[♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] ROBERT LAWRENCE KUHN:<i>
"Reports of my demise
are not exaggerated."</i> <i> That was the tweet from
philosopher Hubert Dreyfus,</i> <i>which I read on April 22, 2017.</i> <i> It was obviously a play on
Mark Twain's classic remark,</i> <i> "The report of my death
was an exaggeration."</i> <i> I, like others that day, at
first thought the tweet a fake.</i> <i> A trolling, cringe-inducing,
web kind of joke</i> <i> that someone was playing
on Bert, as he was called.</i> <i> But then in an instant,
I feared the jarring truth.</i> <i> Bert had in fact died,</i> <i> and the tweet was a sly joke
that he was playing on us.</i> <i> He pulled off a beauty.</i> <i> How characteristic
of the renowned philosopher</i> <i> and legendary teacher,
reporting his own death</i> <i> on his own terms
in his warm, quixotic style.</i> ( ♪♪♪ ) <i> A decade earlier,
in the formative days</i> <i> of</i> Closer to Truth,<i> I'd spent
a delightful day with Bert,</i> <i> asking him
my favorite questions.</i> <i> Consciousness,
artificial intelligence,</i> <i> God, creation, religion,
body and soul,</i> <i> existence, meaning of life,</i> <i> all from the perspective
of phenomenology,</i> <i> the privileging of experience,</i> <i> what the world feels like
to conscious beings,</i> <i> Bert's intellectual passion.</i> <i> I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn,
and in this special episode</i> <i>of</i> Closer to Truth,<i> we offer our
tribute to Hubert Dreyfus.</i> [♪♪♪] [♪♪♪] <i> Hubert Lederer Dreyfus
was a preeminent scholar</i> <i> of 20th Century European
philosophy and phenomenology,</i> <i> the study
of conscious experience</i> <i> from a first-person
point of view,</i> <i> especially the work
of Martin Heidegger,</i> <i> also Michel Foucault,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty,</i> <i> Søren Kierkegaard,
and Edmund Husserl.</i> <i> Dreyfus' interpretation
of human being, of</i> dasein, <i> in Heidegger's formulation,
has had broad impact</i> <i> in the natural and social
sciences, and even beyond.</i> <i> His commentary on Heidegger's
famously-impenetrable</i> <i> time and being, called</i>
Being-in-the-World, <i> made Heidegger accessible
to English-speaking readers.</i> Bert, analytic philosophers
would tend to dismiss phenomenology as something
that's not relevant, that doesn't really help us
to understand metaphysics. Let's just start with what
phenomenology sort of inherits and has to get out of,
and which I think, and Heidegger would say, the analytic tradition
is still stuck in. I was just teaching
this yesterday, a Heidegger teaching in 1925, railing against the idea
that there's a problem of the external world, there's
a problem of other minds, there's a problem of whether
reality depends on us or is independent of us. He thinks they're all false
problems, and he says you get an industry of
philosophers constantly trying to solve them, getting
jobs, and refuting each other. But they're starting
from the wrong place. What's the wrong place? Well, the wrong
place is Descartes. He's the villain. And what did Descartes do? He had the idea that we were
self-sufficient subjects, and there was only two things in
his ontology, two ways of being. You be a mind, self-contained,
with ideas in it, and then there's on
the other side the world, and Descartes' physics,
it was bits of extended matter, the extended thing. And the question is how you
get these two things together? They're both totally real,
but there's a big problem about how this one,
the thinking one, gets to know anything about
the substance out there which is self-sufficient stuff. They go round and round before
Heidegger comes along, and Heidegger just thinks
the whole thing is wrong. How would you go about showing
that this way of thinking that's dominated Western
thinking totally. Even the people who disagree
with it disagree with it in its terms. I mean, Heidegger is just going
to crash it, break with it. So, the first level,
and the one that I like best, is Heidegger's notion
of how we relate to the stuff in the world. And Heidegger says,
we deal with it. My word is cope with it. He says, when you go out
the door, you use the latch. That means you don't have
to think about the latch, you don't have the goal
of going out the door, you don't have to figure out
did you use the latch. It's all in flow. Just packed in flow. - So, at the basic level...
