The least science can do is to stop pretending that such a reality does not exist." — darthbarracuda

They are not pretending it doesn't exist. They simply borrowing from Buddhism calling everything that doesn't fit neatly into their equations "illusions". In other words, the only things to take seriously it's that which can be measured. Everything else is inconsequential and just a fantasy created by chemicals. In literature such fantastical thought is called magical-realism, that is it seems possible enough until one steps back and realizes how fantastical the whole story really is.

Remember we are basically, fundamentally being asked to believe that chemicals created everything in some God-like moment of creationism including the illusions that are fooling itself.

Eliminative materialists are denying that consciousness exists, in the same way chemists deny phlogiston or astronomers deny the planet Vulcan.

Part of the reason eliminative materialism seemsto be so misunderstood is, in my opinion, precisely because it is so staggeringly unintuitive - people wonder if they really understood the fundamental position because it seems ridiculous to actually believe consciousness does not exist. And yet this is what eliminative materialism accepts. You'll do a double-take and ask if this is really what it's all about, and continue to be dumbfounded as to how this can actually be taken seriously.

The main problem with elim mat is that it equivocates, by kind, consciousness with phlogiston or Vulcan. The latter two were unobserved, hypothesized entities meant to fill in an explanatory role. Consciousness is not this. Consciousness is the data, not something we put in the data.

It's also kind of funny to see how elim mat tends to be a "phase" of philosophers of mind. Not many elim mats have been elim mats since day one.

Elim mat is also not identical to reductive materialism, or type-type identity theory. Dennett's theory is reductive in the sense that it maintains that consciousness "exists" but not in the sense we usually see it as. Consciousness is an illusion, but it still is something. Eliminative materialism doesn't even give any room for consciousness to be anything at all, because it denies the existence of consciousness to begin with.

By whatever means science attempts to deny that consciousness exists (as they do with the concept of choice) the singular goal remains the same, that is to deny any possibility of the immaterial or more precisely the unmeasurable. The myth of science as being the sole holder and means to be truth must be upheld at all costs. There is a tremendous cost in quality of life for anyone who buys into the myth that only the material is real and everything else is an "illusion".

"The first person's point of view is not accepted as a valid source of data in the physical sciences... — darthbarracuda

...and the attempt to apply scientific method to the kinds of philosophical issues that can only be properly addressed in the first person is the precise meaning of 'scientism'.

We need a science that admits and takes seriously the reality of the inner subjective world. — darthbarracuda

Or, alternatively, a simple acknowledgement that the natural sciences only ever deal with objects and forces in the world, and not with the nature of the meaning of being.

That point is very close, in any case, to that made in Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos.

It comes down to deeply-held and an almost pre-reflective sense of what constitutes reality. I notice in the original review, that Dennett naturally defaults to the idea that:

the world is populated with molecules, atoms, electrons, gravity, quarks, and who knows what else (dark energy, strings? branes?).

But, whatever they are, they are the kinds of things that physics, and only physics, can ever understand. So 'mind' is always, and must be somehow, derivative of that - through the 'unconscious competence' of bits of organic matter that spontaneously happen to organise themselves well enough for the Darwinian dynamic to kick in.

By whatever means science attempts to deny that consciousness exists (as they do with the concept of choice) the singular goal remains the same, that is to deny any possibility of the immaterial or more precisely the unmeasurable. The myth of science as being the sole holder and means to be truth must be upheld at all costs. There is a tremendous cost in quality of life for anyone who buys into the myth that only the material is real and everything else is an "illusion". — Rich

...and the attempt to apply scientific method to the kinds of philosophical issues that can only be properly addressed in the first person is the precise meaning of 'scientism'. — Wayfarer

I would absolutely love to start a new discussion over this at some point, but I agree and disagree with you both at the same time.

If subjective, first-person experience is a part of the world (as it does seem to be, thanks Descartes), then there are a number of courses of action that I see that science can take to account for this:

1.) Deny that first-person experience is something "special" and try to explain how it "emerges" from unconscious, third-person objectivity, as elim and reduct mats etc try to do.

2.) Deny that consciousness is fit for scientific study, as behaviorists and even some phenomenologists believe.

3.) Change the scope of the science itself to account for subjectivity.

By far, the third option seems, to me, to be the least used. Super-Scientists (as I like to call them) have the rhetoric against religion (and even philosophy!) for not observing the empirical data and for constraining the world to a hypothesis (when it should be the other way around), yet all too often they deny what is most obvious (consciousness).

