selfAdjoint said:
Sorry, I was being sarcastic. You said Dennet's view was easy to show incoherent. If that was literally true how could any rational person disagree? And who cares what an irrational person thinks?
Yes, you're right. I see what you mean now. My post was out of order. Mostly I just meant to say that there was no evidence to support what was being claimed, but on the language/consciousness thing I was glib and dogmatic. My apologies.
To unpick this a bit. The poster I was contradicting stated confidently that language gives rise to consciousness. To say that it gives rise to 'self' must to some extent be true, but the idea that language gives rise to consciousness is like saying that dynamite is caused by explosions. I suppose in a way it is, since if it didn't explode it wouldn't have been invented, but it's a difficult argument to defend, and it certainly can't be just stated.
The trouble is also that I get very annoyed with Dennett. He seems determined to ignore common sense in favour of whatever view he happens to favour. I consider him to be irrational, but I do care what he thinks because people read him and take him seriously, outside the professsion at least. Gregg Rosenberg in another thread says that Dennett's views challenge his intellectual integrity. I tend to be less polite, because Dennett himself is insulting and desperately patronising to those who won't roll over and accept his arguments.
I said his arguments can be refuted, so I'll have a go. Here he is on language. (All this is from 'Consciousness Explained'). I'm not having a go at anyone here, just with DD.
"In other words, I am proposing that there was a time in the evolution of language when vocalisations served the function of eliciting and sharing useful information, but one must not assume that a co-operative spirit of mutual aid would have survival value, or would be a stable system if it emerged. Instead, we must assume that the costs and benefits of participating in such a practice were somewhat "visible" to these creatures, and enough of them saw the benefits to themselves as outweighing the costs so that communicative habits became established in the community." (195)
This is surely incoherent. It says that consciousness is causal, that being conscious impacts on our evolution as a species, and that the doctrine of causal completeness, on which physics is more or less predicated, is false. This from a physicalist.
Or does he mean that that vocalisation only gives the vocaliser the illusion that what it vocalises is understandable in a way that brings perceived benefits to its illusory concept of self, a self which it is deluded into believing it has by having an illusory conscious experience of understanding the meaning of what it is experiencing itself saying. Perhaps that’s it. It's nonsense. How can the benefits of vocalisation be 'somewhat visible' to creatures that are not conscious? How could they see the benefits to 'themselves' before selves existed?
Why is "visible" in inverted commas here? And what does ‘somewhat’ mean? Dennett’s use of language is worth paying very careful attention to as one reads him. He is ever so careful not to be too clear. One supposes that putting these words in inverted commas means that these are not words he wanted to use, since what they mean, shorn of their inverted commas, is that these creatures were consciously aware of the costs and benefits to themselves of communicating. If they do not mean this then it’s hard to see what they do mean. Yet somehow the inverted commas give them an ambiguity that at first glance avoids self-contradiction. It’s clever stuff.
The fact is that if these creatures were robot-replicators (as he suggests) then clearly the benefits of communicating would never be ‘somewhat visible’ to themselves. The idea is ridiculous. We can define robot-replicators as entities which have no selves to which anything at all would ever be somewhat visible, creatures which would never have any clue as to what might be of use to them or what would not.
But with self-assured self-contradiction this passage asserts that these creatures were not robots at all, but were in fact conscious beings, for otherwise they would have no ‘self’ to which communicating could have been known to be beneficial, no way of knowing that it was beneficial, and in fact no way of knowing anything at all. So, and despite all Dennett’s talk in his robot-replicator book on evolution (‘Darwin’s Dangerous Idea’, another gem), it turns out that consciousness must after all have played a part in our evolution, and that consciousness is causal.
He could have said ‘understood to be beneficial’, but this would be to give the game away. "Somewhat visible" is much more safely ambiguous.
