Dr. Daniel Dennett — Freedom Evolves: Free Will, Determinism, and Evolution

[Music] dan dan it's one of the great minds of our time and we are lucky to have him here doing it on as part of his book tour for his new book freedom evolves you obviously know who he is and so some of the people are here but Dan's kind of special because this is a science organization skeptics here we are at Cal Tech what are we doing with the Philosopher's well because dan has done something I think important that Ed Wilson talks about in his book Concilium sand that is this sort of Concilium sar bringing together jumping together of the different disciplines the humanities and the sciences the arts humanities and sciences philosophy science and so forth and he certainly showed this with his earlier books on consciousness he wrote a book on freewill already in the 1980s called elbowroom he's done a lot of research on neuroscience he's at Tufts University and the neuroscience department and philosophy department probably the book that really I think linked them to some of the major scientists of our time was Darwin's dangerous idea certainly one of the more controversial books of the 90s right in the middle of the sort of rise of evolutionary psychology as a really legitimate science and and Dan brought a sort of fresh skepticism to a branch of evolutionary theory that probably needed some critiques that is the whole Gould Ian sort of branch of of that side of evolutionary theory and he wrote a long critique of that as well as a whole bunch of other people is really a good skeptics book it really hammers home critiques of a lot of evolutionary theory that probably needed to be aired I remember talking with who's mister new kind of science well from Wolfram was I was talking to will for him about all this stuff and I was saying well you know there is sort of this sort of Gould and and his camp and and and Dawkins and Dennett in their camp and he says what why do we have to have all this kid just say it the way it actually is well because that's the way Wolfram operates sort of in a vacuum where you just make these profound discoveries in isolation but it doesn't really work that way science is a social process that thrives I think on debate and disputation and confrontation that's where the action is and where it's not clear what the data shows that's really where these great debates I think feeling the the the interest for all of us that love this stuff and Dan's been one of the pioneers in that his new book which I just finished reading freedom evolves as you can see on the screen so here I think he's doing something important not just another philosophy book on a timeless subject but trying to do as ed Wilson said it's sort of a Concilium so bringing together of different fields in the sciences and humanities and philosophies to try to show that in the future I think to be a humanitarian a humanist a scholar and academic you really have to be schooled in the sciences the sciences is where the action is in the future so everybody artists and humanists and literary people will have to have something at least have a copy of Stephen Hawking's book on the coffee table even if you don't look at her I guess Wolfram this book now is the book du jour for the coffee table and have some understanding of that so we're fortunate to have Dan Dennett one of the great thinkers of our time when the great philosophers and science philosophers of our time please help me welcome dr. Daniel Dennett thank you it's a hard act to follow I'm a little bit concerned now that the screen doesn't hasn't doesn't have my title in the middle and I wonder if the if the if the projector is not going to read all of my all of my screen will soon ah how curious I've never seen that happen before well let's see what happens when I get started first of all I'm delighted to be here I am honored to be in such distinguished companies as my friends Jared Diamond and Steve Pinker I know I've given talks here before and have you come out to hear me talk about my new book is a great delight and I'm going to start with it with a bit of humor too we'll see if this works hello hang on be patient sometimes these things yeah okay well this is this Dilbert came out a few months ago dog where do you think the chemistry of the brain controls what people do Dilbert of course but how can we blame people for their actions because people have free will to do as they choose dogbert are you saying that free will is not part of the brain of course it is but it's the part of the brain that is out there just being an kinda free so you're saying the free will part of the brain is exempt from the natural laws of physics obviously otherwise we couldn't blame people for anything they do dog where do you think the free will part of the brain is attached or does it just float nearby shut up that is the state of play on the freewill issue for many people and what it nicely brings out I think is that there's been a 2,000 year-old active of misdirection which is many people think that physics is the key to this the natural laws of physics when in fact the key is biology and evolutionary theory in particular and that is the fact the theme of my book it is it is a theme this is not my book this is Lee Siegel's book but I'm going to tell you about this is a wonderful book by the way especially for skeptics Lee Siegel is a professor of religion at the University of Hawaii and he's written this lovely book about Street magic Indian Street magic and in the book there's a great passage which I which I love to quote I'm writing a book on magic I explained and I'm asked real magic by real magic people mean miracles thaumaturgic elack's supernatural powers no I answer conjuring tricks not real magic real magic in other words refers to the magic that's not real while the magic that is real that can actually be done is not real magic and I've decided that this passage sort of is an emblem of my whole life as a philosopher because one of the problems that I've had over the years is I write a book about consciousness and people say well that's not real consciousness and what they mean by that is because it's not magic enough because I'm explaining consciousness as something which isn't in the end magical and the same I've learned is true a free will people want freewill to be magical in in in the way that Dilbert suggested they want it to to be some sort of exemption or a truncation of the laws of nature and they think well if it's not that then it's not really free will is it it's something something cheesy something only physically possible you know not a miracle as it should be and this attitude of wanting everything wonderful like consciousness like freewill to be not just wonderful but supernatural that wonderful is something that I've had to address and live with throughout my career and in a way the freedom revolves is an attempt my latest attempt to to show people that free will can be quite wonderful enough and still be part of the natural universe and the way to understand this is not by looking at physics and particularly not looking at quantum physics but looking at biology which is where the action is on this topic so I'm going to try to show you but first I have to say a bit more about the anxiety that is provoked by these questions I think you probably all have seen I hope you've all seen the great Disney classic animated film Dumbo the flying elephant and as you see in this picture he's he's holding in his trunk the magic feather there's a great scene early in this film when Dumbo doesn't know he can fly yet he's he's he's he's managed to fly in a drunken stay it up into the top of the tree and the crows his friend the pros find him there and they eat falls to earth and now they're trying to convince him he can really fly how else could he have gotten in that tree in there trying to coax him off a cliff and needless to say he's very very anxious about this and one of the pros gets a bright idea plucks a tail feather from one of his brothers or cousins and proceeds to tell Dumbo this is a magic feather