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[anonymous66]

I've been reading a lot about panpsychism, and a friend of mine who teaches philosophy has challenged me to read about Dennett's views on consciousness - so here goes.

From the flyleaf - "How did we come to have minds? For centuries, this question has intrigued psychologists, physicists, poets, and philosophers, who have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled ability to create, imagine, and explain.... Dennett... builds on ideas from computer science and biology to show how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection.... [and] explains that a crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Language, itself composed of memes, turbocharged this interplay. Competition among memes - a form of natural selection - produced thinking tools so well formed that they gave us the power to design our own memes. The result, a mind that not only perceives and controls but can create and comprehend, was thus largely shaped by the process of cultural evolution."

[anonymous66]

In chapter 1 Dennett writes that the book's argument is composed of 3 strenuous exercises of imagination -
"turning our world upside down, following Darwin and Turing; then evolving evolution into intelligent design; and finally turning our minds inside out".

what he wants to do is "delve into the evolution of minds and language as they appear from our inverted perspective. This allows us to frame new questions and sketch new answers, which then sets the stage for the hardest inversion of all: seeing what consciousness looks like from the new perspective".

[anonymous66]

More thoughts on chapter 1 - Dennett appears to view himself as continuing the work of those who want to convince the public that substance dualism is not a viable theory of consciousness - but he does admit that our unchallenged first person view of consciousness does appear to be hard-to-challenge evidence that substance dualism is the case.

[anonymous66]

Chapter 2's title is "Before Bacteria and Bach". In it, Dennett outlines the problems of trying to determine the process by which life began - for Dennett adaptationism is the most likely explanation (described as a kind of reverse-engineering). He ends the chapter by asking "Is there design in Nature, or only apparent design? If we consider evolutionary biology to be a species of reverse engineering, does this imply that there are reasons for the arrangements of the parts of living things? Whose reasons? Or can there be reasons without a reasoner, designs without a designer?"

[anonymous66]

Chapter 3 is called "On the Origin of Reasons"... Dennett argues that the process of evolution makes biological organisms (and processes within those organisms) look like they are designed - without a designer.

"Evolution by natural selection is not itself a designed thing, an agent with purposes, but it acts as if it were... it is a set of processes that 'find' and 'track' reasons for things to be arranged one way or another". Dennett reasons that Darwin has not banished teleology. "Now I want to defend the claim that there are reasons for what proteins do, and there are reasons for what bacteria do, what trees do, what animals do, and what we do".

Dennett notes that word reason is closely related to the word "why" - and when we ask why - we can refer to one of 2 questions - "what for?" and "how come?".

How come - refers to process narrative - without saying what a thing might be for

Dennett notes that in some contexts, the word "reason" can mean "cause". We need to be careful when we think about teleology and reasons to be sure we know the context of the question.

"In Darwin's Dangerous Ideas (1995), I argued that natural selection is an algorithmic process, a collection of sorting algorithms that are themselves composed of generate-and-test algorithms that exploit randomness (pseudo-randomness, chaos) in the generation phase, and some sort of mindless quality-control testing phase, with the winners advancing in the tournament by having more offspring". He then brings up examples of how stones in fields under certain conditions are arranged in circles by purely natural processes (not man-made).

"... an organism doesn't need to know the reasons why the gifts it inherits are beneficial to it, and natural selection itself doesn't need to know what it's doing".

Darwin himself understood this -
"The term 'natural selection' is in some respects a bad one, as it seems to imply conscious choice; but this will be disregarded after a little familiarity... I have also, often personified Nature; for I have found it difficult to avoid this ambiguity; but I mean by nature only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, - and by laws only the ascertained sequence of events".

Dennett refers to the reasons tracked by evolution as "free-floating rationales".

Dennett uses the example of termite castles - Termites build castles that look remarkably like the cathedrals built by man - but there was no termite architect, and no individual termite has a clue about what it is helping to build. Living organisms have reasons for behaving the way they do - but they don't "have the reasons; they don't need to have the reasons".

[anonymous66]

Chapter 4 - Two Strange Inversions of Reasoning - How Darwin and Turing Broke the Spell

Before Darwin - everything was held together by tradition - Where did everything come from? God - "an omnipotent and omniscient intelligent creator - who bore a striking resemblance to the second-most exalted thing".

Darwin's view of the world was much different:

In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principal of the whole system, that, IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUIRED TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE It. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express it in a few words all Mr. Darwins' meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.

