94 J.J. Haldane
Engaging as it is, I suggest that this proposal fails because of a fallacy
of equivocation committed in the sentence: ‘The representations are themselves,
as it were, less representational.’ To say that something is ‘less representational’
is ambiguous between claiming that it represents less and maintaining that
it is less a representation. Dennett hopes to ‘discharge the homunculi’ by
progressive reduction of representational content; but the fact that some
representations contain less information does not on that account make them
any less representations. The non-representation – representation distinction is
not the same as the much representation – less representation distinction; and
one cannot explain the former in terms of the latter, since however little
intentional content a representation carries, it is still on that very account a
representation.
Commenting on this objection Kathy Wilkes proposes that it can easily
be set aside:
For Haldane, intentionality, or the existence of representations, is all or
nothing... I find this impossible to believe... We need only look to
neuroscience; where time and again the ‘homuncular strategy’ is bearing
fruit. Low-level function can be called ‘expecting/comparing’, ‘detecting’,
‘synthesizing’; as we go down the hierarchy the degree of intentionality fades,
the representations do indeed (paceHaldane) become more limited (cf. the
primary visual cortex, where cell-columns ‘detect horizontals’, or ‘detect colour
contrasts’).^11However, if one compares this passage with that from Dennett it should
be clear that it invites exactly the same response. The intentionalizing of
low-level functions may be methodologically convenient, but if a regressive
homuncularism is to avoided it has to be discharged. Mention of ‘fading’
intentionality does not begin to achieve this when, as here, it is explained in
terms of the representations becoming more limited. If one process detects
both horizontals and verticals, and another detects only horizontals, then the
second is to that extent more limited, but it is not thereby any less a process
of detection.
Recall now the response that although the evolution of species proceeds
by cumulative selection which presupposes reproduction, which itself could
only plausibly be the product of cumulative selection, nonetheless the process
could begin with proto-replication. What is envisaged is quantities of primit-
ive organic matter ‘giving rise’ in one way or another to further quantities
that resemble the originals, and so on. The inescapable question, however,
is whether this initial process involves the exercise of powers of reproduction,
be they ever so limited. To say that it does, intending by this a realist non-
reductionist interpretation, is to ascribe teleology to the process and to admit