Dennett has written another excellent book full of creative ideas and thoughtful discussions. I enjoyed reading his arguments although I disagree with his conclusions. Here is the essence of his theoretical idea.
First of all, Dennett segregates living creatures into four major categories based on the adaptive mechanisms that allow them to survive and reproduce. They are:-
1. Darwinian creatures: competence (without comprehension)
2. Skinnerian creatures: competence and learning.
3. Popperian creatures: competence, learning and reasoning.
4. Gregorian creatures: competence, learning, reasoning and comprehension (humans).
Most of his insightful discussion revolves around how humans became Gregorian creatures as a consequence of brains that became infected by cultural "memes" (words and other thinking tools), that ultimately led to comprehension, foresight, and intelligent, purposeful design.
I think this is a very interesting idea.
However I believe his conclusions are problematic. Here they are.
1. “We can then see human consciousness as a user-illusion, not rendered in the Cartesian Theater (which does not exist) but constituted by the representational activities of the brain coupled with the appropriate reactions to those activities.”
2. Elsewhere he states “There are structural, chemical properties of glucose—mimicked in saccharine and other artificial sweeteners—that cause the sweetness response in our nervous systems, but “the intrinsic, subjective sweetness I enjoy” is not an internal recreation or model of these chemical properties, nor is it a very special property in our non-physical minds that we use to decorate the perceptible things out there in the world. It is no property at all; it is a benign illusion.”
These conclusions reflect Dennett’s belief that because there is causal closure in the physical world, conscious subjective experiences, like our sensations and feelings, are nothing more than benign illusions that have no functional value. The alternative, I suggest, is that conscious experiences are “adaptive illusions” that have enormous functional value. The evidence for this is compelling (see “Why We Feel”).
Indeed, the world outside of us is filled with electromagnetic radiation, air pressure waves and chemicals floating in the air or dissolved in fluids, but it is pitch dark, silent, tasteless and odorless in the absence of a conscious brain. Our color sensations are highly refined discriminations between electromagnetic frequencies that are almost identical, and our feelings, unpleasant and pleasant, are discriminations between events that are (or were) threats or benefits to our reproductive success. It is certainly not an accident that our most intense pleasurable feelings (orgasms) are experienced when we are closest to reproducing. (If such feelings were non functional epiphenomena, as Dennett suggests, then there would be no consequences to feeling happy when our lover dies, or angry when we won the lottery.) Indeed, by favoring functional subjective experiences, over generations natural selection has consistently modified and refined the neural mechanisms that generate such experiences. They add meaning to mere existence!
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Guilherme
Evolution of minds and thinking tools
Reviewed in Brazil on December 8, 2019
