Mindscape 78 | Daniel Dennett on Minds, Patterns, and the Scientific Image

hello everyone welcome to the mindscape podcast I'm your host Sean Carroll and welcome to 2020 hope everyone's having a good new year so far I'd like to start a tradition of starting off each calendar year with a bang podcast wise last year to begin 2019 we had Sir Roger Penrose one of the world's most famous scientists in the public sphere but also someone whose enormous ly respected by his professional colleagues so this year in 2020 we're gonna start off with Daniel Dennett who is a philosopher who is as well known as any philosopher is in the modern age among the general public and also once again extraordinarily respected among his professional colleagues I in particular have enormous respect for what Dan has done and part of it is just that our attitudes are very similar our approaches to what we do are very similar if you know it would not be completely wrong to say that when I am in a more philosophical mode I'm trying to do for physics what Dan has been trying to do for biology and neuroscience and consciousness over the course of his career as we'll talk about in the podcast we we go it's a long podcast it's a long episode we cover an enormous amount of ground so individual topics are breezed through very quickly but there's a theme there's a framework that ties it all together which is this idea of taking what science teaches us about the world and connecting it to the world of our everyday experience you know for whatever science teaches us it is very often going to be the case that even though it comes ultimately from our experience of the world the ultimate theories that we end up building might seem very different very surprising even disconcerting the Big Bang cosmology quantum mechanics Darwinian evolution are things that you wouldn't have just guessed just on the basis of your everyday experience without enormous amounts of observation and experimentation into realms that you don't see in your everyday life and therefore the theoretical frameworks you develop don't or feel much like our everyday world this is especially noticeable when it comes to things like consciousness freewill the nature of human beings so what Dan Dennett has devoted his career to are taking discoveries from science whether it's neuroscience or biology or what-have-you computer science artificial intelligence and teasing out their philosophical implications he is one of the world's leading philosophical naturalist s-- not a naturalist in the sense of going out into the forest and poking around the trees and the animals but a naturalist in the sense of not being a super naturalist an ontology that says there is only the natural world so how do you then explain things like purposes and meanings and other things that we human beings naturally associate with our lives here in the world that's what Dan has been trying to figure out for the course of his whole career and so we have a wonderful discussion back and forth where we both ask each other questions because he's thought very very deeply about the nature of existence the world we live in the nature of thought how we conceptualize what's going on and questions that are very important to me like emergence and intentionality how it's ok to talk about things like purposes and choices in a world that is ultimately governed by the laws of physics so I already said previously and I think maybe don't only to patreon subscribers but this is probably my favorite podcast interview that I've ever done and I think that you're gonna enjoy it just as much remember we have a web page for Posterous universe comm slash podcast where you can find show notes transcripts of every episode an eagle can also find a link to support mindscape if you like on patreon and patreon supporters get benefits like monthly ask me anything episodes and episodes that are completely ad free so this is gonna be very very fun episode I hope you enjoy it as much as I did let's go [Music] denne denne welcome to the mindscape podcast so I do with you you had a little thing that you said when I was in the room one time that I'm sure you've said many many times but it really struck a chord with me talking about Wilfred sellers and the manifest image and the scientific image and how you thought of your task as a philosopher to reconcile these why don't you tell us why we begin setting the stage by telling us what these are oh good I'm glad you asked Wilfrid Sellars great American philosopher said the job of philosophy was to explain how things in the broadest sense of the term hang together in the broadest sense of the term well that sounds sort of trivial how things hang together well but what he had in mind is this there's all the things of the everyday world colors and sounds and haircuts and pains and dollars and homeruns those are all things and then in the scientific world there's there's electrons and quarks and fields and molecules and how do we relate the things of our everyday sort of pre scientific world to the things that science has discovered and what a hundred years and more have shown is there's no simple answer what's very winded sellers say this in 1961 or two so but I mean when I say a hundred years I mean let's say since Einstein that's when the world really starts to look weird from the scientific point of view and you have people saying really it's all just atoms on the void and there's no such thing as solidity and there's no such things as colors and after all atoms aren't colored and the world of atoms is an empty space and we can go on from there so at one extreme you have people who have insisted that the scientific image that's the gold standard that's what sets what's real that's reality that's reality everything else is illusion but as a cartoon I like puts it reality maybe the world we live in may be an illusion but it's the only place you can get a good cup of coffee so it's not very helpful to be told that not only do dollars and homeruns not exist but colors don't exist and pain doesn't exist yeah and and you know solidity doesn't exist so we have to we have to negotiate between the two worlds that's seller says that's what philosophy is for and I think yeah I agree that's about as good a definition of philosophy as I can think of but you're adding a little bit right I mean one could buy into sellers this formulation while still denying that the manifest image is capturing something real right oh yeah yeah I mean seller's image leaves all the options open yeah these leaves open both the hard core scientific realists who says everything else is just illusion eliminative ISM is philosophers say or you go the other extreme and say the the the electrons and quarks and all that's just a useful fiction what's really real estate and chairs and people and ideas and love and so forth and so those are the two extremes and then there's all kinds of positions in the middle and my view which might seem to be giving up especially to philosophers is to think we have to learn how to get back and forth between these two images the manifest image and the scientific image but the way we do that is not by strict definitions that are counterexample proof the way we do it is with diplomatic and pedagogical ways of easing the passage and we just this may be an old example voices our voice is real okay what's a voice what's it made of is it a is it a bodily part is it is it biological material but you can record a voice you can recognize a voice it has causal power in the world it has right voices if you say what category of thing they are you you run out of it seems to be almost in a category by itself well all right fine we we don't need a voice throat problem to go with a mind-body problem we we we may not know how to answer the question of what voices are but we're not mystified we're not puzzled we're not baffled it's just the curious fact about the way language and and our perception of the world our pre-scientific perception of the world carbs things up and and the otolaryngologists and the and the other biologists can and the acoustic engineers can tell us all about voices without we don't ever have to settle that issue right I labeled this view in my book the big picture poetic naturalism being the motto being that there's only one world the natural world but there are many ways of talking about it and those ways all can capture some elements of reality and it's Aleta them illusions just because they're not the most fundamental thing I think that's good yeah I think I think that I think that's that's about yeah that's about right now the idea was not supposed to be anything original it's just a label you know to help us will understand because there are there are people who want to who are alive into mists right who want to say that some of these higher-level struggles wouldn't count as real yeah and and I've been a battling against that view for decades so I'm sure we'll get there but just to you know label just put things on the table so before we get there so therefore you will think of things as such as consciousness and freewill as real yeah for exactly this kind of reason yeah real but they're not what you think they are not what we think they are right okay I mean that's that's my motto X is real but it's not what you think it is good so you you wrote a paper a while ago called real pattern yeah and I want to talk about that a little bit I don't know if you even are aware that this is become an important fun topic in quantum mechanics No yeah David Wallace who is one of the interests of the Everett or many-worlds interpretation yeah I'm also a partisan of leans on your paper and your notion of real patterns very heavily in his book the emergent multiverse okay trying to explain how the classical world you know forget about tables and chairs but even you know electrons with positions and atoms and things like that are somehow not there in the most fundamental formulation of quantum mechanics but they describe the pattern and therefore they're real yep wonderful I'm delighted yeah can you give a sales pitch for what your