Comments by "Peter deWolf" (@StoneShards) on "Exploring the Philosophical and Scientific | Dr. Daniel Dennett | EP 438" video.

So...science proceeds from religion, and precipitates the formation of "secular" society that recognizes science in the place of religion? I see political interference with the conduct of science precipitating a "willing blindness" to the religious implications of scientific frontiers, like the "quantum" realm underlying the phenomenal reality that science hides behind as it avoids the sight of God (i.e. religion). A science unencumbered by politics would turn itself to explicating and exploring religion quite naturally. Basic religious indoctrination facilitates the development of critical sensibilities, like self-control and imagination, love and righteousness--civilizational values.
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"Intelligible order"...intelligibility is an order imposed by intelligence upon the "unknown", the disordered. The perception bears the mark of the perceiver on the unknown. We can only meet the unknown in terms of the known; that's how order propagates, transforming the unknown into the known as it goes. It's the RESPONSE to a stimulus that determines what the stimulus is.
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'Round about 42:00, Jordan says he approaches a problem "with humility". This may well be the proper posture for thinking about God, or praying, the solution coming, then, by divine inspiration. But all "problems" arise from our rooting in the physical world, the denizens of which have no special regard for human beings, and, in themselves, do not warrant your prostration before them. Exactly the opposite attitude is proper: insistent expectation in the style of a "demand". These beings of involutionary activity bear the one spirit of God into manifestation by differentiation in progressively greater densities--they are the cosmos construction workers. They are capable only of obedience to the spirit of God; their natures are pure and raw, but limited to their specific purposes. By virtue of our physical bodies, we have intimate intercourse with these beings as "natural influences" within us. We know ourselves by knowing them, as they govern sensation, emotion, and, partially, thought--the kind of thought that follows upon observation and identification, let's call it "articulation"; not the higher-level function that solves problems.
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The guest posits "the myth of God" with an arrogant certainty that I find scientifically offensive. It shouldn't be necessary for science to deny the existence of "God"! And, indeed, true science does not! Secular science, science with a political axe to grind, does! A free science will ultimately find God.
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"The intentional object is whatever the thought is about", says Dennett, at 08:15, hinting at the relationship between his notions of "intentionality" and "aboutness". He says the Easter Bunny does "not exist", creating logical problems, which, for some reason, he says can be "set aside". At 8:40, "We have to explain how information that's in our brains can be about things in the world and also about things that don't even exist." My immediate question is always the same: Why? What value would that explanation provide? Dennett seems caught up in the problem of the general invalidity of logical negation: "Nothing cannot exist". Everything exists; there is only truth. Falsity is an illusion of negation. That which is cannot cease to be, since its existence has impressed itself in the substratum of reality that participated in its existence...like footprints of our passage in the sands of reality. The universe REMEMBERS EVERYTHING! That's "where" your memories reside, not in your brain. The brain is part of a memory recall system, not the repository of memories, any more than your radio receiver contains what it emits from its speaker.
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What is the "Love of God", but the very tendency of association?! Everything feels this tendency, sympathetically or antipathetically. The "psyche" is a resonant system; it "intones" the state of awareness, and, in vibratory response, associations form--quite organically. Complexes that have formulated stimulus/response cycles resonate to these intonations. These resonances translate into "images" of the identity of the stimulated complexes that appear, mentally, as "associations" to experiential memory--"food for thought", as it were. Contextualizing the various images of associations is an abstraction process involving the "higher mind", as opposed to a "lower mind" occupied primarily with the "translation" process. This is where all the trouble starts. 🧐
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Jordan's doing a great job. Dennett's a tough nut! 😊 What is "the good"? The good is "order". What is "order"? Order is the meaningful arrangement of chaos. What is "chaos"? Chaos is the disordered randomness of possibility residing in the "unknown". Chaos manifests an influence of disorder, which produces "novelty" of conception. When you get to the border of what you know, you find the unknown; but because of the inchoate nature of the unknown, you can't meet it face-to-face. You have to give it form in order to meet it. The form arises from the cloud of associations (from experiential memory) elicited from the context of this unknown's appearance. It's a basic balancing act: the pressure of disorder pushes specific disorder into an ordered context; order resists, by...resolving the binaries posed by the effects of the disordering influence. The binary of "light" and "dark" resolves on a scale of "illumination", for example. Resolving the binary into a trinary introduces context into what was a tug-of-war, creating a sort of hierarchical supervisory function. "Judgement" IS "the balance".
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I've found that the complete understanding of the "problem" manifests the "solution" in an "ah-HA!", eureka, moment. The perfect question produces its own answer. At 41:14, Jordan undertakes to explain what happens in "thinking", using himself as example. "Thoughts make themselves manifest in relationship to our aim", Jordan says. I don't care for the attribution of agency to thoughts in the matter of their own creation! And "aim", the arrow of intent, is "intention"; so, "Thoughts manifest in relationship to our intention", captures the fact of the matter succinctly. In my terms, though, thoughts manifest in resonant RESPONSE to our intention. Intention pings for a match, and the entire psyche resonates to the tone of that intention, eliciting a sympathetic resonant response as elements of psyche are naturally able, according to their inherent potency and "frequency" match to the intention. Intend the image of a boat, for instance, and a flood of boat-related imagery from experiential memory bustles to the fore. The memories that were physical have special vibrancy, as the resonances affect the physical body. Now, what do you do with all these boat images floating around? If you had a purpose in pondering the boat, you proceed to organize the images according to your purpose. However, if you've been woolgathering and had no purpose in intending the boat, you'll probably go on to consider whatever images happen to present, for reasons you have no clue about, until...eventually, there is an illumination. "Gee, I've been seeing the same images over and over again! Why? What does this process signify?"
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We learn to trust what we know to be true. This is usually ourselves; we know nothing better than we know ourselves...what "doubt" and "certainty" feel like, what the preponderance of our experience signifies. Ultimately, we are left with the responsibility for being our own final authority; with the trust that our experience is true.
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