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LINK Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul | The New Yorker

“In the course of a few summers, he fixed up the Blue Hill farmhouse himself, installing plumbing and electricity. Then, for many years, he suspended his academic work during the summer in order to devote himself to farming. He tended the orchard, made cider, and used a Prohibition-era still to turn the cider into Calvados. He built a blueberry press, made blueberry wine, and turned it into aquavit. “He loves to hand down word-of-mouth knowledge,” Steve Barney, a former student who has become one of the Dennetts’ many “honorary children,” says. “He taught me how to use a chain saw, how to prune an apple tree, how to fish for mackerel, how to operate a tractor, how to whittle a wooden walking stick from a single piece of wood.” Dennett is an avid sailor; in 2003, he bought a boat, trained his students to sail, and raced with them in a regatta. Dennett’s son, Peter, has worked for a tree surgeon and a fish biologist, and has been a white-water-rafting guide; his daughter, Andrea, runs an industrial-plumbing company with her husband.”

skado 9 May 20
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8 comments

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1

Love this, ty.

2

Wonderful article!! Thank you for posting!! I think/feel/believe if more people would just go and sit quietly in the wood the world would be less fucked up. We are too busy being busy - sadly technology has not helped. It's never to late to just stop and reflect inward. All the answers are there.

5

"Along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens, Dennett is often cited as one of the “four horsemen of the New Atheism.” In a 2006 book called “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” he argued that religion ought to be studied rather than practiced. Recently, with the researcher Linda LaScola, he published “Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind,” a book of interviews with clergypeople who have lost their faith. He can be haughty in his dismissal of religion. A few years ago, while he was recovering from his aortic dissection, he wrote an essay called “Thank Goodness,” in which he chastised well-wishers for saying “Thank God.” (He urged them, instead, to thank “goodness,” as embodied by the doctors, nurses, and scientists who were “genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive.&rdquo😉"

2

"To Dennett, this blindness reflects the fact that we take the intentional stance toward ourselves. We experience ourselves at the level of thoughts, decisions, and intentions; the machinery that generates those higher-order properties is obscured. Consciousness is defined as much by what it hides as by what it reveals."

That's an interesting quote, because much of who we are is hidden, not just from others, but from ourselves. We take certain things for granted, but seldom dig into the truth of what is really going on. Take sight, for example. When asked, most people would define sight as the ability of the eye to transmit signals to the brain for interpretation, allowing us to "see" by creating an image in the mind (an upside down image, which the brain flips for us).

In reality, the eye is not a fantastic organ of sight, but a fantastic organ that LIMITS what we see. The spectrum of light is large, from ultra-violet to infrared. The "visible spectrum" is but a tiny sliver of all that radiation, most of which the eye filters out so that the brain can interpret what we think we "see." But that vision is just a tiny world view, and the images created from other parts of the entire spectrum reveal just how little we actually "see."

Consciousness also filters our view of ourselves, and others, and the world around us. Much is hidden from our conscious mind, especially within the subconscious. Yes, psychologists and philosophers can help us reveal what is hidden, but all of us are capable, to some degree, of digging deeper into our inner selves to better understand things, about ourselves and others, more clearly. Most people, however, only live on the surface. Fearing the deeper water of the thinking brain, and what dangers may be hidden there..

"It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed."

"There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities."

"Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls."
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

1

Great quote: "At sunset on the last day of the conference, the experts found themselves circling a familiar puzzle known as the “zombie problem.” Suppose that you’re a scientist studying octopuses. How would you know whether an octopus is conscious? It interacts with you, responds to its environment, and evidently pursues goals, but a nonconscious robot could also do those things. The problem is that there’s no way to observe consciousness directly. From the outside, it’s possible to imagine that the octopus is a “zombie”—physically alive but mentally empty—and, in theory, the same could be true of any apparently conscious being...."

1

Good post.

4

Oh.. cool. I didn't know that side of Dennett. That's inspiring.

Same here.

4

Wow, what a wonderful person to know!
Makes me think tho, we all have talents we ought to share before we go.
Not as many, but yeah, still,

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