Adapted from the “Prospect” article on mycourses.
Critics of the materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett argue that in his book From Bacteria to Bach and Back , he continues to fail to address what is known as the “Hard Problem” of consciousness: “Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?” as David Chalmers puts it. Dennett says his “refusal to play ball with my colleagues is deliberate.” He realises that—as in politics—if you debate on your opponents’ terms, you have already lost. To win, you must set the agenda. His bet is that if you understand consciousness in the right way, the Hard Problem will be exposed as an artefact of an outmoded way of thinking—a pseudo-problem comparable to the fruitless quest in the early 20th century for the élan vital that animates matter.
“As language became more complex, we gained the capacity to mean things by what we said and to understand what others meant.”
This approach, however, leaves Dennett almost completely silent on the very thing that characterises consciousness: subjective feeling. This is partly why Dennett is often accused of effectively denying that consciousness exists, of claiming that we are no more aware than zombies. Dennett has denied this.
In this book, Dennett argues that we must understand how consciousness emerged through the process of evolution. To do this we must understand how random, uncomprehending, Darwinian evolution could possibly have given rise to creatures such as us, who are capable of top-down, directed, comprehending action. In his deliberately dizzying summary, we need to see how “a process with no Intelligent Designer can create intelligent designers who can then design things that permit us to understand how a process with no Intelligent Designer can create intelligent designers who can then design things.”
How do we manage that? Any adequate answer must account for how more can come from less, how effects can be greater than causes. More specifically, features we take to be essential to consciousness could have emerged prior to consciousness: Dennett argues that there can be reasons without reasoners, design without designers and competence without comprehension.
That there are reasons without reasoners is evident from the animal kingdom. Dennett compares the ornate towers of Antoni Gaudí’s La Sagrada Família in Barcelona with the fantastical shapes found on termite castles. There are reasons for both existing, but only “Gaudí had reasons for the shapes he ordered and created; there are reasons for the shapes created by the termites, but the termites didn’t have those reasons.”
There is something of a taboo in philosophical circles about spelling it out in these terms because the orthodox view is that science has no place for reasons or purposes. “Teleological” explanations that appeal to ends are supposed to be redolent of pre-scientific Aristotelianism. But Dennett argues that “Darwin didn’t extinguish teleology; he naturalised it.” Darwin showed that there certainly are reasons why organisms do things, but that it isn’t necessary to attribute intention or planning for those reasons to exist. Nature contains design without necessarily having a designer.
Perhaps more significant is that there can be competence without comprehension. Nature displays this in abundance. The kingfisher doesn’t understand how to time its dive into the water to catch its prey, while allowing for the distorting refraction of light—but, boy, it’s brilliant at doing it. Humans are also familiar with competence without understanding. Turing showed how to build a computer that could do any algorithmic task without having any conscious idea what it was doing. We find riding a bike as easy as, well, riding a bike, but few of us know how we manage it.
But how do we get from such unthinking processes to the highly-thought through decisions familiar from everyday life? According to Dennett, the key step was the evolution of language. Animals and plants exchange information all the time. Words, though, add new levels of flexibility and complexity. They can be combined in almost infinite permutations, placing few limits on the information we can convey. Crucially, language didn’t need to start out—indeed it could not have started out—as the rich human artefact it has now become. Early humans didn’t need to understand the primitive language they used any more than bees understand their honey dances.
As language became more complex, we gained the capacity to mean things by what we said and to understand what others meant. Dennett’s most striking thesis is that it is precisely this ability to track other people’s “states of mind” through language that allowed us to track our own—and hence for our highly developed sense of self to emerge. He claims that every organism, even a single cell, has rudimentary selfhood. But when we start communicating richly, we need to be aware of the boundaries of our bodies and the boundaries of our minds—which thoughts are ours and which are other people’s. Words, he argues, “turned our brains into minds—our minds—capable of accepting and rejecting the ideas we encounter, discarding or developing them for reasons we can usually express.”
Prophet of rationality: Daniel Dennett ©Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images
These minds, however, are not quite what we generally assume them to be. The unified, central-controller self is a “user-illusion.” We tend to think, as Descartes did, that we have privileged access to our own consciousness—“I think, therefore I am”—but in fact our self-awareness is limited, biased and partial. The self is not so much a thing as a “centre of narrative gravity,” a story we tell ourselves to make more coherent the jumbled reality of our minds. Asked why we do what we do, we are quick to find reasons, when “the most honest thing to say is often ‘I don’t know; it just came to me.’”
Whether you buy Dennett’s account or not, it illustrates just how much you can offer by way of a theory of consciousness without addressing the Hard Problem. This certainly isn’t the last word. Dennett modestly describes it as “the sketch, the backbone, of the best scientific theory to date of how our minds came into existence, how our brains work all their wonders.”