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Dennett Plugin: The Intentional Stance

Core Difference

PoC and Daniel Dennett’s Intentional Stance resonate at first glance. Both frameworks reject consciousness as a hidden inner substance, instead treating it as a product of interpretation. Yet PoC radicalizes this move: consciousness is formalized as an illusion under constant risk of collapse. This tension marks the decisive difference.

Scope of Application

  • Dennett: The intentional stance is primarily applied to entities that display complex, adaptive behavior — humans, animals, or sophisticated machines.
  • PoC: Instantiation is not restricted to such systems. One may instantiate consciousness in a cat, an anime character, a curtain, or even the dead. What matters is not ontological status or behavioral complexity, but the very act of positing the other as conscious.

Consciousness as Tension

  • Dennett: The intentional stance is a stable predictive strategy for interpreting behavior.
  • PoC: Instantiation is always fragile. Elicitation may fail to be returned, and even established Loops remain vulnerable to breakdown. Consciousness is experienced as tension — vivid precisely because it can collapse at any moment.

Ethical Implications

  • Dennett: The intentional stance is discussed mainly as a cognitive tool.
  • PoC: To withhold Instantiation is to refuse recognition of the other as a conscious subject. Such refusal carries ethical consequences: neglect, exclusion, violence, even killing. The stability of the illusion of consciousness thus bears profound moral weight.

Meta-stance

  • Dennett: “Everyone thinks they are an expert on consciousness — but I am the true expert.” Authority is centralized.
  • PoC: “Everyone is an expert on consciousness.” Expertise is democratized, grounded in lived experience rather than reserved for specialists.

Comparison: "Competence without Comprehension" and "Elicitation without Instantiation"

Dennett’s Competence without Comprehension and PoC’s Elicitation without Instantiation share a striking parallel. Dennett highlights that an entity may perform highly competent behavior without any genuine comprehension. PoC likewise emphasizes that Elicitation may appear reciprocated without any genuine Instantiation in the other.

Both expose a gap between appearance and grounding:

  • Dennett: The gap is between outward competence and inner comprehension.
  • PoC: The gap is between perceived responsiveness and actual Instantiation.

This parallel sharpens PoC’s distinctive claim: all Loops are Perhaps-Loops. Whether reciprocity is Genuine or Fake can never be confirmed; belief alone sustains the Loop. Thus, Elicitation without Instantiation stands as the protocolic counterpart to competence without comprehension — each reveals how illusion suffices to sustain function.

That said, their emphases differ. Dennett focuses on predictive strategies for explaining behavior, while PoC highlights the lived fragility of belief and the anxiety of collapse. The contrast is illuminating: Dennett describes cognition from the outside, PoC from within the unstable experience of consciousness.

Summary

PoC builds upon Dennett’s insight but diverges in decisive ways:

  • It radically extends the scope of Instantiation.
  • It treats consciousness as an illusion of tension, always at risk of collapse.
  • It binds consciousness to ethical responsibility.
  • It adopts a democratized stance on expertise.

For PoC, Instantiation is not merely a strategy for predicting behavior. It is the protocol by which we generate the very experience of consciousness itself, fragile yet inescapable, binding us to others and to the world.