Macbraughton

The Science Studio: Interview with Daniel Dennett

This video was taken during a conference of scientists, philosophers, and other forward thinkers called Enlightenment 2.0. It is kind of long for an internet video (1hr 19min) but well worth spending the time to watch if you can. It raises many questions and suggests many answers.

I first read Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea a little over a year ago and have admired him ever since. One of the main themes of that book, which is much in line with Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene, is that Charle’s Darwin’s theory of evolution is possibly the most important concept invented/discovered by humans in our entire history. The reason lies quite simply in its explanatory power.

What I admire so much about Dennett is his rigorous approach to all phenomena through the lens of evolution, and his persistent optimism that reasonable explanations can be (and have been and are being) discovered along this path. He is opposed to “magical thinking” or what he calls skyhooks and consistently shows us that many things previously unexplainable to humans of the past are no longer beyond our comprehension. We need only to tap into the explanatory power of the theory of evolution.

It is not magical leaps, but baby steps, cranes that have gotten us and everything else to where we are now, i.e “the cumulative effects of incremental change over time”. When the timescale is long enough, what appears to be miraculous is suddenly exposed as a natural process.

The theory of evolution itself is a magnificent key that explains and unlocks hitherto sealed mysteries and there are no realms off limits to its cypher. The impact of this is evident within so many different areas of scientific investigation, looking back, it is a hallmark of the twentieth century. How many things which we take for granted now are its fruit?

I can see a recursive process happening around the application of the theory of evolution within human civilization which is increasing our abilities in language and conceptualization, freeing us from the shrugging shoulders of our ancestors in our abilities to describe what was believed to be beyond understanding only a generation ago. We are still at an early stage in this process, though few of those who went before could have dreamed at the things we now count as knowledge.

Of particular interest to me personally, and Dennett as well (which he deals with in his most recent book Breaking the Spell) is religion as a natural phenomena. This approach finds much opposition because the very nature of religious thought places beliefs and faith beyond the pale of reasonable discourse. Fortunately, many denizens of the twenty-first century, even some who would consider themselves religious, are beginning to see the danger of this attitude: It is blindness, it is madness.

Proposition: Religion should be examined in light of the processes by which it has arisen among humans , not necessarily by the purposes it purports itself to serve. Belief for the sake of belief should be discredited in religion as it is in all other realms of human discourse.

Outcome: If this path is pursued on a large scale, the future of reason is quite bright indeed.