Daniel Dennett on our Consciousness, God and other Illusions | Sternstunde Philosophie | SRF Kultur

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Hughes this is a heads laughter and sow but season tech Jose and how moons are just as always principal wissenschaftliche Eclair bar skittles Malaysian dig into skip niche you were not religious one hottest by NIH algae found he say these science problems he does Angus in oh I think when I was very young when I was a teenager I remember reading the carts meditations cogito ergo sum and his dualism and I think I was 17 at the time and I was fascinated by it but I also just made a snap judgment the way 17 year old said this is beautiful but it's wrong and I think I'll figure out why and should take me an afternoon or two and 50 years later more than that I'm using T alpha Vox in my own field and about you if I'm really also not twisting shafts not a statistician not the science my my father was a historian Islamic historian my mother was an English teacher so we were very much in the humanities and but I had an interest in science as a little boy but never really pursued it in school beyond the regular courses in fact I got all the way through undergraduate college without ever taking up any proper science courses I passed my science requirement by taking logic courses and things like that oh hey Lee Gyu won what kind team are buying into for me to see show he'll accuse at saw one well I did in a way in our town in New England all the children went to Sunday school and there were lots of Protestant churches in the Catholic Church and I went to the Congregational Church which is ultra liberal ultra lenient even back then in the in the 40s and 50s it was doctrinally relaxed shall we say but I learned a lot I learned a lot of Bible verses I learned the books of the Bible like I learned lots of him sang a lot of choirs and still love religious choral music there's hardly any that I haven't sung most of it many times but I never took the Creed very seriously and then I didn't have a great atheist awakening I just realized I didn't believe it this was helped along by a very pompous and self-righteous Minister whom I simply detested and I'm sure he he drove me towards atheism just because I thought he was a pompous fool the event it's mushy harmful myths steam here meets here on finishes and causes violence isn't there even the expert or the island a few hundred experiments they would sign Katie's in philosophy professor and director the sentence fear cognitions recent job under Tufts University in the Navy from Boston in the new SR and Kansas Astana under moment every known as its immersed Marga dr. Vassar I know it's the star house an Asian state and they would give fuel entry income I remember as an undergraduate thinking about this and thinking about visual perception in particular and already I had in my head that the mistake that a lot of people were making was thinking that they had an inner moving running in their head somehow that there was this show going on inside somehow and I thought no no that can't be right that that's got to be subtly incoherent but I don't see how to tell a positive story to replace it so I was already beginning to sniff around inquisitively about that idea and then when I was a graduate student in Oxford a friend of mine a medical student I didn't know what's that I don't know anything about the brain not a thing I said what her brains made of neurons what are neurons and he sat down on the floor as I recall and got out of pad of paper and drew a picture of a neuron and connected it to another neuron and told me just basic what was known in 1963 about neurons and I had a then I did have a dramatic insight it suddenly hit me that this was the kind of entity which could be put together in large networks where you could get learning by a process of sort of evolution in the brain it was that the whole trick about learning I mean brains are wonderful learning devices how on earth is learning possible without a mystery how do you do it if you don't have a knowing teacher in there to point the way it has to be by a process of trial and error groping around more or less mindlessly until you find connections that work and then building on those and building on those and building on this so I had the idea of learning as evolution in the brain back in 1963 and then I later discovered that I wasn't the first one to think of that or the second or the third Darwin himself had some ideas about this it's I think pretty well agreed upon now that in a sense the process of learning and of discovery and of invention breaks down if you think of it mechanistically how the brain does it it breaks down into cascades of trial-and-error processes where there's competition and the winners are better helping the organism understand and the losers man action this is model the evolution stage built by in evil-ina holistically enough cool to hell if enemy so Pantheon zongzi assists angry monkey even a seasoned Gibbs already take food to near 35 in dome vision Anson and Nathan sail annoy her wooden about if rock me it's happened exactly an and does come on a Clarence I'm here firstly understand Tifa been doing tuition Antonin no wooden satsanghis Jack Tretton up a big boost