Hubert Dreyfus

He's been, like, an important figure, um, along these lines.

And of course, um, Hubert Dreyfus has these excellent online lectures about Heidegger and Merleau, uh, Ponty.

And so I'm, I'm curious about your... how you, how you see Heidegger fitting in along this same vein.

I don't know if it-- Is, is Heidegger a continuation of Hegel? How should we, how should we think of Heidegger in relation to Hegel and enactivism? Because he's r- very much related.

Um, so anyway, I'm not sure what you teach about Heidegger because, uh, whether it's related to the cognitive sciences at all, but I'm curious if you have thoughts about how someone like me could, could, uh, take inspiration from someone like Heidegger's work.

[chuckles]

Well, um, you mentioned Dreyfus.

Dreyfus, it was, of course, the, the key, um, reference for me because he, he was, he, he was able to accomplish, um, uh, something incredibly hard, which was, uh, introducing Heidegger in, in the United States, which was, um, for...

They also used some of it to hire a consultant, a young associate professor of philosophy at MIT who had just completed his dissertation.

His name was Hubert Dreyfus, and his job was to spot check Simon and Newell's claims and to give a balanced critique of artificial intelligence writ large, its prospects and pitfalls from a philosophical standpoint.

What the folks at RAND didn't realize is that Dreyfus was a vociferous critic of artificial intelligence, and of Simon and Newell.

A general artificial intelligence equal to that of a human wasn't three years away, or eight, or twenty.

Score big.

Try Dr. Pepper Tic Tac today.

Hubert Dreyfus had a long and prestigious career in philosophy.

He was particularly influential in phenomenology and existentialism, and particularly expert in the work of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.

But not all kinds of knowledge is expressible as statements that you can write down.

Some forms of knowledge, which philosophers call knowledge how, depend on direct experience and are difficult, if not impossible, to express in words.

Recently, I held my newborn nephew in my arms for the first time.

Has anyone here held a newborn? Take a moment to close your eyes and just bring that experience to mind, savor it.

Cognitive scientists call this the problem of other minds.

We are separate beings, they say, each trapped in a cage of our own perspective that profoundly limits what we can know about each other.

But are we really that separate? Is the problem of other minds actually a problem, or is it an invitation to re-examine how we conceptualize the self, separateness, knowledge? American philosophers and cognitive scientists tend to see a glass half empty, focusing on the gap between self and other as if imperfect knowledge is the same thing as no knowledge at all.

What if we focused on the water in the glass instead? Our bodies are mostly made of water, after all.