Daniel Dennett | From Bacteria to Bach and Back | Talks at Google

[Music] please put your hands together for Daniel Dennett can can I ask for the house lights to be put up I'm not an actor I'm a professor I like to I like to see the students eyes I like to see the audience reactions I feel very uncomfortable if I can't do that okay so my new book is called from bacteria to Bach and back and let's see oh yeah that's a bacterium and that's Bach and I'm gonna say a little bit about them but mainly today I'm gonna talk about back because that's what you folks come in yes Google actually is not just mentioned in the book but discussed a little bit in the last chapter so we'll get to that but first I have to give a sort of swift review of how I got there so here's the great tree of life this is my favorite diagram I just realized with all these screens I can't use my my laser pointer so I have to use the cursor here aha here we are so if you this is the present out here at the outer edge and this is the origin of life here so time goes this way everything that's alive on the planet today is somewhere out there on that fringe and you can see how it started with the archaea and the bacteria and then you had this amazing event this was the eukaryotic revolution the endosymbiosis that created the eukaryotic cell the first great technology transfer to independent simple cells bumped into each other and instead of one eating the other they joined forces and it just happened to work and thus was the eukaryotic cell born and everything that's alive that's big to see with the naked eye is a eukaryote we're eukaryotes so our pine trees and whales and birds and everything else everything else except for bacteria and some other protists so this huge colorful fan-out is all the sequel to a chance event that happened several billion years ago and then here is another familiar feature you may have heard of the Cambrian explosion over a relatively short period of time a few million years relatively short by evolutionary biology standards you had a tremendous creative burst of new designs novelty and of course along with the creativity went a lot of destruction mass extinctions along with the it was in a tremendous arms race I've more to say about that later and so then over way over here somewhere we have the mammals and let's just look a little bit larger at the mammals and let's look even a little bit larger look and if we look see that little Y there right there that's about 6 million years each leg so that could be the chimps and bonobos on one leg enough on the other that's how recent hominids are us and and modern Homo sapiens of course is much more recent still so there we are just at just a tiny little tweak on the tree of life so there's the tree of life and I like that particular diagram because it helps us to visualize the history of life on the planet as a history of ardi of research and development it's a design process that exploits information in the environment to create maintain and improve the design of things I do not shrink from talking about design by evolution I think it's a mistake of evolutionary biologists we're not going to about design because that gives aid and comfort to the ID intelligent design crowd now the the the brilliant designs of evolution if that isn't design nothing is because it outstrips human design often by by many degrees let's agree it's designed without an intelligent designer that's Darwin's idea I have more to say about that well R&D takes time and energy as you know and there are two main varieties there's evolution by natural selection and then there's human intelligent design low lower case I lower case D our intelligent designers the room is full of them you are intelligent designers and you're not alone and there have been intelligent designers for quite a while but not for millions of years there have only been intelligent designers for a hundred thousand years which is just barely visible on the map of the Tree of Life we're a very very very recent development and it we read back features of our own intelligent design into nature at our peril there are very important lessons to learn about that effort to reverse-engineer nature and I indulge in it throughout the book but there things you have to be careful about because the process is different fundamental ways evolution of course is purposeless for sightless extremely costly trillions and trillions and quadrillions of poor organisms die childless oh 99% of everything that's ever lived died childless an awful lot of waste and of course it's slow to experience of years contrast that with intelligent design which is purposeful goal-directed it's somewhat four-sided not as far sighted is that often thinks it is and of course it's governed by cost considerations as you all know well and it's usually relatively fast even though as you also know particularly in the world of software projects always take longer than you expect even when you expect them to take longer than you expect so evolution may be slow and costly but it is brilliant the late great Sir Francis Crick wants made a joke about it teasing in a way his colleague Leslie Orgel by calling it Orgel second rule evolution is cleverer than you are and what he meant is not he nobody on earth would ever be less likely to be a supporter of ie intelligent design than Francis Crick that was not his point his point is that the process of natural selection though mindless purposeless without imagination nevertheless it produces designs that are more cunning more devious and more efficient than most human beings can imagine that's what he meant so intelligent design now exists as I say the room is this where we are sitting in a veritable castle of intelligent design and it's becoming ever more intelligent and a lot of you can take some credit for that too and this has some surprising implications here's an arrest in comparison on the left you see an Australian termite castle on the right you see gaudi's famous Barcelona Church Sagrada família they're remarkably similar in overall shape and structure and material and even the interior design there are many features in come it's a sort of breathtakingly interesting comparison so the end product is stripe they're strikingly similar but the processes by which these products have been made are hugely different these are my exemplars of a point I want a contrast I want to distress the termite castle is made by termites millions of them and in a word they're clueless they don't know what they're doing they don't know why