view is there and that real patterns paper what you're trying to get across the main idea of the paper is that if we think about information we think about information theory we recognize that well to put it in in sort of everyday terms how big a file do you need to capture this particular phenomenon yeah and Michiko board which has got just 64 squares and some are black and some are white pretty easy you can give a very limited description of that pattern and and write it on the back of an envelope if you've got a color picture of confetti and you have to describe it in detail you've got a much bigger file that's why that's why some pictures on your phone or bigger have used more more megabytes than other pictures it all depends on how much complexity there is in the picture and if there's if there's no pattern in the picture at all if it's just random oddly enough that that's one that takes the most information right to record because you have to record every pixel you can't say well there's a region of deep blue over here and there's a region of red over here those are nice concise ways of taking advantage of the pattern in the phenomenon so the idea of real patterns is take any phenomena and are there patterns in it well what's a pattern a pattern is a summary of concision something that permits you to generalize so that you're better than a coin flip about what the next little bit of it is if you've got any predictive edge at all on the data set that you're looking at you got a pattern right and it's not necessarily well I put this way we should be happily surprised when there are such patterns in some sense right I mean if you but what the patterns enable you to do is to ignore certain pieces of your having so lately that nature has designed an evolution natural selection has designed organisms to be route this pattern finders to ignore almost all the information that's officially available at their surfaces and just focus in on what matters to them those are the patterns that if they can latch on to those they can feed themselves and avoid getting eaten and live long happy lives mate and all the rest so the idea of the pattern is I think a very useful and deep idea and it can be given a nice clear mathematical formulation and it's the key what what science does is fine spatter but it's also what the manifest image does right we take for granted all the patterns that we see if that we do more than that we over interpret them mmm that is if we see two things that look the same shade of green to us we think well deep deep down there or they say no they might be green for entirely different reasons they might be so called meta Murs and they only look the same color to us because we're you might say green green colorblind yeah I'd like to talk about the great courses plus a 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mindscape start learning today I did a podcast with Melanie Mitchell who's a computer science oh yeah I know about the struggle of artificial intelligence to capture common sense right and in would it be off-base to think that some of this struggle has to do with the fact that AI is even very advanced deep learning networks and so forth are not as good at finding the patterns as human intelligence is at the current state of the art ah good let's see I think that's true except for the fact that if you crank your deep learning system long enough it'll find patterns where there aren't any patterns I mean deep learning systems algorithms are very good at squeezing pattern out of apparently random data I mean that's that's how the neuroscientists they train up a categorize Iran on this fMRI data about what's going on in people's heads and they discover they can make a prediction about what person's going to do 10 seconds later yeah they can and that shows that it's a real pattern right but a lot of the patterns they find by these methods aren't real that is they don't react to things well that's the thing I'm wondering if because what the AI is what the deep learning networks are so good at is manipulating huge amounts of data that they they don't need to be as tricky as human beings are going to find the patterns that let you know prediction that with fewer that's right so of course we pay a price for that where it's not a miracle and the price we pay for that is that we have a lot of false positives we see a lot more pattern in the world and is really there we we see similarities that are only similar in that they have the same effect on us but they're otherwise as different as can be well what does the does the word real in the phrase real patterns have the same meaning as the word real when we were just talking about you know baseball's being real well that was the idea I mean I wanted to say if we have the concept of a pattern we do have some pretty good tests this whether it's real and there's to put it bluntly can you make money betting on it hmm if you can it's predictive it's real and that's a touchstone of reality that seems to hold up very well so let's say maybe patterns are the thing that's most obviously where we can make a real non real distinction right and that everything every other distinction between real and unreal real and fictional real and bogus it's somehow dependent on that so if someone so if there's a room and there's you know this huge number of atoms in the room and of course if you were infinitely smart and I gave you the location of all the atoms and their velocities you could predict anything be laplace's demon but the patterns that there's the other structures are the idea that I could give you much less information than that I could say you guy there's a baseball and it's headed toward a window yeah and then you could infer an enormous amount from that exactly therefore baseball's are real enzymes that's right years ago I concocted an example to show the power of this where we have a we have a visiting Martian who's a sort of laplacian demon and he's in somebody's house and and the phone rings and the lady picks up the phone and says yes dear you you're bringing the boss home for dinner do we get a bottle of wine on your way home see you in half an hour hangs up okay so now both the woman and the Martian predict that and within 30 minutes two people are going to walk in the door one of them holding up a glass bottle filled with an alcoholic beverage but the laplacian demon has had to trace out the whole trajectory stop signs and the lights and the pain every Photon every Photon and to the laplacian this is a miraculous prediction where did she find how did she do this without all added information well very simple she understood what was being said so let's take this point of view that patterns at the higher level that captures some some influence some predictability of the world and apply it to the difficult cases right where we have things like people and agents and another phrase that you popularized way back in the day is the intentional stance you know so one of the sets of controversial concepts which we might ask are these real or do they have some special status are things like intentions reasons why aboutness right like why these are meeting around something like that so how do those boundary contentious words fit into this picture oh they fit in beautifully and the intentional stance patterns are just one particular set of patterns and they're the set of patterns that have to do with living agents and nonliving agents that living agents have made I don't think there's any other and what's the simplest one well when I first started writing about the intentional stance I chose a thermostat and said you can consider the thermostat as a little agent that can be instructed to keep the temperature a certain way it senses the temperature and when the temperature falls below or below the set it it it has a desire to to raise the temperature retreat a thermostat as an agent surrogate you know you could have a person standing throwing logs on the fire but you can replace it with this dead simple thing and you can explain it to a child say without going into the mechanics and their hundred different ways in other words explain it in terms of its purpose oh it's rather there is exactly and if they considered a little homunculus a little a little agent and it has one desire only and that is to maintain the temperature but it has a way of sensing the temperature and responding to changes by making an appropriate move by the way this is the way that one gets taught about transistors in physics class as if there's a little man in there transistor man who decides how much current electro well it turns out that this tactic this strategy of adopting the intentional stance works throughout biology it works not just for brains and for higher organisms it works for bacteria it works for archaea it works for single-celled organisms the question is does it work for things that were smaller and simpler than that well I like to say we're robots made of robots made of robots made of robots made of robots and once you get down subcellular you get down to the the kinesins the motor proteins and tubulin and things like that and or think of a ribosomes fantastic little machines you can treat them from the intentional stance you have a job to do they have they have a job to do they know how to do it one of the things that I particularly like about motor proteins is that it now turns out basically they're sailing they're using the storm of the water molecules inside the sail and they have sort of ratchets in their feet so they're actually selectively using the energy in the random bombardment of the water molecules as a source of power and reminds me of Ricky Skaggs great line I can't control the wind but I can trim the sails and that's your basic agent and it's just a protein right right it's a little Maxwell demon I mean this is this is in last just fifteen or twenty years this has become another hot topic in physics understanding these non-equilibrium fluctuations in very very tiny things and I think that it's probably still underappreciated in my personal world how much this transitioned