Reading From Bacteria to Bach and Back III: Beyond Stances

by rsbakker

 

The problem with his user-illusion model of consciousness, Dennett realizes, lies in its Cartesian theatricalization, the reflex to assume the reality of the illusion, and to thence argue that it is in fact this… the dumbfounding fact, the inexplicable explanandum. We acknowledge that consciousness is a ‘user-illusion,’ then insist this ‘manifest image’ is the very thing requiring explanation. Dennett’s de-theatricalization, in other words, immediately invites re-theatricalization, intuitions so powerful he feels compelled to devote an entire chapter to resisting the invitation, only to have otherwise generally sympathetic readers, like Tom Clark, to re-theatricalize everything once again. To deceive us at all, the illusion itself has to be something possessing, minimally it seems, the capacity to deceive. Faced with the question of what the illusion amounts to, he writes, “It is a representation of a red stripe in some neural system of representation” (358), allowing Clark and others to reply, ‘and so possesses content called qualia.’

One of the striking features of From Bacteria to Bach and Back is the degree to which his trademark Intentional Systems Theory (IST) fades into the background. Rather than speak of the physical stance, design stance, and intentional stance, he continually references Sellars tripartite nomenclature from “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” the ‘original image’ (which he only parenthetically mentions), the ‘manifest image,’ and the ‘scientific image.’ The manifest image in particular, far more than the intentional stance, becomes his primary theoretical term.

Why might this be?

Dennett has always seen himself threading a kind of theoretical needle, fending the scientifically preposterous claims of intentionalism on the one hand, and the psychologically bankrupt claims of eliminativism on the other. Where intentionalism strands us with impossible explanatory vocabularies, tools that cause more problems than they solve, eliminativism strands us with impoverished explanatory vocabularies, purging tools that do real work from our theoretical kits without replacing them. It’s not simply that Dennett wants, as so many of his critics accuse him, ‘to have it both ways’; it’s that he recognizes that having it both ways is itself the only way, theoretically speaking. What we want is to square the circle of intentionality and consciousness without running afoul either squircles or blank screens, which is to say, inexplicable intentionalisms or deaf-mute eliminativisms.

Seen in this light, Dennett’s apparent theoretical opportunism, rapping philosophical knuckles for some applications of intentional terms, shaking scientific hands for others, begins to look well motivated—at least from a distance. The global theoretical devil, of course, lies in the local details. Intentional Systems Theory constitutes Dennett’s attempt to render his ‘middle way’ (and so his entire project) a principled one. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back he explains it thus:

There are three different but closely related strategies or stances we can adopt when trying to understand, explain, and predict phenomena: the physical stance, the design stance, in the intentional stance. The physical stance is the least risky but also the most difficult; you treat the phenomenon in question as a physical phenomenon, obeying the laws of physics, and use your hard-won understanding of physics to predict what will happen next. The design stance works only for things that are designed, either artifacts or living things or their parts, and have functions or purposes. The intentional stance works primarily for things that are designed to use information to accomplish their functions. It works by treating the thing as a rational agent, attributing “beliefs” and “desires” and “rationality” to the thing, and predicting that it will act rationally. 37

The strategy is straightforward enough. There’s little doubt that the physical stance, design stance, and intentional stance assist solving certain classes of phenomena in certain circumstances, so when confronted by those kinds of phenomena in those kinds of circumstances, taking the requisite stance is a good bet. If we have the tools, then why not use them?

But as I’ve been arguing for years here at Three Pound Brain, the problems stack up pretty quick, problems which, I think, find glaring apotheosis in From Bacteria to Bach and Back. The first problem lies in the granularity of stances, the sense in which they don’t so much explain cognition as merely divvy it up into three families. This first problem arises from the second, their homuncularity, the fact that ‘stances’ amount to black-box cognitive comportments, ways to manipulate/explain/predict things that themselves resist understanding. The third, and (from the standpoint his thesis) most devastating problem, also turns on the second: the fact that stances are the very thing requiring explanation.

