Daniel Dennett on Tools To Transform Our Thinking

I'm delighted to be here to see you all on such a beautiful day not outside in the sunshine so I'm going to talk about tools for thinking one of my students famously said or I love it you can't do much carpentry with your bare hands you can't do much thinking with your bare brain oh by the way can I have the house lights up I really like to see faces this isn't a drama thank you I'll try to make it entertaining but it's not you know thank you how many do you know about the Flynn effect oh only a few okay named after Jim Flynn James Flynn psychologist he didn't do the original research but he's drawn attention to the importance of it it turns out that since the in the hundred years that we've had IQ tests scores have been going up IQ tests are normalized at a hundred being the average and that so you have to keep tweaking that scoring system but if you give the tests that you gave in 1932 people today they'll score on average a hundred and thirty not a hundred at least as the whole world over to it's not it's not just in any one area at least we're a lot better at taking IQ tests than we were 8090 years ago but it seems to be a real pattern and what's what might cause that Flynn thinks that what's happened is that the tools for thinking that are developed and proved and and refined in in the sciences and then the other academic disciplines have sort of filtered down into popular culture and become part of the ambient culture that you learn independently of school and that this is why people are actually thinking better they're actually better problem solvers they see patterns better and so forth in any case it's a hypothesis that hasn't been disproven and it has a good chance of being the right the right answer to that question and the reason I mention it is because if you ask me wait a minute are you saying that these thinking tools actually make us smarter I'm saying yes yes they do so what are some thinking tools well par excellence the thinking tools or words can't do much thinking without words and I'm reminded of a famous line of Goethe's when ideas fail words come in very handy he really didn't say that and when you think about it you realize what wisdom is there when the when the thinking gets really hard you can often use words as a certain sort of prosthetic device a crutch to help you over some difficult stretches numbers obviously our thinking tools diagrams Maps methods of all kinds from finding the average the long division to cost-benefit analysis you name it notice that these are all quite abstract things they're they're techniques for handling information in your head rather than tools that you plug in or need a power source for then there's intuition pumps I coined the term way back in 1980 or 81 in order to talk about John Searles famous or notorious Chinese room thought paramount I said it's an intuition pump and because I was on that occasion criticizing a lot of people thought that I meant the term intuition pump pejoratively no I didn't actually and I've since explained that I think intuition pumps at their best are wonderful they are the best philosophical thinking tools there are and they always have been if you look at the history of philosophy Plato's cave of Socrates teaching the slave boy geometry they carts evil demon Hobbes state of nature these are the these are the great melodies of philosophy that you remember long after you forgotten the details of the arguments so philosophers have always used intuition pumps little stories scenarios vignettes and they're not typically formal arguments they're little stories it's not like doing songs when you get to the end you've got the answer very few intuition pumps are like that they're much more like Aesop's fables you get the end there's a little moral you hmm interesting you'd put it that way and if it really works you pound your fist on the table so it's got to be that way that's the intuition that's been pumped now there are persuaders in other words somebody wrote me the other day saying well I've looked at your book now and I think what you're really talking about in every case you're talking about social thinking you're talking about persuading others it's it's very much interpersonal and I wrote back said yes and in fact I should have stressed that more all really serious thinking is interpersonal I think I think that's in fact one of the keys to how we think is by challenging each other with our ideas lovely case in point Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem a few years back but nobody could be sure even Wiles himself couldn't be sure he'd done it until his peers his colleagues in mathematics who would dearly love to have the honor of having proved Fermat's Last Theorem themselves until they had signed off and said darn it yes he's got it congratulations this competitive opponent process between people is actually one of the key intuition pumps are the key thinking tools all on its own and so this is a book very much about how to persuade others and yourself about difficult matters there are also tools of discovery by exploring these vignettes you uncut you encounter either problems that you hadn't anticipated or sometimes opportunities that you would not otherwise notice and they hold our attention you you can just refer back to them and at least they give you a focus on a topic that's very useful now some fields of academic inquiry have lots of fixed points just in moveable bedrock philosophy I think has none hardly a one maybe the law of non-contradiction according to Aristotle what we have are candidates for fixed points we say in effect suppose for the sake of argument we treat this and this and this at six points now what follows from those three points triangulate those see what kind of a theory you can make of that see how the questions look if we take those as fixed points so very often an intuition pump is a is a wonderful fixer of a candidate for a fixed point and that's a very valuable tool in itself how powerful are these tools they're this powerful they drove what is one of the great biological phenomena in the history of life on this planet Paul MacCready the late great green engineer if you don't know who Paul MacCready is I'll probably be able to identify it for you by drawing attention the fact that he's the one who designed and built the gulfs of gossamer albatross the human powered airplane that flew across the British Channel he pointed out that at 10,000 years ago a twinkling engine in biological time at the very dawn of Agriculture our species plus its livestock and its pets was a fraction of one percent of the by weight if you like of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass a minor primate what is it today ten thousand years later any guesses 99 percent eighty five out here any others you know that's not true there are a few bears out in the woods but it's actually it's 98 percent most of that's cattle but in ten thousand years our species plus its domesticated animals have completely transformed the biosphere in a way that really hardly I don't think any earlier global event can compete with that