Word: dennetts
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Chalmers' forthcoming book is already making a stir. His argument has been labeled "a major misdirector of attention, an illusion generator," by the well-known philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts University. Dennett believes consciousness is no longer a mystery. Sure there are details to work out, but the puzzle has been reduced to "a set of manageable problems...
...roots of the debate between Chalmers and Dennett--the debate over how mysterious mind is or isn't--lie in the work of Dennett's mentor at Oxford University, Gilbert Ryle. In 1949 Ryle published a landmark book called The Concept of Mind. It resoundingly dismissed the idea of a human soul--a "ghost in the machine," as Ryle derisively put it--as a hangover from prescientific thought. Ryle's juiciest target was the sort of soul imagined back in the 17th century by Rene Descartes: an immaterial, somewhat autonomous soul that steers the body through life. But the book...
Ryle's book was published three years after ENIAC's birth, and at first glance his ideas would seem to draw strength from the computer age. That, at any rate, is the line Dennett takes in defending his teacher's school of thought. Dennett notes that AI is progressing, creating smart machines that process data somewhat the way human beings do. As this trend continues, he believes, it will become clearer that we're all machines, that Ryle's strict materialism was basically on target, that the mind-body problem is in principle solved. The title of Dennett...
...having knowked down all opponentsto Darwinism, Dennett fails to make a strong casefor a Darwinian morality. maybe we aren't . justmachines for eating and reproducing; but where dowe go from there? Are we consigned to a sterilerelativism, or is some more normative ethicspossible? The title of the chapter "The MoralFirst Aid Manual" should give some indication:Dennett sees the process of moral reasoning asessentially chaotic and endless, and he valuesmoral rules simply as semi-arbitrary ways ofending a moral deliberation. He has no deepcommitment to any principle, but merely wants aresult, and it doesn't seem to much matter whatthat...
...after Darwinism remains a matter fordebate. Much of the book is spent attacking thenotion of essences and teleologies, yet Dennettdoesn't address how one could formulate any kindof human ethics without some essential conceptionof human nature. This question is not answered bythe Moral First Aid manual, and without answeringit Dennett cannot claim to have assuaged all ourfears about Darwinism...