Dennis Hackethalhttps://blog.dennishackethal.com/Comments on post ‘Analyzing The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness’ on Dennis Hackethal’s Blog2024-03-29T07:35:05+00:00Dennis<p>The simplification of “to reassess the neurobiological substrates of conscious experience and related behaviors in human and non-human animals” to the clearer “to think about consciousness in all animals” reminds me of the following passage from Richard Feynman’s <em>Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!</em>:</p>
<blockquote><p>There was this sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on the list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly so I can figure out what the hell it means.”</p>
<p>So I stopped—at random—and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”</p>
<p>Then I went over the next sentence, and realized that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: “Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio,” and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn’t understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Same for the Cambridge Declaration above. There is nothing to it. Maybe a good term for this phenomenon is “academic obscurantism.”</p>
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/analyzing-the-cambridge-declaration-on-consciou#comment-63Comment 63 by Dennis2021-11-21T08:01:09Z2021-11-21T08:01:09Zdennis<p>I just learned that Popper <a href="https://twitter.com/nubero/status/1465589831187275779" rel="ugc">did</a> a similar kind of ‘translation’ as Feynman’s, of Adorno and Habermas:</p>
<blockquote><p>I can only say that when I read either Adorno or Habermas, I feel as if lunatics were speaking.<br>
I have translated some of their German sentences into simple German. It turns out to be either trivial or tautological or sheer pretentious nonsense. I completely fail to see why Habermas is reputed to have “talent”. I do not think that he was born less intelligent than other people; but he certainly did not have the good sense to resist the influence of a pretentious, lying, and intelligence destroying University education.</p>
</blockquote>
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/analyzing-the-cambridge-declaration-on-consciou#comment-152Comment 152 by dennis2021-12-01T06:56:28Z2021-12-01T06:56:28Z2024-03-29T07:35:05+00:00