Bruce's Reviews > From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

On Reading Daniel Dennett

I lay on my bed this morning feeling rather despondent. From my blog's reading of From Bacteria and Bach and Back Dennett has almost convinced me: God is a user illusion; perhaps a beneficial one, but one of the answers my mind provides to account for certain vague intimations I experience in living my life. I know, however, that when I start praying (as I was doing then), and when I go to church next Sunday, I will be likewise convinced that God and his plan for me and the rest of humanity is a vital reality. I ask myself, will I be constantly going back and forth between these two views, depending on what I’m reading and who I’m listening to?

I must try to decide for myself . . . I must think, introspect – which Dennett claims is not necessarily the best way to learn about one’s own mind. With a second person observing you are not as susceptible to the weight of one’s user illusions. (Dennett’s Cartesian gravity). But I still must ultimately be convinced myself. So I started to introspect then and there, laying on my bed, looking at the sunlight seeping through tree branches outside my window, encased by, amongst many other random objects, a messy pile of books and a laptop jutting out from my bureau.

What is my experience, I asked. What exactly can I conclude about my conclusions about reality—the reality of the universe and my place in it? Dennett lists some of the relevant items: “colors, opportunities, dollars, promises, and love . . .” (p. 368). These are “a few valuable examples from a large set of affordances.” They are, he points out, like the icons on our computer screen that help us navigate on our computer, completely ignorant of what’s really going on within.

Back to my experience. The sunlight through the trees is beautiful and gives me a sense of hope. From that hope I extrapolate a validation of my life—but not just a life lived in any old way. Only a life in which I’m confident of having a purpose consonant with the intimations of that sunlight through the trees can validate that hope. That sunlight through the trees, then, is a kind of user icon to navigate through life, trying to figure out how best to live it. And, like the screen icon, it covers an incredibly complex underlying system that I can’t begin to imagine or manipulate.

So far I’m following Dennett’s model which on completion he claims we will be able to “align our manifest-image identifications of mental states . . . with scientific-image identifications of the subpersonal information structures . . .” (p. 367). This is a model for scientists. The ordinary lay person will continue contentedly with his own manifest-image and the user icons with which he wends his way through it.

However, my conjecture about the “subpersonal information structures” underlying my hope are quite different. They are, first of all, structures in the universe, not simply my mind (e.g., the sunlight through the trees), and in the center of that structure is God. I hastily concede the concept of God (not God Himself!) is a kind of user icon. But, in order to properly align this all-important element of my manifest-image with what’s really going on out there, I find I must include a genuine, a real, reason for hope that comes from living a certain kind of life (i.e., a purposeful, moral life). Dennett might reply that I’m experiencing an illusion, albeit a useful illusion of a hope and purpose validated by some structure in the universe. But, alas, realizing something is useful only to make life more bearable and pleasant, completely empties it of worth—like discovering someone you thought loved you is only interested in your money.

In Dennett’s view we’re all analogous to church-goers who, it’s been claimed, enjoy greater longevity from living in a faith community. But of course this is only the case if they sincerely believe the dogma of their creed, just as the taker of a placebo must be confident it will alleviate his ailment. It seems, then, that the basis of their lives is a very precarious ignorance which, as Lady Bracknell points out, is “like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.” According to Dennett, we all navigate reality with the help of similar user illusions of hope, love, friendship, virtue, etc., giving our lives a sense of consequence that suggests our efforts to live a good life are not simply in alignment with bottom-down evolutionary forces, but in some way make a difference. For instance, when we resist the temptation to act dishonestly or meanly, are we simply following ‘best practices’ for a reasonably pleasant life, so that honesty has value solely as a “user-illusion of the manifest image”?

Sometimes Dennett's conjectures are the basis for a rebuttal to his views, as when he cites “[t]he incessant torrent of self-probing and reflection that we engage in during waking life” as a potent evolutionary force. But surely such self-probing can bring one to realize the existence of forces that transcend blind evolution.

At one point Dennett seems to come close to recognizing the imperative our existence affords to believe in God:

“We tend to overlook the importance of the fact that we have voluminous experience of many people independently coming up with the same answer . . . but if that were not our experience, no amount of analytic reflection in the intrinsic necessity of mathematics--or the existence of a benign God--would convince us to trust our calculations.” (p. 378)

This voluminous experience we share with “many people independently” is a certain depth of feeling for which the word ‘feeling’ is far too weak. Such feelings are the basis for institutions that develop and explicate that ‘feeling.’ Examples are the feeling of danger (institution: police), romantic love (institution: marriage), and the apprehension of a world that cries out for an entity responsible for the rich significance of life (institution: religion). These ‘feelings’ do indeed create for us an imperative that cannot be ignored.