from the world of individual particles where it would make no sense to adopt the president stands to the to the macroscopic world is driven by entropy in the arrow of time I think it's I think I'm not a hundred percent sure of this but I think the key element to being an agent is having a history a history that makes a difference that is something can happen to it that changes it and the changes is it again it has a sort of memory yeah I think that's just interesting thing about electrons they don't pick up scars or dirt or anything yeah you can't an electron over over billion years doesn't change at all and that's a huge difference now I had we had a wonderful argument in San failure the Santa Fe Institute with David wolf hurt and his colleagues and one of our big issues whether tornadoes countless agents and trying to particular slider you automatic I can't do I was against it yeah okay because I didn't think that the tornado could actually exploit information as it's a complex system but surviving agency or intention to it does not seem to help so that was but but it was a very illuminating discussion so either if you want to look at the boundaries you want to look at things like tornadoes yeah yeah or motor proteins right and but in the biologic in the living world everything bigger than a motor protein is is a designed thing and it has purposes it's got parts that have jobs to do yeah I think participating in the arrow of time is probably a necessary precondition for being a nation in the sense you know yeah the thing about an electron is like you said they don't have scars they don't change over time really but more complicated things have different access to the past versus the future their memories of the past and they can a little bit all they can do is predict the future and that's when it becomes that's when purposes and things like that become necessary so I what you're gonna say then is ascribing intentionality or purposes to things has a reason why we there's a reason why we do that a reason we have reasons it makes sense for ribosomes so it makes sense in exactly the same way for human beings they're not in a different way yeah absolutely and I think it's interesting to think about the history of this before there was language you didn't have any agents that we're comparing that were arguing that we're explaining language brought into the world you know on to our earth something that Wilfrid Sellars called the space of reasons and this is the the space of reasons is where human persuasion and explanation and querying and challenging happens the wise and the because --is and the arrival the emergence of the space of reasons that has to have an evolutionary history too and there's only in one species so that's why i'm interested so much in the evolution of language and in evolution of human minds which are profoundly different from even chimpanzee minds or dolphin minds or whale minds take your favorite birds take your favorite species human minds are really different and they're different precisely because they are obliged to articulate reasons okay and they learn how to do this and it's an imperfect business and some are better than others but it's the fundamental basis for morality if you are responsible it's because you respond to reason you you can you can't argue a bear you know human being is supposed to be persuadable so you can train or teach a dolphin or a dog or whatever but you don't give it a reason why it's just it's pure stimulus and response right and and recently in my work I've had lots of examples of what I call free-floating rationales this is where we see a phenomenon the reasons are clear but they're not the reasons of the organisms involved so the the spotting are pranking gazelles of throwing these great extravagant leaps and they're running away from the Lions say what are they doing and it's a tremendous waste of energy makes it dangerous what they're doing is they're showing off they are signaling to the Lions don't bother trying to catch me I can throw these big expensive dangerous leaves and still outrun you go after my cousin over there you can't do that and the lines believe them and the evidence for this is pretty clear I was gonna ask you know that this is a testable and tested hypothesis yes and and sure enough the Lions discriminate and they don't go for the ones that are stunting now I've given you the rational explanation the lions are in effect wise to take this information that's being offered to them it benefits both the the speedy gazelle and the line doesn't have to work it's hard to get a supper and there's lots and lots of cases of this but don't think that the lion understands this or that the gazelle understands us this is a rationale that has been uncovered by natural selection the gazelle just don't know why it wants to make those leaps it does if you can the lion doesn't know why it doesn't care for those jumpy ones they don't have to know so they are the beneficiaries of a rational system but they don't have to understand it and that's it more or less exactly the same sense in which alphago doesn't know why puts a certain token on the board and so that's right knows what to do it couldn't tell you what and and Sutter's soda the ribosomes and every one of your cells there's a rationale for every part of the job I mean if you look at the machinery elegant elegant engineering but the ribosome doesn't know and in fact no agent figured that out in advance the winning molecular biologists the chemists they worked it out for the first time what the rationale is but the rationale is secures anything and in some sense because you know we're all among philosophers here the fact that we human beings can attach reasons to this in this sense has to do with some sort of counterfactual thought experiment if the gazelles were not leaping in that way then we know that the Lions would chase them even the gazelles don't know that right no it's the intentional stance but it's it's like an instinct I think I think we're we're and I think probably though it's it's a Alden effect I think that first first that came on the scene that is in its articulate form with human beings discovering they could they could talk about the reasons why things were happening but we're very very good at it and in fact if you want to see it as an instinct you can go back and see the early animations of simple triangles and and circles moving around on the screen but everybody looks and says oh the big circles trying to catch the little circle everybody instantly sees intentionality and purpose in these cases infants quite young infants are puzzled by violations of the apparent agency in very very simple displays but in circles and triangles isn't that kind of an edge case here because we're saying that the the ascribing of intentions to human beings or to the behavior of the gazelles is real and true whereas musically is not real and true in the case of well hang on let's see whose experiments am I thinking of I can't think of his name right now German psychologist when he when he made the film's to show to people as a sigh he deliberately set out to create these intentional patterns I see oh come he so there was an intention so there wasn't he wanted to create he wanted to show that just by and in fact he tested this by having sort of randomly moving circles and triangles and people did not attribute intentionality to those that was just noise so so so there was and in the same way natural selection has enforced the patterns that we see in the jumping gazelles and the Lions it's not just for anthem right so we we can see in tension where there's none where we're very good at that it's called paranoid yeah Thomas Pynchon has some novels about this yes yes yes I mean so you can see it emerging I guess you don't use the word emergence that much but are you happy with the word emergence is a is a word that I don't use much because it has a sordid history and philosophy where emergence comes to mean yeah next ball and so this is just use it all the time but I'm worried if I might philosophy colleagues if if you know in fact I when John Holland's wrote his book emergence I said John you've gotta put a forward in where you say what you don't mean and I mean that I completely approve of John Holland's work on emergence right because it does not mean that this is a an inexplicable pattern precisely not fact I like to illustrate emergence with John Horton Conway's life world and the amazing patterns that emerge there and say look that's the emergence and that's completely explainable and predictable there's there's there's no question mark anywhere in that system but it creates stunning emergent effects yeah and you could you can talk this higher-level vocabulary Absalom that yeah that's it that's what emergence gets you I want to pause for a moment to talk about policy genius a wonderful tool that helps you decide what kind of insurance to get whether it's life insurance home insurance auto sheron's etc you know he just started 2020 we're gonna look forward to a whole bunch of jokes forthcoming about 20/20 hindsight because of course it's easier to explain what did happen than to correctly predict what's going to happen that's what good insurance is all about it's helping ameliorate the fact that you can't predict exactly what's going to happen what you can try to do is buy the right kind of insurance and so policy genius makes this a breeze in minutes you can compare quotes from a large number of top insurance companies to find your best price you could save fifteen hundred dollars or more a year by using policy genius to compare life insurance policies and then once you apply policy genius will handle all the paperwork and red tape they take the unk stout of finding the right insurance policy so even though predicting the future is very hard don't get discouraged get life insurance it takes just a few minutes to find your best price by applying it policy genius.com policy genius it's better to get the future right with that definition of emergence on the table I mean it seems to make sense that