No wonder people don’t like Dennett
In Kinds of Minds (1996, p15), Daniel Dennett quotes Elaine Morgan:
The heart-stopping thing about the new-born is that, from minute one, there is somebody there. Anyone who bends over the cot and gazes at it is being gazed back at. (1995, p99)
Dennett responds:
As an observation about how we human observers instinctively react to eye contact, this is right on target, but it thereby shows how easily we can be misled.
Last night I told a friend, a mother of three, about this and she was horrified—understandably so, I’d say. Viewing and treating a very young child as a “little person” is essential for their socialisation, but Dennett doesn’t seem to care about that sort of thing. In his quest for objectivity, he misses what’s absolutely crucial in the development of a mind: intersubjectivity. He is fixated by cognition to the virtual exclusion of affect. For him folk psychology is all theory and no simulation. That the attribution of personality could be based on the latter rather than the former seems inconceivable to him.
I’d like to pursue the idea that Dennett’s efforts to eliminate subjectivity and intersubjectivity from his own thinking were what caused him to miss their significance in what he’s thinking about: the normal human mind. Given the progress recently made by others, however (such as Vittorio Gallese (Wikipedia)), this issue seems to take on rather a historical tinge: Dennett as dinosaur. Hmmm, yes, I think so, one of the big ones, but…
Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996.
Elaine Morgan, The Descent of the Child: Human Evolution from a New Perspective, Oxford University Press, 1995.
December 19, 2009
Posted in: Dennett, differentials, philosophy
3 Responses
Sir, you are completely misreading him. I’d respond to your comments, but I’m not sure I even follow them. What do you mean Dennet doesn’t accept simulation or that intersubjective relationships are key to a developing mind. I’ve been reading Dennett for 15 years and cannot recall him every saying anything like this.
I’d also ask that you spell out your own vision and motives a little. Your tone certainly suggests being threatened by having consciousness explained. But you really shouldn’t be. As a father of three myself, I can assure you, watching a mind develop is every bit as fantastic and wonderful an experience as it ever was.
Just a follow up thought: I think Dennett would identify Ms. Morgan’s observation as one of those intuition pumps, as it implies that the baby’s consciousness isn’t “really real” like that of the parent leaning over the crib. But Dennett would never accept that the parent’s was any “realer” than the baby’s. He would say they’re both as real as they need to be, but still objectively describable in evolutionary terms.
Incidentally, Dennett has children and grandchildren and I think, with your friend, would be just as horrified by someone suggesting that they were somehow less than human.
PS the title of your post is unhelpful.
Re simulation, see my essay linked from the Papers page. Dennett is a theory-theorist, not a simulation theorist.
Re intersubjectivity, I believe the mind develops mainly through social interaction, and that this view is becoming quite mainstream. [Added later: here's a paper by Evan Thompson, from the Journal of Consciousness Studies, entitled Empathy and Consciousness, which is very good on this issue.]
Assuming that any critic of Dennett is threatened by having consciousness explained is like assuming any critic of Israel is anti-Semitic. In fact, I go further than him, in stating clearly that, in strictly third-person, objective terms, “phenomenal consciousness” is meaningless, so in that context, in effect, consciousness doesn’t exist. Much of what he says implies that but he seems scared of saying it clearly, probably because he doesn’t appreciate that subjective and intersubjective considerations more than make up for the negativity of the objective aspect.
When I first studied philosophy, I was a Nagel fan, and Dennett was my ideological arch-enemy. Over many years I gradually swung around, almost to the opposite extreme. I now think he was probably the most important philosopher of mind of the latter half of the twentieth century (and some of Nagel’s output is just rubbish). But even so, Dennett’s neglect of simulation (and affect: see the essay) was a serious omission that is becoming more and more obvious. See, for instance, Gallese’s “shared manifold” concept.
A new-born child has yet to acquire any memes, but for Dennett “Human consciousness is itself a huge com-
plex of memes…” (CE, 210), so the new-born is not conscious. A reasonable fall-back is that it is sentient, but for Dennett sentience is nothing but sensitivity (KoM, 97): the new-born is just a sensitive mechanism. For me, the piece that’s missing from that jigsaw picture is simulation+affect, or in other words, empathy. I dare say that “in real life” Dennett is as empathetic as anyone else. But that begs the question: why is it such a glaring omission in his theory? I can only suppose that, being intersubjective, it was not considered worthy of inclusion. Which is rather a serious mistake for a philosopher of mind to make. But he was a man of his time. Not so long ago academics in the arts and humanities used to ignore popular culture for reasons that are not quite the same, but interestingly similar.
The title was intended to be provocative, and it seems to be working!
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