![]() The problem presupposes that consciousness is like a light switch: either an animal has a self or it doesn’t. He regards the zombie problem as a typically philosophical waste of time. Many young philosophers of mind look like artists (skinny jeans, T-shirts, asymmetrical hair), but Dennett carries a homemade wooden walking stick and dresses like a Maine fisherman, in beat-up boat shoes and a pocketed vest-a costume that gives him an air of unpretentious competence. Broad-shouldered and imposing, with a fluffy white beard and a round belly, he resembles a cross between Darwin and Santa Claus. Rainier, dozens of researchers shared speculative work on honeybee brains, mouse minds, octopus intelligence, avian cognition, and the mental faculties of monkeys and human children.ĭennett sat at the seminar table like a king on his throne. In a fourth-floor meeting room with views of Mt. The Edgewater was once a rock-and-roll hangout-in the late sixties and seventies, members of Led Zeppelin were notorious for their escapades there-but it’s now plush and sedate, with overstuffed armchairs and roaring fireplaces. Late last year, Dennett found himself among such skeptics at the Edgewater Hotel, in Seattle, where the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research had convened a meeting about animal consciousness. The dualists believe that science can uncover only half of the picture: it can’t explain what Nabokov called “the marvel of consciousness-that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being.” The physicalists believe, with Dennett, that science can explain consciousness in purely material terms. These skeptics derided the book as “Consciousness Explained Away.” Nowadays, philosophers are divided into two camps. ![]() It left untouched the question of how a three-pound lump of neurons could come to possess a point of view, interiority, selfhood, consciousness-qualities that the rest of the material world lacks. To them, the book was like a treatise on music that focussed exclusively on the physics of musical instruments. Others thought that he’d missed the point entirely. Many readers felt that he had shown how the brain creates the soul. In “Consciousness Explained,” a 1991 best-seller, he described consciousness as something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain. His newest book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back,” tells us, “There is a winding path leading through a jungle of science and philosophy, from the initial bland assumption that we people are physical objects, obeying the laws of physics, to an understanding of our conscious minds.”ĭennett has walked that path before. Into his own he has crammed nearly every related discipline: evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence. His special focus is the creation of the human mind. In the course of forty years, and more than a dozen books, Dennett has endeavored to explain how a soulless world could have given rise to a soulful one. If, however, it could be said to belong to any single person, that person might be Daniel Dennett, a seventy-four-year-old philosopher who teaches at Tufts. It has no single author it’s been written collaboratively by scientists over the past few centuries. This, to a first approximation, is the secular story of our creation. They developed language and used it to know themselves they began to ask how they had been made. ![]() They experienced being alive and had thoughts about that experience. When they looked within, some found that they had selves-constellations of memories, ideas, and purposes that emerged from the systems inside. ![]() They used these systems to anticipate their future and to change it. Organisms developed systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems, layered in ever-deepening regression. The tree of life grew, its branches stretching toward complexity. A new level of order had been achieved on Earth. The replicating chains were caught in oily bubbles, which protected them and made replication easier eventually, they began to venture out into the open sea. Some hit upon the trick of making copies of themselves that, in turn, made more copies. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and combined. Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place.
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