it is also argued by Dennett and some of his defenders that people like Bentley Hart misinterpret and provide reductive accounts of Dennett's ideas. — Tom Storm

Pardon me, but tosh. Dennett literally says humans are essentially mindless robots in service of the selfish gene, and that life is a kind of runaway chemical reaction. It's a symptom of the decline of the West that such nonsense is dignifed with the title 'philosophy'.

I have no way of knowing if DD is right or wrong. I am assuming he knows more about this stuff than most people alive. The only thing I know about Dennett is Bentley Hart's great polemical essays on DD's last two books. Anyway that's for somewhere else.

I have no way of knowing if DD is right or wrong. — Tom Storm

He writes for the public, and you're a member, a very intelligent one, at that. Oughtn't be that hard to see through his schtick. Anyway, enough with me kvetching about Dennett, I do it every time his name comes up.

:up: Maybe we can discuss this at another time in the right place.

Nothing much further to discuss, really. If Dennett means what he says - well, he actually can’t. His model is ‘unconscious competence’ - that your billions of cellular transactions act together to give rise to the illusion of conscious experience. So he can’t make a rational argument, as such, because whatever he says is simply the outpouring of those processes, fundamentally executing the Darwinian algorithm that Dennett says rules all organic existence. That’s why his critics accuse him of being ‘self-refuting’ which I think is painfully true. But arguing against it is like those cowboy games you played as a kid, when you plainly had shot the other guy but he simply refused to acknowledge it and kept going regardless. And it is both hard and pointless to argue against a philosophical zombie.

The Plantinga ‘evolutionary argument against naturalism’ is a form of the ‘argument from reason’. I’m seriously considering enrolling in an MA at UniSyd to write a thesis on that argument. It’s current exponents are mainly Christian apologists, but I think the roots of the argument are firmly Platonist. I do believe the Universe is animated by reason, rather than the outcome of chance, so if that makes me ‘theistic’, so be it. I’d rather be part of a plan, than part of an accident.

But arguing against it is like those cowboy games you played as a kid, when you plainly had shot the other guy but he simply refused to acknowledge it and kept going regardless. — Wayfarer

Amen to that!

I’d rather be part of a plan, than part of an accident. — Wayfarer

Be careful what you wish for...

Yes, I brushed up on Dennett and got the main gist of his thesis via qualia and other tit bits. Fascinating. I guess his view doesn't strike me as odd or horrible because my own introspective sense of self seems so random and incomplete - my awareness always struck me as being constructed from a mosaic (fragments heard, seen, felt, thought) creating an illusion of a coherent whole - which surprisingly are words very similar to those used by Dennett in describing consciousness.

Then there's David Bentley Hart's suggestion that most humans experience a sense of surprise or joy in the experience of Being - I have never felt that. Maybe it's those who don't that gravitate towards atheism. In other words, humans as a random, profane explosion of chemistry doesn't sound to me as the worst fate we could befall. The self-refutingness notwithstanding.

I think it would be very interesting to examine and take on this expression of the argument from reason as it has excited me a great deal in recent times. I think I came to it (and Plantinga) via Kant's transcendental argument. No problem if all this makes you a theist. But it would be quite a big leap to get from that to Jesus as your own personal saviour. Would that take you full circle? :razz:

I think I came to it (and Plantinga) via Kant's transcendental argument. No problem if all this makes you a theist. But it would be quite a big leap to get from that to Jesus as your own personal saviour. Would that take you full circle? :razz: — Tom Storm

I'm a Buddhist convert. Strictly speaking Buddhism doesn't have a dog in the fight. But Buddhism sees modern scientific materialism as nihilism, that has become widespread in Western culture - just as Nietszche predicted. It's the 'culture of unbelief' - everything is defined in those terms.

Actually my first exposure to Kant was through T R V Murti Central Philosophy of Buddhism. It was published in the 1950's and has fallen out of favor with modern buddhologists, but it was one of the books responsible for my conversion and has many illuminating comparisons between Buddhist and classical Western philosophy, Kant especially. I know about 1% of Kant's output, but enough to know the meaning of his 'copernican revolution in philosophy' which hardly anyone does.

By the way, just splurged seventy five bucks on this.

By the way, just splurged seventy five bucks on this. — Wayfarer

Cool. Let us know if it's clear and accessible.

Pardon me, but tosh. Dennett literally says humans are essentially mindless robots in service of the selfish gene, and that life is a kind of runaway chemical reaction. It's a symptom of the decline of the West that such nonsense is dignifed with the title 'philosophy'. — Wayfarer

Neo-anti-Darwinist David Berlinski says that Dennett's most impressive achievement is his beard.

I haven't actually read Dennett's argument but I must say I find the claim that the mind "doesn't exist" to be a puzzler.

Plus, he worked his way through college playing jazz piano. That, I respect.

Actually, Dennett seems a really decent guy, but if that's so, it's not by virtue of anything in his philosophy, but in spite of it.

I haven't actually read Dennett's argument but I must say I find the claim that the mind "doesn't exist" to be a puzzler. — fishfry

He doesn't say that. It's more that the popular understanding of the nature of mind - 'folk psychology' in the jargon of his clique - is grounded on a misunderstanding of its nature. So he says. But as many qualified critics have pointed out, it's based on the idea that the mind is in some fundamental sense unreal.