By RUDY!
The capstone speaker of the Caroline Warner Gannett Project: Consilience: The Cognitive Revolution was Daniel C. Dennett. His presentation was nothing short of phenomenal. For me, it was most encouraging.
Recently, I had been taking long walks to ponder–among other things–if I was treating my life correctly. That is to say, I wondered if my interpretation of life, to lessen my immediate impact on the world while maximizing the my impact on myself, was the correct approach since it has led me inwards and away from societal norms. Dr. Dennett’s lecture was encouraging because it confirmed many of the conclusions I’ve made through the inward ruminations of my personal observations and experiences.
He spoke on a variety of topics, but all under one umbrella: the origin of our consciousness and its byproducts (literature, ethics, etc.). His premise was to refute the need for a creator, that is, to show how it is possible to get to these complex end products from a bubble-up theory. He spoke at length about evolution, sky hooks, and a curious little fluke, a flatworm, that enters an ant’s brain and then commandeers the ant, forcing the ant to constantly climb to the tip of a blade of grass where it is more likely to be eaten by a cow, which is the only way the fluke can get into the cow’s intestines to successfully reproduce. He was sure to point out that this simple little creature, the fluke, was not very bright, it is just adapted and selected to be the way it is. Oh happy nature!
His presentation was accompanied by two aids. First, his slides, so simple, so clean, the most dense slides were long quotes from literature. And he READ THEM OUT LOUD TO US, which is always a pet peeve of mine, but in this instance, he annotated the reading with careful consideration of what each statement said, it was most insightful into the text and into how he thinks and reads. He showed me how passages that I may have dismissed as needlessly obfuscated are really precise statements when read critically. Obvious, but it has never occurred to me before.
The second aid were sign-language interpreters that handed-off throughout the presentation. One interpreter was a stoic male and the other was a lively female. I always switched from Dennett to the interpreter when the female took over. She was a few seconds off, but her facial expression embellishments were second to none.
At some point the lecture will be posted here. When it becomes available, I highly recommend viewing it.