sign does a leap and each perspective it's hard these are weld Schmitz and some leap it something on Salida we come come this immaterial and mainland phenomena to stand a house this matter here and the sisters cozy like silly probably mother's probably even guys don't kyun to something no no one stood in this before son he had time on V V let's take what is for many people the most pressing concern pain and suffering our bodies are equipped our nervous systems were equipped with cells called nociceptors for instance that is there they they detect harm or danger or they can be misfired but those are the that's the beginning of pain signals hawking skin density tense minutes mmm-hmm no and and the physiology and the neuroanatomy of of pain fibers and so forth up to the brain is pretty well known and agreed upon and but now what happens in the brain how do you get pain in the brain well obviously it's not that there's one neuron that that other neurons you know beat with chains or something and that's what makes pain it's not that the individual neurons are feeling pain how do you get the interaction of let's say millions of different neurons to realize to be the phenomenon of pain in the whole organism that's a good question it's a tough question but I think we can at least sketch the answer you wouldn't have nociceptors if they weren't useful nociceptors or the pain receptors what are they useful for they're useful for interrupting whatever you're doing and changing your priorities these routes and ones forget far off and cut the money shot the highest absolute if you were born without pain networks you would be very disabled and you there are people who are congenitally insensitive to pain they lead short unhappy lives well now we have to say all right so part of the function of these then is to interrupt whatever else is going on with a with a signal which tends to overpower whatever else is going on and we have to do this all without a a Hough central homunculus who decides what to think about next what to do next so there has to be a competition and there's a competition with whatever else you were thinking about at the time and if when the pain is really strong it tends to overpower in that competition now how is that competition rendered I mean what's the what's the physiology of it well it's it's the physiology of differential production of neuromodulators which either damp down some things or or facilitate things we understand that there are a lot of processes in the brain which are called opponent processes one pulls the other pulls and the compromise is what you do for instance your eye muscles are in opposition to each other and and where you look next let's take a very very simple case as you're just living in your life your eyes are moving three or four times a second jumping jumping jumping you don't notice this but that's happening well what determines where your eyes jump there's a competition in in the neurons that control that and some of them are saying boring boring I've seen this give me something new others are saying home sweet home I like this I'm going to stay here and when the when the power builds up on one side you get a saccade and this all happens very fast every every fifth of the second let's say does Alice first eat garbage 215 and that's a clear top on you over the hump Chanel vexy you that's not a ballute tsundere for tire live and we plot the highest emitter let's say our name we this is last year a segment us pitched it out how small in human hearts by all these helps ID molecule is needful oosik becomes feel enough on st. Theresa simplistic science essentially that annoying equality by boosting Bambi here is the civilized English essentially test is important from there from templates to Schmitz am finding wassup is fairly common doesn't receive me becomes EDA in okay yes that's the next that's the next thing I have to explain and I will do it very Schedule II the brain has a problem the brain has a problem because it's 86 billion neurons and they're all capable of doing all kinds of things then so something has to come in and simplify this and recast the activities of large groups of neurons into the representation of simpler things and this phenomena is very similar to something that has only recently been accomplished by human engineers and it's called the user interface on your computer or on your phone your cell phone is a unbelievably complicated object layer upon layer upon layer of software and hardware and firmware and it's actually billions of things going on you don't want to know about all that what you want is to have a metaphorical interface which is very simple which is a sort of ilusory it's called the user illusion well who's a user I'm the user and my cell phone is giving me an illusion but it's a it's a benign delusion it's good it's something you want because it simplifies your life it it allows you to control your cell phone and do all the things you want to do now here's the idea the idea is that the brain has a user illusion of itself and this means that the brain simplifies further what do I do next part of the brain the input that modulates what I should do next and the result of this is that you the conscious subject emerges from this interaction between