Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking One of the world’s leading philosophers offers aspiring thinkers his personal trove of mind-stretching thought experiments. Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett’s most successful "imagination-extenders and focus-holders" meant to guide you through some of life’s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will. With patience and wit, Dennett deftly deploys his thinking tools to gain traction on these thorny issues while offering readers insight into how and why each tool was built. Alongside well-known favorites like Occam’s Razor and reductio ad absurdum lie thrilling descriptions of Dennett’s own creations: Trapped in the Robot Control Room, Beware of the Prime Mammal, and The Wandering Two-Bitser. Ranging across disciplines as diverse as psychology, biology, computer science, and physics, Dennett’s tools embrace in equal measure light-heartedness and accessibility as they welcome uninitiated and seasoned readers alike. As always, his goal remains to teach you how to "think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions." A sweeping work of intellectual seriousness that’s also studded with impish delights, Intuition Pumps�offers intrepid thinkers—in all walks of life—delicious opportunities to explore their pet ideas with new powers. |
Contents
What Is an Intuition Pump? | 1 |
A DOZEN GENERAL THINKING TOOLS | 17 |
Making Mistakes | 19 |
Using Reductio ad Absurdum | 29 |
Rapoports Rules | 33 |
Sturgeons Law | 36 |
Occams Razor | 38 |
Occams Broom | 40 |
Summary | 197 |
tOOls fOr thinking abOut eVOlutiOn | 201 |
Universal acid | 203 |
Vast and Vanishing | 205 |
Genes as Words or as subroutines | 214 |
The Tree of life | 217 |
Cranes and skyhooks lifting in Design space | 218 |
Competence without Comprehension | 232 |
Using Lay Audiences as Decoys | 42 |
Jootsing | 45 |
Rathering Piling On and the Gould TwoStep | 48 |
A Mental Block | 53 |
Rhetorical Questions | 55 |
What Is a Deepity? | 56 |
Summary | 58 |
TOOLS FOR THINKING ABOUT MEANING OR CONTENT | 59 |
Murder in Trafalgar Square | 61 |
An Older Brother Living in Cleveland | 65 |
Daddy Is a Doctor | 68 |
Manifest Image and Scientific Image | 69 |
Folk Psychology | 73 |
The Intentional Stance | 77 |
The PersonalSubpersonal Distinction | 86 |
a Cascade of Homunculi | 91 |
The Sorta operator | 96 |
Wonder Tissue | 98 |
Trapped in the Robot Control Room | 102 |
an interlude abOut COMputers | 107 |
The seven secrets of Computer Power Revealed | 109 |
Virtual Machines | 133 |
algorithms | 140 |
automating the Elevator | 143 |
Summary | 148 |
MOre tOOls abOut Meaning | 151 |
a Thing about Redheads | 153 |
The Wandering Twobitser Twin Earth and the Giant Robot | 157 |
Radical Translation and a Quinian Crossword Puzzle | 175 |
semantic Engines and syntactic Engines | 178 |
swampman Meets a Cowshark | 180 |
Two black boxes | 184 |
FreeFloating Rationales | 234 |
Do locusts Understand Prime Numbers? | 236 |
How to Explain stotting | 238 |
beware of the Prime Mammal | 240 |
When Does speciation occur? | 246 |
Cycles | 252 |
What Does the Frogs Eye Tell the Frogs brain? | 258 |
Noise in the Virtual Hotel | 269 |
Memes | 276 |
Two Counterimages | 283 |
The Curse of the Cauliflower | 298 |
The sad Case of Mr Clapgras | 304 |
The Tuned Deck | 310 |
The Chinese Room | 321 |
The Teleclone Fall from Mars to Earth | 332 |
Heterophenomenology | 343 |
Summary | 354 |
Conways Game of life | 361 |
Rock Paper and scissors | 372 |
Two lotteries | 377 |
70 | 386 |
Ultimate Responsibility | 395 |
another boom Crutch | 403 |
What is it like tO be a philOsOpher? | 409 |
Higherorder Truths of Chmess | 420 |
The 10 Percent Thats Good | 427 |
Solutions to Register Machine Problems | 435 |
Sources | 445 |
Bibliography | 451 |
| 463 | |
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