[Wittrs] Re: Dennett's Intentional Stance
- From: "BruceD" <blroadies@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 23:45:58 -0000
"Dennett is the great demystifier of consciousness. According
to him there is, in the final analysis, nothing
fundamentally inexplicable about the way we attribute
intentions and conscious feelings to people. We often
attribute feelings or intentions metaphorically to non-human
things, after all. We might say our car is a bit tired
today, or that our pot plant is thirsty. At the end of the
day, our attitude to other human beings is just a version - a
much more sophisticated version - of the same strategy.
Attributing intentions to human animals makes it much easier
to work out what their behaviour is likely to be.
It pays us, in short, to adopt the intentional stance when
trying to understand human beings."
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The Dennett quoted above doesn't sound like the Dennett presented here.
Dennett above starts with with the everyday notion of conscious,
intentional person as an obvious given who naturally attributes the same
to other being who seem the same. The Dennett presented here insists
that consciousness is caused by the brain and in doing so must reconcile
the language of brain mechanics with the language of purpose.
And just what is he demystifing? The above paragraph doesn't say. I say
he is questioning the need to view consciousness as either the
manifestation of some spirit or the causal end-product of a neurological
event.
bruce
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