- It's being in the world. Yes, that's it. At the basic level, we are
just dealing with things. And Heidegger calls
that being in the world. That's the first move. Then there are about five
different moves that Heidegger makes against
the subject-object distinction. The next one is to say that
we're the kind of being that has to take a stand
on its own being. There are three kinds
of being in Heidegger. There's the being
that things have when we're using them
as equipment. The doorknob's being
is what Heidegger calls readiness at hand. There's the kind of being
that objects have which he calls presence at hand. And then there's a kind of being
we have which he calls<i> dasein,</i> which is being there. And that kind of being has
to take a stand on its being. They're really called to have
an unconditional commitment and to understand who they are. But the only way they can
understand who they are is by dealing with things. I need this, quote,
external world to be me. But then it's no longer
the external world. It's this whole organized bunch
of objects with other people who are students
and interviewers and so forth. And all of that
in order to, again, get rid of the subject-object
distinction. So, finally, metaphysics
gets switched around by a phenomenologist into a
description of this ground level where the idea of inner and
outer subject and object doesn't even come up, and then
you have being in the world, and you can start out
in a whole new direction. That's Heidegger. And what we learn
isn't a bunch of facts that we store in our memory. What we learn is that the
world looks richer and richer. For instance, Merleau-Ponty
example now, a city looks strange and confusing
and very meaningless at first, but once you live in it
a while, what you know begins
to show up in the city. The turn to the right looks like
the way to the bakery, and the turn to the left looks
like the way to the cleaners, and so forth.
It just looks that way. You don't have to figure out
how to get to the bakery. So, we learn that our way
of being in the world is such that we don't have
to store anything in our mind. The world is
the best model of itself. [♪♪♪] KUHN:<i> Being in the world, just
dealing with things, coping.</i> <i> So simple. So profound.</i> <i> Hubert Dreyfus was born in
1929 in Terre Haute, Indiana,</i> <i> to Stanley Dreyfus,</i> <i> a businessman
in the poultry industry,</i> <i> and Irene Lederer Dreyfus,
a homemaker.</i> <i> Dreyfus studied philosophy
at Harvard,</i> <i>arriving as a freshman in 1947.</i> <i> He received his BA
with highest honors in 1951,</i> <i> completing
an undergraduate thesis</i> <i> in the philosophy of physics</i> <i> under the famous philosopher
W. V. Quine.</i> Bert, how do you approach
consciousness from the standpoint
of phenomenology? To begin with,
even the phenomenologists don't talk much about
consciousness. It seems to me it's just
a subject about which everybody agrees we know
absolutely nothing, and everybody says, yes,
it's the hard problem, and then they go on
talking about what makes it so hard anyway. I think it's such a hard
question that I don't understand why anybody wants
to talk about it. I don't. But there is something
I will talk about. One of the big deal things is
consciousness gets so much tied in with self-consciousness,
with being a subject, and a subject is conscious,
a human subject. That means the subject has
something inside it which is its stream of consciousness. And that's its inner story. And I think that that's
the wrong thing to look for. I don't think that it's false,
that sometimes people have streams of experience
and maybe they see after-images, but it's certainly not
our normal way. Basically, consciousness is
not a matter of something inner. Phenomenologists think that's
a very marginal breakdown sort of experiences. Mostly we're out there
in the world having moods, acting, interacting with
other people, and so forth. That's what consciousness is. A world of attractions
and repulsions. It's not inner stuff. Now... But it feels like inner stuff. Well, no, not when
you're chasing the streetcar. It feels like, I've got
to get it, get in closer. Now, I've got to get it.
That's wrong. Now, getting closer, pulling,
and so forth... - When you're in the moment.
