Vanity Fea - Blog de notas de José Angel García Landa (Biescas y Zaragoza)
Johnson, Scott, and Daniel Dennett. Mind out of Matter. Oratorio on texts by Daniel Dennett. 2014.
_____. Mind Out of Matter. Lyrics and voice by Daniel Dennett. Album. 2018.*
_____. "Mind Out Of Matter (2018) FULL ALBUM." Audio. YouTube (Free Forgotten Music) 18 March 2018.*
2024
Unos párrafos finales del libro de Daniel Dennett 'From Bacteria to Bach and Back', meditando sobre la comprensión limitada que tenemos de la realidad que nos rodea... Venimos a ser los humanos como termitas construyendo el Termitero sin que nadie lo diseñe ni lo entienda, a pesar de nuestras ilusiones de comprensión parcial o global.
We have now looked at a few of the innovations that have led us to relinquish the mastery of creation that has long been a hallmark of understanding in our species. More are waiting in the wings. We have been motivated for several millennia by the idea expressed in Feynman's dictum, 'What I cannot create, I do not understand.' But recently our ingenuity has created a slippery slope: we find ourselves indirectly making things that we only partially understand, and they in turn may create things we don't understand at all. Since some of these things have wonderful powers, we may begin to doubt the value—or at least the preeminent value—of understanding."Comprehension is so passé, so vieux-jeu, so old-fashioned! Who needs understanding when we can all be the beneficiaries of artifacts that save us that arduous effort?"
Is there a good reply to this? We need something more than tradition if we want to defend the idea that comprehension is intrinsically good—a good in itself, independently of all the benefits it indirectly provides—or practically necessary if we are to continue living the kinds of lives that matter to us. Philosophers, like me, can be expected to recoil in dismay from such a future. As Socrates famously said, "the unexamined life is not worth living," and ever since Socrates we have taken it as self-evident that achieving an ever greater understanding of everything is our highest professional goal, if not our highest goal absolutely. But as another philosopher, the late Kurt Baier, once added, "the over-examined life is nothing to write home about either." Most people are content to be the beneficiaries of technology and medicine, scientific fact-finding and artistic creation without much of a clue about how all this "magic" has been created. Would it be so terrible to embrace the over-civilized life and trust our artifacts to be good stewards of our well-being?
I myself have been unable to concoct a persuasive argument for the alluring conclusion that comprehension is "intrinsically" valuable—though I find comprehension to be one of life's greatest thrills—but I think a good case can be made for preserving and enhancing human comprehension and for protecting it from the artifactual varieties of comprehension now under development in deep learning, for deeply practical reasons. Artifacts can break, and if few people understand them well enough either to repair them or substitute other ways of accomplishing their tasks, we could find ourselves and all we hold dear in dire straits. Many have noted that for some of our high-tech artifacts, the supply of repair persons is dwindling or nonexistent. A new combination color printer and scanner costs less than repairing your broken one. Discard it and start fresh. Operating systems for personal computers follow a similar version of the same policy: when your software breaks or gets corrupted, don't bother trying to diagnose and fix the error, unmutating the mutation that has crept in somehow; reboot, and fresh new versions of your favorite programs will be pulled up from safe storage in memory to replace the copies that have become defective. But how far can this process go?
Consider a typical case of uncomprehending reliance on technology. A smoothly running automobile is one of life's delights; it enables you to get where you need to get, on time, with great reliability, and for the most part, you get there in style, with music playing, air conditioning keeping you comfortable, and GPS guiding your path. We tend to take cars for granted in the developed world, treating them as one of life's constants, a resource that is always available. We plan our life's projects wit hthe assumption that of course a car will be part of our environment. But when your car breaks down, your life is seriously disrupted. Unless you are a serious car buff with technical training you must acknowledge your dependence on a web of tow-truck operators, mechanics, car dealers, and more. At some point, you decide to trade in your increasingly unreliable car and start afresh with a brand new model. Life goes on, with hardly a ripple.
