Daniel Dennet Discussion with Marvin Minsky: The New Humanists 1/2

very strongly and Grover Norquist's the Republican activist you know said in there that that this Bush stands on the shoulders of of Reagan but I don't think there's any question that he's modeled himself after him but I have to raise the same question that I did in response to the earlier question about the comparison of Schwarzenegger and and and Ronald Reagan to paraphrase senator Bentsen III I know Ronald Reagan and I don't think George Bush lukannon has written four books on our 40th president Ronnie and Jessie Ronald Reagan in the presidential years President Reagan the role of a lifetime and his latest governor Reagan his rise to power visit public affairs ebooks.com for more information next science writers Jon Brockman Daniel Dennett and Marvin Minsky discuss current theories on the origin of the universe evolution and the work of their late colleague Stephen Jay Gould this from a Barnes & Noble in New York City lasts an hour good evening ladies and gentlemen I'm Alan Kahn president of Barnes Noble publishing we at Barnes & Noble are thrilled to be publishing the new humanists science at the edge a book filled with with cutting edge idea we have dead mics up here this little one working now I'm Alan Kahn from Barnes & Noble we at Barnes & Noble are thrilled to be publishing the new humanists science at the edge a book filled with cutting edge ideas from many brilliant scientists and empirical thinkers two of them are here tonight Daniel C Dennett and Marvin Minsky they will discuss how the universe designs itself but before I begin before we begin I'd like to introduce John Brockman the editor of the new humanists as well as being a well-known author and editor mr. Brockman is president of the edge foundation and the founder president and editor of edge a website that serves as an intellect isn't as as an intellectual forum for science and other thinkers edge which has more than a hundred thousand visitors and participants features some of the best minds of today including such well-known intellectuals as Jared Diamond Steven Pinker Jared linear reycarts while and our two speakers tonight edge captures online the continuing conversations of these prominent members of the edge community the new humanists was derived from this preeminent group of intellectuals and scientists they illustrate Brockman's theory that we are entering a third culture one defined by coming together by the coming together of the humanities and science Brockman calls for a new energy between these two areas which are often viewed as separate or incompatible tonight's discussion will illustrate Brockman's theory and the lively spirit of edge Barnes and Noble is proud to be associated with edge and a book that highlights some of the best scientific thinkers of the 21st century here to interrupt introduce our panelists is John Bachman a key to this book is the idea that the central metaphor of our time the central metaphor of our time is computation it's about the computer the models we create by using computers and the act of computing or computation it it's running across all the disciplines and I realized having seminars of groups that included Marvin and Dan that will have biologists artificial intelligence experts physicists and what connects them all is the notion of computation in terms of that field about ten years ago when I put together the book the third culture I introduced Marvin as the leading light of AI that is artificial intelligence he sees the brain is a myriad of structures scientists who liked Minsky take a strong AI view believed that a computer model of the brain will be able to explain what we know of the brains cognitive abilities Minsky identifies consciousness with high-level abstract thought and believes in principle that machines can do everything that a conscious human being could do for Dan Dennett I said that Dan is interested in consciousness his views similar to Minsky's is as a high-level abstract thinking he's known as the leading proponent of the computational model of mind in in that regard of people like Pinker have followed on and developed this along with in his class with philosophers such as John Searle who maintain that the most important aspects of consciousness intentionally intentionality and subjective quality can never be computed he's the philosopher of choice of the AI community in this most recent work he has turned to what he calls Darwin's dangerous idea he's squarely and the Darwinian camp of George C Williams Richard Dawkins and he has mustered with great energy a serious critique of the scientific ideas of Stephen Jay Gould it was the critique of Gould all hundred pages that ended a lot of people's relationships with Gould when someone like tenet writes 100 pages about you you have to stop what you're doing and spend three years to respond now that that is over it's been about 10 years in Google's unfortunately as long with us Dennett is writing a new book called breaking the spell in which he's gonna relax a bit after Gould and take on God Marvin when I was doing this third culture book we had asked everybody in the book to comment on the other people and Marvin's comment about Dan was well he's our greatest philosopher since Russell six months later I sent the galleys and he said I wrote that what I meant is the greatest philosopher that understands what we're doing so I will turn it over to address the topic of how the universe designed herself I've asked each of these gentlemen to speak for 15 minutes uninterrupted ask each other some questions and then we'll open it to the floor what would you like to talk about I just like impassive to say that I don't think the universe exists I will say a few bits and then I want to see how Dennett reacts a lot of people feel that there are some important questions that science can't answer and that's why they resort to religion and one of the questions well there there various questions that are very hard to answer like where the world come from and or in a more naive way who made the world because everything you see in civilization was made by somebody nobody made rocks and so what