So yes, I do agree that science, in particular physics and neuroscience, has an almost masturbatory fetish with reductionism. It's implausible, if not wholly insufficient.

That being said, I don't agree that scientism is merely the utilization of science for "first-person" projects. If we are being completely honest, if science can't answer questions about consciousness, then probably nothing can. Philosophy has its uses but if we expect it, and/or its relatives like mysticism or religion, to explain something when it has a generally poor track record of linear, teleological progress (not that that's inherently a bad thing), we're going to be sorely disappointed.

I also don't agree that there is a strict demarcation between science and philosophy. Science is more than just the study of third-person, objective facts about the world, and philosophy is more than just the study of first-person accounts. In order for there to be such a demarcation, there should need to be some kind of explanation as to why science can study this-and-that but not the stuff philosophy does.

I like to think myself as an open-minded methodological naturalist. When push comes to shove, I would rather align myself with the scientistic Super-Scientists rather than those who try to exclude science from some domain of inquiry (even it's justified), because all too often I've seen that those belonging to the latter group are pushing some sort of reactionary set of beliefs. "Science can't explain this!" unfortunately gets lumped together with more conservative claims like "Science as-it-exists-today is not capable to understanding this!" All too often the intentional limiting of science is an unconscious mechanism meant to curb the perceived threat of meaningless objective nihilism or what have you. Hence why phenomenology has been criticized as being conservative and trying to seclude human meaning from the rest of the world.

So once again I go back to the list I made before: that which cannot be studied scientifically must either be mistaken, unfit for scientific inquiry in general, or unfit for scientific inquiry as science is practiced today. There are examples of all three: the first includes things like ghosts, phlogiston, and magic, the second includes normative ethics, politics, theology and any sort of transcendental or supernatural-ism (and even then it could be argued that "technically" we could use science to do these things, albeit in a very clunky and indirect way), and the third includes, in my opinion, things like consciousness, aesthetics, and perhaps even some theological issues.

Like I said, I don't see any real strict demarcation between science and philosophy. You can go off and focus more on one rather than the other but they nevertheless are inherently tied. It's silly in my opinion to have a separate branch of inquiry, secluded away from everything else that studies matters in a methodological black box.

If subjective, first-person experience is a part of the world — darthbarracuda

But, it's not 'part of the world'. It precedes the world. I don't want to say that the world is 'all in the mind' in the sense implied by solipsism, but to say that the first-person experience is 'part of the world' is a mistake, in my view, because you're already making 'it' something it is not. Have a look at this note on Husserl's criticism of Descartes, which makes a very similar point.

I don't agree that scientism is merely the utilization of science for "first-person" projects. If we are being completely honest, if science can't answer questions about consciousness, then probably nothing can — darthbarracuda

Look back on the history of the question. The mind-matter dichotomy which preceded the whole modern mind-body problem, was a consequence of the combination of Cartesian dualism with Galilean science. Actually Philip Goff, who was the author of the article on panpsychism, has a really good blog post on this. He says:

Perhaps the most important move in the scientific revolution was Galileo’s declaration that mathematics was to be the language of natural science. But he felt able to do this only after he had revolutionised our philosophical picture of the world. Before Galileo it was generally assumed that matter had sensory qualities: tomatoes were red, paprika was spicy, flowers smelt sweet. But it’s hard to see how these sensory qualities – the redness of tomatoes, the spicy taste of paprika, the sweet smell of flowers – could be captured in the abstract, austere vocabulary of mathematics. How could an equation capture what it’s like to taste spicy paprika? And if sensory qualities can’t be captured in a mathematical vocabulary, it seemed to follow that a mathematical vocabulary could never capture the complete nature of matter.

Galileo’s solution to this problem was to strip matter of its sensory qualities and put them in the soul. The sweet smell isn’t really in the flowers but in the soul of the person smelling them; the spicy taste isn’t really in the paprika but in the soul of the person tasting it. Even colours, for Galileo, aren’t really on the surfaces of objects but in the soul of the person observing them. And if matter had no qualities, then it was possible in principle to describe it in the purely quantitative vocabulary of mathematics. This was the birth of mathematical physics.

But of course Galileo didn’t deny the existence of the sensory qualities. Rather he took them to be forms of consciousness residing in the soul, an entity outside of the material world and so outside of the domain of natural science. In other words, Galileo created physical science by putting consciousness outside of its domain of enquiry.