But what about the huge system that makes this all possible: the highways, the oil refineries, the automakers, the insurance companies, the banks, the stock market, the government? Our civilization has been running smoothly—with some serious disruptions—for thousands of years, growing in complexity and power. Could it break down? Yes, it could, and to whom couled we then turn to help us get back on the road? You can't buy a new civilization if yours collapses, so we had better keep the civilization we have running in good repair. Who, though, are the reliable mechanics? The politicans, the judges, the bankers, the industrialists, the journalists, the professors—the leaders of our society, in short, are much more like the average motorist than you might like to think: doing their local bit to steer their part of the whole contraption, while blissfully ignorant of the complexities on which the whole system depends. According to the economist and evolutionary thinker Paul Seabright (2010), the optimistic tunnel vision with which they operate is not a deplorable and correctable flaw in the system but an enabling condition. The distribution of partial comprehension is not optional. The edifices of social construction that shape our lives in so many regards depend on our myopic confidence that their structure is sound and needs no attention from us.
At one point Seabright compares our civilization with a termite castle. Both are artifacts, marvels of ingenious design piled on ingenious design, towering over the supporting terrain, the work of vastly many individuals acting in concert. Both are thus by-products of the evolutionary processes that created and shaped those individuals, and in both cases, the design innovations that account for the remarkable resilience and effciency observable were not the brain-children of individuals, but happy outcomes of the largely unwitting, myopic endeavors of those individuals, over many generations. But there are pfofound differences as well. Human cooperation is a delicate and remarkable phenomenon, quite unlike the almost mindless cooperation of termites, and indeed quite unprecedented in the natural world, a unique feature with a unique ancestry in evolution. It depends, as we have seen, on our ability to engage each other within the "space of reasons", as Wilfrid Sellars put it. Cooperation depends, Seabright argues, on trust, a sort of almost invisible social glue that makes possible both great and terrible projects, and this trust is not, in fact, a "natural instinct" hard-wired by evolution into our brains. It is much too recent for that. Trust is a by-product of social conditions that are at once its enabling condition and its most important product. We have bootstrapped ourselves into the heady altitudes of modern civilization, and our natural emotions and other instinctual responses do not always serve our new circumstances.
Civilization is a work in progress, and we abandon our attempt to understand it at our peril. Think of the termite castle. We human observers can appreciate its excellence and its complexity in ways that are quite beyond the nervous systems of its inhabitants. We can also aspire to achieving a similarly Olympian perspective on our own artifactual world, a feat only human beings could imagine. If we don't succeed, we risk dismantling our precious creations in spite of our best intentions. Evolution in two realms, genetic and cultural, has created in us the capacity to know ourselves. But in spite of several millennia of ever-expanding intelligent design, we still are just staying afloat in a flood of puzzles and problems, many of them created by our own efforts at comprehension, and there are dangers that could cut short our quest before we—or our descendants—can satisfy our ravenous curiosity.
(406-10)
Hoy, hay un nuevo reto. La Inteligencia Artificial nos hace deslocalizar todavía más funciones cognitivas, pero no es radicalmente distinta de la Inteligencia Colectiva, y puede ayudar a mantener nuestra limitada comprensión del Todo que hemos hecho y que nos ha hecho.... a la vez que puede volver todo mucho más complejo todavía de lo que jamás hubiéramos imaginado.
Sobre todo, una vez pase a diseñarse a sí misma, del mismo modo que ha sido diseñada, y abra así—como está abriendo—una nueva era del Diseño Inteligente: el Diseño Inteligente autogenerado —inconsciente para sí, y generador de realidades y procesos que tampoco comprenderemos nosotros.
I comment here on some of Daniel Dennett's insights in his book From Bacteria to Bach and Back (2017)— allowing an improved understanding of the interface between exaptation and topsight, on the basis of a more adequate theory of information.
