Closer To Truth - Daniel Dennett Interviews

source: Closer To Truth

Daniel Dennett Interview on Mind, Matter, & Meaning

source: Philosophical Overdose     2015年6月27日
An interesting interview with Daniel Dennett discussing various philosophical issues having to do with mind and meaning. Some of the topics discussed include consciousness, science, materialism, computation, meaning/purpose in biology, emergence & reductionism, the intentional stance, evolution, philosophical zombies, the self, and free will.
This interview was given by Robert Pollie from a podcast called the 7th Avenue Project. For more information, go to www.7thavenueproject.com.

What is Belief? (Closer to Truth)

# click the up-left corner to select videos from the playlist

source: Closer To Truth     2016年7月25日
Everyone has beliefs—some are simple and basic (e.g., my name, age), others complex and controversial (e.g., God? Soul? Politics? Morality?). But what is the concept of 'belief'? What does it take for some statement to be a 'belief'?
Click here to watch more interviews on belief http://bit.ly/2ab7Lgn
Click here to watch more interviews with Rebecca Goldstein http://bit.ly/1RxuI0c
Click here to buy episodes or complete seasons of Closer To Truth http://bit.ly/1LUPlQS
For all of our video interviews please visit us at www.closertotruth.com

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein - What is Belief? 8:31
Daniel Dennett - What is Belief? 5:34
John Searle - What is Belief? 8:05

Daniel Dennett - What is the Mind-Body Problem?

source: Closer To Truth    2014年6月30日
How is it possible that mushy masses of brain cells, passing chemicals and shooting sparks, can cause mental sensations and subjective feelings? How can brain chemistry and electricity be 'about' things?
For more videos on the mind-body problem click here http://bit.ly/1ItBBHw
For more on information on Daniel Dennett click here http://bit.ly/1y49TBd

Crazy Wisdom: Daniel Dennett on Reductio ad Absurdum

source: Big Think· 2013-07-12
With his new book "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking," (http://goo.gl/FtKWl) philosopher Daniel Dennett offers a kind of self-help book for deep thinkers -- a series of thought experiments designed as a workout for the deliberative mind. Here he discusses reductio ad absurdum, "the workhorse of philosophical argumentation", wherewith thinkers test the validity of an opponent's argument by taking it to its most illogical extreme.

Transcript -- One of the reasons I wrote this book is because oddly enough, philosophers who are famous -- notorious for being naval gazers, for being reflective. I think, in fact, philosophers are often remarkably unreflective about their own methodology. I wanted to draw attention to how philosophers actually go about their business and get them thinking more self-consciously about the tools they use and how they use them.

A tool that everybody should be familiar with and, in fact, people use it all the time is reductio ad absurdum arguments. It's the sort of general purpose crowbar of rational argument where you take your opponents premises and deduce something absurd from them. That is, you deduce a contradiction officially. We use it all the time without paying much attention to it. If you say something like -- if he gets here in time for supper, he'll have to fly like Superman. Which is absurd -- nobody can fly that fast. You don't bother spelling it out, you just say -- you point out that something that somebody imagined or proposed has a ridiculous consequence.

Well, let's look at one of the great granddaddy reductio ad absurdum arguments of all times. And that's Galileo's proof that heavy things don't fall faster than light things leaving friction aside. He argued as follows. Okay, suppose you take the premise that you're gonna show is false. Suppose heavier things do fall faster than light things. Now, take a stone A which is heavier than another stone B. That means if we tied B to A with a string, B should act as a drag on A when we drop it because A will fall faster, B will fall slower and so A tied to B should fall slower than A by itself.

But A-B tied together is heavier than A by itself so it should fall faster. It should fall both faster and slower than A by itself. That's a manifest contradiction. So we know that our premise with which we began has to be false. That's a classic reductio ad absurdum. That's been known and named for several millennia I guess. And, as I say, it's the workhorse of philosophical argumentation.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd