Philosophy in the 20th century was dominated by language studies. Gradually, this bias became increasingly pronounced. Being and consciousness dissolved in language, and the world turned out to be a huge text without an Author or a semantic center. Western thought was threatened by relativism and the “deconstruction” of rationality. However, in the last decades of the 20th century, radical changes took place in the philosophical climate. Philosophy was again in demand for its positive function. This was partly due to the rapid development of communication tools and the integration of the world community, which forced people to think about “human universals” against the backdrop of many cultural differences.
It turned out that only philosophy is capable of constructing a unified theory of human nature. And it is the language that can unite representatives of different empirical disciplines – evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, ethnography, etc. – in their attempts to find points of contact between their concepts. It is therefore not surprising that philosophical anthropology and philosophy of mind were at the forefront of intellectual developments at the end of the 20th century. The best minds from different fields of knowledge rushed into this area: biologists, Nobel laureates F. Crick, J. Edelman and J. Eccles, physicist R. Penrose, psycholinguist S. Pinker, cognitivists, analytical philosophers, epistemologists and phenomenologists. One of the pioneers of modern philosophy of mind, permeated with evolutionism, ideas of cognitive science with its computer model of consciousness and unifying tendencies was the American philosopher Daniel Dennett.
Dennett was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian. He attended Harvard University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1963. In 1965, Dennett completed his PhD in philosophy at Oxford, which formed the basis for his first book, Content and Consciousness (1969), which contained a blueprint for his entire future system. From 1965 to 1971, Dennett worked at the University of Irvine. In 1971, he moved to Tufts University, where he became a professor in 1975. In the following years, Dennett published a number of books that brought him wide fame in the world: Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Psyche and Psychology (1978), Room to Move: What Kind of Free Will Do We Need (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995), Kinds of Psyche: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness (1996), Children of the Brain: Essays on the Design of the Psyche (1998), and Evolving Freedom (2003). The book Breaking the Spell is coming soon, in which Dennett will try to prove the inevitability of the collapse of the religious worldview. Consistent materialism and scientism were characteristic of Dennett already in his student years. Soon after entering the university, he read Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy and became puzzled by the problem of the relationship between the mental and the physical, which is discussed in this work. The dualism of spirit and matter proclaimed by Descartes could not satisfy Dennett. He understood that spirit and the mental should be treated in such a way as not to undermine the unity of scientific knowledge and the universality of physical laws. But, Dennett believed, dualism cannot be eliminated by ignoring the mental or pretending that it does not exist at all. This was done, for example, by the famous behaviorist B. F. Skinner and the analytic philosopher W. Quine. Both of them taught at Harvard during Dennett’s student days. Rejecting the radicalism of their approaches, he nevertheless adopted from them the general behaviorist thesis on the need to study the psyche “from the point of view of a third person.” Unlike Quine, however, he believed that mental concepts could be reformulated in terms of the functioning of material systems. This tactic was more in line with the philosophical experiments of L. Wittgenstein and the British analyst and “logical behaviorist” G. Ryle, although Dennett later acknowledged that his constructions were consistent with Quine’s position on the “indeterminacy of translation” of the mental into the physical, and declared his theories to be the product of a “crossbreeding” of the ideas of Quine and Ryle.
Ryle, under whom Dennett worked on his doctoral dissertation, argued that Descartes’s “ghost in the machine” could be exorcised by relating the mental to some behavioural dispositions and realising that the concepts of the mental and the physical belong to different “categories” so that it is simply incorrect to speak of their ontological juxtaposition or, conversely, identity. Dennett continued this line, attempting to demonstrate the “non-referential” nature of mental concepts, i.e. to show that the terms of “folk psychology” such as “pain”, “desire” or “belief” do not designate an independent or substantial layer of reality, but refer to certain functions of the human brain.
The line of clarifying the objective functional content of mental concepts, however, must be combined with an analysis of the specifics of the mental, given to us in introspection. Therefore, a full-fledged theory of the mind, Dennett argued, must include both a functionalist component and a doctrine of introspection data. For the reasons stated, he calls the first part the theory of “content” or content, and the second – the theory of “consciousness”. An adequate theory of consciousness, Dennett is sure, can only be built on the basis of a functional analysis of the psyche, with the conclusions of which introspection data must be correlated. He contrasts his approach with the position of T. Nagel and other thinkers who believe that the philosophy of mind should be based precisely on the analysis of the subjective data of consciousness, the specifics of the “first-person point of view”. Such a path, he believes, does not allow one to escape the conviction of the “irreducibility” of mental phenomena and unravel the mystery of consciousness.