Full text @SSRN:
9 Pages Posted: 31 Jul 2025
Date Written: March 07, 2024
Keywords: Philosophy, Information theory, Topsight, Disinformation, Noise, Exaptation, Detection, Cognition, Attention, Daniel Dennett
Suggested Citation:
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Also here:
_____. "Topsight, Bullshit, and Noise: Dennett's Take on Exaptation, Information Sifting, and Pattern Detection." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 7 March 2024.*
https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2024/03/dennetts-take-on-exaptation-and-topsight.html
2024 DISCONTINUED 2025
_____. "Topsight, Bullshit, and Noise: Dennett's Take on Exaptation, Information Sifting, and Pattern Detection." Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 20 Jan. 2025.*
https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/topsightbullshit.pdf
2025
_____. "Topsight, Bullshit, and Noise: Dennett's Take on Exaptation, Information Sifting, and Pattern Detection." SSRN 31 July 2025.*
https://ssrn.com/abstract=5355399 http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5355399
2025
Epistemology eJournal 31 July 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Epistemology.html
2025
Philosophy of Science eJournal 31 July 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Philosophy-Science.html
2025
Philosophy of Action eJournal 31 July 2025.*
https://www.ssrn.com/link/Philosophy-Action.html
2025
_____. "Topsight, Bullshit, and Noise: Dennett's Take on Exaptation, Information Sifting, and Pattern Detection." In García landa, Vanity Fea 17 July 2025.*
https://blogdenotasvanityfea.blogspot.com/2025/07/topsight-bullshit-and-noise.html
2025
https://x.com/JoseAngelGLanda/status/1952014395875201288
2025
_____. "Topsight, Bullshit, and Noise: Dennett's Take on Exaptation, Information Sifting, and Pattern Detection." Academia 2 Janl 2026.*
https://www.academia.edu/145721869/
2025
A couple of insights from Daniel Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back— allowing us to see the interface between exaptation and topsight. Which is by way of information theory.
First, exaptation,
Stephen Jay Gould's term, which is not mentioned here by Dennett, but
anyway. How to make a new or alternative or increased use of an organ
which originally developed for another purpose but which happens to
possess unforeseen or unselected-for side effects, and thereby acquires
or develops a new function or use—a wing not made for flying which
allows an aspiring bird first to flaunt and flutter and fan, and then to
fly:
Evolution is all about turning "bugs" into "features", turning "noise" into "signal" and the fuzzy boundaries between these categories are not optional; the opportunistic open-endedness of natural selection depends on them. This is in fact the key to Darwin's strange inversion of reaonind: creationists ask, rhetorically, "Where does all the information in the DNA come from?" and Darwin's answer is simple: it come from the gradual, purposeless, nonmiraculous transofrmation of noise into signal, over billions of years. Innovations must (happen to) have fitness-enhancing effects from the outset if they are to establish new "encodings," so the ability of something to convey semantic information cannot depend on its prior qualification as a code element. (124)
A clear (illuminating?) example: an eye may originally arise from a heat-sensitive cell which, as it evolves, gradually turns the noise of nonperceived light and color into the signal of perceived light and color, unscrambling the different wavelenghts woven into the noise and bringing and image into focus.
The above goes on:
There will be (so far as I can see) [note, so far as I can SEE] no privileged metric for saying how much semantic information is "carried" in any particular signal—either a genetic signal from one's ancestors or an environmental signal from one's sensory experience. As Shannon reconized, information is always relative to what the receiver already knows [i.e. relative to previous information], and although in models we can "clamp" the boundaries fo the signal and the receiver, in real life these boundaries with the surrounding context are porous.
And now we transition from information gathering and processing to TOPSIGHT,
in an extended cognitive sense—another term or concept that Dennett
does not use but which I think benefits from his analysis, which might
also benefit from it. Topsight as used and defined in this blog, and
understood as competitively superior information gathering, processing
and use in a given situation. Especially in competitive situations —but
then any situation may turn out to be a competitive one after the fact.
Topsight provides (or is) superior insight and is (or provides)
strategic advantages, a superior cognitive mapping of the situation and
the interactants's respective (hypothesized) cognitive maps:
Semantic information is not always valuable to one who carries it. Not only can a person be burdened with useless facts, but often particular items of information are an emotional burden as well—not that evolution cares about your emotional burdens, so long as you make more offspring than the competition. This doesn't cancel the link to utility in the definition of semantic information; it complicates it. (The value of gold coins is not put in doubt by the undeniable fact that pockets full of gold coins may drown a strong swimmer). Still defining semantic information as design worth getting seems to fly in the face of the fact that so much of the semantic information that streams into our heads every day is not worth getting and is in fact a detestable nuisance, clogging up our control systems and distracting us from the tasks we ought to be engaged in. (127)
Which reminds me that I should be doing something else just know. But this is by the way. The above goes on as follows:
But we can turn this "bug" in our definition into a "feature" by noting that the very existence of information-handling systems depends on the design depends on the design value of the information that justifies the expense of building them in the first place. (127).