they're doing it there's no boss termite there's no architect termite there's no subcontractors and contractors they all just doing their little local mindless jobs and amazingly the termite castle with many outstanding design features like air-conditioning emerges from there very competent but clueless behavior Gaudi on the other hand is just perfect for my purposes because he's the archetypal charismatic mad genius hero the top-down king of design who had blueprints and manifestos and proof of concept and and it was all planned out in advance and he lorded it over his assistants who lorded it over their assistants who lorded it over their assistants who lorded it over the bricklayers and stone cutters and others who built so we have gaudi as an exemplar of top-down design and the termites as an exemplar I'm up design I think that's pretty clear now here's a puzzle we have bottom-up design and we have top-down design I'm just giving you some examples now a termite colony might be as many as say 70 million clueless termites a brain latest count 86 billion even more clueless neurons your brain is much more like a termite colony than you might like to think there's no boss there's no boss neuron there's no head architect there's no lieutenants and captains and generals just 86 billion little mindless neurons and doing their thing and having even less know-how and versatility in many ways then then the termites so now here's the question how do you get a Gaudi type mind out of a termite colony brain I think it's obvious to everybody that a termite colony wonderful though they are they're never gonna write any poems they're not going to have a new form of government they're not going to build ships they're not going to do any of the resilient things that we've done and yet the whole colony has a structure which is not all that different from the structure of our brains the neurons are semi-autonomous quite independent they live their own little lives and they grope around in their local spaces not unlike termites so there's the puzzle now what's the answer well the short answer which is nicely been put by a former student of mine both album you can't do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can't do much thinking with your bare brain your bare brain is like a termite colony it can't do much thinking it's very competent that some things but it can't do much thinking and it can't because it doesn't have the thinking tools a termite colony is a bear brain intelligent designers have well equipped brains equipped with thinking tools where did they get their tools well the wrong answer is from Freeman Dyson technology is a gift of God after the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts it is the mother of civilizations of Arts and Sciences the Freeman is a sweet man the passage I'm quoting the first sentence is false and the rest of that I think is true so we have to replace that first sentence with something more plausible something more naturalistic so if that's the wrong answer here's the long answer cultural evolution cultural evolution the process of natural selection of cultural items Design Thinking tools that impose novel structures on our brains what happened over not billions of years but only over thousands of years because cultural evolution is very fast is that virtual machines were evolved that could travel and spread and be installed on different brains giving those brains powers they otherwise didn't have or as I like to put it there are apps that we download into our neck tops and I mean that almost literally our basic mammalian brains are like a computer without even an operating system or with only a rudimentary operating system and then we pile in the apps and many apps depend on other apps which depend on other apps and in the end you have a multi competent entity that can do things that the bare brain can't do by itself and that's the power the source of our power and versatility well that's the long answer but very shortly put I want to now spell it out in a little more detail because I want to highlight a few of the important features of this idea which many people find shocking and repugnant and I want to acknowledge that and expose it so we can move on from that so we have to go back to my favorite passage from a critic of Darwin's who talked about Darwin's strange and version of reasoning I've read this over the years many times I still love to read it because it expresses the outrage so perfectly and I'm going to attempt to do it in a sort of Oxbridge accent accent because the author who was originally anonymous in the book in which he said this he's listed in the on the title page has simply a graduate of Cambridge University so here is what he said in the theory with which we have to deal absolute ignorance by 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 the caps are in the original 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 absolutely fully qualified to take the place of absolute wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill exactly he's nailed that's what Darwin did and it was a strange inversion of reasoning why do we send our children to university so that they get the wisdom so that they can then do achievements of creative skill here's Darwin saying it's the other way around now we can we can get brilliant design out of absolute ignorance well the idea was appealing to many people but it really needed another great Brit to show in detail how this might work and that's my second hero Alan Turing and here's touring strange inversion of reasoning first of all remember here's Darwin's strange aversion in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine that's not requisite to know how to make it here's Touring's in order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine it does not represent to know what arithmetic is what touring had figured out was that the computers of his day who were people many of them wearing dresses women who would read mathematics in university that their jobs could be replaced by a machine from which all the comprehension who sort of laundered out and that was the dawn of the computer age so Darwin and touring together have a common theme which is expressed in my I suppose this is my bumper sticker now these days competence without comprehension competence without comprehension the upshot of this is very alarming to many people it means that mind consciousness understanding intentionality is the effect not the cause but the traditional view with God the intelligent designer