(still under construction)
The Cartesian soul, Daniel Dennett points out, has no physical or temporal thickness. It is point-like in its unity, instantaneous in its action--and as unreal as any object of geometry.
To rebut Descartes' philosophical notion of the soul, Dennett brings up scientific data showing that the act of choosing takes time rather than being instantaneous and that it involves the interaction of many parts of the brain rather than being point-like in its unity.
Dennett's way of using this data, however, not only works against Cartesian notions of the soul but also against a common sense holistic regard for the person. For prior to any scientific investigation of where thought or choice takes place, we tend to think the person as a whole that acts through its parts.
(edit here: insert DD's opinion as contradicting common sense)
That regard recognizes what Descartes denied: that we are bodily beings in space and time with existence and operations that have spatial and temporal "thickness."
Dennett doesn't want to eliminate the common sense view, for it is indispensable to our getting along in this world. And it is unavoidable as well: faced with a situation that calls for a quick response, the scientist will think of himself in the same terms as would a non-scientist of earlier situations. Instead, he wants to offer a scientific explanation of how it works. That sort of explanation consists of showing how what seems to be one action from a common sense, prescientific perspective is really a complex interaction of many parts. Science deconstructs the apparent unity into a multiplicity. The human person, under science's gaze, appears to be a kind of machine.
Nowhere is this contrast of perspectives more important than in the human brain. In fact, we might call Dennett a neuro-Copernican, for he sees the same sort of revolution (please forgive the pun) taking place in that field as took place centuries ago in astronomy.
Consider how, in our daily conversations with friends, we will say the sun is rising, even though we know thanks to science, that the earth travels around the sun. We not only talk as if the sun were moving around the earth, we might, when engaged in the hustle and bustle of everyday concerns, allow ourselves imagine reality in those terms when thinking thus gives us a sufficiently good grasp of our situation for us so that we can mange things well. While camping, I might think to myself, "The sun is rising, now is a good time to get up, get out of the tent, and make breakfast for my fellow campers." To say to myself, "The sun seems to be rising but actually the earth has turned on its axis and so its light has begun once again to appear on the eastern horizon" would be disorienting--and not helpful. I could not respond to my environment in a direct manner: instead, I would have to pause, translate an appearance-based regard for my situation to a scientific one, draw a conclusion, translate that conclusion into an appearance-based regard for my situation, then act. Scientific thinking wouldn't get me anywhere that I didn't want to go: it would only stop me from acting for a while.
For Dennett, the same could be said for free will and (I believe) the identity of the self. Both of these convictions belong to the real of common sense; both have, in his opinion, been overturned by scientific discovery; and both are indispensable for getting along in the world. Imagine what would happen if we took apart every single common sense expression and "corrected" it with science. We might never get anything done. We might starve, having become immobilized by constantly correcting ourselves. So we instead let ourselves be guided for the most part by the way things would appear to us had we never so much as even heard of science, for doing so enables us to respond quite spontaneously to our environment, and such spontaneity keeps us alive. We let ourselves be guided, Dennett might say, not only by the way things appear to us, but also by the way we appear to ourselves. For we appear to be free even though we aren't (believes Dennett).
Dennett never says straightforwardly that the appearance of a free self is false. Instead, he goes back and forth over the same terrain many times, sometimes saying how wrong it is to say that free will is an illusion and at other times pointing out that it actually is so. Looking at human action from the vantage of physics, he sees that, qua physical actions, they are predetermined: they cannot occur differently than they do. Looking at human action from the vantage of common sense, he sees that different outcomes are possible. To put it in his language, none of the outcomes is inevitable.
He softens the blow by showing by showing how the common-sense perspective can be translated into language that renders it compatible with scientific understanding. "Not inevitable" means that, from a vague, imprecise knowledge of state space (of the location and vectors of each of the particles) different outcomes are physically possible.
What is surprising to me, however, is the fact that he sees the task of a philosopher as one of rendering free will statements compatible with scientific understanding.
Why does it never seem to occur to him to try rendering scientific understanding compatible with common sense? Why is he so quick to adopt a science centered compatibilism without so much as considering whether a compatibilism that works in a reverse direction (showing how science can be rendered consistent with common sense) would, as it were, let one have their cake and eat it too.
The answer might be that Dennett sees only two alternative accounts of human life: a dualism that gives a point-like unity to the self and a materialism that discovers, by looking in the human body, that what seems to be unity is really a multiplicity of parts. But he simply overlooks a third option, which would be that the unity is real and the multiplicity is not false, but only part of the story. He never gives holism a chance.
But he ought to.
I gotta move on soon, but before I do I'll try to come up with a name for my counterproposal: holistic compatibilism.
