Your response puzzles me. What I take Dennett to be saying is that apple trees and the insides of skulls are deeply entangled. “Perception” is a term that will recur often when we seek to explain the entangled history of apple trees and mobile fructivores. And I’d be rather surprised to find Dennett running away from hard questions.
OK, you’ve said where the scary part of the problem is. Can you say more about what is scary about “doing a Dennett”; or about what you take to be the scary part of the problem ?
There are some unsettling, if not scary, things that come out of considering apple trees, that do not come out of considering only the insides of skulls and simplifying color as being all about light wavelengths. For instance, if “redness” is as gerrymandered a category as Dennett’s view implies, then it would be in pratice impossible to design from scratch a mind that has the same “qualia” of redness, for lack of a better word, that we have.
Your response puzzles me. What I take Dennett to be saying is that apple trees and the insides of skulls are deeply entangled. “Perception” is a term that will recur often when we seek to explain the entangled history of apple trees and mobile fructivores. And I’d be rather surprised to find Dennett running away from hard questions.
OK, you’ve said where the scary part of the problem is. Can you say more about what is scary about “doing a Dennett”; or about what you take to be the scary part of the problem ?
There are some unsettling, if not scary, things that come out of considering apple trees, that do not come out of considering only the insides of skulls and simplifying color as being all about light wavelengths. For instance, if “redness” is as gerrymandered a category as Dennett’s view implies, then it would be in pratice impossible to design from scratch a mind that has the same “qualia” of redness, for lack of a better word, that we have.