patterns are real we're gonna you know ascribe reality to these higher level things that give us some way of capturing what's going on purposes and intentions are in that bucket like they serve a purpose like so that is really why that helps us understand what's going on absolutely so now we get to consciousness right yes maybe they'll just let you fit it in and and it emerges in this innocent sense and the idea that it's one thing that everything in the universe is either conscious or not that it's the light is on or the light is off that is I think a fundamental error but it's very widespread it's just amazing how many really deep and clever thinkers can't get it out of their heads that consciousness is all or nothing and I think no no it's emergent and in fact what that means is that the search for the simplest form of consciousness Menai hunt it's a wild goose chase because it emerges and and yes starfish are have some of the aspects of consciousness so do trees and bacteria and as you but not electrons but no not electrons and we can argue about motorboat yeah yes but but but once you write that it's nothing mystical it's something and the question where do you draw the line is a is an ill motivated question that's like where do you draw the line between night and day do you have a simple definition of what consciousness is that you prefer no it's um you didn't write a book called consciousness explains I I did and I but I think that that's in one regard that's that's the way science proceeds to the scientists done and sit around wasting hours and hours and hours trying to define time yeah energy they they get on with the theory and once they've got a really good theory it'll be obvious when time or energy is and I think that's the same with consciousness okay I'm still you both have something in mind yeah yeah I think that let's talk about human consciousness or human consciousness is much more in my view and it's it's an embattled one but I'm pretty sure of it the human consciousness is much different from the consciousness of any other species and the reason it's hard to see this is what was many reasons one is that consciousness has a moral dimension and we want to be kind to animals and and and the very idea so we say well yes dogs are conscious but not the way we are and people immediately there they get their backs up and therefore he's about ready to talk about mistreating animals and it not matter no no no because I think the properties of human consciousness that we share with dogs and mammals and birds to some degree with reptiles and fish those have moral significance so let's see if we can take moral significance as itself a graded notion mmm it's not it's interesting British law octopus vulgaris protected it's an honorary vertebrae you can't it's against the law you know to throw a live octopus on a hot grill when did this become against law in the UK their own sometime in the last 20 years but it's just it's just it's that one it's not all cephalopods it probably should be squid you wanna you know you wanna throw a squid on a live girl you can but it's you that you are allowed to boil a lobster but you are allowed you know can't do it the British law says vertebrates yeah cause it is it cut off right okay and so I think you guys are okay in general for these tricky questions right I mean people say well if you draw the line here then they argue about either side but the law has to draw yeah exactly and what we should recognize is the law draws lines that are reasonable to the vast majority of people and we can we can talk about exception so this is an interesting case the the wonderfulness of octopus the the amount of convergent evolution between octopus and say human beings has enough over the lunch and I think you know I I approve I I say yes indeed so but if we put the moral issue behind us well know before we put the moral issue behind us we should know that almost nobody wants to hold any non-human species responsible morally responsible for their behavior that's key they may be as once as moral patients but they're not moral agents a bear that kills a tourist is not committed murder just not yep because they don't have the mental wherewithal they don't have the kind of free will that we have we couldn't have offered them a reason not to do that's right we we can't expect them to appreciate the societal norms that we've set up and so forth so even so don't look in the Bears brain and a human brain for the fact that one of them is in deterministic determinism has nothing to do with the issue it has to do with in for me it has to do with self control and with degrees of freedom and and degrees of freedom is a term that I've been using more and more recently and really have seeing it come more out of engineering than out of physics and thinking a degree of freedom is an opportunity for control and you can clamp a degree of freedom and then you don't have to control it you can just lock it down in one way or another yeah how many degrees of freedom do we have millions billions of because we can think about so many things we have orders of magnitude more degrees of freedom than a bear does that means the problem with plead the same number of cells and some place it easier time yeah it means that the options that the bear has are a vanishing subset of the options that we have and learning to control our perusal of those options that's not a science that's an art and it's what we try to train our kids to grow up so that when we launch them and they are no longer in our control that they will be able to control themselves in ways that will lead them to have happy and productive lives and if they can't they're gonna get in trouble and we have to have that set of troubles looming out there for those who can't control themselves well you've used the word agent a few times and I use it all the time but we haven't described what that word means I mean it's really a relationship between agency responsibility consciousness no is there a simple definition of agent it's not a conscious well again the thing is that agents come in all sizes and shapes too and a few minutes ago we were talking about bacteria is agents viruses as agents Evans so that's not the sense of agent we want something we want a moral age we want to talk about a moral agent is not just a a locus of self-control with a with purposes and an ability to fend for itself and prolong its existence and improve its enhance its circumstances that that's a pretty good definition of an agent something that can fend off the second law of thermodynamics fend off dissolution that would other you know mountains aren't agents is erosion just yeah they can't protect themselves or move or anything but you can see why tornadoes are an interesting edge case exactly that's why that's why tornadoes are an edge case but at the most sophisticated as we climb that ladder and I think I'm a pretty good scale would be um how many how many degrees of freedom are available for control and when it gets up into the billions as it does for even young children now we're talking about potential moral agents and a moral agent is simply a human being at the per moment we don't have any other we could but we don't a human being that is mature enough and as I do with how old they are except coincidentally mature enough to control the degrees of freedom that matter when they matter and to be able to foresee and understand the outcomes of possible actions and act accordingly so that gives us a pretty good I call it a member of the moral agents good I think that that does make sense to me but but it deviated us from our task which was you were explaining the salient features of human consciousness that's right yeah so one of the curious features of the way the science is proceeded here is that many theories of consciousness only attempt half of theory we and this is the inbound path or the upward path and we get we get from the photon striking the retina and the sound waves and up and up through the nervous system up through the various cortical areas and then Toa consciousness happens that's the end of the theory wait a minute I want to ask my what I call the hard question and then what happens what makes whatever you say amounts to consciousness what makes that consciousness what does it enable what does becoming conscious of this or that enable the agent whose consciousness is to do or disable that agent from doing what effects does it have on those multiple degrees of freedom and the answer is almost anything can happen but we need to have the neuroscientific theory of how laughs can be true and how the various sequelae the various outcomes can spell themselves out I mean it's some people's theories of consciousness are a little bit like somebody who mounts a a closed-circuit TV camera on a hood of his car and and puts a receiver under the hood so the end car can see where it's going Fenny know yeah what what's going to consume that information it's Ruth Milliken talks about the consumers of representations and in theories scientific theories of consciousness there has been a systematic neglect of the consumers hmm sorry the consumers are the consumers are ultimately neural structures that respond to representations spread all over the brain in ways that give rise to the ability of people to report and reflect on and remember there's a tremendous difference between sensing something and noticing that you're sensing something and noticing that you're noticing that you're sensing some the first time I ever was familiar with your work was the collection you had with Douglas Hofstadter the mind's eye and I'm not sure that at that young age when I came across it I absorbed very much but the one idea that kept coming through was this recursive self-awareness I'm sure looking at ourselves and that has something to do with what it means that the recursion recursion and and Doug is the maestro there his book I am a strange loop is a is a really a retelling of what he did in his earlier work in kurtal a shoe box and amazing thing about Gerda Shabak is that it was a best-seller school it