Daniel Dennett: From Bacteria to Bach and Back

thank you thank you everybody for coming I want to thank the organizers for making this possible it is an honor to be speaking at Yaga mony and university I've been hearing about it and reading about it for decades my first visit and I'm very proud to be here so I'm going to be talking today about some of the ideas in my new book here's the polish jacket of the book and here's the American jacket of the book the English jacket is a little different still from bacteria to BA and back the evolution of minds well now there's a bacterium and there's BA today I'm going to concentrate on back after a swift review of the other parts of the book it's a long fairly detailed story and I will try to highlight the major points of the path so that I can get to some points at the end which may be unsettling or surprising to you let's see here's my hero Darwin and I'm going to talk first about Darwin's strange and version of reasoning one of his early critics wrote a passage that I love to repeat because it is very eloquent and very impassioned this is Robert McKenzie Beverley writing in 1868 and he says in the theory with which we have to deal absolute ignorance okay if it if it catches on my beard it stuff better huh how's that I I was once at a meeting in artificial intelligence with John McCarthy what a dear friend of mine and the coiner of the term artificial intelligence we were sitting in the back and a speaker began speaking and somebody in the crowd yelled louder so the speaker began to speak louder and John yelled funnier so I'll be ready for that if you try I love the capital a capital I that McKenzie you McKenzie Beverly uses absolute ignorance is the artifice ur 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 exactly that's just what Darwin was saying and he was right and it is a strange and version of reasoning for many people it is still almost impossible for them to take it seriously let alone believe it but I submit that Darwin was right that we know he was right and now I'm going to talk about the implications of this strange inversion of reasoning it raises a puzzle we might express it as follows how can a process with no intelligent designer create intelligent designers who can then design things that permit us to understand how a process with no intelligent designer can create intelligent designers who can then design things it may look as if this is a trick with mirrors or some sort of subtle contradiction but it isn't it's not an easy question to answer but it's possible it's not impossible what I will be doing today is giving you sketching for you my answer and there are others that is the details very the mainly what I'm going to give you is what I take to be the backbone of any good answer what we have is not a dearth of possibilities we have an embarrassing bounty of possibilities and we're just working on figuring out which is the best one we all begin with the Great Tree of Life this is my favorite diagram of the Great Tree of Life let's see I guess I can't use the pointer no I can't use the pointer all right well I'll just the the outer boundary that's today every living thing alive on the planet today is along that outer rims time moves out radially from the beginning where you see the first the origin of life there in the black and we see the archaea and the bacteria that were the first living organisms and then we see a very important point that where that sharp curve happens that's the eukaryotic revolution one of the great moments in evolutionary history and you can see that it's a great moment right there because to a first approximation every living thing that's visible to the naked eye is a eukaryote composed of eukaryotic cells the plants and the animals the birds and the fish you and me and the redwood trees we are all eukaryotes and none of us would be possible if it weren't for this amazing transition that occurred about two billion years ago and here's how it happened there had been bacteria of many lineages archaea of many lineages bumping around for several million years developing different strengths and weaknesses different capacities and every now and then they bumped into each other and when they did the usual result was that one of them would eat the other or one of them would invade the other and as it were taken apart from the inside and sometimes they would both die and very rarely none of those happen and instead a engulfed B and then a B moved on together and it turned out that in very rarely but occasionally a be together joining forces were more fit than either A or B by themselves they formed a sort of partnership and when they divided they both divided together so that you got to a B's and then for a B's and then 8a B's and so forth that was the endosymbiotic origin of the eukaryotic cells we can see in this grant on the left is a bacterium on the right a eukaryotic cell and the eukaryotic cell is bigger and it has these organelles it has little parts those little parts are the descendants of the original invaders for instance the mitochondria that you have in all of your cells are the descendants of original mitochondria that invaded some bacterium and then created a eukaryotic cell way back when now that's about all I'm going to tell you about bacteria except for one more thing first of all I should say the person most responsible for convincing the world of biology that this was true this is a late great lynn margulis lynn was not the inventor of the idea but she very bravely and persistently enunciated it and defended it and and championed it against ferocious opposition for a long time and she won and now it's in all the textbooks and she's the one responsible so this invasion