Integral Options Cafe: The Failure of the Loud Atheists

Thank you Integral Options Cafe for not lumping Dan Dennett in with the fundamentalist, or Loud, athiests - a habit I've been very keen to dispell recently. Haidt's essay is a good example of where people are mis-understanding Dennett.

As you say in The Failure of the Loud Atheists the biggest flaw of the atheist fundamentalists "is their failure to distinguish between objective reality and subjective reality". Now Dennett, in both 'Breaking the Spell' and 'Consciousness Explained' is playing a completely different game and to roll him up into the angry atheist crowd is mis-reading him almost completely.

Dennett recognises interiors and exteriors. He recognises evolution and development. He recognises the difference between left and right-hand quadrants (although wouldn't use those terms). And he states clearly that 3rd person methodologies have a large part to play in understanding interiors. He's got at least Zone1 and Zone2 of the 8 Integral Methodological Pluralism zones covered and he spotted the blind spot that phenomenology has to structuralism and 3rd person methods. His hetrophenomenological method addressed the problem back in the 1980s.

This, from his latest TED talk, says it nicely.

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