This brings to mind a well-known quandary, to wit, that you never know when or whether you are going to need a random factoid or piece of junk you store in the warehouse of just-in-case. Such outcomes are decided in the thick of things, because situations are always partly unexpected and partly multidimensional. A relevant reading on topsight at this point may be pointed out here as an excursus or clarification—in this paper I wrote on the multidimensionality of reality. In multidimensional reality, the interface of dimensions often defines where the action is, as the multidimensional crossroads of actuality it is closer than any isolated dimensional model to the uniqueness of the situation—its unique complexity— and the unprecedented interaction of its dimensions (or frames, or Goffmanian channels of information).
Voici the paper:
_____. "The (In)Definition of Reality: Reframing and Contested Topsight." SSRN 13 April 2016.*
http://ssrn.com/abstract=2763243
2016
The Dennett passage goes on as follows:
"Once in place, an information-handling system, a pair of eyes or ears, a radio, the Internet) can be exploited—parasitized—by noise of several species: sheer meaningless "random" white noise (the raspy "static" that interferes with your transistor radio when the signal is weak), and semantic information that is useless or harmful to the receiver. Spam and phishing e-mails on the Internet are obvious examples, both dust clouds and (deliberately released) squid ink are others." (Dennett 127)
Here we reach informational trash, or the fake news of the corporate media denounced by Donald Trump with accusations they threw back on his head—or, in a more subtly massive way, the organized "fact-checkers" deployed globally by the Poynter Institute with their artful mismanagement of scandals and of whistleblowers' conspiracy scandals, slickly explaining them away by the book.
The disinformation game reaches an explicitly global scale when the United Nations, the Biden Administration, the European Union, the Big Pharma, the Big Tech and the WEF unleash a witch hunt against pandemic negationists, climate change deniers, and other dangerous disinformers who abuse whatever freedom of expression is available, by using it. Deliberately released Squid Ink, indeed.
Dennett goes on with further insights on the dialectics between information detection, deceptive disinformation spreading, and topsight:
"The malicious items depend for their effect on the trust the receiver invests in the medium. Since Aesop we've known that the boy who cries wolf stops commanding attention and credence after a while. Batesian mimicry (such as a nonpoisonous snake with markings that mimic a poisonous variety) is a similar kind of parasitism, getting a benefit without going to the cost of manufacturing poison, and when the mimics outnumber the genuinely poisonous snakes Aesop's moral takes hold and the deceitful signal loses its potency.
Any information-transmitting medium or channel can set offf an arms race of deception and detection, but within an organism, the channels tend to be highly reliable. Since all "parties" have a common fate, sinking or swimming together, trust reigns (Sterelny 2003). (For some fascinating exceptions, see Haig 2008 on genomic impringing)." (127)
Note that, on the political level, ancient nations often stood or fell sharing the common fate of an organism, while more the more elaborate politics of global empires or modern states gives rise to rather more complex interplay of trust, deception and mutual reliance. The skin in the game is not as bare as it used to be, for good and ill alike.
Dennett's
final pronouncement on informational topsight-minus-the-name. Note that
he is thinking mainly in biological terms, of arms races and struggle
for life in ecosystems, but these notions may be usefully applied to
informational ecosystems or infosystems in human cultures (since man
preys on man in an organized manner, what Hobbes called the state of
culture, and Marx the systematic exploitation of men by man—through all
available means and media).