the brains the two sides of the brains user interface and actually it's not as if there's a single place as many many places in the brain where these compromises are being worked out where oversimplifications are sufficient to trigger or evoke decisions reactions identifications so if we if we if we think of some little part of the brain as the this is this is the part that's going to locate the pain and this is the part that's going to say how severe it is well different the the the one of the central themes of my work for over 25 years is there's no place in the brain where it all comes together for consciousness I call that the Cartesian theater Descartes had the pineal gland right in the middle of the rain he said that was sort of the the fax machine to the soul and everything had to go through there to become conscious crazy brilliant bit crazy so there's no such place so all that work all the work that would be done by the clever is appreciating the monk ulis in the control room that all has to be distributed around two entities neural agencies that are themselves not conscious but they do the work that's cancer is timoshkin experienced ik that's heist I can please when it's realistic birthday does each on Dow in finding wish mats and I can't leash illusio no did ask Ian at soy to meet design for her R Biden columnist is a complexity thing may be vertical most disputed to hyper sense that's your own developed in Survivor as a sister and aren't you grateful for those illusions they are they are a brilliantly designed by evolution a brilliantly designed pre see a summary a metaphor for what's actually going on is our vision see versus problem is finish that's the stinky that's mine guys my new Villa kind and iron flows done hardened can of man-cub as a vanished dog target it's mostly it's my narration arm he encouraged us tune and these are bunch they get drunk about who asked done not see the skin and the arm in the vehicle because it's a brass Fortuno Motel also these function yet decent mentally fit that's right it doesn't work that way of my model because you're imagining the I as being this isolated and distinct subpart or inhabitants of the brain no no the eye is if you like the whole brain and the implementation of your wishes and desires and intentions involves lots of processes that are distributed in both space and time and that's what determines when your hand goes on the brain especially the human brain has a property which is not sufficiently appreciated I mean by scientists maybe it is by poets and that is that we can think about anything the representational fecundity of conscious thought is staggering there seemed to be no limits in fact it even seems to outrun language sometimes we say words fail me I can't put in words what I'm experiencing right now there's a tremendous repertoire of different states well in engineering terms those are degrees of freedom each one of those is a degree of freedom that has to be controlled well way too many to control their billions of degrees of freedom in the human brain so how do you ever get how does anything ever control anything and that's the process of autonomy that's how do you set up and how does a brain create an autonomous agent well if the autonomous agent is say a rat first of all the brain simplifies and only really represents a small number of possible actions you can you can hide you can sleep you can procreate you can fight you can eat you can hunt for food that's pretty much it and so there's five degrees of freedom right there do I do this do I do a B C D or E pretty much that's it there's no F G H or if they are they're just variants on the other but in us the number of different things we can do at any moment is staggering and so somehow and this is where I'm working right these days the system the evolved system is able to set up processes that determine what you think about next how you go about executing your decisions and so what so is it all determined yeah it's all determined but it's determined by its own by the activities of the system itself autonomous preciseness nobody does each want eleven is an illusion the dusky here that select so enough if ride height the severe so certain and hidin on dying - can a spirit song dheere again in st. the Tuskegee and or history and TV kyun does this Alice snitched their foul Susie is too talking the severe yet yeah actually actually though you could say and some people begged me to say because that's what they want to say that free will is an illusion and I say well there is the user illusion part of it there's the fact that your brain is designed to present you which is more of your brain with choices to decide among and then how you decide those choices is determined by the balance of education and experience and current desire and weakness and whether you're drunk and all the rest so you have this but you do have a sort of arena where decisions are made and that is independent of determinism chess-playing computers make decisions a chess-playing computer is the deterministic system but it does make this is I mean if you think those aren't real decisions try to make sense of the competence of a chess playing program without considering those real decisions cons are going beat - and chidomo visualization