by DAVID PAPINEAU
There seems to be no stopping Daniel Dennett. In academic circles, he has long been recognized as a leading figure. He has played a major role in integrating philosophy of mind with cognitive science, and his ideas have been widely discussed for decades. While many of these remain controversial, he has been an undoubted influence on the way contemporary analytic philosophy has addressed human mentality.
In the past few decades, Dennett has broadened both his readership and his subject matter. He has always been a gifted expositor, with an enviable gift for memorable coinages and illuminating tales, and his past few books have exploited this to move beyond the limits of academic philosophy. His break-out volume was Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), which urged the far-reaching significance of the theory of natural selection. This was followed by a series of other works aimed at a general audience, most notably Breaking the Spell (2006), in which Dennett treated religion as a subject for scientific anthropology.
His latest volume, the somewhat unfortunately titled From Bacteria to Bach and Back, ranges yet further, aiming to cover the evolution of everything on earth, from the start of life to the heights of modern culture. Its publication has been greeted with unusual levels of public acclaim. Dennett now seems to have acquired the status of an international treasure. A series of enthusiastic media profiles have presented him as a kind of avuncular alternative to Richard Dawkins – bringing us news from the bright new world of science, but without the sharp edges.
Some of this attention is no doubt due to the arresting claims made in the new book. For a start, Dennett maintains that consciousness is an illusion. Our conscious life is no more real than the virtual realities conjured up by computer imagery. Taking consciousness to be real, says Dennett, is like taking the icons on your computer screen to be genuine folders. Scarcely less striking are Dennett’s claims about the development of modern culture. Very little of it is deliberately directed, says Dennett. As he sees it, the technological wonders of the modern world have little to do with people understanding how certain means will achieve certain ends. Rather the social world, just like the biological world, is shaped by the blind forces of natural selection, not intelligent design.
Dennett likes to present his views as forced on us by science. If only we would free ourselves from outmoded myths, and open ourselves to the latest discoveries, he repeatedly assures us, we would be able to see things as he and his scientific allies do. Readers should be wary of this rhetoric. In truth Dennett’s distinctive views are by no means common currency among the scientific experts. Most cognitive scientists have no doubt that consciousness is real, and most social scientists accept that advanced human culture rests crucially on means-end understanding. This is not to say that Dennett’s theses are pulled out of thin air. They have the backing of a developed theoretical framework. But this framework owes far more to Dennett’s long-standing philosophical commitments than to his familiarity with the latest science.
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