you hold this in your trunk and then you can fly the scene is done with with great economy it's very elegantly done they're going to use ecology psychology they say and and one can see that this is going to work now imagine if Disney rewrote that scene and just as the smart crow is about to hand Dumbo the feather this other smart aleck II crow the skeptic who realizes who saw the feather beam five knows this is not a magic feather starts coming up to Dumbo to tell him about this isn't really a magic feather this is just an ordinary tale every kid in that audience would be screaming stop that crow and what I've come to realize is that in the eyes of rather a large number of people I am that crook you skeptics you use skeptics know about this there is the sense in the case of Dumbo this would be justified yeah this this crow he knows the truth but there's a time for truth and there's a time for buttoning your lip there's a time when the truth will do more harm than good don't break the spell and there is a very powerful sentiment out there that there are some maybe they're true maybe they're false but there are ideas that are so dangerous that if we let people spread these ideas around they will do a lot of mischief however well-intentioned now after I realized that this was the the motivation for some of the criticism and some of the sort of bizarre willful misrepresentation of my views that I was encountering and not just my views but the views of others including Jared Diamond and Steve Pinker I realized that those of us in philosophy or science who actually aspire to having an effect on a wider public do in fact have to play by slightly different rules and the rest of our colleagues who don't have those aspirations we have to play by the same rules as engineers who build bridges and skyscrapers and the like and doctors we have to be extra careful not to do harm and the fact that you've got a true idea that you're expressing is not in itself perhaps sufficient because one if your idea however true it is is misunderstood by many people who run off and do something foolish and dangerous as a result of their misunderstanding of your perfectly good idea how responsible are you for the predictable effects of the misunderstanding of your ideas however true they are so I began to worry about whether or not I was actually causing some mischief or in danger of doing some serious mischief with my ideas and I talked to a lot of people about this and looked at it very hard and in the end I decided no I understood the people who felt this way I appreciate them if I if I encountered somebody who had we wanted to put forward a claim that however true would in my opinion cause vast human suffering then I would be strongly motivated whether I would act on I don't know thank God I'm not in that position to do what I could to discredit this person to squelch his views to get him to shut up if that's what it took so I appreciate I think I don't think the motivation is daft and I don't think it's ignoble I just think in this case it's wrong it's a mistake I think that the views that I and others have been defending in this on this score on these scores are benign valuable useful although I grant that misunderstood misinterpreted especially if they're willfully misconstrued they could they could cause they could cause some harm it's a close call so there are people out there who whose attitude is stop that grow as I was flying in today from Boston and if I'm a little disconnected it's because I was in London yesterday and stopped for four hours of sleep and a laundry in Boston on my way here so not quite sure what time of day it is Alan Moore's review of Pinker's the blank slate in the New York Review of Books is a perfect example of stop that crow John Cornwell's review of my book in the London Sunday Times is there's another these authors make it very clear by the way they they overreach that they were going to do what they can to discredit this message and if they can't find falsehoods to declare then there to find other ways to to discredit to discredit this message what I want to argue instead is that evolutionary theory not physics is the key to understanding the phenomenon of freedom and then what sense well it explains how we can be free when our parts aren't free that might seem like a contribution Airy Theory lets you understand how that can be the case and it explains why people get so anxious freedom does evolve and it could go extinct if we aren't careful that's one of the forward-looking messages of my book now there's a word that we all know what it means but we never use it it's the false positive or the lost positive that goes with uncouth and there's a lot of these words gruntled you're all very gruntal today I'm happy to say we don't need these words but here's one that we do need evitable if only this word were in regular use we would we would have a good term for something which is in fact very important and that has been misunderstood and overlooked by by generations of philosophers what I want to talk about is the evolution of evitable ax T now here's the view that most people find so obvious it hardly needs mentioning if the world is deterministic everything in my future is an inevitable I mean that's just what determinism means isn't it if the world is deterministic of physics is deterministic then my future is inevitable this is false one of the main messages of my book is this is simply a mistake it is a well-known mist I mean it is well-known claim it is seldom viewed as a mistake it is flat-out an error and I'd like to try to show you that that's the case now I'm not going to do that in as much detail in my talk as I do in the book but I'm going to give you the basic argument and it begins of course we're just defining just what determinism is so this peter van in wagon good philosopher and although i profoundly disagree with his views he has the virtue of putting things very pithily very often the thesis that there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future that's the view of determinism now it's more familiar to most of us in the guise of Laplace's demon this is pierre-simon laplace writing in 1814 and giving us the image that more or less governs the thinking of certainly philosophers who think about determinism and I think physicist too Laplace imagines an intellect which at any given moment knew all the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to analysis could condense into a single formula to move the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain than the future just like the past would be present before its eyes so this vision then of you have this omniscient demon but all you really have to give them is a snapshot of an instant given the exact position the exact momentum the the trajectory the location of every particle in the universe then you just turn the crank and if physics is deterministic the demon can calculate the next instant and the next in the next and the next and the next and calculate the whole future that's the vision of determinism now what I want to show is that determinism so defined and that's standard definition does not imply inevitability even though it does imply that if you rewind the tape again and again again and put it back in the universe back into exactly the same state that it was in before then exactly the same future would unroll again and again and again that's part of the meaning of the concept of determinism and the way I'm going to try to show this is that in deterring that in deterministic worlds some things are inevitable and some things are not well if some things are not inevitable then some things are evitable so there's a 'but ability in deterministic worlds so maybe you're lucky enough to live in one of those deterministic worlds where your future isn't inevitable but rather evitable which case the problem disappears doesn't it now inevitable means unavoidable in fact in French it's the same word in every jobs of unavoidable by what by whom by an avoider or a potential avoider what's that it isn't just anything