Comment by aragonite | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aragonite | Hacker News Reader

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Dennett himself (like his teacher Quine) is very deflationary about the kind of philosophy practiced by most of his colleagues. See e.g. his "Higher-order truths about chmess" (https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/s11245-006-0005-2):

> Some philosophical research projects ... are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed upon rules are presupposed — and seldom discussed — and the implications of those rules are worked out, articulated, debated, refined. So far, so good. Chess is a deep and important human artifact, about which much of value has been written. But some philosophical research projects are more like working out the truths of chmess. Chmess is just like chess except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one. I just invented it — though no doubt others have explored it in depth to see if it is worth playing. Probably it isn’t. It probably has other names. I didn’t bother investigating these questions because although they have true answers, they just aren’t worth my time and energy to discover. Or so I think. There are just as many a priori truths of chmess as there are of chess (an infinity), and they are just as hard to discover...

A more charitable view is that a lot of research projects which seem like chmess to an outside observer become a lot more rational when properly contextualized. Often, the authors have justifications, ontological commitments or motivational factors for pursuing esoteric research that get lost in the writing process and only become apparent when familiar with the ambient conceptual framework.

> I just invented it — though no doubt others have explored it in depth to see if it is worth playing. Probably it isn’t. It probably has other names.

Ah, I believe this is the same "mess we're in" from Joe Armstrong's eponymous 2014 Strange Loop conference talk[0]:

> This is a device that we can imagine. I try to find a big sausage machine where you put sausage meat, you know, you turn the handle. So we put all programs into it, and we turn the handle, and a smaller number of programs come out. Then we can throw away all the other programs. And that breaks the second law of thermodynamics. The trouble with software, you see, its complexity increases with time. We start with one program, and it splits and becomes two programs and four programs.

> Files and systems, they mutate all the time. They grow in entropy. Disks are absolutely huge. And there's all these problems with naming. Naming's horrible. If you've got a file or something, what file name should it be? What does it have? What directory should I put it in? Can I find it later?

(68% match)

> When you have an idea, you have a little box and you type something into the box. I've done this, I've implemented it. You have a little box and then there's a little icon, Sherlock Holmes at the bottom. You type this stuff into the box and you press the Sherlock Holmes button. And the idea is that will find among all my files that I'm interested in, the most similar thing to what I've just put in this box. So I want it to find the most similar thing to this new thing. And then I want to know, is it different? So once it's found them, it makes a list of them in order.

(64% match)

Edit: Just had the revelation that I am posting these quotes straight out of a RAG on the transcript of his talk.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4

> just as many a priori truths of chmess as there are of chess (an infinity)

I guess Mr Dennett never came across the ideas of Mr Cantor.

[Yes, yes… I know they’re both countable.]

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