Dennett, Freedom evolves?  Book note below, nytimes review link

It is either ominous or amusing to watch Darwinists try to close the gap on the issue of the evolution of freedom. I know my eonic model has made some jump to, after liberating the issue from both Darwin and Hegel. (cf. Kant's Challenge, http://eonix.8m.com/kant.htm)

  Dennett's new book seems the supply for a strange demand, some window dressing on Darwin's quite inadequate theory. Why not just abolish the term freedom? After all, the book opens with the usual jeremaid on the term 'soul', accompanied by the usual Dawkinsian horror at this lingering superstition along with 'slurs against those who don't buy the argument that Darwin solved every philosophic problem with his theory of natural selection, which despite a lack of evidence had to be right because it solved every philosophic problem.

I get tired of new age or religious verbiage on the soul, but any system that gets fanatic on the subject and claims as already established that science has proven anything on the subject, including its non-existence,  is eyewash.

You would think a trained philosopher might have a trace of Kantian sense here.
Where's the proof then man has no soul (and I don't claim he has one).
This is the old tough guy behaviourist mode. It's boring finally.


Still, I find this book interesting reading, although I always have a tired feeling at the start, since I know that Darwin's theory has a basic flaw and these aggressive defenders fail or refuse to acknowledge that flaw. What a waste of effort then, to say nothing of whole careers, this determination to mindfix the basic Darwin regime, this organized amnesia of the modernist tradition hijacked by neoliberal crackpots?

Is this fair? I fear it is. Darwin's theory is an obsession, but it is pre-Kantian, and simply flunks all tests on anything like the evolution of freedom. Not that we have to accept Kant, as such, and Dennett's book has a lot of interesting leads in new directions. But the warning was always there, as the Big Science machine proceeds out of religious waters, a new problem was foretold by the right prophet, foretold in vain.

The basic issues are simply buried in increasing sophistry and the bum steers of the compatibilist postion, which is potentially a very useful approach. I think that is useful here, only the obstinate rigidity of the basic assumptions that vitiates the total effort.

Maybe it's all propaganda. Eh? 

The requirement for any technocratic regime attempting to dominate man is first a good source myth, an evolutionary theory that strips man of all complications, e.g. soul, and after that a good cover story on 'freedom' to keep the object of control, the suspect/organism under the illusion that he is a free man in a free economy. The first theory is also useful for neutralizing ethical objections to market behavior as covered also in theory 1.
So theory 2, depends on theory 1. And we don't really have a theory 1. The irony is that if we examine history we see the real evidence for the 'evolution of freedom' and this must severely caution our Darwinian assumptions. The eonic model for example shows how freedom, macroevolution, determinism, and relative free action can be blended in a unique 'evolutionary emergence construct' of a type that must surely have occurred in the earlier descent of man and is easy to verify in the facts of world history.

We should therefore, with these suspicions, demand out scientific right to demand an evidence check for this 'freedom evolving' via natural selection. There isn't a shred of such evidence. The question of evidence never even arises in this book, unless it is a reference to Wright's Non Zero, about which I will speak in hushed whispers (cf. http://eonix.8m.com/nonzero.htm).
We seem to have lost the right to demand scientific procedure on evolution. We will overcome. People pull ideas out of their heads, and as long as it has the Darwin logo, that's a net increase to the propaganda regime.
Meanwhile the rich mother lode of considerations of freedom in the rise of the modern are declared obsolete by a bunch of nineteenth century positivists plying neoliberal ideology. And there is nothing anyone can do about it, apparently.

Dennet's book is not that bad! It is just a waste, overall. My animus springs from the lazy behavior of this gang. They don't have to think straight to succeed. All they need is the right lingo.
It will prove a sad fate to discover it isn't philosophy. I will finish reading the book. But...this is a poor start.

'Freedom Evolves': Evolution Explains It All for You
By GALEN STRAWSON

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/books/review/002STRAWT.html

In the last several years the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett has published two very large, interesting and influential books. The first, ''Consciousness Explained'' (1991), aimed to account for all the phenomena of consciousness within the general theoretical framework set by current physics. It failed, of course, and came to be affectionately known as ''Consciousness Ignored.'' But it was a very fertile and valuable piece of work. The second, ''Darwin's Dangerous Idea'' (1995), set out to make the case for the theory of evolution even more irresistible than it already is, and it was right on target: vivid, ingenious and illuminating, if sometimes huffy and overpolemical.
Now Dennett is advancing on free will. In ''Freedom Evolves,'' he wants to show how evolution can get us ''all the way from senseless atoms to freely chosen actions.''
John Landon
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