Rather than 'in the soul', it might be better put 'attributing them to the observing mind'. But that also meshed with Locke's representative realism, which is fundamentally naturalistic - there is a real world, and scientific method and quantitative analysis the way to chart it.

So the naturalistic approach to 'what is consciousness' is naturally to treat it in biological or evolutionary terms, as the attribute of conscious beings, of which h. sapiens is the obvious example. That is what leads to the whole evolutionary-neurological approach of Dennett (and the secular intelligentsia as a whole). And Dennett attempts closure by then altogether denying the presence of the observer, saying that only the observable phenomena are real (ignoring wht I consider to be the obvious fact that all judgements of meaning are made by the subject.)

Nobody can seriously challenge that view in the modern academy (as Nagel did, in Mind and Cosmos, which was accordingly nominated 'most despised philosophy text of 2012', Raymond Tallis having won that honour the year previously on pretty much the same grounds).

But the issue is, that entire 'objectifiying' worldview is itself a state of mind, if you like: an historically-conditioned attitude to life, the universe and everything which treats such questions as 'the nature of consciousness' as being continuous with the other questions that science can deal with (such as physics, medicine, chemistry, and all the other disciplines.) It is part of being modern, to see the world like that. Phenomenology (for instance) wants to undermine or subvert its 'instinctive naturalism' by calling it out.

I also don't agree that there is a strict demarcation between science and philosophy — darthbarracuda

I don't think it's that strict a demarcation, but I am sure that there is a profound difference between philosophical and scientific questions; however, it's only a difference which is recognisable by philosophers!

All too often the intentional limiting of science is an unconscious mechanism meant to curb the perceived threat of meaningless objective nihilism or what have you. — darthbarracuda

That's very true, but I'm sure the same can be applied to a lot of 'scientism', such as Dennett's. What is the big payoff for denying the reality of first-person experience? Why, it solves (or rather bypasses) a lot of existential anxiety. It's almost like a kind of faux transcendence - but rather than passing beyond the self, as traditional spirituality attempts to do, one simply dons a lab-coat and declares it a non-problem.

Snippet from the Wiki entry on Michel Henry's criticism of 'barbarism':

In his essay Barbarism, Michel Henry examines science, which is founded on the idea of a universal and as such objective truth, and which therefore leads to the elimination of the sensible qualities of the world, sensibility and life. There is nothing wrong with science in itself as long as it is restricted to the study of nature, but it tends to exclude all traditional forms of culture, such as art, ethics and religion. Science left to its own devices leads to technology, whose blind processes develop themselves independently in a monstrous fashion with no reference to life.

Science is a form of culture in which life denies itself and refuses itself any value. It is a practical negation of life, which develops into a theoretical negation in the form of ideologies that reduces all possible knowledge to that of science, such as the human sciences whose very objectivity deprives them of their object: what value do statistics have faced with suicide, what do they say about the anguish and the despair that produce it? These ideologies have invaded the university, and are precipitating it to its destruction by eliminating life from research and teaching. Television is the truth of technology; it is the practice par excellence of barbarism: it reduces every event to current affairs, to incoherent and insignificant facts.

This negation of life results, according to Michel Henry, from the "disease of life", from its secret dissatisfaction with the self which leads it to deny itself, to flee itself in order to escape its anguish and its own suffering. In the modern world, we are almost all condemned from childhood to flee our anguish and our proper life in the mediocrity of the media universe — an escape from self and a dissatisfaction which lead to violence — rather than resorting to the most highly developed traditional forms of culture which enable the overcoming of this suffering and its transformation into joy. Culture subsists, despite everything, but in a kind of incognito; in our materialist society, which is sinking into barbarism, it must necessarily operate in a clandestine way.

Emphasis added.

Like, on philosophy forums. ;-)

Except that is the opposite of the truth. Consumerism, materialism, and the suppression of the human spirit is leading to far less violence than ever before. When people care more about the universal, the behavioral, and objective, then ethics become about inclusion, and the avoidance of physical harms and ailments. It only makes sense that that would lead to less violence (like the unprecedented lows we now globally experience, northern hemisphere entirely war free).

A more complex ethic involving virtuous and vice filled behavior, purity, group loyalty over universalism, and a spirited physical lot, and you of course get more violence. It may be better, and more healthy for individuals, and people may be happier and this be closer to truth... but it would definitely be more violent.

I enjoyed Dennett's paper, "Two Black Boxes," but whenever I read his stuff on consciousness, I immediately sense that he's trying to hoodwink me.

