Consciousness Explained (Penguin Science) by Daniel C. Dennett

Author:Daniel C. Dennett [Dennett, Daniel C.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780140128673
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1993-06-23T23:00:00+00:00

ures of the stories we learn provide guidance at a different level, prompting us to ask ourselves the questions that are most likely to be relevant to our current circumstances.

None of this makes any sense so long as we persist in thinking of the mind as ideally rational, and perfectly self-transparent or unified. What good could talking to yourself do, if you already know what you intended to say? But once we see the possibility of partial understanding, imperfect rationality, problematic intercommunication of parts, we can see how the powerful forces that a language unleashes in a brain can be exploited in various forms of bootstrapping, some of them beneficial, and some of them malignant.

Here is an example.

You are magnificent!

Here is another:

You are pathetic!

You know what these sentences mean. You also know that I have just introduced them out of the blue, as an aid to making a philosophical point, and that they are not the intended speech acts of anyone. Certainly I am neither flattering you nor insulting you, and there is no one else around. But could you flatter yourself, or insult yourself, by helping yourself to one or the other of my sentences, and saying it to yourself, over and over, “with emphasis”? Try it, if you dare. Something happens. You don’t believe yourself for one minute (you say to yourself), but you find that saying the words to yourself does kindle reactions, maybe even a little reddening of the ears, along with responses, retorts, disclaimers, images, recollections, projects. These reactions may go either way, of course. Dale Carnegie was right about the power of positive thinking, but like most technologies, thinking is easier to create than to control. When you talk to yourself, you don’t have to believe yourself in order for reactions to set in. There are bound to be some reactions, and they are bound to be relevant one way or the other to the meaning of the words with which you are stimulating yourself. Once the reactions start happening, they may lead your mind to places where you find yourself believing yourself after all — so be careful what you say to yourself.

The philosopher Justin Leiber sums up the role of language in shaping our mental lives:

Looking at ourselves from the computer viewpoint, we cannot avoid seeing that natural language is our most important “programming language.” This means that a vast portion of our knowledge and activity is, for us, best communicated and understood in our natural language…. One could say that natural language was our first great original artifact and, since, as we increasingly realize, languages are machines, so natural language, with our brains to run it, was our primal invention of the universal computer. One could say this except for the sneaking suspicion that language isn’t something we invented but something we became, not something we constructed but something in which we created, and recreated, ourselves. [Leiber, 1991, p. 8]

The hypothesis that language plays this all-important role in thinking might seem

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.