The reason the intentional stance, Dennett’s most famed explanatory tool, so rarely surfaces in From Bacteria to Bach and Back is actually quite simple: it’s his primary explanandum. The intentional stance cannot explain comprehension simply because it is, ultimately, what comprehension amounts to…

Well, almost. And it’s this ‘almost,’ the ways in which the intentional stance defects from our traditional (cognitivist) understanding of comprehension, which has ensnared Dennett’s imagination—or so I hope to show.

What does this defection consist in? As we saw, the retasking of metacognition to solve theoretical questions was doomed to run afoul sufficiency-effects secondary to frame and medial neglect. The easiest way to redress these illusions lies in interrogating the conditions and the constitution of cognition. What the intentional stance provides Dennett is a granular appreciation of the performative, and therefore the social, fractionate, constructive, and circumstantial nature of comprehension. Like Wittgenstein’s ‘language games,’ or Kuhn’s ‘paradigms,’ or Davidson’s ‘charity,’ Dennett’s stances allow him to capture something of the occluded external and internal complexities that have for so long worried the ‘clear and distinct’ intuition of the ambiguous human cylinder.

The intentional stance thus plays a supporting role, popping up here and there in From Bacteria to Bach and Back insofar as it complicates comprehension. At every turn, however, we’re left with the question of just what it amounts to. Intentional phenomena such as representations, beliefs, rules, and so on are perspectival artifacts, gears in what (according to Dennett) is the manifest ontology we use to predict/explain/manipulate one another using only the most superficial facts. Given the appropriate perspective, he assures us, they’re every bit as ‘real’ as you and I need. But what is a perspective, let alone a perspectival artifact? How does it—or they—function? What are the limits of application? What constitutes the ‘order’ it tracks, and why is it ‘there’ as opposed to, say, here?

Dennett—and he’s entirely aware of this—really doesn’t have much more than suggestions and directions when it comes to these and other questions. As recently as Intuition Pumps, he explicitly described his toolset as “good at nibbling, at roughly locating a few ‘fixed’ points that will help us see the general shape of the problem” (79). He knows the intentional stance cannot explain comprehension, but he also knows it can inflect it, nudge it closer to a biological register, even as it logically prevents the very kind of biological understanding Dennett—and naturalists more generally—take as the primary desideratum. As he writes (once again in 2013):

I propose we simply postpone the worrisome question of what really has a mind, about what the proper domain of the intentional stance is. Whatever the right answer to that question is—if it has a right answer—this will not jeopardize the plain fact that the intentional stance works remarkably well as a prediction method in these and other areas, almost as well as it works in our daily lives as folk-psychologists dealing with other people. This move of mine annoys and frustrates some philosophers, who want to blow the whistle and insist on properly settling the issue of what a mind, a belief, a desire is before taking another step. Define your terms, sir! No, I won’t. that would be premature. I want to explore first the power and the extent of application of this good trick, the intentional stance. Intuition Pumps, 79

But that was then and this is now. From Bacteria to Bach and Back explicitly attempts to make good on this promissory note—to naturalize comprehension, which is to say, to cease merely exploring the scope and power of the intentional stance, and to provide us with a genuine naturalistic explanation. To explain, in the high-dimensional terms of nature, what the hell it is. And the only way to do this is to move beyond the intentional stance, to cease wielding it as a tool, to hoist it on the work-bench, and to adduce the tools that will allows us to take it apart.

By Dennett’s own lights, then, he needs to reverse-engineer the intentional stance. Given his newfound appreciation for heuristic neglect, I understand why he feels the potential for doing this. A great deal of his argument for Cartesian gravity, as we’ve seen, turns on our implicit appreciation of the impact of ‘no information otherwise.’ But sensing the possibility of those tools, unfortunately, does not amount to grasping them. Short explicit thematizations of neglect and sufficiency, he was doomed to remain trapped on the wrong side of the Cartesian event horizon.

On Dennett’s view, intentional stances are homuncular penlights more than homuncular projectors. What they see, ‘reasons,’ lies in the ‘eye of the beholder’ only so far as natural and neural selection provisions the beholder with the specialized competencies required to light them up.

