Sean Carroll

And that seems crucial because it grounds intentional explanation in objective functional organization rather than mere observer projection.

Do you think Dennett is sometimes unfairly characterized as a pure instrumentalist about agency and intentionality when his actual position was closer to the idea that higher-level patterns are real insofar as they provide stable predictive and explanatory power, much like your own poetic naturalism?

Yeah, in some sense, I'm not the perfect person to ask this about because when you're asking questions like, is someone sometimes unfairly characterized?

Sometimes, right?

I certainly don't have the data on how often that happens or how many people think that way.

But there's a very general tendency in many intellectual circles where you're dealing with difficult questions that when someone has a nuanced view on a difficult intellectual question that is a little bit related to a simplistic view but is much more nuanced than it, people will inevitably attribute to them the simplistic view that is closest to their nuanced view.

Because people don't carry around in their brains

a very accurate representation of other people's nuanced views okay it's just too much work you know you got to get every keep everything straight even if you like really work to understand somebody and then you think okay i've done it like this person actually has a quite an intricate view and i'm going to try to get it right like a few days later it's gone you're back to thinking of the the sort of cartoon straw man version

So Dennett has always tried to be very straightforward about physical stuff making up the world being the fundamental things that exist and higher level things emerge from them.

Although he didn't use the word emergence a lot, but that was definitely the word I would use to describe what he was talking about.

And people absolutely do point at positions like that and claim, oh, you don't think that tables and chairs exist.

OK.

And he didn't think that.

I mean, sorry, he didn't think the tables and chairs don't exist.

As you say, he thought that they do exist.

They're real patterns in the world.

Now, I also, and I had this disagreement with Dan.

I tried to talk him out of it, but he was kind of too willing to feed that misimpression by referring to himself, and Keith Frankish and others also have this label for themselves, illusionists about consciousness.

There's a bunch of people out there, and Dennett was one, and Frankish is another one, who say, I am an illusionist about consciousness.

And if you say, oh, so you mean you think consciousness is an illusion and they will go, oh, no, no, I don't mean that.