"Error is always possible, the result of simple breakdown—wear and tear— of the system, or misapplication of the system to environments it is ill equipped to handle. This is why delusions and illusions are such a rich source of evidence in cognitive neuroscience, providing hints about what is being relied upon by the organism in the normal case. It is often noted that the brain's job in perception is to filter out, discard, and ignore all but the noteworthy features of the flux of energy striking one's sensory organs. Keep and refine the ore of (useful) information, and leave all the noise out." (127-28).
Keeping the noise out allows the organism to survive, and allows the awakened citizen to gobble less media-fed bullshit. Here Dennett will sound positively like William Gibson trying to detect the near future or recognize the emeging patterns of the future which are already at work in the present:
"Any nonrandomness in the flux is a real pattern that is potentially useful information for some possible creature or agent to exploit in anticipating the future." (128)
By way of context for this allusion or parallel, here are my papers on some novels by William Gibson:
_____. "Pattern Recognition de William Gibson: El presente presentido con jet-lag." Online at ResearchGate 30 April 2012.*
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/33419644
2012
_____. " Cyberspace Everting: Spook Country, de William Gibson." Academia 2 March 2014.*
https://www.academia.edu/173388/
2014
_____. "A MacGuffin of Ultimate Scale." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 28 Dec. 2011.* (William Gibson).
http://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2011/12/macguffin-of-ultimate-scale.html
2011
—all of them dramatizing and exploring novel ecosystems of information circulation, sifting and management, on the socialite net, on the Internet, or on "The net of telephony, all digitized, and all, she had to suppose, listened to" ("Spook Country" 158).
Let's quote Dennett on net information patterns in lifeworld ecosystems and on topsight on the net:
"A tiny subset of the real patterns in the world of any agent comprise the agent's Umwelt, the set of its affordances. These patterns are the things that agent should have in its ontology, the things that should be attended to, tracked, distinguished, studied. The rest of the real patterns in the flux are just noise as far as that agent is concerned. From our Olympian standpoint (we are not gods, but we are cognitively head and shoulders above the rest of the creatures), we can often see that there is semantic information in the world that is intensely relevant to the welfare of creatures who are just unequipped to detect it. The information is indeed in the light but not for them." (128)
Which invites an analogy… just as we are gods to the ants and cattle who lack the appropriate patterns of information detection and management (our superior information is just noise for them) there are Informed Humans and Spooks for whom we are the Cattle and the Ants—resources to be used and exploited. They bit the Apple of the Tree of Information, aspiring to be like Gods, enjoying the available Topsight. And they trust, even as they watch us grope like moles, that they will escape our detection, forever if possible, or at least keeping several steps ahead of the buzz in the herd.
Such things do happen in the real world, —only it is not real for us.
—oOo—
Another evolutionary Big-History-in-a-Nutshell by Daniel Dennett, from Natural Selection to Artificial Intelligence, from the last chapter of his book From Bacteria to Bach and Back ("The Age of Post-Intelligent Design"):
I have argued that the basic, bottom-up, clueless R&D [Research and Design] done by natural selection has gradually created cranes—labor-saving products that make design work more effective—which have opened up Design Space for further cranes, in an accelerating zoom into the age of intelligent design, where top-down, reflective, reason-formulating, systematic, foresighted R&D can flourish. This process has succeeded in changing the balance of selective forces that shape us and all other organisms and in creating highly predictive theories that retrospectively explain the very processes of their creation. This cascade of cranes is not a miracle, not a gift from God, but a natural product of the fundamental evolutionary process, along with the other fruits of the Tree of Life.
