Honestly, if you enjoy reading the work of a cultural meme in the form of a Dawkins groupie, then you will enjoy reading this review of a book by that slick philosopher of science, Daniel Dennett. Regarded as a "naturalist" and "materialist," Dennett cannot be expected to explore anything but the brain and its evolution wrt free will or inevitability; but he can certainly be looked at in the context of other scientists and evolutionists such as Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Susan Blackmore when trying to get a manageable notion of what is meant by evolution of mind and cultural memes.

You may or may not be familiar with the term "compatibilist" as a person who attempts to reconcile the validity of both determinism and free will. Until these modern and postmodern days of relativity, evolution, and quantum theory, the debate around this issue was conducted by theists and philosophers well grounded in a sense of a world behind the physical, sensory one; and a mind or soul either distinct from the brain or as something more encompassing or even infinite that the finite brain could be seen as part of. But nowadays such notions are minimized or denigrated as unscientific and unprovable by hard evidence, even though it might have been proven beyond doubt to some.

Anyhow, Dennett follows the Dragnet school of science: just the facts, ma'am... and nothing beyond the brain and Cartesian empirical evidence will do: no divine, no supernatural explanations, and nothing of the paranormal will be entertained or accepted. Thus, the compatibilist Dennett argues:

that despite living in a deterministic world, humans enjoy cerebral freedom, an "evolved creation of human activity and beliefs," that amounts to a back-formation from human language and its unique communicative capacities. It's generated by our adaptive ability to bring self-reflective, deliberative attention to options before us, to talk with ourselves, and that's a perfectly respectable definition of free will in a scientific age. To Dennett's evolved mind, a definition of freedom as "the capacity to achieve what is of value in a range of circumstances" is "as good a short definition of freedom as could be."

"Free will," Dennett almost rhapsodizes, "is like the air we breathe, and it is present almost everywhere we want to go. ... " He suggests we think of it like the "atmosphere ... another sort of environment." It is the enveloping, enabling, life-shaping, "conceptual atmosphere of intentional action, planning and hoping and promising -- and blaming, resenting, punishing and honoring." Elsewhere, he slyly acknowledges his view as one that insists "a whole can be more free than its parts.

Here are some hotlinks to reviews of Freedom Evolves...

http://www.kenanmalik.com/reviews/dennett_freedom.html

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/ae/books/reviews/1817681

I would like to know what you think of Dennett and the postmodern view of science, the brain, evolution, and memes that drive discussion of determinism and free will these days. What say you?

ananda

http://www.kenanmalik.com/reviews/dennett_freedom.html

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/ae/books/reviews/1817681
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… looking to spirituality or a belief in the other-world represents a serious incompatibility with Dennett's basic worldview and philosophy of science, a view which absolutely excludes anything which cannot be seen or proven by empirical methods.

Personally, I think it's a mistake to exclude the divine and spirituality from the discussion of determinism and free will; but there seems to be a way that scientists, and philosophers of science, are in the process of creating an unbreachable gap or schism between science and spirituality/theology. Even in the 19th century, Fyodor Dostoevsky saw the advent of atheistic science and materialism as a great tragedy for the Russian people, which he ... with his great heart and vision ... lamented for its resulting in isolation and spiritual suicide for the rich, and in addiction and bitter envy for the poor... all to the detriment of the beautiful connectedness and soul-depth provided by the waning Russian Orthodox church and belief system. Thus, it appears that at least one of the reasons FD wrote The Brothers Karamazov was a last, exhaustive and exhausting attempt to elevate the spiritual and depict the problems caused by the material and the scientific.

I agree with Dostoevsky. I think we deny or denigrate the spiritual and the supernatural to the great detriment of our inherently human need for divine love and connectedness. Yet, at the same time, I find the ideas of modern and postmodern science very interesting, especially as regards the evolution of memes and the way current science, according to some adepts, tries to explain the supernatural and paranormal in terms of brain, cells, and quantum theory... which also bleeds into the area of philosophy and the issue of determinism vs. free will. Still, I don't think the theological and mystical aspects of life can be denied, not even by empirical science, because there will always be people who have mystical and supernatural experiences that cannot be explained by science. Thank God.

ananda

"Dennett's basic worldview and philosophy of science, a view which absolutely excludes anything which cannot be seen or proven by empirical methods." (my emphasis)

Thus the conscious-self is un-provable and unknowable, yet we all claim to be such.
Consciousness is a-priori and does not need to be established by empirical proofs.
Indeed, there is NO empirical proof that can ever negate consciousness.
Consciousness precedes science. Consciousness in the baby precedes all knowledge of the world in the baby's mind.