for the changes that have been wrought in just ten thousand years and this is what this is what McCready says about it over billions of years on a unique sphere chance is painted a thin covering of life I love that image 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 that's true and we have the same genes that our ancestors 10,000 years ago had they're our ancestors a hundred thousand years ago pretty much it's not genetic it's thinking tools that have made this all puff possible which raises a chicken-egg problem did evolve tools make us smarter or did we evolve to become smart enough to make tools and the answer as to all good chicken-egg problems is yes it's co-evolutionary it's a sort of bootstrapping thing where we get a little bit smarter smart enough to make a few tools and then those tools make a smarter still and so it goes building and building and building my next book is going to be about that process so some simple tools from the book everybody knows reductio ad absurdum even if you don't know the name it is that you might say it's the great crowbar of thought it is the way you budge people from their position by taking their premises saying well if we assume for the sake of argument that your premises are such-and-such look what I can do and then you deduce logically from those premises a contradiction something absurd in fact we use this all the time in more more informally and don't even notice it but it's really the same thing I mean if you say if that's a bear then bears have antlers that's really a sort of reductio ad absurdum argument I mentioned it in part because I want to point out that although we use reductio ad absurdum arguments in either expanded or truncated form we also imply them all the time using rhetorical questions a rhetorical question whenever you see one one of those questions it isn't supposed to be answered stop and think about it it's an implied reductio the idea is haha you can't answer this question it would be it's it's so obvious that that the answer to this question is so obvious that I don't even have to mention what the answer is everybody knows that's nudge well that means that a good practice a habit to get into is when you see one of those question marks in a doc document a rhetorical question try answering the question and see if maybe it's not so ridiculous after all in one of my favorite peanuts cartoon strips Charlie Brown says something like well who's to say what is right and what is wrong and Lucy says I will and try it you'll like it sometimes you can really bring a person up short by just answering their their rhetorical question then there's the Shirley alarm I tell my students every time you see the word Shirley a little bell should ring ding and you should pause hearing the Shirley alarm and you should look to see if you have just found the weak point in the argument why well what follows the Shirley is a sentence that the author wants you to believe is putting forward is true it's not so obvious that it goes without saying if it were it would go without saying and here the author is putting it in but not bothering to argue for us instead trying to get by on the cheap with a little nudge a little Shirley so if you have a Shirley alarm and this becomes just a habit in your mind this this will stand you in good stead I've been inviting people to send me now that they've installed a Shirley alarm in their brain to tell send the examples where they catch the catch of Shirley marking a weak spot I did a little research on this I actually went and string search for surely in several dozen actually more like 70 or 75 philosophy papers online and found a couple of dozen Shirley's and check them out and and about a third of them work I thought clearly the weakest point in the case being made in that in that article it doesn't work all the time and a lot of false alarms you can go ahead and use the word shortly every now and then but if you hear the word surely you should ding so we just give it a little try because surely if you I didn't hear it if surely if you get in the habit of whenever you hear the word surely a little bell rings practice surely being thank you now look what I've done I've just downloaded and apt to your neck top in the same way that an app on your on your smartphone adds to the functionality it gives gives your smartphone a new talent a new capacity it's like Google Alert or something like that you now have another little tool in your kit that may very well alert you to a weak spot in some argument through your otherwise impressed with okay computers are of course thinking tools par excellence and I there's a lot about computers in the book and I have learned from many years experience that a lot of people think they understand how computers work and they don't really and if they just understood a bit more they would understand a lot more things that can be easily understood with the help of computers so there's there's an interlude on computers including what must be an eccentric first in a trade book there's actually a chapter which teaches you how to program the world's simplest computer a register machine and there are even problem sets with the answers at the back of the book if you will spend a couple hours with that chapter you will understand computers the way you never understood them before but of course you're free to pass over that if you really don't care how long by the way was a philosopher who came up with the idea of a register machine around the same time little after girdle's famous proof and touring coming up of the Turing machine and the the long register machine this is is computes everything that storing computable so it's a it's a user-friendly alternative to a Turing machine if you've ever tried to program a touring machine you know it's hard it's very counterintuitive but a register machine is very easy to understand it's it's the world's simplest computer and are some little exercises on that now here's some thinking tools well actually this picture I want to point out this is a this picture is all by itself for thinking too it draws attention to a rather striking comparison and provokes reflection the one on the left is in a chalet and hand-axe the one on the right I don't need to tell you notice the actual hand axe was used in this form unchanged without any noticeable improvements for over a million years weird really strange the mouse in comparison has only been around for a few decades and is probably on the way out the speed of tool use and improvement is picked up a little bit over biological time here's another thinking tool all on its own the comparison between these two entities on the left you see an Australian termite castle on the right you see gaudi's famous Church in Barcelona the Sagrada família they're strikingly similar in appearance and actually in structure even internally they're quite remarkably similar so here are two artifacts made by animals looking very similar and yet profoundly different in both the design and construction the one on the left is designed by Darwinian processes clueless mindless little termites it's all local action there's no there's