of prokaryotes and eukaryotes created well invasion of one prokaryote with another created the eukaryotic cell and this was a great case of technology transfer you think of it this way this lineage has a billion years plus of R&D gone into making it what it is so does this one they join forces and they get a tremendous increase an immediate increase in new capabilities the eukaryotic cells can do a lot of things that bacteria can't do and it was a case of endo symbiosis one well-designed thing entering the body of another well-designed thing making a much better design thing in the process a great leap forward in evolutionary space so we can see then the eukaryotic revolution at that sharp curve in the sort of lower left now I want to enlarge the tree of life a little bit and I want to look over here with the mammals and you'll see down near the bottom a little Y on its side not the bottom one but the one up above that that that little Y there that's about six million years on each branch so at the base of the Y at the crotch we can put the common ancestor of us and the chimpanzee that's how recent we are on the whole big tree of life now I'll just back up so you can see we human beings well hominids have been around for being generous six million years Homo sapiens have been around for a hundred thousand years two hundred thousand years in that neighborhood so we're talking about very recent history on the tree of life now I like to adopt a sort of engineering perspective on all this and think of evolution is R&D research and development it's a design process that exploits information in the environment to create maintain and improve the design of things and Ardie takes time and energy and there are two main varieties of R&D evolution by natural selection and human intelligent design not capital i capital e not godly intelligent design a human intelligent design by intelligent designers like you all in this and like Shakespeare and Copernicus and Einstein and and Lynn Margulis and Marie Curie and all the rest the two processes differ in fundamental ways evolution by natural selection is purposeless for sightless it's extremely costly ninety nine out of a hundred of its trials end in childless death it's slow whereas intelligent design is purposeful somewhat four-sided governed by cost considerations and usually well relatively fast think of all the technology that has been designed in the last two thousand years and compare that two thousand years to the billions of years since the eukaryotic revolution and you get some idea of the difference in speed well evolution may be slow and costly but it is brilliant I like to quote Francis Crick who once made jokingly spokes many times jokingly spoke of what he calls Orville's second rule named after his colleague Leslie Orgel evolution is cleverer than you are this encapsulate a very frequent experience among evolutionary biologists they see some feature of some organism it might be a bacterium or it might be a tree or a bird or a fish that seems to be ill designed a bit of a bit of bad cobbling together and and they're marveling it what a bad design this is and then later they figure out no no actually it's more devious and clever than you ever imagined it's a better design than any you could make yourself this has happened so many times in the last century that this orbital second rule has many confirming instances that doesn't make it of course always true but pretty close well we have intelligent design now and it's becoming evermore intelligence and this has some surprising implications and that's really what I want to talk to you after I've built the case up to intelligent design to the I want now to describe the process that brought us to the age of intelligent design which is the age that we live in and it's very recent maybe a hundred thousand years old no more than that on the left that's a termite castle in Australia on the right is La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona Antoni gaudí's great masterpiece they are eerily similar in shape and in structure they are both brilliant engineering constructions brilliantly designed beautiful strong and intensely practical and useful for what they're for so they're very similar their artifacts made by animals the one on the left is made by termites who are not all that impressive in fact we might say they're clueless they are myopic and they they have no boss there's no architect there's no blueprints there's no manifesto there's no principles of best practice written out anywhere there's just several million termites myopically doing their little thing and this amazing structure is the result contrasted with the termites is Gaudi who was the perfect contrast because he was charismatic megalomaniac egotistical brilliant he had manifestos and blueprints and defenses and it was all this is all worked out in advance of course it changed a lot still being changed it still isn't finished so we have on the one hand bottom-up R&D by the termites and top-down Rd by Gaudi there are fundamentally different processes of research and development and the puzzle about them is this first of all what you're seeing here is a couple of neurons in a petri dish and what you've got between your ears is by latest count 86 billion give or take a few 86 billion clueless neurons and they're even more clueless than termites they are stunningly myopic none of them knows who you are or cares and yet if you put together 86 billion of them they make a brain which makes a mind now here's the puzzle I've just described bottom-up design and top-down design and here's the question termite colony might be 70 million clueless neuron that termites a brain 86 billion clueless neurons how do you get