I listened to this whole book, then went back and listened to the first half again, to try and cement an understanding of his argument which could be fairly complicated. The goal of the book was to give a convincing explanation of Scientific Materialism. So instead of “A Case for Christ” this would be “A Case for Darwin”. It was pretty nice to hear the best arguments for materialism from a guy who has spent much of his life studying the problem, but it took extra concentration to keep up as the reasoning was so different from the usual hippy pan psychic stuff I’ve been reading of late. Here are some thoughts,
Two Kinds of Why When someone asks why something is the way it is, are asking two different things. One answer describes the process of how something came to be, the other answer is the reason for the way the thing is. He labels this difference as the how come vs what for distinction. For example, if you were to ask, “why do I have a fever?” the how come answer is that your body is creating many cells which are working harder than usual which raises your body temperature. The “what for” answer is that your body is does this to fight infections. This is an important distinction to keep in mind when considering natural selection. The evolutionary process always has a “how come” reason but think of the “what for” reason as a graduation. Only when a series of “how comes” align to create a meaningful difference do the how comes get a what for reason.
Things can do things without “having” the reason Agents can operate in a system to achieve really complex results without “having” the reason for what they are doing. The example in the book was to contrast Gaudi’s Barcelona Cathedral with termite mounds. The many termites work together to create this complicated structure, but not one of the termites knows why they are doing what they are doing (as far as we know
People/Daniel Dennett