Daniel Dennett: The Future of Life - Schrödinger at 75: The Future of Biology

[Music] understanding the nature of information was central to Schrodinger's lectures seventy-five years ago today we understand the answer to the question of how information is coded in the genome but we only danced around the question of how information is coded in the brain what is wrong with this question it assumes that we are all talking about the same thing we all know what we mean by the brain but what do we really mean by information if we found information in the brain or in the mind what would it look like what would it be made of how would we read it how would it evolve our understanding of information and its role in life is still both rudimentary and abstract it is a frontier not just for science but for engineering and for philosophy and in this broad scope our keynote speaker this evening is author philosopher and cognitive scientist professor Daniel Dennett Dennett is the Austin B Fletcher professor of philosophy at Tufts University in Boston he originally took his BA at Harvard before doing his DPhil at Oxford University under the mentorship of the late Gilbert Ryle he has produced seminal philosophical works on the philosophy of mind freewill epistemology and philosophy of religion his work uniquely incorporates evolutionary biology cognitive science and neuroscience and he does this to create a paradigm of how to understand nature and the origin of consciousness in a non mystical way Dennett has done this not just through academic writing but also through 15 seminal books that are read by scientists and the general public including consciousness explained breaking the spell Darwin's dangerous idea and the intentional stance amongst others his most recent work from bacteria to Bach and back the evolution of minds he offers a particularly adventures perspective on the evolution of information at least information in the broad sense and how we can think about the future of our own evolution and while reviewing this book Mike Gazzaniga who's one of our speakers tomorrow summarized his opinion of it by saying this is the kind of book you read relish and read again I've also read this particular book twice though I can't honestly say so about Schrodinger's what is life there is no Nobel Prize for philosophy but if there was professor done it would surely have already received it though he doesn't need to according to the late a I researcher Marvin Minsky Denish is our best current philosopher he is the next Bertrand Russell unlike traditional philosophers Dan is a student of neuroscience linguistics artificial intelligence and computer science and psychology he is redefining the role of a philosopher Denis approach to philosophy is different to most of his colleagues he does not engage in theatrical debate he is not aggressively argumentative or didactic he doesn't go down narrow logical corridors of analysis and he doesn't rely on overly artificial but logical discourse he does not base his views on shaky premises he starts always with science his interests are diverse and he becomes a near expert in any subfield of science that takes his interest he learns the facts he understands the crucial insights he surveys the boundaries and familiarizes himself with the frontiers of the field and the challenges that lie there most crucially he brings all of this knowledge together and then delivers new synthesis through his landmark works he marshals the ideas the questions the theories into singular stories and worldviews and he does this through plain English Dennett's capacity for a synthesis for insightful and interdisciplinary intercultural research puts him in a rare class of thinkers scientists and artists such as Sydney Brenner Lynn Margulis Ada Lovelace Jocelyn Bell James Joyce Mary Wollstonecraft David Bowie and I think Arwen Schrodinger the result of this is to introduce the reader to a new way of viewing the world to see things as they evolved and to gain a perspective of where we might be going in the future and beyond the values to science of the scientific utility it provides us with valuable cultural tools as well Dennett is often lambasted by ideologically driven religious groups across the world for his work in promoting atheism but his work in my opinion offers the most evidence-based but optimistic view of the world and of our own culture because it shows most clearly how far we have come from higher primates - hunter-gatherers through nothing but our own resourcefulness despite all our suffering despite all of the challenges we have brought ourselves here alone without any help and even if sometimes we allow our more primitive instinct but I've always been there to take over and because we take our eye off the ball we are all still here and we can continue to develop our own evolution and our own culture which is still in an extremely early stage if we just keep talking and as Dennett reminds us to always do keep thinking ladies and gentlemen it is my privilege to introduce the schrodinger at 75 what is life keynote lecture please welcome to the stage professor daniel dennett [Applause] [Music] Thank You Tomas for that amazing introduction I don't know how I could ever live up to it I want to thank you and the other organizers on Trinity College for this amazing gathering and say that it is a great honor to be part of it but more than an honor it's a great thrill today has been a feast of ideas and facts and I am grateful to all the previous speakers for their thrilling talks and will try to take the sort of bird's-eye view on some of the talks I prepared my slides last night and I'm delighted to say that just about every