The reasons tracked by evolution I have called ‘free-floating rationales,’ a term that has apparent jangled the nerves of some few thinkers, who suspect I am conjuring up ghosts of some sort. Not at all. Free-floating rationales are no more ghostly or problematic than numbers or centers of gravity. Cubes had eight corners before people invented ways of articulating arithmetic, and asteroids had centers of gravity before there were physicists to dream up the idea and calculate with it. Reasons existed long before there were reasoners. 50

To be more precise, the patterns revealed by the intentional stance exist independent of the intentional stance. For Dennett, the problematic philosophical step—his version of the original philosophical sin of intentionalism—is to think the cognitive bi-stability of these patterns, the fact they appear to be radically different when spied with a first-person penlight versus scientific floodlights, turns on some fundamental ontological difference.

And so, Dennett holds that a wide variety of intentional phenomena are real, just not in the way we have traditionally understood them to be real. This includes reasons, beliefs, functions, desires, rules, choices, purposes, and—pivotally, given critiques like Tom Clark’s—representations. So far as this bestiary solves real world problems, they have to grab hold of the world somehow, don’t they? The suggestion that intentional posits are no more problematic than formal or empirical posits (like numbers and centers of gravity) is something of a Dennettian refrain—as we shall see, it presumes the heuristics involved in intentional cognition possess the same structure as heuristics in other domains, which is simply not the case. Otherwise, so long as intentional phenomena actually facilitate cognition, it seems hard to deny that they broker some kind high-dimensional relationship with the high-dimensional facts of our environment.

So what kind of relationship? Well, Dennett argues that it will be—has to be, given evolution—heuristic. So far as that relationship is heuristic, we can presume that it solves by taking the high-dimensional facts of the matter—what we might call the deep information environment—for granted. We can presume, in other words, that it will ignore the machinery, and focus on cues, available information systematically related to that machinery in ways that enable the prediction/explanation/manipulation of that machinery. In other words, rather than pick out the deep causal patterns responsible it will exploit those available patterns possessing some exploitable correlation to those patterns.

So then where, one might ask, do the real patterns pertaining to ‘representation’ lie in this? What part or parts of this machine-solving machinery gainsays the ‘reality’ of representations? Just where do we find the ‘real patterns’ underwriting the content responsible for individuating our reports? It can’t be the cue, the available information happily correlated to the system or systems requiring solution, simply because the cue is often little more than a special purpose trigger. The Heider-Simmel Illusion, for instance, provides a breathtaking example of just how little information it takes. So perhaps we need to look beyond the cue, to the adventitious correlations binding it to the neglected system or systems requiring solution. But if these are the ‘real patterns’ illuminated by the intentional stance, it’s hard to understand what makes them representational—more than hard in fact, since these relationships consist in regularities, which, as whole philosophical traditions have discovered, are thoroughly incompatible with the distinctively cognitive properties of representation. Well, then, how about the high-dimensional machinery indirectly targeted for solution? After all, representations provide us a heuristic way to understand otherwise complex cognitive relationships. This is where Dennett (and most everyone else, for that matter) seems to think the real patterns lie, the ‘order which is there,’ in the very machinery that heuristic systems are adapted—to avoid! Suddenly, we find ourselves stranded with regularities only indirectly correlated to the cues triggering different heuristic cognitive systems. How could the real patterns gainsaying the reality of representations be the very patterns our heuristic systems are adapted to ignore?

But if we give up on the high-dimensional systems targeted for solution, perhaps we should be looking at the heuristic systems cognizing—perhaps this is where the real patterns gainsaying the reality of representations lie, here, in our heads. But this is absurd, of course, since the whole point of saying representations are real (enough) is to say they’re out there (enough), independent of our determinations one way or another.

