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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 18 Jun 2019

Taken: 18 Jun 2019

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Excerpt •
From Bacteria to Bach & Back •
Author •
Daniel Dennett •

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . There were reasons long before there were reason-representers -- us. The reasons tracked by evolution I have called “free floating rationales,” a term that has apparently jangled the nerves of some few thinkers, who suspect I am conjuring up ghosts of problematic than numbers or centers of gravity. Cubes had eight corners before people invented ways to articulating arithmetic, and asteroids had centers of gravity before there were physicists to dream up the idea and calculate with it. Reasons existed long before there were reasoners. Some find this way of thinking unnerving and probably “unsound”, but I am not relenting. Instead I am hoping here to calm their fears and convince them that we should all be happy to speak of the reasons uncovered by evolution before they were even expressed or represented by human investigators or any other minds….

The termite castle and Gaudi’s La Sgrada Familia are very similar in shape byt utterly different in genesis and construction. There are reasons for the structures and shapes of the termite castle, but they are not represented by any of the termite who constructed it. There is no Architect Termite who planned the structure, now do any individual termites have the slightest clue about why they build the way they do. This is competence without comprehension. …….. . . . . . There are also reasons for the structures and shapes of Gaudi’s masterpiece, but they are (in the main) Gaudi’s reasons. Gaudi had reasons for the shapes he ordered created; there are reasons for the shapes created by the termite, but the termites didn’t have those reasons. There are reasons why tress spread their branches, but they are not in any strong sense the trees’ reasons. Sponges do things for reasons, bacteria do things for reasons, even viruses do things for reasons. But they don’t have the reasons; they don’t need to have the reasons.
5 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
From Bacteria to Bach and Back
5 years ago.

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