What doesn't sit right is this: Dennett wants to say that common-sense things, like emotions and macroscopic objects and such, are illusions of the manifest image, but that we ought to regard them as real because they're useful. He's basically saying, "It's all just pretend, but it's fine that we pretend, as long as we keep in mind that we're pretending."

On the one hand, I see the merit of this. It certainly helps to keep in mind that the representation is not the thing that it represents, and the reification of representations is, indeed, a philosophical pitfall. The problem is that Dennett wants to claim that the only thing that isn't a representation is physicality. Of course, pretense itself is also a user illusion, but it's okay for us to pretend that there's such a thing as pretending. :s

I am quite comfortable with there being a physical description of all subjective phenomena. It bothers me not one whit that the thoughts I form while writing this all correspond to brain states, or even that they are brain states. I'll even grant you that the neural descriptions are far more useful, if you're doing neuroscience or something similar. The third-person perspective can be primary for methodological reasons, but why grant it ontological primacy? Dennett's answer, ultimately, is "because it's useful to do so." But things are the way they are, regardless of what is useful to us, and Dennett would, no doubt, agree with that. And if utility determines ontology, then why not assume the manifest image is real as well, since we need that too? You can even argue that the manifest image is more useful; we survived for millennia with it alone, and we still use it more often in our lives than the scientific image. More to the point, if Dennett is so adamant that things are the way they are regardless of what's useful for us, then why does he base his ontology on utility in the first place?

The manifest image is "the world according to us," yes - as is the scientific image.

The third-person perspective can be primary for methodological reasons, but why grant it ontological primacy? Dennett's answer, ultimately, is "because it's useful to do so." — Pneumenon

Except it's not as useful as the first person perspective when it comes to human interaction; and what could be more important for humans than that? It's arguable that all the technological and ecological problems facing humanity do not spring nearly so much from an impoverished third person (scientific) understanding of the world and human technological effects upon it, but from a deficiency of decent first person understanding in those with power (and not only those in power, either) when it comes to their ethical responsibilities, including, centrally, how to properly regard others and their suffering.

Wasn't it Peirce who said something like: 'Never doubt philosophically, what you cannot sincerely doubt in your heart"?

I think it just comes down to 'more prosperity, less violence'. The prosperous also have much greater technological means now for keeping the less prosperous peoples marginalized, and distancing themselves from any of their insurgent actions.

I think that it's obviously what I suggested. When you look up the ethical concerns of progressives, and conservatives, you'll see that the godless only care, or care by far the most about only harm. Conservatives care also about purity, loyalty, and such. These other ethical concerns, to the extent that one is more concerned with them, must be less proportionally concerned about harm. It it also easily conceivable for someone to care more about other considerations than harm.

Caring is not a zero-sum game.

With our minds we can care about everything equally and infinitely, but not in real life. It actually is a calculus where things get hierarchically ordered through various metrics. We don't have time to care and worry about everything, and if we do then we aren't doing anything anyway.

The most significant danger is for something else to over take harm in importance, so that it's more important that people be virtuous than not harmed, or pure than not harmed.

all right, there is something to the limited capacity that each of us has for moral concerns; however, I think that more importantly, moral imperatives are often in tension with each other (e.g. do not harm vs. punish).

My claim was to the notion that modern materialistic, and secular trends will lead to more violence. Firstly by noting that it actually hasn't, but has lead to less. I kept with keeping that there was a causative factor, in that people that would identify as that self-report their own ethical concerns to revolve by far the most around avoiding harm.

Might be coincidental and none of any of it has anything to do with the trends of violence in modernity, I dunno, my suggestion is as modest as, if the opposing ethical concerns are indeed a relevant and causative factor, then the evidence suggests that the inverse is that case. That it causes less, and not more violence.

Some of the comments on Dennett’s use of “illusion” are covered in a review in The New Statesman. For example,
these excerpts:

“In this new book, confusion persists, owing to his reluctance to define his terms. When he says “consciousness” he appears to mean reflective self-consciousness (I am aware that I am aware), whereas many other philosophers use “consciousness” to mean ordinary awareness, or experience. There ensues much sparring with straw men, as when he ridicules thinkers who assume that gorillas, say, have consciousness. They almost certainly don’t in his sense, and they almost certainly do in his opponents’ sense. (A gorilla, we may be pretty confident, has experience in the way that a volcano or a cloud does not.)