speaker has anticipated my talk in some way and given me some illustrations which I will try to point out as I go as I go along this has been a wonderful day my title the future of life that Tomas gave me that title and I accepted it a little bit reluctantly I look a little bit like Santa Pablo and and he added the word research so that he could talk about the future of ancient DNA research well I'm making the same move in a slightly different way one thing we know about life is that it's changing in unpredictable ways and the reason for that is that evolution is a noise amplifier it takes events that are unpredictable that happen to change the setting of the world in some way that then amplifies some differences and obliterates others so it's a mug's game to try to predict the future of life so I'm not going to try but life as we know it is also changing and that's what I'm going to talk about being a philosopher I'm going to call these intentional objects if you if this philosophical jargon is unfamiliar to you I'll illustrate it with a few examples roughly it's the things we believe in you can have a book called the history of God that's written by an atheist no difficulty with that there are such books because it's so history of the intentional object God you could also of course write a book the history of Santa Claus perfectly legitimate scholarly exercise you don't have to believe in Santa Claus to to write that book and there's lots of information in it or think about the gold in Fort Knox in the United States we have this vast supply of gold in Fort Knox it plays a role in our economy but only because people believe it's there it's it doesn't have any sort of magnetic or or gravitational effect on the economy it all cycles through people's beliefs the intentional object the gold in Fort Knox that's the object that economists are interested in and what I'm interested in today is the intentional object life life as we know it some of you may have heard of this woman she lives on a neighboring island and when I was a graduate student at Oxford many years ago I heard a program on BBC Radio where small school children I think they were kindergarten age we're very solemnly interviewed by the interviewer about queen elizabeth ii and they're confident answers have stuck in my head ever since then according to them the Queen watches telly watches the telly while sitting on the throne with the crown on her head and she and she she Hoover's Buckingham Palace wearing an ermine robe and all these other details a wonderful amalgam of Mum and and the actual Queen and it hit me at the time that this Queen Elizabeth the second the Queen Elizabeth the second of six year old British children was in some ways both more interesting and more politically potent than the actual woman that's why I'm interested in in intentional objects so my topic is life the intentional object now this is the cover of my original copy old copy of the schrodinger book it cost 95 cents I see when I bought it and a thing to know about it of course is that now 75 years after Schrodinger asked they're still debates among very intelligent and well-informed people about whether the question for his life can be answered and whether it matters is this sometimes just a bad philosophical habit to ask for definitions I think so should the habit be squelched on occasion I think so so I'm not going to define life that's a fool's errand I reread the book recently and I got a new copy of and somebody else already showed this cover of the more recent paperback edition of sureness what is life and I particularly like this cover because it reminds me of one of my favorite explanations of what's hurting this book is all about and that was by my dear late friend Richard Gregory the second law of thermodynamics as you have often heard one way of saying what the second law of thermodynamics asserts is that you can't unscramble an egg and Richard Gregory said oh but you can you can you can unscramble an egg and here's how you do it first you scramble the egg then you pour it in the black box and after a little while out comes an egg what's in the black box a chicken and in a few simple sentences that really encapsulates what Schrodinger's theory is all about it's about the fighting against the second law of thermodynamics to create structure and information over time in a living thing so I love this simple explanation of Gregory's but of course it's oversimplifies the wonderful analyses the deductions the speculations of churning this book but shredding are also oversimplifies things in his book and that's the beauty of it so when is a simplification oversimplification what do you think neither what I'm going to be talking about the rest of my talk is the uses of oversimplification life depends on it and so does life as we know it both life the biosphere and our concept of life here is the one way of looking at the question I want to address how did life ever create life as we know it that is beings that can conceive of life the way we do our intentional object life as we know it that intentional object that many in this room the speaker said I have contributed so much to that understanding we are intelligent designers how did we come to be able to create life as we know it that's what I want to talk about frogs are alive and frogs intentional object life is more impoverished than the children's intentional object queen elizabeth ii they don't have much of a concept of life and they don't need one but we have and we put it to great use this is one of my favorite slides on the left you see an australian termite castle on the right you see gaudi's great sagrada la sagrada família