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from Dennett
  • In the eyes of Weird Studies though, he's the worst philosopher, kind of emblematic of everything they hate. I have a weak goal of convincing them otherwise, but I feel I have about as much chance of doing that as of convincing Marvin Minsky to take Heidegger seriously
    something I actually tried to do – pretty ambitious of me in retrospect. If I had succeeded it would have been quite a feat of intellectual peacemaking and diplomacy
    .

Weirding Dennett

06 Aug 2023 - 07 Mar 2026
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    • This was inspired by a rather offhand sneer at Dennett on a Weird Studies/Spiritual Science episode — delivered as if his view were the most obviously ridiculous thing in the world:
      • "... the scientistic view that animals can't have minds, that no other non-human can have a mind....shift to unembodied minds...the most radical is the ultramaterialist that there is simply nothing that is not material, which can lead to a position like Daniel Dennett's that you aren't actually conscious." (paraphrased)
    • I don't really want to be in the position of defending Dennett — he's earned some sneers. But in this case I think his position is being distorted. He would not say "you aren't actually conscious." What he says is more like: consciousness is not what we think it is. What we think of as our most basic reality is something more like a mechanically-generated illusion. We are neuron-based computers, or assemblages of them, and consciousness is a puppet show the computer puts on for itself. Dennett claims to explain consciousness, not explain it away.
    • It's not exactly "consciousness is an illusion" so much as "consciousness just is illusion." That is its nature. Everything we think we know is part of this illusion created for us by our powerful brains. It's all we have. We manage to construct what seems like a fairly sold reality out of our illusion-machines – but it's still a construct.
    • The Buddhist parallel: this maps surprisingly well onto the Buddhist view of mind. Buddhism holds not that the mind is unreal, but that it has the nature of an illusion (per my limited understanding). This is practically the same thing as Dennett, properly understood — not that consciousness doesn't exist, but that its nature is not what we think: real but not solid, not thing-like, not graspable, a self-generating network of words and images endlessly trying to make itself solid, and failing.
    • The weirding move: this is where I push Dennett past where he would like to go. If his theory is correct, then all consciousness is profoundly imaginal. We don't experience an objective reality; we are co-creators of a collective hallucination. You can be as hard-nosed about physics and neurobiology as you like — human life is still lived in the fictions we spin on top of these mechanical layers. The implication of this is that gods, spirits, and stories are perfectly real despite their fictional nature. We ourselves are fictional, so gods are as real as our selves — that is to say, sort of.
    • Dennett's inconsistency with religion: Dennett wants to break the spell of religion (it's the title of one of his books). But if he were consistent, he would have to give up the distinction between "spells" and other forms of knowledge. It's all spells. So his attack on the spell of religion is implicitly in the service of some other ideology — a competing set of spells. His strong anti-postmodernism follows from not following his own theory to its conclusions: if all we have are sketches of reality, we have no good basis for declaring some things realer than others — granting reality to rocks but not to gods.
    • Why WS sneers at him: a core conviction of Weird Studies is that the weird experiences of individuals — mystical revelation, synchronicity, UFO sighting — are real, at least in the sense that personal experience is ipso facto real for the experiencer. Dennett's brand of science seems to say the opposite: nobody's experience is real, it's all just brain hiccups, and only those of us with prestigious imprimatur of science get to say what is real. This makes everybody else into marginal figures, suckers at best, with an inferior folk reality.
    • Dennett and his materialist colleagues have been sneering at people with spiritual leanings for decades, with considerable noise and fanfare. He was one of the leaders of the New Atheist movement (no longer very new if it ever was), determined to expose religion as nonsense and replace it with a scientific foundation. Many of their critques of religion were misguided and in a way dishonest in that they engaged with the weakest forms of religion rather than the strongest. Dennett was less crude about his anti-religiosity than others such as Dawkins, but still dismissive.
    • It's striking that so many of the New Atheists and like-minded materialist thinkers ended up as part of Jeffrey Epsteins circle. Their poor judgement (at best) doesn't automatically invalidate their views, but it sure does make one want to use caution. Maybe there is a downside risk to discarding religion, maybe science is not quite ready to replace it.
    • If all we have are illusions, then we also have the freedom to choose which illusions we count as real. If a mechanist, representationist, multiple-draft theater theory of mind is correct — as Dennett holds and I mostly do too — then voilà: not only do we get a postmodernist world-as-text, we also get full justification for religion. It's all spells all the way down. This is Dennett's fictionalism in spite of himself — naturalism plus fictionalism, a combination he'd resist but can't quite escape. The two things I've always held as incompatible, materialist cognitive science and something like weirdism, turn out to share a foundation. The tension is the point.

    • Scrap

      • The mechanical framing puts people off, because we like to think we are something more than machines.
      • It's hard to grasp this, because normally an illusion needs an audience — and in this theory, the audience is as illusory as the show.