Daniel Dennett's Intuition Pump

Philosopher Daniel Dennett coined the term Intuition Pump in referring to a thinking tool that challenges our intuitive ideas or inspires new ones. In his book by the same name he offers up many such thinking tools, claiming that “these handy prosthetic imagination-extenders and focus-holders permit us to think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions.” Among the thinking tools that Dennett points out are analogies and thought experiments, both of which are the topics here.13
Analogies are impressive learning tools. A great analogy effectively transfers meaning from one idea to another, but in a way that helps in the understanding of an otherwise difficult or ambiguous idea. For example, Darwin gave us the tree of life, a way …show more content…
Consider another famous thought experiment, the Chinese Room, invented by philosopher John Searle.15 In this scenario, you are an English speaker with no knowledge of Chinese. You are placed in a small room and in possession of a large batch of Chinese letters along with a set of rules which are written in English. Every so often, through a thin space in the wall of the room, a set of Chinese letters will be passed through to you. Your job is to look at those letters, find them in the rule book, and follow a procedure which will detail for you the Chinese letters you should send back in response. You get so good at following these rules that someone outside, passing the letters in, cannot distinguish you from a Chinese speaker. But you, the person inside the room, do not speak Chinese. You do not understand it, you are simply following the rules. Searle used this experiment to determine that a computer cannot become conscious, as they are always programmed to run a script, which is the same thing as following the rules. One might, if so inclined, take a similar stance on our own …show more content…
In this scenario, we turn our focus to a large ship. It is well-used, worn in fact, and needs some upkeep. So we replace some boards. So far so good. However, after a little more sailing, a few more boards spring leaks, and the sail, after battling some stormy weather, has a few too many rips in it. So we replace those too. More time goes by, and more of the ship starts to degrade, so we replace it, until eventually, nothing on board is original. Is it the same ship? If so, let’s say we gathered together all of the old worn pieces and put them back together, forming the ship you started with—which is which? If you don’t believe it’s the same ship, then at what point did it become a different one? Like we should do with any good analogy, let’s apply this to something else—you. Virtually none of the cells your body contains were there when you were born. You’re losing cells of some variety in every moment, while also producing entirely new ones. Are you the same person you were at birth? Are you the same person as that which started reading this