providing all the meaning and purpose and it sort of trickling down to the creations throw that away it's not a mine first universe it's a matter first universe mind is a very recent development on this planet termites are not intelligent designers beavers are not very intelligent designers we are the first intelligent designers in the Tree of Life and we come along very recently but what a difference we've made I want to talk about the McCready explosion I mentioned the Cambrian explosion I want to talk about an even more dramatic explosion which I call the McCready explosion Paul MacCready how many of you know who he is he's a late great green engineer the gossamer albatross the pedal power the human powered plane that flew across the English Channel that's one of Paul McCready's brilliant creations of a real visionary man wonderful stuff and he wrote a paper not so many years ago where he calculated that 10,000 years ago a twinkling in evolutionary time the human population plus their livestock this is as agriculture was just getting going 10,000 years ago if you took the human population at the time plus all their livestock and pets it was probably in the order of a tenth of a percent by weight of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass of the animals we're leaving out all the insects and the worms and the fish and the sea terrestrial vertebrate biomass a fraction of one percent 10,000 years ago the percent today is rather higher would anybody hazard a guess 25 percent no that's low it's 98 we have engulfed the planet most of that is cattle but this is probably the biggest fastest biological change on the planet ever and this happened in 10,000 years and genes don't explain it technology explains it and technology is not transmitted through the genes it was in fact the result of another great technology transfer I already described the eukaryotic revolution where to two protists cells two prokaryotic cells each with a billion-year lineage of R and D to give them the talents that they had joined forces and suddenly you had this multi-talented new thing the eukaryotic cell that was a fecund happy event if ever there was one the next one is the invasion of human brains by symbiotic thinking tools means a term of course is from Richard Dawkins the selfish how many of you have read The Selfish Gene however you haven't well put it on your list it is it is one of the great science books of the 20th century and it is often denigrated and dissed by people who's scared of it it is still to this day was published in 76 probably the single best clearest and most exciting survey of what we know about evolution that's been written and in that book The Selfish Gene he also wrote about a new kind of replicator which he called a meme a selfish meme which are like genes are like viruses they are cultural replicators and like viruses a virus travels like it doesn't carry its own replication machinery with it it has to invade a cell and commandeer the copy machine in that cell to make copies of it rather than the DNA that the cell was supposed to copy and he suggested that culture was composed of entities that were similarly capable of provoking their own replication by invading brains we don't inherit memes via our genes we learn them from our parents from our peers from our friends from television we are constantly bombarded with ideas some of them stick some of them go in one ear out the other the ones that stick take up residence in our brain and then they have to compete for life support with all the others that are trying to get in there and every time you think it you make an offspring every time you say a word you make another copy every time you think a word you make another copy and words are the best examples of means I'll get to that I'm getting a little bit of myself the main point though for our purposes here is that we don't have to design them ourselves we are the beneficiaries of thousands of years of cultural evolution we don't we don't have to design alphabetizing lists or long division or or plain geometry or calculus or how to write music or the well-tempered scale or perspective or if you go on forever of course these are all highly developed ways of doing things that are not instincts instincts or ways of doing things that are passed through the germline through the through the DNA memes are just like instincts they're ways of doing things but they're not pass through the germline they are they are picked up perceptually socially in many in most cases we don't have to design them ourselves in fact nobody has to design them so the Macready explosion is an explosive amplification of competence which eventually it started off being competence without comprehension I think it's very important to realize that our early ancestors the first the first hominids infected with memes were still pretty clueless they didn't know what they were doing they didn't think of it as culture they didn't think of it as anything they just had all these new habits that were infectious that got them doing things that they hadn't done before and it turned out that these built and built and built and built and pretty soon they had language and then they had epic poetry and then they had architecture and boat building in to the races we go and it evolved into competence with comprehension finally we get to comprehension the diet so it's the Darwinian strange inversion Rhian verted we get a move a trend away from bottom-up competence without comprehension to the evolution of a different kind of designing which is competence with comprehension to understand this we have to understand the free-floating rationales trees do things I know some people don't like that term I'm sort of sorry I coined it when I did but it's sticking and and I can't go back and change it now and in a way it's sort of evocative because what I mean by a free-floating rationale is a reason a real objective reason why something is the way it is that was never anybody's reason until some clever person analyzed the thing and figured out retrospectively what it was good for trees new things for reasons the trees don't know them that they aren't reasons that the trees have and consider but they do lots of things for reasons funghi do things for reason bacteria do things for reasons the biotic world is saturated with reasons from the molecular scale on up there are reasons why the parts inside the bacterium have the shapes they do and have the powers they do and fit together the way they do and we can reverse-engineer these don't think