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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Tuesday, March 04, 2003
Rather odd review of Daniel Dennett's latest tome, Freedom Evolves, by John Gray. The most striking quote is this;
"The history of ideas is made largely by political power and human folly not through the workings of natural selection. If there is no Cathar religion today, the reason is not that natural selection has weeded out the memes that composed the Cathar belief-system. It is that the Cathars were persecuted into extinction. "
I'm not sure I see the reason for the chiastic opposition between politics and memetic influence. Those who persecuted the Cathars were acting in accordance with a set of memes of their own, even though one should not necessarily link memetic evolution with the idea of progress. In short,Gray sees ideas as disembodied entities separate from the beings that instantiate them. As I read the review I was strongly reminded of this piece by Thomas Nagel:
"It is not easy to see the disagreement between the two schools as a large or significant one. Both sides believe that the influence of natural selection is enormous, but that it operates only in the context of environmental circumstances that make some characteristics of organisms adaptive and others not, and are responsible for the extinction of species from time to time. Both sides believe that some features are directly explained by natural selection, and others are mere side-effects. They also both acknowledge that physics and chemistry constrain and shape the biological possibilities and the range of possible genetic variation. So why are they so cross with each other?"
On the whole, the genealogy of science and religion offered by Gray is richly suggestive, but not necessarily meangingful. Dennett may well be trying to rescue a place for quasi-religious notions of human free will against determinism, but that is very far from meaning that he will not be proved right.
posted by Richard 10:12 am