Robert MacKenzie Beverly (1868).

"When we turn to Darwin's bubble-up theory of creation, we can conceive of all the creative design work metaphorically as lifting in what I call Design Space. It has to do with the first crude replicators, as we saw in Chapter 3, and gradually ratchet up by wave after wave of natural selection, to multicellular life in all its forms". Skeptics continue to look for examples in nature that are unevolvable (think Behe's irreducible complexity). Dennet's term for this concept is a skyhook (italics) - like a fictional convenience you can hang in the sky in order to lift what you want into position. "A skyhook floats high in Design Space, unsupported by ancestors, the direct result of a special act of intelligent creation." When skeptics go looking for skyhooks, what we discover are "regular" cranes - "a nonmiraculous innovation in Design Space that enables ever more efficient exploration of the possibilities of design, ever more powerful lifting in Design Space."
Some examples:
Endosymbiosis - it lifted simple cells into the realm of much complexity
Sex - permitted the stiffing up of gene pools
Language and culture - opened up vast spaces of possibility to be explored by ever more intelligent designers - allowed for the creation of glow-in-the-dark tobacco plants and other innovations.

"As we learn more and more about the nano-machinery of life that makes all this possible, we can appreciate a second strange inversion of reasoning, achieved almost a century later by another brilliant Englishman: Alan Turing"
In Beverly's way of writing we can say that -
"IN ORDER TO BE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL COMPUTING MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW WHAT ARITHMETIC IS"

"Many people can't abide by Darwin's strange inversion. We call them creationists. They are still looking for skyhooks - 'irreducibly complex" (Behe 1996) features of the biosphere that could not have evolved by Darwinian processes. Many more people can't abide by Turing's strange inversion either, and for strikingly similar reasons.d They want to believe that the wonders of the mind are inaccessible by mere material processes, that minds are, if not literally miraculous, then then mysterious in ways that defy natural science. They don't want the Cartesian wound to be healed."

"Both Darwin and Turing claim to have discovered something truly unsettling to a human mind - competence without comprehension. This goes against everything we "know" about comprehension - we send our kids off to college so they will gain competence in order to succeed in life. We look down on those who merely memorize - Dennett suggest our motto is "if you make them comprehend, their competence will follow". On the other hand the military creates competent mechanics, radar operators, navigators, etc... by forcing them to "drill and practice". "...so we have good empirical evidence that competence doesn't always depend on comprehension and sometimes is a precondition from comprehension. What Darwin and Turing did was envisage the most extreme version of this point: all (italics) the brilliance and comprehension in the world arises ultimately out of uncomprehending competences compounded over time into ever more competent - and hence (italics) comprehending - systems. This indeed is a strange inversion, overthrowing the pre-Darwinian mind-first vision of Creation with a mind-last (italics on last) vision of the eventual evolution of us, intelligent designers at long last."

"It doesn't 'stand to reason' that there cannot be competences without comprehension; it just feels right, and it feels right because our minds have been shaped to think that way.... [Turing and Darwin opened] up the novel idea that we might invert the traditional order and build comprehension out of a cascade of competences in much the way evolution by natural selection builds ever more brilliant internal arrangements, organs, and instincts without having to comprehend what it is doing."

We must remember though that while Darwin discovered natural selection - Turing invented (italics) the computer. It appears that Turing played the role of an intelligent designer when he invented the computer. Dennett goes on to explain "The short explanation [of why we shouldn't see Turing as an intelligent designer] is that Turing himself is on of the twigs on the Tree of Life, and his artifacts, concrete and abstract, are indirectly products of the blind Darwinian processes in the same way spider webs and beaver dams are, so there is no radical (italics) discontinuity, no need for a skyhook, to get us from spiders and beaver dams to Truing and Turing machines." Dennett goes on to explain that there is still a lot to explain, because Turing's way of making things is very different from that of spider's and beaver's "and we need a good evolutionary account of that difference." If evolution is so good at creating competence without comprehension, then just how did human-style comprehension come to be?

Dennett spends some time explaining how comprehension is different in different situations. When Gaudi built his cathedral, he didn't have to understand how to mix mortar or carve stone - the experts in their crafts were responsible for those tasks, and Turing didn't have to know how to solder or know how to manufacture vacuum tubes. "A closer look at a few examples of human artifacts and the technology we have invented to make them will clarify the way-stations on the path from clueless bacterial to Bach..."

