Daniel Dennett Kinds of Minds

In Daniel Dennett’s book, Kinds of Minds, Dennett’s theory regarding the origin of minds is difficult to disprove given the large body of studies, research, and evidence for the evolution of creatures over time.   It is obvious that we have evolved from what Dennett refers to as “self-replicating macromolecules” (p. 20), which evolved into gradually more and more complex life forms, until we could begins to call them organisms, creatures, plants, animals, and finally, humans.   This evolutionary perspective hinges on the scientific perspective of empirical study, and is the section of his overarching theory that revolves around the least amount of guesswork and speculation, and is not to be disputed here.   What is to be disputed is the far more open-ended, less stable, and more interesting topic of the nature of our minds as humans, and the minds of whatever else has minds that are similar enough to ours, (whether we ever identify them as such or not) that are able to think similarly to the way we do. Dennett’s beliefs and ideas about the nature and origin of our thoughts are questionable at best.   His contention that our thoughts just randomly bubble up to the surface without any sort of way to select and sort through them is off base and too extreme.   His idea that a few thoughts or even just a single thought are picked out of the endless sea of various thoughts, and that is the thought that gets chosen, quite randomly, and is the one that is sent to our brain and gets acted on is premature given the lack of conclusive knowledge in this area, simplistic, and plain wrong.   We have the ability to greatly affect the result of this supposedly random process.
We deserve more credit for our thoughts.   Just look at our ability to change our thought patterns over time.   It is true that the majority of the time for the majority of people, their thoughts appear to magically bubble up with little control on the part of the person in question, but this is a habit they have...