that those reasons were the reasons represented in the head of any intelligent designer ever they just were uncovered and exploited by natural selection and now we clever reasoner's that we are can sometimes go back and reverse-engineer them and uncover the reasons that then become represented for the very first time when we write about it talk about it argue about whether this is the reason or that is a reason why something is the way it is and we do things for reason we shiver we vomit we blink and we don't have to know why we do it but there are reasons and they're good reasons and then there's the things that we do where we choose and decide and we actual reasons sometimes we do that without even appreciating that we're doing that retrospectively we may figure out oh it was a good reason for that and of course sometimes weakened fabulet sometimes on purpose how many of you have ever made a move in the chess game which only later you realized was a brilliant move and did you admit it ah there was a very good reason for that slowly dawned on me that phenomenon I am arguing is much much more frequent than we think because we tend to advertise all of our successes with retrospective accounts of the reasoning that led up to them and it may be in some sense be accurate we're actually reverse engineering how we got there that doesn't mean we thought of it at the time it doesn't mean we had the reasons in mind because you don't need a mind to act for reasons that's one of the lessons so the problem that culture solves is it is the question how do you get a bauxite mine out of a termite colony brain how do we get intelligent design with representation of reasons out of 86 billion mindless neurons and that was the second great endosymbiotic revolution we are Apes with infected brains our brains have been colonized by all of these viral like things a virus isn't alive but it evolves some people think viruses are alive you can argue about that viroids at least aren't what are they a virus there's a string of nucleic acid with attitude it just happens to have a shape that gives it the competence to provoke its own replication under many circumstances meme similarly are things made out of information with attitude they provoke their own replication and they don't have to understand this this is just the secret of their success we're now ready to look at cultural evolution and nobody in this room I think will be intimidated by such a simple diagram but I find that for many audiences I have to sort of lead them through this this is one of Peter Godfrey Smith's Darwinian spaces we can't easily imagine four dimensions or more so we well if we want to imagine changes in evolution not only in things evolving but in the very process of evolution itself we can take various features of evolutionary phenomena and map them on three dimensions in a in a three space and then put things on the on the on the cube in various places so in this case we're going to put down at zero zero zero we're going to put very Darwinian evolution that is to say this is no competent no comprehension at all mindless trial-and-error random search bottom-up so if you like it sort of termite castle type R&D okay up in the upper right hand corner far right-hand corner I've put intelligent design which is high in comprehension it involves top-down methods and involves directed search purposefully directed search so now the question is how do we get from the lower left hand corner to the upper right hand corner in a hundred thousand years and what I want to argue is that evolution itself evolved as cultural evolution got underway the products of cultural evolution changed the very terms of selection so that the process of evolution was sped up and sped up and made more efficient the searches became less blind and trial and error the organization of the searches became more top-down the comprehension level gradually goes up and we have end up not at the pinnacle but close to it I put Picasso I put the termite Castle down in the lower left and I'm putting Picasso up in the upper right-hand corner not because he was the most intelligent designer ever but because he said he was he once said who's in the share spot is the truth I don't search I find I just get it without any grubby trial and error no erasers no false starts I just leap with my godlike genius to the Mount Everest peak in the fitness landscape and bingo I create another masterpiece well you know chefs positive truth my answer is married not true it's an ideal of creative intelligence that even Picasso could not meet and in fact if you look at his work you see that he made sometimes dozens sometimes even hundreds of variations on a drawing or a painting before he stopped working on that his part of his genius lie and the fact that unlike a lot of other artists he signed those and sold them imagine if you could do that with software so I'm gonna replace Picasso with Bach who really is an exemplary and was an exemplary intelligent designer deep comprehension of what he was doing it was highly constrained trial and error methods he was a very fast composer cantata a week for years amazing and it was constrained by knowledge by comprehension by foresight he really knew what he was doing and he had purpose and foresight he was magnificently equipped with thinking tools he couldn't have existed before the the system for writing music out and instruments like the organ and in fact he wasn't just an organist he was more famous in his day as an organist than as a composer he was an organ repairman he understood organs from an engineering perspective so he really does make an exemplary intelligent designer he had music theory he had the history of music vast knowledge this these are the thinking tools he used now we're ready to look at a comparison I thank Matt Ridley for this slide wonderful writer about evolution on the left you see in a Chilean hand ax they were made by our ancestors for about a million years without any change it's one of the strangest artifacts ever a million years without any change on the right it's the Emmaus nobody invented the Ashley and hand axe Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse the mouse was invented when back in the 70s maybe late 60s it's almost extinct it may soon be extinct that's the difference in speed of cultural evolution measured on the big scale of the Tree of Life so here's our diagram again and I first thing I want to acknowledge is that we're not the only species that has some cultural evolution chimpanzees have a several traditions