surprised me and a lot of people read it but a lot of people didn't understand it now and so he I read the dialogues when I was a kid yeah so I am a strange loop is in a way Doug's attempt to do what Hume did humor the treatise on human nature which he said fell dead born from the press and then he had to write the inquiry so that people would understand what he was saying Doug had to write I'm the strange loop so absolutely right recursion it's this capacity for indefinite reflection and reflection on reflection because whenever you can reflect in this in effect you create a new object to think about we well let's take a let's take a frog the frog has a fairly complicated life and it's faced at every moment with a number of opportunities and it survives if it makes good decisions at those opportunities those are degrees of freedom and it controls them as best you can frogs are agents they fend for themselves yeah but they don't know they have opportunities there's no there's no sign that they can think about their opportunities as opportunities reason this I think quite obvious fact is hidden from us is what I sometimes call the Beatrix Potter syndrome whenever we see a clever animal or animal doing something that is appropriate and reasonable sly we are find it almost irresistible to attribute to the animal the understanding that we have of what it's doing and the fact is that very often it's it's clueless it's the beneficiary of a very good system it doesn't have to understand you and it's and that's even true of a lot of human behavior one of my favorite examples is crisis theory of meaning now according to Paul Grice the late great Paul Grice when you and I converse when an utter err I may give you a speech act my utter of speech and I intend you to form a belief based on my speech at but I also intend you to recognize it's that I have that intention so we get third order I intend you to believe right that is intentionality on both sides we've got you you've got you've got reflexivity and crisis theory there was something clearly wonderful about this theory but as a theory of human everyday psychology is it's not kids time deepen wonderful conversations with their parents and their peers before they have the capacity to reflect in this way what you have to understand is that Christ wasn't wine he was uncovering the free-floating rationales of human communication he was doing the same thing that the that the ethologist are doing when they figure out what this spotting is all about yeah they he's finding the rationales this is why communication has the forms it does this is why it works and these are the conditions and various individuals can be more or less virtuosic in their sensitivity to this you wouldn't want to be constantly thinking about recognizing the intentions those persons because if you did you couldn't pay attention to what they were saying this I think you have the Frog not worrying too much about its decision making is fascinating I did a podcast with Malcolm McIver who is a neuroscientist and mechanical engineer Northwestern and he is trying to explore the idea that one of the major transitions that led to consciousness was when fish climbed up on land hmm the idea being that a fish swimming around at a few meters per second is underwater and can only see a few meters in front of it all of its evolutionary pressures are to make decisions very rapidly once you climb up on land and you can see for kilometres there's a new space of possibilities that opens up namely imagine different possible things to do and contemplate which one would be best and so he says that climbing up onto land enabled the evolution of imagination which was usual step along the road to consciousness oh that's nice I'm not sure I believe it but but it's a nice variation on a theme that I'm very fond of which and that's Andrew Parker's idea about the Cambrian explosion and the Parker hypothesizes that the shallow ocean became transparent in a way it hadn't been before and this suddenly permitted distil perception permitted eyesight and that the book is called in the blink of an eye and he argues that the arms race of predator and prey locomotion camouflage armor this all was generated by a growing transparency and it's not the only theory out there but it's one that I think there's got to be an element of truth in it and I've been arguing that what we're facing right now is the second great transparency and that's the electronic transparency and everybody's not worried and so they should be about privacy and yeah we can we can we can now see farther and we can see into things we could never see into before but we can also be watched and our capacities for better for worse and so we're now all to invert the image we're all now living in a fishbowl ok but wait a minute I wanted you you used a phrase that was you did not use the phrase the hard problem but you use the phrase the hard question good but there was there's at least a family resemblance between the distinction you're drawing between this sort of bottom-up theories of consciousness and table game yeah and Chalmers is distinction between the easy problem in the heart yeah and and I it's not coincidental so I ask the hard question before David raised the hard problem okay which I've been throwing pails of cold water on for decades now and I think that the hard problem Chalmers problem is precisely the fix you get yourself into if you stop and don't try to answer the hard question if you don't ask the hard questions then what happens then you're left with this gobsmacking jaw-dropping mind deadening mystery for the audience does it just very briefly let's tell them what the hard question is that you have in the hard problem developers like synthesize David introduces the hard problem by contrasting it with the easy problems the easy problem says how does your brain discriminate things how does it move your your tongue in language how does how does it do all the cognition that you engage in how does it recognize things and have memory and all the rest those are the easy problem so what's the hard problem he by the way recognizes they're not actually easy they're not they're not yes but but the hard problem is the problem with why is it like anything at all to be mean what and and what's red what's my experience of red or pain let's and these are so-called qualia right and philosophy it's a philosopher's term comes from the Latin it just means quality property really but qualia are a term of art in philosophy I think it's a bad one it's a if it's an artifact of bad theorizing which is led to you know hundreds of careers of misguided thinking about mind and consciousness and alas a lot of scientists have been seduced by it so that they think that philosophers have this idea of quality and quality that's where the that's where they're going really gets tough it's explaining qualia those some are claim for properties that's the hard problem how do we explain the qualia and Chalmers has been arguing for this for decades and recently he's written a paper on the meta problem and matter problem is why do we have a harmful and to which part of my responses what do you mean we dogs don't have a hard problem that doesn't mean they're not conscious it means they're not reflexively ruminative lee theoretically conscious of air consciousness that's only for us and that's the the hard problem arises as an artifact of the fact that we're reflective and in our reflections we focus on what is otherwise a stunning embarrassment when we look inside to see what's going on mainly we can't tell now you well let's think about think about seeing for a moment yeah I I look out the window and I see I see a birdhouse stake between two trees how do I know I see it well you know if I close my eyes that's all right so I now know light has to bounce off and you know the photons have to come into my eye and blah blah blah retina ganglion cells lateral nucleus but that's nothing to which I have direct access that's something I had to learn from books that's third person knowledge of the process my first person knowledge is very limited I tell you there's a birdhouse out there how do you know I can see it what do you mean well my eyes are open and there it is well how do you know that you're seeing a burner well does that look like a birdhouse but how do you know it looks like a birdhouse what's going on inside I don't know it just looks like I work I can describe it in more detail if you want no nobody is freaked out apparently by the fact that neuroscientists can come in and figure out all these amazing details about what happens between the eyeball and the lips let's say but mainly between the eyeball and your experience well notice that that's only half the story the other half of the story is and what happens between experience and your ability to talk about it and answer all these questions well it's just as much neuroscience that has to go into that is yeah it has to say one of the first right now if you stop with experience then you simply it's like declaring victory halfway through the mouth now you've got the whole rest of a theory you don't have a theory of consciousness until you've explained what happens next I like to point out that if you have a theory of consciousness that still has a witness in it mm-hmm you've only got half a theory see you want to turn experience into something going on in the brain in their eyes all the reactions a good theory of consciousness when we finally have one it will be like live menses mill will Walker I would be like a deserted factory there's nobody home there's no agents it's all just machinery that a theory of consciousness simply has to have that form and people who resist that like Chalmers they've got a hard problem in fact they've got a systematically impossible problem and I at least I'm saying I'll show you how to get out of the hard problem namely by asking and then answering the hard question and then what happens and my way of doing that now I've hit on this with the philosopher Keith Frankish have you ever piloted a drone a little you know so