No matter how we play this discursive shell game, the structure of heuristic cognition guarantees that we’ll never discover the ‘real pattern pea,’ even with intentional phenomena so apparently manifest (because so useful in both everyday and scientific contexts) as representations. There’s real systems, to be sure, systems that make ‘identifying representations’ as easy as directing attention to the television screen. But those systems are as much here as they are there, making that television screen simply another component in a greater whole. Without the here, there is no there, which is to say, no ‘representation.’ Medial neglect assures the astronomical dimensionality of the here is flattened into near oblivion, stranding cognition with a powerful intuition of a representational there. Thanks to our ancestors, who discovered myriad ways to manipulate information to cue visual cognition out of school, to drape optical illusions across their cave walls, or to press them into lumps of clay, we’ve become so accustomed to imagery as to entirely forget the miraculousness of seeing absent things in things present. Those cues are more or less isomorphic to the actual systems comprising the ancestral problem ecologies visual cognition originally evolved to manage. This is why they work. They recapitulate certain real patterns of information in certain ways—as does your, retina, your optic nerve, and every stage of visual cognition culminating in visual experience. The only thing ‘special’ about the recapitulations belonging to your television screen is their availability, not simply to visual cognition, but to our attempts to cognize/troubleshoot such instances of visual cognition. The recapitulations on the screen, unlike, say, the recapitulations captured by our retinas, are the one thing we can readily troubleshoot should they begin miscuing visual cognition. Neglect ensures the intuition of sufficiency, the conviction that the screen is the basis, as opposed to simply another component in a superordinate whole. So, we fetishize it, attribute efficacies belonging to the system to what is in fact just another component. All its enabling entanglements vanish into the apparent miracle of unmediated semantic relationships to whatever else happens to be available. Look! we cry. Representation…

Figure 1: This image of the Martian surface taken by Viking 1 in 1976 caused a furor on earth, for obvious reasons.

Figure 2: Images such as this one taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal the former to be an example of facial pareidolia, an instance where information cues facial recognition where no faces are to be found. The “Face on Mars” seems be an obvious instance of projection—mere illusion—as opposed to discovery. Until, that is, one realizes that both of these images consist of pixels cuing your visual systems ‘out of school’! Both, in other words, constitute instances of pareidolia: the difference lies in what they enable.

Some apparent squircles, it turns out, are dreadfully useful. So long as the deception is systematic, it can be instrumentalized any which way. Environmental interaction is the basis of neural selection (learning), and neural selection is the basis of environmental domination. What artificial visual cuing—‘representation’—provides is environmental interaction on the cheap, ways to learn from experience without having to risk or endure experience. A ‘good trick’ indeed!

This brings us to a great fault-line running through the entirety of Dennett’s corpus. The more instrumental a posit, the more inclined he’s to say it’s ‘real.’ But when critics accuse him of instrumentalism, he adverts to the realities underwriting the instrumentalities, what enables them to work, to claim a certain (ambiguous, he admits) brand of realism. But as should now be clear, what he elides when he does this is nothing less than the structure of heuristic cognition, which blindly exploits the systematic correlations between information available and the systems involved to solve those systems as far as constraints on availability and capacity allow.

The reason he can elide the structure of heuristic cognition (and so find his real patterns argument convincing) lies, pretty clearly, I think, in the conflation of human intentional cognition (which is radically heuristic) with the intentional stance. In other words, he confuses what’s actually happening in instances of intentional cognition with what seems to be happening in instances of intentional cognition, given neglect. He runs afoul Cartesian gravity. “We tend to underestimate the strength of the forces that distort our imaginations,” he writes, “especially when confronted by irreconcilable insights that are ‘undeniable’” (22). Given medial neglect, the inability to cognize our contemporaneous cognizing, we are bound to intuit the order as ‘there’ (as ‘lateral’) even when we, like Dennett, should know better. Environmentalization is, as Hume observed, the persistent reflex, the sufficiency effect explaining our default tendency to report medial artifacts, features belonging to the signal, as genuine environmental phenomena, or features belonging to the source.

As a heuristic device, an assumption circumventing the brute fact of medial neglect, the environmentalization heuristic possesses an adaptive problem ecology—or as Dennett would put it, ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ applications. The environmentalization heuristic, in other words, possesses adaptive application conditions. What Dennett would want to argue, I’m sure, is that ‘representations’ are no more or less heuristic than ‘centres of gravity,’ and that we are no more justified in impugning the reality of the one than the reality of the other. “I don’t see why my critics think their understanding about what really exists is superior to mine,” he complains at one point in From Bacteria to Bach and Back, “so I demure” (224). And he’s entirely right on this score: no one has a clue as to what attributing reality amounts to. As he writes regarding the reality of beliefs in “Real Patterns”:

I have claimed that beliefs are best considered to be abstract objects rather like centers of gravity. Smith considers centers of gravity to be useful fictions while Dretske considers them to be useful (and hence?) real abstractions, and each takes his view to constitute a criticism of my position. The optimistic assessment of these opposite criticisms is that they cancel each other out; my analogy must have hit the nail on the head. The pessimistic assessment is that more needs to be said to convince philosophers that a mild and intermediate sort of realism is a positively attractive position, and not just the desperate dodge of ontological responsibility it has sometimes been taken to be. I have just such a case to present, a generalization and extension of my earlier attempts, via the concept of a pattern. 29

Heuristic Neglect Theory, however, actually put us in a position to make a great deal of sense of ‘reality.’ We can see, rather plainly, I think, the disanalogy between ‘centres of gravity’ and ‘beliefs,’ the disanalogy that leaps out as soon as we consider how only the latter patterns require the intentional stance (or more accurately, intentional cognition) to become salient. Both are heuristic, certainly, but in quite different ways.

We can also see the environmentalization heuristic at work in the debate between whether ‘centres of gravity’ are real or merely instrumental, and Dennett’s claim that they lie somewhere in-between. Do ‘centres of gravity’ belong to the order which is there, or do we simply project them in useful ways? Are they discoveries, or impositions? Why do we find it so natural to assume either the one or the other, and so difficult to imagine Dennett’s in-between or ‘intermediate’ realism? Why is it so hard conceiving of something half-real, half-instrumental?

The fundamental answer lies in the combination of frame and medial neglect. Our blindness to the enabling dimension of cognition renders cognition, from the standpoint of metacognition, an all but ethereal exercise. ‘Transparency’ is but one way of thematizing the rank incapacity generally rendering environmentalization such a good trick. “Of course, centres of gravity lie out there!” We are more realists than instrumentalists. The more we focus on the machinery of cognition, however, the more dimensional the medial becomes, the more efficacious, and the more artifactual whatever we’re focusing on begins to seem. Given frame neglect, however, we fail to plug this higher-dimensional artifactuality into the superordinate systems encompassing all instances of cognition, thus transforming gears into tools, fetishizing those instances, in effect. “Of course, centres of gravity organize out there!” We become instrumentalists.

If these incompatible intuitions are all that the theoretician has to go on, then Dennett’s middle way can only seem tendentious, an attempt to have it both ways. What makes Dennett’s ‘mild or intermediate’ realism so difficult to imagine is nothing less than Cartesian gravity, which is to say, the compelling nature of the cognitive illusions driving our metacognitive intuitions either way. Squares viewed on this angle become circles viewed on that. There’s no in-between! This is why Dennett, like so many revolutionary philosophical thinkers before him, is always quick to reference the importance of imagination, of envisioning how things might be otherwise. He’s always bumping against the limits of our shackles, calling attention to the rattle in the dark. Implicitly, he understands the peril that neglect, by way of sufficiency, poses to our attempts to puzzle through these problems.

But only implicitly, and as it turns out (given tools so blunt and so complicit as the intentional stance), imperfectly. On Heuristic Neglect Theory, the practical question of what’s real versus what’s not is simply one of where and when the environmentalization heuristic applies, and the theoretical question of what’s ‘really real’ and what’s ‘merely instrumental’ is simply an invitation to trip into what is obviously (given the millennial accumulation of linguistic wreckage) metacognitive crash space. When it comes to ‘centres of gravity,’ environmentalization—or the modifier ‘real’—applies because of the way the posit economizes otherwise available, as opposed to unavailable, information. Heuristic posits centres of gravity might be, but ones entirely compatible with the scientific examination of deep information environments.

Such is famously not the case with posits like ‘belief’ or ‘representation’—or for that matter, ‘real’! The heuristic mechanisms underwriting environmentalization are entirely real, as is the fact that these heuristics do not simply economize otherwise available information, but rather compensate for structurally unavailable information. To this extent, saying something is ‘real’—acknowledging the applicability of the environmentalization heuristic—involves the order here as much as the order there, so far as it compensates for structural neglect, rather than mere ignorance or contingent unavailability. ‘Reality’ (like ‘truth’) communicates our way of selecting and so sorting environmental interactions while remaining almost entirely blind to the nature of those environmental interactions, which is to say, neglecting our profound continuity with those environments.