do you do about those exceptions and you imagine some super being from the x-files or x-men or something who can make whole worlds and that gives people of warm fuzzy feel anguish but and of course the idea of God is wonderful because it's the answer to all questions you can't understand and in this book that I'm finishing but you can read chapter four on my webpage it's a discussion of consciousness and it's quite harmonious with what Dennett has said because I used the same idea that there isn't any one thing that's consciousness there's a lot of stuff and in particular different parts of your mind are making different stories and weaving them together and there's all sorts of negotiations but on a larger scale I think the word consciousness is a very convenient word to have because it's the name for all of the things your mind does that you don't have any idea about and it's useful to have such words and God is the name of the answer to all the questions about the world that you don't have a good answer to so let me just say what you can do about that and the first thing is to notice that there's something wrong with who made the world religious people have trained themselves not to worry about that because you say who made the world and they say God and you say who made God and they say that's rude or God made itself or it was always there or whatever isn't it stunning that that's not considered an objection to the God theory whereas in science it would be regarded as well there's something wrong with your theory but there's let's be a little more serious if you look at the question who made everything or why does the universe exist there's something wrong with the word exist because what does it mean to say this alleged spring water exists I mean the eggs do you see these big trucks driving by every day full of Evian or whatever it is spring water and you count the number of trucks and guess how many people drink it and figure out what size pipe is coming out of some poor little Hill somewhere it's any way to say something exists says that it's in the universe to say the universe exists is a little bothersome sort of problem that Bertrand Russell Dan's predecessor worried about and decided that you had to be very careful about statements where a thing is part of itself or a subset of itself or something so it doesn't mean anything to say the universe exists because that would be to say the universe is inside itself it's alright to say the universe is itself but it doesn't seem right to say that it's part of itself so how do you get out of that and it seems to me is you shouldn't be asking what made everything you should be saying what could this word exist mean that we're so quickly extending from very little things like the water is in the bottle to the bottle is in the universe what's the universe in and I think the best answer is that that's probably meaningless there are probably a lot of possible universes and there's nothing special about any of them this is just what would happen if you had a big computer and dropped a program into it and it simulates all this but suppose somebody wrote that program then that world would exist in the sense that this program says what it would do suppose they didn't write the program suppose you never loaded into computer it would still be the same possible world suppose you didn't even write the program well somebody else might have written it what difference does it make if somebody's written it or even thought of it well I'm not joking seems to me that this is this is a possible logical system or unlogical system or whatever and then what you have to do is ask is there anything special about it and obviously there is this is one that could have people in it and what's more a since Darwin you can't just drop people into a world you have to evolve them they have to come somewhere the universe has to make them as John hints and what does that mean well that universe had better have some conservation laws like energy suppose you didn't have in other words why is the world the way it is physicists are nervous about this kind of argument called the anthropic argument and I'm not sure why they're so nervous it's a great argument if the world didn't have conservation laws like the ones Newton discovered energy is conserved momentum and angular momentum are conserved as long as they don't bump into anything what would happen if you didn't have that law or if that if the universe didn't have that constraint well every now and then something would start generating energy and maybe make little parts that do the same thing and in five minutes the entire galaxy would blow up some physicists say how come the universe is such that the Einstein coefficient is very close to one and the answer is if the universe were expanding much faster or contracting much faster of course we might have been in it once but we wouldn't be now and so lots of things about the universe have to be that way or else things wouldn't be stable for long and to evolve which as far as we know usually takes three point half a billion years we only have one example of it and that's about how long it took then it took it's only 500 million years since we were fish so there was about three billion years of nothing much happening there was a moment when was the Cambrian explosion yeah right and in that there was a book by Stephen Gould that I hated it was because it was so romantic was called wonderful life he made little references to Jimmy Stewart and things in it Steve had a wonderfully homey way of combining the familiar with the ridiculous and the big mystery to him was how come just at this moment in evolution did suddenly animals develop literally millions of kinds of forms so you take this this bunch of shale which is only ten million or so years wide it's not much and there's hardly any kind of animal at first and then there are all these forms and snails and little things practically insect like stuff and gold makes up some theory that Darwinism isn't really a very good theory because it would suggest that things happen slowly and steadily whereas things happen very suddenly but what happened that's when animals got