The first, functionalist part of the theory of the psyche is set out in detail by Dennett in his collection “The Intentional Attitude”. This title is not accidental. Following F. Brentano, Dennett is ready to recognize “intentionality” as a characteristic property of the psyche, i.e., focus on an object or meaning. At the linguistic level, this focus is expressed by “intentional idioms” – “convinced”, “desires”, etc. (5: 60). Intentional idioms have an intensional, not an extensional, nuance, since the substitution of equivalent terms into sentences in which they are included does not always preserve the truth of the latter (for example, from the fact that I am convinced that Venus is the Morning Star, it does not yet follow that I am convinced that it is the Evening Star). Material systems whose activity can be characterized by means of intentional idioms and predicted from an “intentional stance,” i.e., by attributing beliefs and desires to such systems, are called “intentional systems” by Dennett. Intentional systems should be distinguished from physical systems and artifacts, the prediction of whose “behavior” is carried out from a “physical” and “designer” stance (see 7: 15–17).
The physical attitude is productive when considering natural processes governed by universal laws, such as the law of gravity. Knowledge of these laws and the initial state of the system is sufficient to determine its subsequent states. The design attitude presupposes an idea of the purpose of a particular thing. For example, when evaluating an object as an alarm clock, we can predict that it will emit sharp, abrupt sounds after a certain period of time, calculated on the basis of the position of its parts at that moment. The intentional attitude is partly close to the design attitude, since it also presupposes an idea of the purpose embedded in the material system. But the design attitude does not require attributing “reasonableness” and self-activity to its objects. The intentional attitude cannot do without these assumptions.
Having made these distinctions, Dennett points out that we apply the intentional stance not only to living beings but also to computers. Its scope of application can be extended to other objects, such as thermostats, or even to all things in general (for example, the hardness of some physical objects can be seen as a consequence of their unwillingness to change, etc.), but intentional interpretations acquire real predictive effectiveness precisely in relation to living beings and computers. For example, playing with a chess computer (Dennett’s favorite example) is simply unthinkable without attributing intentionality to it, i.e., certain desires, intentions, and beliefs.
The isomorphism of mental activity realized by the brain and installed computer programs, which is revealed when considering this activity “from the third-person point of view,” allows Dennett to interpret the psyche itself in a computer sense. The psyche is also a kind of program or computational activity of the brain. True, unlike computer programs, which have a fixed logical structure, mental algorithms, Dennett believes, cannot be interpreted unambiguously. Although he does not deny the presence of objective “patterns” in the brain that correspond to intentional states, since an enormous number of computational processes occur in it simultaneously, summing up their results, it turns out to be impossible to determine exactly which patterns generate this or that intentional state. Therefore, “beliefs and desires … are best viewed as abstractions—more like centers of gravity or vectors—than as individualizable concrete states of some mechanism” (10: 85).
These differences, however, do not cancel out the important similarity between the psyche and computer programs – their teleology, functionality. The functionality of programs is that they allow one to achieve some specific goals. The psyche also serves a specific purpose – the survival of organisms and the continuation of their species. Dennett does not argue that computer programs have only “derivative intentionality”. In other words, intentionality is put into them by people, programmers. But people themselves also have derivative intentionality. Their Programmer is “Mother Nature”, namely the long process of natural selection.
Since the “arrow of intentionality” is directed toward the future (the main intentional states are therefore desires that set goals and beliefs that allow one to determine the means to achieve them), the evolution of intentional systems took place precisely in relation to their ability to construct or anticipate the future. Dennett identifies four stages of this process. At the first, the prognostic capabilities of organisms are practically absent; they are rigidly genetically correlated with their current environment. Dennett calls such organisms “Darwinian creatures.” At the second stage, “Skinnerian creatures” emerge, capable of varying their behavior depending on positive or negative reinforcements of their specific actions, which suggests that they create a certain image of the future. The third stage is characterized by the emergence of “Popperian creatures” capable of playing out future actions in their internal information environment even before they are actually committed. Finally, at the fourth stage, “Gregorian creatures” (named after the psychologist C. Gregory) emerge, namely people who are characterized by a qualitatively new level of saturation of this internal environment, achieved largely due to the emergence as a result of a long evolutionary process of a developed ability to learn (see 9: 374–378).
