Cool. Will there be a lot of overlap with Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking? Based on your description, it sounds like Dennett just wrote this book for you.
Actually I wrote it before he did, while trying to simulate him. It was great confirmation of my simulation skills when his book was published, exactly because there is some uncanny overlap. In the beggining of my book I talk about this a bit, it was one of three coincidences which gave me full retrospective confidence in the project. I can simulate Dennett, the question that remains unanswered so far is, can I install that ability into other minds through words?
This is one of the strangest posts I have ever read on Less Wrong..
50 comments 50 words or less. #48
There's been somewhat frequent coverage of Daniel Dennett on Lesswrong:
How not to be a Naïve Computationalist
Dennett's "Consciousness Explained": Prelude
"Where Am I?", by Daniel Dennett
My personal favorite: Zombies: The Movie
I've written a book called Simulating Dennett nearly five years ago now (if you are considering an academic career, keep that slow paced speed in mind, for good or ill). It summarizes Dennett's philosophy while trying to make the reader able to think like Dennett. It seemed to me at the time, and still does now, that Dennett's kind of mind is very interesting and we should have more of those, so I tried my best to create a Dennett installer in book form.
Simulating Dennett: Tools and Constructions of a Naturalist
Is the 244 pages that ensued. Portuguese or Spanish reading skills advised. Or use it to learn Portuguese prior to your trip to Rio, Pantanal, Iguaçu Falls and the Amazon Forest. (for legal reasons I've chopped out the second half of the file, but there are instructions on how to get it when you get to the end of the first half)
Abstract
This dissertation intends to provide the reader with an inner simulation of Daniel Dennett’s form of reasoning, spreading over his whole philosophy, emphasizing his treatment of patterns, the evolutionary algorithm, consciousness, and his use of illata, abstracta, semantic, and syntax, to carve nature at its joints, especially biology and the human mind. It recasts, in a new light, great part of his most important ideas, and reverse engineers what made him think in particular ways, walking the reader through similar pathways, fostering an active learning of a thinking style, above and beyond a mere exposition of the results obtained by this thinking style over the years.
Keywords: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness, Memetics, Intentional stance, Evolution,
Algorithm.
This Wednesday 2013-03-19 at 14:00 I’ll be presenting it as thesis in the University of São Paulo. Lesswrongers passing by Brazil, or the 20 of us who actually live here are welcome to join.