little nervous systems and what happens when an animal gets a nervous system well it it can crawl around and you can evolve mechanisms but what happens when that little brain has any kind of learning at all something very dramatic happens which was understood by what was Baldwin's name the great evolutionism around around 1900 yeah I can't deal with his first name husband but this is the Baldwin effect and a Steve Gould didn't seem to know about it here's what happens suppose you have something like a crab and this crab has evolved exactly to eat a certain kind of seaweed by detecting it and going like that what would happen if there was a mutation and the poor crabs arms went like that would starve to death and and so animals had to be very rigid before they could learn but if an animal was like this and by accident had happened to do this he could remember it and though the point is that once you've got a nervous system that could learn a deformity was not fatal and that's exactly the time of the Cambrian explosion so the creatures could mutate that but still survive and there was something that looks like an explosion and that Darwin has not explained this and of course he has so I'll stop and see if we can get into an argument if Marvin lives for arguments and we I've known for about 30 years and he'll if if you don't start arguing with him right away those things things more and more outrageous until finally you realize that you're supposed to resist but today he started right off by saying the universe doesn't exist now he's already played his trump card I don't know how you how if you're not gonna balk at that how are we going to balk but I'm going to resist the temptation for the moment because I want to first of all I want to follow up on the point he just made about the Cambrian explosion yes Steve Gould said it was a it was a sort of an embarrassment to classical Darwinism because it was this embarrassment of riches this fabulous time of creativity when all these new life forms came into existence very fast and then most of them disappeared very fast strange architectures body plans that that didn't survive at all well he wasn't very imaginative about what might explain it and I think Marvin has put his finger on it but there's a book that came out just this last year by the Oxford zoologist Andrew Parker which really is I highly recommend if you want a very good read on this topic it's called in the blink of an eye and Parker's thesis is that five hundred and thirty five hundred forty million years ago that's when for reasons he's not very clear about the oceans became transparent and light for some chemical reason because now you've had a medium in which you could see if only you had eyes and this is one and this is when eyes evolved they they evolved as soon as a medium of transparency evolved all life was in the water at that point and there was locomotion but it was sort of blind groping locomotion and things like that but they couldn't see where they were going they were just sort of bumping around and as soon as the water became transparent vision evolved and once vision evolves the great game of hide-and-seek begins now you can see at a distance now you have an epistemic horizon which is getting farther away you don't have to wait till you bump into something once you don't have to bump into something once you have radar in effect once you have distal perception it's a whole new ballgame suddenly the Predators can see the prey and the prey can see the Predators and the tremendous the the prodigious creative energy of evolution was unleashed by the simply that all you have to do is render the ocean more transparent and we're off for the races it's an arms race now what's nice about Andrew Parker's theory is that it's testable and there's many predictions that it makes and it may not in the end be quite right but it completely gives the lie to the idea that this sudden explosion of creativity by evolution is any sort of an anomaly or any sort of an embarrassment to evolution if it's an embarrassment at all it's an embarrassment of riches there's there are many many possibilities to explain why the Cambrian explosion happened and as I like to say in the consciousness Wars of which I am a part I am I am very tolerant of all sorts of craziness that goes on in the world of consciousness from search am i my sort of MAOIs motto is let a thousand flowers bloom but then remember that 999 of them are going to wilt there's an awful lot of junk out there and let's get it behind us as soon as we can and then we'll get to the to the good theories and I think that's what happened and they can be an explosion for itself now I'm really sorry that Lee Smolin isn't here because actually John invited us all to submit a title for this and I was the one that came up with how the universe designs itself and I really thought of this as an occasion when Marvin and I were going to provoke Lee because that's in a way more his idea than ours but it's a very interesting idea and let me just explain to you what what how I conceived of this topic and I will do my best to do some rough justice to some of these ideas as some of you know one of my big things for oh my gosh 30 years and more has been what I call the three stances the intentional stance the design stance in the physical stance but I want to talk about the design stance if you look around the world you see a lot of things that seem to be designed obviously the artifacts in front of us to watch the microphone even this plastic glass these have all been designed by intelligent designers to serve various purposes but so does everything in the living world seem to be designed and exquisitely designed that's the famous argument from design and until Darwin came along it was a magnificent argument it really was impressive these things can't be accidents as Paley had said and in fact I have hypothesized that this idea that there's no design without a designer is perhaps older than our species how could that be well before there was homeless sapiens sapiens that's us it was Homo habilis you know the the handyman made tools we've been making tools for since before there was homeless ap