Darwin’s theory of evolution is thus one of the foundations of Dennett’s theory of the mind. It is not surprising that he spent much effort to demonstrate the lack of real alternatives to the doctrine of evolution by natural selection in connection with the increasing attacks of creationists against evolutionary views. The elegance of Dennett’s style contributed to the fact that his evolutionary work, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, was well received by the public and highly praised by critics as one of the best modern treatises on the theory of evolution. In this work, Dennett explains the central tenets of Darwinism and offers a number of ideas (in particular, the concept of “cranes” that accelerate evolution) that eliminate the difficulties of this theory. At the same time, he does not limit himself to defensive measures. Having supported the bold undertaking of the biologist R. Dawkins, he tries to extend the principles of Darwinian evolutionism to culture.
In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which sold a million copies worldwide and had a huge influence on modern Western culture, Dawkins proposed to look at evolution from the point of view of genes rather than organisms or species, and to treat living beings as machines for preserving genes that “care” only about successfully copying themselves. He also proclaimed that the principles of Darwin’s theory of evolution are independent of their specific material embodiments and can be realized in other media, particularly in the cultural sphere. Dawkins called the cultural analogues of genes “memes.” Examples of memes are “melodies, fashionable words and expressions, ways of cooking soup and building arches,” etc., in general, any “ideas” capable of replication, i.e., being transplanted from the mind of one person to the mind of another. Like genes, memes have different survival abilities and can mutate when copied. According to Dawkins, the evolution of cultures can be explained from these premises. True, in The Selfish Gene he expressed this idea, essentially in passing, and Dawkins himself admits that he realized the full significance of his meme hypothesis after Dennett had worked it out in detail, after which many began to seriously talk about creating a new science – “memetics”.
Memetics. However, Dennett himself is cautious about the prospects of memetics as a science of culture. The comments of S. Pinker, S. J. Gould and other authors, who pointed out the non-random but directed nature of meme mutations, the much higher frequency of such mutations, the fact that various memetic lines, or “ideas”, are constantly united, which does not happen with genetic lines, made Dennett doubt the possibility of directly transferring the laws of biological evolution to the transformation of culture. The value of the concept of memes, Dennett believes, is rather that it allows us to look at culture from a new point of view, which in some respects turns out to be more promising than other approaches. Thus, the interpretation of a person as a device for preserving the selfish memes that parasitize on him, which together constitute culture, helps, on the one hand, to understand why some cultural technologies, for example, those associated with drugs, work to the detriment of the individuals who use them (memes “think” primarily about their own multiplication), and on the other hand, to understand why culture as a whole contributes to the well-being of people (selfish memes achieve the best results by caring for their owners).
But the main benefit of the meme concept, according to Dennett, is that it helps clarify the nature of human consciousness. The fact is that consciousness is interpreted by him as “an enormous complex of memes (or more precisely, meme-effects in the brain),” organized as a “virtual machine,” i.e. a temporary structure “made of rules rather than wires” with a sequential “Turing” or “Newman” architecture superimposed on “the parallel architecture of a brain not designed for such activity” (8: 210–211). The rules for this virtual machine are, in fact, set by memes, a kind of cultural programs, which include, in particular, ethical codes. For the effective functioning of the vast multitude of these competing programs, they must receive different priorities, allowing the order of their execution to be established, correlated with the governing instances replacing each other in time. All this, according to Dennett, presupposes the creation of a virtual “bottleneck” for information flows in the brain, which transforms this organ from a parallel to a quasi-sequential device. The installation of memes in the brain is carried out in the process of speech communication, the predisposition to which is inherent in humans at the genetic level. The emergence of a virtual machine of memes in the brain, Dennett believes, significantly increases the natural capabilities of this computing organ, which is clearly confirmed by the biological successes of civilized man.
Consciousness, therefore, facilitates adaptive human activity. According to Dennett, its prerequisite was the process of brain autostimulation, which arose in the situation of questioning oneself (the reason for which could be people’s erroneous beliefs that there is someone nearby, they turned to their companion for help, no one answered, but they noticed with surprise that they themselves could usefully answer themselves), which historically allowed the establishment of external communication channels between brain systems that were not connected by genetically fixed transitions. Such “software” connections were developed in culture, the penetration of which into the brain endows it with consciousness.
The doctrine of consciousness, which forms, let us recall, the second part of the theory of the mind in Dennett’s system, is set out in one of his most intriguing works, “Consciousness Explained .” His theory has a fairly complex structure. It seems that it should be a description of the phenomenological experience of man, subjective qualities and states, which since the time of Descartes have been considered by many to be an unshakable reality. It is easy to notice, however, that Dennett’s reasoning about consciousness as a product of the infection of the brain with memes, which allows for the effective functioning of the intentional system “man,” was conducted from the point of view of a third person. This is no accident, and he directly states that his objectivist theory of intentionality is used to show how human consciousness arises as a “private phenomenon within this theory.” Dennett thereby denies the existence of clear boundaries between the first and second parts of his theory of the mind. And although this does not mean that he completely ignores the so-called phenomenological experience, when examining it, he, as before, tries to maintain objectivity, using the “heterophenomenological method”, which boils down to the adoption of the same intentional attitude towards the subjects being studied. This approach allows one to construct “neutral” interpretations of subjective states, abstracting from the question of their correspondence to reality and likening them to the fictitious worlds of artistic texts.