they are stunningly similar in design both internally and externally the similarities run quite deep they are both artifacts created by living things they look very similar but their method of construction and the R&D that went ISM the research and development profoundly different on the left the termite castle is made by termites who are pretty clueless there is no architect termite no there's a queen termite but she's more like the crown jewels than like a leader there's no boss there's no blueprint there's no top-down this is bottom-up construction bottom-up design design by a process that is itself mindless and uncomprehending natural selection Gaudi on the other hand makes a very nice example because he's the quintessential almost the caricature of the charismatic genius the super intelligence who Lords it over his underlings who lord it over their underlings who lord it over their underlings this is top-down intelligent design small I small deep but the very model of an intelligent designer two profoundly different ways of making something and the question is how do we get from bottom-up competence but non comprehending design processes to top-down comprehending processes of design in other words how can a process with no intelligent designer create intelligent designers who can then design things that permit us to understand how a process with no intelligent designer can create intelligent designers who can then design things is this just a rhetorical question or does it point to an embarrassing contradiction in the theory of natural selection no but the answer takes some surprising turns and they all deal with oversimplification here's a rule of thumb when problems are difficult is like oh my student says when problems are difficult board something out then you have something to try to fix and that's the first maximum of oversimplification blurt something out and then you have something you can look at and study and think about and it fix or throw away that's what evolution does in other words oversimplify and then self-monitor we have many examples of this we have mutate and replicate the mutation is blind undirected we have trial and error which was discussed earlier today we have the more general term is generate and test all of these are methods of designing where you try something test it and then try something else one of my favorite examples actually is celestial navigation which I learned as a boy and it's now completely obsolete because of GPS but here's how celestial navigation works here's how to make a cocked hat a cocked hat is the small triangle hopefully small triangle on your chart which is your boat is located in the middle of that hot app that's what it's called first you make a guess then you correct it thanks to the nautical Almanac in your sextant sighting and that lets you draw a line of position on your chart you're somewhere on that line we're making progress then you repeat steps one and two the sun's moves a little further make another reading draw another line then you repeat step three make another line when that's where the three lines intersect you get a small triangle known as a cocked hat of course if you were perfect you they would all intersect at a point but there's always error so the idea is to minimize your cocked hat and you take that as your new position your new geographic position and of course that's what your GPS system does to just a thousand times faster and more accurately maybe a million times faster and more accurately haven't worked that out that's where you are well here's how to make chickens take a dinosaur let it replicate select for flight worthy and this repeat steps one two and three repeat step four until you get a chicken it's the same sort of process slightly different scale and a lot more repetitions oversimplification gets you into the arena where you can learn from your mistakes by working out the implications and doing a reality check now some years ago I provided a sort of caricature of four stages in this process the bottom stage we have what I call Darwinian creatures Darwinian creatures here's a little schematic where we have a five slightly different variants they're there they're different phenotypes and they are they confront this sort of scary environment and one of them does better than the others and then the next generation you see that it has the offspring and the others have gone extinct and so it goes a very very very simplified picture of the algorithm of natural selection Darwinian creatures and there are Darwinian creatures but they're actually they're Darwinian proto creatures very simple hardwired can't learn anything but they can evolve by these methods next rung on the ladder I called skin Arian creatures and BF Skinner the great behaviorist famously saw that his model of learning the reinforcement learning was a analog a strong analog of natural selection here you have a single creature who has five behavioral options doesn't know which one to do tries them all in some random order and gets reinforced by something in the environment you need a reinforcement signal of course to do this but something you need a reward we were hearing about rewards and if you get a reward then that's the one you do in the future so those are skinned Aryan creatures there they're examples of things which engage in reinforcement learning of the kind that Mary Shanahan was just talking about but Skinner and creatures have the problem that they have to risk their trials in the real world and if they make a mistake they may not get to make another trial so a better creature is a pop Aryan future I was very glad to be here my predecessor on the stage talked