Next Dennett describes ontology and manifest image. Ontology is usually used to describe beliefs - but it can also describe the set of things that an animal can recognize and respond appropriately to - or the set of things a computer program can deal with in order to operate correctly. "Vacations are not in the ontology of a polar bear, but snow is, and so are seals... The GPS system in your car handles one-way streets, left and right turns, speed limits, and the current velocity of your car (if it isn't zero, it may not let you put in a new target address), but its ontology also includes a number of satellites, as well as signals to and from those satellites, with it doesn't both with, but needs if it is to do its job."

Humans have a wide range of beliefs - some people believe in ghosts, others don't. "But there is also a huge common core of ontology that is shared by all normal human beings from quite an early age - six years old will capture almost all of it." This common core of ontology was called "manifest image" by Wilfred Sellars (1962). Contrasted with the manifest image is the "scientific image" - "populated with molecules, atoms, electrons, gravity, quarks, and who know what else (dark energy, string? branes?)" "Unlike the term 'ontology'', 'manifest image' and 'scientific image' have not yet migrated from philosophy to other fields, but I'm doing my best to export them, since they have long seemed to me to be the best way I know to clarify the relationship between 'our' world and the world of science."

More to follow.

[anonymous66]

Dennett explains how the operations of an elevator were automated - in terms of a simple program. "The point of this digression into elementary programming is that the finished working elevator has some interesting similarities to living things yet also a profound difference." 1. The elevator has activities that are appropriate to its circumstances - it is a good elevator - it makes all the right moves. 2. Its "goodness" comes from the fact that it has a "good" ontology. "It uses variables that keep track of all the features of the world that matter to getting its job done and it oblivious to everything else..." 3. It doesn't need to know what its ontology is - it doesn't need any rationale. The profound difference is that the program's designer does have to know the rationale.

"Even bacteria are good at staying alive, making the right moves, and keeping track of the things that matter most to them; and trees and mushrooms are equally clever, or , more precisely, cleverly designed to make the right moves at the right time. They all have elevator-type 'minds', not elevated minds like ours." Those things don't need minds like ours - "and their elevator-minds are - must be- the products of an R&D process of trial and error that gradually structured their internal machinery to move from state to state in a way highly likely - not guaranteed - to serve their limited by vital interests." When we look at the source codes of programs - we find comments and and labels that reveal the thinking of the intelligent programmers - when we look at things "designed" by evolution, there is nothing "that plays the roles of labels or comments in a source code program."

"Elevators can do remarkably clever things, optimizing their trajectories, thereby saving time and energy, automatically adjusting their velocity to minimize discomfort of their passengers, 'thinking of everything' that needs to be thought about, and obeying instructions and even answering the frequently asked questions." They do this without any of the components that make up organic brains. It's fair to say that they are a "perfect case of competence without the slightest smidgen of comprehension or consciousness."

The same can be said of bacteria, trees and mushrooms. "They exhibit impressive competence at staying-alive-in-their-limited-niches, thanks to the well-designed machinery they carry with them thanks to their genes." There is nothing in the R&D process of natural selection that reveals the rationale of the functions of "whole systems or component functions of their parts the way components and labels represent these functions for human designers." But when we engage in reverse engineering, we can expect to find the reason why "the parts are shaped as they are, why the behaviors are organized as they are, and that reason will 'justify the design'..."

"Before we take up the minds of animals, I want to turn to some further examples of the designs of artifacts that will help isolate the problem that evolution solved when it designed competent animals."

The examples that Dennett uses are the Manhattan project's Oak Ridge complex and "good old fashioned artificial intelligence".

When the huge complex at Oak Ridge was being built, very few people knew what they were actually producing. "Early AI or GOFAI (Good Old-Fashioned AI [Haugeland 1985]), was a 'top-down', 'intellectualist' approach to Artificial Intelligence: write down what human experts know, in a language the computer can manipulate with inference engines that could patrol the 'huge' memory banks stocked with this carefully handcrafted world knowledge, deducing the theorems that would be needed to make informed decisions and control appropriately whatever limbs or other effectors the intelligence had." This ended up being a Cartesian way of thinking - it had in mind a rational expert with a lot of propositions stored in its memory - and the ability to understand how to draw conclusions from the "relevant axioms and detect contradictions in its world knowledge - as efficiently as possible. What is an intelligent agent, after all, but a well-informed rational being, which can think fast enough, using the propositions it knows, to plan actions to meet whatever contingencies arise?"