you've had the remote unit in your hands and you're making the drone go where it's going you're looking at the little screen and and using the joysticks and on all right think of that that remote controller for the drill and that's the Cartesian theater outside it's a control room for the job so now supposedly we're going to emancipate a drum in other words all the control decisions that you doing while you're piloting the drum we're going to upload those put them on board the drum it's already got a lot of self control already on board but we want to we want to get every last bit of decision-making and discrimination and noticing and so forth and control we want to move it all into the job to do that we will be asking and answering the hard question because notice by the way the first thing you do once you start doing that and she I throw away the screen who needs the screen right you don't need the screen you've already got all the spatial information in just the form you wanted for offloading namely you've got it into into bitstream center that can be computed you've got you've got just the medium you need now that may not be the brains medium but at least you've got it into the medium that you're gonna have to get it into for controlling the drone in various ways and in our thought experiment very extended thought experiment unpublish we're just working on it we gradually see we point out the importance of instead of just rewiring it when it comes back from each mission or reprogramming it we want to be able to inform it suggest it things to it talk with it we want it we want it to be in the space of reasons you have it reasons yeah and so we want to install language but we don't want to install language the old-fashioned girl fashioned AI way by you know designing it and simply putting it in we want it to learn in negotiation with us we want it to be able to have its own way of making points and as we think about the task of helping a drone create a language that it can use to communicate with us in and we'd like it to be as hosts I think we can get it and to teach the drone English but we want to teach that we want to drawn to learn English not just be wired up for English at birth this will give us models of answers to all the hard questions and might not be the correct answer for our Braves they might not be but at least but at least exactly and I think that's the way a eye has always been it gives you an existence proof yeah this may not be the way we do it but it's a way of doing this job and the idea that it's magic or you know beyond human can we know it's not beyond human can because we found a way of doing it right so it's very hard to even ask the hard questions first of all we have no personal private knowledge about how we do it suppose I ask you to imagine three cows standing in the field and the one on the left is brown and the other two are mottled you can do it I do it yep Wow I don't know yeah yeah you heard my request and you were able to act on it yeah now an interesting thing about just a simple case like that another example I want you to imagine putting a plastic bucket over your head and climbing hand-over-hand up a rope okay okay now I deliberately chose items that would not be alien to say a chimpanzee in the zoo can the chimpanzee stimulate its own brain can it could it we can't ask it yeah can it ask itself can it does it have the the layer of control over its own cognitive processes so that as it sat there not otherwise occupied it could manipulate those familiar items of its experience good question I don't know the answer but I suspect the answer is no and I suspect the answer is no because you you can't do that wordlessly until you can do it interactively with language without language I don't think you have the the systems and your cognitive system for self stimulation for self probing that we have we are in we are virtuoso self probers of our own brain it's interesting I want to pause just to say you've been going on for a little over an hour now I'm very happy to keep going I have a lot to ask about but I don't want to impose on you too much all right having a great time good excellent it's very interesting you say exactly that because I once asked Steven Pinker what is the role that language plays in consciousness and he says none whatsoever he said it's a completely different thing yeah yes I know I know Steve's few well and I think Steve was tremendously smart much smarter than some of his critics take him to be but I think he's wrong about this got it okay I didn't know what like all the experts had it no no no I know I'm I'm pretty much out on a limb here in claiming it as I did in consciousness explained that the human language doesn't just let us talk about what we're conscious of human language allows us to be conscious of things that we otherwise wouldn't be conscious of things that bears and dogs and fish and birds are not conscious of the way we are right and I think once you appreciate or if you appreciate if you believe that recursion and self representation things like that are crucial then obviously language is a hugely useful tool indeed I I think that language is here this is a strange inversion of say Tom sees you Chomsky has the I think bizarre view that recursion is a sort of Shazam gift of natural selection this giant leap that once you have recursion and everything else falls into place and what it is the the basis for for for language and there's a sense in which I think he's almost right but I think it's the other way around I think it's language that mean doesn't make any heavy use of recursion in its controls gradually creates in us the capacity to create recursive levels in our own brains and it goes back to the thing I was giving you some examples of a few minutes ago like I can ask you okay now I want you to imagine a blue triangle and you can do that and not perfectly but Daniel door has a book called the instruction of imagination which is a wonderfully um chomskyan look at language and I think he's got a lot of this right what language permits is the development of a sort of a place to stand you know our Khomeini's and is give me a face to stand and I'll move the world with a lever language gives us places to stand in our own cognition which permit us then to self stimulate to probe to explore our own brains and that's what creates recursion and that's what creates the creatures of recursion which have things like qualia right it creates a whole menagerie of properties that are not real properties they are properties that are the effects well no I it's hard to say this they are subjective in the sense that the appreciation of the property is what brings it into existence okay now I think I probably agree with you too much about all these issues but let me for purposes of podcast conversation try to channel the skeptics you know they place a huge amount of emphasis on the distinction between a sort of an external third-person view in the internal first perspective Chalmers go so far as to imagine the possibility of a P zombie that could act exactly like you do but have no inner conscious experience it always seems like a bit of a conversation stopper to me that idea that you need to speak the language of first-person subjective experience even to have this conversation because we're all different I mean it you know it yeah this is on the one hand I think the idea of a philosophical zombie is just an embarrassment somebody one philosopher once said to me Dan if I understand you right if I want to talk about philosophical zombies I should probably put a paper bag over my head I said you know well I do think that they're possible is that decibel I think I think that I think that there's a way of I think really showing that this is whatever it was trying to do it doesn't do a real job and it creates just distracting monsters that should be ignored but then let's look at the job it was trying to do and you had a pretty good version of it just now when you said it looks as if we need we can't just stay with the third person point of view and we need the first person point of view so let's let's agree that what's really amazing is that you have your point of view and I have my point of view and we know that and we can spend all day comparing our points of view and that's a phenomena that we want to explain mm-hmm notice by the way let's imagine some Martian scientists or you know alien utterly alien intelligences I think a lot of good science though and they come to our planet and let's suppose that they if we can imagine this and maybe we can't but let's start with the idea we can imagine they have no idea of consciousness or quality at all Martian zombies Martian zombies they're Martian zombies but there not just Martian by being a Martian zone philosophical zombies it our Earthlings know all about consciousness because their because they have to to get by on the world so well but these are these are aliens and they come in they they study us are they going to discover the first-person point of view of course they are how by reading our novels by hearing how we talk to each other our we have filled the world with public third-person accessible representations of our own first-person subjectivity stream of consciousness novels and this is all available this is data hard data to the Marcin zombies they can go and come through our libraries and watch our television shows and just overhear conversations and they'll have a very bill they'll soon learn if they learn you know the rules of baseball and how the stock market works they're also going to learn that we all have a first-person point of view I did try unsuccessfully to convince Chalmers that the philosophical zombie argument was a great argument for physicalism because if you really believe that the zombie would act exactly as the same collection of atoms that had consciousness would you could ask it what it was experiencing and it would say oh I'm experiencing pain or Brad or whenever but by hypothesis it's not so it's lying and therefore you don't know if you're experiencing those things either because