a Gaudi type mind out of a termite colony brain termite colonies are as colonies pretty smart they they air-conditioned their houses and they guard their food supplies and they go foraging in very efficient ways the whole colony is so smart that early researchers went so far as to say the colony itself had a soul the soul of the white ants was a famous book written about termites 150 years ago a soul a race Kaka tan so steak heart would say it doesn't have a race car eat ants it's just millions of termites and of course however brilliant a termite colony is it can't write poetry or design automobiles or go to war against other creatures or build ships or create great art can't do any of that so now we have our puzzle somehow the billions of neurons in your brain each individually clueless none of them knowing anything about you can be harnessed together in a system that can do things that are way beyond the capabilities of a termite calling me and I'm think you will probably agree beyond that the abilities of a million termite colonies working together how is that possible and here is the short answer I owe this to my former student and friend in Sweden you can't do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can't do much thinking with your bare brains the termite colony is a bear brain intelligent designers have a well equipped brains they have lots of thinking tools now when did they get their tools well over there somewhere in the last million years you can go back a million years to the first hominid tools go back further than that a bit but it's a very recent development tools and especially thinking tools which are more recent still and how did they get their tools well here's the wrong answer technology is a gift of God after the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gift it is the mother of civilisations of arts and the sciences that's my friend Freeman Dyson I say it's the wrong answer the first sentence is the wrong answer everything else is true yes technology is the mother of civilisations of Arts and the sciences technology tools designed tools but Dyson is wrong to just declare that this is a miraculous gift from on high we have to tell a bottom up story not a top-down one we have to take Darwin's strange inversion of reasoning seriously so the long answer is that cultural evolution designed thinking tools that impose novel structures on our brains cultural evolution is a separate a distinct process of natural selection not of genes but of cultural items which creates evolved virtual machines I used to have to explain what virtual machines were but I think it's entered the vocabulary of most people by this point virtual machines are not made out of pistons and rods and cogs are made out of information they're made their software your your your cell phone your mobile phone has lots of virtual machines on it they're apps that we download into our neck tops and those are the source of our power and versatility in order to understand this we have to look at another strange inversion of reason due to Alan Turing's another one of my heroes remember here's Darwin's strange inversion of reasoning in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine that is not requisite to know how to make it I'm going to just change a few words and give you Touring's in order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine it does not requisite to know what arithmetic is when Turing came along there were plenty of computers they were mostly women poorly paid they'd read maths and university a lot of them and that was their job what are you I'm a computer I work for the government I worked for corporations and what touring realized was even though this was a technical job and these people knew what arithmetic was it wasn't necessary they could be replaced by a machine that didn't know anything didn't know addition didn't know what arithmetic was at all but it could add and subtract divide multiply better than any human being and that was the birth of the computer in our sense of the word today so two to the two of them together actually coming from different places arrive at the same wonderful idea my bumper sticker for this is competence without comprehension according to this view mind or consciousness or understanding it's not the cause it's the effect comprehension is an effect of competence rather than the other way around now this is in itself a strange inversion many of you maybe most of you are university students and most of the rest of you who no doubt have university degrees why did you go to university and why did you take those courses because you and parents thought in order to be competent in this world you've got to comprehend you have to understand comprehension is the source of competence and we all look down at rote learning and and mindless drill and so forth and we think no the way that the way to get real competence is to start with comprehension we might call that the Cartesian top-down way and what Darwin and touring showed is no that's backwards comprehension is a product of competence not the other way around as you add competences you gradually build up to comprehension comprehension isn't some miraculous talent that drops down out of the sky that is the result of putting together lots and lots of mindless competences whether by computer circuitry or termites or neurons termites are not intelligent designers they don't understand what they're doing beavers are not very intelligent designers in fact we are the first intelligent designers in the Tree of Life and this is a very recent biological phenomenon and it's had some huge biological effects the late great Paul MacCready the green engineer and theoretician who some of you