Philosophy & Consciousness
Spiral Dynamics (Value Memes)
Spiral Dynamics is Beck and Cowan's development of Clare Graves's proposed framework of changing value orientations
Dennett's Intuition PumpsThe encyclopedia
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Philosophy & Consciousness
Swampman Meets a Cow-Shark
Dennett examines thought experiments that separate internal structure, future behavior, ancestry, and history to force intuitions about content or category membership
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Boys from Brazil: Another Boom Crutch
Dennett critiques a manipulation-based responsibility argument by Greene and Cohen inspired by The Boys from Brazil
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Chinese Room
Searle's Chinese Room challenges the claim that executing the right formal program is sufficient for understanding
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Curse of the Cauliflower
Dennett's cauliflower example begins with differences in taste and liking, then challenges the assumption that intrinsic qualia can be isolated from contextual, relational, and dispositional features of experience.
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Intentional Stance
The intentional stance predicts behavior by attributing beliefs and goals under suitable rationality assumptions
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Library of Mendel: Vast and Vanishing
The Library of Mendel represents genomes within a vast combinatorial sequence space
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Personal/Sub-personal Distinction
Dennett distinguishes descriptions of persons and their activities from explanations of contributing subpersonal processes
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Sad Case of Mr. Clapgras
Dennett's imaginary Mr
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Self as the Center of Narrative Gravity
Dennett proposes understanding the self as an organizing abstraction associated with narrative patterns, analogous to a center of gravity rather than an inner controlling object.
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Seven Secrets of Computer Power Revealed
Dennett introduces elementary computation through a register machine and develops seven lessons about competence without comprehension, representation, stored instructions, universality, and implementation
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Sorta Operator
Dennett uses sorta to discuss partial, precursor, or approximate versions of capacities without prematurely demanding a fully developed all-or-nothing category.
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Teleclone Fall from Mars to Earth
Dennett's teleclone story explores whether informational reconstruction would preserve a person and what kinds of continuity matter
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Tree of Life
The tree of life represents evolutionary relationships through common descent
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Tuned Deck
The Tuned Deck illustrates how a seemingly unified feat can be produced by different methods on different occasions
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Wandering Two-Bitser, Twin Earth, and the Giant Robot
These thought experiments examine how a device's function, a word's reference, and an autonomous robot's goals depend on environment, history, and purpose as well as internal organization.
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The Zombic Hunch
The zombic hunch is the intuition that a complete physical and behavioral duplicate of a conscious person could nevertheless lack experience
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
The “Surely” Operator: A Mental Block
The surely operator is Dennett's suggestion to inspect confidence words for assumptions a writer expects readers to accept
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
Three Species of Goulding: Rathering, Piling On, and the Gould Two-Step
Rathering implies an unsupported incompatibility
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
Trapped in the Robot Control Room
This thought experiment asks how signals inside a robot could become meaningful when their interpreter has no independent view of the surrounding world
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
Two Black Boxes
Dennett's connected boxes use different internal representations but coordinate responses through overlapping represented content
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
Two Counter-images
Dennett's two counter-images challenge a privileged central location for consciousness by emphasizing distributed processes and the wider influence that some contents acquire.
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
Two Lotteries
Two Lotteries compares selecting a winner before tickets are distributed with selecting one afterward
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
Ultimate Responsibility
Ultimate responsibility concerns a demanding form of moral responsibility that appears to require responsibility for the character from which one acts
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
Universal Acid
Dennett's universal-acid metaphor expresses how Darwinian explanation challenges assumptions about design and intelligence across disciplines
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
Using Lay Audiences as Decoys
Experts explain their positions to willing nonexperts while fellow experts listen, making detailed explanation socially comfortable and exposing omitted premises
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
Vim: How Much Is That in “Real Money”?
Vim is Dennett's invented term for a currency's supposedly intrinsic economic value apart from all exchange relations
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
Virtual Machines
Virtual machines are computational organizations implemented by underlying systems
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
What Does the Frog’s Eye Tell the Frog’s Brain?
Lettvin and colleagues showed feature-sensitive processing in frog retinal outputs
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
What Is a Deepity?
A deepity gains apparent profundity by moving between a modest defensible reading and a stronger, unsupported or false reading
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
When Does Speciation Occur?
Speciation can involve gradual lineage divergence and partial reproductive isolation, but mechanisms and species criteria vary, and some reproductive barriers arise rapidly
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
Who Is the Author of Spamlet?
Dennett imagines a constructed creator, Spakesheare, producing a play, Spamlet, and asks where the creative design work occurs
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
Widowmakers, Mitochondrial Eve, and Retrospective Coronations
Dennett examines properties defined by distant or later relations, including widowhood and a maternal-line common ancestor
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
Wonder Tissue
Wonder tissue is Dennett's warning against assuming an unspecified special power of neural material to explain mental competence
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
ZOMBIES AND ZIMBOES
Dennett's zimbo highlights the self-monitoring and reflective complexity required of a purported unconscious duplicate
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
“Daddy Is a Doctor”
Dennett's example asks how much related knowledge a child needs to count as understanding a statement
Dennett's Intuition PumpsPhilosophy & Consciousness
Beginner's Mind (Shoshin)
Shoshin is an orientation of openness in Zen practice, articulated by Shunryu Suzuki as meeting activity without a closed self-image of expertise
Eastern PhilosophyPhilosophy & Consciousness
Dependent Origination (Everything Arises in Relation)
Dependent origination is a Buddhist teaching on conditional arising and cessation, centrally the conditions sustaining suffering
Eastern PhilosophyPhilosophy & Consciousness
Impermanence (Anicca)
Anicca is the Buddhist teaching that conditioned phenomena are impermanent
Eastern PhilosophyPhilosophy & Consciousness
Middle Way (Avoiding Extremes)
In an early Buddhist formulation, the Middle Way avoids indulgence and self-affliction through the Noble Eightfold Path
Eastern PhilosophyPhilosophy & Consciousness
Wu Wei (Effortless Action)
Wu wei is a Daoist idea of nonaction or non-forcing, often concerning action and governance without unnecessary interference
Eastern PhilosophyPhilosophy & Consciousness
Yin-Yang (Complementary Opposites)
Yin-yang concerns relational and complementary aspects within Chinese philosophical traditions
Eastern PhilosophyPhilosophy & Consciousness
Agnosticism
Agnosticism concerns limits of warranted knowledge; Huxley's formulation emphasizes following reasons without claiming unsupported certainty
Ethics & EpistemologyPhilosophy & Consciousness
Birth Lottery
The birth lottery highlights unchosen starting conditions that shape opportunities and outcomes
Ethics & EpistemologyPhilosophy & Consciousness
Consequentialism
Consequentialism is a family of ethical views grounding moral assessment in consequences, with different accounts of value, uncertainty, and the object evaluated
Ethics & EpistemologyPhilosophy & Consciousness
Distributive Justice vs Procedural Justice
Distributive justice concerns allocation of benefits and burdens; procedural justice concerns how decisions are made
Ethics & EpistemologyPhilosophy & Consciousness
Effective Altruism
Effective altruism uses evidence and reasoning to seek better ways to help others and act on them
Ethics & EpistemologyPhilosophy & Consciousness
Just World Hypothesis
The just-world hypothesis concerns motivation to view outcomes as deserved, which can sometimes encourage victim derogation or unsupported merit judgments
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