So my question for Dennett is this: In precisely what sense does he comprehend what he wrote in his essay and how does that comprehension justify his sneering contempt for those who disagree with him on his biological and computational reductionism?
In almost every debate or interview with Prof Daniel Dennett have never witnessed him having "sneering contempt" for anything , these poor fellows really know how to play the wounded doves when they feel threatened by these ideas & new perceptions investigating emergent consciousness & its causes from evolutionary pov. This is the most frightening thing for its implications without the "sky hook/sky crane " explanation of 'reasons from above" and of course unsettles the ancient status quo assumptions .
Its always the case when we see certain taboos violated finds immediate vitriolic retaliation of the same order & of course universally playing the "hurt card" one see's so often here (ceasless whining) . Dennett is actually quite moderating & critical of too radical leaping approaches made by earlier materialist reductionist science in what he recently termed "Greedy Reductionism" for there are still many layers of understanding we have yet to go thru .
en.wikipedia.org
In his earlier book Consciousness Explained, Dennett argued that, without denying that human consciousness exists, we can understand it as coming about from the coordinated activity of many components in the brain that are themselves unconscious. In response, critics accused him of "explaining away" consciousness because he disputes the existence of certain conceptions of consciousness that he considers overblown and incompatible with what is physically possible. This is perhaps what motivated Dennett to make the greedy/good distinction in his follow-up book, to freely admit that reductionism can go overboard while pointing out that not all reductionism goes this far
Whereas "good" reductionism means explaining a thing in terms of what it reduces to (for example, its parts and their interactions), greedy reductionism is when "in their eagerness for a bargain, in their zeal to explain too much too fast, scientists and philosophers underestimate the complexities, trying to skip whole layers or levels of theory in their rush to fasten everything securely and neatly to the foundation." [1]
Using the terminology of "cranes" (legitimate, mechanistic explanations) and "skyhooks" (essentially, fake—e.g. supernaturalistic—explanations) built up earlier in the chapter, Dennett recapitulates his initial definition of the term in the chapter summary on p. 83: "Good reductionists suppose that all Design can be explained without skyhooks; greedy reductionists suppose it can all be explained without cranes." |