no blueprint there's no intelligent designer there's no no boss there's no hierarchy it's bottom-up construction in sort of every sense of the word whereas Gaudi is the very model of an intelligent designer autocratic full of manifestos and blueprints and orders ordering the underlings around now they're both natural and one of the really interesting questions is how do we get in this on this planet how did we get from termites tile design and construction to gaudí's style design construction how did the second kind evolved from the first that's a very deep and interesting question that's the one that I am now devoting as much time as I can to and will attack in the next book and I hope I'll be back to talk about that one more visual thinking tool is this my favorite picture of the Tree of Life this is Leonard Eisenberg's and you can you can get this as a big beautiful glossy poster to put up on your on your wall in your study or in your classroom or you can get t-shirts and buttons and all sorts of things what's really nice about it is that so many features that are important to understand or rendered so vivid here's the birth of the earth and time this is four billion years ago and here's the present out around the outside edge so this represents all living things today and this represents where it started and we see that the bacteria in the archaea came first then we had this amazing event the the eukaryotic revolution when an endosymbiotic event joined to prokaryotes to simple cells into a symbiotic Union and that was the first eukaryotic cell and everything else these are all eukaryotes to a first approximation every living thing that's big enough to see you the naked eye is a eukaryotic including you and me and oak trees and fish and all the rest you can see some important events here's the Cambrian explosion 530 million years ago when was this sudden influx of many different life forms new body plans new ways of making a living Steve Gould famously wrote about that tremendous creative period and way over here that little that little fork right there that's about seven billion years just from that crotch right there seven million years fuse me that's about the length of time that we has passed since we shared a common ancestor with the chimpanzee and of course language and culture is just right out here right out here so in in in just what's happened just in the last fine fringe is everything that's transformed the world thanks to thinking tools and notice it on this whole Tree of Life the termites are on there the the birds building their nests are on there the first intelligent designers show up on one twig in very recent times in the last hundred thousand years or so and becoming more intelligent as they go now give you a few examples of intuition pumps just because of so far I've just been talking about simple tools here's the nefarious neurosurgeon first a little science fact da me and Denise in Amsterdam has developed a little microchip that can be surgically implanted in your head if you suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder it will control your obsessive compulsive disorder quite well it's it's being implanted in a lot of people today and so far the results are good its experimental but very promising that's fact now fiction so you see one day this fellow who has OCD goes to see his neurosurgeon and asks her to implant the Denis chip and she does and as she's sewing him up and shaking his hand and sending him out of her shiny surgery she says oh yes your OCD is a thing of the past it would be completely controlled by the chip and by the way our staff here will be monitoring you 24/7 and electronically we will be controlling all your decisions from now on you will have the illusion of free will but it's just an illusion thank you have a nice life says about the door he believes her well shiny lab white lab coat neurosurgeon and believing her he begins to act a little bit irresponsibly he's a little self-indulgent indulging his worst whims becomes a little arrogant a little aggressive and before long he gets in trouble with the law and he says to the judge but your honor I don't have any free will the neurosurgeon told me I don't have any free will you can't hold me responsible they call the neurosurgeon to testify and she says under oath yeah I'm I told him all right I was I was just messing with his head you know I never thought he'd believe me now I think we can all agree can we not here's the intuition I want to pump she did an awful thing that was that was a really bad thing she did to him she actually accomplished with her words what she claimed to accomplish surgically electronically she disabled him as a free agent now if I've secured that intuition then I can go on and say to the neuroscientists of its design for and so tell me exactly how is it that your own recent pronouncements in many books and popular articles the nurse science shows that there is no free will that free will is an illusion and I've got quotes - exactly that effect from a lot of very eminent people I say why isn't that just doing wholesale what she did retail why isn't that a really dangerous and irresponsible thing to do to a person to suggest that their free will is an illusion now this of course raises some questions about well what's the difference between what they're saying and what she said there are differences and they're important differences but in the meantime we have a lot of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists and philosophers going around saying neuroscience shows that nobody has free will nonsense it shows no such thing and it's very important that we stop that bandwagon before it builds up a head of steam or it will start doing some real damage there is by the way empirical evidence that people who have been told this message become more irresponsible vos and schooler Jonathan schooler out at the University of California Santa Barbara did a very clever experiment where they had subject undergraduate students as usual but in two groups one group was given a passage from Francis Crick's book the astonishing hypothesis Oh which talked about consciousness the other group was given another passage from the same book by Nobel laureate Francis Crick which says free will is an illusion both groups of students are then given a test or it's a puzzle to solve and they're going to get paid for how well they do in the puzzle and deliberately the experimenters have made it possible to cheat on this test and the students who saw who read the passage where Crick says that they don't have any free will they cheated significantly more than the students who read the other passage and that study has been replicated so this is a this is a real this is not just a fantasy of philosophers but now you think what still doesn't don't we learn from brain science that since brains are more or less determined and what's going on and then probably doesn't owe anything to quantum effects in the brain doesn't that show we don't have free will it well let's see I want to ask you whether you think the fall which of the two lotteries are fair in lottery a the winning