- Yes, exactly. When you're absorbed in the
moment, consciousness is gone, and self-consciousness
is really gone. And most of the time,
we are absorbed in the moment, and therefore, we're looking
in the wrong place when we're looking at
these inner feelings, which are these sort of
break-down moments when you're crying inside because you don't want
other people to see it. So, that's my only
contribution, and it's not much. [♪♪♪] KUHN:<i>
Dreyfus was an early skeptic</i> <i> of the powers
of artificial intelligence.</i> His critique was not much
appreciated by AI leadership. <i> A paper he wrote
for the RAND Corporation,</i> <i> the influential think tank,</i> <i> became Dreyfus'
seminal 1972 book,</i> What Computers Can't Do:
A Critique of Artificial Reason. [♪♪♪] I think AI has failed,
and it's failed in a way that isn't even pointing
in the direction of you're getting
intelligent behavior, let alone consciousness. I taught at MIT for eight years. The AI people were doing their
artificial intelligence thing nearby, and they came into
my class and said, well, if you philosophers
have had 2,000 years and you can't understand
consciousness, intelligence, language, learning, any of that,
and we're beginning to understand it
over here in the AI labs. And I thought, wow.
If that's so, I better find out. Well, my brother happened to be
hired at the RAND Corporation, so, they hired me as a
consultant, and that was in '65, and I wrote a paper called <i> Alchemy
and Artificial Intelligence</i> to say that the way they were
trying to achieve intelligence with computers couldn't be done,
and it was sort of interesting how I knew it couldn't be done
and they didn't know it couldn't be done,
is that philosophers had developed a lot of very
sophisticated ways of thinking about the mind. Mainly that there must be
elementary bits of knowledge, that concepts were rules, that we had representations
in our minds of the world, and we made inferences
from those representations of the world,
and that's how we came to behave intelligently
and understand things. Now, there wasn't any particular
place in that for consciousness, but they didn't care. They were trying to make
computers at that point that just could behave
intelligently. And what was interesting was
whereas they came to my class and said, you know, you
philosophers have wasted your time for 2,000 years, once
I saw what they were writing, I discovered they had inherited
the whole philosophical story. The philosophers like Descartes
believed in atomic ideas and Hume and so forth. Kant said that concepts
were rules. Husserl said that concepts
were formal rules and hierarchies of rules,
all sounding very AI-like. Every one of these people
since Descartes believed that we had internal mental
representations of the world, and they bought all that
and they turned it into a research program. At the very same time,
Wittgenstein published the<i> Logical Investigations</i>
where he was destroying that whole view. And Heidegger had already
destroyed the whole Cartesian thing in 1927,
in<i> Being and Time,</i> and since I was
teaching those guys, I knew that the AI people
had inherited a lemon. They had taken over
their research program, a 2,000-year failure. And so, I just said, okay, you
guys are just behind the times. You're going to discover
that this doesn't work. And they finally did, and that's
what I talked about in my book, <i> What Computers Can't Do.</i> There were two problems: the
common sense knowledge problem, where is all this knowledge
of the world stored. And I said,
well, if Heidegger's right, it's not stored in the mind. It's stored out there
in the world, and the proof is that you've got something
called the frame problem, you guys, that you are
sort of repressing, which is if something
changes, like say, I get up and walk over there,
how much in my representation of the situation
in the computer has to change? Well, my shadow has to go
with me, and my feet go with me. But most of the stuff over
there doesn't go at all, doesn't change. But they
couldn't deal with that. And the only way to deal
with it would have been to see what Heidegger saw, that the best model of the
world is the world itself. You have to be in the world. Yeah, you have to be in the
world, and your knowledge shows up
in the familiarity of things, and when you learn
something new about the world, things look different, and you
learn what looks like it changes when something else
changes by looking. What happened was the AI people
doing what's called symbolic information processing,
which is the philosophical approach to the mind, failed,
and I gave them a lecture on why you have
to understand Heidegger if you're going to do AI. And all this converged into
something which is now called Heideggerian AI,
and that's fine, except there's a new problem. We don't learn new facts
about the world. We learn the world
keeps changing the way it works for us. Now, what's going to help them
to get the missing thing, which is learning,
or even more missing thing, which is consciousness? All this has been done
on the behaviorist level. We'll just get it
to behave like people. And it fails to behave
like people, and darned well must fail
to be conscious. Everybody agrees to that. So, what would it take? The latest idea, which sounds
to me like sheer madness and desperation, is to say,
well, computer chips get more and more
and more powerful, and once they get powerful
enough so that there's as many bits
on them as there are stored in the brain,
then we'll be able to do this. For one thing,
that's been an old story. As AI was failing
and going down and down, the computer chips
were getting cheaper and faster and more condensed,
and they kept saying, well, we're having trouble
now, but the next generation of computer chips
is going to save us. And it never saved them. They just kept getting worse, and the computer chips
kept getting better. It can't be that just by having
all the bits in there it's doing us any good at all,
because we're crunching along. But if it's not that,
then what is it? Nobody has any idea, and they
should just keep quiet until they do, because, I mean, I think it is
the hardest question. How in the world matter, which is this third-person
material stuff, could ever produce
consciousness. And AI and the use of computers is not helping us
understand it one bit. [♪♪♪] KUHN:<i> Between his M.A. and Ph.D.
