Post-Discussion Commentary regarding Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back: I. The Ugly

 

Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, W.W. Norton & Company, 2017. [All page numbers in this commentary come from the 2018 paperback edition]

While reading Dennett’s book, I encountered a strange mixture of ideas, some of which I considered to be Good, Bad, Ugly, and/or Silly. To cover all of these topics would require a very long essay so I decided to break my comments into smaller chunks. In this first commentary I will start with the UGLY to get that out of the way. I will add three additional posts later to discuss the GOOD, BAD, and SILLY.

 

THE UGLY

Dennett has many critics as he himself acknowledges early-on in the book.

“There are distinguished thinkers who have disagreed with my proposals over the years, and I expect some will continue to find my new forays as outrageous as my earlier efforts…” [page 4]

When responding to his critics, Dennett sometimes provides thoughtful explanations about the nature of the disagreements and the bases for his own position. Here are a few examples.

 “In a highly influential essay, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin (1979) coined the phrase ‘Panglossian paradigm’ as a deliberately abusive term for the brand of biology—adaptationism—that relies on the methodological principle of assuming, until proven otherwise, that all the parts of an organism are good for something. [page 29] … Was Gould and Lewontin’s reuse of the idea an unfair caricature of the use of optimality assumptions in biology? Yes, and it has had two unfortunate effects: their attack on adaptationism has been misinterpreted by some evolution-dreaders as tantamount to a refutation of the theory of natural selection, and it has convinced many biologists that they should censor not only their language but also their thinking, as if reverse engineering was some sort of illicit trick they should shun if at all possible.” [page 30]

“But some thoughtful biologists and philosophers of biology are uneasy about these claims and insist that all this talk of functions and purposes is really only shorthand, a handy metaphor, and that strictly speaking there are no such things as functions, no purposes, no teleology at all in the world.” [page 34]

“I disagree with this overkill austerity, which can backfire badly.” [page 35]

Another example starts out reasonable:

“I am not denying the existence of such a boundary [between humans and other animals]; I am postponing the issue, exploring how far we can get without postulating such a boundary, which is the way any scientific investigation should proceed. [page 338]

But then disintegrates into an attack on anyone who disagrees with his position.

If you find yourself unable to tolerate [my] even-handedness, you are overcompensating for the effects of Cartesian gravity and disabling yourself from participation in the investigation.” [page 338]

These kinds of gratuitous attacks, often involving sarcasm, occur far too frequently. While reading the book I soon started drawing little frowning face sketches in the margin next to these passages; thumbing through the book here are a few examples that I had marked that way.

“Insisting, in resistance to this, that you know more about your own consciousness just because it’s yours, is lapsing into dogma. By shielding your precious experience from probing, you perpetuate myths that have outlived their utility. [page 351]

“For a century and more philosophers have stressed the ‘privacy’ of our inner thoughts, … An occupational blindness of many philosophers…” [page 343]

“Here is another source of the staying power of the Cartesian point of view [with which Dennett disagrees]. By presupposing that we are rational … [t]his puts us in distinguished company: we are intelligent designers, rather like the Intelligent Designer who designed us. We wouldn’t want to give up that honor, would we?” [page 367]

“…when I Tried to uncover the submerged grounds for resistance to any version of the account of consciousness sketched here … I discovered that many cognitive scientists … were reluctant even to consider such doctrines. After I had laid to rest a number of their objections, they would often eventually let the cat out of the bag…” [page 368]”

“…we need to recognize how the fear that these important features of everyday life are doomed [by Dennett’s theory] generates a powerful undercurrent of resistance, that distorts the imaginations of people trying to figure out what human consciousness is… The human mind, many think, is the last bastion of what is sacred in this world, and to explain it would be to destroy it…” [page 369]

“[In this book] I have tried to help the unpersuaded find a vantage point from which they can diagnose their own failures of imagination and overcome therm.” [page 370]

I suppose these kinds of snarky passages help sell books, but for a reader like me who is simply a retired cognitive neuroscientist trying to understand and evaluate Dennett’s ideas and arguments they are simply a distracting annoyance. And these attacks begin to get ugly when they become personal. Dennett sometimes seems more interested in settling scores with his critics (even those no longer alive to defend themselves) than in explaining his own arguments. Consider these examples.

“Why did the concept of a meme acquire a bad reputation? … [One influence ] has been a frantic campaign of misbegotten criticism, an allergic reaction of sorts from scholars in the humanities and social sciences who were unnerved to see dread biology invading their sacred precincts. … For years this hostility was encouraged by the late Stephen Jay Gould … If you want to understand more vividly, abandon Gould and start down the trail blazed by Dawkins.” [page 210]

“… by the lights of Wright and Strawson (and others), I ought to have the courage then to admit that neither consciousness nor free will really exists. … I don’t see why my critics think their understanding about what really exists is superior to mine, so I demur.” [page 224]

“The fact that Nagel’s (1974) famous formulation ‘what is it like?’ is now treated as a crutch, a nudging gesture that lacks content but is presumed to point to the sought for … and cosmic distinction, should be seen as an embarrassment… [page 337]

Speaking of embarrassments, I think Dennett could learn from the adage about not throwing stones from glass houses. Here are a few cringe inducing (for me) passages from his book:

“[The inner workings of neurons are] like the marching broomsticks in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice…” [Dennett page 162]

“[A neuron] is always hungry for work…” [Dennett page 163]

“Your average neuron is apparently docile enough to spend its long lifetime doing the same job while still maintaining a spark of autonomy, a modest ability and disposition to try to improve its circumstances when opportunity knocks. We can easily imagine that some environments in which neurons find themselves favor more enterprising, risky exploration of options, breeding more versatile, aggressive neurons… These would be feral neurons…” [Dennett page 173]

“It was in the ‘interest’ of audible memes … to exploit whatever habits of tongue prevailed locally—When in Rome sound like the Romans…” [Dennett page 268]

“A bounty of productively generated sounds looking for work…” [Dennett page 270]

“[The process by which children learn that two things are the same or different are] Like the prebiotic cycles that provided the iterative processes from which life and evolution itself emerged…” [Dennett 274]

And one last example.

“The biosphere is utterly saturated with design, with purpose, with reasons.” [page 36]

Next month our book club is going to be discussing a book of poetry. If I were to encounter sentences like the above in a book of poetry I might very well enjoy and appreciate them. In a book supposedly about a scientific theory of consciousness, not so much.

Ron Boothe, psyrgb@emory.edu