ticket is chosen after the tickets are sold that's most lotteries are like that you buy a ticket then they make have a ceremony where they choose the winning ticket lottery B is just the same except the winning ticket is chosen before the tickets are sold and the ticket stub is locked away in a vault until after the tickets are sold now how many of you think that lottery B is unfair that that you don't really have a chance of winning lottery B that lottery a may be fair but lottery B is is just some kind of a hoax how many of you think that hardly anybody I think I think the audience is right they are eeeek there's they're equally good both of them both of you have no and after all Publishers Clearing House bets on this they sent you send out those envelopes you may already have one you know a million dollars or whatever people see that both of these are fair lotteries with opportunities to win in both cases but now look if determinism is true then you're all your lottery tickets were chosen before you were born and put in an envelope for you to use as you needed a coin flip as you needed a little bit of luck right so what people say well you know then you're determined to have good luck on some occasions and had luck on others yeah but that's true even if in determinism is true there's no difference between in determinism and determinism as far as you're having opportunities in this life so we should temper our conviction very traditional conviction that there's a deep incompatibility between determinism and free will and moral responsibility it just isn't there it takes a lot of intuition pumps to get people to see that but is one okay the philosopher David Wiggins once said many years ago talking about this issue you talked about the cosmic unfairness of determinism and I think a lot of you say yeah I know what he means yeah cosmic unfairness of determinism yeah well what about the cosmic unfairness of in determinism they are equal on this score you're going to win some you're going to lose some the luck average is out in most cases not perfectly that's life you can't get around that in determinism doesn't give you any more luck any more opportunities any more free will anymore elbowroom than you would have in a deterministic world I dare say I haven't persuaded many of you of that but give me time I'm working on it okay so there they are the book is sort of like at APIs in a 77 thinking tools 77 little chapters and the point of the term intuition pump is that you're encouraged to think of these as gadgets as devices you should take them apart see how they work reverse-engineer them turn all the knobs see why they do what they do then you can build your own thanks for coming so now questions we have microphones yes um earlier on you mentioned Chinese room scenario as a thinking pump that's like a sort of bass one I was wondering if you go into more detail about that haha I'm going to decline for it but I'm going to explain why I'm going to decline John Searles chinese room has been amazingly successful as a persuader for now over 30 years and I have spent many hours every year in the last 30 trying to explain to people why it is not a good intuition pump why it is defective and I've learned several things from this one of them is that if you don't understand how computers really do their work you don't get it Searle is rudely dismissive of what he calls the system's reply but anybody who understands computers knows that the system reply is just obviously right so you have to you have to take you have to read the chapter you have to become computer literate in this rather strong way to understand why Searles thought experiment is defective in fact I teach my students at Tufts how to program register machines in my regular undergraduate course on language in mind this is I say this is just a thinking tool that you should have later in the course end of the course they get to read Searle and they all see right through it but it would take me too long to lead you through all those exercises that's why you have to buy the book but I want to add something to that too I notice what I try to explain this to a lot of people girls what's wrong with girl their eyes glaze over and I realize that if I prod them a little bit I know why they hate the idea that artificial intelligence is possible they love the fact that a Berkeley professor has an argument which has as its conclusion that strong AI is impossible and that suits them just fine they don't want to hear the details they like the conclusion don't bother me with the details it looks to them like nitpicking well I used to hold that attitude in contempt I thought this was this is the worst sort of anti intellectual attitude and then I caught myself doing it on a related issue or know a different issue I will confess that I find the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics ugly offensive I just don't want it to be true and I don't want it to be accepted and I know a lot of people share that attitude with me but never mind that's not the point my what I've always felt oppressed by the Copenhagen interpretation and thought gosh I hope I just don't want that to be right and then Murray gell-mann Nobel laureate in physics in his book the quark and the Jaguar takes off after the Copenhagen interpretation and he just beats the tar out of it he is just hit em again Murray and the chapter called Quantum flapdoodle he no-holds-barred he just lets the quantum interpretation have it between right both barrels right between the eyes and I found myself reading that proof hit him again Mary I love this I love this and then I realized I'm not qualified to judge Murray gell-mann argument maybe I'm just being taken in by the rhetoric and the fact that he's got a Nobel Prize I'm so pleased that there's a Nobel laureate who's on my side and that's the way people feel a lot of them about Searle that's why it's an uphill battle a lot of people want Searle to be right they are offended by the idea of artificial intelligence and they don't want to listen to some nitpicker who says the argument doesn't work so I've come to temper my view I realize that there can be deep aesthetic and emotional antipathies to a certain view which can get in the way of a patient consideration of the arguments so you see I've mellowed but I've also explained to you at great length why I'm not going to talk about the Chinese rule I profess it in it and I come up here okay upstairs upstairs hello and I agree with you about the systems reply so I suppose they need to buy the book or anything and do you think that the the logical endpoint of our thinking tools is the what some people call whole brain emulation of the uploading of the human mind to an artificial system where we can have tools far beyond our current imagining do you think it's possible I think it's possible in principle very unlikely in fact there's lots of things that are possible in principle that would be nevertheless technologically unrealistic my favorite example is would it be possible to build a robotic bird that could perch on a twig and catch insects on the fly and way you know a few hundred grams yeah