To review, over several thousand years we human beings have come to appreciate the powers of individual minds. Building on the instinctive habits of all living things, we distinguish food from poison, and, like other locomoting organisms, we are textra sensitive to animacy (guided movement) in other moving things, and more particularly to the beliefs and desires (information and goals) that guide those movements, tracking as best we can who knows what and who wants what, in order to guide our own efforts at hide and seek. This native bias is the genetic basis for the intentional stance, our practice of treating each other as rational agents guided by largely true beliefs and largely well-ordered desires. Our uninterrumpted interest in these issues has generated the folk psychology that we rely on to make sense of one another. We use it to predicet and explain not just the repetitive behaviors we observe in our neighbors and ourselves, and the "forced moves" that anyone would be stupid not to execute, but even many of the strokes of "insight" that are the mark of "genius." That is, our expectations are very frequently confirmed, which cements our allegiance to the intentional stance, and when our expectations are confounded, we tend to fall back on "explanations" of our failure that are at best inspired guesswork and at worst misleading mythmaking
We encourage our children to be curious and creative, and we self-consciously identify the ruts and boundaries in our own thinking processes so that we can try to overcome them. The minds we prize most are the minds that are neither too predictable (boring, unchallenging) nor too chaotic. Practice makes perfect, and we have invented games that encourage us to rehearse our mind-moves, such as chess and Go and poker, as well as prosthetic devices—telescopes, maps, calculators, clocks, and thousands of others—that permit us to apply our mind-moves in ever more artificial and sophisticated environments. In every sphere of inquiry and design, we have highly organized populations of experts collaborating to create and perfect theories and other artifacts, and we have adopted traditions and market mechanisms to provide the time, energy, and materials for these projects. We are the intelligent designers living in a world intelligently designed for intelligent designers by our ancestors. And now, after centuries of dreaming about this prospect, we have begun designing and producing artifacts that can design and produce artifacts (that can design and produce artifacts...).
A self-begetting passage in Daniel Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back ("The Age of Post-Intelligent Design", p. 379), on the spontaneous order emerging from natural selection and generating memes, mental tools, theories, and explanations like this one. All in one paragraph! Watch me this cascade of cranes:
I have argued that the basic, bottom-up, clueless R&D [Research and Design] done by natural selection has gradually created cranes—labor-saving products that make design work more effective—which have opened up Design Space for further cranes, in an accelerating zoom into the age of intelligent design, where top-down, reflective, reason-formulating, systematic, foresighted R&D can flourish. This process has succeeded in changing the balance of selective forces that shape us and all other organisms and in creating highly predictive theories that retrospectively explain the very processes of their creation. This cascade of cranes is not a miracle, not a gift from God, but a natural product of the fundamental evolutionary process, along with the other fruits of the Tree of Life.
This should go to Retrospection:
Recuperamos este artículo de 2015, con una addenda de Dennett:
_____. "Impresión de realidad: La percepción intelectiva en la epistemología de Zubiri." SSRN 23 June 2021.*
http://ssrn.com/abstract=3866299.
2021
_____. "Lo mismo despiertos, que soñando: Hobbes sobre la virtualidad de lo real." Academia 25 Feb. 2017.*
https://www.academia.edu/31599964/
2017
It is how our brainsrespond that causes "us" (in the manifest image) to "project" an illusory property into the (manifest) world. There are structural, chemical properties of glucose—mimicked in saccharine and other artificial sweeteners—that cause the sweetness response in our nervous systems but "the intrinsic, subjective sweetness I enjoy" is not an internal recreation or model of these chemical properties, nor is it a very special property in our non-physical minds that we use to decorate the perceptible things out there in the world. It is no property at all; it is a benign illusion. Our brains have tricked us into having the conviction, making the judgment, that there seems to bean intrinsically wonderful but otherwise undescribable property in some edible things: sweetness. We hcan recognize it, recall it, dream about it, but we can't describe it; it is ineffable and unanalyzable.
There is no more familiar and appealing verb than "project" to describe this effect, but of course everybody knows it is only metaphorical; colors aren't literally projected (as if from a slide projector) out onto the front surfaces of (colorless) objects, any more than the idea of causation is somehow beamed out onto the point of impact between billiard balls. If we use the shorthand term "projection" to try to talk, metaphorically, about the mismatch between manifest and scientific image here, what is the true long story? What is literally going on in the scientific image? A large part of the answer emerges, I propose, from the predictive coding perspective we explored briefly in chapter 8 (How do brains pick up affordances?)
