Re: Daniel Dennett on Darwin's Unifying Idea

21 thoughts on “Re: Daniel Dennett on Darwin's Unifying Idea”

1. I always find the consciousness subject interesting. With there being no beginning of a theory for how the matter in the brain creates consciousness, it makes me wonder if consciousness could lie elsewhere in the body or throughout the body, kind of like cellular memory.

2. Totally agree. The concept of a continuum is extremely important – it's a shift, not steps up a ladder.

3. Crick was studying the structure and function of the brain. He wasn't studying consciousness. I think we know plenty about consciousness, but science isn't yet able to understand the form of language with which it is known.

4. What, in your opinion, does dennett show in 'consciousness explained'? I haven't read it, but I thought he goes beyond correlation and shows how assuming a causative link from the brain to experience/mind gives explanatory and predictive power.

5. He shows, I think, that he is an unknowing panexperientialist. He wants to derive human consciousness from the complexification of matter through evolution. I completely agree with this approach, but I think there is a fundamental incoherency in his thought in that he assumes matter began entirely without any experience. You can't suddenly get experience when none was present before. You can get more complexity, certainly, but from nothing, nothing comes!

6. Ok, so it's similar to life, was matter dead and innanimate and through evolution it came to life, or was it always alive and evolution gave it ever increasing complexity. I don't really know what it means to say that matter is inherently conscious. To me it doesn't make sense to say whether or not matter has consciousness or life, these are properties of large complex arrangements of matter, it doesn't make sense to say whether or not an atom can catch a cold.

7. But now I guess we're in a definitions game, and until someone can define consciousness, there'll be no real answer to these questions.

8. I wouldn't call matter "conscious." I'd reserve that word for the complexity of higher primate experience (ie, formation of ego). I would assign a degree of experience to atoms, which are not discrete objects but actually dynamic processes constantly emerging through their interaction with other atoms/particles. Obviously, atoms cannot catch colds because they do not have immune systems. Follow the logic here: from entirely blind matter, NO experience can come, regardless of complexity!

9. If we rely on complexity to turn dead matter into sentient consciousness, we are asking for a miracle b/c there is a HUGE explanatory gap between matter and mind. I'd rather avoid the miracle and explain human consciousness in terms of a complexification of experience/interiority which was present from the beginning.

10. Explain how neurons create consciousness and I will retract my craziness. Until then, it is I who think you are crazy for not seeing the miracle required for blind matter to becoming conscious. Don't you want to avoid logical contradictions and supernatural explanations??

11. Haha, I love how your video response gets more views in less time then the actual Dennett video.

    To answer your question: No, I do not have a solution to the hard problem. Since the summer I've been reading a lot more concerning Philosophy of Mind and have gradually slipped away from my Churchland roots. I'm currently halfway through Chalmers' "The Conscious Mind" and think he might be convincing me that consciousness can't be reductively explained.

12. So yeah… no real disagreement here, I just thought I'd post the Dennett video for others to see.

    🙂

13. P.S. – Feel free to post this video as a video response to the Dennett one if you feel so inclined.

14. It seems to me there has to be evidence of some sort of decision-making process. I see my consciousness as the experience of my mind's elaborate decision-making process. It seems that even the simplest life is purely reactionary and some experience can be considered when there is some degree of processing going on within the pattern.

15. Forms of energy doesn't have to have existed throughout all time cause all energies hasn't existed throughout all time. Consciousness may be an energy which is not detectable for one reason only. Because it is used TO detect. If it is an energy, we still couldn't detect it because of its implementations. This reasoning gives all sides no foundation for their claims about consciousness (it may or may not have existed always in lower forms and no one has any evidence on either side).

16. All of what you say rests on a proper definition of "energy," right? How would you define it?

17. An element which can change form to something that can change form and so on. If consciousness is an energy, there should be another energy able to turn into consciousness and consciousness should be able to turn into something else. That could be detected and proved I guess. If consciousness isn't an energy. It should spread out as minute conscious entities when we die. That can never be proved.

18. I am not following most of what you've said here, but I did understand that you define energy as that which can change form. We know that no energy can be created or destroyed, in which case, consciousness could not be a new form of energy created by sufficiently complex brains. I am saying that consciousness isn't a different form of matter/energy, it is an ontological property of matter (existing only in germ in particles, gradually becoming more aware as it evolves through cells, etc).

19. consciousness could be a new form of energy, because energy is formed from the components of previous states of energy. It is of course an energy that has always existed, though might have not always been in the form of consciousness. If this is the case then energy formation in the moment of death should look like it increases, since consciousness is not detectable energy. If no energy increase takes place, then conciousness is not an energy. This is hard to meassure though. Did it get clear?

20. I think there are more options than what a substance ontology provides us with, whether our favored substance is material stuff or mental stuff. I think both are scientifically obsolete. I prefer a process metaphysics, where the final real things are not bits of matter, but events.

21. The problem is that we are beginning with the assumption that matter is some kind of stuff. It appears that way but physics has shown otherwise. Elementary particles take a certain amount of time to be what they are, they are not merely bits of spatial extension. They are dynamic processes. Matter is not conscious in anything like the way a human being is, but atoms possess what Whitehead would call "prehension," a primitive form of feeling that can eventually self-organize into higher beings.

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