may know him as the inventor of the gossamer albatross the bicycle-powered plane that flew across the English Channel powered just by a human cyclist a wonderful man and he calculated that 10,000 years ago and that's roughly when agriculture got started human population plus livestock and was approximately 1/10 of 1% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass vanishing this is a very minor species with a few tag-along a companion species livestock 1/10 of 1% 10,000 years ago today it's considerably higher with anybody hazard a guess of what the percentage is today you said 98 you're right 98 percent yes yes I've this is a knowing audience it's it's still amazingly surprising 98 percent now most of that's cattle but we have transformed the planet this is one of the largest transformations in the biosphere in the history of life on the planet and it happened in 10,000 years and what explains it human engineering technology design intelligent design McCready says over billions of years on a unique sphere Chance has painted a thin covering of life complex improbable wonderful and fragile suddenly we humans have grown in population technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power we now wield the paintbrush for better or for ill so this was a result I'm claiming of another great technology transfer not unlike the eukaryotic revolution the invasion of human brains by symbiotic thinking tools what Dawkins calls memes we don't inherit them via our genes we don't have to design them ourselves they come already designed check this out I mean how many of you could have invented a long division or cost-benefit analysis or calculus or just alphabetizing a list of words your mind is filled with thinking tools that make life easier for you you didn't have to design them you got them ready-made and you just installed them and we were off just like installing an app nobody the thing is that nobody had to design them they'd they were designed by differential replication exactly the same way that your genes were designed and your and the and the parts of your bodies that your genes transmit information about so memes are things that are made of information they're habits or ways of doing things they differ from instincts and that instincts are ways of doing things that are transmitted genetically memes are ways of doing things that are transmitted perceptually socially that's really the only difference best example are words words are memes that can be pronounced and each one is a little thinking tool when you add a word to your vocabulary you have added a new tool to your kit numbers another fine thinking two poems symphonies theories proofs algorithms so the Macready explosion is an explosive amplification of competence initially competence without comprehension evolving into competence with comprehension we now comprehend as it were in retrospect most of the great achievements of Rd that culture has given us but we didn't have to comprehend them when when they arrived they were they were designed just as cluelessly as the termite castle is designed by a process of cultural natural selection so now we want to invert the Darwinian strange inversion we want to move from bottom-up mindless creation to top-down mindful comprehending competence and the intermediate step is what I call free floating rationales trees do things for reasons but they don't reason Bunji do things for reasons they don't reason the biotic world is saturated with reasons from the molecule on up everywhere you look there's reasons why things are the way they are we can't we human beings clever folks that we are we can articulate these reasons when these reasons are articulated they cease to be free-floating they are now anchored to expressions of reasons in the minds and books of human beings and that's the first time they've ever been articulated or expressed evolution does not need to articulate the reasons why it does the things it does and we do things we blink we shiver we vomit for reasons that we don't understand consider yawning nobody knows really yet why are we on there's probably a reason it'll probably be figured out pretty soon we know why we shiver we know why we've Amin but knowing why is not necessary for being the beneficiary of this instinct in those cases that we have we also often choose and decide and act for reasons that we don't need to appreciate I have lots of examples of this in my book so here's the problem that culture solves how do you get a box mind out of a termite colony brain how do we get intelligent design with representation of reasons out of 86 billion mindless neurons the second great endosymbiotic revolution human culture we're Apes with infected brains this is a three dimensional diagram first used by Peter Garvey Smith I'm not going to go into detail on this I just want to use this to structure your imagination a little bit this is a space of cultural items we can place things in it and the three dimensions along the the x axis you see bottom-up versus top-down so we put the termite castle R&D in the lower left hand corner top-down as intelligent design but let's look at the other scales comprehension is on the vertical dimension so as we move up through that three-dimensional space we're talking about things which were aided by more and more comprehension in order to get built and then on the fore and after or z-axis we have random versus directed search random search is just guessing at random directed search is when you have a lot of information to focus your search much more precisely and way up in the right hand far right hand corner we have intelligent design in the low or left hand corner we have Darwinian design now the claim I'm making is that