We used what we learned from this approach to develop "applications in the not particularly demanding world of controllers in restricted environments (from elevators and dishwashers to oil refineries and airplanes)... and in medical diagnosis, game playing, and other carefully circumscribed areas of investigation or interaction: making airline reservations, spell-checking and even grammar checking, and the like." These applications were similar to the way Groves (head of the Oak Hill project) was able to build an operative Oak Hill complex without the individual sub-contractors knowing what they were building.

"The dream of a hand-coded, top-down-organized, bureaucratically efficient know-it-all, a walking (or at least talking) encyclopedia, is not yet entirely extinguished, but as the size of the project became clearer, there has been a salutary shift of attention to a different strategy: using colossal amounts of Big Data and the new statistical pattern-finding techniques of data-mining and 'deep learning' to eke out the necessary information in a more bottom-up way."

"I will have much more to say about these developments later; for the time being, the point that we need to recognize is that the vast increase in speed and size of computers over the years has opened up the prospect of exploring 'wasteful', 'mindless', less 'bureaucratic', more evolution-like processes of information extraction, and these are achieving impressive results. Thanks to these new perspectives, we can now think in some detail about the question of how the relatively simple systems that control bacteria, worms, and termites, for example, might have evolved by the bottom-up, fore-sightless, brute force processes of natural selection. In other words, we want to see how evolution might play the Leslie Groves role in organizing clueless operatives into effective teams without the luxury of Grove's understanding and foresight"

"Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless computation on the other. These twin ideas have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but they still provoke dismay and disbelief in some quarters, which I have tried to dispel in this chapter. Creationists are not going to find commented code in the inner workings of organisms, and Cartesians are not going to find an immaterial re cogitans 'where all the understanding happens.'"

[anonymous66]

Chapter 5

The Evolution of Understanding

Animals designed to deal with affordances.

We usually think of designers starting with a goal in mind - then working top-down to search for solutions to their design problems. But evolution has no goals - it succeeds by muddling through with what already exists, "mindlessly trying out tweaks and variations, and keeping those that prove useful, or at least not significantly harmful."

Could evolution create a digital computer by bottom-up natural selection? "For the sake of argument let's concede that evolution by natural selection could not directly evolve a living computer (a Turing machine tree or a Turing machine turtle, for example)." But evolution can indirectly create a digital computer - it just has to create humans first.

Dennet suggests that an explorer visiting a distant planet would be more impressed by a clam rake than an actual clam. "How could a slow, mindless process build a thing that could build a thing that a slow mindless process couldn't build on its own?" "Now we can see how strange and radical it is: a process with no Intelligent Designer can create intelligent designers who can then design things that permit us to understand how a process with no Intelligent Designer can create intelligent designers who can then design things."

Returning to the idea of ontology (in regards to organisms) "was prefigured by Jakob von Uexkull's (1934) concept of the organism's Unwelt, the behavioral environment that consists of all the things that matter to its well-being. A close kin to this idea is the psychologist J.J. Gibson's (1979) concept of affordances: ' What the environment offers the animal for good or ill.'"

"The shape of a bird's beak together with a few ancillary features of anatomy, imply a diet of hard seeds, or insects or fish, so we can stock the Umwelten of different species of birds with hard seeds, insects, and fish, as species-specific affordances on the basis of these anatomical features alone, though of course it is wise to corroborate the implication by studying behavior if it is available. The shape of the bill does not in any interesting sense represent its favored food-stuff or way of obtaining it."

"Palentologists draw conclusions about the predatory preferences and other behaviors of extinct species using this form of inference, and it is seldom noted that it depends, ineliminably, on making adaptionist assumptions about the designs of the fossilized creatures." "... biology is reverse engineering, and reverse engineering is methodologically committed to optimality considerations." We're always asking "what is this feature good for?"

Bacteria don't know they are bacteria, but other bacteria are in their ontology - they respond to other bacteria in bacteria- appropriate ways - they deal with items in their Umwelt without understanding what they are doing. "Bacteria are in the ontology of bacteria the same way floors and doors are in the ontology of elevators, only bacteria are much more complicated. Just as there are reasons why the elevator's control circuits are designed the way they are, there are reasons why the bacteria's internal protein controls are designed the way they are" - it's all about handling problems efficiently and effectively. Of course - elevators have intelligent designers, while in the "R&d history" of bacteria there was no mindful consideration of problems and solutions. Evolutionary biologists assign functions to some feature - but interpret others as errors (think webbed feet vs a two headed frog). This is similar to the way that literary editors of long-dead authors interpret some passages as deliberately misleading, and some as typos or memory lapses.

