Daniel C. Dennett - Do Persons Have Souls?

dan if i want to explore the idea that naturalism or physicalism the idea that there's no supernatural factors in the world if i want to explore that idea how can the techniques and methodologies of philosophy and you're a great philosopher help me to explore that well i think that philosophers are more experts on questions and answers uh my sort of bumper sticker slogan is the philosophy is what you have to do until you know what the right questions are and that means that philosophy is always somewhat informal it's not structured there's no rules exactly for how to do it you're always sort of thrashing about trying to figure out are these the right questions or these are the right questions and once you get clear about what a question is it's a good question then you go off and try to answer and that's not philosophy that's whatever it is it's physics or psychology or history or jurisprudence you're saying your job is over when you got the question that's right when i think that's the history of the field too that it all starts out as philosophy back in aristotle's day and as various questions got clear then they shelved off like an amoeba now we create physics we create mathematics we it's it's it's an interesting historical fact that the american philosophical society not the american philosophical association that's for philosophers the american philosophical society is is basically a physics society it was founded by ben franklin among others is in philadelphia and back in those days even physics was part of philosophy so that's why i understand our world and so i don't think it demeans philosophy at all to say that what philosophy is good at is getting clear about the questions and that's the help that's the help that we can give you is helping you see why certain questions which are very tempting are going to mislead you more than help you okay that's you're absolutely right so let's look at physicalism or naturalism that only the physical is real and anything non-physical non-material is imaginary so what are the kinds of questions that would steer me in the wrong direction and what are the kinds of questions that that might be neutral to to get an appropriate answer well if you start with your own experience and say well here i am i know that i exist i have my own experiences now what are they made of uh what are what made of exactly well these experiences don't be sure that that's the right way of thinking about it because that that sort of first-person perspective will probably take you down the primrose path to dualism and dualism is is a mess now might it be true i suppose it might but if you can adopt resolutely adopt a third-person perspective on yourself and say well here's this guy puzzled asking himself questions how can a how can a living body ask itself questions and by the way that's a good question because we never i mean i don't know about you but i've never paid myself for making myself lunch that seems like a sort of stupid thing to do doesn't that right right i've never lent myself money why because i'm me i mean this is but then why do we talk to ourselves we already know we're going to say why do we do this why do we ask ourselves questions and the answer has to be we're not as unified as we think we are one part of this is asking another part of us a question and that other person oh i'm glad you asked me that question it's there is information exchange there's getting things together that weren't naturally together they're our very asking of the questions tells us the fact that we do it tells us something about our disunity because it it makes sense to do it we learn a lot by uh we make progress yeah socrates was puzzled by that here we are we're sitting around trying to figure out what the definition of say justice is what are we doing if we don't know why are we asking we're asking the wrong people if we do know why aren't we asking we already know it's got to be that we know it in one way and don't know it in another way and so philosophy is good at reflecting on what people are doing when they ask themselves questions and saying why are they doing that is this a good way to proceed sometimes it is let's take that same technique because that's that's terrific applying to ourselves which is one of the sources of dualism i think the other source of uh non-physical ideas about the world come from the external world particularly in today's world from cosmology study of the universe or study biological systems and basically the so-called argument from design that there's design out there so how can philosophy approach the external world and help us to to dissect the good questions from the bad questions oh um well i think that you raised the question of design in the world and the argument from design and i think that until darwin came along that was a very respectable argument for the existence of god because the design that is observable in nature is just exquisite and every day we learn how brilliant it is we learn more details about how fantastically beautifully designed things are did all that design come from now here's where philosophy can help in a very simple straightforward way and say look you've got to make a distinction between the product and the process the product is absolutely brilliant the process is not brilliant the process is mechanical foresightless purposeless it doesn't have any purpose but it generates things that have purposes and that's hard to understand i could give you quotes from really intelligent people just in the last few years who don't make this distinction and don't see it they don't look if something's designed there's got to be a designer so that means must mean that the biological world isn't designed that what darwin showed us is that we could live without design we could live without teleology no i don't think that's what darwin showed us i think what darwin showed us is how you can get design without a designer but there really is design right in the sense that the parts mesh beautifully there's there's reasons for them in fact people have a hard time with this idea of reasons i say look everywhere we look in nature we see reasons there's reasons why this part of the body works this way there's reasons why we have this enzyme and not that enzyme there's reasons everywhere we look whose reasons are they they're not the organism's reasons they're natural selections reasons they're what i call free-floating rationales and