So here's the most intriguing quote from "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" by Daniel Dennett, which I am currently slogging through. I apologize for the length, but I want to give some context.
Intentionality is the philosopher's technical term for this meaning: it is the "aboutness" that can relate one than to another--a name to its bearer, an alarm call to the danger that triggered it, a word to its referent, a thought to its object...Intentionality is widely regarded by philosophers as the mark of the mental. Where does intentionality come from? It comes from minds, of course.
But that idea, perfectly good in its own way, becomes a source of mystery and confusion when it is used as a metaphysical principle, rather than a fact of recent natural history. Aristotle called God the Unmoved Mover, the source of all motion in the universe, and Locke's version of Aristotelian doctrine, as we have seen, identifies this God as Mind, turning the Unmoved Mover into the Unmeant Meaner, the source of all Intentionality. Locke took himself to be proving deductively what the tradition already took to be obvious: original intentionality springs from the Mind of God; we are God's creatures, and derive our intentionality from Him.
Darwin turned this doctrine upside down: intentionality doesn't come from on high; it percolates up from below, from the initially mindless and pointless algorithmic processes that gradually acquire meaning and intelligence as they develop. And, perfectly following the pattern of all Darwinian thinking, we see that the first meaning is not full-fledged meaning; it certainly fails to manifest all the "essential" properties of real meaning (whatever you take those properties to be). It is mere quasi-meaning, or semi-semantics. It is what John Searle has disparaged as mere "as if intentionality" as opposed to what he calls "Original Intentionality." But you have to start somewhere, and the fact that the first step in the right direction is just barely discernible as a step towards meaning at all is just what we should expect.
This passage is fantastic to me. I really enjoy how he puts Darwinian thought into a very rough lineage of Western philosophy, giving it just enough background to really show how much has changed since this idea. And the fact that he clearly believes there is meaning and value in life warms my heart. Sure, ultimately there's no meaning in the universe, but meaning has been created, through a gradual and algorithmic process. Fantastic.
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2 comments:
Dennett's a blast. but I wonder, is intionality really the essential mark of the mental? Perhaps it is not the intentionality of mental states (what/-the fact that- they indicate) but their phenomenally conscious aspect (how they indicate) which is more essential to mental phenomena. I'm suggesting that it's not that my mental state tells me that there's a certain light-wave dancing on my eyeballs which makes my mental state a mental state. I mean, my thermostat contains representations (intentional states) about the temp but we wouldn't normally say it has a mind (though some philosophers would, and I've considered it myself).
Maybe its the blue sensation that I get from this intentional state which we need to consider. Dude named Thomas Nagel who liked bats a lot thought that what makes this sensation a mental state, is that there is 'something which it is like' to have it. In other words, it has a subjective quality. He also thought that this subjective aspect of mental states was irreducible in terms of any objective analysis. So even though I may have my 'blue sensation' brain state very carefully pinned under a double duty techno micro scope (a techno-scope if you will) I would never discover this subjective aspect (what we might think of as the blueness of the sensation). I'd learn a lot of stuff about my brain state but a lot of nothing about my sensation qua sensation.
This certainly raises problems for some naturalists, Dennet included, and threatens to push the whole phil of mind project back to the old days of Descartes, Locke and all those fancy philosophers who like to think of themselves as ghosts, maybe itchin to chill with a holy ghost some day. I like to think that these types of puzzles threaten aspects of our scientific worldview more than they support our equally well respected religious one.
so Darwin surely dealt a mighty blow to the weirdness that some philosophers these days like to call metaphysics. But that was just the tip of the weirdness iceberg. and he's still standing on it.
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