it has to be something like an agent something that could or would or would want to or could hope to avoid something presumably bad we usually don't want to avoid the good things we want to avoid the bad things so the idiom X avoids y is what we have to look at what is it to avoid something and how can there be avoiders in deterministic worlds that's the task to show now in order to do this I take a load off our imagination by using a toy world that is deterministic and that is very clearly and obviously deterministic and show how there can be avoiding in that toy world and that's a world that I've talked about in some of my earlier books John Horton Conway's Game of Life now this is a deterministic universe which has the virtues of existing simply on a plane imagine an infinite plane divided into squares cells pixels and each square is either on or off either black or white that's it so any state of such a universe simply consists of the whole universe with some of the squares in the on state and the rest of the squares in the off state there's no in-between States and now we have some physics that determine just how the next instant comes about you'll see that choosing one cell this dark green one here we see that it has eight neighbors north west north east south west south east north south east and west so every cell this cell has eight neighbors those this cell well it goes off the edge but this cell has eight neighbors every cell has eight neighbors and now here is the entire physics of the life world if two of those neighbors are on than the stealth cell stays in its present state in the next instant if three are on then the cell is on in the next instant there's a berth on that cell if it was off it becomes on if it's on it stays on under all other conditions the cell is off now I hope you can see why this is a deterministic world pepper the plane with on cells any number you like some cells are on some are off the physics on this page completely determines which cells are going to be on and which cells off in the next instance and then in the next and then in the next this is a laplacian universe but it's very simple you think of all the work you have to do to learn modern physics this physics there it is all on one overhead you can capture the whole physics in a few simple rules and it's you can see that it's deterministic now what can we do with this well let me show you here is the life world this is by the way I'll put the URL you can download this for free off a website and this is a I I have all my students learn this toy now this is a great teaching tool a wonderful a wonderful toy and here's the life plane and it's just got two little configurations but I'm gonna go up here to options and go into drawing mode and yeah and now here I'm gonna put us I'm gonna put a cell on here I'm gonna put two on here and I'm gonna put three on here now what will happen in the next instant to this cell well it has no neighbors on so it'll go off what about these two cells each one has one neighbor on but that's not enough they'll both go off how about these three cells here well this one will go off because it only has one neighbor this one will go off because it only has one neighbor this one will stay the same because it has two neighbors but here to the left and right there will be a birth because those yet this cell has three neighbors on and this cell has three neighbors on well let's just hit the spacebar and see what happens sure enough well what will happen in the next instant then we'll go back to that and so forth back and forth meanwhile this other configuration is doing whatever it's doing let's just rewind the tape of life and let's run it mmm that's that little simple thing took on quite a life of its own didn't it let's make it easier to see it's gonna that's not all the way back there we go we'll make it a little bit smaller still and then let's run it again you see those little things going darting out heading off to infinity those are called gliders and they're just one of the more interesting denizens of the life world just to give you a little idea of what sorts of things are possible let's show you say ooh rake gun I like rake gun that's a pretty neat thing that that gives you a close-up view but let's that's no I want to go the other way don't mind let's look at it small so you can see what it looks like when it's put into operation maybe I'll enlarge it a little bit I know but I want you to see it whoo quite astonishing well it's a cute toy right what else can it do well let's see that's one more thing I want to show you if I've got it here lighter eaters okay now what you see here are two little gliders heading towards a thing called an eater and if we pace it along you will see what happens when it gets there the eater eats it right up boom boom uh-oh what happened there well the glider was actually one cell over to the side so didn't get eaten quite as securely as you as the other ones were these are immensely interesting to me at least demonstrations of the variety that's possible in a simple two-dimensional deterministic world what can you do in such a world it's perfectly deterministic and in that world as Conway and his students showed there is a universal Turing machine that is constructible out of gliders eaters still lifes and the other denizens of that world out of those simple parts you can build a universal Turing machine which means any program that can run on this laptop can also run very slowly on the universal Turing machine that you can simulate on that's in this 2-dimensional world so that it's possible to run tetris and word and any program you like including any artificial evolution program can run in the life world on the universal Turing machines that is constructible out of those pieces now here's what Poundstone has to say about that this has written a few years ago displaying how this is how big the universal Turing machine is it's 10 to the 13th pixels pattern would require a video screen about 3 million pixels across at least assume the pixels are one millimeter square that would be low resolution by today's standards even when I've had my resolution set back down here then the screen would have to be 3 kilometers about 2 miles across it would have an area about 6 times out of monoco now no we could put this on a we could put this on a considerably smaller screen now it would only be about as big as Cal Tech's campus or something like that at high resolution so in other words not surprisingly on reflection in order to make something as complex as a universal Turing machine you need to make it that much bigger than the smallest parts but then how much bigger than the smallest parts are living things in our world compare them with the atoms of which they're made and the answer many many orders of magnitude bigger so the message so far is simply this don't underestimate the power of a simple deterministic world to support surprising innovative flexible phenomenon takes lots of design work to get the flexible things to happen in such a world where do these nice designs come from they don't just come by people playing around at random there are people who devote large parts of their lives to the hobby of creating ever more wonderful thing immobilise designs I want to share with you a couple of quotations from one of their websites now-defunct the loaf reacts with all the junk the arpan tomato produces as it naturally transforms into a herschel miraculously reappear sometime later leaving no debris at all it is necessary to prevent the first Herschel glider from hitting the fading remnants of the reaction and there's no room for an ordinary eater but luckily a tub with tail and a block can be used instead here's another one Dave Buckingham found a faster stable reflector does not use Paul Callahan special reaction instead the incoming glider hits a boat to make a B hep Tamino which is converted into a Herschel moved around to restore the boat the compact form the 919 step Herschel conduit is needed here as is a non standard still life to cope with a 64 64 77 conduit