At least as traditionally (intentionally) conceived, reality does not belong to the real, though reality-talk is quite real, and very useful. It pays to communicate the applicability of environmentalization, if only to avoid the dizzying cognitive challenges posed by the medial, enabling dimensions of cognition. Given the human circuit, truth-talk can save lives. The apparent paradox of such declarations—such as saying, for instance, that it’s true that truth does not exist—can be seen as a direct consequence of frame and medial neglect, one that, when thought carefully through step by empirically tractable step, was pretty much inevitable. We find ourselves dumbfounding for good reason!

The unremarkable fact is that the heuristic systems we resort to when communicating and trouble-shooting cognition are just that: heuristic systems we resort to when communicating and trouble-shooting cognition. And what’s more, they possess no real theoretical power. Intentional idioms are all adapted to shallow information ecologies. They comprise the communicative fraction of compensatory heuristic systems adapted not simply to solve astronomically complicated systems on the cheap, but absent otherwise instrumental information belonging to our deep information environments. Applying those idioms to theoretical problems amounts to using shallow resources to solve the natural deeps. The history of philosophy screams underdetermination for good reason! There’s no ‘fundamental ontology’ beneath, no ‘transcendental functions’ above, and no ‘language-games’ or ‘intentional stances’ between, just the machinations of meat, which is why strokes and head injuries and drugs produce the boggling cognitive effects they do.

The point to always keep in mind is that every act of cognition amounts to a systematic meeting of at least two functionally distinct systems, the one cognized, the other cognizing. The cognitive facts of life entail that all cognition remains, in some fundamental respect, insensitive to the superordinate system explaining the whole let alone the structure and activity of cognition. This inability to cognize our position within superordinate systems (frame neglect) or to cognize our contemporaneous cognizing (medial neglect) is what renders the so-called first-person (intentional stance) homuncular, blind to its own structure and dynamics, which is to say, oblivious to the role here plays ordering ‘there.’ This is what cognitive science needs to internalize, the way our intentional and phenomenal idioms steer us blindly, absent any high-dimensional input, toward solutions that, when finally mapped, will bear scant resemblance to the metacognitive shadows parading across our cave walls. And this is what philosophy needs to internalize as well, the way their endless descriptions and explanations, all the impossible figures—squircles—comprising the great bestiary of traditional reflection upon the nature of the soul, are little more than illusory artifacts of their inability to see their inability to see. To say something is ‘real’ or ‘true’ or ‘factual’ or ‘represents,’ or what have you is to blindly cue blind orientations in your fellows, to lock them into real but otherwise occluded systems, practically and even experimentally efficacious circuits, not to invoke otherworldly functions or pick out obscure-but-real patterns like ‘qualia’ or ‘representations.’

The question of ‘reality’ is itself a heuristic question. As horribly counter-intuitive as all this must sound, we really have no way of cognizing the high-dimensional facts of our environmental orientation, and so no choice but to problem-solve those facts absent any inkling of them. The issue of ‘reality,’ for us, is a radically heuristic one. As with all heuristic matters, the question of application becomes paramount: where does externalization optimize, and where does it crash? It optimizes where the cues relied upon generalize, provide behavioural handles that can be reverse-engineered—‘reduced’—absent reverse-engineering us. It optimizes, in other words, wherever frame and medial neglect do not matter. It crashes, however, where the cues relied upon compensate, provide behavioural handles that can only be reverse-engineered by reverse-engineering ourselves.

And this explains the ‘gobsmacking fact’ with which we began, how we can source the universe all the way back to first second, and yet remain utterly confounded by our ability to do so. Short cognitive science, compensatory heuristics were all that we possessed when it came to question of ourselves. Only now do we find ourselves in a position to unravel the nature of the soul.