can't even enjoy on other ladies are weaker knocking on a tetraman yet and veiled in there Alice - Carol because it's a fest Khaliq these fries I'm a stammers over B billiard coolant - have a number on Survivor does this opinions of Hungarians Oh M done is I complete indecent tiled then the naturalism Delvian done east of sytem work null state faced the severe body it's here's its only turn on the philosophy and dust canister finish this bus for hi hi to name mr. Hobbes would well that's a very familiar and widespread opinion and I think it rests on the two-thousand-year-old mistake and that is the idea that freedom in the sense that matters is incompatible with determinism and I say no it just isn't in the sense that matters let me give you an example a historical example I used this many years ago yeah in my first book on in elbow room and the the Viking spacecraft was launched from Earth and sent off towards Mars and at some point the time it took to get signals from the ground control on earth through the Viking became too long for practical control so they had planned on this they had a switch they threw that switch and the Viking became autonomous it was no longer under the control of them it was a self control now there's nothing mysterious or metaphysical about that control theory in engineering makes very clear what the difference is between a controlling B and be controlling B self control is independent of determinism now self control autonomy in that limited sort of engineering sense it starts with something quite simple like the Viking or like an amoeba or a clam but as you add degrees of freedom the idea of being autonomous is becomes more and more interesting and more and more important because once you get a system which is capable of doing billions of different things but decides which of those billions of things to do yes the decisions that makes are determined by the state of its brain which in turn is determined by its history and its genes and all that but it is still the case that it isn't determined by outside environmental forces it is it is determined locally by the current state of the of the computer that the brain is and that's that's a kind of autonomy and when again when we get to people like us organisms like us it even has a moral dimension that has folk doctors does our instances they may be in computer robota Franken high high talkin about the boost sign carbon curtain especially the sort of NTC obyekt assist overhaul and Al's op c5 an order P boost sign hard really hard in job done happens is our me am astonished science in principle that's right in practice the degree of complexity that a robot or and artificial intelligence would have to have to be like us in as it were morally significant ways is is immense but yes and Prince after all I've said for years are there conscious robots sure I'm one so are you we're robots made of robots made of robots made of robots if we get down to the sub cellular level we get too little protein robots like motor proteins they're clearly robots they don't have metabolisms they're just little robots that's what we are we're made up of Kazue I wish Pinto head was under us else this is iPhone with Siri to have materialized eating walnuts in your arm soon infinity our patient can limit even our decency rehab can be worse than the heart can can Aleve not kind of hi hi does this really sorry I skipped it now no no and I think in fact giving Siri consciousness would it double or triple or quadruple the size and complexity of Siri no it would be a hundred orders of magnitude more complicated people should take scale seriously here a an amoeba is it conscious well it's alive it has it has it doesn't have a nervous system as one cell but the protein cycles the chemical cycles of reaction inside the amoeba our sort of nervous system that determine its behavior and it's autonomous to a surprising degree it it protects itself to a surprising degree and so does every neuron in your brain yeah I know I've always said I did he stopped me fry along well right and we made up of a trillion amoeba and they are all as you say they're they're robotic they're they only react to external stimuli but they do have agendas but you put together enough of them and now you get large assemblies which do respond to their inner states and respond to their inner states by reflecting on them by evaluating them by imagining alternative futures all of this can be implemented in wetware if you might say in in in the computational connections between neurons and glial cells the brain is a wonderfully complicated thing and no AI is close to it amongst each of these if I cry student computer nursing ones I guys this software isn't the ski here the hardware there is significant stock he having principles probably much even on especially this is phenomenal it is a qualia this a lady's quality the assist and look what to think Subash bill yes vanish machine very rare with us to Stanley Cohen skipped paramedic Gedanken experiment in the philosophy the result on the argument Zuma and getting these artful functionalism so the physical is most didn't see fat weight Moses are let's dish keep the stuff anglo-italian and don't politicize Mary the stump from Frank Jackson on developments yum