that's exactly what you would do but he he didn't buy that well I don't know what I've tried the same argument on I mean I think in the end for David and for say Galen Strawson another philosopher they're just so sure that their intuition about their first-person point of view is right that they can't they can't even hypothetically or for the sake of argument they can't abandon that intuition and you know I I appreciate that inability or it's more of a reluctance than an inability I feel the same way when physicists start asking me to set aside some of my intuitions yeah about space and time it's over and I say here yeah but something in me does I don't know if if I try to abandon that intuition I don't know what to trust yeah well it calls up the reliability the usefulness of introspection generally right I mean introspection is where we get a lot of these ideas of our experiences should we be generally skeptical of introspection we learn something from it we learn something from it but yes we should be we should be skeptical first of all let's start small and build up I love to point out to my students and others all the ways in which their consciousness isn't the way they think it is for instance it seems that our color vision goes right way out to the to the edge of our vision it doesn't it seems that we have high resolution vision out to the side we don't I love to point out that the lots of things that are surprising I can demonstrate to them whoo-hoo well you didn't did so forget about the so-called incorrigibility of first-person acquaintance it's that's just that's just a mistake that doesn't mean that we're not reliable informants to ourselves and others about many features but forget about this Cartesian idea that on the inside we are the masters of what's going so you're saying that even when we experience the outside world there's a lot of stitching and jiggery-pokery that comes together to give us this image we have so why shouldn't the same thing be true about our introspection well no I think that yes I think we have very clear cases where people miss introspect if you like and and that raises the possibility which I think every theorist is sort of honorbound to take seriously that their deepest intuitions their most cherished intuitions about what their first-person experiences might be mistaken wellnow humanely well I can see where dennis is going here he's going to the idea that we're all some beasts and but that we have these strong intuitions that we're not and in a sense I think that's right that in a sense in a sense that is when we have a proper theory of consciousness we look around inside we're not gonna find any selves in there we're not gonna find any witnesses in there so as far as we can tell when we have that theory it will be a theory which does not distinguish zombies from conscious beings now is that a feeling or that's why it should be I think that's the way it should be so in a sense the distinction between a zombie a philosophical zombie and a conscious being no abandon that but then but then we have plenty of room to distinguish people's being conscious of this or that and being unconscious of this being not just you know in a coma but yeah not cognizant to various things that are going on around them things happening beneath their notice things that are subliminal things that are unconsciously being that we can have that wealth of cognitive science and psychology which has been building up for more than a hundred years is available and that's all untouched by this the one thing you have to give up is this idea that you know that you're not a philosophical zombie no that's that's just an artifact of bad theorizing so just to be super clear to get the lingo right you are not claiming that consciousness is an illusion it's real in the same sense that the patterns that we talked about are real I mean our these concepts of experiences play a useful role in how we explain well what we go through well I'm glad you asked that yeah or or because because let's get it right because I like the term illusion okay and I think it's a generational thing I think that the younger generation has no trouble with illusion as a positive term as in the user illusion consciousness is a user illusion in fact the manifest image is a user illusion it's nature's way of simplifying the world force in the same way that software engineers have brilliantly created these metaphorical icons and sound effects and think of how badly you would misunderstand the computer if you tried to figure out how computers work by simply extrapolating from the user illusion yeah take literally the files on your desktop that's right the the the user illusion is a brilliantly designed the user illusion of a laptop or a smartphone it is brilliantly designed to exploit your perceptual and locomotory and hand dexterity powers and and your audition to use hearing to permit you to perform things you want to do ignorant of the details of how it's going on same thing is true in your brain the one difference is that there's no screen because there's no eyeball in there so if you want to know who is the who is the victim of the you illusion know who's the beneficiary as a user illusion but now I'm a little confused because we agreed that elements of manifest image or an often oftentimes real well okay so consciousness is both real and evolution yeah yeah yeah and and that's Frick is a better word than illusion maybe trick is better word than illusion well yeah for years I've been saying consciousness is a bag of tricks it's a whole lot of different tricks it's not one big galumphing metaphysical trick it's a whole lot of engineering tricks and those engineering tricks create an agent that has instant reliable dexterous fluent use of a huge array of representations the agent one doesn't need to know how those representations are created or in this case even where they are or whether they have the properties they seem to have here's a way of thinking about it think of stage magic often thing I like to use examples from stage magic there's a sort of honor code among magicians you're supposed to you're supposed to show something you show not tell you haven't done a trick if you simply bribed the or we can we can we can test our intuitions here what would you think of a magician that used mass hypnosis and simply could hypnotize the whole audience and then you know have flaming elephants dancing on their toes and and no display at all nothing on the stage the magician is all along but everybody is just going oh and I would say well that's uh sort of the sheet yeah that doesn't really count well why not so instead of hypnosis let's do it scientifically but let's let's say that you've got a magician who says I now ask people to wear special headset to my magic shows and this is a headset which simply beams I keep it dead simple just beams directly to occipital cortex v1 the the sort of first major way station for for all visual information and it can simply create hallucinations there this is him bypassing the eyeballs photons eyeballs no longer part but everything else you know from the SA from could be from the optic nerve maybe what he's doing is he simply captured the optic nerve this device everything from the optic nerve in is as it would be if there was a flaming elephant standing on this trunk would that be magic but but at least we now have people that were darn tootin sure that they had seen an elephant standing on its trunk on the stage question would they have koala no wait we've thrown away the screen you know yeah there's no more room they think they have qualia they think they've seen the elephant but they haven't seen they had they think they've had the experience of seeing Bo that's right well they have had the experience of seeing an elephant it's a bogus experience yeah because there was no elephant out there but I mean if we take the whole phenomenon from from the light hitting whatever's on the stage up through the eyes and through to final to the conviction centre to what people will swear on a Bible they saw at every point we could in principle intervene and lay out the the food for the consumers at the next layer level and it might be very very light and if it was very very late you might get some very anomalous things like this is weird I could for a moment there I could have sworn that there was an elephant on this stage I mean it just sort of hit me but um no details or anything I mean we do have experiences like that short oh yeah so there's a sense in which consciousness is real is also a sense in which it's evolution ya know and and in particular there's the theorist solution okay what's that the theorist solution is what the theorist may have in the dog doesn't the dog doesn't think it has qualia right the theorist does that's just yeah that's just false that's just that's a that's an artifact bad theory so would we take the same angle on freewill that there's an aspect of it that's real aspect of which is an illusion yes that's the philosophers favorite answer yes the traditional idea freewill where somehow our bodies or our brains are shielded from causation that's crap yeah that's it's just gotta be false we're not lower than torso we're not lost and we're not there's no miracles happening like that so if that's what you think freewill has to be if you think freewill is incompatible with say determinism then there's no free will yeah then freewill isn't real it's an illusion but but but I would prefer to say free wills perfectly real as justice and what you think it is yeah which you did predict ahead of time that you were gonna say so good so but it is so in the sense in which it's real has something to do with the fact that it plays this explanatory role in the manifestation not just an explanatory role it plays a huge role in people's lives yeah as I was saying before since our society has the concept of free will I signed the mortgage papers for this house I was asked if I was giving my signing this of my own free will [Laughter] the nobody agent have any other notaries talking to notary was reading this