- Caveat: This is not a summary or consensus of the discussion, merely my own musings triggered by the discussion. Responses from those who attended, or anyone, are welcome.
- Evolution is a process without purpose that creates the first system of purposes. Those purposes all begin with survival, but proliferate as niche adaptation and colonization, since each evolutionary lineage seeks its own survival.
- Dennett’s three stances (physical, design, and intentional) correspond to things without functions, things with functions imposed from without, and things with functions determined from within the thing itself.
- Dennett is clearing hinting that much that looks to belong to the third, autonomous, category, does so only in the sense that their genetic and cultural determinants are carried within in their genetic nature and cultural nurture, and thus are only apparently autonomous. He does not make that case in the brief excerpt we read, but he clearly leaves the door open for it.
- How far are we autonomous beings capable of forming our own purposes, and how far are we the product of external engineering by nature (evolution) or nurture (culture)?
- A question raised by some: Is the human practice of science an unbiased form of receptivity to all that in any sense exists? Or is it a discipline, a motivated practice developed by human beings to serve the purpose of predicting and controlling anything conceivable as an object?
- A further question: can subjects be conceived as objects? Does doing so capture all that is important about them, or some of that only? Ought we to conceive of subjects as objects? Must we conceive of them as such, at least to some degree, when we manage them, whether as citizen-subjects, soldiers, employees, students, or any other group organized to cooperate to achieve group benefits?
Thinking German, Talking Irish, on Big Questions, with Banter
When All Is Said and Dunn 