Here is where Bayesian expectations can play an iterated role: our ontology (in the elevator sense) does a close-to-optimal job of cataloguing the things in the world that matter to the behavior our brains have to control. Hierarchical Bayesian predictions accomplish this, generating affordances galore: we expect solid objects to have backs that will come into view as we alk around them, doors to open, stairs to afford climbing, cups to hold liquid, and so forth. But among the things in our Umwelt that matter to our well-being are ourselves! We ought to have good Bayesian expectations about what we will do next, what we will think next, and what we will expect next! And we do. Here's an example:
Think of the cuteness of babies. It is not, of course, an "intrinsic" property of babies, though it seems to be. What you "project" onto the baby is in fact your manifold of "felt" dispositions to cuddle, protect, nurture, kiss, coo over,... that little cutie-pie. It's not just that when your cuteness detector (based on facial proportions, etc.) fires, you have urges to nurture and protect; you expect to have those very urges, and that manifold of expectations just is the "projection" onto the baby of the property of cuteness. When we expect to see a baby in the crib, we also expect to "find it cute"—that is, we expect to expect to feel the urge to cuddle it and so forth. When our expectations are fulfilled, the absence of prediction-error signals is interpreted by our brains as confirmation that, indeed, the thing in the world we are interacting with really has the properties we expected it to have. Cuteness as a property passes the Bayesian test for being an objective structural part of the world we live in, and that is all that needs to happen. Any further "projection" process would be redundant. What is special about properties like sweetness and cuteness is that their perception depends on particularities of the nervous systems that have evolved to make much of them. They have a biased or privileged role in the modulation of our control systems—we care about them, in short.
Here we must be very careful not to confuse two independent claims. The properties of sweetness and cuteness depend on features of our nervous systems and hence are in that limited sense subjective, but that must not be taken to mean that sweetness, say, is an intrinsic (subjective) property of conscious experience! Hume's strange inversion is wonderful but incomplete: when he spoke of the mind's "great propensity to spread itself on external objects," this should be seen not as a stopping point but as a stepping-stone to a further inversion. Hume's image nbrilliantly conjures up the curious vision of the mind painting the external world with the propietary ("intrinsic") hues properly worn by the mind's internal items.—impressions and ideas, in his vocabulary. But there is no such paint (which is why I once dubbed it "figment"). We need to push Hume's inversion a little harder and show that the icons of the user-illusion of our minds, unlike the user-illusion of our computers, don't need to be rendered on a screen.
(Or—a peek from the peak)
One of the passages in Daniel Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back in which he comes really really close to cracking the code of reality—or perhaps closer to blowing your mind away into smithermemes... The passage in question is found in the chapter "Consciousness as an Evolved User-Illusion".
Its title is unpromising,
"How do human brains achieve 'global' comprehension using 'local' competences?"
... but the going gets really good with the epigraphs—especially when the epigraphs get glossed and riffed in the text itself. The trip goes from a bon mot to a reflexive hall of mirrors in the funhouse of your brain, so... brace your self for a dive ride into your own mind, and other minds as well:
Language was given to men so that they could conceal their thoughts.
—Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand
Language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with others.
—Karl Marx
Consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no General Leslie Groves to organize and command the termites in a termite colony, and there is no General Leslie Groves to organize and command the even more clueless neurons in a human brain. How can human comprehension be composed of the activities of unncomprehending neurons? In addition to all the free-floating rationales that explain our many structures, habits, and other features, there are the anchored reasons we represent to ourselves and others. These reasons are themselves things for us, denizens of our manifest image alongside the trees and clouds and doors and cups and voices and words and promises that make up our ontology. We can do things with these reasons—challenge, reframe, abandon, endorse, disavow them—and these often covert behaviors would not be in our repertoires if we hadn't downloaded all the apps of language into our necktops. In short, we can think about these reasons, good and bad, and this permits them to influence our overt behaviors in ways unknown in other organisms.
The piping plover's distraction display or broken-wing dance gives the fox a reason to alter its course and approach her, but not by getting it to trust her. She may modulate her thrashing to hold the fox's attention, but the control of this modulation does not require her to have more than a rudimentary "appreciation" of the fox's mental state. The fox, meanwhile, need have no more comprehension of just why it embarks on its quest instead of continuing to reconnoiter the are. We, likewise, can perform many quite adroit and retrospectively justifiable actions with only a vague conception of what we are up to, a conception often swiftly sharpened in hindsight by the self- attribution of reasons. It's this last step that is ours alone.
