enough. This flaw in the system is famously explored and deplored in Feynman’s “Cargo Cult Lecture,” a commencement address he gave at Caltech in 1974, reprinted in Feynman, 1985. (Location 524) - Here are a few to consider. You decide. The French neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux and I once debated neuroscientist Sir John Eccles and philosopher Sir Karl Popper about consciousness and the brain at a conference in Venice. Changeux and I were the materialists (who maintain that the mind is the brain), and Popper and Eccles the dualists (who claim that a mind is not a material thing like a brain, but some other, second kind of entity that interacts with the brain). (Location 548) - How to compose a successful critical commentary: 1. You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” 2. You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement). 3. You should mention anything you have learned from your target. 4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism. One immediate effect of following these rules is that your targets will be a receptive audience for your criticism: you have already shown that you understand their positions as well as they do, and have demonstrated good judgment (you agree with them on some important matters and have even been persuaded by something they said).3 Following Rapoport’s (Location 605) - One of the least impressive attempts to apply Occam’s Razor to a gnarly problem is the claim (and provoked counterclaims) that postulating a God as creator of the universe is simpler, more parsimonious, than the alternatives. How could postulating something supernatural and incomprehensible be parsimonious? (Location 672) - account of punctuated equilibrium: Change does not usually occur by imperceptibly gradual alteration of entire species but rather [my italics] by isolation of small populations and their geologically instantaneous transformation into new species. [1992b, p. 12] This passage invites us to believe that evolutionary change could not be both “geologically instantaneous” and “imperceptibly gradual” at the same time. But of course it can be. (Location 798) - Let us suppose we are going to insert into Tom’s brain the following false belief: I have an older brother living in Cleveland. Let us suppose the cognitive micro-neurosurgeon can do the requisite rewiring, (Location 1029) - “I don’t know his name,” and when pressed he will deny all knowledge of this brother and assert things like “I am an only child and have an older brother living in Cleveland.” In neither case has our cognitive micro-neurosurgeon succeeded in wiring in a new belief. In the first case, Tom’s intact rationality wipes out the (lone, unsupported) intruder as soon as it makes an appearance. (Location 1034) - This science-fiction example highlights the tacit presumption of mental competence that underlies all belief attributions; unless you have an indefinitely extensible repertoire of ways to use your candidate belief (if that is what it is) in different contexts, it is not a belief in any remotely recognizable sense. If the surgeon has done the work delicately, preserving the competence of the brain, that brain will undo this handiwork as soon as the issue arises—or else, pathologically, the brain will surround the handiwork with layers of pearly confabulation (“His name is Sebastian, and he’s a circus acrobat who lives in a balloon”). Such confabulation is not unknown; people suffering from Korsakoff’s syndrome (the amnesia that often afflicts alcoholics) (Location 1041) - What this intuition pump shows is that nobody can have just one belief. (You can’t believe a dog has four legs without believing that legs are limbs and four is greater than three, etc.)1 It shows other things as well, but I won’t pause to enumerate them. Nor will I try to say now how one might use a variation on this very specific thinking tool for other purposes—though you are invited to turn the knobs yourself, to see what you come up with. I want to get a varied assortment of such thinking tools on display before we reflect more on their features. (Location 1051) - Some people have said that color is an illusion. Is it? Electromagnetic radiation in the narrow range that accounts for human vision (the range in between infrared and ultraviolet) is not made of little colored things, and atoms, even gold atoms, aren’t colored. But still, color is not an illusion in the sense that matters: nobody thinks Sony is lying when it says that its color televisions really show the world of color, (Location 1081) - Sellars (1962, p. 1) famously said, “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” (Location 1087) - Umwelt is really an engineering concept; consider the ontology of a computer-controlled elevator, the set of all the things it needs to keep track of in order to do its job. (Location 1104) - Artists and philosophers agree on one thing: one of their self-appointed tasks is to “make the familiar strange.”1 Some of the great strokes of creative genius get us to break through the crust of excessive familiarity, jootsing into the new perspective where we can look at ordinary, obvious things with fresh eyes. Scientists couldn’t agree more. Newton’s mythic moment was asking himself the weird question about why the apple fell down from the tree. (“Well, why wouldn’t it?” asks the everyday non-genius. “It’s heavy!”—as if this were a satisfactory explanation.) (Location 1152) - 1. “knows” the rules and “knows how” to play chess, 2. “wants” to win, and 3. will “see” these possibilities and opportunities for what they are, and act accordingly (that is, rationally). In other words, you assume the computer is a good chess player, or at least not an idiotic, self-destructive chess player. You treat it, in other other words, as if it were a human being with a mind. In still further other words, when you use folk psychology to anticipate and understand its moves, you have adopted the intentional stance. (Location 1196) - Your eyes don’t see; you do. Your mouth doesn’t enjoy chocolate cake; you do. Your brain doesn’t abhor the stinging pain in your shoulder; you do. Your hand doesn’t sign a contract; you do. Your body may be aroused, but you fall in love. This is not just a “grammatical” point, like the fact that we say, “It’s raining,” when there is a thunderstorm, not “the thunderstorm is raining.” Nor is it just a matter of definitional convention. People sometimes ask, dismissively, “Isn’t this just semantics?” which is taken to mean that nothing much hangs on how we “define our terms.” But how we define our terms often does make a big difference, and this is one of those times. Our way of speaking about persons and what they can do and suffer is grounded in some important facts. (Location 1346) - brain, nothing my arms and hands could do counts as signing a contract. Pluck out my eyes and I cannot see, unless I get fitted with prosthetic eyeballs, which are not such a distant science-fiction fantasy. What if you start “amputating” parts of my brain? If you were to remove the occipital cortex while leaving my eyes and optic nerve intact, I would be “cortically blind” but might still have some residual visual competence (for instance, the famous condition known as blindsight). No doubt we could amputate a bit more brain and wipe out the blindsight, while still leaving you a life to lead. The tempting idea is that such a process of elimination, removing hearing, touch, taste, and smell, could pare down the brain to the ultimate headquarters of you—and that is where, and what, a person would be. Tempting but wrong. The brain’s multitudinous competences are so intertwined and interacting that there simply is no central place in the brain “where it all comes together” for consciousness.1 For that matter, many of the competences, dispositions, preferences, and quirks that make you you depend on paths through your body outside your brain; the always popular philosophical thought experiment of the brain transplant (which would you rather be: the brain “donor” or the brain “recipient”?) is enabled by a very distorting idealization. As I once put it, “One cannot tear me from my body, leaving a nice clean edge” (1996a, p. 77). (Location 1355) - The small child sorta understands her own sentence “Daddy is a doctor,” and I sorta understand “E = mc2.” Some philosophers resist this anti-essentialism (see chapter 43): either you believe that snow is white or you don’t; either you are conscious or you aren’t; nothing counts as an approximation of any mental phenomenon; it’s all or nothing. And to such thinkers, the powers of minds are insoluble mysteries because minds are “perfect,” and perfectly unlike anything to be found in mere material mechanisms. (Location 1521) - idea, that brains come equipped with an internal language that they never have to learn—Mentalese, or the Language of Thought (Fodor, 1975, 2008)—is (Location 1616) - Bacteria have all sorts of remarkable competences that they need not understand at all; their competences (Location 1635)