“The Tuned Deck” is the trick: ” This deck of cards is magically tuned [Hull holds the deck to his ear and riffles the cards, listening carefully to the buzz of the cards]. By their finely tuned vibrations, I can hear and feel the location of any card. Pick a card, any card. . . . [The deck is then fanned or otherwise offered for the audience, and a card is taken by a spectator, noted, and returned to the deck by one route or another.] Now I listen to the Tuned Deck, and what does it tell me? I hear the telltale vibrations, . . . [buzz, buzz, the cards are riffled by Hull’s ear and various manipulations and rituals are enacted, after which, with a flourish, the spectator’s card is presented].
Like much great magic, the trick is over before you even realize it has begun. The trick, in its entirety, is in the name, “The Tuned Deck,” and more specifically, in one word—“The”! As soon as Hull had announced his new trick and given its name to his eager audience, the trick was over. Having set up his audience in this simple way, and having passed the time with some obviously phony and misdirecting chatter about vibrations and buzz-buzz-buzz, Hull would do a relatively simple and familiar card presentation trick of type A (at this point I will draw the traditional curtain of secrecy; the further mechanical details of legerdemain, as you will see, do not matter)
Hull’s trick was introducing a single common word: “the”—for heaven’s sake! This modest monosyllable seduced his audience of experts, paralyzing their minds, preventing them from jootsing. They found themselves stuck in a system in which they were sure that they had to find a big, new trick, so they couldn’t see that their problem(s) had not one solution but many; they failed to jump out of the system.
What does the story about the Tuned Deck add to all the other intuition pumps about qualia? Just a real-life example of how very clever, knowledgeable experts can be induced to create a phantom problem simply by the way an issue is presented to them. It has happened. It can happen again. And this yields a novel perspective on the impasse, creating a new burden of proof: How do you know that you have not fallen for something like the Tuned Deck? I’m not suggesting that this is conclusive, but just that it ought to give those who credit the Zombic Hunch some second thoughts about how “obvious” it is.
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