of nut-cracking and of termite fishing or ant fishing that are passed on non-genetically and there's different traditions in different in different troops and that's where it stops it never goes cumulative it never goes recursive it never piles up that's they're not a one-trick pony but they're about a three trick pony but now I want to talk about our cultural evolution and all the things that are made of information these are some of the most important things in our lives you are very familiar you are living in this world of things made of information they have to have a physical embodiment this isn't dualism but what matters in every case is something that you can send from A to B in a bit string if you want to you can't send a bowl of soup that way so now let's look at the key elements of cultural information in our species and I think words are the key element and I want to suggest that the first words that existed were what we might call sin anthropic words now a sinner OPIC species is a species which is not domesticated but has evolved by natural selection to thrive in human company mice rats squirrels barn swallows bedbugs cockroaches and many many more those are cinemas the first words were like that nobody owned them nobody people didn't even hardly notice that they were using them these were just habits that they developed I go into this in a lot more detail in the book next we get domesticated words and as Darwin tells us the key feature of domestication is you control the reproduction of the animal so you have a vocabulary those are your words you have your vocabulary 50 60 70 80 thousand words and if you ever catch yourself about to say one word and replacing it with another word reframing what you say before you blurt it out those are domesticated words you're controlling their replication not perfectly but you're playing a strong role in which words get replicated when and a lot of this is beneath notice but nevertheless this leads to differential replication and the words are not always wonderful I like to tell my students that there are it's quite possible for them to be a word or an expression which is of no utility whatever but which catches on and which has it has its own fitness it doesn't have to boost your fitness it just has to be able to survive and one day if student said can you give me an example and I said well it's like if you are like talking about some subject like and like it occurs to you that like maybe there would be a word in the sentence that like you didn't have to use all the time and he said I get the point I want an example it's very important that memes can evolve without human notice even though they involve the utilization of human perception the pronounciation of a trip or the meaning of a term can gradually shift over your lifetime or over a couple of generations or over a few years and suddenly you may notice oh my gosh this used to mean something else now it means something different happens all the time that's mimetic evolution after domesticated words we get coined words the word meme is a good example deliberately coined sort of like GM food intelligently designed terms you can design them all day but whether they catch on depends whether they replicate is that's the hard part so even though they are given a boost by human intelligence they still have to survive by differential replication in the society most coined words don't then we get to technical terms which are very deliberately created designed and and their reproduction is fostered by careful training and and examination and sort of group pressure we got to get everybody on the same page here now phenotype genotype if you don't understand that you fail a class so we those are sort of hyper domesticated words where we're very we expend a lot of energy and time to make sure they replicate and that they replicate accurately and then we get to internet memes and a lot of people would say the internet memes are sort of a reductio ad absurdum of Dawkins concept of memes and I used to think that myself would be I think it's too bad that this wonderful term is being hijacked and used in this dumb way and then I realized and the reason I thought it was too bad because an intelligently designed meme is a contradiction in terms you might think it's supposed to be an evolutionarily designed bottom-up designed cultural item but my gosh they have contests to see who can design the most viral internet meme that's manifestly these are this is an attempt at intelligent design but is this a reductio ad absurdum no is this a contradiction in terms well in a way yes but so what a splittable asks of Adam is also a contradiction in terms but nobody goes around saying no such thing as an Adam so what we have to recognize and one of the main points of my book is to show that Dawkins concept of memes does just fine as long as we allow for the fact that the evolutionary process that enables cultural evolution changes that evolution itself evolves into a process which is ever more like what tradition tells us cultural evolution is namely intelligently designed treasures that are understood bequeathed to the young etc etc so that traditional views of culture are sort of limiting cases of cultural evolution and in between we have every combination and degree of semi insightful tinkering one of my favorite examples is the Polynesian canoe I'm not going and this is the where I got the quote that I'm going to read but it turns out that the philosopher who who was writing it was not writing about Polynesian canoes but about French fishing boats every boat is copied from another boat let's reasonless follows in the manner of Darwin it's clear that a very badly made boat will end up on the bottom after one or two voyages and thus never be copied one could say then with complete rigor that it is to see herself who fashions the boats choosing those which function and destroying the others that's natural selection who comes back copy it different floats copy it and notice that if that's the tradition that you're working under you don't have to know why it's a good boat you might be all wrong about why it's a good boat if you're just conservative I don't know why they do it this way but grandpa did it this way I'm gonna do it this way and by and large if it ain't broke don't fix it and gradually the design will stabilize and uneven improve all without any comprehension required if at comprehension can stand in the way you can have a brilliant idea which turns out the beach is wrong mother nature punishes you for that