Interview: Daniel Dennett—philosophy has a big role to play, “if only it will play it”

Most academic philosophy today "is not worth my effort"

by Alex Dean / March 6, 2017 / Leave a comment

Philosopher Daniel Dennett, Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University

From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel Dennett, £25

“I am not engaging in a lot of the disputation that is currently fashionable in academic departments of philosophy… I don’t think it’s worth my effort.” In an exclusive interview with Prospect, Daniel Dennett, world-leading philosopher of mind and one of the “Four Horsemen of Atheism,” aimed fire at those who pull philosophy in the wrong direction.

“I’ve got my priorities, and I think there’s more philosophical substance to be obtained from taking science very seriously and thinking about the traditional philosophical issues—free will, consciousness, mind, creativity, meaning—using scientific tools, rather than by adopting hyper-abstract semi-formalism, and thrashing away on that in terms that nobody else understands.”

Dennett is a philosophical troublemaker. As Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Massachusetts, he stands well apart from his contemporaries—most of whom are concerned primarily with abstract logical puzzles. Having marched into the Prospect offices with a giant knobbled walking stick, huge beard, and a silver badge on the lapel of his jacket that read “Darwin,” he ran through the arguments in his latest book. From Bacteria to Bach and Back is, he hopes, a “culmination of a 50-year project to provide the main components of a unified, naturalistic view of the mind.”

As you’d expect from a die-hard Darwinian, Dennett believes that “you can have an uncomprehending, unintending, lacking in foresight, blind process that can make intelligent things.” When I asked him whether there could ever be room for God in the Dennett worldview, he shot back: “Not at all.”

Biological evolution has given rise to all manner of wonderful things, he believes, but to understand how humans came to have minds, we must look also to cultural evolution: the evolution of ideas, symbols and, particularly important here, practices.

Dennett calls things which fall into this latter category “memes.” The term has come to refer to something that is shared around on social media, but it was coined by Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to mean something which is culturally transmitted, like a virus, from person to person. A whistled tune, a way of building clay pots or, crucially for Dennett, words.

It is words that enabled human minds to come into existence, says Dennett, as language gave us the thinking tools we needed to start reflecting on things. We already had reasons…

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Comments

ted schrey montreal
March 11, 2017 at 14:17
Once upon a time, in a universe near me, I read Dennett's Consciousness Explained. So, naturally I feel entitled to comment---and still more so since I saw several photographs of the great man seated in a little sailboat with no wind in sight. Dennett is a philosopher as a sailor is without wind. And it makes no difference however often one repeats the pose.
ted schrey montreal
March 11, 2017 at 16:53
I clearly remember coming to the fulfillment of the promised Consciousness Explained, lo, these quite a few years ago, it was somewhere in the 400 numbers of the book. What the heck, I thought, couldn't Dennett have said that on page 3 or, giving him a chance to rant on, page 14 maybe? Add up all you have learned via science and that's it. There is an oddly autistic quality about this sort of verbal knitting, which I wouldn't call thinking or reasoning--autistic in the sense that the knitting never escapes its centripetal force. I see free will as emerging from consciousness and since this is a rare quality or force, it is no surprise free will itself is somewhat bizarre. Till one takes the next step and presents consciousness as non-causal in its essence. By then one may feel quite far removed from science. Which is where one should be.
Michael Gover
March 13, 2017 at 15:10
I made the mistake of doing a philosophy module in an Open University course and hated it. Of all the philosophers discussed only JS Mill appeared worth serious attention. Dennett was mentioned briefly in a footnote somewhere and I have subsequently read "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking". It was a breath of fresh air. Ted says "I see free will as (...) a rare quality or force (...)." He means that he feels subjectively that this is the case. It is the old "life force" fantasy indulged in by the likes of Mary Midgley. You might as well read Lobsang Rampa. If you want to study things that are apparently non-causal, you could try quantum mechanics but that is too hard for most, certainly too hard for me. We do hear from time to time that there are quantum mechanical explanations for mind, but generally they come from people who think "I don't understand A or B, therefore B is like A". Penrose is the honourable exception, but there comes a point where a mathematical proposition must be subject to a real world test if you want to assert that it has a real world effect. Not likely any time soon.