cultural evolution started in the lower left-hand corner right down there with the termites human cultural evolution started off the human beings were just about as clueless as termites they were the beneficiaries of new habits that invaded them and that spread that were contagious and only gradually over eons did they become more self-aware more self-conscious more comprehending of what they were doing and this is recapitulated in children children they talked before they know what talking is they don't know what talking is they don't even know what words are until they've got quite a vocabulary and that's the way it was in the early days I'm gonna put Picasso up in the upper right hand corner not because he's the most intelligent designer of all time but because he said he was Jeunesse Esch pop the truth I don't search I find I leap in a god-like way to the maximum to the highest point in design space with no grubby trial and error no random search I just nail it right from the beginning I am a genius that is the perfect boast of the intelligent designer and nobody not even Picasso can live up to it and if you study the biography of any great creative mind you'll find lots of trial and error lots of mistakes lots of backing filling Picasso had one brilliant addition to add to the grubby business of trial and error he signed and sold all the errors I want to replace him with ba because I think Bach is actually a better example of an intelligent designer than Picasso and besides it is a literal literal alliterative Li close to bacteria Bach was an exemplary intelligent designer deep comprehension of what he was doing highly constrained trial and error methods it was constrained by knowledge by comprehension by foresight he was magnificently equipped with thinking tools and with music theory vast knowledge of history of music but a lot of people don't know is he was also a technocrat of his day he meant just design organs he repaired organs he was not just an organist he he had a deep appreciation the organs were the were the high-tech music of his age and he was more known as an organist than as a composer during his life on the Left we see in a chalet in hand-axe our ancestors made these for over a million years with no discernible improvements a million years very strange on the right of course you see a mouse nobody invented the Ashland hand ax Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse and it's on the verge of extinction in only a few decades the pace of R&D has picked up dramatically in recent years now for an intermediate case philosopher Alma and writing in 1908 about French fishing boats wrote the following every boat is copied from another boat let recent as follows in the manner of Darwin it is clear that a very badly made boat will end up at the bottom after one or two voyages and thus never be copied one could say then with complete rigor that it is the sea herself who fashions the boats choosing those which function and destroying the others if it comes home copy it that's natural selection and notice that the boat copiers don't have to understand the principles they may think they understand the principles of marine architecture and and hydro engineering and so but they don't have to in fact they may make terrible mistakes if they think they understand better than the sea what makes a good boat over many generations of boats the boats become more and more seaworthy and they don't have genes they have memes so now we're 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 its search methods and so has genetic evolution thanks to our intelligent designers we have genetically modified food we have craig venter we have all the celebrated and castigated triumphs of molecular biology to look at and the pace of development is getting faster and faster thanks to CRISPR and other technologies and now gene Drive it's we're entering an ever-accelerating period of R&D in the age of intelligent design but now I want to talk about the age of post intelligent design which it seems we are now entering in many fields intelligent designers are exploiting the truth of Oregon's second rule evolutionists cleverer than you are they're using evolutionary and quasi evolutionary processes on the computer to do the heavy lifting whose genetic algorithms which are very much evolution they're inspired there's deep learning which you must have heard of evolutionary architecture buildings being designed by evolutionary algorithms to optimize letting in the light being being cost-effective being having a small carbon footprint being easy to heat and so forth there's nanotechnology and there's a machine learning things like Watson IBM's Watson Google Translate and many many others in the news everyday and it's leading to what some people worry about under the term black box science it's getting to the point now where you can have a really good scientific question you want answered and there's a black box algorithm a deep learning system you feed the data into that and it gives you the answer and you don't have to understand it at all this is competence without comprehension and it doesn't understand it either it can't explain what it's done it's any more than natural selection can explain how it designed birds so we're beginning to be gifted with products of [Music] evolutionary design coming out of computers no I'm Tom see is famous for decades he's been arguing that there are two kinds of problems there's puzzles which we can solve and mysteries which we can't this was a point of almost theology for him I guess and from my point of view this was always awkward because among the mysteries that we couldn't solve were consciousness and freewill two of my favorite topics and he was