degrees in philosophy</i> <i> at Harvard, Bert took a series
of research fellowships</i> <i> in Europe, during which
he met leading</i> <i> continental philosophers,
especially Heidegger, Sartre,</i> <i> and Merleau-Ponty.</i> <i> Although he was less impressed
with their conversations</i> <i> than with their writings,
he became convinced</i> <i> that the then-unconventional
ideas of phenomenology</i> <i> and existentialism
were worth paying attention to.</i> <i> As religion did not play
a central role</i> <i> in Bert's philosophy,
he approached God</i> <i> with his characteristic
iconoclasm.</i> [♪♪♪] What I'd like to do is explore
the history of philosophy and see what we can
learn about how to -- how should we think about
this question about whether or not God exists? Okay, well,
that's a good question, and I'm going to give you
a kind of maverick answer. That's why I came to you. So, from Plato and Aristotle on, there have been some views
about the Supreme Being, the good in Plato
which was eternal, and the prime mover
in Aristotle, and then in the Middle Ages,
they were always trying to figure out the properties
of the Supreme Being, and one of the most
important properties, namely existence, and whether
being the Supreme Being, he didn't have
to have existence. This famous
ontological argument. All of that was getting nowhere
over 1,000 years of nowhere when my hero comes on
the scene, Pascal. Pascal is a very
religious person and a brilliant mathematician
and a super good philosopher, and he says the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob is not the God
of the philosophers. So, all this debate about
the Supreme Being that Plato and Aristotle and the
medieval supposed Christians is just irrelevant to us
Judeo-Christians. But that's only half of it. He still does think that
you ought to be able to say something about God. He decided that there was
something special about God in the tradition of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob. Their God was a present God, a God that the mind
could contemplate. And Pascal said,
our God is a hidden God. He's never present.
You can't see him. The Jewish thing.
You can't make pictures of him. And that's important. If you don't understand that,
you don't understand this whole tradition
that's been off the rails, because the point is, you can
prove the existence of God, and you can prove
the non-existence of God. That's what they've been doing. But they haven't realized
that that shows that God's not available for
that kind of understanding. That the very important feature
of God was that God was not present,
couldn't be present, couldn't be represented at all. And that gets to you
to Kierkegaard who, leaning on Pascal, makes a big
deal about the difference between what he calls
metaphysical religions, religions who think that you
can have a vision of God, for instance,
the way Dante does at the end of the<i> Divine Comedy.</i> And that's a kind of religion,
but it's got nothing to do with Judeo-Christian religion,
none of the Jews ever got this kind of vision
of God. The best they got was a
burning bush and so forth. And it turns out, it's very
important they could see Jesus, the Christians. And in some sense,
Jesus was God, but Kierkegaard says,
once Jesus is here, there is no access
to God the Father. We don't know anything about --
we don't need to know anything about, we couldn't
know anything about, anything behind Jesus,
which was a Supreme Being. Even though Jesus says,
if you've seen me, - you've seen my Father.