Also, and although I’m no expert on neo-Darwinist theory, this passage seems to me to contradict that theory completely. For a start it implies teleology. It suggests that these creatures began to communicate on purpose, by intention, for the sake of the benefits that were somewhat visible to their ‘selves’. It suggests that the evolution of language was the result of teleological processes. As the language pathways in the brain which develop during the lifetime of these creatures cannot be passed on genetically without invoking Lamarck one wonders how they developed. As he states that these poor creatures could not think anything that they could not say, then one supposes they just sat around waiting for new words to biologically mutate so that they could start thinking them. He goes on;
"Then one fine day (in the rational reconstruction) (sic!), one of these hominids "mistakenly" asked for help when there was no helpful audience within earshot – except itself! When it heard its own request, the stimulation provoked just the sort of other-helping utterance production that the request from another would have caused. And to the creature’s delight, it found that it had just provoked itself into answering its own question." (195)
If I wrote this here in this forum everyone would fall about laughing. Perhaps then they would hear themselves laughing and realize that by they had provoked themselves by inadvertent auto-stimulation into finding something funny, and had thus invented humour. And what does "mistakenly" in quote marks mean? Does it mean mistakenly or not-mistakenly?
We can note that these hominids are capable of feeling delight, and were aware of themselves talking, so again consciousness is asserted to be causal, since this delight and awareness is assumed to lead to the repetition of the behaviour. We may also note that no explanation is provided of how they became capable of feeling delight or became aware.
It is very unclear what he means here by "rational reconstruction." He doesn’t define what he means by ‘rational’ at any point in his book. I suspect that most people define it differently. All this is to support his claim that:
"the practice of asking oneself questions could arise as a natural side effect of asking questions of others, and its utility would be similar."
Dennett’s thesis here is that talking comes before thinking. Sooner or later we quite accidentally say something, and then eventually, by a series of genetic mutations in our brains, evolve to be capable of thinking about what we are saying. Eventually the virtue of talking sotto voce to oneself is "recognised", and an internal dialogue begins, thus creating the illusion of consciousness.
Quite how these poor creatures ever became aware that they were talking, or became aware of what they were talking about, is not explained. Nor is it explained how or why a creature who is not aware of its own existence would care whether or not it was talking, nor whether talking is somewhat visibly useful to itself or not. It’s a muddle.
At some point these dumb creatures learn to think with their mouth closed. Or as he puts it, in the usual opaque language designed to disguise the naivety of the ideas -
"This innovation would have the further benefit, opportunistically endorsed, of achieving a certain privacy for the practice of cognitive autostimulation."
I really don’t know why anyone takes him seriously. Apparently the evolution of self-conscious thinking started with shouting loudly for help (accidentally and unknowingly) then by shouting more quietly, and eventually by learning to cognitively autostimulate in silence.
Of course if he is right then it follows that these creatures could not think anything that they could not say. As he puts it:
"If there were only fifty things one hominid could "say" to another, there would only be fifty things he could say to himself."
Note that "say" is placed in quote marks. And I wonder. Perhaps if we are not able to think things through internally before we have "said" them to other people this would explain much of what he says in his book. I remember one famous politician who, when asked what he thought about some issue or other answered, "how can I know what I think until I’ve spoken about it".
What he says is that these creature could know things, could feel delight, could be aware of what was useful and beneficial to themselves, and had self-awareness. They had language and they had a social structure built on communicating with each other. One wonders why he says this in such a complicated way.
"Once our brains (sic) have built the entrance and exit pathways for the vehicles of language, they swiftly become parasitized (and I mean that literally, as we shall see) by entities that have evolved to thrive in just such a niche: memes." (p200)
So, once we can talk we can start thinking about what we are going to say. Once we have done this then we can start having ideas, perhaps even ideas about what we are going to say. Apparently the pathways for the vehicles of language become parasitized by memes, which by definition can exist only in consciousness, thus causing the consciousness in which they exist, which by definition consists of memes. No wonder he states that:
"I don’t view it as ominous that my theory seems at first to be strongly at odds with common wisdom."
I presume by 'common wisdom' he means common sense. I'm afraid I find it extremely ominous that it contradicts this. It seems unsurprising that his book has had no impact in the profession beyond generating objections.
All this, and my general annoyance with Dennett, was what was behind my much too quick response to the suggestion made above that language caused consciousnesss. Maybe I've been unfair on Dennett, or missed his point somewhere, but I cannot see how his position can be defended.
Of course there are issues here worth discussing, and of course I might be wrong in various ways, but it cannot just be stated that without language we would not be conscious. There's no evidence for it, no rational argument for it (yet), and much evidence that's against it (studies with feral children for instance).
But you were quite right to be critical, I should have made a case and not just pontificated.