basically saying don't even try it's simply beyond human Ken will never understand those interestingly he's changed his tune a little bit first of all he inspired a second generation of Chomsky fans Jerry Fodor call him again and indirectly Thomas Nagel to argue that the mind will remain a mystery forever it's it is beyond the kapow ER of the human brain to understand the mind the brain is too complicated to understand itself here's what Chomsky said recently while there is a conceptual distinction between problems and mysteries we accept the best explanation science can give us even when we can't imagine how they work and then he says this it doesn't matter what we can conceive anymore we've given up on that now a remarkable statement from Chomsky and I don't think it's true but I think it's on the edge of truth raises the question of whether comprehension matters should we just give up on comprehension and just settle for black box science I hope not do we want to have technological competence without comprehension DARPA which has funded a lot of this research that's the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon has a new initiative for research on so-called explainable III the whole point of which is to make AI systems that can explain how they got the results explained in terms that a user can understand and of course since they've got a lot of money a lot of researchers are putting in their bids for how they're gonna make explainable AI and some of this I think will work and some will be good but I think there's a great danger should we try to make persons out of these AIS a lot of people think this is natural and it's going to happen and the reason they think it's a good thing is so that they can explain their reasoning to us so they can develop their own imaginative curiosity and their own epistemic goals the Khan against this is the idea this will blur blur the lines of moral responsibility I submit there's a great difference between those thinking an intelligent tool and a colleague some people want to make a eyes and a colleague's with moral responsibility and consciousness others want to keep them as tools you can take apart anytime you like you don't hold them responsible you hold yourself responsible for using the tool and not abusing the tool and not misusing the tool and that's the goal that I think we should be pursuing and the way I think we should pursue it is even with legal innovations we should license users of these new systems they should be bonded and there should be strict liability laws in other words if you are licensed to use one of these AIS and I use use you're not collaborating with this AI you're using it it's a tool a very powerful to if you're licensed to use that tool and you make a judgment you issue recommendations that are followed that lead to disaster you are responsible you don't get to say well or didn't know that there was this flaw in the system you are held responsible for flaws even if you couldn't know about them because the company hadn't told you about them or didn't themselves know about them that's how strict liability laws work they work for pharmacists they work for other professions where you have people using tools that are dangerous very powerful but could be very dangerous you impose a very stern constraint on users so that they will make their due diligence particularly strong and then of course there you're gonna have to have malpractice insurance because you would never take on a job like this with the risk of being utterly ruined if you ever were found negligent and the insurance companies will put a tremendous pressure on the builders of AI to expose every known flaw every weakness every gap in the systems that they sell I don't know how it is in Poland but in the United States these laws now are on the books for some pharmaceuticals and if you watch on television you see a new prescription drug being advertised and it's always accompanied by a hilariously long list of known and suspected side-effects that might be bad and it's required by law and they have to list all of these otherwise they would be in very big trouble so I want AI purveyors to live under the same rule exposing the flaws that they know and training operators to recognize those flaws and not letting people use their machines until they can show that they can they can catch the flaws then the step makers will have the incentive to advertise the flaws the weaknesses in their system it will be a sort of reverse Turing test where the computer challenges the user to find the flaws the gaps the shortcomings and if you can't if you don't pass the test you don't get your license you can't use the system years ago I and a colleague started this curricular software studio at Tufts and our motto for what we were doing is using computers to improve to empower people who to increase their intelligence well there's two kinds of empowerment there's the bulldozer way where you can now move great amounts of earth around but you're still a weakling and then there's the Nautilus machine where the Machine the technologies use actually to build up your personal power we think you can apply the same distinction to AI you can make systems the point of which is not simply to extend the reach of your data gathering and analysis but to train you to be more comprehending to teach you how to comprehend things that you don't now comprehend and that I think is the path that we should follow two kinds of empowerment thank you for your attention thank you thank you a lot you have infected a lot of range today that's that's for sure so now is a good time if you have scribbled anything on your small pieces of paper I guess our helpers will move around the room and collect