sequence now I have no idea what that means but it's pretty clear what these guys are doing they're playing God they are designing wonderful things in this world out of parts they're sharing ideas about good parts and worrying about debris and collisions and the remnants of collisions and the like and to see if they can make something ever more wonderful something is wonderful for instance as a universal touring machine oh by the way Conway's universal Turing machine also is a self-replicating universal Turing machine it it makes copies of itself as it goes it's more or less like like bacteria in a petri dish it would cover an ever larger plane if you gave it room now being fond of their creations these folks playing God is life hackers need to protect their creations from incoming debris from junk from debris remnants that are lying around in the world and that as you saw in the case of the gliders coming in and being eaten by the eaters is not a trivial matter you can't automatically protect your your just put a few centuries around the edge of your creation and hope to protect it but it is possible to create things in the life world which can take some steps to protect themselves that can move out of harm's way now of course in order to be able to do this they have to be able to anticipate harm coming now either this is because they're godlike designers have pre-designed them to be particularly adept at getting out of certain kinds of harm's way or they maybe even have to have some way of learning in their own lifetimes within the life world what steps to take to avoid certain kinds of harm in other words it is quite possible to design avoiders in the life world and then we can ask such questions as well if you run this life world some vast assemblage on the plane if you run this life world for a trillion generations for a trillion instance what will be left at the end and you can say well the harm avoiders are going to do better than those that can't avoid harm there they're the ones that are going to have a better chance of survival and so in this way an evolutionary process can go on in the life plane in spite of the fact that it's a deterministic world some of the avoiders are going to be better at avoiding harm than others and they're the ones that are going to survive and if they can replicate they can make even better avoiders and so forth and so on just the way it's happened in three dimensions in a somewhat more complicated physics on this planet and presumably on many others avoiding harm has been the first problem of all living things since life began avoiding the destruction of self thanks to the inexorable impingements of the junk that's lying around in the universe and if you can exploit some of those materials to make your life even better if you can gather energy from them or information about other things in the future better still now one attitude that these if we were to anthropomorphize these life these life forms one attitude they could take it just you know god will protect me and indeed Dave Buckingham in this crowd they they can always protect their creations they can just hit this pause button move everything over erase some unfortunate debris and then well they can cause miracles left and right whenever they want to and then hit the play button and go right on with the world more interesting however is the task of designing things which can protect themselves evolution can do that job as well as hacker gods can and in fact even better and now you already know the main theme of my book and why it is that I say that evolution is the key to the understanding of ability and why in deterministic world your future is not inevitable it's because you have evolved from a long line of avoiders and you have become better and better able to avoid things because you can use your senses to gather information about the worlds present and past and extrapolate the world's future so that you can see harm coming and take steps to avoid it the evolution of avoiders is one way of looking at the whole process of evolution from the very earliest viral like replicators to us as this has happened it has increased what engineer would call the degrees of freedom in the world we have moved from there being just one or two ways to go on living there being many different options whenever you have a degree of freedom you had the problem of how to control it for that you need a nervous system to provide useful control for the many degrees of freedom that have evolved on this planet I was thinking of I was talking with somebody just yesterday actually if I'm not sure what yesterday means but very recently within the last 24 hours and he was telling me about these wonderful jellyfish he'd seen that show up and down yeah that's right rather like rather like a hot-air balloon you've got only one degree of freedom to control in a hot-air balloon you can turn on the heat and go up you can turn off the heat and let the balloon cool you can go down but a really clever balloonist can use that one degree of freedom if he knows enough about where the winds are to provide at least indirect control of a great deal of the rest of the other dimensions of its of the trajectory of the balloon this use of the control of degrees of freedom has and grown and grown and grown with the advent of multicellular life and finally with the advent of culture and language and we human beings are the most virtuoso avoiders that the planet has ever seen we've had an explosive growth inevitability on this planet in the last 10,000 years and in the last hundred years in fact in the last week there are things that used to be inevitable that aren't anymore inevitable there evitable now thanks to the latest advances in science and technology every day we get an increase in evitt ability on this planet a rather striking manifestation of that was recently pointed out by Paul MacCready well that's not my next slide after all so evitable ax T is what matters and it is strictly independent of determinism in fact if your universe is determined this actually helps you be an avoider because it gives you more reliable information about what the future has in store if you're if the future you face is truly unpredictable if it's really random then whatever happens is inevitable you have no chance if you're gonna cross a field in which you might get struck by lightning the randomness of the of the positioning of the lightning laws is it's not something you want if you could if you can tell that there's not going to be any lightning for the next three minutes you're you're in great shape its predictability that breeds is the precondition for evitable ax t so determinism is your friend not your foe this can be understood I think only from an evolutionary perspective from the perspective of physical determinism and and an absence of a biological point of view which looks at agency we can't see this spectacular explosion of Evatt ability that has changed the future the futures of all the agents on the planet over time this growth in a very and important phenomenon evitable 'ti is invisible if you don't adopt an evolutionary perspective consider this fact the human population plus livestock and pets now represents 98 percent of the mass of vertebrate life on land and in the air ten thousand years ago that 98% was less than 0.1% that's the impact of the explosion of evitable 'ti by one species on this planet but this of course creates problems philosophers don't agree about very much I think perhaps the only thing that almost every philosopher subscribes to as a sort of bumper sticker is that odd implies can Triton do you know do you know the story about Jewish ethics can implies don't that is not as widely shared an opinion but odd implies can if you if you're unable to do something that you can't be then you can't be obliged to do it if it's simply not in your power to do X then however nice it would be if X we're done you can't be obliged to do aught implies can but as I've just said what we've had on this planet is an explosion of can do there's lots of things we