Intuition pump

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An intuition pump is a term coined by Daniel Dennett for a thought experiment structured to elicit intuitive answers about a problem.^[1] In Dennett's book Consciousness Explained he uses the term pejoratively to describe John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment, describing it as designed to elicit intuitive but incorrect answers by formulating the description such that important implications of the experiment would be difficult to imagine and tend to be ignored.

In the case of the Chinese Room argument Dennett argues that the intuitive notion that a person manipulating symbols seems inadequate to constitute any form of consciousness ignores the requirements of memory, recall, emotion, world knowledge and rationality such a system would actually need to pass such a test. "Searle does not deny that programs can have all this structure, of course," Dennett says, "He simply discourages us from attending to it. But if we are to do a good job imagining the case, we are not only entitled but obliged to imagine that the program Searle is hand-simulating has all this structure - and more, if only we can imagine it. But then it is no longer obvious, I trust, that there is no genuine understanding of the joke going on."

In his book Elbow Room Dennett used the term in a positive sense to describe thought experiments which facilitate the understanding of or reasoning about complex subjects by harnessing intuition:

A popular strategy in philosophy is to construct a certain sort of thought experiment I call an intuition pump [...]. Intuition pumps are cunningly designed to focus the reader's attention on "the important" features, and to deflect the reader from bogging down in hard-to-follow details. There is nothing wrong with this in principle. Indeed one of philosophy's highest callings is finding ways of helping people see the forest and not just the trees. But intuition pumps are often abused, though seldom deliberately.
From D.C. Dennett, 1984, Elbow Room; The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. [Emphasis in original.]

References

See also

• Philosophy of Mind
• Consciousness

External links

• Dennett, D.C., "Intuition Pumps", pp.180-197 in Brockman, J., The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, Simon & Schuster, (New York), 1995.
• Computer Models as "Intuition Pumps"

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