Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Dennett starts this book, careful to align the specific context of Darwin’s ideas from a material biology context to one of functionalism.
With this alignment, Darwin seeks to atomize all complexity into functional processes so that the material moves within a complexity are atomized into building blocks that allow for a supervenience of complexity to material atoms.
For instance, he applies this maneuver from biological evolution to behavior, psychology, culture and ultimately consciousness. What Dennett notes as being skyhooks constitutes a logical break, such as the jump from ordinal numbers to the smallest limit cardinal numbers. What Dennett calls cranes are moves that constitute supervenience.
This mapping is accomplished by Dennett mainly through a series of analogies and then, through a series of quotes that directly address each complexity through a dialectical structure that aligns various quotations that attempt to get at the root of contrary positions. These contrary positions are then atomized in terms of Dennett’s algorithmic supervenience in order to be better incorporated into his algorithmic supervenience. If there is one thing I have noticed, it’s that the presence of a dialectical structure necessarily supports an ideological position.
It’s hard to moralize ideological positions of this complexity because of its range, but Dennett wishes to highlight the rational consistency possible in atomizing our most difficult endeavors (ethics, culture, subjectivity). This sounds well and good, but until you understand the larger context it is difficult to address how Dennett’s book is an expression of an ideologue.
One of the debates in biology is a dispute about how to calibrate survival. Richard Dawkins and Dennett both wish to calibrate adaptation to the level of the gene. Some biologists would calibrate survival to the species, others to ecology. Some to the individual. Each of these optimizations of utility provide a basis for the creation of different terminologies, some of which are impossible given a radically different calibration. For instance, Stephen Jay Gould, who comes from a paleontologist background would calibrate survival to the species and thus has arrived at varyingly different concepts, some of which are nonsensical to someone like Dennett who only sees atomized genes as being the root basis for adaptive difference.
When John Maynard Keynes in the 70s introduced game theory to biology he provided a tool for biologists to compare the utility of different survival adaptations. This revolutionized the field but it forced biologists to try and come to a different basis for how to compare adaptations. I recently read an essay exploring the utility of allowing non-queen workers to breed. Wasps and bees do have non-queen workers that can breed, and it has been shown that the queen may kill these offspring but at other times, may allow them to live so that the workers compete with each other. The question in this essay remained unanswerable because the authors of the essay were unable to provide a basis to decide what level to calibrate their comparison to. Since all the workers in a colony were related, should the adaptation be addressed in terms of the individual? Or the colony? Economics often does not have this problem (individual vs society) because the healthiness of each is hidden by the maximal utility of specific groups. Economists are often political simply because they will hide the (dis)favoring of a group by calibrating utility to the society, or to specific individuals in isolation.
By NOT addressing his heady position to this basic difference, by explaining the mechanisms of his attempt at a supervenience view of adaptation, Dennett dismisses the veracity of other views by distorting them into failed forms of supervenience.
The ideologue that Dennett wishes to superimpose is that of a consistency from the point of genetics.
What makes this position obviously an ideologue is the arbitrariness of Dennett’s stopgap. Dennett himself provides this analogy when he explains the problem of “levels”. He utilizes the example of a computer in order to highlight this issue. When attempting to explain the processes inherent in a Word processing program, Dennett states that trying to understand the program in terms of electrical mechanics, or even at the quantum mechanics level is too much! We shouldn’t try and understand the processor in terms of machine language or even at low level code, we should understand it in terms of the operating system environment and the APIs that the word processor utilizes (as well as the user context needs) in order to best understand how a word processor forms. The “baggage” of quantum mechanics or electrical engineering would be too detailed and merely mechanical from the point of view of the appropriate level, because what makes a word processor isn’t the mechanical moves of its basic units but the functional consistency of its end result.
As is Dennetts style, this analogy is very clear, but when we apply this analogy to Dennett’s own arguments (should we not understand consciousness in terms of the needs of the individual? In terms of the need for society) does this not go against a genetic view for why consciousness needed to happen? Does not the view that genetics is the key to EVERYTHING, even religion including too much baggage? After all, might not a colony of conscious robots not having genes but needing the same economic, political coordination also form a religion?
Dennett does consider that culture goes far in changing the context of what survival and adaptation means, but he seems to find the “limit cardinal” to be at the level of the gene, rather than providing a multiple level of calibration — mainly due to this insistence on supervenience being the model we should take. If this is so, however, should he have not started this book talking about Darwinist “survival” of quantum sub-atomic laws persisting in the face of disorder?
Dennett is a brilliant man and more impressively a very clear writer of very difficult ideas. But in his haste to push forward a world-philosophy-science view calibrated to that of the gene, he ends up falling prey to the same problem he would accuse others of, that genetics is a “skyhook” given the properties of chemical biology from which genetic properties can be derived. In the end, the rationality he sees as being factual is in fact, to a large degree an arbitrary choice until he is able to demonstrate that other calibrations to other levels, on their own terms, cannot provide enough consistency and explanatory power as this one. Yet even this point is arbitrary, after all, why cannot all of these different calibrations occur simultaneously in competition with one another?