can do now that we never used to be able to do and what the trouble is as evitable 'ti has expanded our reasons have not kept pace of all the things we can do what ought we to do and here is where people's anxiety about freedom really becomes important because we simply are oppressed by all the things we now can do and the fact that we don't yet have any ethical systems or perspectives that tell us clearly enough what we ought to do of all of the possibilities and here is where today one of the particular anxieties is so called genetic determinism which I argue in the book is a myth but it's not always a myth I want to contrast different ways that genes can affect your future consider Huntington's disease as Matt Ridley points out in his lovely book genome pure Huntington's disease Huntington's chorea is pure fatalism undiluted by environmental variability good living good medicine healthy food loving families or great riches can do nothing about it in other words if you have the gene for Huntington's chorea you are doomed there's nothing you can do about it that's genetic determinism but the point is that's the rare case for most genetic conditions the bad the bad outcomes are not determined consider phenol phenylketonuria all you have to do with this is simply change your diet and you don't have the bad effects at all now as Ridley points out there's a simple test if you're at risk for Huntington's you can find out with a simple test whether you're gonna come down with it great many people informed about the possibility of this test decide not to have the test why because there's nothing they could do about it it is simply a sort of terrible death sentence and so they choose not to know something that they could easily know that is of course I think the reasonable response in a case of genetic determinism and this is what people are afraid of but notice that if the day comes and it may come any day now what would the explosion of Evatt ability that there is some move that can be made some therapy that can that can avoid the terrible symptoms of Huntington's chorea these people will be the first person in line to take the test what you need for freedom is foreknowledge and a path that that knowledge can guide are we then freer than we want to be I've been fascinated to see that a lot of the anxiety that people have about free will especially when they consider science and technology is that it seems to be making life for some people freer than it used to be and in ways that people find this extremely disconcerting after all if people can choose the sex of their offspring go shopping for a genome that has certain properties and not others use plastic surgery to change their facial features and so forth and so on if people can do all these things that were never possible before maybe we've become too free this is one of the anxieties that has to be dealt with and the reason that it has to be dealt with is that freedom does he fall it's fragile this is the website that you can download life 32 from if you want I'll let you leave that up for a moment while I say a few more words people campaign on behalf of this topic at first I was really puzzled by this I thought boy it took me a long time to figure this out pre Willis unlike I think every other philosophical issue people very few people care about issues in metaphysics the nature of causation nature of time you know just the past real who cares I mean most people let the philosophers worry about that but they don't feel that way about freewill and moreover when you when you talk to them about it you realize that they're not just arguing about it they're campaigning about it there there there it's as if they are afraid that if the wrong view won this would be a really bad thing and then I hit me well you know they're right because freedom the freedom that we value depends on a supporting atmosphere just as much as life depends on on the atmosphere the oxygen-rich atmosphere which itself had to evolve the cultural environment the cultural atmosphere that had to evolve to sustain the sorts of freedoms that we do in fact hold dear the freedom to act as a free agent to be responsible for ourselves to be held responsible for our actions to be allowed to go with pretty much where we where we want to when we want to the conditions under which this is possible depend on a large manifold of social institutions and shared attitudes and we're those to evaporate we're those to go stinked then freedom would go extinct too now that may seem like a bizarre metaphysical claim but just compare it to one which is more readily imaginable let's think of something else which is valuable though not as valuable as freedom which also depends on a supporting manifold of attitudes money the disks that we call coins the pieces of paper that we call bills all of the marks on paper and the records and computers that that we use and rely on every day in our in our monetary system that all depends on a tremendously intricate and interlocking set of attitudes and practices which if they somehow got forgotten if we all suddenly woke up with amnesia didn't know any of those things there wouldn't be any money anymore money could go extinct freedom could go extinct too so it's well worth preserving the main message of my book is if you want to preserve it then understand it understand how it evolves because that's the best hope for preserving it in the future thank you very much I'll take some questions but before we do that two orders of business there is a play going on in Rainbow Hall just below us so when you leave after the QA do be quiet when you're particularly one out there those stairs and it's really loud in the hallways here so just dinner afterwards at burger continental anybody's invited inside lake and just up from California just a little west of here so late in California burger time I'm sure there's plenty of questions let's go in in I want to thank whoever it was who showed me how to change the resolution on the fly yeah thank you thank you I won't make next time you think next time that'll be evitable for me that's how it goes okay any questions I guess not oh yeah good I I don't see how life 32 is anything other than inevitable aside from God's interference right let me let me drive home your points every particular state of the life world has exactly one future which just it's whatever it is and if you put the life world into that state that's the state it'll go into every time that's because it's a deterministic world now in some of those what how many worlds are there how many life worlds are there what depends on how you know how big how big a screen yeah but it's it's it's a in my technical sense it's a vast number it's not an infinite number but it's an unbelievably large number of different possible worlds here we can use the phrase possible worlds and mean something very precise and clean about it there's all these different ways of having States in the life front now it's interesting that some of these life worlds are just junk they're just chaotic nothing interesting happens in them and in fact all but a tiny tiny fraction of the possible life worlds are just junk they don't differ the junky ones from the ones that are interesting in in that in that they're deterministic and the others aren't there all deterministic but in some of them avoiders evolve and wonder of wonders that's the kind of world we live in we live in a world in which avoiders have evolved we didn't have to there were all sorts of other possible universes that wouldn't have had a voyeurs but our world has of Waiters and we are then fine but think of it this way I throw a brick at your head and you duck was that brick that bricks collision with your head inevitable no apparently because you avoided it now you avoided it because the light bouncing off the brick into your eyes triggered mechanisms which have been evolved for doing just this sort of thing so yes it's all determined it's all determined but he's still docked yeah you say well you see see here's the fatalist argument well you see the brick