about Karl Popper I call these pop Aryan creatures because he once said that we permit our hypotheses to die in our stead and what what this inspires is the idea that if you want to do better than a skinned Aryan creature what you want to have is a sort of model of the world in your head that you carry around with you where you can test out your hypotheses before you try them in the cruel real world so a pop Aryan creature has an inner selective environment it's not actually it's a it's like a mathematical model it's something that yields predictions when you try things out of it and then that means that a popper and creature is more likely to make an adaptive first move than a merely skinned Aryan creature it tries things offline before it tries them in the cruel world but that's not the end of it there's one more and it's the Gregorian creatures named after my late lamented friend Richard Gregory the wonderful British psychologist and Gregory made a wonderful point about how tools even things as simple as a pair of scissors how they actually give us more intelligence they make us smart it's not just you have to be smart to use them your use of them makes you smarter and so what Richard Gregory pointed out is that we we don't all have to reinvent calculus and maps and addition and subtraction and cost-benefit analysis and and Bayesian statistics we get all these wonderful tools ready-made we download them from the environment and that makes this smart and we use these tools and these are in fact the key this is the key step to answering my question and we have to look of course at the transitions between them and again oversimplification is the key that is it's not a magic step that takes you from skin arian to pop re-enter from pop parian to grigory the idea we need I think comes best from James Gibson and it's the concept of an affordance an affordance is what the environment offers the animal for good or ill it's it's a hole to hide in a window to look out food to eat a tree to climb whatever whatever you need depending on your opportunities your physiology and the perils of your world and this is Nature's Way of oversimplifying find something important and track it evolution provides organisms with affordance trackers just the ones they need no extras only the ones that are of paramount importance to their welfare don't worry about getting it right every time good enough good enough for government work you get it you use it and that what it does is it gives you time to improve it it gives you a little breathing room so you can take get a little help and sometimes you'll have false positives you don't worry about those too much and so over time the affordance trackers are tuned by evolution to improve the fate of those organisms that are the beneficiaries they don't have to understand them that's very important they don't have to understand that they've got these trackers they just rely on them and they do very well I've been thinking about how to make clear what affordances are and I thought it might help if we thought about it from from a human point of view instead of from the point of view of C elegans or or ecoli or aura or a rat thinking wouldn't it be nice if we could just perceive all the things that matter to us and so many things matter us in the future you might be able to wear a device or implant one that labels everything in the world that matters to you so there you are you're walking down the street and what might matter to you well what might matter to you is that there's a doctor somewhere nearby or maybe a lawyer but but you know how do you tell if you're just walking down the street who's a doctor who's a lawyer well what does a lawyer look like well they come in all sorts of flavors so you're not gonna do this by any simple direct visual test there's no Hubal and diesel cell or system of cells it's going to tell you what a lawyer looks like but it would be not so hard for for google they're already working on this so they could they could design something so that when you looked at the street you wore these warrior Google glass and the lawyers would just be labeled automatically for you by the data cloud that surrounded them and there's a pickpocket and you'd want to know that too but of course if Google did that they wouldn't use writing they could in the cheap oversimplified first version they would probably find some other symbol that we do the trick and of course in the end you don't need a symbol at all all you need to do is to hook the tracker up with the right responses and you you get the effect of the affordance tracking without any rendering and symbols at all and that's what nature has done we might think of this as an enhancement of human perceptual capacities but it's really just an extension of the very sort of thing that nature has been doing for several billion years Nature has already done this now if you had one of those devices you might get so used to this user-friendly innovation that if you lost your device you'd feel you've been struck blind and in fact in a certain sense you would if you want to know what the colors and aromas and shapes and all of the macroscopic properties of the world we live in really are they are the they are the properties that matter to us as large several trillions cell entities and they are have been honed to be user-friendly for us given the brains that we have I want to look at a few more oversimplifications four in particular Mendel and beanbag genetics nobody's mentioned Mendel today the McCulloch Pitts logical neuron Chanin information Claude Shannon was mentioned and good old-fashioned AI here are four oversimplifications that I think we're all