them and then we will find if there's anything doing maybe infect your mind in return but so far there was actually one question that was asked online I think we can start with this one which is within your frame of thinking about a human mind is it possible that there are things happening inside consciousness which you cannot possibly explain even to yourself so contents of consciousness which are formerly indescribable is the place for this so in the in the framework of evolutionary mind theory could that you could something evolved that is completely incomprehensible to the mind and you cannot English it there seems to be but I don't think there are I think one of the great obstacles to getting on with the business of coming up with a good theory of consciousness is that for well understood reasons there's a strong temptation to inflate the phenomena beyond the wonderfulness and strangeness that they are and people routinely suppose that they're conscious of much more and a much stranger than in fact they are they are themselves deluded about what's going on in their own minds and sometimes we can show this very straightforwardly and I take great delight in showing people that they don't know as much about their own consciousness as they think they do since they cart we've had this tradition that our minds are transparent to ourselves that there's nothing I know better than my own and nobody else could know it anywhere near as well forget it it's false it's just false there are lots of things that are going on in your mind that are very central to you as a person as an intelligence that you have no inkling about whatever and science can tell you about those things and only third-person science can tell you about that thing there are other things that you are in effect authoritative about but it's much less than you might suppose okay thank you and then the second I will just move around those piece of paper in just a minute but there's one more this one is about forgetting for exam or tools yes the question was do you expect well do you expect the thoughts and the tools the mental tools to become extinct and what is the dynamics of extinction is it the same sort of dynamics that happens in biological evolution do these things become extinct as often as species you know the answer most of the species are actually interested in a question I guess is are most of the mind tools that we have operated in the past are they extinct or do we just accumulate and just accumulate oh good question and the answer in some regards is obvious today there's about very people have different counts they're five thousand six thousand natural languages I'm alive and in in various states of health around the world that's five thousand out of hundreds of thousands that have existed in the past the rest have gone extinct so most of the languages that have ever been spoken have gone extinct and ant languages are going extinct at a at a very great rate probably before Christmas and other dozen languages will go extinct and linguists field linguists are trying to at least record some of these before their loss and when they're lost they're really lost they're lost even more in excessively than dinosaurs there are efforts now to reconstitute dinosaurs by basically starting with chickens and doing genetic engineering backwards making chickasaws and then other dinosaurs I mean this is serious science is going on right now but you're not going to do that with a lost language is there's no fossil traces there's no there's no DNA but continuing on that would you subscribe to some sort of linguistic universalism that languages are actually it's just a single tool the concept would be that you know there's 5000 languages but if there is at least one left then we retain the same basic capability of language ink and it's sort of like there is a thousand word processors but as you know if we just have one that we have this particular tool it's not about the flavor it's about the whole concept of using a language or our different languages different tools know that well here's where we enter into the controversial waters of the wharf hypothesis and whether or not differently you think differently in different languages and this was a very popular idea in the last century then it was very influential II debunked by a lot of people and now there are a few researchers who are coming back with new evidence that suggests that in some rather subtle ways the Latin your native tongue does either argument or constrain the way you think about some things so it is not clear that any language will do and even if the old proverbs about no French is the language of diplomacy in German is the language of science and Italian is the language of love English is the language of Commerce there may be a grain of truth in those but not much and the loss of the language is I think a very great cultural loss in the same way that a loss of biodiversity is a great loss the same reasons that lead people to establish seed banks and comb through the jungles of the Amazon looking for plants that need particular protection I think the same thing should go for language because they they embody a lot of ardi a lot of Technology thank you this is a I don't know maybe it's a tricky question what is the first or girls rule what is our girls first rule I don't know I I never asked Crick that's why I hesitated it's one of those tricky questions ok he just made that up I have an even better one how can we defend ourselves from quote militarized thinking tools what was the militarized militarizing I guess the question is should we be afraid oh yes well every basically every technology that's ever been invented has been put to some military use some