Daniel Dennett
Article
Daniel Dennett is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 13, 2022 and July 16, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Daniel Dennett argues that a more appropriate description is the multiple drafts model…""; “just like Geoff Hinton, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Daniel Dennett”; “special characteristics of qualia that distinguish it from normal unconscious information processing, given by Daniel Dennett”. It most often appears alongside John Searle, Wikipedia, #57.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: May 13, 2022
- Last seen: July 16, 2024
Appears In
- Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain
- In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism
- Consciousness As Recursive Reflections
Related Pages
-
- John Searle (2 shared issues)
-
- Wikipedia (2 shared issues)
-
- #57 (1 shared issues)
-
- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
-
- Adam D’Angelo (1 shared issues)
-
- AI (1 shared issues)
-
- AI doomerism (1 shared issues)
-
- AI risk (1 shared issues)
-
- AI Safety (1 shared issues)
-
- animal welfare (1 shared issues)
-
- Anthropic (1 shared issues)
-
- ARC Evals (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
- In the book Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett argues that a more appropriate description is the multiple drafts model (also called Cartesian theater): the brain is a collection of many different regions, all of which follow their natural task of observing the surrounding neural activity. Each region acts like a little agent with its own perception. The experience is then just the collection of these local experiences.
Inline links: Consciousness Explained
I don’t want the takeaway from this post to be “Sure, you may hate EA because it does a lot of work on AI - but come on, it also does a lot of work on global health and poverty!” I’m proud of all of it. I believe - just like Geoff Hinton, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Daniel Dennett, etc - that there’s a pretty serious risk of human extinction from AI over the next few decades. I can’t imagine believing this and not thinking it’s important to prepare for. EA has done a great job working on this (see list of accomplishments above), and I think the AI and x-risk people have just as much to be proud of as the global health and animal welfare people.
Inline links: just like
The jhāna states seem to indicate that after considerable training in maintaining self-reflection, the minimum number of simultaneous qualia can go down to one. In that case, the remaining one quale will appear to pervade everything. If you don’t have any, you’re unconscious. Then there are the four special characteristics of qualia that distinguish it from normal unconscious information processing, given by Daniel Dennett5. Ineffable: qualia cannot be communicated, or apprehended in any way other than direct experience.
Inline links: jhāna states, 5
Daniel Dennett: Quining Qualia. The summaries are from the Wikipedia page on qualia.
Inline links: Quining Qualia, the Wikipedia page on qualia