His “Consciousness Explained” was the book that ignited my interest in philosophy, and the philosophy of mind especially. His arguments seemed a miracle of clarity and insight. He was obviously right on everything, how could there be any question left? At least, that’s what I thought until I read other philosophers, who provided just as clear and compelling arguments, but for radically different conclusions. The time I’ve spent considering these issues has been immensely enriching, and the small contributions I’ve made on that front are some of my happiest. Thanks for widening my horizon.
I still think he was 100% wrong, and his arguments seemed to be full of self-contradictory nonsense and semantic sleights of hand (sound and fury signifying nothing), but wrong forum for such a debate.
I’ve occasionally sent the following to friends when they got tenure:
“The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It’s rather like getting tenure.”
All but the last line seems to be something he really said. But why do the setup and leave out the punchline?
There’s folk who quiestion the details of the sea squirt thing. Killjoys.
I read his book and was unimpressed. I think it was called “Conciousness Explained” and should have been called “A Prologue to the Beginnings of a Possible Explanation of Conciousness”.
The book also included, IIRC, a gratuitous putdown of one of my heroes, Stephen Jay Gould.
It was that Gould didn’t understand evolution. Dennett claimed that if you learned evolutionary theory from Gould, you would believe the following three things. I don’t recall what they were, but I didn’t believe the first two and could not even understand the third. Dennett did not really understand punctuated evolution for which there is much evidence. For example, if you adopt upright stature, this is likely to quickly lead to other adaptive changes until things settle down. You can read about some of this in the Times obit:
I read Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, Freedom Evolves and Breaking the Spell (and The Mind’s I which was a collaboration with Hofstadter). Dennett was a hyper-adaptionist, which I think makes him wrong, but he wrote stuff that made me think, even when I disagreed with it.
I found this, which explains things in some detail, but I still find the disagreement a bit hard to understand.
Gould seems to elevate historical contingency above natural selection, or at least gives it a very significant role. It seems hard to deny some significant role–after all, an asteroid wiped out a bunch of life and while natural selection filled out the niches that would and would not survive, and also controlled their evolution afterward, the event itself was purely random. Nevertheless, the life we see today is a result of that event.
On the other hand, Dennett seems to think that Gould’s purpose here is to dilute the influence of natural selection, because it is such a “dangerous” idea. Perhaps there is a relationship here with Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria”–Gould came up with that so that science and religion could coexist in the same mind. But Dennett, Dawkins, and others have no such interest, and think that natural selection is a death blow to religion: the one part of nature (the seeming miracle of life) that might actually call for a God is actually a result of a mechanical, unthinking process. So Dennett may believe that Gould was letting his sympathies for religion influence his thinking (even though he was an agnostic).
I suppose I should read Darwin’s Dangerous Idea myself to get a clearer picture. As for punctuated evolution, it really shouldn’t say much here, since the bursts of activity are still interminably slow from a human perspective. It still takes millions of years for anything significant to happen.
Gould has the following thought experiment. Imagine you could restart evolution 60 million years ago (so that the contingency of the asteroid doesn’t play a roll. Do you expect humans to evolve. Gould does not–there are too many points of contingency in the evolutionary process. Apparently Dennett disagreed. To him, evolution is deterministic (except for an asteroid here and there). Gould’s argument was really with Simon Conway Morris a very religious British evolutionary biologist who believed that God would have intervened to drive it. Obviously, Dennett wasn’t coming on this from a religious point of view; he just denied that it was contingent on random events. Whether some electron spinned up or down and some mutation did or didn’t happen. I come fully down on Gould’s side in this argument.
Anyway, it is not the disagreement that I criticize; rather that Dennett carried it out in a mean-spirited way.
Back in the day when Gould was churning out books lickety-split I decided to start reading his. That did not last long. So my take on the following is …
Don’t pick an (intelligence) fight with an unarmed man.