[1]
Dennett named these rules after social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapaport. They are not to be confused with another “Rapoport’s Rule”, named after Eduardo H. Rapaport (cf. Stevens 1989). Here is the full list of Dennett’s Rapaport’s Rules:
1. “You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, ‘Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.’”
2. “You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).”
3. “You should mention anything you have learned from your target.”
4. “Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.”
(Dennett 2013a, p. 33)
[2]
A philosophical zombie has nothing to do with any other sort of zombie. It behaves in every way like a normal person. The only difference is, that it lacks phenomenal experiences (though ex hypothesi it believes that is has phenomenal experiences). The zombic hunch is the intuition that a philosophical zombie would be different from us.
[3]
“Think of the cuteness of babies. It is not, of course, an ‘intrinsic’ property of babies, though it seems to be. […][W]e expect to expect to feel the urge to cuddle it and so forth. When our expectations are fulfilled, the absence of prediction error signals is interpreted as confirmation that, indeed, the thing in the world with which we are interacting has the properties we expected it to have”
(Dennett this collection, p. 5).
[4]
The intuition pump of Mr. Clapgras in Dennett’s section 6 is there to make the point that colors can be seen as dispositional properties of the organism rather than as properties of perceptual objects, in the same way as cuteness. Whether one is convinced by this or not, the intuitive problem seems to be the same: science tells us there are no properties like cuteness or color, while the zombic hunch tells us that this cannot be true. A more detailed discussion can be found in Dennett (1991, p. 375). I will not go into this here, but for the sake of argument I shall assume that this admittedly counter-intuitive categorization is acceptable. The reader’s willingness to accept it might be helped by the following point given by Nicholas Humphrey, which reminds us that although at first thought colors do not seem to have action-provoking effects (like cuteness or funniness), after second thought one might think differently:
“As I look around the room I’m working in, man-made colour shouts back at me from every surface: books, cushions, a rug on the floor, a coffee-cup, a box of staples—bright blues, reds, yellows, greens. There is as much colour here as in any tropical forest. Yet while almost every colour in the forest would be meaningful, here in my study almost nothing is. Colour anarchy has taken over.”
(Humphrey 1983, p. 149; quoted in Dennett 1991, p. 384).
[5]
What qualia are […] are just those complexes of dispositions. When you say ‘This is my quale,’ what you are singling out, or referring to, whether you realize it or not, is your idiosyncratic complex of dispositions. You seem to be referring to a private, ineffable something-or-other in your mind's eye, a private shadeshade of homogeneous pink, but this is just how it seems to you, not how it is.
(Dennett 1991, p. 389).
[6]
This property of the beliefs is acknowledged in Dennett (2005), p. 22, fn 18: “[The Zombic Hunch] is visceral in the sense of being almost entirely arational, insensitive to argument or the lack thereof”.
[7]
See Dennett (1987) for an elaborate discussion of the intentional stance and its implications, Dennett 1998b for the ontological status of beliefs and desires, Bechtel (1985) for another interesting interpretation, and Yu & Fuller (1986) for a discussion of the benefits of treating beliefs and desires as abstracta.
[8]
This section takes strong inspiration from Wilfrid Sellars’ section “Our Rylean Ancestors” in Sellars (1963, p. 178).
[9]
What I mean by “project” is that instead of positing an inner representation whose content is “I (the system in question) want to eat that apple” and whose function is a desire, along with correct beliefs about the current situation, what is posited is an eat-provocative property of the apple itself. Both theoretical strategies allow for the prediction of the same behavior. The crucial difference is that attributing new properties to objects that are already part of the model is a simpler way of extending the model than positing a complex system of internal states to each agent. Thus it is also more likely to happen. It’s definitely much simpler than extending the model to incorporate all the entities that explain the behavior on a functional level (i.e., all the neurons, hormones etc.). It is successful to the same extent the intentional stance is successful, that is, in an arguably noisy way, but still successful enough to gain an advantage (since ex hypothesi all the conspecifics are intentional systems).
[10]
This is very close to Gibson’s affordances (e.g., Gibson 1986) in that “values and meanings are external to the perceiver” (p. 127) and in a couple of other respects (ibid.). It is, however, different in that the postulated properties serve to predict the behavior of others and not to guide the behavior of the organism itself. For the relation between Gibsonian affordances and predictive processing see e.g., Friston et al. (2012).
[11]
“[R]ecent work on non-human primate theory of mind suggests that monkeys and chimpanzees have a theory of mind that represents goal states and distinguishes between knowledge and ignorance of other agents (the presence and absence of contentful mental representations), even if it fails to account for misrepresentation.”
(Roskies this collection, p. 12).
[12]
The selection of goals and other cognitive capabilities, etc., is all placed outside of the target object (see footnote 9). It will approach the object that has the highest attraction value, given that there is no object with a higher repulsion value, i.e., there is no internal selection process represented as internal selection. What makes other agents special objects, in this model, is that they react to properties that no other things react to, not that they have an internal life that is somehow special.
[13]
Notice that according to PP, there is no shortcut to be taken: the mind is a black box to itself—it has to infer its own properties just as any others.
[14]
This is where one might speak of the origin of a self-model (Metzinger 2003) in some sense, where there is not only a model of the body (built up by proprioceptive inputs) but also a model of the self as having (primitive) goals, at least in any given moment.
[15]
Maybe language plays an important part in this further development as an external scaffold (cf. Clark 1996; Dennett 1994). One fact supporting this view is that monkeys do not seem to be able to understand the concept of false belief (and therefore the concept of belief) (cf. Marticorena et al. 2011, but also Lurz 2010 for an overview of this debate).
[16]
This is also true of affordances (see e.g., Gibson 1986, p. 141).