The crazy thing to understand, here, the point Dennett continually throws himself toward in From Bacteria to Bach and Back only to be drawn back out on the Cartesian tide, is that there is no first-person. There is no original or manifest or even scientific ‘image’: these all court ‘imaginative distortion’ because they, like the intentional stance, are shallow ecological artifacts posturing as deep information truths. It is not the case that, “[w]e won’t have a complete science of consciousness until we can align our manifest-image identifications of mental states by their contents with scientific-image identifications of the subpersonal information structures and events that are causally responsible for generating the details of the user-illusion we take ourselves to operate in” (367)—and how could it be, given our abject inability to even formulate ‘our manifest-image identifications,’ to agree on the merest ‘detail of our user-illusion’? There’s a reason Tom Clark emphasizes this particular passage in his defense of qualia! If it’s the case that Dennett believes a ‘complete science of consciousness’ requires the ‘alignment’ of metacognitive reports with subpersonal mechanisms then he is as much a closet mysterian as any other intentionalist. There’s simply too many ways to get lost in the metacognitive labyrinth, as the history of intentional philosophy amply shows.

Dennett needs only continue following the heuristic tracks he’s started down in From Bacteria to Bach and Back—and perhaps recall his own exhortation to imagine—to see as much. Imagine how it was as a child, living blissfully unaware of philosophers and scientists and their countless confounding theoretical distinctions and determinations. Imagine the naïveté, not of dwelling within this or that ‘image,’ but within an ancestral shallow information ecology, culturally conditioned to be sure, but absent the metacognitive capacity required to run afoul sufficiency effects. Imagine thinking without ‘having thoughts,’ knowing without ‘possessing knowledge,’ choosing without ‘exercising freedom.’ Imagine this orientation and how much blinkered metacognitive speculation and rationalization is required to transform it into something resembling our apparent ‘first-person perspective’—the one that commands scarcely any consensus beyond exceptionalist conceit.

Imagine how much blinkered metacognitive speculation and rationalization is required to transform it into the intentional stance.

So, what, then, is the intentional stance? An illusory artifact of intentional cognition, understood in the high-dimensional sense of actual biological mechanisms (both naturally and neurally selected), not the low-dimensional, contentious sense of an ‘attitude’ or ‘perspective.’ The intentional stance represents an attempt to use intentional cognition to fundamentally explain intentional cognition, and in this way, it is entirely consonant with the history of philosophy as a whole. It differs—perhaps radically so—in the manner it circumvents the metacognitive tendency to report intentional phenomena as intrinsic (self-sufficient), but it nevertheless remains a way to theorize cognition and experience via, as Dennett himself admits, resources adapted to their practical troubleshooting.

The ‘Cartesian wound’ is no more than theatrical paint, stage make-up, and so something to be wiped away, not healed. There is no explanatory gap because there is no first-person—there never has been, apart from the misapplication of radically heuristic, practical problem-solving systems to the theoretical question of the soul. Stripped of the first-person, consciousness becomes a natural phenomenon like any other, baffling only for its proximity, for overwriting the very page it attempts to read. Heuristic Neglect Theory, in other words, provides a way for us to grasp what we are, what we always have been: a high-dimensional physical system possessing selective sensitivities and capacities embedded in other high-dimensional physical systems. This is what you’re experiencing now, only so far as your sensitivities and capacities allow. This, in other words, is this… You are fundamentally inscrutable unto yourself outside practical problem-solving contexts. Everything else, everything apparently ‘intentional’ or ‘phenomenal’ is simply ‘seems upon reflection.’ There is no ‘manifest image,’ only a gallery of competing cognitive illusions, reflexes to report leading to the crash space we call intentional philosophy. The only ‘alignment’ required is that between our shallow information ecology and our deep information environments: the ways we do much with little, both with reference to each other and with ourselves. This is what you reference when describing a concert to your buddies. This is what you draw on when you confess your secrets, your feelings, your fears and aspirations. Not a ‘mind,’ not a ‘self-model,’ nor even a ‘user illusion,’ but the shallow cognitive ecology underwriting your brain’s capacity to solve and report itself and others.

There’s a positively vast research project buried in this outlook, and as much would become plain, I think, if enough souls could bring themselves see past the fact that it took an institutional outsider to discover. The resolutely post-intentional empirical investigation of the human has scarcely begun.