Book ‘em Dan(n)o! Misspelling!

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Book ‘em Dan(n)o! Misspelling! I was going to write a blog on the meaning of life…however pressing and important news has suddenly surfaced. News that may very well shake the foundations of crossword makers everywhere! And it doesn't just start there. Oh no. You think they let you off that easy and then next thing you know they'll take your children and behead them like some crazed executioner. They'll rape your wife. They'll even kick your dog! Yes, it's the ever growing problem of whether, in the Hawaii Five-o TV programme, the famous saying "book 'em ____" is spelt 'Danno' or 'Dano.' Now a good place to start would be to look at the cold hard facts. So I went straight to the source. Google. I furiously typed the ten or 11 luminescent letters (save for the space bar, which I pressed a total of two times, and I decided to leave out the apostrophe to encompass more results) into the text bar. And the results I found were, indeed, quite shocking. For "Book em Dano" Google identified 132,000 results in the space of 0.22 secs. For "Book em Danno" Google identified only 56,100 results in the space of 0.16 secs. A whole 75,900 results less than the aforementioned search. You can't argue with the cold hard facts. It seems we could scientifically deduct that the phrase, if written down on say…a crossword puzzle…is Book 'em Dano. But due to the unreliability of scientific induction, are we simply assuming too much by these results? Let's have a look at the teams representing the 'Danno' side and the teams representing the 'Dano' side. I will nominate a captain of both teams. On team 'A' (the 'Danno' team) the lineup consists of Ayer, William Shakespeare, Ben Cousins, Stravinsky, Michael Schumacher, James Williams, Beethoven (the dog) and Daniel Dennett as captain. On team 'B' (the 'Dano' team) we have Andrew Johns, Alfred Hitchcock, Danny Carey, Aristotle, Skippy, Johnny Depp, Tom (from Myspace) and David Chalmers as captain. Captain Chalmers has decided to settle this debate by comparing certain websites considered reliable sources of television knowledge to see how they have the name in question spelt. Immediately, Chalmers points to the website 'Total Television' which references the quote as "Book 'em Dano." Chalmers also points to tv.com which lists both Dano and Danno but the majority of the spelling is 'Dano.' Chalmers passes the baton over to team 'A' captain Daniel Dennett. Captain Dennett has decided to against the grain and claim that the spelling of the name is not the main problem. The real problem is how the quote has been misinterpreted. Dennett further explains that the character Steve-o from the television show Hawaii Five-o was screaming and ordering that a character be booked. Therefore the quote should be written and interpreted as "Book 'im Dan(n)o" rather than the common adopted phrase of "Book 'em Dan(n)o." Daniel Dennett smugly hands the baton back to the 'B' team where David Chalmers stands baffled and confused. Captain Chalmers immediately questions the relevance of Daniel Dennett's theory and dismisses it as "Dano explained away" and "Dano ignored." Chalmers declares an ultimatum, "if there is no further evidence to suggest any other spelling of the name, then it should be made official that the spelling of the popular quote should be indeed, "Book 'em Dano." The baton is passed and Beethoven proceeds to bark with ferocity. Captain Dennett claims that Chalmers is ignoring the problem he has raised. However Captain Chalmers interrupts and states that Dennett's problem is in fact irrelevant to the topic discussed. One of the creators of Wikipedia, James Wales, interjected and stated his case. "The character's name was Danny Williams. We have listed on my online Encyclopedia that the popular catch phrase uttered by the character Steve-o is indeed "Book 'em Danno." There are a lot of credible websites online that have referenced the name Danno in reference to Danny Williams. Credibility comes from credible websites, rather than the majority of websites. Websites such as the official Hawaii Five-o homepage. Captain Chalmers still states that suppose the official website made a typo – we would still need to see the script in order to find out whether it is indeed spelt 'Danno' or 'Dano.' William Shakespeare stands up and asks "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Both teams engage in a heated discussion amongst themselves. Shakespeare makes a solid philosophical point. Captain Chalmers' analyses this and adds that it does not matter whether Dan(n)o is spelt 'Dano' or 'Danno.' The point is that the character is still the same however his nickname is spelt. However I find this conclusion irrelevant to the whole argument in question. The idea that the character would still be the same despite how his nickname is spelt does not help the crossword makers who want to slot the quote into one of their morning crosswords directly underneath the television guide for the day. We need to go for the jugular here. So I decided to do a little more sleuthing. I wrote to Leonard Freeman, the creator of Hawaii Five-o demanding a copy of the script and to put to bed, once and for all, the circular debate of how Danny Williams' nickname is spelt. However I realised that the name could have been misspelt in all of the script so I decided to try and find out from the character himself – James MacArthur. I am still yet to receive a reply. In conclusion I feel that the evidence for the spelling of the phrase is "Book 'em Danno" seems much more credible than the other offering despite the majority of findings from Google page searches. However Daniel Dennett has brought up a new argument questioning the spelling of 'em and 'im stating that "It seems more of a problem cause it determines how the phrase is said much more than the spelling of the nickname of the character." Perhaps in my next Philosophical Essay I will argue against this new theory. But until then, I'll keep you posted on how his nickname is spelt (if I ever get a reply from the actor himself). Even then you could debate the diachronic identity – but let's just leave that for a personal identity debate, rather than a television debate. Feel free to post your theories or attack mine. Or at least post 'The Truth.' Take it easy.

