I like to imagine that Dan Dennett started his celebrated (1988) "Quining qualia" as an attempt to publish a journal article in the manner of a comic, Borges story. (In fairness to my teacher, this was in the age before blogs!) How else to explain the erudite reference to Descartes in the first paragraph of the essay, and then the mock-ironic, scholarly reference to the
'What's neat about Dennett's interpretation of Darwinism is that it explicitly, "chance and necessity," combines the doctrine of necessity (Spinozism) with the doctrine of chance (Epicureanism).'
Dennett's view of the centrality of undirected mutations to evolution could be seen as sort of metaphorically similar to the Epicurean doctrine of the atomic swerve, but his view is that indeterminism at the level of fundamental physics is not really necessary for Darwinian evolution--for example, on p. 150 of Elbow Room he writes "Would evolution occur in a deterministic world, a Laplacean world where mutation was caused by a nonrandom process? Yes, for what evolution requires is an unpattered generator of raw material, not an uncaused generator of raw material. Quantum-level effects may indeed play a role in the generation of mutations, but such a role is not required by theory."
'What's neat about Dennett's interpretation of Darwinism is that it explicitly, "chance and necessity," combines the doctrine of necessity (Spinozism) with the doctrine of chance (Epicureanism).'
Dennett's view of the centrality of undirected mutations to evolution could be seen as sort of metaphorically similar to the Epicurean doctrine of the atomic swerve, but his view is that indeterminism at the level of fundamental physics is not really necessary for Darwinian evolution--for example, on p. 150 of Elbow Room he writes "Would evolution occur in a deterministic world, a Laplacean world where mutation was caused by a nonrandom process? Yes, for what evolution requires is an unpattered generator of raw material, not an uncaused generator of raw material. Quantum-level effects may indeed play a role in the generation of mutations, but such a role is not required by theory."