ins we've been making stone axes and things like and I think perhaps as long as hominids have been making tools it has seen just crashing li obvious that it takes a big fancy thing to design and make a or things you never see a pot making a Potter you never see a horseshoe making a blacksmith and so I was wonderful big fancy things making things which are considerably less wonderful sort of the trickle-down theory of design and I think that was just obvious to the world until Darwin and when Darwin put forward the theory of natural selection all of a sudden an alternative became available and in fact one of his earliest critics thank goodness for this man an otherwise anonymous man named Robert Beverly Mackenzie wrote a very heated and outraged negative review of the Origin of Species and there's a passage in it which I just love to quote then I I actually wrote it out I printed it out so that I could get it right it's I love this partly for the outrage let me just read what what Robert Beverly Mackenzie had to say about Darwin's dangerous idea he fed in the theory with which we have to deal absolute ignorance and he capitalizes that a.i absolute ignorance is the artificer so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system that in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine it is not requisite to know how to make it this proposition will be found on careful examination to express in condensed form the essential purport of the theory and to express in a few words all mr. Darwin's meaning who by a strange inversion of reasoning seems to think absolute ignorance fully qualified to take the place of absolute wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill bingo yes that is exactly what Darwin is saying absolute ignorance can take the place of absolute wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill that's the strange and version of reasoning that Darwin introduces to us and it goes down hard this is this is really a revolutionary turning upside down of the way we've thought about creation and design since before we were even Homo sapiens and what we've seen in the time just since Darwin is a series of sort of retreats on the part of thoughtful people trying to deal with this this strange idea that you can have design manifest design in the biosphere without an intelligent designer ASA gray who was a contemporary of Darwin's and professor at Harvard famously said well you see God isn't the the designer of each and every critter you know all creatures great and small God designs the system that then churns out the bunch of them he that he he's he chooses the the physics if you like and the fundamental biological principles and then just let's turn the crank and let's let's all the rest of the design happen I had a lovely phrase word he said design by wholesale is even better than designed by retail so so god the wholesale designer is the is the successor to God the the individual handicraft er but then people began to think well what about these laws of nature that God so cleverly devised so that evolution could happen here's where Lee Smolin really comes in because because Lee and other cosmologists and physicists have suggested that these exquisitely tuned constants of physics that marvin was talking about this these uncannily precisely chosen values of the variables that permit life to permit our universe to be one in which life can evolve because carbon atoms are sticky enough to be a sort of great glued you know the fundamental glue that holds things together in fancy mechanisms maybe those aren't so much constant it's just locally constant maybe there's a whole lot of universes out there and we just happen to be in one of course we couldn't be in any other where all the laws are just right if you're in it if you're in a if you're in a universe that has life it's gonna have to have laws that are life friendly that make it possible this is the anthropic principle now so then God gets demoted from lawgiver to not even to law chooser because now we suppose well the part of the universe that we're in has these laws of its no no no accident that that should be so we don't need God to choose the laws because the other parts of the universe where there are other laws they also exist or may exist for all we know so we so God is demoted again so what's God's now well he's sort of a a master of ceremonies I guess or maybe you know our Father who placed air guitar or something like that so we've watched this somewhat graceful and somewhat graceless retreat where God has given less and less to do to the point where it's no longer at such a mystery that he should be omnipotent if you don't have any job then it's not so hard to be on if it n't now these ideas may amuse some of us but they they strike terror and repugnance in the minds of many people who want the traditional top-down view of an intelligent designer to prevail and it's fascinating to see how many how even the most resourceful and wily scientific speculators can be drawn back again and again to the idea that maybe there's some way where we can we can save the idea of an intelligent designer after all well in a way I think we should all be agnostic about that maybe there is but by the time we've established that it is going to be so different from the original imagined creator that if those who are religious want to say something like well we told you so we'll say well if you have to say that go ahead but of course it isn't it's so remote from anything you've ever imagined or could have imagined using your traditional point of view that that it doesn't really count now if Li were here if I may go on for just another minute or so playing the lead role what's fascinating about about Lee Lee's work is that he's found some ways to take seriously I mean very seriously as a physicist the idea that evolution can actually apply below the biological level to the level of in effect universes or sub universes themselves that you can have an evolution of universes so that the universe can indeed design itself

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Length: 32min 44sec (1964 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 03 2012