![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterYesterday evening was splendid. It began with another game of Scrabble in the Bunker, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
trifold_flame's new office. Only this time, the Bunker's harsh edges were softened with the aid of a new rug, gentle lighting, and a hand-crocheted amoeba. E is truly amazing. As I said to D as we walked over to the Bunker, playing Scrabble in E's office somehow makes it feel like an erudite activity. I almost wanted to be wearing a sweater with elbow-patches, although it would have gotten a bit too warm after a while.
Scrabble wrapped up just in time forsblat and I to head over to listen to a lecture by Daniel Dennett...or so we thought. I had e-mailed to ask about tickets for the lecture, and was informed that there would be no tickets, so I mistakenly assumed that the size of the venue would accommodate the audience. Alas, we were directed to an unplanned and hastily assembled overflow room, where, several minutes into the talk, we were finally able to both see (sort of) and hear Dennett. [Eventually, you might be able to watch his lecture courtesy of the Beyond Center, here.]
Dennett's talk was entitled "Darwin's Strange Inversion of Reasoning," and thus focused on one of Dennett's favorite subjects, the theory of evolution by natural selection. [The "strange inversion," in this case, was Darwin's idea that higher levels of complexity could emerge from simple processes, which Dennett likened to Turing's reasoning about how computers could work]. I'm not sure that I learned much that was new, but I'm not sure I expected much that was new, for Dennett covers this subject extensively in Darwin's Dangerous Idea and related concepts in Consciousness Explained. So instead, I focused on observing the semantics of his lecturing style (his, I assume, intentional re-appropriation of the word "design," for example, to refer to the products of evolutionary processes).
In the lecture, he did a slightly better job of elaborating on his meaning of the word "truth," which was something that had been bothering me after reading Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. He basically indicated that he believes in the arrival at scientific truth through a process of approximation, which is a more satisfactory explanation than what he had stated about science in BTS (where he simply referred to arrival at truth through science).* And yet at the same time, we hypothetico-deductive-ly trained biologists in the crowd cringed every time he used the word "prove."
At the end of the lecture, in response to a question from the audience, he also took a minute to talk about his academic mentor, who, he said, was a beautiful writer who wrote only sentences with impact.
------
*Aside to Dad: I don't think Dennett's perspective on "truth" is mutually exclusive with the concept of "encompassing truth" outlined by Primack and Abrams, although it might be more short-sighted. Though one could argue that the short-sightedness itself is a critical issue. I've considered contacting Dennett to find out.
trifold_flame's new office. Only this time, the Bunker's harsh edges were softened with the aid of a new rug, gentle lighting, and a hand-crocheted amoeba. E is truly amazing. As I said to D as we walked over to the Bunker, playing Scrabble in E's office somehow makes it feel like an erudite activity. I almost wanted to be wearing a sweater with elbow-patches, although it would have gotten a bit too warm after a while.Scrabble wrapped up just in time for
sblat and I to head over to listen to a lecture by Daniel Dennett...or so we thought. I had e-mailed to ask about tickets for the lecture, and was informed that there would be no tickets, so I mistakenly assumed that the size of the venue would accommodate the audience. Alas, we were directed to an unplanned and hastily assembled overflow room, where, several minutes into the talk, we were finally able to both see (sort of) and hear Dennett. [Eventually, you might be able to watch his lecture courtesy of the Beyond Center, here.]Dennett's talk was entitled "Darwin's Strange Inversion of Reasoning," and thus focused on one of Dennett's favorite subjects, the theory of evolution by natural selection. [The "strange inversion," in this case, was Darwin's idea that higher levels of complexity could emerge from simple processes, which Dennett likened to Turing's reasoning about how computers could work]. I'm not sure that I learned much that was new, but I'm not sure I expected much that was new, for Dennett covers this subject extensively in Darwin's Dangerous Idea and related concepts in Consciousness Explained. So instead, I focused on observing the semantics of his lecturing style (his, I assume, intentional re-appropriation of the word "design," for example, to refer to the products of evolutionary processes).
In the lecture, he did a slightly better job of elaborating on his meaning of the word "truth," which was something that had been bothering me after reading Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. He basically indicated that he believes in the arrival at scientific truth through a process of approximation, which is a more satisfactory explanation than what he had stated about science in BTS (where he simply referred to arrival at truth through science).* And yet at the same time, we hypothetico-deductive-ly trained biologists in the crowd cringed every time he used the word "prove."
At the end of the lecture, in response to a question from the audience, he also took a minute to talk about his academic mentor, who, he said, was a beautiful writer who wrote only sentences with impact.
------
*Aside to Dad: I don't think Dennett's perspective on "truth" is mutually exclusive with the concept of "encompassing truth" outlined by Primack and Abrams, although it might be more short-sighted. Though one could argue that the short-sightedness itself is a critical issue. I've considered contacting Dennett to find out.