was never really gonna hit you it was never really going to hit you because after all though it was determined that the light bouncing off the brick was gonna go into your eyes and you were gonna duck some other brick you know your back is turned I throw it actually it hits you that brick was gonna hit you and it did hit you and you didn't avoid that one well you can't avoid everything but the fact is that you're a pretty good avoider thanks to determinism now it is true that any particular event that happens was unavoidable that's true whether determinism is true or false if it happened it was unavoidable the events that are avoidable are the events that you see coming the the prospects and then they don't happen because you take steps that's what it is to avoid something now you may think well this is just playing tricks with words this isn't this isn't the kind of avoidance I want well I beg to differ with you I think this is the kind of avoidance you want and in fact I challenge you to find the kind of avoidance that's better than this this is the avoidance that we want this is the avoidance that matters and in determinism gives you know better kinds of avoidance now I know that goes against the grain of several thousand years of thinking on this topic going back to the to Democritus and the random swerve the atoms but I think it's time to just confront that tradition and say it was a mistake well you next because I think the fast effective work is not deterministic other time I lose a statistical way do you think we in the real deterministic universe world where this one single future determined from this moment I think it doesn't matter did you everybody hear the question all right Vic the question the question was he says he says he thinks that that it doesn't matter what I'm saying about determinism because our world isn't deterministic we live in a world you know we've all heard about how the quantum physics shows us that our world isn't deterministic after all and so so the fact is that there isn't a single future and you say it's deterministic only in a loose sense well that's a view that is shared by very many people but I think it's I think it's a mistaken view in the following regard indeed at the subatomic level our world is apparently in deterministic and because there can be amplification of subatomic indeterminacies we can get large scale in deterministic events anytime we want to in our world I am going to allow you that I think this is simply irrelevant to all the interesting questions about freewill now there's a tradition among philosophers it says that's not so and since I respect that tradition I go to considerable lengths in my book to give a sympathetic account of the best version of this that I have been able to find and that's Robert Kane's attempt to harness quantum indeterminacy in an account of free choice in his book the significance of free will which I highly recommend and I devote a long chapter I I'm sure that many readers will will will be reluctant to follow me through the complexities of Kane's treatment but I want to give Kane his shot I want to give the best case for in determinism playing a role in human choice that I can and his is by a country mile I would say the best in the end I think I am able to show that his account can't actually use the in determinism that it was motivated to to exploit everything he has to say can be accommodated within a model which isn't determined in in deterministic at all now this isn't the time or place to go into those arguments but I I accept that this is a this is a very widely held opinion which needs to be considered in length I've tried to do that in the book yes so let me let me again try to try to repeat your question this gentleman is disappointed that he didn't see the connectivity between the shall we say the apparent purposiveness of the simple things in the life world with the more meaningful purposefulness of human activity you didn't see that was a mighty big leap there and you wanted me to say more about that and I agree that was a mighty big leap and I didn't have time here to do that and I do attempt to to take those that make that journey in smaller more manageable steps so let me give you just a few a few hints about that how that goes and I did say at one point that one of the tasks is to show how we can be freer than our parts a little simple thing that you can take in and the life world that doesn't have any free will it doesn't even really have any purpose it's too simple but it is rather like the the earliest replicators on this plan they bacteria don't have free will either and if they have purpose they may seem to have purpose but they don't really let's let's agree on that bacteria don't really have purpose if you don't agree then take something simpler I mean proteins don't really have purposes I want that because I want to build from something which everybody agrees doesn't really have purpose to something that does really have purpose and show that what you do is simply add more and more of them and add more complexity and more organization and system and you gradually build two unicellular life forms which have Hemi semi Demi quasi purpose two things which have Hemi semi purpose two things that have semi purpose two things that have purpose that's the way evolution works it it's the same as with life our virus is alive I don't know I don't care say they aren't proteins aren't alive but when you put them together you get something as well is it alive sort of yes what are the necessary conditions for life philosophers traditional moves art is to be an essentialist at this point say here are the essential conditions and we have the first living thing this is the first living thing but the of course the biologists are going to say well play that game if you want to but the first living thing is going to differ imperceptibly and of no theater in no theoretically important way from its progenitor and I spend quite a bit of time in the book on an argument I love this argument do originally I think the David Sanford how many of you think there are mammals I do how many of you think that there have only been a finite number of mammals in the history of the of the of the planet ah but now we have a problem because by definition every mammal has a mammal for a mother yeah that gives us an infinity either there's no mammals at all or there's an infinity of mammals what shoot what's your choice folks this is a conte this is a paradox well the answer obviously is we have to go via the the therapsids in between the reptiles and the mammals and how you can say that some threats had had a mammal offspring and you can pretend that there's some interesting theoretical way to draw the line but the fact is that evolution works by sort of imperceptible gradual steps and there's a lot of little backsliding and there's there's going to be just as good reasons for denying it's a mammal hey its mother was off the wrap SID what could be a better reason for denying it's a mammal than their but of course if we play that game forever then we don't have any mammals and what we realize is that things everything interesting comes apparently in degrees and you have to have these transitions from things that aren't free at all and don't have any real purpose through things that gee it's sort of as if they had purposes to things that well you might call those purposes and gradually we get to things that are as I say not just situation action machines with choice machines they don't just they're not just the beneficiaries of a bunch of hard wired designs which take them in good directions tropa Stickley as it were they also actually have the machinery to represent the reasons for doing the things they do at which point you have purposes yes no but they could that is strong AI are the robots going to take over I'm glad you raised that because I think you're right to raise it because I think the anxiety is the same I think the sort of visceral repugnance that many people feel to the idea strongly AI is directly connected with their sense that