Candace's E-learning and Digital Cultures site

This brief interview (apparently procured by a journalist pursuing Daniel Dennett out of the lecture theatre and down the road to his lunch appointment, and only taking the hint when the starter arrived) touches on a couple things we’ve been discussing.

One is memes, which Dennett seems to be suggesting rely on a social hierarchy to be passed from the top on down. (I guess for modern times he’s thinking of marketing/advertising, curriculum, political parties, religions here as well as more microcosmic social hierarchies like a workplace or club…I wonder if things like wikipedia would have an effect on this or not…or does wikipedia hold a certain position in the hierarchy of crowdsourced information repositories…?) But he does also point to a spectrum of memes, from ‘mistakes’ akin to genetic mutation (e.g. a malapropism becoming the standard word/phrase) to purposeful meme-creation (e.g. as far as I can tell, anything knowingly created and made public in any way). The crux here is just quickly quoted, but I think is quite important to post-humanism: ‘The mind is the effect, not the cause.’

This is expanded a bit more later in the interview, where Dennett criticises the ‘greedy reductionism’ that equates the brain with the mind, turning them both into unresponsible machines. This certainly echoes Hayle’s problematisation of separating thought from body, but from a slightly different angle. I would interpret this as saying mind, differentiated from brain, is that constantly fluctuating non-subject; the genes of the brain are mostly unchanging, but the memes, the food, the weather, the beauty and horror of the environment are all constantly working on the pliable mind.

And lastly, in a little throw-away bit (when the man clearly wanted his lunch), Dennett confessed to Short Circuit being his favourite AI movie. Why? Because we can’t help but anthropomorphise the robot.