Daniel Dennett: Master of Being Owned

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Daniel Dennett: Master of Being Owned Current mood: pessimistic Don't get too engrossed in my blogs. I don't want to get hooked into doing them. I figure I may as well let off some steam. So here it is. Enjoy. If there's one thing that Daniel Dennett should be remembered for, in his E grade celebrity status of a life, is his magnetic ability to cop ownage from philosophers world wide. And not just philosophers, but children too are laughing at his idiocricy. What? I hear you ask, grabbing your phones, waiting for the right moment to dial my number and ask me what the fuck I am going on about. Just chillax. Put down that phone, and Dennett, put down that gun that is resting in your mouth, the cold steel rattling against your yellow teeth. You don't get much love Dennett, but I respect you. You stood up for what you believed in and even though you got owned so harshly, and that you basically rattled off contradictions left right and centre, I would personally like to apologise on behalf of philosophers around the world and offer my pity, and my mercy upon thee. Just don't write another philosophical thing again. I thought I may as well not leave people hanging with this web log and try and help people understand who the fuck Daniel Dennett is. I will do this by posting excerpts form my essay "Dennett Owned: An Insight into Philosophical Incompetencies" and this will identify who Dennett is and why he desrves such harsh ownage. (Funny how this turned into a serious philosophical discussion despite originally being a comedic statement). Dennett (1991) argues that qualia cannot exist and that it is an epiphenomenon meaning that all mental phenomena are derived from the physical. Dennett also argues the existence of the types of 'zombies' that were mentioned in the above paragraphs. He states that if they act like just like conscious beings then they are in fact conscious beings. In response, Dennett seems to accept a weak form of qualia, referring to the natural properties of experiences that are indescribable, inexpressible and non physical. Another criticism of Dennett's approach comes from Chalmers who states that Dennett's argument misses the point by redefining consciousness as an external property and therefore ignoring the subjective aspect. Dennett states further that the subjective aspect is ignored because it simply does not exist however Dennett, in my opinion, has not given people a valid enough reason to accept this assumption simply because he has accepted a weaker definition of qualia. Because he accepts this weaker version of qualia he is misinterpreting the non-physical phenomenon's associated with consciousness. Therefore he is arguing the distinction between the easy problem of consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness from an incorrect interpretation. Dennett (1991) refers to a term called Heterophenomenology in which he describes a third person scientific approach to the study of consciousness. The study consists of self-report studies to discover how a subject views the world and themselves. The study applies the scientific method with an anthropologic slant. The study begs for the subject to be taken seriously and accept everything they say, but the study also allows the researcher to view the world around them and conclude that the subject is wrong about even their own mind. This is done by comparing self beliefs to subpersonal processes. Subpersonal processes are states that are attributed to a subsystem, rather than the person as a whole. If these do not match up, then the validity of the responses from the subjects can be questioned. Zahavi (2007) states that the study does not consider first person perspectives, only the third person perspective. So if Heterophenomenologists are prevented on relying on their own first-personal relationship with consciousness, it is difficult to justify how they could describe and identify the mental states of subjects. For Heterophenomenology studies to work, contrary to Dennett's belief, a science of consciousness should draw from the first, second and third points of view, just like how we engage in the everyday practice of understanding not only ourselves but others as well. Zahavi (2007) interprets Heterophenomenology as the study of reports of conscious phenomena rather than the study of conscious phenomena. This is because Dennett stays neutral on whether conscious phenomena actually exist. Dennett argues that neutrality is important and required as in any anthropological study. He states that we should not prejudge the phenomenological investigation by stating that conscious phenomena are real. However Zahavi notes that this principal of neutrality is Dennett's own view and that it conflicts and questions the compatibility with another principal, the principle of metaphysical minimalism, which seems to be a characterisation of Heterophenomenology. The principal of metaphysical minimalism is quite similar to the materialist view of eliminative materialism, or eliminativism, which argues that people's common sense understanding of the mind, known as folk psychology, is false. Additionally the theory argues that behaviour and experience can only be explained adequately on a biological level. The incompatibility between this principal and the principal of neutrality is that Dennett's study cannot be considered neutral because it contains the characteristics of eliminativism, or the principal of metaphysical minimalism, and therefore dismisses the idea of Heterophenomenology. This also strengthens the idea that the hard problem and the easy problem of consciousness both exist and that the hard problem cannot be explained by induction of the easy problem. Dennett (1991) further states that when consciousness is understood, and that there is no more mystery, then there will be more beauty and plenty of room for awe. His argument seems to be ignoring the issue of experience, let alone consciousness, completely. Strawson (1994) identifies this and states that this is unconvincing because if you deny the existence of experience then no account of reality or consciousness is correct. In fact, you would be denying the existence of the reality of the experience of pain. Strawson then states that to suggest that there seems to be an experience but in fact there isn't is contradictory as seeming itself is an experience. (Which means total ownage...and proof that Dennett should never write again). For a complete reference list. see comments! I will do more updates to this if Dennett were to ever comment back. But I'd be surprised if he didn't commit suicide after that brutal ownage.