so in this diagram the traditional model of cultures when the upper upper reaches up near the ceiling it's the economic model of culture where we think of culture as treasures you know high culture opera museums technology science the Declaration of Independence all that wonderful stuff which we appreciate preserve honor make sure that our children and grandchildren take control of them and appreciate the value of keeping them alive and so with the preservation of our culture and that's a very real phenomenon but what we have to realize is that that's the icing on the cake in addition to all the treasures of culture there's all the trash of culture all the junk all the graffiti all the stuff that's just fad and fancy it comes along for the ride because it can that's it it has its own fitness independently of what we think of it some of it we'd love to eradicate if only we could but we can't so now we're living in the age of intelligent design and cultural evolution has become ever more top-down ever more comprehending and self comprehending ever more refined in this search methods and of course the same thing that's been true genetic evolution because we now have GM food and we have Craig vender etc etc so we seem to be entering a new wonderful world with Google leaving the way but I want to suggest that what we're doing is we're entering the age of post intelligent design why because in many fields intelligent designers are exploiting the truth of Orgel second rule that evolution is cleverer than you are genetic algorithms deep learning evolutionary architecture nanotechnology breeding nanotechnology by making novel proteins in the in a evolutionary setting machine learning these are technologies which produce wonderful epistemological competences without comprehension Watson beats Ken Jennings in jeopardy google translate lovely example of competence without comprehension and many many others and in fact in science itself we're now getting black box science where you got a box designed by some wonderful technocrats you put the data in you push the button you get an answer which you can prove is highly reliable better than you could do using the old-fashioned methods do you understand how it does it no do you have to know so we're moving away from the ideal of comprehension that created intelligent design in the first place one little bit and then I'll close on this Noam Chomsky is famous for distinguishing between what he calls problems versus mysteries sometimes equals some puzzles problems we can solve like evolution and quantum mechanics and plate tectonics and meteorology the Big Bang and then there's mysteries which are beyond human can now and forever I find that a I really dislike that idea because it's so defeatist basically that says give up don't even try but he's inspired some people some philosophers in particular to become what has become known as mysterion's who make a point I make a point of declaring will never understand it well speak for yourself the rest of us are gonna go on try if you don't mind so I used to have a very very dim view of this whole approach and I still do but Chomsky's recently changed his tune I want to draw your attention to this in 2014 he said the following things in it you know this was a podcast while there's a conceptual distinction between problems and mysteries he says we accept the best explanation science can give us even when we can't imagine how they work it doesn't matter what we can conceive anymore we've given up on that well does comprehension matter do we want post comprehension science do we want technological competence without comprehension DARPA has gotten into the act with a new initiative for so-called explainable AI which seems to be directed precisely at this issue it's going to make AI that can explain there are results to us poor goats who are using the systems is that a good idea well depends on how it's done should we try to make persons out of these explaining a eyes I think no on the pro side it seems well that's great they can explain their reasoning to us so then they can develop their own imaginative curiosity and epistemic goals are we sure we want to do that I think we shouldn't because it's gonna blur the lines of moral responsibility because they don't have skin in the game and we want the people who make the decisions that really matter to take moral responsibility for them and we can do this with some legal innovations we could license users of these new system illogical black boxes and they would have to prove that they understood the limitations and the boundaries of any system that they used and as it were made money using they would be morally responsible for any misuse of anything that came out of the box that they use and they would not be able to declare whether who didn't understand because you'd have a strict liability law because it doesn't matter whether you understand you want to use this tool you have to take as it were the risk of being held liable for something if it goes wrong that's a bracing test but it's a good one it keeps people very honest keeps gives them a real sense of due diligence and keeps them from just taking the manufacturers word for it and running off into the sunset maker should have the responsibility and be have the incentive to advertise all the flaws gaps weaknesses of their systems advertise them even you might even have I think it would be good thing have sort of tutorial programs built into them you can't use this system until you can spot the flaws now this is gonna take you 10 or 20 hours depending on how clever you are to really get to understand what's real and what's facade in this system I think that would be a very good many years ago we had Tufts my colleague Jordan Smith and I created the software studio the curricular software studio and the idea was to use computers to to enhance human imagination we called them imagination prosthesis and what one of our metaphors was there's two kinds of empowerment there's the bulldozer way and the Nautilus machine way the bulldozer way you can move a mountain but you're still a 98-pound weakling the nautilus machine is a technology that which actually enhances your strength your personal strength and we want to do the same thing for imagination we want to make imagination enhancers systems that help people become better thinkers independently of the system they're using I think we want to make a is that our Nautilus machines for the mind not bulldozers tools not colleagues thank you for your attention this there's microphones