Skip to main content

Daniel Dennett, reductionism, mind-stuff, history of philosophy

In Consciousness Explained (1 hour 22 minutes into the audio), Daniel Dennett give four objections to his materialism.  He describes these as four reasons against the reduction of the mind to the brain or as reasons for believing in "mind-stuff."

The four reasons are the claims that nothing in the brain could...
1. ...be the medium in which the (imaginary) purple cow is rendered;
2. ...be the "I" in "I think therefore I am";
3. ...appreciate wine, hate racism, love someone, be a source mattering;
4. ...act with moral responsibility

More on this later.  Meanwhile, it's worth noting that his description of the objection to materialism as belief in "mind stuff" is the sort of straw man that a reductionist would find quite natural: he finds it so natural to think materialistically, that he thinks anti-reductionists must be positing a different kind of matter.  It may be true that dualism does posit something like "mind stuff" and that inasmuch as it does so it is a kind of second-hand materialism.  But it seems like rather careless thinking to assume that Cartesian dualism and reductive materialism are the only two alternatives.

Regarding dualism's being second-hand materialism:  well, Descartes himself provokes this sort of suspicion by referring to himself as a "thinking thing":  if the mind is a thing and things are made   of stuff and stuff is matter, then yes, Descartes does seem to be sneaking in a materialistic conception of matter under the guise of dualism.

Then again, in talking as if the only two options were reductionism and dualism, Dennett shows that he's ignorant of the philosophical options and of the history of philosophy prior to Descartes.

Did someone say "chronological snobbery?"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...
Post a Comment
Read more

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....
Post a Comment
Read more