greatly indebted to let's start with Mendel and beanbag genetics without Mendel is hard to imagine Crick and Watson but then we go from gene centrism to evo-devo and then we have segregation disorders and transposons and methylation and all the other wonderful things that we've been hearing about today but it all goes back to the blessedly easy-to-understand oversimplifications of Mendel hardy-weinberg and all those simplifications which we learn to throw away when we get more sophisticated well now let's look at the McCulloch Pitts logical neuron that this is the oversimplification that changed my life on the Left we see a old diagram of a neuron on the right we see McCulloch Pitts logical neuron of 1943 and when I first saw a diagram of that which was in 1963 Shazam it hit me like a ton of bricks you could put these things together into a machine that could learn that could that could bootstrap itself up from an initial beginning and create learning as a kind of evolution in the brain that's what I've been pursuing ever since Marie Shanahan has already explained the gated threshold gated logical neuron and how it's the basis for later work in AI it was an existence proof of sorts an entirely explicable mechanical network of mindless units can be designed to compute any computable function that swept away a whole strand of mystery that we didn't have to worry about anymore it grounded work by Frank Rosenblatt on the perceptron in 1957 which was the basis for connectionism which which Amory talk to you about little later and today's deep learning great but here's some actual neurons in action they're not much like a McCulloch Pitts logical neuron this is an this is a simplification that we have to learn to live without Shannen information another simplification here's Shannon's original diagram from 1948 where you have a transmitter and a receiver and this is all a design system and there's a source of noise and what Shannon said was think of these as think of this as a theory of intelligently designed artifacts with senders and receivers and no meaning no meaning it was just codes it was just getting the code from point A to point B but without concerned with what the code might be about or what it meant I a shocking oversimplification in some ways and yet in other ways the most important simplification we've had in a hundred years I like to remind people that there's more Shannon information in five minutes of Teletubbies than in the Encyclopedia Britannica if you want to count bytes and megabytes it's still one of the key ideas in the computer age we're just now finally I think beginning to come together on how to understand what is sometimes called semantic information information about things in the world and basing that on Shannon's original ideas but that's work in progress one more oversimplification good old-fashioned AI and I'm delighted to say that Murray introduced this too in talking about John McCarthy one of my heroes and like friends as well who created so the this is my caricature of good old-fashioned AI the walking encyclopedia it's all done with logical propositions who have a language where you write down everything in a strict logical form and then you have your resolution theorem prover that cranks out theorems from the axioms and you prove everything by deduction and you try to do that fast enough so you don't walk into walls or off the edge of cliffs not a good idea in some ways but a brilliant idea and others if we hadn't had good old-fashioned AI I think we would still be waving our hands about options which have proven they aren't this isn't going to be the way to do it you have to remember that failures by very smart people on very ambitious projects those are real landmarks really important good old-fashioned day I closed off a lot of otherwise extremely tempting seductive avenues of research and led through AI winters as Marie was saying to later moves what was wrong with good old-fashioned AI well one thing that was wrong with it was that it was top-down design it was designed by intelligent designers and what they did was they used worst-case scenarios to design the architectures and that created y2k problems although at a much bigger scale you remember the y2k problem Moreau's because somebody decided we only we know only need a few we only need a few registers to hold the date and it turned out hey we're forgetting about the fact that the century was going to change and everything that's going to have to be rewritten and you had to take apart a lot of software put it back together because there was this unadjusted limit which had been determined by somebody's idea of a worst-case scenario well that if in fact a good old-fashioned AI in a big way it highlighted however many important features I'll just mention to self-monitoring itself and the idea of credit assignment the idea that when something goes wrong you want to know who to blame or who to credit self-monitoring is another way of looking at one of the important steps in this procedure trees notice things bacteria notice things but they don't notice that they notice things or if they do sort of they don't notice that they notice that they notice things it's this reflexive recursive power of noticing what you're noticing and noticing that you're noticing what you're noticing that gives rise to the perspective that permits Gaudi style intelligent design that's where self-monitoring comes in the rueful phrase will it seemed like a good idea at the time is often used as a sort of jokey reference to some idiotic rueful reflection but I want to say on the contrary anybody who can say that and mean it and understand it as one of the key marks