The Cartesian soul, Daniel Dennett points out, has no physical or temporal thickness. It is point-like in its unity, instantaneous in its action--and as unreal as any object of geometry.
To rebut Descartes' philosophical notion of the soul, Dennett brings up scientific data showing that the act of choosing takes time rather than being instantaneous and that it involves the interaction of many parts of the brain rather than being point-like in its unity.
Dennett's way of using this data, however, not only works against Cartesian notions of the soul but also against a common sense holistic regard for the person. For prior to any scientific investigation of where thought or choice takes place, we tend to think the person as a whole that acts through its parts.
(edit here: insert DD's opinion as contradicting common sense)
That regard recognizes what Descartes denied: that we are bodily beings in space and time with existence and operations that have spatial and temporal "thickness."
Dennett doesn't want to eliminate the common sense view, for it is indispensable to our getting along in this world. And it is unavoidable as well: faced with a situation that calls for a quick response, the scientist will think of himself in the same terms as would a non-scientist of earlier situations. Instead, he wants to offer a scientific explanation of how it works. That sort of explanation consists of showing how what seems to be one action from a common sense, prescientific perspective is really a complex interaction of many parts. Science deconstructs the apparent unity into a multiplicity. The human person, under science's gaze, appears to be a kind of machine.
Nowhere is this contrast of perspectives more important than in the human brain. In fact, we might call Dennett a neuro-Copernican, for he sees the same sort of revolution (please forgive the pun) taking place in that field as took place centuries ago in astronomy.
Consider how, in our daily conversations with friends, we will say the sun is rising, even though we know thanks to science, that the earth travels around the sun. We not only talk as if the sun were moving around the earth, we might, when engaged in the hustle and bustle of everyday concerns, allow ourselves imagine reality in those terms when thinking thus gives us a sufficiently good grasp of our situation for us so that we can mange things well. While camping, I might think to myself, "The sun is rising, now is a good time to get up, get out of the tent, and make breakfast for my fellow campers." To say to myself, "The sun seems to be rising but actually the earth has turned on its axis and so its light has begun once again to appear on the eastern horizon" would be disorienting--and not helpful. I could not respond to my environment in a direct manner: instead, I would have to pause, translate an appearance-based regard for my situation to a scientific one, draw a conclusion, translate that conclusion into an appearance-based regard for my situation, then act. Scientific thinking wouldn't get me anywhere that I didn't want to go: it would only stop me from acting for a while.
For Dennett, the same could be said for free will and (I believe) the identity of the self. Both of these convictions belong to the real of common sense; both have, in his opinion, been overturned by scientific discovery; and both are indispensable for getting along in the world. Imagine what would happen if we took apart every single common sense expression and "corrected" it with science. We might never get anything done. We might starve, having become immobilized by constantly correcting ourselves. So we instead let ourselves be guided for the most part by the way things would appear to us had we never so much as even heard of science, for doing so enables us to respond quite spontaneously to our environment, and such spontaneity keeps us alive. We let ourselves be guided, Dennett might say, not only by the way things appear to us, but also by the way we appear to ourselves. For we appear to be free even though we aren't (believes Dennett).
Dennett never says straightforwardly that the appearance of a free self is false. Instead, he goes back and forth over the same terrain many times, sometimes saying how wrong it is to say that free will is an illusion and at other times pointing out that it actually is so. Looking at human action from the vantage of physics, he sees that, qua physical actions, they are predetermined: they cannot occur differently than they do. Looking at human action from the vantage of common sense, he sees that different outcomes are possible. To put it in his language, none of the outcomes is inevitable.
He softens the blow by showing by showing how the common-sense perspective can be translated into language that renders it compatible with scientific understanding. "Not inevitable" means that, from a vague, imprecise knowledge of state space (of the location and vectors of each of the particles) different outcomes are physically possible.
What is surprising to me, however, is the fact that he sees the task of a philosopher as one of rendering free will statements compatible with scientific understanding.
Why does it never seem to occur to him to try rendering scientific understanding compatible with common sense? Why is he so quick to adopt a science centered compatibilism without so much as considering whether a compatibilism that works in a reverse direction (showing how science can be rendered consistent with common sense) would, as it were, let one have their cake and eat it too.
The answer might be that Dennett sees only two alternative accounts of human life: a dualism that gives a point-like unity to the self and a materialism that discovers, by looking in the human body, that what seems to be unity is really a multiplicity of parts. But he simply overlooks a third option, which would be that the unity is real and the multiplicity is not false, but only part of the story. He never gives holism a chance.
But he ought to.
I gotta move on soon, but before I do I'll try to come up with a name for my counterproposal: holistic compatibilism.
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