getting our head around that idea is very difficult a lot of people even trained philosophers resist the idea of reasons that aren't anybody's but i think it's a very important idea it's no secret to you i'm sure that many scientists including some famous ones would pretty much dismiss all philosophy as uh at best a uh a a uh uh a a neutral waste of time and it works the hindrance yeah you know i get that all the time uh and it's a little bit deserved sometimes uh one scientist has said that that the philosophy is to science what pigeons are to statues one of my favorite but um uh i then take all the more delight in watching the scientists when they find they have to address a philosophical question they think this is a piece of cake and what do they end up doing they end up reinventing all the mistakes of aristotle and plato and hume and kant and descartes and mill and and then they realize uh if they reflect at all on this that there's really no such thing as as philosophy-free science uh you can get your philosophy from the seat of your pants the way a lot of them do or you can get a little help from somebody who's specializing in this or you can try to become a philosopher yourself but you're going to have a philosophical position whether you like it or not now because even what i said that it's all a waste of time is a philosophical position by itself that is and and and the risky one a particularly risky one um you know the they say but you philosophers you uh you spent so much time on the history you go pouring over all these old texts why do you do that we we scientists we don't do this we learn a little bit about about newton a little bit about curie and a little bit about darwin now we get on with it now why are you pouring over the past that way and the answer is look the mistakes those people made the philosophy is in many regards the history of mistakes really tempting mistakes really really tempting mistakes that very smart people have to be tempted by if you don't go over those and see why they're mistakes and why they're tempting you're just going to reinvent them and so i take a certain perhaps ignoble delight in watching those scientists who have sort of contempt for philosophy fall on their faces when they try to say something a bit more about say what consciousness is or isn't and then they begin to realize it's not quite as easy as they thought i think that's where philosophers have a role and more and more of the people in the field who are working on the tough questions appreciate it and that's what's really gratifying is to see that though they recognize that they're getting help from some of us we're clarifying issues we're raising questions that they hadn't thought to raise we're helping to articulate the reasons for some of the things that they feel in their bones and that's a worthwhile contribution and and it's and it becomes clear it's a it's a clarity uh process it's a it's a way of helping them see the woods for the trees very often what would be an example of a of a superficial scientific uh philosophy that later turns out to be to be problematic and has to be refined professionally um well um my favorite is is the is what i call cartesian materialism now cartesian materialism is the idea well descartes ah maybe going to good scientists but it's all wrong about that dualism stuff it's just it's all just the brain it's all just the brain so that's the materialism part but then the cartesian part is where they say yeah but there has to be a place where it all comes together and that's what i call the cartesian theater it's material it's physical it's in the brain it's but it's the headquarters within the headquarters now if i put it that way most people work in the field oh i don't believe in that oh i don't believe that well then why are you asking this question and why are you asking that question why are you saying this if you're if you're not presupposing that there's this place where it all comes together what is the point of your questions and i could give you some time lots of examples of people who say they're not cartesian materialists but then it's very hard to see what the heck they think they're doing because their views really demand that there be this place farther upstream where it all comes together and they have to start getting out of that so even though they would not be duelists in any way shape or form they're totally materials they're totally great but they still maintain this they're making the other cartesian mistake yeah they're still thinking they curt you know had said it was the pineal gland yeah which i like to call the fax machine of the soul it's this place everything has to go through this is a little turnstile it's a bottleneck you have to get through the pineal gland to get to the soul well everybody scoffs at that quite correctly descartes was that was foolish well so where does it come together if you still think it comes together not in the pineal gland but in one place in the cortex you're making the same mistake and it's actually hard to see how to say the things that you want to say about consciousness without falling into that mistake it takes some real uh mental gymnastics to think your way into other ways of thinking about these issues so really philosophy in terms of being able to clarify and particularize questions for science is is very important in the process of physicalism and understanding the material world not just in eliminating a dualistic approach oh i think i i think that's right i think that that one of the most interesting reactions i've had to my book on my consciousness explained is that a lot of scientists have come up to me and said you know i thought i was a good materialist until i read your book i began to realize how much i have to give up if i'm going to be a good materialist and they say oh now the attractions of dualism are beginning to be clearer to me and and that is progress because their sort of flat-footed materialism wasn't going to work and it was they were just grafting materialism onto second-rate cartesian ideas and so now they realize it's so trickier than that isn't it yeah well that's progress

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 96,940

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, Daniel C. Dennett, daniel dennett, persons have souls, what is a soul, are souls real, human soul, is there a human soul, soul consciousness, what am i

Id: IL6I0aHQEO8

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021