But back to the Art of Philosophy, Daniel Dennett is driving my thoughts these days. Listening to Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea has been a rather frustrating challenge. It quite different from my excursions into Hoffman’s somewhat delusional mindscape, in that Dennett is very evidence based, there’s nothing to dispute on a factual rational basis - it’s the tone and blind spots that I have issues with, and that provide a vehicle for me to better define my ideas.
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is a retelling of people’s ideas about the details of the mechanism of Evolution, and it’s about arguing about definitions and examining various geniuses’ notions, then the endless beating dead horses with dead ponies. It’s a celebration of human ingenuity and evolving rhetoric in action, but it loses sight of the topic it’s supposed to be about.
From my perspective the problem is that the actually topic, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea; namely that Natural Selection is a mindless, mechanical and algorithmic process is overlooked. The process itself still hasn’t become the focus (though I’m only to Chapter 16 with nearly 8 more hours to go, so we’ll see) .
What disturbs me is so much focus is on evaluating each others ideas, that they lose sight of a fundamental transcendent truth: The fact that we are here, indicates there was one particular path Evolution took, only one actual unfolding. Anything may have been possible and we can dream about all the possibilities, but in the end the actual factual bottomline is that only one story went down for real, regardless of what our human minds can conjecture. The Physical Reality of us being here is the absolute proof of that notion.
Treating their conjectures with such overblown seriousness - such as Dennett’s deep explorations of the debates, punctuated equilibrium and such, where competing ideas are both obviously wrong, yet both holding kernels of truth just the same. (same as it ever was)
My biggest gripe is the egocentric lop-sidedness. For instance, Earth’s evolving environmental conditions receive a nod now and then, but there’s never an explicit recognition, or integration, of the idea that you can’t understand an organism without also understanding the environment/biosphere it was born into and must negotiate it’s entire existence.
Evolution isn’t driven from within creatures, Evolution is driven by creatures interacting with environments, with far more connections between them than is recognized by most.
That’s very big, with cascading impacts upon one’s understanding and it should color every discussion about the Evolution of life on this here Earth.
The same with Deep Time, try to grasp that we are born out of billions of years worth of life, then creatures, living one day at a time with the future being restricted to dealing with the ever changing immediate concerns of the next moment. The insight will profoundly change one’s own perspective of the life unfolding within and surrounding us. Evolution flows within our blood, why don’t philosophers glory in that?
In that light, a framing such as: “Natural Selection is a mindless, mechanical and algorithmic process” is as quaint and telling, as well as limiting, as a Sherlock Holmes novel. The quality of our answers are limited by the quality of our questions.
Dennett never explicitly recognizes the fact of the “Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide” with all its philosophical implications. Yet without which, neither Evolution, nor our human consciousness, can be “objectively” appreciated.
For that matter knowledge itself can’t be philosophically grasped until the meaning within “Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide” blinks on like a shining beacon.