crazy88 comments on Rationality Quotes September 2011 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: dvasya 02 September 2011 07:38AM

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Comment author: crazy88 04 September 2011 07:29:46AM *  17 points [-]

Ralph Hull made a reasonable living as a magician milking a card trick he called "The Tuned Deck"...Hull enjoyed subjecting himself to the scrutiny of colleagues who attempted to eliminate, one by one, various explanations by depriving him of the ability to perform a particular sleight of hand. But the real trick was over before it had even begun, for the magic was not in clever fingers but in a clever name. The blatantly singular referent cried out for a blatantly singular explanation, when in reality The Tuned Deck was not one trick but many. The search for a single explanation is what kept this multiply determined illusion so long a mystery.

--Nicholas Epley, "Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making"

Comment author: PhilGoetz 10 September 2011 03:48:01PM *  7 points [-]

Google tells me Dennett referred to this, in arguing that there is nothing mysterious about consciousness, because it is just a set of many tricks.

It’s a shame that the niceness of the story of the tuned deck makes Dennett’s bad argument about consciousness more appealing.

Dennett’s argument that there is no hard problem of consciousness can be summarized thus:

  1. Take the hard problem of consciousness.

  2. Add in all the other things anybody has ever called “consciousness”.

  3. Solve all those other issues one by one.

  4. Conveniently forget about the hard problem of consciousness.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 08 September 2011 12:17:59AM 3 points [-]

Would this count as doing something deliberately complicated to throw off anyone with an Occam prior?

Comment author: MinibearRex 06 September 2011 08:54:04PM 1 point [-]

You don't have to put the little '>' signs in on every line, just the beginning of a paragraph.

Comment author: crazy88 07 September 2011 02:38:55AM 2 points [-]

Fixed. Thanks.

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