Our habits of self-justification (self-appreciation, self-exoneration, self-consolation, self-glorification, etc.) are ways of behaving (ways of thinking) that we acquire in the course of filling our heads with culture-borne memes, including, importantly, the habits of self-reproach and self-criticism. Thus we learn to plan ahead, to use the practice of reason-venturing and reason-criticizing to presolve some of life's problems, by talking them over with others and with ourselves. And not just talking them over—imagining them, trying out variations in our minds, and looking for flaws. We are not just Popperian but Gregorian creatures (see chapter 5), using thinking tools to design our own future acts. No other animal does that.
Our ability to do this kind of thinking is not accomplished by any dedicated brain structure not found in other animals. There is no "explainer-nucleus" for instance. Our thinking is enabled by the installation of a virtual machine made of virtual machines made of virtual machines. The goal of delineating and explaning this stack of competences via bottom-up neuroscience alone (without the help of cognitive neuroscience) is as remote as the goal of delineating and explaining the collection of apps on your smartphone by a bottom-up deciphering of its hardware circuit design and the bit-strings in memory without taking a peek at the user interface. The user interface of an app exists in order to make the competence accessible to users—people—who can't know, and don't need to know, the intricate details of how it works. The user-illusions of all the apps stored in our brains exist for the same reason: they make our competences (somewhat) accessible to users—other people— who can't know, and don't need to know, the intricate details. And then we get to use them ourselves, under roughly the same conditions, as guests in our own brains.
There might be some other evolutionary path—genetic, not cultural—to a somewhat similar user-illusion in other animals, but I have not been able to conceive of one in convincing detail, and according to the arguments advanced by the ethologist and roboticist David McFarland (1989), "Communication is the only behavior that requires an organism to self-monitor its own control system." Organisms can very effectively control themselves by a collection of competing but "myopic" task controllers, each activated by a condition (hunger or some other need, sensed opportunity, built-in priority ranking, and so on). When a controller's condition outweighs the conditions of the currently active task controller, it interrupts it and takes charge temporarily. (The "pandemonium model" by Oliver Selfridge [1959] is the ancestor of many later models). Goals are represented only tacitly, in the feedback loops that guide each task controller, but without any global or higher level representation. Evolution will tend to optimize the interrupt dynamics of these modules, and nobody's the wiser. That is, there doesn't have to be anybody home to be wiser!
Communication, McFarland claims, is the behavioral innovation which changes all that. Communication requires a central clearing house of sorts in order to buffer the organism from revealing too much about its current state to competitive organisms. As Dawkins and Krebs (1978) showed, in order to understand the evolution of communication we need to see it as grounded in manipulation rather than as purely cooperative behavior. An organisms that has no poker face, that "communicates state" directly to all hearers, is a sitting duck, and will soon be extinct (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944). What must evolve to prevent this exposure is a private, proprietary communication-control buffer that creates opportunities for guided deception—and, coincidentally, opportunities for self-deception (Trivers 1985)—by creating, for the first time in the evolution of nervous systems, explicit and more globally accessible representations of its current state, representations that are detachable from the tasks they represent, so that deceptive behaviours can be formulated and controlled without interfering with the control of other behaviors.
It is important to realize that by communication, McFarland does not mean specifically linguistic communication (which is ours alone) but strategic communication, which opens the crucial space between one's actual goals and intentions and the goals and intentions one attempts to communicate to an audience. There is no doubt that many species are genetically equipped with relatively simple communication behaviors (Hauser 1996), such as stotting, alarm calls, and territorial markings and defense. Stereotypical deception, such as bluffing in an aggressive encounter, is common, but a more productive and versatile talent for deception requires MaFarland's private workspace. For a century and more philosophers have stressed the "privacy" of our inner thoughts, but seldom have they bothered to ask which this is such a good design feature. (An occupational blindness of many philosophers: taking the manifest image as simply given and never asking what it might have been given to us for).
*I have silently corrected a typo, or spello, substituting "peek" for "peak". Perhaps I shoudn't have—topsight makes a new height here.