possible in principle don't expect it I say that knowing that some of my robotics friends are developing little robotic insects with cameras on them that can sort of be the fly on the wall so we're getting closer but still I think the sort of adroitness of an insect averse bird will probably evade technology indefinitely and there's no real reason to do it and I think the same thing is true about sort of whole brain emulation you've got I've recently by the way sort of changed my mind about about the brain as a computer as I told I said in your neck top I do think your brain is a computer it's not at all like your laptop well it is it is because it's a computer but the organization and the construction of the cerebral computer has some fundamental differences from any device that we've built so far out of silicon for one thing in a computer every memory place every flip flop every logic it they're all exactly alike write down practically to the atoms and the reliability of the system depends on that tremendous uniformity it's a it's a masterpiece of precision engineering your brain has somewhere between say 100 and 200 billion neurons no two are alike and they have their own agendas they're not as slavish as the flip flops in the machine they are computing there are a whole bunch of slightly willful selfish interacting slaves and they do can cute but not really the way your laptop computes so I think the task of emulating all of that in silicon is possible in principle but really unlikely after all not only do you have some hundreds of billions of neurons you've got ten times more astrocytes glial cells in your brain and although we used to think of them as sort of little pillows that just protected the neurons no no no turns out they're computing - so the brain we now realize is orders of magnitude more complicated than we thought just a few years ago so don't hold your breath thanks who's that the mic okay here and then there go ahead given the natural and acquired deficiencies and limitations for minds where do you see the greatest dangers in the way we make decisions and what is the change or what are the changes that need to happen oh that's very good and because it permits me to to illustrate one of my main themes many of the thinking tools that we've developed over the centuries have been designed as prosthetic improvements on our natural equipment which is really faulty as we've discovered we're lousy for instance of probability naturally we're as George Angley points out we are exponential discounters of future events and that's just wrong it's a fallacy but Nature has built us that way we have lots of foibles little cognitive glitches and a lot of people who pointed them out in recent years Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky in a famous series of papers and now more recently Danny's got the book out on Thinking Fast and Slow but the point is that we can think slow and when we think slow using words tools and using the methods that we've devised we can overcome the natural limitations of our brains and we can become to put it bluntly more civilized and more rational and the vert crack that you asked the question in a little recursive loop shows that we can be indefinitely self-critical and critical of what we're doing so far as as we discover problems in collective irrationality we can start devising solutions or workarounds for those problems I think we can I don't see any thing like you know a sound barrier or a brick wall that will prevent us from continuing to transcend our current cognitive limits with further limits I don't see any any natural stopping point to that I'm sure there will always be things we'll never understand but that doesn't impress me because never is a long way away and the things that matter to us I see no reason why we can't understand them now where somebody on yeah yeah maybe here okay good yeah I struggled with your talk I was intrigued by the problem you sat at the beginning which said that IQ has increased and I struggled because what I heard afterwards was a long list of thinking tools but what I didn't hear was statistical or measurable analysis of what caused that change or how it could be demonstrated last week there was an article in The Times newspaper that said that thinking speeds have decreased significantly since the Victorian times thinking skills speeds average thinking speeds have disagreed feeds young that the speed people take to come to a certain decision or work something out has actually slowed down another example in the UK some people might not agree with me but many people think that educational standards particularly at secondary school have been dumbed down significantly universities certainly complain about that a lot and so wouldn't one see actually a decrease in IQ in certain advanced countries because of that so can you give any examples of how people have statistically or scientifically measured and what actually increases IQ what decreases it yeah Jim Flynn and many others have done a lot of statistical research and have explored various hypotheses and it's not diet and it's not wealth and it's worldwide and the results seem to be quite robust and culture independent and I mean I can't I can't cite chapter and verse I except to say just just google it and thinking of talking about thinking to Google James Flynn and the Flynn effect and you will find a feast of online materials to peruse now I I'm interested in this Times reported study of slowed down thinking and I I want to see what's involved one possibility of course is that by slowing down people are thinking better of just taking a little more time because their tools take a little more time to work after all one of the messages of Danny Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow is there are things that Thinking Fast is good at and then there are things that you better think slow or you won't get it right and it might be that we've shifted the balance since Victorian days whether whether this is a part of the increase in general capacity to not make mistakes or whether it's a decrease I don't know but it's an interesting question it might well be that it pays to slow down on some of these tasks and that's something we've learned I'll look into that yes I'm sorry this is moving too far away okay yeah there you go okay moving too far away from topic but I'm really interested to you to you here what do you think victim Stein would make of the four horsemen of atheism well I don't know I'm happy to answer the question now lo I don't think when I was a student I was a very great appreciator of the later Wittgenstein along with my fellow Oxford students although I did not think of him as the sort of intellectual Saint that they did and in fact I found a lot of Vidkun Stein's later work to be suspiciously mysterious and I I fled that it's interesting you know he had some training as an engineer and I've met other engineers who at a certain point in their life suddenly take a swan dive into philosophy and it's usually disastrous Viktor Stein clearly wasn't that kind of thinker he was I think himself a great constructor of intuition pumps