does anemia in the high philosophic s-- when we sheryn Anthes quotes to someone Jesus babbling atrás - desi wanted an aesthetic I'm fighting a battle 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he agrees that it does not make the point that he wants to make and I've been arguing against it for years it's a failure of imagination here the I deliberately in in my 1991 book in consciousness explained I said I'm gonna retell the story of Mary just just the same except when the door opens when she's first sees color her scientist friends who've been locking her up but they show her is a blue banana and she immediately says wait a minute that's a blue banana you're trying to trick me and people say oh she couldn't know that she couldn't know that yes she could if you think she couldn't immediately know given the premise that she knows all about the physical reactions of her own brain she'll had no trouble it's it's as if it's as if you've never been touched with a pencil point in your whole life but you read all about pencils or something and now I touch you with a pencil point sir okay touch me with a pencil point no I didn't learn a thing and I mean that's just part of my criticism of Mary the top university reading it - keep knockin on doors building just a dog an experimental quit some fast income from from the American Asian fields of Thomas Nagel exact an inflatable isn't art we can Alice Lee but is a T Revis envisage laugh music for plans with es nada I wish better neva Cindy assist any Fledermaus Suzanne this is qualitative a boost sent a commissioner on our sea bahattin doctors Babu's son is from our portion yes in fact at one point I was going to write a paper co-author a paper with my graduate student Kathleen Aikens it was going to be called what it is like to be a bath and she actually did publish a paper called what it is like to be boring and myopic and went into the there's a subtle problem with Tom Nagle's argument and that is that Nagle helps himself to quite a bit of bat physiology in that paper why does he think that's relevant if it's relevant then more would also be relevant and more would be relevant to and more would be relevant to and the claim that we cannot imagine what it's like to be a bat is he never argues for it he never argues for it he just insists upon it and over the years I've been frustrated and annoyed and then finally amused I've seen Nagle's paper cited as Nagle's result by scientists if you look closely at the paper you'll see there isn't an argument in it he assumes that we can't know what it's like to be a bat and then his arguments are all about the implications of that and he's just wrong in this assumption there's there's no the idea that there's nothing that that there's information that we can get from the inside that we can't ever get scientifically it's just I think broken back by the way Tom and I had a little impromptu debate on this in New York City just a month ago and it's online and Nagel leads very very confidently with I've gone in for you know over 40 years 50 years and and he said where do you think science gets its authority he made it a issue of authority and there's the authority of the first person point of view and there's the authority of science and I pointed out to him that the authority of the first person point of view is just bogus in fact we know very little about our own consciousness and a lot of what we think we know is false we have no insight at all into the medium of consciousness we only have insight we only know about the content a retired artificial intelligence researcher named the richard power recently sent me a letter where he made the point crystal clear and now i'm citing it very often he compares our circumstance with consciousness to the fact that we can we can have a painting so you have a landscape and hold it up in the very landscape and we can compare and we can see that here the oil paint here's the green patch here there's the green out that we can we can see both the medium and the properties of the medium and we can see the properties of the thing represented and we can we can look at the differences in similarities we cannot do that with our own experience we cannot we have no access to the medium at all the medium is in fact spike trains in in neural networks and that's nothing that we have any access to but that is the medium and the properties of that medium are what determines the contents that we experience and when we recognize that we just draw a blank when we try to compare the two media then we invent qualia to be the the things we're looking at and that's just wrong that's this bad theory that's not introspection yeah this is intuitive so we've got so I can call testing if I smashed it contains too long it's American does and its machinery try it again since Indiana the artist Newton Richard Dawkins Dean CSTO good can timsy tried hasn't tried to some deviant brights kick her in the table that's easy that's ooh actually we didn't create it that was created by two wonderful high school teachers retired high school teachers in California they named the movement we just both learned about it we were reporting on it we were the messengers not to create it for 1/2 an ounce maybe this does fizzy our really given me et