god dammit, and vice versa
Over at BeliefNet, Robert Wright is twisting Dan Dennett's words into an endorsement of his position. Dan Dennett, although not quite as much of a jerk about it as the late Francis Crick, is an atheist, and a modern philosopher famous enough that people have actually heard of him despite his complete failure to inspire the birth of any fascist dictatorships (the true benchmark for any 20th century thinker).
Wright's article twists Dennett's position like an ad exec quoting two words from a movie review. Wright lays out a very broad descriptive framework -- one so broad that there's basically no option but to agree with it. When Dennett does so, Wright ignores all of the qualifications Dennett inserted, and goes on to use this weak endorsement as a vote in favor of some crackpot speculation about the planet evolving into a thinking organism.
More specifically, Dennett agrees that evolution as a process can be described as a "designer", insofar as it plays a causal role in the development of organisms. He also agrees that evolution can be ascribed a "direction", although he thinks that direction is probably arbitrary.
Wright simply gets Dennett to agree that these descriptive metaphors can be applied on a global scale to the planet. As I understand it, this is the limit of his assent: that the earth's development is proceeding in an arbitrary but consistent direction, and that this development is caused by natural, deterministic processes to which, if you're intent on it, you can apply the term "designer". That's it. He doesn't talk about God, or morality, or the meaning of life. He
just agrees on the validity of a very broad descriptive framework.
From there, Wright engages in some frankly sophomoric philosophizing, throwing out Gaia theory speculations and implying that complexity is synonymous with meaning, and that linear progression indicates deliberate design. Although I'm sympathetic to some of this, it's completely obvious that there is no factual justification for it. And it opens up some unpleasant cans of philosophical worms, which Wright is mostly happy to ignore. For instance: does his position mean that evolutionary progress is synonymous with morality? If so, would I be a better person if I had, I donno, retractable claws? I mean, clearly it would be awesome, but would a prehensile tail make me a righteous person?
I'm no Dennett apologist -- for one thing, I'm not at all satisfied with the only work of his with which I'm very familiar: his account of consciousness, which, after 500 pages, basically boils down to saying you don't really need to explain subjective experience after all (although he would deny this and probably send some enforcers/philosophy TAs to rough me up and/or confuse me). And frankly I am pretty receptive to the idea of existence having a higher purpose, in much the same way that I am receptive to the idea of free ice cream. But I think Dennett will be unhappy with Wright's characterization of his position, and downright pissed-off by the way bloggers like Begging To Differ and Sullivan are linking to it -- which is tending to be surround by language along the lines of "ATHEIST RECANTS! THERE IS A GOD!"
UPDATE: Dennett responds (thanks, Catherine, for finding this)
Comments
Actually, my post at Begging To Differ is not surrounded by the language you describe. And I don't really care what Dennett thinks. I understand his quasi-endorsement of Wright's framework is the reason the story has legs, but my interest is in the framework itself.
I do not believe in "God" but I am certain there are processes at work in the universe that are beyond our comprehension. I think theses processes seem "godly" to us precisely because we cannot understand them.
Wright's idea that the early amphibians are analogous to human stem cells is interesting to think about. It may or may not be "crackpot" but it's always amusing to contemplate alternate explanations of our universe, previously unexplored layers of abstraction.
I carefully referred in my post to the "existence OR nature" of God because I think people apply the God-label to ordinary natural processes we just haven't figured out. Just because an atheist scientist is wrong about something doesn't mean there's a white-haired guy in a robe sitting on a throne up in the clouds.
Certainly, your post isn't as egregious an offender as Andrew Sullivan's. But you still strongly imply that Dennett has been convinced to change his position. He hasn't. He has simply agreed that evolutionary processes can have a direction, e.g. toward intelligence. In other words, there are attractors in this particular chaotic system. That's all that Dennett cops to.
Wright's idea seems to be that the fact that the system tends toward a distinct direction implies that it was intentionally designed to go in that direction, because of the system's elegant nature. But that's not a valid conclusion. There are lots of small-scale deterministic processes that produce complex results; for example, the erosion of a particle of sand leading to the Grand Canyon. Or the Chaos Game method of creating the Sierpinski Triangle. There's no reason to believe that either of these systems was intentionally created in order to arrive at their particular outputs.
The mystics looked at the elegant complexity of life and said "God must have done it". Evolution explained that away. Now Wright is looking at the elegant non-randomness of evolution and saying "there must be intentionality behind it". But that's not true. He just won't accept that deterministic processes don't necessarily produce random results.
I'll also say that I appreciate the qualifications you put into your post and your comment here. And that I don't necessarily think the amphibian/stem cell comparison is nonsense, just that the "planetary nervous system" stuff is going to require a *lot* more rigor before it should be given much respect.
I agree that it's an interesting framework, but it's basically just mysticism with scientific window dressing. And Dennett is getting a raw deal.
I must have been wrong - I thought Dennett actually did (at least kinda sorta) change his mind. When I read Darwin's Dangerous Idea (and it's been a while) I thought he was saying evolution absolutely does NOT have direction or design.
As I mentioned, I'm not very familiar with Dennett's work outside of Consciousness Explained, so you're the authority here on his positions within DDI (although, as you might expect from a book on consciousness, he does touch on some of these Big Questions in CE).
I think the use of the term "direction" is misleading us. I don't doubt that Dennett refutes the idea of a "direction" to evolution, in some sense -- but not in the sense that Wright ends up using. Dennett thinks there are attractors, like intelligence, toward which evolution may tend. However he thinks the process is still capable of swinging wildly away from them once such a state has been reached (the "sawtooth pattern" he talks about in the video). He's also very clear that there is no guarantee that an evolving organism will reach such an attractor (I should be clear that the attractor terminology is my own). More likely, it'll die out.
The only evolutionary direction that Dennett believes in is the direction toward being more able to pass along genes. Evolution may tend to drift toward the development of intelligence, but only because intelligence confers competitive advantages. I think Wright is reading things into Dennett's acceptance of this fact that aren't there.
Nice blog, I like reading it :) Cheers
Post A Comment