kennyc wrote:"Unless dualism or vitalism is true (in which case you have some extra, secret ingredient in you),
you are made of robots--or what comes to the same thing, a collection of trillions of macromolecular
machines. And all of these are ultimately descended from the original macros. So something made of
robots can exhibit genuine consciousness, or genuine intentionality, because you do if anything does."
- Daniel Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Maybe you missed
my post where I quoted a
Wiki entry on Owen Barfield:
Barfield argues that if, as physics suggests, ordinary appearances—including for example colors, sounds, and smells—are a kind of subjective response of the human organism to an unknown underlying base of reality, and if what underlies our phenomena and is real independently of us is only what is suggested by science's experimental hypotheses of a subatomic world; if, that is, we must conclude that there is no such thing as unseen color, unheard sound, or unfelt solidity, because physics tells us the only thing existing independently of us is a subsensible or supersensible base symbolized in some detail by particle theory—then in that case other sciences besides physics, in particular those sciences that deal with the pre-human past, must be profoundly reconceived.
For example, the evolutionary biologist and the archaeologist talk about the pre-human, and even pre-life distant past as if color, sound, solidity, and a phenomenal world rather like that of modern Western humanity were all present even before the advent of life and consciousness, though physics tells us that all that is present in the absence of human beings or life is what can be described quantitatively by the particle theories of physics. Barfield emphasizes that contradiction between physics on the one hand, and on the other, sciences that offer an account of the earth before life and consciousness evolved. Barfield draws out the implications and argues we must learn to conceive of an evolution of phenomena that first begins at the point where life and consciousness manifest. The evolution of phenomena is correlative to the evolution of consciousness. Prior to the point where consciousness, and in particular human consciousness, comes into existence, we should not naively speak as if phenomena similar to our own existed.
As he writes in
Saving the Appearances:
Whatever may be thought about the "unrepresented" background of our perceptions, the familiar world which we see and know around us-the blue sky with white clouds in it, the noise of a waterfall or a motor bus, the shapes of flowers and their scent, the gesture and utterance of animals and the faces of our friends-the world too, which (apart from the special inquiry of physics) experts of all kinds methodically investigate-is a system of collective representations. The time comes when we must either accept this as the truth about the world or reject the theories of physics as an elaborate delusion. We cannot have it both ways.
If you are unsure of what he means by "collective representations", see
hereIn speaking about robots and macromolecular machines, Dennett is transferring modern, human, Western consciousness to a time long before it came into existence. This is unacceptable anthropomorphism.
by 
