Inversions of reasoning
Daniel Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back is a whirlwind of thought.
It will shock you with its ideas baked in the sheer austerity of Dennett's clear thought and comprehensive arguments. The span of subject is wide; Dennett glides and skates across a thousand aspects of the why and how of the human mind with a penchant for pulling in fields like computer science and evolutionary biology to illustrate his ideas.
One of the glittering gems mined from the book is the idea of "comprehension without competence". An inversion of the idea of doing-through-knowing, top-down design of the kind a computer programmer might be familiar with, it emerges gradually with no plan. It is generally unfocused, yet paradoxically expert, seemingly, at the narrow needs of survival.
It has been argued that GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned Artifical Intelligence), when applied to sophisticated computer programs or robots, is not a reflection of the entity's intelligence or understanding, rather it is a reflection of the programmer's. The logic is applicable in the other direction: microbes and plants and insects do not reflect their own hard-won intelligence and application of it, they are designed to perform smart behaviors at the right time. The design may be elegant and sophisticated, but the designer (the ecosphere of entropy-warped matter that bore their iterated-upon generations) is no more intelligent than they.
According to Dennett, the rationale and reasons for behavior are no less true for the lack of intelligence; the how and the why are not necessarily dependent on top-down design: there is no need for a predictor of need or an imparter of reason. The Opposum really does play dead because it will indeed be left alone by predators who prefer their meat fresh. The bird weaves its nest just so to reap the benefits for brooding and hatching eggs. The antelope stots to actively signal their fitness to the persuer: "Don't chase me, I am sleek and fast. Find an easier meal." These remain the explanations of these phenomena even if the participants and exhibitors, if miraculously given the power of speech, couldn't tell you. We paint giant murals of material reason with the most simplistic of brushes: comprehension.
Even we, us frontal-lobe-toting, intelligence-gifted humans, suffer from a lack of comprehension. A child gradually drifts through their formative years; it's all "doing" without much "knowing". We are ignorant of the rules of our native tongue's grammar while simultaneously quite capable of breaching that veil of ignorance and learning it, or another spoken language's. The light of comprehension eventually shines brighter and brighter, until reflection of knowledge and acquisition of concept emerges with form and grounding. Yet even then, we only grasp and have access to the shallows; we are still only complex cellular automata. The capacity for a shining light of comprehension does not require the embracement of it at all times; we benefit from not needing to know everything to function. We go from "hard-wired" to "higher-order" at some stage in our development and at various points in our endeavors, just as across species this sort of thing seems to emerge. The capacity to abstractly apply our lessons to new scenarios, new materials and new topics is uniquely human. We have set the pinaccle at our scale.