“More unnecessary confusion, in which one begins to suspect Dennett takes a polemical delight, arises from his continued use of the term “illusion”. Consciousness, he has long said, is an illusion: we think we have it, but we don’t. But what is it that we are fooled into believing in? It can’t be experience itself: as the philosopher Galen Strawson has pointed out, the claim that I only seem to have experience presupposes that I really am having experience – the experience of there seeming to be something. And throughout this book, Dennett’s language implies that he thinks consciousness is real: he refers to “conscious thinking in H[omo] sapiens”, to people’s “private thoughts and experiences”, to our “proper minds, enculturated minds full of thinking tools”, and to “a ‘rich mental life’ in the sense of a conscious life like ours”.

“The way in which this conscious life is allegedly illusory is finally explained in terms of a “user illusion”, such as the desktop on a computer operating system. We move files around on our screen desktop, but the way the computer works under the hood bears no relation to these pictorial metaphors. Similarly, Dennett writes, we think we are consistent “selves”, able to perceive the world as it is directly, and acting for rational reasons. But by far the bulk of what is going on in the brain is unconscious, ­low-level processing by neurons, to which we have no access. Therefore we are stuck at an ­“illusory” level, incapable of experiencing how our brains work.

“This picture of our conscious mind is rather like Freud’s ego, precariously balan­ced atop a seething unconscious with an entirely different agenda. Dennett explains wonderfully what we now know, or at least compellingly theorise, about how much unconscious guessing, prediction and logical inference is done by our brains to produce even a very simple experience such as seeing a table. Still, to call our normal experience of things an “illusion” is, arguably, to privilege one level of explanation arbitrarily over another.”

The entire review is here:

http://tinyurl.com/jp9xhc5

So "we" have no access, but little thinking neurons do. And they have an agenda!

Well, thank you to the reviewer for clearing it all up. Really all we need to do is think of neurons as little people doing all the thinking for us and we are all set. A little bit of
anthropomorphism usually clears up all issues relating to consciousness.

Now back to illusions and myth-makers. Who's to blame for this bit if trickery? Blame it on the neurons? Now why would they go through all of the trouble to do such things? What is their agenda?

I think 'competence without comprehension' describes Dennett very well.

My claim was to the notion that modern materialistic, and secular trends will lead to more violence. — Wosret

The word I used, and the passage I referred to, wasn't about violence as such, but about barbarism.

Which is equally manifestly the opposite of the truth.



A good analog for the brain is a bee hive. Bees do two things when they're doing their dance, which is try to recruit others to do the same dance, or stop others from doing a different one. Likewise, neurons fire, and prevent other neurons from firing. So, ideas, or actions start small, and then cascade.

To me it feels like a superposition of vague possibilities or thoughts until the act collapses the many possibilities into the one actuality.

Which is equally manifestly the opposite of the truth. — Wosret

Because Woz says, right?

So people are more brutal now than ever before, and brutality has increased in the world? Where? In what senses?

I'm sure that it appears to be so if you listen to the right (wrong) people. It's just not at all plausibly maintainable that we're living in a more brutal time now than the past...

I understand. Neurons start off life as little babies and then the grow into adults who form little communities and sometimes big cities, and then they die and give each other funerals.

Can we please stop referring to neurons as little people? It gets kind of creepy. Maybe it's just an illusion??

People sure love to respond with a lot of rhetoric, and zero content. Just like this post, notice how it's mocking and accusatory, and not a single word of it meaningfully addresses anything anyone said.

You're all silly and creepy, and are not my friends, nor my buddies, but have been reduced to my guys.

I will grant one sense in which it is true. People are psychologically or emotionally more brutal than ever, I think. A consequence of a lack of physical reprisals, and distance.

Psychological violence is still violence. I will grant that I think that it is on the rise. I'm not entirely sure which is worse, either.

I don't know, I would say the ethic behind "purity, loyalty and such" is the basically the avoidance of objectification; which I would call the basis of all rationalizations of harming. We can only be pure, loyal and such to persons or, at the minimum, to fellow creatures, whom we consider to be something more than merely objects.

I've heard that kind of thing a lot, but again, when it doesn't actually pan onto what's going on in the world, it can't be true.

For it to be true, all of our archaeological and statistical evidence to suggest that violence has gone down by many multiples in a few centuries, people's self-professed either systems, and the correlation of violence would have to be better accounted for.

You'd just have to ignore all of the evidence, or say everyone is actually lying.

