Of course we have free will. — René Descartes
Aren't all free wills the same thing? Whether it be religious or scientific it is still free will. — René Descartes
moist robot, — gurugeorge
It's Scott Adams' coinage, picked up by Daniel Dennett. — gurugeorge
Do you think using an analogy from a comic strip invalidates the points Dennett is making? — gurugeorge
No. I think it fully validates it as pure comic fantasy. Dennett's is just spinning tales from pure imagination. People who want to role-play bots (I use to role-play play Superman as a child) love it. — Rich
Dennett is spinning tales from pure imagination? What makes you think that? — gurugeorge
Have you ever seen or experienced a Moist Robot in your body? — Rich
How can you see or experience a metaphor, or analogy? — gurugeorge
all Dennett's is doing is replacing Mind with the carefully chosen substitution character Moist Robot — Rich
replace our ordinary mental concepts with snazzy new ones — gurugeorge
Because after all we do have this problem that science seems to be telling us one thing, and our ordinary mental concepts seem to be telling us another - so how do we reconcile the two? — gurugeorge
His middle-ground is that yes, it's an illusion in a certain precise sense, but it's a benign illusion — gurugeorge
You will note, for example, that he (Dennett) is pretty staunch in defending the concept of free will as necessary for society, necessary for us to use, — gurugeorge
As for me, I still retain the same Mind as I had since I was a baby. — Rich
Ignore biological science. — Rich
yeah but as a necessary illusion. Talk about ‘condescending’. The point is, if mind is real, Dennett’s entire life work is undone. — Wayfarer
we do have this problem that science seems to be telling us one thing, and our ordinary mental concepts seem to be telling us another - so how do we reconcile the two? Dennett's general theme is that when you look clearly at what each Image seems to be telling us, maybe it's not actually telling us what it seems to be telling us; maybe the Scientific Image doesn't have the dire implications it seems to have, and maybe by some slight revisions of our ordinary mental concepts, we can see how they can be reconciled with the Scientific Image. — gurugeorge
Some of the biologists [at the 'Moving Naturalism Forward' conference] thought the materialist view of the world should be taught and explained to the wider public in its true, high-octane, Crickian form. Then common, non-intellectual people might see that a purely random universe without purpose or free will or spiritual life of any kind isn’t as bad as some superstitious people— religious people! —have led them to believe.
Daniel Dennett took a different view. While it is true that materialism tells us a human being is nothing more than a “moist robot”—a phrase Dennett took from a Dilbert comic—we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that “for general purposes” the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist—that colors and sounds exist, too—“just not in the way they think.” They “exist in a special way,” which is to say, ultimately, not at all.
On this point the discussion grew testy at times. I was reminded of the debate among British censors over the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover half a century ago. “Fine for you or me,” one prosecutor is said to have remarked, “but is this the sort of thing you would leave lying about for your wife or servant to read?”
Is some of our behavior determined by physics, chemistry, biology? I suppose it is. — Bitter Crank
I don't see why having faith in God does not equate to having faith in your senses. — René Descartes
Can I see this "huge elaborate proof". — René Descartes
How would you know? — gurugeorge
, Dennett isn't asking you to change it entirely, just to revise it and modify it in the light of science. — gurugeorge
You have to meditate on the absolute absurdity of quantum wave-particles asking questions of other quantum-wave particles. — Rich
Exactly what scientific evidence is there that little Moist Robots are zooming around in the body. — Rich
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