that this mechanistic materialistic worldview that I'm putting forward is going to is going to deny us all possibility of a free will or responsibility it's going to it's going to shatter our precious world you and I address this head-on right the right the first page of my book by quoting I was interviewed on and for an Italian newspaper for the Corriere della Sera a few years ago and I don't know who whether the interviewer wrote the headline but I loved the headline when the paper came out the next day was so this is the interview with me about my book on consciousness and the interview the headline was see a Bahama un animun my fat that eat on typically the robot yes we have a soul but it's made of lots of tiny robots yeah well that's the view yes we have a soul but it's made of lots of tiny robots and they don't have souls and what are these robots in our case it's Oh 100 trillion give or take a few who's counting cells a human cell it's not so different from a bacterium it doesn't have any freedom it doesn't have any purposes it's just this little mindless little robotic thing now Jacques Monod once said the dream of every cell no Pierre Jacobi got the Francoise jacobian at the wrong French biologist the dream of every of every cell is to become two cells now but that's not a conscious dream that's not a purpose it's just a built in mechanical materialistic propensity yes it's always trying to become two cells and that's the kind of robots that we're made of little things the dream of becoming more little things and when you get enough of them put together in the way that we are and you add all of the information that can modulate the structures thanks to the evolution of human culture and language then you get free will yes sir the fact that in science we use different theories at different levels for example by knowing all about DNA we can't predict when somebody might have a heart attack or by knowing quantum physics we can't tell whether we're going to have an accident on the way home and in the same way the microscopic rules of life don't tell you anything about what these huge configurations are going to do so at each stage of complexity we use different rules and it seems to me that you are saying that at the micro level there's determinism at the macro level there's freedom yeah I have I have I hope everybody could hear that I think your point about levels is one I heartily endorse yes at the micro level we have determinism by the way if you get life 32 you can fiddle with the rules you can change the physics adlib you want to see what happens if you change the rules for birth cells and death cells I can't remember I think yes you can even you can even randomize it it's at least pseudo-random so you can you can play around with pseudo random life if you want to to see but in fact you don't get any benefit from this what what is going on down in the engine room it down at the microscopic level is simply irrelevant to the reliabilities the patterns that are there at the higher levels and for that we need higher-level theories we need biological theories psychological theories political theories because those are the levels at which the causal features that matter are visible in that regard others tell you one another example which are I used in the book to exploit this I imagine a chess tournament between two chess-playing computers except I put them all on one computer to chess-playing programs you know in a program tournament we're gonna play a thousand games against each other against B well what's gonna be the result who knows I mean depends on how good the programs are but suppose a always beats B we play a thousand games different now we said why does a always be B here's a dumb answer well because it's determined today would always be B this is a deterministic system it's a computer you're running this on and indeed if you start the computer back in exactly the same state you reboot and you run the same tournament it'll run exactly the same tournament of a thousand games with exactly the same failed attempt to castle or failed you know missed opportunities to castle and so forth that at the level of determinism tells you nothing about the relative strengths of a and B there's programs and it tells you nothing about why one program is stronger than another the why is a causal why and it's a causal why which is invisible to the lower level to the to the deterministic level you have to go to a higher level in order to see that yes well yes H Allen or evolutionary biologist I think he's at Rochester wrote a very critical review of the thinker's book the blank slate in the latest issue the New York Review of Books or has a track record in this regard he wrote an absolutely ferocious review of Darwin's dangerous idea for the lead journal and evolution mainly evolution which had a dozen major factual errors or just misconstrue us of what was in my book and accusing me of mistakes on one page that if you'd turn to pages later I corrected by the way that hole or did was not content just to lambaste me in that technical journal he then rewrote the review for the Boston review where I got to reply to it and you can find all that on the web if you're interested so I mentioned this because Orr has a track record of of writing what are superficially very reasonable and very knowledgeable after all he's a professional biologist reviews of books that he doesn't like such as Steve fingers book in my book and some others like that if you look at them closely you see that he I'm thinking of a good general term I'll give you an example let me give an example from the review of the blank slate he criticizes Pinker Pinker's lying on psychopathy where Pinker cites frequency dependent selection and he and/or calls this an esoteric he says he defends us with an esoteric feature of evolution now come on or this isn't a it's not esoteric and be how to put this in the past or criticized evolutionary psychologists for being naive evolutionists for not knowing their evolutionary theory now he's criticizing Pinker for not being naive enough come on you can't have it both ways the fact is that Pinker knows his evolutionary biology and is preparing a response which will demonstrate I think quite clearly that or is just inventing errors that aren't in Pinker's book at all but I be when you first read it it seems very reasonable yes sir I've questioned your statement that quantum mechanical and chaotic in determinism is not relevant to the evolution of freewill as you can see bit because from our knowledge of genetic algorithms you always need a source of variability to drive the genetic algorithm and if their word and now variability in the universe maybe evolution would not work yes I think everybody could hear that and and I'm very glad you raised this point it's one I discussed at some length in the book a very distinguished evolutionary theorist this is the other Frenchman now this is Jacques Monod also thought what as you think that quantum indeterminism was important for evolution but I think he is in a minority of one I don't think any other evolutionary biologist believes that I've ever encountered believes that you need quantum indeterminacy as opposed to just chaos as opposed to deterministic pseudo randomness to drive evolution now why do I think so for a very for the reason you actually stated you say genetic algorithms require a certain amount of variability right they require a certain amount of pseudo randomness now the day that somebody shows an evolution a simulated evolution process of using it say a genetic algorithm which depends on real quantum randomizing rather than a pseudo-random number generator then I will agree with you but to date nobody has shown any such thing and as far as we know every evolutionary process that runs with a you know you could put a quantum randomizer on your computer if you want to or you can there's a website where you can get real random numbers if you want to they don't make any difference as far as evolution goes I don't think evolution does depend on quantum indeterminacy