what he would make of the of the Four Horsemen of atheism I I have no idea I would expect probably he would have a mixed reaction but I won't try to untangle it thank you yeah this is a non sequitur so feel free not to answer but I'm could you think of an intuitive way to explain to a colorblind person that there's information the visual spectrum that they're missing out on as a person who's not color blind oh sure I think in fact my experience with people who are colorblind is that they understand color fully well they can't pass the Ishihara tests but they know what what it's like to pass the test as well as something after all I think I can explain to you what it's like to be a pigeon who's a Tetra Chrome instead of a tri-chromatic vision and and and and they see more colors than we do and things that you and I would find indistinguishable in color are sharply different to them and I we can go into the details I don't think this I don't think it's impossible to do the hard work of imagining what this is like in detail hello hello there we are okay the lights are down so low I can't really see back there I we've been thinking about intuitive tools and I just wondered whether you think that women are more intuitive than men as they often think they are oh you're trying to lead me into waters where I do not want to go but actually I'm glad you asked me the question because by intuition pump I sort of don't mean that everyday sense of intuition I'm talking about intuition and the philosopher sense of something that occurs to you that you just think has got to be right and you're not quite sure why I mean it happens all the time I remember actually the first pop paper I ever published was about artificial intelligence and Hubert Dreyfus had written his famous alchemy and artificial intelligence diatribe against AI years before Searle and in that piece Dreyfus said that they'd never make a computer with intuition that no computer program would ever have intuition and in my first publication I said actually it's child's play to make a computer that has intuition you take your computer program that solves any problem you like it might be long division or weather prediction or whatever and you ask it a question it gives an answer and you say how did you work out that answer and it says I don't know it just came to me intuition is when you've got a conviction you haven't the faintest idea how you got it when you have an intuition pump you and you know that before the intuition pump you didn't have the idea now you do you can be pretty sure that the causation runs through that pump somehow now you take the pump apart see how it works and you get insight into how you arrived at that intuition and I'm not going to touch the rest of that way yes in the same way that we're not quite as good with axes as some of our forebears do you think that generations get better and worse as using thinking tools and if so where do you see the future well first of all let's let's confirm that people get worse how many in this room know how to run a slide rule is there anybody under 40 who knows how to run a slide rule or how many of you can actually do the algorithm for finding a square root yeah but not many use it or lose it when you can do it all on your hand calculator you don't bother learning the technique anymore and you know GPS is probably seriously diminishing our capacity to read maps wonderful thinking tool which is you know becoming more and more sort of obsolete and so forth so I think that with the times different tools play roles of greater or lesser importance in what we're doing that will no doubt continue and the user to lose it maksim will I daresay be maintained in full force I've always admired and envied my British colleagues who were required in their youth to memorize lots of poetry and I love it I love the way they can just find the right line from Shakespeare play or a poem and I wish I could do that I can't of course if I really want to get that line I can I can get on the web and usually find something appropriate pretty fast but it's not the same talent they have but after all nobody today bothers to memorize train timetables but people used to do that as a sort of intellectual exercise I would think we would find better ways of being intellectual athletes then then that and our new tools permit us to do that so I think we'll go on I think Andy Clark wonderful philosopher of cognitive science and Edinburgh puts it very well when he says that we we we make smart tools to take the load off our brain so that we can we can be stupid and still be sort of smart uh-huh thanks to the help we get from our tools and I think that's years ago actually let me let me expand on that a little bit more years ago at tufts george smith my wonderful colleague and i created something called the curricular software studio and this was to bring computers to bear on the toughest thinking problems we knew this was creating what what we called prosthetics of the imagination and one of them was it was a simulated computer on a computer a 12 bit computer with 256 registers and but you could watch the instruction cycle happen you could you could completely see slowed down about a million fold and enlarge about a million fold what was going on inside the very box that it was simulated on that was a lovely thinking tool for or expanding people's imagination giving them a really vivid and reliable robust tool for imagining things with computers then we did the same thing for population genetics and we had a program called gene right after Sewell right which had this these wonderful simulations of population genetics and you could you could sort of see at a glance once you use how to learn how to use that tool what was the recessive characteristic and why and so forth and it was good enough tools so that the the evolutionary biologists who helped us create it would use it in her own research to test her hunches before she went to the trouble of seriously modeling them and we did other we called them concept pianos the reason we called them concept pianos was that in my eagerness to find other fields where we could apply this I talked to a dear friend of mine in the music department who taught harmony courses and said could we could we make a software device that would help you teach students harmony theory and we sat down and brainstormed for a couple of hours and realized that what we just invented was the piano it's wonderful you get the auditory and you get two different visualizations you get the keyboard and then you've got the music in front of you it's it's very user friendly you can get it running right away but it's indefinitely expandable there's really no better instrument for learning harmony theory than a piano we couldn't really improve on it so we but we were making concept pianos and other areas and the way we used to sort of sell the idea to funders and people like that they'd say look there's two ways that technology can make you smart the same way there's two ways that technology can make you strong there's the bulldozer way you're still a 98-pound weakling but in your bulldozer you can move