Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Metaphysics

[Neo-Scholastic]

Agreed. He's not stupid; he's a zombie. It's the people who take him seriously that I wonder about.

Actually, those are are the logical conclusions of naturalism.

I'd assume you're not a naturalist. Haha. What do you mean by zombie? Just curious of your whole take on the subject.

I call Dennett a zombie because his speculations lead him to conclude that mental properties, like qualia and intentionality, are illusions. His claim is that intentionality, which applies to the whole brain, can be broken down into smaller parts. As such, specific brain functions contribute to the overall sense of intentionality with smaller, more specialized intentions. He carries this process all the way down to individual neurons and concludes that intentionality disappeares. Poof. The problem with this is that even a very small bit of something is still something, so you cannot completely get rid of intentionality. He intends to show that intentions do not exist. That makes Dennett a modern day sophist. He uses verbal slight of hand to distract from his circular logic. Thus you have knowing subjects incapable of actually knowing. There goes reason. Poof.

If you extend this naturalistic logic to morality you get a similar result, since the distinction between living and inanimate things disappears. Life becomes a stable electro-chemical reaction. So if humans are moral agents, it is the result of an amoral physical process. That is a contradiction.

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Reason is an emergent, evolved property of the brain.

Other than the human mind, please provide an example of another emergent property. Functions do not count because those are names applied to physical processes and not qualities in-themselves.