🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7650@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

>Perhaps you saw the tv show about Dennett.  Was it Panorama?
>BBC?  ITV?  Maybe I'd better look it up...  

>Anway, I found that more or less infuriating.  For instance, Dennett
>told us a bit about Descartes, consciousness and the pituitary gland,
>etc, and then tried to make it sound like virtually all philosophers
>held that view!  We call this a straw man where I come from.

>Then, again and again, there was a huge gap between some amazing
>example or experiment and the conclusion Dennett seemed to want
>us to draw from it.

I'm a Dennett fan and made a point of recording it. I was so disgusted
after watching it that I erased it. It was a comic-book travesty and I
can't understand why Dennett allowed it to appear. In his book he is
gravely aware of the problems he faces in putting forward such
counter-intuitive views to his readers, whose very language has so
strongly infected them with Cartesian dualism, and he spends a lot of
time trimming the undergrowth of misconceptions and assumptions.
Despite the size of the book it is a sustained and well-articulated
argument towards his conclusion, with very little spare flesh on it.
But in the TV show the journey between observation and conclusion was
so brutally truncated that only those already familiar with the
territory stood any chance of understanding what he meant.

I guess maybe the TV crew kidnapped Dennett and tortured him until he
agreed to do the show :-)
-- 
Chris Malcolm    cam@uk.ac.ed.aifh          +44 (0)31 650 3085
Department of Artificial Intelligence,    Edinburgh University
5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK                DoD #205