Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
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Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
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Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#2> “Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.”
That's just silly. We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk, the effort was supremely insightful in helping us to understand animal cognition. Animals communicate with us all the time, they just do it non-verbally. We often just choose not to listen.
A talking lion would still be a lion. He wouldn't be able to tell us directly what life on the fields is like, but that's what the researchers are for.
I would not continue the 17th century delusion of non-sentient animals any further than we absolutely have to. Animals have exceedingly rich inner lives, and so do humans that don't have language. They just lack certain tooling. I'd put not having language on par with not having sight. A handicap for sure, but you're still a person and you still have thoughts.
There is, literally, a part of the brain that if you shut it off, you lose language. Dennett would have you believe that it's that one part that makes us human.
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#3> “Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” That's just silly. We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk, the effort was supremely insightful in helping us to understand animal cognition. Animal…
Consistency is really key. As long as there is consistency in thought and action, there is a level of understanding, whether innate or consciously. Language has nothing to do with consistency except for the outward showing of it to others. And it may possibly help with self-consistency..we cannot assert that yet.
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#4> “Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” That's just silly. We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk, the effort was supremely insightful in helping us to understand animal cognition. Animal…
Yes! Highly recommend Carl Safina's Beyond Words.
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#5> “Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” That's just silly. We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk, the effort was supremely insightful in helping us to understand animal cognition. Animal…
I don't think Dennett is denying that animals have rich inner lives, or that they can express basic desires to us. He's saying that their conscious experience is somehow fundamentally incomprehensible to us.
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#6> “Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” That's just silly. We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk, the effort was supremely insightful in helping us to understand animal cognition. Animal…
Your quote doesn't support your conclusions about the subject or Dennett's views on them.
A lack of sight from birth results in visual cortex used for other things. Damage to language areas can result in loss of comprehension or production, but neighboring tissue can recover the functionality. The lines we draw are fairly blurry to be honest.
Dennett isn't saying that the language area makes the human but that language and narrative as a cognitive currency are what make us human; the neurobiology is incidental.
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#7> “Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” That's just silly. We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk, the effort was supremely insightful in helping us to understand animal cognition. Animal…
That quote, and its context, is not an argument that animals do not have exceedingly rich inner lives, nor is it an argument that language is some prerequisite for such a state. It is an effort to address, and dismiss, the kind of "17th century delusions" that you're worried about (and, in fact, participating in, whether intentionally or not).
The statements, "Animals are sentient", and, "Animals are not sentient", are opposite positions extrapolated from the same axiomatic premises; that there is some thing called 'sentience', that humans 'have' this 'sentience', and animals either do or do not. Most commonly this kind of thinking also assumes that there is one kind of thing called sentience, (often referred to in religions as a soul). Your phrase, "lack certain tooling", is in line with this logic; it implies that there is some absolute definition, some core kernel of "inner experience" that is separable from ancillary layers that it may leverage. This is analogous to the statement that a computer may be running an operating system, whether it has a keyboard and speakers or not.
What Dennett argues, here and in general, is that this definition of sentience is not nearly holistic enough. That there is no one objective thing called 'sentience'. Instead, there are a bunch of different things; being a lion, being a bat, being a human. Each of these is a model of experience in and of itself, and is defined in and of itself; you can't factor out a common set of experiences or functions and expect them to translate. Part of being a human is being able to, amongst other things, see, hear, taste, and speak. These are not tools built on top of some common 'sentience interface'[1]. To continue (dangerous and leaky) software metaphors, it's much more like a spaghetti-coded monolith[2]; the features -are- the system, and their implementation is part of a feedback loop into the deepest parts of the system, and all the way back out again. The tools aren't 'used by' the 'sentience'; they _are_ the sentience, and the sentience is the tools. A practical demonstration to consider here is something like synesthesia, where what might superficially seem to be well-defined verticals are crossed and interwoven.
And so, when he (extending Wittgenstein) says, "If a lion could talk, we’d understand him just fine. He just wouldn’t help us understand anything about lions.”, he's saying that if such a thing as a talking lion existed, it wouldn't help us understand lions because talking lions and non-talking lions have different experiences, in part because they have different capabilities, different available tools, and thus different architectures. This isn't to say that they don't each have some rich inner life. Just that these inner lives are not mutually comprehensible, shared, or even compatible. In fact, the article, further down, pretty much says just this, albeit in many fewer words:
“If you think there’s a fixed meaning of the word ‘consciousness,’ and we’re searching for that, then you’re already making a mistake,”
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[1] This line of thinking is very close to the "17th century delusion" of something like a homunculus. It is made more palatable by using a word like 'soul', however
[2] or, indeed, something like a neural network; the weights 'mean' something inside the system, but they're all relatively defined, not absolutely; you can't necessarily look inside the system and expect to understand what individual components 'mean' without addressing their entirely relative context.
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#8> “Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” That's just silly. We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk, the effort was supremely insightful in helping us to understand animal cognition. Animal…
I think Dennett responded too narrowly to the question and thus misreprested his own point of view. "A lion that talks like a human" is not a well formed thought experiment, since no real lion could talk like a human. A lion that that does wouldn't be like any lion we've ever seen. And if Koko could talk like a human, she too would no longer be like any gorilla we've seen. The main point of limited consciousness in lions is lost in an implausible fantastic model of a superintelligent lion that doesn't exist and never could. There's no point in extending that (lousy) line of reasoning to gorillas too.
Through our experience communicating with Koko and with higher primates like chimps, we've come to understand how much 'more conscious' a chimp is than a gorilla, and how we can better assess consciousness without using language. We've seen that the chimp is aware of more of the world than is a gorilla, both inner and outer worlds -- the content of one's own mind and the minds of others.
This really isn't so different from what Dennett espouses, that consciousness is a continuum that begins with a lowly few-cell organism that's aware of nothing in the universe more than a sugar gradient, and ends with another organism (man?) that's attuned to the loftiest truths and actively strives to achieve ideal/complete consciousness, or Satori.
I suspect that on reflection, Dennett would not defend his own "lion-ness" argument for the same reasons you suggest. Koko is an existence proof to the contrary.
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#9> “Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” That's just silly. We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk, the effort was supremely insightful in helping us to understand animal cognition. Animal…
I totally agree (not any kind of expert). Even babies don't talk for a couple of years, but they are very much alive and in fact some psychology says that most of personality is baked by about 7 years old. Then most of it is must be determined without words or language, rather by memories & connected emotional experiences. Not hard to imagine that animals might experience the world similarly to babies via instincts & emotions.
Re: Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul
#10> “Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” That's just silly. We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk, the effort was supremely insightful in helping us to understand animal cognition. Animal…
There is, literally, a part of the brain that if you shut it off, you lose language. Dennett would have you believe that it's that one part that makes us human.
That's an interesting position for him, considering (IIRC) his co-author Douglas Hofstadter (The Mind's I) has a sister who is a perfectly normal & functional adult except for her complete incapacity for language.