Daniel Dennett appears to be a jolly, old fellow. And, judging by the way he communicates, that stereotype fits pretty well. It doesn't hurt that his views on science and religion are fairly close to my own (with a few exceptions that are almost exclusively on the science side). All in all, he was a very enjoyable speaker.
I liked the term “bright,” or at least I like what it stands for (the word itself is a bit odd). Brights are people who reject supernatural explanations. It's been a fairly common practice throughout history to explain something you don't understand as supernatural, or beyond human understanding. This is pointless. Virtually every “unexplainable” phenomenon from the past has been explained away in purely scientific terms, and the rest we are making great strides in. I can relate to people's desire to understand the universe, but creating illusions for yourself isn't helping anybody (unless you like to lie to yourself).
Listening to the commentary in this lecture on evolution and natural selection made me realize something, it deals with the desire to understand as well. What I realized is that I'm glad we have at least some scientific understanding of the world. I realized over the past few years (I'm only 20 years old) that you don't need religion to accept life and our place in it. All of these conflicting and contrasting metaphysical “answers” were out there and I could reject them. I didn't need them, but for years I thought that I did. Science made that a great deal easier. To know that there was a practical understanding of the world out there that I could accept with as much passion as any religion was a really big development for me. The whole point of all of this is that without something real to latch onto in the world, like science, I would have been stuck believing in some religion or another. Not that being an atheist or an agnostic wouldn't have been an option (well...if circumstances in history had been different then they might not have been), they just wouldn't have amounted to much. In other words, believing in absolutely nothing would have been just as fruitless as believing in some false purpose.
Science gives people practical answers they can accept. I think it was Richard Feynman who said, “I'd rather believe what I know than think think I know what I believe.” That quote sums up my entire philosophy on the universe and I thank “God” that science allows me to do that.
Daniel Dennett's views on consciousness are where we tend to differ. I find his hypothesis to be a valid one, but incomplete. This notion of competing ideas with the idea that wins-out being conscious is plausible, but alone it seems to lack context. For instance, it appears to have little structure, something which our consciousness obviously does have. Anyway, Robert Wright (the interviewer) is very correct in saying that something as yet undefined is difficult to understand or communicate (although he didn't say it in so many words). When you can't even define what something “is” it's difficult to understand varying explanations about it.
In other words, “how do you defend an indefensible position?” I don't have an answer to that, but it was sure fun trying.
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