- Seen the Father. Good, that's Kierkegaard's line,
because since he says that, there's nothing more to see. You know all you'll ever
get to know about it, so, stop debating it. And you've got enough. Well,
gee, what more do you want? You've got Jesus. So, they're really just two
totally different religions, Kierkegaard says. Metaphysical religion which
somehow mistakenly thinks it's Judeo-Christian, and the Judeo-Christian God
and that religion. The next really important step
is Nietzsche who wants to say certainly
the God of the philosophers isn't anything we can know
anything about or need to know anything about. But that God in general
no longer plays -- even plays any important
role in our culture, and he expresses that by
saying, God is dead, and we have killed him. We have killed him
by presumably partly sort of misunderstanding him and
doing philosophy about him, and partly by becoming, he
says, so good at understanding people's desires and being
honest about our desires that we discover
how much we need God, but that we haven't any
evidence, and therefore, we have no right
to believe in him anymore. And that's the end of
what Nietzsche calls the monotono-theism, which he thought was
a bad idea from the start. [♪♪♪] KUHN:<i> During Dreyfus'
long tenure at Berkeley,</i> <i> he was an influential
and much beloved teacher.</i> <i> Bert believed
that teaching is learning.</i> <i> He refused to teach any text
that he already understood.</i> <i> Bert's teaching style
was unique,</i> <i> because he taught the
phenomena of human existence.</i> <i> Bert believed that any
human being could contribute.</i> <i> Bert's courses were
genuine conversations.</i> <i> They were electrifying.</i> <i> Although Dreyfus retired
from Berkeley in 1994,</i> <i> he continued to teach
until the last day of class</i> <i>in December 2016, less than five
months before he died at 87.</i> [♪♪♪] Bert, if we had to come up
with the ultimate question, it's that fundamental concept,
why is there anything at all? Why is there something
rather than nothing? Heidegger thought that was the
fundamental question, too, but he thought that that way of
putting the question was wrong. Heidegger's got
a whole book about the<i> Principle
of Sufficient Reason,</i> which is about why there
must be a reason for it, why there must be
a reason why there's something
rather than nothing. And he says
it's part of metaphysics, it's a wrong-headed question. You can't ask that question expecting a kind of
rational answer to it. I think what Heidegger's
thinking is, that we're always already in
it, the meaning, the universe, the world, things that --
that are. And it's only from within it
that we can deal with it and so forth,
and that's the leap. Instead of getting an answer,
you sort of switch the position. And instead of looking like a
philosopher and a metaphysician standing outside
and looking at being and saying, what, why is there
being rather than nothing? You see that you could
never be in that position. - Because you're in it?
- Because you're in it. And then you can have a kind
of mystical awe in there being something
rather than nothing. A feeling somehow about it
that Heidegger seems to have. But you can't ask this kind of traditional
philosophical question. Because I feel that emotion
about that question. Heidegger went and sat at
the place where Cézanne sat when he painted Mont
Sainte-Victoire and said Cézanne could experience being
shining through. And being is there,
and it's shining in Heidegger, and but it's just wrong to ask,
why is being there shining? We just have to accept it
and be grateful for it. And you can appreciate it,
but you can't analyze it. Yes, exactly.
You put it perfectly. [♪♪♪] DREYFUS: After all, philosophers
have tried to understand the meaning of life. That is, why are we here, and
what is the highest form of life that we could have? People like Kierkegaard
and Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, the people
that I read, or Pascal, are all concerned with that. And roughly, they've got
some version of the view that having some commitment
to some cause or to some person is
the highest thing you can have, and that will give your life
meaning. And that's what existential
phenomenology is about. [♪♪♪] KUHN:<i> Hubert Dreyfus came
among us not to pronounce</i> <i> his own philosophical schemes,</i> <i> but to widen
our philosophical stance.</i> <i> He gave new status
to phenomenology,</i> <i>privileging experience, praising
the holism of human sentience</i> <i> as intimate interactions
in the world.</i> <i> He addressed
all the perennial problems.</i> <i> Consciousness,
artificial intelligence,</i> <i> God, creation, religion,
body and soul,</i> <i> existence, meaning of life.</i> <i> I cannot assess whether
Bert's critique of AI</i> <i> will stand the ultimate test</i> <i> of vastly advanced
hardware and software.</i> <i> But I commend his skepticism
of AI's extravagant claims</i> <i>as a caution all should welcome.</i> <i> Although reports of his death
were indeed not exaggerated,</i> <i> neither were the
tributes to his life.</i> <i>Now, because of his tweet, when
I think of his death, I smile.</i> <i> How clever, Bert.</i> <i> Hubert Dreyfus
exemplified what he taught,</i> <i>helping us come</i> Closer to Truth. ANNOUNCER:<i>
For complete interviews
and for further information,</i> <i>please visit closertotruth.com.</i> [♪♪♪]
