Sat, Oct 25 · 2:00 PM CDT
On October 4, 2025, seven of us tried to finish our discussion of the last two chapters of Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back and found the evolution of minds more complex than we can handle in a two-hour discussion. Perhaps we are like Horatio, finding out from Hamlet that "There are more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Darwin’s dangerous idea is stranger than we think.
Dennett took us on a voyage of discovery that examined, as the 19th-century critic of Darwin, R. B. Mackenzie wrote, "Darwin's strange inversion of reasoning." Mackenzie described Darwin's idea as absurd because it implied a strange inversion of reason that “in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it.” If we are questioned about how a house, a car, or a pocket watch was made, our expectations lead us to conclude that someone, an intelligent designer, made them. If Darwin’s mindless algorithm shaped living things, without a designer, how can a mindless process create a mind?
According to Dennett, Darwin’s algorithm created a design space that made more complex organisms and made neurons respond better to the environment, evolving brains. What makes up a human brain? When disease damages parts of the brain, this experiment of nature reveals locations where the brain controls an activity. A stroke can affect the Broca and Wernicke's areas that play a role in language processing. Broca's area handles the processing needed to produce speech, controlling the muscles involved in articulation. Wernicke's area handles the processing needed for understanding language, where it processes auditory signals and converts them into meaningful words and sentences. These are but a couple of small regions, leaving the rest of the brain for many other neural circuits to handle a multitude of other functions. However, Descartes could not accept that we are made of parallel and distributed processing of a multitude of neural circuits. There must be someone viewing the Cartesian theater of sensory inputs, making sense of what is sensed.
In contrast, Dennett proposes that the mind is made of parallel and distributed processes. There is no theater. There is no viewer. Instead, there is a multitude of neural circuits functioning as a committee building a consensus of what is sensed. One of Dennett’s students said that "You can't do much carpentry with your bare hands, and you can't do much thinking with your bare brain." What are the tools that the bare brain wields? Our brains are not bare but are infected with memes, the toolkit for thinking. One important memetic tool is language, where words are memes to express ideas. Thus, language creates two types of phenomenology when we speak from our points of view. When we speak for ourselves, we express our first-person point of view, we create an auto-phenomenology, a collection of our own experiences. When speaking to others, we do a reality check that creates a heterophenomenology, a collection of shared experiences when we speak to others. This heterophenomenology becomes the manifest image, representing the world as understood through common sense. From a mindless process, we have become intelligent designers.
Dennett presents the third example of inverted reasoning. David Hume argued that we do not perceive a necessary connection between events, but that we only see one event consistently following another, and through habit, impose causation onto that observed sequence. In other words, we only know sequences of events and their consequences, but consequences are not necessarily causes. We perceive causation because this belief arises from an internal, psychological habit of our minds. We need to have a cause. For example, in the cartoon of Bugs Bunny chewing on a carrot, we see the video of a rabbit chewing on a carrot synchronized with a soundtrack of someone crunching on a carrot. The video of Bugs Bunny is not causing the sound of crunching on a carrot. Our expectations create an illusion of a cartoon character chewing on a carrot. Together with other illusions, we create a sense of consciousness. Our illusions also force us to blame someone or a supernatural being, like a Greek god, for our predicament. From that perspective, what becomes of Kant's "a priori" knowledge that is justified by reason alone, or, for that matter, what happens to the Platonic forms? As intelligent designers, do we have a will and a moral responsibility?
We invite you to find out if we have will and moral responsibility and how capable artificial intelligence is in our continuing discussion of Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, B105.C477D445 2017, on October 25, 2025, from 2 PM to 4 PM.