aggressive use whether it's boats or planes or printing presses or whatever everything so of course the thinking tools that we are developing at great rates today are always candidates for being put to some militaristic use and I think the only way you can guard against that is eternal vigilance and we just have to make sure that our children grow up learning that they shouldn't trust everything and there are many very attractive options out there which may turn out to be not so good for them after all after all all the all the things that now afflict us start out being very attractive cellphones wonderful mobile phones you probably call them cell phones but now people are beginning to realize they can become addictive and they can stunt your life in many ways so that's we should bear that example in mind and I think we have time for one more question so out of the many quite interesting ones the one that you kind of naturally led us into and it's a very practical question I love it it's simple what tools to increase our comprehension would you suggest the the background of the question is that we sometimes out compa outcompete are even our parents incompetence but not necessarily in comprehension and in the age of the of Internet and broad access to tools what are your favorite tools to increase the comprehension well when when I was working with my colleague and some wonderful coders to do the software studio we had the concept of what we call a concept piano and here's how that came about I I was looking all the time for new applications of the talent we had in the software studio thinking can we design a software system that will help teachers widen pedagogical bottlenecks in their teachings so we had a wonderful tool for population genetics and another one for computers themselves and another one for for geology and I was talking one day with a friend of mine who's a musicologist and was talking about what and a music theorist and I said let's sit down and design a tool that would be a great way of exploring music theory that would be user-friendly and indefinitely extensible and we thought about it for an hour so and I said you know what we just done mark we've just reinvented the piano the piano is a wonderful user-friendly thing you you don't have to worry about fine tuning it's already tuned for you just very easy to push the buttons you've got you've got several different visual arrays that you can map between there's the music paper there's the black and white keys there's high and low it's it's all set out in a wonderfully intuitive way and it's just inexhaustible as a way of exploring at least Western harmony of the well-tempered scale and so I thought well ok so mark you don't need our services you've already got your perfect tool they don't need any help from our software people but then I turned it around and and said so now what now you know what we're trying to do we're trying to make concept pianos in all other fields so for instance the late Steve Gould complained to me once that his students at Harvard in they needed to learn how to reads that stratigraphy drawings no layers of geological layers and the fossils in the layers and he tried to teach them how to how to draw and read the stratigraphic diagrams and he said the trouble is that the best students get it and then other students copy trace the diagrams of the best students when they hand in their homework and I said Steve have we got a tool for you we worked with the geologists and made this was way back in the days of IBM pc's we made a paint program where the primitives were geological events likely like depositing a layer of sediment and another layer of cetera and then you could fracture them you could fold them you could have magma coming up and it would keep redrawing the pictures you had another geological event and so the trick was that we never got it to market but that Steve or any other one any other person teaching stratigraphy and and Paley ology could simply use the program to draw a particular draw diagram send that picture file for the students they draw this using this system and the only way you could do it is by understanding the principles of how how geology works and some events happen over millions of years and some events happen very fast and it's all modeled in the system and what I loved about it was that it was open-ended you didn't have to use it to do your homework in geology in fact when I was developing it with a dear friend and colleague my son who was then about eight or ten got interested in it I had a copy of it at home that we were working on and he spent hours trying to get it to write his initials in in the in the stratigraphy using the the big Rafi he was learning a lot about geology as he was doing that but it was he could put it to some other purpose so I think the idea of making concept pianos using software to create virtual worlds that require people to get a lot of hands-on experience in difficult domains there's a great way of proceeding thank you thank you very much and thank you all for the other questions we weren't unfortunately able to ask and this is about time unfortunately we want to be able to have the signing ground that's that but we all thank you dearly for your lecture we saw that you thank you very much thank you very much Tim Kuya

Channel: Copernicus

Views: 9,663

Keywords: Daniel Dennett, Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Copernicus Center, Kraków, evolutionary biology, Darwin, intelligent design, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Big Questions, Jagiellonian University, philosophy, technology, evolution

Id: zfLynOBIsVA

Length: 69min 6sec (4146 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 28 2017