it does depend on there being lots of variation which is not coupled to the selected regime that's what it requires yes it seems to me do we need to wait for the science of these things to come along well in the long run everything all his us included but but but we want to mean something less less than the ultimate long run no I think seriously I think you're great I think you raise an interesting point I can't prove don't claim to prove that you can evolve avoiders in the life plane that are as good as we are I do claim I don't claim to prove that I claim to give a pretty good argument which shifts the burden of proof I don't think anybody has given us any reason to suppose that they can't but but I can't do it I can't do a constructive proof of this of any sort all I can do is point to the fact that there is a universal Turing machine that runs in the life world so we don't actually have to use a life world we can just use computer simulations of evolution no we don't we don't know we don't know and this is actually a an interesting issue in one regard it it turns out there turns out to be a sort of sort of wonderful law of diminishing returns here where as our simulation becomes more and more like the real world it becomes less and less feasible so that since we already know that evolution depends on serendipitous collisions with lots of junk that's what evolution depends on what Doug Hofstadter called spontaneous intrusions into the process and it's very hard to model spontaneous intrusions on a computer we usually settle for much simpler world so so this isn't a certain sense an open-ended question instead of throwing the threader you throw it all out of reach they move well alright well the opposite of avoiding is sort of getting or enhancing or approaching approaching is probably as closest to an opposite and and how would I handle that well in just the same way it's just the difference between between seeking out and fleeing from and and we have lots of simple models of this in biology we have we have phototaxis where you have very simple things that head to the light or they change head for a change in salinity they they go towards places where there's have to be food they have various ways of detecting conditions that are either good for them or bad for them and the ones that are wired up right are the ones that approach the good and flee the bad that's tautological and over time this gives rise to reasons you can start partitioning the world around you into those states of the world that as it were unfortunate and those that are that are good those that are toxic and those that are tonic and once you have that division of the states of the world into the tonic and the toxic and the behaviors for dealing with that then we're on the road to Evatt ability and and agency and life yes threw the ball at the end of the evolution of employers any mentioned exploiter the fact that there's an explosion of an explosion of evitable 'ti that there's this being that at this point from this point forth that the evolution of avoiders will become the precedent are we in a changing point because of the six motion of evidence there's always been an arms race not always for well-nigh four billion years there's been an arms race between exploiters and avoiders and we've biologists have described many different examples of this from the from the level of transposons and jumping genes to bacteria phages and bacteria to every imaginable source it seems every almost every imaginable sort of competitive relationship between different exploiters and and different avoiders and so it goes I don't I don't see all we've done is changed the scale in the pace but it's the same sort of thing yes question we've always been how the translated other way ya could have done otherwise the question is about how can my view handle the phrase could have done otherwise X could have done otherwise and as the gentleman says this has been a this has been a central pivot point in the discussions in the philosophical literature and I discussed this throughout the book in a number of places let me give let me give you two points I'll try to be quick because I think my answers are going on a bit long here JL Austin the Oxford philosopher has a famous footnote where he talks about a pot he's on the golf course and he takes his putt and he misses it and he says I could have got it I could have hit I could have hit that putt and we wonder we know is that true what does it mean well he says I mean in exactly those circumstances I could have got it but if we think more carefully about we always know that's not what that means he means in very very similar circumstances he would have made it and he precisely doesn't mean the case where if you replay history innings with every atom in place exactly as before that motion of could have done otherwise it turns out to be of no interest at all for any purpose the interesting notions are quite are quite compatible with determinism and I explain that but more I think more interestingly from from the perspective of your question there's also the question at the end of the day if what does it mean when a person talks about a moral decision and we could say he could have done otherwise and here actually I take I take a hint from my colleague Stephen white who in an elegant book of a few years ago very difficult but elegant book on that called the unity of the self proposes that we have to turn the question sort of inside out we realize you don't get a metaphysical answer to the question of what could have done otherwise means and then apply it to your moral and legal system you work out the moral and legal system and then could have done otherwise means whatever it has to mean for that - for that system to work and in other words you let you let the the ethics and politics drive the metaphysics and in fact it's not metaphysics at all and I think this is profoundly right what it means when you say I could have done otherwise is best understood in the context where you are say charged with a crime and you have to decide whether or not you could have done otherwise I mean everybody has to decide this but in particular he advocates a view of punishment and sanction and blame which gives the age in a particular role and I know he's not gonna like me for this because I found a very cute way of summarizing his position in a sort of bumper sticker slogan which he will be opposed to probably but I haven't checked with him thanks I needed that the the ideal that any sane theory of punishment should strive for is that the one who is punished endorses the punishment as fitting and this is not a coerced endorsement of course we don't always get this we seldom get this but this is the ideal that should govern the way we think about our laws and then we say X could have done otherwise precisely in those cases when X is responsible by those by that by that political criterion and the reason this is important if I'm if I may just go on one more bit is I've said and I haven't given any reason for you to believe yet that political conditions are part of the essential supporting atmosphere for free will and this is what I had in mind yes sir since life 32 is a deterministic system isn't it in this normal to call certain cells avoiders essence giving them an aftermarket purpose when in actuality it's just determined that they're going to be existing for you it's determined that they were going to be existing because they were avoiding things until they couldn't avoid them any longer just like you and me I think that is to say that's right they buy through no luck through no act of their own they were born avoiders lucky them it's just luck it's also luck for us Thanks [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 5,189

Rating: 4.7647057 out of 5

Keywords: Skeptics Society, Michael Shermer, Daniel Dennett, free will, determinism, human evolution, meaning, morality, evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience

Id: Lg-9k1uAHCo

Length: 86min 58sec (5218 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2019