Another working paper, links:
Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/16514603/Dennett_on_Memes_Neurons_and_Software
SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2670107
Abstract, contents, and introduction below.
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Abstract: In his work on memetics Daniel Dennett does a poor job of negotiating the territory between philosophy and science. The analytic tools he has as a philosopher aren’t of much use in building accounts of the psychological and social mechanisms that underlie cultural processes. The only tool Dennett seems to have at his disposal is analogy. That’s how he builds his memetics, by analogy from biology on the one hand and computer science on the other. These analogies do not work very well. To formulate an evolutionary account of culture one needs to construct one’s gene and phenotype analogues directly from the appropriate materials, neurons and brains in social interaction. Dennett doesn’t do that. Instead of social interaction he has an analogy to apps loading into computers. Instead of neurons he has homuncular agents that are suspiciously like his other favorite homuncular agents, memes. It doesn’t work.
CONTENTS
Introduction: Too many analogies, no construction 2
Watch Out, Dan Dennett, Your Mind’s Changing Up on You! 5
The Memetic Mind, Not: Where Dennett Goes Wrong 11
Turtles All the Way Down: How Dennett Thinks 16
A Note on Dennett’s Curious Comparison of Words and Apps 21
Has Dennett Undercut His Own Position on Words as Memes? 23
Dennet’s WRONG: the Mind is NOT Software for the Brain 27
Follow-up on Dennett and Mental Software 31
Introduction: Too many analogies, no construction
Just before the turn of the millennium Dennet gave an interview in The Atlantic in which he observed:
In the beginning, it was all philosophy. Aristotle, whether he was doing astronomy, physiology, psychology, physics, chemistry, or mathematics — it was all the same. It was philosophy. Over the centuries there’s been a refinement process: in area after area questions that were initially murky and problematic became clearer. And as soon as that happens, those questions drop out of philosophy and become science. Mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry — they all started out in philosophy, and when they got clear they were kicked out of the nest.
Philosophy is the mother. These are the offspring. We don’t have to go back a long way to see traces of this. The eighteenth century is quite early enough to find the distinction between philosophy and physics not being taken very seriously. Psychology is one of the more recent births from philosophy, and we only have to go back to the late nineteenth century to see that.
My sense is that the trajectory of philosophy is to work on very fundamental questions that haven’t yet been turned into scientific questions.
This is a standard view, and it’s one I hold myself, though it’s not clear to me just how it would look when the historical record is examined closely.
But I do think that, in his recent work, Dennett’s been having troubles negotiating the difference between philosophy, in which he has a degree, and science. For he is also a cognitive scientist in good standing, and that phrase – “cognitive science” – stretches all over the place, leaving plenty of room to get tripped up over the difference between philosophy and science.
Dennett has spent much of his career as a philosopher of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. That is to say, he’s looked at the scientific work in those disciplines and considered philosophical implications and foundations. More recently he’s done the same thing with biology.
Now, it is one thing to apply the analytic tools of philosophy to the fruits of those disciplines. But Dennett has also been interested in memetics, a putative evolutionary account of culture. The problem is that there is no science of memetics for Dennett to analyze. So, when he does memetics, just what is he doing?
The analytic tools he has as a philosopher aren’t of much use in building accounts of the psychological and social mechanisms that might underlie cultural processes. The only tool Dennett seems to have at his disposal is analogy. And so that’s how he builds his memetics, by analogy from biology on the one hand and computer science on the other.
Alas, these analogies do not work very well. That’s what I examine in the posts I’ve gathered into this working paper. What Dennett, or anyone else, needs to do to formulate an evolutionary account of culture is to construct one’s gene and phenotype analogues (if that’s what you want to do) directly from the appropriate materials, neurons and brains in social interaction. Dennett doesn’t do that. Instead of social interaction he has an analogy to apps loading into computers. Instead of neurons he has homuncular agents that are suspiciously like his other favorite homuncular agents, memes. It doesn’t work. It’s incoherent. It’s bad philosophy or bad science, or both. Continue reading “Dennett on Memes, Neurons, and Software”
