Text: Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Overview:

• "In the beginning was the Word ..." ("logos" -> intent, reason, cause)

• Possibility that it is not so, that intent/reason were not present at the beginning, leading to ...

• "fears that the wrong answer [to whether evolution is the explanation] would have intolerable moral [and other] implications [no comfort/goodness/personal responsibility]" (Dennett, p 20], ie that things important to us would prove to be shams/illusions

• Dennett's solution ...

  Selfish genes, selfish memes, exploration within a fixed landscape/library, emergent meaning/intentionality/morality within that constraint

  "Darwin has shown us how, in fact, EVERYTHING is just such a product [of mindless purposeless forces] ... Darwin offers us [a convincing explanation of how God is distributed in the whole of nature]: it is in the distribution of Design through out nature, creating, in the Tree of Life, an utterly unique and irreplaceable creation ... that wonderful wedding of chance and necessity ... [that] just happened to happen, in the fulness of time ... it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all ... it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail ... I can stand in affirmation of its significance." (p 520)

• Paul's problem (maybe yours?) ...

  Admiration and awe is all very fine, but I want to be an agent, to MATTER, not only to be shaped by but to shape, to be more than a product of genes and memes.

  science itself will teach man... that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ... so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature....even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point.... the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! .... Fyodor Dotoevsky, Notes From Underground, 1864

• So ...
  • If evolution/emergence is genuine, the story doesn't end with Dennett (or anyone else
  • And needn't, if one looks a little more closely at the brain than Dennett does ...
  • There IS more there than genes and memes, certainly more cranes and perhaps even a skyhook created by cranes ...

    I am, and I can think, therefore I can change who I am ... and the libraries, search landscapes as well?

  • Sometimes trimming associated with the Hegelian dialectic (and other forms of rigor) can get in the way of productive expansion ...

A slightly different story, more cracked

• Evolution is as much about exploring novelty as it is about "survival of the fittest"
• The human brain evolved not only to survive but to explore and create
• With the bipartite brain came the ability to recognize and make use of multiple ways of making sense of things, to create things that have not yet existed, and to choose among them as a basis for action
• These include not only the concept of "God" but also those of "the Word", "purpose", "meaning", "morality"
  • may be predisposed to think in particular ways but have capacity to alter/transcend them, genes and culture notwithstanding
• Culture does not replace evolution; it is a product of it and, having come into existence, a contributor to it
• Personal choice and responsibility are real contributors to ongoing exploration/evolution/emergence
• We are all both products of and contributors to the ongoing explorations that are simultaneously ourselves, our cultures, the universe
• Implications for thinking about other aspects of culture, including the use of words, literature?
  • and about the value of stories, including this one?

Post discussion thoughts It is from the "crack" (ambiguity) that creativity, ability to conceive meaning, bring into existence things that haven't yet been derive; "stories" are what come from, are made possible by the crack. Depends on both expansion and trimming (to get new things with which to build) Can't say in advance what expansion/trimming will be generative. Does not depend on words/language, which further expands the range? Expansion/trimming cycles obvious throughout human culture (science, art, etc), without there being a "plan" for them. Inherent in "generative" processes? Literature: no plan, intent, goal - a "generative" process Should be "Darwin's Generative Idea" And on ... Ambiguous figures everything experienced consciously is a story isn't "real" has an author, reflects authorial perspective could be different, have different meaning consciously unexperienced things have meaning, influence behavior, may influence conscious experience/story Behavioral (unconscious, algorithmic) meaning vs experienced (conscious, story) meaning behavorial is temporarily fixed, experienced is potentially fluid react to picture vs see picture and notice ambiguities experienced can affect behavior in short time, modify behavioral over longer times, directly or by influence on behavior both involve "trimming", experienced more so? experienced can lead to new rapid branching (case in point), as in escape from the computable (see emergence07 notes) This an example of trimming/expansion; of intuition that a particular trimming will prove generative (and so experienced by PG as dysphoric (?) signal from unconscious, which must then be able to detect that?). Generation in unconscious, destablizing?, reported? Outburst of ideas an effort to capture before restabilized (trimmed?) in unconscious? Originated in intuition that Dennett not adequate, persistent effort to establish the limitation, unconscious also able to judge/motivate that? Issue of "consciousness" without neocortex ...

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