In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, elaborating on the materialist stance that has occupied him for much of his career, endeavors to explain how the human mind and consciousness itself are the product of gradual, incremental evolution entirely reducible to physics and chemistry. To Dennett, the brain, like a computer, performs a series of discrete and mindless functions, which together create in us the illusion that we are conscious and sentient beings. David Bentley Hart attacks this argument in his review:
It is a fairly inflexible law of logic that no reality can be the emergent result of its own contingent effects. This is why. . . it is difficult to make much sense of Dennett’s claim that the brain is “a kind of computer,” and the mind merely a kind of “interface” between that computer and its “user.” The idea that the mind is software is a popular delusion at the moment, but that hardly excuses a putatively serious philosopher for perpetuating it—though admittedly Dennett does so in a distinctive way. Usually, when confronted by the computational model of mind, it is enough to point out that what minds do is precisely everything that computers do not do, and therein lies much of a computer’s usefulness. . . .
In the physical functions of a computer, there is neither a semantics nor a syntax of meaning. There is nothing resembling thought at all. There is no intentionality, or anything remotely analogous to intentionality or even to the illusion of intentionality. . . . And, when computers are in operation, they are guided by the mental intentions of their programmers and users, and they provide an instrumentality by which one intending mind can transcribe meanings into traces, and another can translate those traces into meaning again. But the same is true of books when they are “in operation.” . . .
[Dennett] would freely grant that computers only appear to be conscious agents. The perversity of his argument, notoriously, is that he believes the same to be true of us. [However], you cannot suffer the illusion that you are conscious because illusions are possible only for conscious minds. . . .
[T]his confusion is entirely typical of Dennett’s position. In this book, as he has done repeatedly in previous texts, he mistakes the question of the existence of subjective experience for the entirely irrelevant question of the objective accuracy of subjective perceptions, and whether we need to appeal to third-person observers to confirm our impressions. But, of course, all that matters for this discussion is that we have impressions at all.
More about: Atheism, Daniel Dennett, History & Ideas, Materialism