is deduced II Evoluzione England and stunts such that cloudy and and God sees help Sultan God film a fix you do you mean it's the same can you intercept asthma before view about God's expression by content is eet how similar for the mentioned before mention or the TV on katsu clap oh I think I can't prove it but I have a very I think persuasive just so story all most animals certainly all mammals have a startle or orientation response something surprising disturbing shocking happens and immediately we what but what's going on your dog may be snoozing at your feet on the winter night and snow falls off the roof and lands bang on the ground outside and the dog jumps up that's it in us unlike the dog we don't just stop there in fact the dog will jump up and bark and basically the dog is looking around and saying who's that not what's that who's that because maybe it's an intruder maybe it's who knows we're treating it finding an agent where there isn't one is a very good strategy evolutionarily now what we do human beings what our ancestors did is they would o be out in the woods at night and hear some shocking noise and they would think they saw you know a tree goblin and a talking tree and pretty soon the idea recurves to them and there's somebody there with him that one says was that a talking tree no there's no such thing as we're talking to you oh yes I think it was no by the time they get back to the village and word gets around Jones saw it I heard a talking tree and it becomes one of the local invisible agents and all the elves and gremlins and and ogres and fairies of folklore this is how they're born they are born out of this recursive imagining triggered by surprising experiences which we can't otherwise explain what happens then is the ones that survive are the ones that are unforgettable the ones you want to tell your kids about and psychos and that gives us polytheism and then we get an evolution down to monotheism and we're off that's our vows in Caesars Isha Sesay Varney moon Osmund ah it can be it was to see in mind justice fictions in steel or any sense in fair and bearish the reality the victory she dies as a BAS Marxist Ossetia does a scarran God gift who have Easton seed us how can I be sure there's no Santa Claus no Easter Bunny no Loch Ness monster I can't maybe they will turn out to be but but I'm pretty so I'm really I'm I say as Richard Dawkins says you know probably there's no God and I mean very probably the III think it's no more likely that there's a God then that there's a Santa Claus the sigh seeker I'm sorry if I'm shocking children that will hear this project about society current easy anomalies if he put a cineast with a lake so no Mrs Hagen aware reached out to be Nick tough you skip kind of if I see does this god keep yeah but when that's the case very often there's very good grounds for for treating one of the alternatives as the least likely and just discarding it the Russell Bertrand Russell had a famous example that's a he can't prove there's no teapot orbiting I can't marry which planet Saturn let's say maybe there's a silver teapot orbiting Saturn he can't prove there isn't but forget it we help this is Posche be the zedonk an experiment for behind that okay dafif Rushton das is kenapa is twine eight a tube table and pizzelle sorry but soy cumin some buyers p d-- here ed loved swishing the ear on the planet Mars Kaiser and taken on this honor this year had an ornament is a take a magazine and Z is troop line pal Stassi deutschen telescope vo bar that we encountered diner / Menon V in an intestine they hoped ejido sera a Neiman's man Annamma Vidal income bleib each permanently open mustnít to the latest darin dark a cloudian though Tim does fact issed a script on sale like a pizza he put is in the mystery Dalek bassant yet for the unarmed us once 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selection of cultural items to enhance cooperativity to to solidify social bonds to make concerted action of tribes of villages people who are not directly closely related a larger family in other words it I'm quite happy to grant that the that early religion play the big role in establishing group identity and permitting social cohesion that role is no longer really necessary I view religion as having been a very valuable early prop a prosthetic crutch if you like to get civilization with democracy and science and and a free press and all of those good things to get that up and running outside decent it's like a mineshaft is the same as sensitive to me surgeon was Center Hollis and mentioned a global Sindh and Punic on Kristin halt distance in in Ihram Laden rhesus by indeed this momentous issue not lie big design but I do believe in things and I and I think yes the creation of meaning is really what life is all about but while you're at it go for meanings that really matter that means something when when I had I had a very serious heart operation I got an artificial aorta I had a a Nordic this section usually it's fatal it wasn't in my case because a wonderful team of doctors and nurses and technicians did just the right things and saved my life that was in 2006 eleven twelve years ago almost and while I was recovering in the hospital bed I was amused and interested to get a lot of