From Bacteria to Bach and Back Again: Difference between revisions

<big>''From Bacteria to Bach and Back Again''</big><br>

First published on [https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/26 September 2017 Amazon] on How to philosophise with a hammer. <br>

 

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{{c|Book review}}

 

::- {{author|Richard Rorty}}, {{br|Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity}} <br>

:“ … the idea that this Intelligence could be broken into bits so tiny and stupid that they didn’t count as intelligence at all, and then distributed through space and time in a gigantic, connected network of algorithmic process.”  

Conundrums don’t come knottier than those of classical metaphysics, and {{author|Daniel Dennett}} has spent the 22 years since {{br|Darwin’s Dangerous Idea}} trying to dissolve them with his bottle of universal acid. First it was free will (in 2003’s {{br|Freedom Evolves}}). Then God (in 2006’s {{br|Breaking the Spell}}) and now, in newly published {{br|From Bacteria to Bach and Back Again}}, Dennett returns to mind, a problem which he declared settled as long ago as 1991, in {{br|Consciousness Explained}}.  

Now, depending on how you feel about {{tag|metaphysics}}, this will strike you as either a great relief or tremendously unsatisfying. In any case, a philosopher once possessed of a broad range has grown ever more tunnel-visioned: [[evolution]], and only evolution, explains everything.  

This abstraction between data and language puts a back on the table a distinction between the “self” and “the brain that generates it” which Dennett has been very keen to banish. Isn’t this [[dualism]]? It might seem like it but, to co-opt another of Dennett’s coinages, it’s not ''greedy'' dualism. It doesn’t impose a supernatural creator or any other kind of sky-hook. It just observes something special is going on: if you want to go from binary code to rice pudding and income tax, you’ve got a bit more explaining to do.   

This is not to say that machines could never acquire a richly figurative natural language, but that to date none has. How would a machine, whose code has no room for self, no tense, no past, no future, no ambiguity, no room for doubt — jump up to a language in which all of these things are not just possible but essential? In the current environment, acquiring a natural language would offer a “flawless rule-follower” few adaptive benefits. The current environment — increasingly populated by flawless instruction followers, don’t forget — favours reliable, flawless, rapid execution over poetic indolence: that is why we are even having this debate. When it comes to slow, indecisive, unpredictable but imaginative workers, it is a sellers’ market. Machines are displacing humans precisely ''because'' machines don’t do [[metaphor]].  

:There are so many different worlds  

:So many different suns

:We have just one world  

:But we live in different ones

::— Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms.

I doubt Mark Knopfler was talking about literary theory. The modern world seems to be polarising. {{author|Daniel Dennett}}’s reductionist disposition is of a piece with that. But the conscious world each of us inhabits is an ambiguous, ambivalent, imaginarium of a place. Alternative accounts of it and the things in it are just additional tools in the box: we are free to use them, or not, as we wish. If we keep them as alternatives we will not have to philosophise with a hammer when the occasion calls for a soft cotton cloth.