mountains and then there's the Nautilus machine way you use the technology to actually improve your muscles in your coordination and so forth and we said what we're trying to do here is make the Nautilus machines of the technology so that they actually you walk away with something in your head that makes you smarter by expanding by giving you these imagination tools I think that's we don't want to lose sight of the fact that we can use technology that way and actually increase the imagination powers and the adroitness of thinkers an example that we started work on this and then for various reasons had to abandon it but it's still a dream of mine and it's the we call it the tube which stands for Tufts University brain Explorer but the idea was that it would do for the brain what the wonderful London Tube map does for the underground color-coded simplified straighten out the lines throw away extra geographical information that isn't really important so you can see the connectivity and we were going to have this lovely big three-dimensional color coded system that would permit students to see what was fastened to what and why in the brain and we would update it as we went I still think that's a great idea and like the to map the idea was you can you can take the London to map and you can then you can impose it on a map which is geographically accurate and you can discover things that you can't see when you're looking at the map and it's regularize simplified idealized form and we want to do the same thing with the brain when you when you look at the thing in its idealized form the cortex is all unfolded and it's this great dome of a sheet with all this regular all the columns and all the layers beautifully laid out and you can see it looks like a computer then you shrink wrap the whole thing to fit in the skull and then you can understand why certain things are right next to each other in the brain even though they're not connected so I think that it's possible to use computer technology to enhance our imaginations not just bypass our imaginations and I'd like to see more of that done yeah yep I was just curious if you had the opportunity right now to upload to the rest of humanity one intuition pump and only one which one would that be and why Oh the trouble is that they're for different different people in some cases the one that I would upload for philosophers is one which I published in Darwin's dangerous idea and because many philosophers do that as you know then it's popular book about Darwinism not really a philosophy book they didn't read it but there's that's the two black boxes thought experiment which I think just drives a spike through the heart of an issue several issues that meta physicians have been scratching their heads about for twenty-five years and we'll see maybe second time around they'll pay attention to it Thanks you think you can teach a humorless person to have a sense of humor no probably not in consciousness explained at one point I sort of promised to come up with a theory of humor and laughter and then I couldn't and I sort of wished I could erase that sentence because I couldn't keep that promise and then in some few years ago a student showed up Matthew Hurley he wanted to do a theory of humor with me and at first I thought his theory was hopeless didn't like it at all but he gradually convinced me of it and we did that book together with reg Adams inside jokes using humor to reverse-engineer the mind and I'm really glad that I did that because I learned a ton and I'm really proud of the theory it's the Hurley model it's not mine in the first place although I've tweaked it a good deal but uh among other things that explains is sort of why you can't have an algorithm for being humorous even though we argue it's the brain as a computer and and we want it is a computational it's an evolutionary computational model of humor but it it's not an algorithm for funny and we don't think there is one and we say why the one of the ways we did the research on that is actually to spend some time not only reading the worst but talking with comedians and comedy writers to find out sort of how they how they go about their trade and how they use their own brains as sounding boards and then their brains get sort of distorted and it's they can't clear their palate in effect they can't they can't find the touch because they've used it too much in certain ways it's that's that among other reasons is why I think humor it will always be sort of an art not a not a science but that doesn't mean there isn't the science of why it's an art somewhere here hi we run a decision-making company we help teams think through complex problems and I was really struck by your comment that all serious thinking is interpersonal which will run counter to what we hear a lot every day or the resistance we face I'm just interesting to know what leads you to that conclusion well many things do one of them is a very recent paper in behavioural brain sciences by Hugo Mercier and dance / bear on the flaws in our reasoning and they argue that as part of our evolutionary heritage we're better at detecting the flaws and an opponent than in our own case where we just are constitutionally bad at gritting our teeth and looking for errors in what we believe and our reasons for it but we're very good at ferreting out the errors in what the other side believes well if that's true and they make a good case for it then as just about everywhere else in nature the way to do this is with an opponent process our eyes work with an opponent process in several ways first of all the muscles that determine where your eye looks next those are sort of in a constant tug-of-war with each other pulling this way that but that's a very sort of friendly tug-of-war but then in the frontal eye fields we've got this other opponent process going on where there are little teams of neurons that are saying about wherever fixation is some of them are saying home sweet home nice I like this familiar and the others are saying boring been there done that they want to move and this is constant opponent process between different groups neurons transit look over here no look where we're looking and and they they Duke it out constantly all day long and the result is that you have very good patterns of eye tracking because in the opponent processes among the little groups they get the job done very well unless you've got a problem and if you've got a deficiency there then you get abnormal saccadic and if you have abnormal sick adding that means you're not looking where you should be looking when you should be looking and that is a profound deficit there's strong evidence for instance that autistic children do not have normal saccadic they don't look where they should they're not good at gaze monitoring their mothers and and they don't they're not good at at joint attention and this means that whereas a normal infant is just sucking from a firehose of information all the time some are not sort of attending to the right place at the right time and it changes the way their whole brain works sometimes for the better sometimes for the worst so I think opponent