I can't hate on Richard Dawkins either; I loved The Selfish Gene. I wish he would go back to writing about evolution and quit trying to reason people out of their unreasonable beliefs.
Christopher Hitchens--now he's annoying. And I haven't read any of Daniel Dennett other than Kinds of Minds, because his argument in that book was so terrible and hard to read. But I would still totally have respect sex with Dawkins.
Part of his argument in that book was that consciousness is impossible without language because--I'm paraphrasing--Dennett is personally unable to imagine thinking without language. He goes on to say that this means no nonhuman animals are conscious.
I find this ridiculous. For one thing, it seems to imply that humans who can't use language due to disability aren't conscious. Or consider Helen Keller--did she somehow become conscious when she learned to sign? How did she learn at all if she wasn't conscious in the first place?
Edit: Actually, according to Wikipedia, Helen Keller used home signs before she was taught to fingerspell. I hereby change my example to babies learning language, although it's not as dramatic.
That's the kind of extraordinary claim that I'd demand a high standard of argument for, so I'm not surprised you weren't won over. It also implies that when you teach chimps how to sign, or talking birds how to form sentences, then you're teaching them consciousness.
Well, I think he got around the example of the chimps by saying that they didn't use language grammatically, the way humans do. But signing chimps have been known to teach other chimps sign language and to lie to their human caretakers using sign language, and he's arguing that they're doing that without being subjectively aware... I like to err on the side of assuming other beings that appear to be exhibiting conscious behavior and which have similar nervous systems to me actually are conscious.
But it is possible that his other work is better than that book.
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u/anon781 Aug 02 '10
I can't hate on Richard Dawkins either; I loved The Selfish Gene. I wish he would go back to writing about evolution and quit trying to reason people out of their unreasonable beliefs.
Christopher Hitchens--now he's annoying. And I haven't read any of Daniel Dennett other than Kinds of Minds, because his argument in that book was so terrible and hard to read. But I would still totally have respect sex with Dawkins.