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Daniel Dennett's theories ride again + Jacques Derrida versus the rationalists

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Review: From Bacteria to Bach and Back
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v54...2030a.html

EXCERPT: [...] The book's backbone is Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. That replaced the idea of top-down intelligent design with a mindless, mechanical, bottom-up process that guides organisms along evolutionary trajectories into ever more complex regions of design space. [Daniel] Dennett also draws heavily on the idea of 'competence without comprehension', best illustrated by mathematician Alan Turing's proof that a mechanical device could do anything computational. Natural selection has created, through genetic evolution, a world rich in competence without comprehension — the bacteria, trees and termites that make up so much of Earth's biomass.

Yet, as Dennett and others argue, genetic evolution is not enough to explain the skills, power and versatility of the human mind. Over the past 10,000 years, human behaviour and our ability to manipulate the planet have changed too quickly for biological evolution to have been the driving force. In Dennett's view, our brains turned into fully fledged modern minds thanks to cultural memes: 'ways of behaving' — pronouncing a word this way, dancing like so — that can be copied, remembered and passed on.

[...] Dennett reprises his long-held counter-intuitive idea that consciousness is a 'user illusion' similar to the interface of an app, through which people interact with the program without understanding how it works. [...] Critics often quip that Dennett doesn't explain consciousness so much as explain it away, or duck the challenge entirely, and this chapter is unlikely to bring them around. [...] Dennett might well reply that a lack of imagination prevents them from seeing how his theory supports a version of consciousness devoid of over-inflation. For the philosophical background to these hard-to-swallow ideas, see Dennett's Consciousness Explained....



Derrida vs. the rationalists
https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5143...tionalists

EXCERPT: Fifty years ago, in October 1966 [...] Jacques Derrida, took to the stage at a conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, entitled “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”.

In doing so he was to inaugurate a dispute between two schools of philosophy that continues even now – between the analytic philosophers and rationalists on the one hand, and the continental philosophers on the other. Today, a popular strain of thought in the English-speaking world, often associated with the “New Atheist” movement, likes to dismiss all things Derrida or continental as “post-modern” nonsense. But the dispute is, I would argue, of great importance. With the “death of God” the search for meaning does not cease: arguably it becomes more urgent. How we produce and analyse meaning becomes crucial particularly when it is not outsourced to a deity.

[...] when Derrida walked to the front of the assembled guests to deliver his paper, the blandly titled “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, no one could have guessed that he had come not to praise structuralism but to bury it, and, according to some, to bury with it the very foundations of philosophy.

At that time, the dominant intellectual movement in France was structuralism. The scene had been set at the start of the 20th century by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. [...] As the relationship between a thing and what it is named is arbitrary, he argued, words can only gain meaning in relationship to other words – or phrases, or sentences – rather than from the thing to which they refer. Thinkers [...] extended this idea into fields such as psychoanalysis, politics, sociology and anthropology, arguing that it is the interrelationship between phenomena, rather than a fundamental attribute of the thing, that produces meaning. These relations are a “structure”, at the foreground of which are local phenomena, and behind which lie constant laws.

For instance Lévi-Strauss [...] sought to differentiate between “culture” and “nature”, seeing the former as localised phenomena and the latter those behaviours that are universally true. Lévi-Strauss argued that local systems of social organisation were permutations of a few simple, universal kinship structures that lay behind them. By analysing the former the latter could be uncovered, and these would, in some sense, identify “human nature”.

Derrida’s approach, which would become known as deconstruction, took claims like Lévi-Strauss’s universal kinship structures as its starting point – and then undermined them. “The structurality of structure”, argued Derrida in his 1966 paper [...] rests on the notion that there is a centre or an organising principle behind it. “Even today,” he continued, “the notion of a structure lacking any centre represents the unthinkable itself.”

This centre, in controlling the structure, in making it cohere, must both be part of the structure and lie outside it. A structure, therefore, is “contradictorily coherent” and relies on an “invariable presence” to determine its existence. That presence, Derrida argued, has been given many different names throughout history – essence, being, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man and so on – but all have relied on this idea of there being something unchanging beneath it all. While structuralism (and, indeed, analytic philosophy) was able to function without God, it retained a fundamental belief in this “invariable presence”, call it what they will. To quote Nietzsche, “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”

The whole history of the concept of structure, Derrida argued, is the history of replacing one metaphor for another. “The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies.” This is now called into question – first by those great “decentrers” Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and Heidegger – but, crucially, by the very project of structuralism. If the structuralists were unable to find the organising principles they believed existed, then everything became “discourse”: things only had meaning in so far as they related to one another in “a system of differences”.

Derrida doesn’t use the term deconstruction. Instead he uses the words destruction and deconstitution. [...] his 1966 paper puts forward one very simple axiom: there is no transcendental signified. Things fall apart. There is no centre to hold them.

The paper drew an immediate response. Derrida had, as the New York Times put it later, “shocked his audience”. Here, at a symposium created to introduce structuralism to America, he had destroyed its very foundations. [...]

[...] While Derrida’s paper was aimed directly at structuralism, it was also a critique of “certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western Culture”, a tradition based on “a search for a transcendental being that serves as an origin or guarantor of meaning”.

Outside France, the dominant philosophical school was analytic philosophy. A broad church, its foundations had initially been articulated by, among others, Bertrand Russell, GE Moore and the early works of Wittgenstein. Founded on the notion of conceptual clarity, analytic philosophy (in its crudest form) regards philosophy as a branch of the sciences, often subservient to the natural sciences, or at best continuous with them. It proposes that through the logical analysis of philosophical propositions, the basic questions of existence can be clarified, and possibly solved.

As the analytic philosophers were already suspicious of structuralism for its proposition that meaning is contingent, Derrida’s emergence didn’t take long to cause a reaction. Philosophy, in most if not all of its forms, must rely on the possibility of truth. It is a search for meaning, which assumes meaning can be found, and that ideas and concepts have meanings in themselves in some sense, not simply as they relate to other ideas and concepts. Science and logic become the final arbiters in a search for meaning which holds that all can (and eventually will) be explained by a rational and scientific approach. That which lies outside of understanding, according to analytic philosophy, only does so because of our limits thus far – and will become explicable as our knowledge expands.

Leading the charge against Derrida was the American philosopher John Searle. [...] While the Searle–Derrida dispute focused on a specific area of the philosophy of language, it was of course based on a fundamental difference in method and meaning. It is a dispute that continues to divide the intellectual community – a division between so-called “analytic” and “continental” philosophy. Academies tend to cluster around one or the other, regarding the other school as being established on false premises.

For the analytic school, the idea that meaning is “created” and contingent is anathema. If “everything is discourse”, then there is no truth, and the whole moral, rational and scientific project falls. A continental philosopher might argue that the “rationalism” closely associated with the analytic school is simply another discourse; one that may have greater explanatory power in some areas, but which cannot account for the whole field of existence in the way that Christians, for instance, believe God to. It is a narrative, as are other versions of the “truth” – albeit, you could argue, one of astonishing power and critical insight.

But is this explanatory power enough to answer that fundamental question, “what is truth?”? Are there not other admissible ways of describing existence? Science may be the best way of describing how the universe works, but is it the best way of describing what it is like to be alive? Might not, for instance, literature, or even religion, make a better stab at that....
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