[killJOY]

Religion must be incomprehensible to be successful, says Dennett.
This interview with Daniel Dennett is a superb and short look at why and how American culture currently abhors evolutionary theory.

Dennett is a great and entertaining writer. I got to see a lecture of his in Portland, Maine several years ago. What a personality: white-bearded and sage as Santa, but tall, lanky and goofy like John Cleese. He is genuinely enthusiastic about Darwinism. I wish he would turn it into a religion.

Imagine a religion where energy, evolution, and entropy are the Three Mysteries, the Great Trinity. I'd go to church.

[rowante]

Thanks for that one killjoy... I'm a fan of Dennett, still struggling thru his book on consciousness. Have you read Jeff Vail's book A Theory of Power (free PDF download).

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Jeff Vail', 'A') closer examination of the dynamics, structure and evolution of patterns of connections
will provide the foundation for exploring and learning to work with
power-relationships. The complex web of connectivity animating our world did
not simply spring into existence fully formed. Rather this web results from the
ongoing processes of development and intensification. Understanding the process
of how and why we have arrived at our present state provides the insight that will
eventually give us greater control over our future. It will illuminate the fundamental
clockwork of our minds, bodies and societies, revealing principles of
power-relationships that govern all aspects of what we perceive as reality, from
the environment and economics to politics and psychology. It will unravel the
bonds that hold humanity in slavery to the patterns of history—and ultimately
provide the key to our freedom. Understanding the interconnectivity of such
diverse fields will yield a theory of power-relationships that will expand our
understanding of the world as a whole. This theory will reduce power to its discrete
nature and reassemble it into the swirling web that exists around us. Power
defines every aspect of our experience of reality. Ultimately, this knowledge, this
theory of power, will provide us with a tool chest to affect our world.

[killJOY]

Ah, many thanks for that!

I'll be gone for a week, then I'll look it up.

[mark]

WOW! I've just read the article; what mind numbing nonsense.

But, coming from a university professor of very much learning (but little knowledge) it provides those with even less knowledge a perfect excuse to remain clueless.

There is so much more but the paradox is, you must first believe in order to see. Rational, scientific minds need to see in order to believe. Fortunately, there is more to knowledge and learning than meets the eye, that's the realm where 'scientific minds' may eventually discover truth.

[ashurbanipal]

I'm of two minds about Dennet. On the one hand, he's got very incisive intuitions and he's always an entertaining and challenging read. He was one of the first to support the conclusions of Julian Jaynes about the origins of consciousness as we know it. And he's a very prolific individual.

But ultimately, his arguments (well, he calls them "intuition pumps") fail, because he doesn't ever really engage the arguments of his opponents. His lambasting of the notion of qualia (and the ensuing arguments against materialism) is really just a grand straw man--"Quining Qualia" just turns out to point up the problem, and he inadvertently argues for the other side. It also turns out, thanks to keen analysis from a fellow named Jaron Lanier, that his counter arguments to the Zombie argument commit him to a species of panpsychism, which he would certainly like to avoid. Finally, he really mishandles Libbet's experiments, and the manner in which he treats of them leads me almost to believe that he's intentionally glossing over the most critical points of them.

[Free]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('killJOY', '
')Dennett is a great and entertaining writer. I got to see a lecture of his in Portland, Maine several years ago. What a personality: white-bearded and sage as Santa, but tall, lanky and goofy like John Cleese. He is genuinely enthusiastic about Darwinism. I wish he would turn it into a religion.

Imagine a religion where energy, evolution, and entropy are the Three Mysteries, the Great Trinity. I'd go to church.