You know, that's a really fundamental thing. For some people, if it isn't magic, it doesn't mean anything.
Reason: Think tanks like the Ethics and Public Policy Center and thinkers like Leon Kass and Irving Kristol seem very frightened about the moral implications of your project.
Dennett: They're scared to death of this, and I think they're just wrong. They're clinging to a straw that won't float. I don't know whether it's comic or tragic. The idea that they could save what they hold dear by making it magical, by embodying it in this little pearl of soul stuff, that's superstitious thinking of the worst sort.
Reason: How would you comfort them?
Dennett: There, there. There, there. It's not as scary as you think.
Reason: I actually suspect some of them of believing that you are correct. They just don't want ordinary people to think about this stuff. They are afraid that if people believed that God doesn't exist, then they might think that everything's permitted.
Dennett: Yes. They don't want me letting the cat out of the bag. I think that's incredibly paternalistic and arrogant. They underestimate the intelligence of their fellow human beings.
Reason: So you're fairly confident that the world will go on and people will still raise their families and they won't murder each other in their sleep?
Dennett: Absolutely. I think it's time to grow up.
Reason: Why would people resist growing up?
Dennett: There are so many reasons. At its worst, it's that paternalism: "I don't need it, but look at all these childish people around me. They need it. I won't dare walk the streets at night if my fellow man doesn't persist in this delusion."
At its best, it's an understandable conservatism, one that says, "You're proposing a really big shift -- 'a strange inversion of reason,' as one reviewer characterized evolutionary theory in 1867. You're going to upset so many apple carts, and this will be so scary, and we're better off clinging to the old-fashioned way even though we grant you that the arguments you're putting forward are correct."
That's why I called one of my books Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Darwin subverted everything. He replaced the top-down theory with the bottom-up theory, and for many people this is just a very scary change.
Reason: Let me turn your own arguments on you. The memes for the top-down theories seem to have been doing fine for all these centuries.
Dennett: No, they haven't. It's been one defeat after another. There was the Galilean defeat and the Copernican defeat and the Darwinian defeat and the Einsteinian defeat. The domain of the supernatural has been shrinking. The retreat has sometimes been graceful, and sometimes it's the farthest thing from graceful.
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|1.27.10 @ 2:37AM|#
I find Mr. Denetts arguments as expressed in this article very persuasive. Except for one thing, the statement at the beginning stateing that "Human Freedom ... is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species, us"
Leaving aside the tautology of "Human". I see little evidence that it can only be found in humans.
For example, I saw a NGC show about a couple of killer whales that killed a great white shark. Upon further examination, the biologists found that pod's members to be rather battle scarred compared to most killer whales.
The show described the phenomenom as a pod of killer whales that had a learned and shared culture of killing sharks.
Furthermore, other pods specialized in hunting fish, or seals. In the later case, by driving hard onto the shore nearly beaching themselves. The particular hunting culture seemed to effect the practical size of the pods involved.
While the show referred to this behavior as culture, I would not be surprised to learn of shunning or devotional behaviors involving killer whales that either refuse a pod's culture or somehow manage to change it, if only the biologists watch long enough.
If this is true, it would not be much different from the civilizing behavior applied to members of our society Mr. Dennett describes as increasing the scope of free will in humans.
|1.27.10 @ 2:42AM|#
A thoroughly impractical but interesting thought experiment would be what would happen to a pod of killer whales if you could attach a radar to each and every member.
I bet you would find a culture war as some of the whales chose to use the radar while others wanted to stick to the tried and true.
Pingback| 4.26.10 @ 10:41PM
Reason Magazine interview with Daniel Dennett links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
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