anybody that has that question should step up to the microphone howdy all right you're coming to read your book and I was just going through the index and I see you mentioned Coffman and Deacon Terence Deacon yeah Deacon a few times I was wondering trying to get the scaffolding right in my mind when you refer to deacon in the book you kind of put that in perspective against what you're saying that there's purposelessness in the lower forms of life because tenant more my reading of him would be the I can incomplete nature okay like Aristotelian final cause starts to emerge spontaneously it rather lower levels of order do you well in fact I think Terry and I didn't agree although put it in slightly different ways there's a I did a long and really favorable review of deacons book it's on my website and the Deacon changed my mind about something that is really important and that's what I discuss in this book he argues that brilliant though touring and Newell Newell Simon McCarthy Minsky and Shannon let's say are that brilliant as the simplifications that they created which made the computer age possible there's an important regard in which they've led us into the wrong set of architectures because all the architectures that are made possible by their simplifications involve a separation of energy and information you don't have to worry the computer doesn't have to worry about where it's where it's gonna get it's it's it's voltage from its computers are parasitic on us and he says life isn't like that the thing that is most important about say a brain is that those individual neurons are semi-autonomous and you have to remember they are the way I put it in the book they're the direct descendants of free-floating eukaryotes that fended for themselves in a difficult environment for millions of years before they ever became parts of multicellular organisms what are they doing in there they're trying to stay alive this is a deacons point you make me an architecture of basic parts trying to stay alive which are looking for work that's gonna be a really different computer architecture from anything that we see coming out of the sort of fun women tradition even programs which have some of the flavor well production systems and and many architectures of good old-fashioned AI have this nice sort of competitive feel but they they're not it's not fundamental enough so I think I think deacons book hard as it is a very good read for the reasons that I described in the book but I don't think that he says and if he does this will be a point of disagreement with him that teleology and any sort of very strong sense comes in well I agree that it comes in with the with the with the origin of life I've got a whole section of what happened before bacteria that's to me one of my favorite sections in the book talking about how life could ever get started and what I argue there is that teleology comes in gradually as we move as I put it from how come - what for - different why questions I to teach my students this I have a pair of examples why are planets spherical why are ball bearings spherical there's a reason there's a what for for the ball bearings but not for the planets why aren't asteroids spherical why aren't dice spherical there's a how come for the asteroids and a what for for the dice what darwin's brilliant permitted was to show how we move from a universe a planet where there's only how come there's no teleology to a world in which there's what for where things have purposes and functions and that is itself a gradual process and I think he agrees with that hi I'm a I'm a fan of yours I'm also a fan of David Chalmers and I I sort of have a question for you maybe you've kind of answered this already which like I I'm curious as to like when when something sort of becomes like a moral agent or like when not an agent but rather like a patient like when when does something when does it have interest that matter will that do well right so but I wonder though that like if I'm a moral patient and I have like a nerve which causes pain and I'm trying to avoid that how is that different from like a computer that I'm programming which has like a cable on which you know a signal is transmitted which might be the pain signal of some sort of mind that we don't comprehend yet well you know we address that very issue in Ron Brooks lab when we were building COG but 15 years ago the humanoid robot and cog had these motors that stuck out of its elbows and they were a little bit fragile and we didn't want cog to be able to move its arm so that it would damage them so we sort of gave it a gave it a funny bone so that if it ever did anything bumped its these motors it's ended an effect a pain signal who didn't awesome do that again so yeah we can have a functional this was of course a top-down design the system to give cog the humanoid robot a quasi quasi pain system because it had some of the functions of the pain system and if we'd continued with that and expanded it by you know many orders of magnitude the project made some wonderful progress but you know not 1% of what what you'd have to do then eventually we would have had a robot that would have interests and where it would be wrong to thwart those interests it would be capable of something like suffering but we never got that far but I don't think of this you mentioned traumas I don't think there's a sort of extra Zowie ingredient qualia or something which the living things have and the things made of silicon don't have I think that's just a bad idea I think John I'm not saying Chalmers is right but I think he would go towards the direction of even silicon has that like your pen psychism or something like that pan psychism is the view that everything is everything everything is conscious and I think I almost agree with it but I I just kind of change the view a little bit I call my view pan nifty ISM everything is nifty every atom is nifty every electrons nifty now the question is is there any difference between pan psychism and pan nifty ISM they both explain the same things namely nothing if you can tell me how pan psychism is an improvement over pan nifty ISM I'd be very interested to learn well it's because conscious things are made out of conscious things oh really that's it colored things aren't made out of colored things no yeah thanks for coming up honored that you're here I'm also a big fan you mentioned skin in the game and the idea of building into into I don't know economics or into legal systems the incentives for makers and users of tools to to have to deal with