Further, I don't think that the reasoning even follows, and is better accounted for by what I've already suggested. When people think that we're "merely objects" then ethics becomes about our objective states of existence, it doesn't start to not value people's objective existences at all, because they don't believe in a higher, more significant one. The very suggestion is made by those that talk about one's objective existence as "mere", so who's going to be the one to care less about it, and think that some transcendental state, or whatever the alternative things is, is not "mere" but what is actually important?

I think that this just further demonstrates everything I've said.

I'm conjecturing that the reduction in brutality or physical violence is a result of civilize-ation, and that civilizing tendencies are both the result of, and enabled by, general prosperity. If you think I am claiming that there is not, overall, less violence and brutality today than in past eras, then you misunderstand what I am saying; I am not disagreeing that there may well be a condition of less violence today, I am disagreeing as to the probable cause of that condition.

It's about hierarchy, not loyalty per se. Conservatives care about maintain a particular hierarchy, which is why purity and loyalty (to that hierarchy) register as important.

Progressives demand loyalty and purity too, just not to the hierarchies the conservatives demand.

In this respect, "loyalty" and "purity" are usually about partaking in objectification as much as avoiding them. They are used to justify who can be objectified and harmed-- the impure, the traitor, the criminal, the unnatural, the savage, etc.-- who are the monsters who deserve no protection or respect.

So people are more brutal now than ever before, and brutality has increased in the world? Where? In what senses? — Wosret

The quote was from an essay called 'Barbarism', by a French philosopher, named Michel Henry. It was made in the context of the debate about Daniel Dennett's denial of the reality of the mind/consciousness/persons. For some reason that caused you to start going off on a tangent about violence, when the quotation wasn't really about violence at all.

But as far as violence is concerned, the USA sees many tens of thousands dead by gun violence every year. Recently a milestone was passed whereby the total number of dead from random acts of gun violence on American soil, totalled more than the number of Americans killed in both World Wars and the Civil War. So I don't think it's possible to claim that 'modern culture' is not violent, certainly not in the USA anyway.

But even though that is true, it's still not the point. The point was first, a quotation from Philip Goff about how modern science, since Galileo, excludes the mind (or soul, or observer) from its doings, and the philosophical implications of that. Then I referred to the quote from Michel Henry. This is because I think Daniel Dennett's anti-philosophy (and that is truly what it is) is based on a systematic denial of the reality of the human being. And that's not really just an academic argument. And I really do think Dennett, in saying these kinds of things, is an instrument (perhaps an unwitting instrument) of the systematic degradation of humanity.

Powered by Darwin, modern science proceeds, in Dennett’s phrase, as a “universal corrosive,” destroying illusions all the way up and all the way down, dismantling our feelings of freedom and separate selfhood, our morals and beliefs, a mother’s love and a patient’s prayer: All in reality are just “molecules in motion.”....

While it is true that materialism tells us a human being is nothing more than a “moist robot”—a phrase Dennett took from a Dilbert comic—we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that “for general purposes” the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist—that colors and sounds exist, too—“just not in the way they think.” They “exist in a special way,” which is to say, ultimately, not at all.

Andew Ferguson, The Heretic (Review of reaction to Nagel's Mind and Cosmos).

You see, ideas really do matter. Dennett's species of neo-darwninian materialism really does deny human nature. Even he acknowledges that this might have serious consequences, and contemplates the notion that 'the brights' ought to let the common folk entertain their notions of purpose and ethical principles, even though the brights realize it's all just matter in motion and none of it means anything.

That was why I referred to Henry. I don't know much about him, he was mentioned here on the forum, I read the Wikipedia entry on it. That is where I read the quote I mentioned:

Michel Henry examines science, which is founded on the idea of a universal and as such objective truth, and which therefore leads to the elimination of the sensible qualities of the world, sensibility and life. There is nothing wrong with science in itself as long as it is restricted to the study of nature, but it tends to exclude all traditional forms of culture, such as art, ethics and religion. Science left to its own devices leads to technology, whose blind processes develop themselves independently in a monstrous fashion with no reference to life.

(This is what is happening in culture. In the USA, you've just seen a budget proposal to totally eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts. It probably won't go through, but the intention has been expressed.)

Anyway, I think Dennett's anti-philosophy is a complete falsehood, a crock from top to bottom. So do a lot of other philosophers, but they have to be polite about it. It is simply the attempt to apply 'scientific thinking' to subjects beyond it's scope, which is 'scientism', pure and simple. People have been pointing this out about Dennett for decades, but he keeps turning out this nonsense.