I think I was really unclear, sorry. I wasn’t so much saying physical analogies to quasiparticles are good ways to think about the issues discussed in the post. I was trying to say that the way physicists and materials scientists think about quasiparticles are an example of humans choosing among implicit vs explicit representations, based on which features each brings to the fore.
Maybe I’m still missing a central piece (or several) of the problem, but I have a hard time understanding why Dennett isn’t just flat-out, uncontestably, obviously right about this? And that his needing to argue it is a failure of the rest of the field to notice that?
I kind of agree that Dennett is right about this, but I think it’s important to notice that the idea he’s attacking—that all representation is explicit representation—is an old and popular one in philosophy of mind that was, at one point, seen as natural and inevitable by many people working in the field, and one which I think still seems somewhat natural and obvious to many people who maybe haven’t thought about the counterarguments much (e.g I think you can see echos of this view in a post like this one, or the idea that there will be some ‘intelligence algorithm’ which will be a relatively short python program). The idea that a thought is always or mostly something like a sentence in ‘mentalese’ is, I think, still an attractive one to many people of a logical sort of bent, as is the idea that formalised reasoning captures the ‘core’ of cognition.
I think I was really unclear, sorry. I wasn’t so much saying physical analogies to quasiparticles are good ways to think about the issues discussed in the post. I was trying to say that the way physicists and materials scientists think about quasiparticles are an example of humans choosing among implicit vs explicit representations, based on which features each brings to the fore.
Maybe I’m still missing a central piece (or several) of the problem, but I have a hard time understanding why Dennett isn’t just flat-out, uncontestably, obviously right about this? And that his needing to argue it is a failure of the rest of the field to notice that?
I kind of agree that Dennett is right about this, but I think it’s important to notice that the idea he’s attacking—that all representation is explicit representation—is an old and popular one in philosophy of mind that was, at one point, seen as natural and inevitable by many people working in the field, and one which I think still seems somewhat natural and obvious to many people who maybe haven’t thought about the counterarguments much (e.g I think you can see echos of this view in a post like this one, or the idea that there will be some ‘intelligence algorithm’ which will be a relatively short python program). The idea that a thought is always or mostly something like a sentence in ‘mentalese’ is, I think, still an attractive one to many people of a logical sort of bent, as is the idea that formalised reasoning captures the ‘core’ of cognition.