the implications of the tools of using the tools but I was wondering and I guess that's more a question of politics or economics how realistic that is I'm thinking particularly of I don't know fake news alternative facts the use of media and social media to to spread viral memes intentionally to to provoke you human action in one direction or the other and that is I I feel that that is its own incentive the possibility of doing that is so powerful that it's very hard at this stage to build limitations to do that for simple things like like internet means misuse internet memes let alone AI tools or whatever like that well I hear you I think this is I think we underestimate how serious these problems are I don't share your pessimism but I agree it's almost too late and we ought to be thinking a lot harder and a lot faster and we ought to be acting more to try to fend off the trends that we can see happening I think that really it is the response and boy if there's an any audience in the world I want to spread this message to as you folks think very hard about what the unintended consequences of some of the innovations are and whether there are ways of steering them down more socially benign directions I think there are and I think the time is short but I think we should get cracking on it now so there's just to follow up shortly on that is there there's a there such a thing as personal interest and such a thing as group interest in such a thing as like so societal interests whether however defined society so is there's a bit of is there a bit of a conflict there and how so you say we should do this but of course for all of these situations there's this personal interest by a certain group so I you're doing your part by spreading the right memes I think and well thank you I'm certainly trying I think that actually one of the one of the most heartening changes that I see on the in the recent development is that now that Silicon Valley is producing all these young plutocrats young billionaires and a lot of them are really taking seriously the idea of putting putting that vast economic power they have to socially benign projects and they're taking seriously good intentions aren't enough they've got to figure out what you can really mess things up by squandering a fortune with good intentions on a bad idea and I think that this ideal of having taking it as a personal responsibility to use this incredible economic power for good and the fact you you help each other do it better this is one of the best developments I've seen and we're not quite at the point where we can start seriously shaming those who don't treat their wealth that way and I don't think we're gonna have to it shaming doesn't usually work anyway but if we can make them feel like there's sort of second-class plutocrats then this would be a step forward thank you yeah I wanna ask you about language came up in your talk so this is a little bit about the Chomsky criticism that you give and a little bit about sort of the tension between the anglo-american analytic philosophy in the European continental tradition so it sounds like on the one hand you're you're challenging Chomsky and saying that that you know reason and language kind of has a mapping to the real world that we can explain and that there's there isn't there isn't really a limit to language right these mysteries don't exist they're not beyond human thought they're not beyond perception or methods of expressing them but then at the end of your talk when you started talking about the dangers at least what I perceive as you mentioning the dangers of AI about competence with that comprehension it sounds to me like the the fear there actually is very much that it's encroaching on the hegemony of language right that we what we don't want to happen is to have meaning or something extra meat you know like outside of the scope of meaning but that kind of messes up our whole calculus right morality stops making sense if it's mala G stops making sense ontology like that these concepts and things that we say are so hegemonic and really do have this very concrete mapping physical things starts to go away and so I'm curious you know kind of sounds like you're saying both things that on the one hand there's a danger to like meaning escaping this and then on the other hand we actually have in Germany over this it's good I hadn't thought of tying it to the difference between you know continental and Anglo phone analytic philosophy aside from thinking that with a few exceptions the Anglophone philosophers are not post modernists and and still have a proper respect for truth facts and I think that the damage done by post modernists to the very ideal of objectivity and truth is that's vandalism one thing I said which I maybe didn't stress enough at this time let's look at science you have competition now who can make the cheapest fastest gene sequencer and it's kitten really cheap and fast and you just push the buttons and it's like it's like a TV dinner you just you know put it in the microwave and push the button and how it comes it's amazing how much of that process which which took genius which took brilliant drudgery bye-bye Nobel laureate scientists to do with in my adult lifetime and now you just push a button and you get it but look at so there's competition among different makers of gene sequencing machinery and what's the benchmark why do you buy unit a rather than unity because unit well maybe because it's cheaper but not if it's not as accurate truth really matters it's it is a it is a design in the same way that fuel efficiency or safety or design requirements for cars so getting it right is taken for granted as an as a requirement for the scientific black boxes or you know getting it right with a high degree of reliability of probability now I can't yet I don't know of any black boxes that are trying to avoid that and are just trying to make memes that'll spread truth be damned utility be damned but maybe there are in which case that's a very ominous development well on that a political note thank you [Applause]

Channel: Talks at Google

Views: 244,682

Rating: 4.843318 out of 5

Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel Dennett, Bach, Bacteria, DNA, philosophers, economy

Id: IZefk4gzQt4

Length: 76min 43sec (4603 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/hurf_mcdurf]

Dan is the man, noncompatibilists BTFO

[u/indeedwatson]

This title supports my view that Bach is the high point of human kind, I almost don't want to watch the talk in case it dispels it.