of intelligence not only can you recall what you thought at the time you can evaluate it in the light of subsequent events the very fact that you can entertain that train of thought is a sign that you're well on your way to being an intelligent designer in other words we want not just pop Aryan creatures but retrospective pop Aryan creatures with memory for their own evaluations that way they can improve their own thinking about their thinking about their thinking and so forth so back to my original contrast between the termites and Gaudi here's a puzzle the termite colony might be 70 million clueless termites and their brain who's counting 80 86 billion clueless neurons now how do you get a Gaudi type mind out of a termite colony brain there's no boss neuron in there there's no king neuron there's no there's no grace kaga tans of descartes in there moving the neurons around how do you get neurons which are individually even more clueless and termites to join into forces that permit you to get a Gaudi type mind that's a real puzzle and here's an oversimplified answer you can't do much carpentry with your bare brain and you can't do much thinking with your bear you can't do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can't do much thinking with your bare brain my friend boat album once said that I think it's a very deep fact about thinking a termite colony is a bear brain doesn't have any thinking tools intelligent designers have well equipped brains when did they get their tools very very recently if you see that little branch there that's about 6 million years on each branch that's about as long as as we've evolved from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee but having thinking tools is a much more recent event than that so in the whole history of life on the planet organisms were thinking tools the way we have are are an absolute novelty they've only been around for the blink of an eye oh and how did they get their tools well here's the wrong answer technology is a gift of God after the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts it is the mother of civilisations of Arts and Sciences that's Freeman Dyson and everything in that sentence is true I think except the first sentence it's not a miraculous gift from God it's a gradual non-genetic transmission of information for instance via the Baldwin effect and interestingly enough Schrodinger himself got it here's what he said the causal connection is not what Lamarck thought it to be rather just the other way around it's not that the behavior changes the physique of the parents and by physical inheritance that of the Austrian it is at this changing behavior is by example or teaching or even more primitively transmitted to the progeny along with a physical change carried by the genome nay even if the physical change is not yet an inheritable one the transmission of the induced behavior by teaching can be a highly efficient evolutionary factor because it throws the door open to receive future inherited mutations with a prepared readiness to make the best use of them and thus to subject them to intense selection that's he had that of course he was not the first to have that Baldwin had it first the long answer is that cultural evolution designed thinking tools that impose novel structures on our brains these are evolved virtual machines that we download into our neck tops and that's the source of our power and versatility but our brains are computers but not like your laptop or smartphone they're not composed of billions of the identical intelligently designed flip-flops but of billions of evolved cells with agendas of their own and Schrodinger got that too the cell as a component of the body is not only a visibly demarcated unit but a unit life centered on itself it leads its own life in other words go Phi is not what's inside it's something very different very quickly I will summarize one more idea which Schrodinger anticipated I've already mentioned McCulloch and Pitt's for the McCulloch Fitz neuron and Jeri Letson was a brilliant and very funny neuroscientist but this classic paper by let the Majorana McCulloch and Pitt's what the frog's eye tells a frog's brain came out in 1959 and in second off it was embarked on Macarena the Chilean thinker and guru and he created the term auto placeis he and Varela his Chilean co-author wrote a interesting book about this in 1980 more recently terry deacon at berkeley came out with a book called incomplete nature and basically what they're doing is rediscovering an idea that there's also in Schrodinger and and building it out here's what Schrodinger said in mind and matter speaking without metaphor we have to declare that we are here faced with one of these typical antinomies caused by the fact that we have not yet succeeded in elaborating a fairly understandable outlook on the world without retiring our own mind the producer of the world picture from it so that mine has no place in it that was true in 1956 when he wrote it and it's still true today but we're working on it thanks for your attention [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Trinity College Dublin

Views: 21,053

Rating: 4.9083095 out of 5

Keywords: Trinity College Dublin, Trinity, TCD, University, University of Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Id: iJ1YxR8qNpY

Length: 47min 3sec (2823 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Open_Thinker]

This wasn't a particularly interesting talk IMHO, he starts by saying that life is changing unpredictably because evolution is a noisy process, and then just touches very superficially on other abstractions such as Mendelian genetics and Shannon information.