Of course, the heterophenomenological method is based on the transfer of the intentional states of the researcher to other subjects. But Dennett insists that the intentional states of the latter should also be interpreted in a heterophenomenological key, understood as conditional, fictitious entities. This clearly contradicts Descartes’ thesis on the reliability of subjective states and the immediacy of access to them. But Dennett does not consider this thesis to be true at all. He denies that phenomenological experience is a sphere of unconditional evidence. On the contrary, this experience is overloaded with false theorizing. Using data from modern experimental psychology, Dennett convincingly shows that people really have a poor idea of what their inner world really is. Thus, the task of the theory of consciousness is to destroy the myth of the self-evidence of subjective experience, eliminate its dogmas and replace them with an objectivist positive theory.
Dennett’s main target is the metaphor of the “Cartesian theatre,” a place where “everything comes together” in consciousness. To acknowledge such a place would be to either admit a special spiritual essence in the body, which would restore dualism, or to fall into “Cartesian materialism,” which assumes the existence of some area of the brain at the “watershed” of its incoming and outgoing impulses (including verbal ones), which is the seat of consciousness. Neuroscience, however, shows that such a place in the brain simply does not exist. This means that the “Cartesian theatre” is an illusion. There is no real center in consciousness, and there is no Spectator or Interpreter in the brain.
Dennett replaces the image of the Cartesian theater with a more fruitful, in his opinion, metaphor of “multiply drafts.” This metaphor, or model, better corresponds to the original parallel architecture of the brain, which arose as a result of the evolutionary layering of its functions. According to the multiple drafts model, many adaptive processes of information processing occur simultaneously in the brain. In essence, they are the real “phenomenological data” purified from pseudo-introspective layers, and are equal, although during the multiple “editing” of these “drafts” with the most direct participation of the virtual memetic machine, only some of them end up in the areas of the brain responsible for verbal reports, “press releases” of the subject. Only about such “drafts” do we say that we are aware of them, although this is not entirely accurate.
Criticism of traditional phenomenology and the replacement of the real unified Self with an abstract “center of narrative gravity” does not mean, Dennett is sure, a rejection of the interpretation of our subjects as intentional systems (although this concept is clarified after the replacement of Cartesian images with new metaphors, and these systems are deprived of the unity initially assumed in them), as well as of the traditional concepts of “folk psychology”. One of the most important concepts of this kind is “free will”. Dennett devoted two books to this problem, and the last of them, “Evolving Freedom”, essentially sums up his entire system, absorbing the themes of his other treatises.
Dennett is confident in the reality of free will. At the same time, he believes that it is wrong to contrast freedom with determinism. After all, it is not determinism at all, but its opposite, indeterminism, that actually undermines the concept of responsibility, which is closely connected with the idea of freedom. The evolutionary-deterministic view of things allows us to explain the emergence of creatures capable of avoiding unfavorable situations based on a preliminary assessment of various behavior options. Only in this context should we talk about freedom. The real content of this concept comes down to stating the fact that a rational person lives in a situation of constant choice.
In his doctrine of freedom, as in other parts of his system, Dennett tries to avoid harsh judgments, emphasizing the hypothetical or model nature of a number of his constructions. Nevertheless, many perceive him as a philosophical extremist. First of all, this is due to Dennett’s persistent desire to demonstrate the sufficiency of the objectivist approach to consciousness. He directly states the possibility of “disqualifying” subjective states, or “qualities” (qualia), and denies the legitimacy of various kinds of thought experiments conceived to demonstrate the irreducibility of the subjective component of consciousness, in particular the hypothetical distinction between conscious human beings and their unconscious behavioral twins – zombies. Dennett is more ready to declare all people zombies than to agree with the conclusion about the irreducibility of consciousness, the illusion of which arises due to the incompleteness of our knowledge of the brain. And although some philosophers, for example, R. Rorty, support these views of Dennett, it is not surprising that they cause sharp objections from other authors. One of Dennett’s most aggressive opponents is the American philosopher J. Searle, to whom the next chapter is dedicated.
Literature
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