email challenges had I had an epiphany had I had I had I seen you know here I was facing death and I said yes but not the one you wanted what I realized that when we say thank goodness that's not a euphemism for thank God what we really mean is thank goodness there's a lot of goodness in the world and that's it's not God's goodness it's the goodness of the people that have gone before it's the goodness of the people who took care of me the goodness of the doctors and the scientists that did the research they made the medicines and and all the rest of that and we are all beneficiaries of mountains mountains of prior goodness and I recommend that we adopt the attitude of gratitude to what's gone before and we can repay that not by sacrificing animals to some imaginary creature but by adding to the goodness pay it forward so plant a tree feed and orphan discover something important vote these are ways of expressing your gratitude for all the good things that have happened that you have benefited from about nothing be about in Mahalo Shin Bet and we catch the kite solidarity and survive that's mr. doe in even built built our blue cific co-enzyme as a skip kind o P active met the sins of eating very cool to hell product to the and Jonathan's in don't newts leaf on the phones well yes and no again you remember that that and I guess you've said this to illusions can be beneficial the user illusion on yours on your cell phone is beneficial there are there are shared ways of seeing the world which were better off with and then without and to call those illusions is a little bit unfair to them the ancient philosophical problem of our things good because God thinks they're good or does God think they're good because they're good yes and what people of my perspective would say is there's no more warrant to the idea that X is deeming it good makes it good I mean my great aunt Lucille thinks it's good so it's good who's she why should we care what her boos well similarly if you believe in a monotheistic God how first of all how do you tell what that God thinks the history is full of outrageous representations of God's convictions and much harm has been done by that what's the better way I think the obvious way is to eliminate little man and think about it in political terms imagine we could have a colloquium of Congress a a public arena of persuasion and whatever you think is good this is your chance to tell the rest of the world why you think this is good and you never get to play the faith part if you say well in my religion we say eating eating pork is is not good and mustn't do that well okay that's a fact tell us why you think we should follow that - and don't say because God says so if there's a good reason fine otherwise and out of that rational process it's not scientific inference its political persuasion and the ideal of achieving consensus while leaving many issues unsettled if you look around the world there are practices that some people deeply deeply believe in that other people think that's just silly well if it's not hurting anybody else let him do it but but I think there is a core of agreement and what could possibly be a better grounding for morality than the fact that when people have been encouraged and obliged to think carefully about of this is what they come up with isn't lighter and fast on ND and this is a special person the homes in eastern god cloud the house NIST the fog machine in brain of any spiritual side events it's much Peter Segal or a good chess musical order on the second step think keeps a source in Daniel Dennett the word spiritual has in English acquired a very elevated meanings but also it the elevation is been accomplished by a watering down of what it actually means for some people professional football that's their spirituality okay Oh thisis fizzy truth democracy autonomy those are my those are my high values and I am so grateful for the existence of music and art which moves me sometimes to tears and I think it's wonderful and I think it is even more wonderful when I realize that Bach wasn't an angel wasn't a god nothing Supernatural about him but he was one amazing product of natural selection and his mind was beautifully enhanced with tools of cultural natural selection and he put them together in ways that are just staggeringly beautiful and that move humanity and that's that's good enough for me I mean I wouldn't I wouldn't appreciate both better if somebody told me and I believe them that some God gave back a genius pill in fact I would think well that's that's like cheating and then a few Nazis and donkeys no I'm delighted nice good questions you [Music]

Channel: SRF Kultur Sternstunden

Views: 24,765

Keywords: Daniel Dennett, Daniel Dennett Interview, Daniel Dennet Ted Talk, Daniel Dennet free will, Daniel Dennett Consciousness, Daniel Dennett Consciousness is an illusion, Daniel Dennett Illusion, Consciousness, What is Consciousness, Brain, Philosophy, Philosophy Talk, Daniel Dennett Philosophy, Daniel Dennett Philosophy of mind, Mind, Mind Brain, Mind Brain Consciousness, SRF Philosophy, SRF Philosophie, SRF, SRF Talk, SRF Sternstunde, Sternstunde, Yves Bossart, Barbara Bleisch

Id: X0ugfVI7UzQ

Length: 59min 53sec (3593 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2018