Use the Tools. Try Harder. by Daniel Dennett
“It’s inconceivable!” That’s what some people declare when they confront the “mystery” of consciousness, or the claim that life arose on this planet more than three billion years ago without any helping from an Intelligent Designer. When I hear this I am always tempted to say, “Well of course it’s inconceivable to you. You left your thinking tools behind and you’re hardly trying.” Recall William Bateson’s firm declaration that a material basis for genes was inconceivable. Even schoolchildren have little difficulty conceiving of DNA today, and it’s not because they are more brilliant than Bateson was. It’s because in the last century we have devised and refined the thinking tools that make it a snap. Of course some people really don’t want to conceive of these things. They want to protect the mysteries from even an attempt at explanation, for fear that an explanation might make the treasures disappear.
When other people start getting inquisitive, they find that “God works in mysterious ways” is a convenient anti-thinking tool. By hinting that the questioner is arrogant and overreaching, it can quench curiosity in an instant. It used to work well, and still works well in the communities where ignorance of science is regarded as a negligible flaw if not actually a virtue. I think we should stop treating this “pious” observation as any kind of wisdom and recognize it as the transparently defensive propaganda that it is. A positive response might be, “”Oh good! I love a mystery. Let’s see if we can solve this one, too. Do you have any ideas?"
Conceiving of something new is hard work, not just a matter of framing some idea in your mind, giving it a quick once-over and then endorsing it. What is inconceivable to us now may prove to be obviously conceivable when we’ve done some more work on it. And when we confidently declare that some things are truly impossible- a largest prime number, or a plane triangle with interior angles adding up to more than two right angles, or a married bachelor- it is not so much because we find these things inconceivable as that we find that we have conceived of their components so well, so exhaustively, that they impossibility of their conjunction is itself clearly conceivable.
We haven’t yet succeeded in fully conceiving how meaning could exist in a material world, or how life arose and evolved, or how consciousness works, or whether free will can be one of our endowments, but we’ve made progress: the questions we’re posing and addressing now are better than the questions of yesteryear. We’re hot on the trail of the answers.
When other people start getting inquisitive, they find that “God works in mysterious ways” is a convenient anti-thinking tool. By hinting that the questioner is arrogant and overreaching, it can quench curiosity in an instant. It used to work well, and still works well in the communities where ignorance of science is regarded as a negligible flaw if not actually a virtue. I think we should stop treating this “pious” observation as any kind of wisdom and recognize it as the transparently defensive propaganda that it is. A positive response might be, “”Oh good! I love a mystery. Let’s see if we can solve this one, too. Do you have any ideas?"
Conceiving of something new is hard work, not just a matter of framing some idea in your mind, giving it a quick once-over and then endorsing it. What is inconceivable to us now may prove to be obviously conceivable when we’ve done some more work on it. And when we confidently declare that some things are truly impossible- a largest prime number, or a plane triangle with interior angles adding up to more than two right angles, or a married bachelor- it is not so much because we find these things inconceivable as that we find that we have conceived of their components so well, so exhaustively, that they impossibility of their conjunction is itself clearly conceivable.
We haven’t yet succeeded in fully conceiving how meaning could exist in a material world, or how life arose and evolved, or how consciousness works, or whether free will can be one of our endowments, but we’ve made progress: the questions we’re posing and addressing now are better than the questions of yesteryear. We’re hot on the trail of the answers.