Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

This is a really terrible review. I really want to say something that contributes more, but my god, this person does not understand or even care to understand Dennet. Again and again, he elides over all of Dennet&#x27;s reasoning only to seize suddenly on the conclusion, which prima facie he disagrees with, as an apparent absurdity or contradiction. I don&#x27;t intend to write an elaborate dissection of the article, but just as a particularly egregious example:<p>&quot;Similarly, when Dennett claims that words are “memes” that reproduce like a “virus,” he is speaking pure gibberish. Words reproduce, within minds and between persons, by being intentionally adopted and employed.&quot;<p>The review can be summarized, in brief: &quot;Dennet gives some &#x27;ingenious&#x27; arguments that I do not particularly care to follow, but for all the effort, he does not seem to grasp the fundamental flaw - namely, that he disagrees with me.&quot;

David Bentley Hart and Ed Feser, who is also mentioned in a comment here, are theist cranks who have both developed evasive &quot;metaphysical arguments&quot; which apparently tell us the universe has a &quot;light of being&quot; (DBH) or a &quot;prime mover&quot; (EF) which turn out, shock horror(!), to be the Christian God that they already believe in and their &quot;arguments&quot; tell us <i>nothing</i> else (e.g. they don&#x27;t tell us if the universe had a beginning or not, because, of course, they don&#x27;t want to go toe-to-toe with physics). DBH and EF are the latest in a long line of &quot;philosophers&quot; paid directly or indirectly by the corrupt church to provide sophistries to make the billions of peasant believers continue paying their tithes. Let them, with their oh-so-deep metaphysical arguments, predict something true about the universe that physics doesn&#x27;t yet know and then we might listen. I&#x27;m surprised the utterances of a crank like DBH would reach the pages of HN.

Has anyone read this article? It is pretty horrible. It argues against explaining mind as a pure physical process that evolved by adaption. I am not sure what it is advocating instead but it isn&#x27;t hard science but something else.<p>This author elevates the idea of consciousness significantly. And dismissing Dennett attempts to reduce it. Now I am not saying there may be weirdness in consciousness such as possible quantum processes which makes it hard to simulate on a traditional computer but it is still physical and ultimately reducible given sufficient technical understanding.<p>I do not support this articles approach at all.<p>That said I find Dennett long winded and boring to read. But ultimately he is right. I guess I buy his argument at the beginning thus reading his thousands of pages is very unrewarding.

Dennet is a reductive materialist. He&#x27;d probably disagree with my hardline depiction of him, but, in my opinion, if it quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, it&#x27;s probably a duck. For what it&#x27;s worth, he identifies as a &#x27;teleofunctionalist&#x27; (???).<p>The author of the piece doesn&#x27;t <i>seem</i> to be a reductive materialist, so obviously Dennet won&#x27;t jive with him. I&#x27;m also not a materialist, so I don&#x27;t really find Dennet very insightful. For example, he denies the existence of qualia (and rejects everything that comes with that experience; see Nagel&#x27;s famous <i>What is it like to be a bat?</i>).<p>With that said, I think he&#x27;s made some pretty big contributions to materialism, in particular with regards to evolutionary theory and by providing some pretty solid theories of an &#x27;emergent&#x27; non-hand-wavy consciousness. I don&#x27;t really agree with his points and I think he&#x27;s being crudely reductive, but dismissing the man&#x27;s life work is kind of unfair.

What&#x27;s the big deal with consciousness? Isn&#x27;t it an obvious trait of any human like, animal like, robot like semi-intelligent being? I&#x27;d expect it to emerge automatically, once correct base instincts &amp; abilities are programmed.

The title would be clearer if it implied that it was a review of a single philosopher - Maybe &quot;Daniel Dennet - The Illusionist&quot;

We cannot know the limits of our thinking because we cannot think beyond those limits (or something like that) - Wittgenstein

It&#x27;s impossible to objectively explain the subjective. To do so is a category error.