Natural selection is an automatic reason-finder; it “discovers” and “endorses” and “focuses” reasons over many generations. The reasons tracked by evolution I have called “free-floating rationales,” a term that has apparently jangled the nerves of more than a few thinkers, who suspect I am conjuring up ghosts of some sort, strange immaterial ideas that have no business appearing in a sober materialist’s account of reality. Not at all. Free-floating rationales are no more ghostly or problematic than numbers or centers of gravity. There were nine planets before people invented ways of articulating arithmetic, and asteroids had centers of gravity before there were physicists to dream up the idea and calculate with it. It is a mistake to confuse numbers with the numerals (Arabic or Roman or whatever) that we use as their names. Numerals are human inventions; numbers are not. Reasons, in the sense I am using the term, are like numbers, not numerals. We should all be happy to speak of the reasons uncovered by evolution before they were ever expressed or represented by human investigators or any other minds. Consider the strikingly similar constructions in the figures facing page 240.
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