Dennett goes into some detail about "bugs" in computer programs - then asks "How does nature debug its designs?" Basically - "the losers die, unexamined". "This won't necessarily find the globally optimal design but the best locally accessible versions will thrive, and further test-driving will winnow the winner further, raising the bar slightly for the next generation." These "designs" are full of bugs, in the programmers sense. When biologists try to decipher the "spaghetti code" that is behind natural selection, they find that there was no thinking or planning involved, "but nevertheless she [nature] muddled through, cobbling together a design so effective that it has survived to this day, beating out the competition in a demanding world until some clever biologist comes along and exposes the foibles."

One of those foibles is something called supernormal stimuli. Niko Tinbergen experimented with seagulls and revealed that the chicks are "programmed" to peck at a yellow spot [adult female seagulls have a yellow spot on their bills - they regurgitate food when it is pecked] to such an extent that they prefer to peck at a large yellow spot on an exaggerated cardboard cutout. Tinbergen also found "that birds that laid light blue, gray-dappled eggs preferred to sit on a bright blue black polka-dotted fake egg so large that they slid off repeatedly."

"As long as their Umwelt doesn't have sneaky biologists with vivid imaginations challenging the birds with artificial devices, the system works very well, focusing the organism's behavior on what (almost always) matters."

[anonymous66]

I'm still picking at this book - Dennett does make a compelling case - if he's right, then humans are sentient because of their language and culture, and no other organism is sentient, and so there is nothing it is like to be another organism - they're basically just automatons.

[value]

I haven't yet purchased the book but I am considering it.

I am currently reading The Principles of Psychology volume 2 by William James which seems to address the evolution of the human mind in a way that may be appreciated by readers of this book. For example, it contains the idea that the human including the mind is vitally a 'habit machine'.

I'm still picking at this book - Dennett does make a compelling case - if he's right, then humans are sentient because of their language and culture, and no other organism is sentient, and so there is nothing it is like to be another organism - they're basically just automatons.

Can you please provide a substantiation for your argument? How would the idea relate to feral children?

The Feral Child: Blurring the Boundary between the Human and the Animal
https://www.animalsandsociety.org/resea ... 16/7365-2/

I am personally interested in animal ethics and I would seek to extend it to plant ethics. Not for ideology but for fundamental philosophy.

I found the following paper by Daniel C. Dennett:

(1995) Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why
Are animals conscious? The way we are? Which species, and why? What is it like to be a bat, a rat, a vulture, a whale?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40971115

An AI kept denying that Dennett argues that animals are mere automatons. However, Dr. Lesley McLean (Australia) mentioned the following about the paper:

"One of the long-standing presuppositions of moral theory about animals is that our moral relations with them depend on our sharing some fundamental characteristic or capacity. Daniel Dennett’s influential paper, Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why (1995) is a good example of how philosophers might go on in discussions that takes seriously this kind of reasoning as well as a comment on what responsible knowledge making amounts to in relation to it. In this paper my aim is to question this kind of theorizing and suggest another way that philosophers might approach the animal question.
...
Dennett argues that there is an inconsistency in Nagel’s argument. Dennett claims that science, which seeks an objective, impartial, and universal description of animal consciousness cannot capture what it is like to be an animal yet it is scientific facts, which Nagel relies on to, tell him something about bat consciousness. According to Dennett (693):

the rhetorical peculiarity – if not outright inconsistency – of his treatment of the issue can be captured by an obvious question: if a few such facts can establish something about bat consciousness, would more such facts not establish more? He has already relied on “objective, third-person” scientific investigation to establish the hypothesis that bats are conscious, but not in just the way we are. Why wouldn’t further such facts be able to tell us in exactly what ways bats’ consciousness isn’t like ours, thereby telling us what it is like to be a bat? What kind of fact is it that only works for one side of an empirical question?

Dennett’s argument ultimately leads him to the position that what has passed for good ‘philosophical form’ – that is, to accept Nagel’s definition of consciousness as “there is something it is like to be an entity” and that we may never know what it is like to be that entity, yet at the same time claim to know the entity to be conscious – can no longer hold. We can no longer ‘invoke mutual agreement that we know what we’re talking about even if we can’t explain it yet” (Dennett 699).

