On Marion Brady's post of the quote on Dennett:
>Many on this list would almost certainly find the profile of Daniel C.
>Dennett, on pages 34 and 35 of the February SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, very
>interesting. It's title: "Dennett's Dangerous Idea."
>
>Here's a quote:
>
>"Philosophers tumbled long ago to the realization that things are not what
>they seem. Dennett has pushed this insight a mind-bending step further:
>even our illusions are not what they seem, because they are built of still
>more illusions. With this mental nutcracker he claims to have split open
>the conceptual chestnut of consciousness, which he sees as the product of
>a "virtual machine" running the brain."
It never will stop amazing me at the rationalizations we come up with for
making sense of that which ultimately cannot be made sense of. Here we
are, sense-making organisms, realizing that our realities are made up, are
purely subjective (while seeming objective), and we are puzzled, and we
make up solutions to this puzzling dilemma that also seem objective,
though we know they're not. And on and on.
Remember at the end of the movie The Terminator, Sarah Connor is recording
messages for her unborn son telling him about how he sent the guy back
from the future to save Sarah, who would then become her son's father.
Sarah's line is "A person could go crazy thinking about this." Perhaps
that's appropriate here, as well. But, wow, what a gift to be able to
contemplate it all anyway!
-- John Woods jwoods@execpc.com