processes our Nature's Way of getting jobs done very often and we should just acknowledge that and exploit it and refine it for whatever it is what we're trying to do I was fascinated where your approach on freewill and I don't know about anybody else here but remember we're coming into into into touch with the idea the kind of sexy rebellious idea that the free will is an illusion it seemed to gel with it I think what I love people were intuiting surely about kind of non-religious heading towards a more material explanation of things that's very leftist to think anti free will but you argue very powerfully Pro free will and so I just wanted to find out what if you could explain when the neuroscience sources are that explained materially where free will occurs and when it occurred and also and also if we want to debate whether it exists or not where you want to see the debate moving on you know there's a lot of mm sociologists who want us to be talking about freewill purely because they want to they want to say that look there's a certain class of people who are populating our prisons politicians mainly in this country but where yeah where would you like to see that debate go what's it's useful application and and and yet in the neuroscience thank you there's a lot in that but and I appreciate all of it actually and I've been thinking and talking a lot about what prison reforms we might want to do and what whether the system of punishment needs any revision some of you may have seen the review I did of Adrian Raines wonderful book in Prospect last month Adrian reign is the neuroscientist psychologist who's studied the brains of psychopaths on death row murderers a lot of them and even more amazing as the experiments he did where he got a lot of of psychopaths in the wild that is they'd never been in any trouble with the law well how do you how do you find psychopaths in the wild he had a hunch he got a grant he hired dozens of temp workers in Los Angeles and found that sure enough when he gave them all the tests that are used in the prisons for psychopathy so it's the sort of gold standard measure the there were psychopaths among the temps at a rate about three times the the average in the regular population so now we had a group of psychopaths that had never been in prison had any trouble of law and under the certificate of confidentiality that his work was done he was able to get his graduate assistants to interview these in depth and they all confessed to armed robberies rapes even murders so they really are psychopaths and they're really out there and and he's got the tools to study them psychopaths are different there but there's other people with other sorts of brain differences that we have to treat differently in our in our system of law and punishment I don't agree with all of reigns proposals I don't think he does either by the way but it's he's raised the issue very well and it was called the anatomy of violence but in my own work what I want to do is turn the tables a little bit and say instead of looking at the metaphysical foundations of free will and whether or not quantum indeterminacy plays a role work backwards start with the idea of the free agent as being morally competent being a morally competent agent and ask yourself what are the specs for a morally competent agent what does it have to have in it what does it what should you be able to do to be morally competent and we can work that out I think quite well and it turns out that neuroscience has next to nothing to say about about how normal people might not be morally competent I think normal people are morally competent and hence in that sense have free will and because they have free will they are proper and because they're morally competent they are appropriate bearers of full responsibility for their deeds and this includes their eligibility for punishment when they commit misdeeds that's a long story but I think that's a constructive way of proceeding most of us I daresay everybody in this room believes they have free will in this sense if you believe that you are competent enough to sign a contract binding contract then then you have freewill in this sense I mean then you believe you have freewill in this sense has nothing to do with determinism or in determinism it has to do with your ability to assess outcomes probabilities consequences costs and benefits the value of reputation and so forth if you've got all of that then when you sign a contract you mean it and so it counts anybody else yet one more up top yes let's go thank you for your presentation I have a question with regards to the connection between the physical part of our brain how this is impacted in our networked and computerized communication as we move on more and more into online networking and communication and how this will impact our history of philosophy going forward so you know what would our thinking be different let's say compared to the Greeks and how this will be changing and what we need to be thinking about oh I think the answer is yes it's very clear that our thinking today is different from the ancient Greeks because as small children we can master all sorts of concepts but not the smartest people in Athens couldn't master not just about science but certainly about science I think we have a hugely enlarged conceptual repertory today compared with the ancient Greeks that doesn't mean that they weren't wise but I think it does does mean that it was harder for them to work these things out and if you look at Plato's dialogues for instance at least to my eyes often what I see there strikes me as who growing heroic attempts to think about topics that Plato and his interlocutors don't have the terms for and they're sort of inventing distinctions in terms as they go along and sometimes making rather embarrassing mistakes by today's standards I had the same impression when I went back some years ago and read the books that were my favorite books when I was a graduate student in Oxford first learning about the brain and trying to think about the mind as the brain and there wasn't very much that was written it was good what was good was in its way brilliant but they just didn't have the tools they didn't have the thinking tools the expression tools that we have today and they labored brilliantly and eccentrically and ingeniously to explain things that now I think that the average smart 14 year old could put quite aptly in a few simple sentences of cyber speech thanks I think that's a good point on which to stop thank you you

Channel: Intelligence Squared

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Keywords: Intelligence Squared, Debate, great oratory, Intelligence Squared debate, speech, top debates, best debates, most interesting debates, educational debates, intelligence2, intelligencesquared, is debate, iq2, iq2 debate, iq squared, intuition pumps, occam's razor, occams razor, reductio ad absurdum, four horsemen, four horsemen of new atheism, sam harris, richard dawkins, christopher hitchens, klatttennedleinad, talk, event

Id: EJsD-3jtXz0

Length: 78min 52sec (4732 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2013