Nevertheless, while Dennett’s argument on the issue of animal consciousness is challenging and insightful his rendering of the connection between animal mentality and animal ethics is not. The view that the moral standing of animals is primarily dependent upon their being conscious is claiming too much.

‘I am not known for my spirited defences of Rene Descartes,’ Dennett (692) writes, ‘but I find I have to sympathize with an honest scientist who was apparently the first victim of the wild misrepresentations of the lunatic fringe of the animal rights movement’. It is a myth, he says, spread by theorists such as Peter Singer and Mary Midgley, that ‘Descartes was a callous vivisector, completely indifferent to animal suffering because of his view that animals (unlike people) were mere automata’. Rather, Descartes was an honest scientist, and we can read this as meaning ‘a responsible knowledge maker’, because, says Dennett (692), he did not take animal mentality at face value, rather he wanted to find out how animals actually work."
https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/ ... ontext=bts

[Chris_winW]

I've delved into Dennett's views on consciousness, and it's a fascinating take on the whole mind evolution thing. His idea of memes and cultural evolution influencing our minds is quite thought-provoking. It definitely challenges some traditional views on consciousness.

[Sy Borg]

I can't disagree with him more strongly. Many species have language and it's not their fault that we are unable to pick up the nuances.

It's like a return to Descartes, who used to cut dogs open in public demonstrations to show that they don't actually feel anything - they just whimper, whine and howl out of automatic reflexes, not suffering.

Humans have a unique abstract sense of things, but the idea that humans alone are sentient is retrograde thinking, long disproved by nervous system studies. Might as well posit that humans are the only ones with souls.

[anonymous66]

anonymous66 wrote: ↑August 22nd, 2023, 6:05 pm
I'm still picking at this book - Dennett does make a compelling case - if he's right, then humans are sentient because of their language and culture, and no other organism is sentient, and so there is nothing it is like to be another organism - they're basically just automatons.

Can you please provide a substantiation for your argument? How would the idea relate to feral children?

Please understand that I'm just commenting on what Dennett said, trying to work out what he believes, and trying to work out the implications of what it would mean if he is right.

As I understand it - Dennett is saying that humans are sentient because they have evolved within human culture. He also very clearly put the onus on others to prove that any other animal is sentient, and suggests that the reason we believe other animals are sentient is because we project our own sentience onto other animals. Regarding feral children I see a at least 2 possibilities. 1.perhaps Dennett believes that because humans have evolved with human culture, he also believes that all humans born today have sentience (because sentience is programmed into their genes?).... or 2. I suppose it could be the case that Dennett believes that if a human was born outside of human culture, then that human wouldn't have sentience until it was introduced into human culture. I'm sure there must be other ways of looking at the issue. BUT- I'm obviously speculating here -if we really want to know what Dennett thinks, then we'll have to ask Dennett to tell us what he believes about sentience and feral children.

[anonymous66]

I can't disagree with him more strongly. Many species have language and it's not their fault that we are unable to pick up the nuances.

It's like a return to Descartes, who used to cut dogs open in public demonstrations to show that they don't actually feel anything - they just whimper, whine and howl out of automatic reflexes, not suffering.

Humans have a unique abstract sense of things, but the idea that humans alone are sentient is retrograde thinking, long disproved by nervous system studies. Might as well posit that humans are the only ones with souls.

Dennett basically says - "if you believe other animals are sentient - then go ahead and prove it".

Dennett appears to believe that sentience is the ability to understand that one is a subject.. and that there are other subjects with whom one is communicating. And the reason that humans have this sentience is because of human culture. So it looks to me like Dennett is saying "humans are sentient because of human culture... no other animal has sentience because no other animal has human culture - if you really think that any other animal is sentient, then prove it". A virtual impossibility, because we don't have access to any other minds besides our own. It could be the case that other animals do understand they are a subject (in some rudimentary way) - it's just that they can't communicate it to us. There does appear to be at least some evidence that other animals are sentient. What of the mirror test? And didn't Koko demonstrate that she understood herself to be a subject?

[anonymous66]

I did finish the book. I didn't see any glaring contractions or problems with logic. But I did notice that Dennett appears to believe that the "what it is likeness" (think of Nagel's What it is Like to be A Bat) comes after sentience, not before. Presumably, humans had no "what it is likeness" before they developed the ability to refer to themselves and their thoughts (because of human culture). But couldn't it be the case that the "what it is likeness" came first (before culture) and is present in other animals?