awful piece of paper and I was only too happy to answer but some people don't have free will some people are incapacity yet some people aren't in control so there's a very real difference and it makes a huge difference in life but I like to put it this way consider back to our drone suppose we throw away the controller and just let it be its own self controlled autonomous thing pretty dangerous yeah well you think that stagers think how dangerous we are empirically we're pretty darn dangerous yes empirically we have we have millions of degrees of freedom and we're not in anybody's control barrel or we can try to control pew parents I like the idea that parents eventually have to launch their children and once they've launched them they're no longer guided missiles they're there now autonomous yeah and how do we dare let people do this we dare let people do this because we trust the people will have done their best to turn their offspring into self controlled responsible agents and that's what free will is and there's no metaphysical bright line but there are lots of legal bright lines and they are negotiable and invasive and there's a sort of arms race going on where as we discover one loophole or another we either exempt or not various people from responsibility or responsibilities well it's the it's legal responsible moral questions that that make this very vivid and absolutely and I know that you said things I want to take this opportunity to clarify as much as we can you you've sort of hinted at the idea that even though we sophisticated scientists and philosophers know that there are laws of physics and we all obey them we should let the people have their free will in some sense because it makes them act more morally that may or may not be true for me personally that fact has nothing to do with why I think that it's sensible to talk about freewill by my reason for talking about freewill is just the answer you just gave which is that it does play this role in helping you explain Meadows on well I think I don't think that the idea that we have freewill is a sort of holy myth that we should preserve but you know for the good of hoi polloi no no we all need it I think it's extremely paternalistic patronizing to say well I don't need you losing a free will but every day folks they need it no I think that's first of all I think that's just obnoxious right we all go through life gauging our opportunities making choices taking them as seriously as we do which is sometimes not seriously enough and some trying to persuade and sometimes it's too serious I'm trying to persuade others it's no secret that this pattern of activity including mental activity including Hamlet like thinking and mulling and musing and worrying it's no secret why it exists it's it's what makes civilization possible and I for one would rather live in a civilized world but so that's a very crucial distinction has the danger of slipping by there it's not that we need to tell people they have free will to make them civilized is that we have to appreciate that we have free will so that we create civilization yes absolutely right yes that's very good but that does mean that the free will skeptics including some they're really they're really engaging in a sort of an anti-social behavior it's a sort of it's a sort of cognitive and ilysm I try to shock them all that I have a little thought experiment about that it's possible if you have a obsessive compulsive disorder to have a little device installed in your in your brain that that will help control it and that's the fact so for now we're gonna have little science fiction so this chap has obsessive-compulsive disorder and he goes to his local neurosurgeon and asks for the installation and she installs it and then after he wakes up after the operation she says now you're free to go oh and by the way yeah we're in radio control here we monitor you 24/7 and if you ever are about to commit some terrible act we intervene of course have a nice life I think that's a black viewer episode yeah you have watched like you know I know I think that if you if you have any inclination whatsoever that especially big the first few seasons of black mirror are made for you you should watch all of them okay they're all thought experiments about how technology is are breaking into our lives okay so I wonder if like Mary as the sequel that I have so this fellow goes off and reassured that he set the safety in that he becomes you know a little bit slovenly in his decision-making and he makes some bad decisions pretty soon he ends up in court and the judge confronts him and asks him well no I don't have any free will you know I'm in control just obey the laws of physics and and the neurosurgeons you know they're there I'm their puppet and the judge calls and neurosurgeon says did you did you tell this man that when you put this device in henceforth it he would be a sort of electronically controlled puppet and she said yeah he says it's not true he says no we're just messing with his brain now she did something evil right well if she in her white coat her scientists white coat is doing something evil for that guy what about you folks out there in science land who are going around telling everybody that free will is an illusion that they don't that they're all really just puppets why isn't that the same sort of antisocial behavior that this neurosurgeon this imaginary neurosurgeon is engaged in I like that okay very good I will remember that not have the black mirror episode ended but still a good one good I think to wrap up let's deviate a little bit from you've had a long career with many greatest hits I think we fit we've hit some of them here but what are the there's a worldview that you're sketching out that is very coherent and fits together in in various ways laws of physics Darwinian evolution intentional stances real patterns what are the implications of that as we've been we've begun to touch on this but for morality for ethics for how we should live our lives right is there a meta ethical conclusion that comes from this or even ethical conclusions well yes I think there is and part of it is yet another aspect to my work we haven't mentioned is it means we don't need religion religion was maybe a good scaffold on which to build civilization maybe it the myths of religion kept people in line and and cooperating because they were worried about big Rolla wat watching them and maybe I'm quite content with hypotheses not provable but they might be true that say that that civilization depended on religion I don't think it does that anymore I think we we can grow up and simply abandon the myths but when we do that we want to be sure that we don't destroy or discard some of the valuable things that came along with that the one that that most concerns me is one that you can get at with the line of Robert Frost's home is where when you have to go there they have to take you in now in that sense there's a lot of people that are homeless and don't trust the state to take care of them one of the things that religions have done over the decades over the millennia is taken in and provided a sense of meaning and love for people who otherwise would not have that and those of us who were fortunate enough to live exciting lives should recognize that this is a social service to call it that is to underplay its significance by orders of magnitude this is a life healing life protecting life improving feature of the world that we don't want to throw away the question is how do you save it without also saving the sort of brute irrationality or a rationality the valorisation of unreason and superstition I think it's possible to domesticate religions a little further they've been domesticated a lot but I think we can go a little farther and keep ceremony keep community keep music and art and celebration intact and leave out the myths but that's a tall order but I see progress all around and I do share the concern that a lot of people have that that while the the fastest growing group in the world is the nuns the Nano and yes those that have no religion at all if they have no community if they have no allegiance if they have no if there's nothing that they think of that's bigger than a more important than they are to guide their lives then we're in trouble it just shouldn't be listened yeah so I think morality is itself a is a human it's a social construct and not moral realist yeah and again it's it's really just isn't what you think it is it's not given by God it isn't deducible from the set of axioms it's a in a certain sense political and rational prehab creation of ideally an informed community of people so I mean it we exercise our free will to create yeah we we can imagine as a sort of grounding myth the philosophers like to do this sort of thing you all come everybody come you're all welcome you got to obey some rules some rules of discourse and whatever your current beliefs are about what's right and what's wrong share them with us if there's something that your group thinks is really really wrong and the rest of us haven't seen that yeah that might be eating meat or it might be well any of the things that religions have to have boos about don't just play the faith chart and say well I'm a nexus to Nexus I think this is a sin no your task is to convince the rest of us that you're right give us reasons give us reasons if you can persuade us that there's a case to be made we'll listen but if you play the faith card if you say this is beyond reason this is this is simply Who I am I can do no other basically what you're doing when you say that is you're saying I'm disqualified from this this discussion I'm disabled my my irrationality prevents me from playing the role that's available to me here and I think if we imagine morality as whatever emerges from that in the ideal circumstance that's the kind of human construction it is well I think I've done a terrible job at playing the devil's advocate here cuz I agree with you too much but Dan Dennett thanks very much for being on the podcast was very education well thank you Shawn you asked all the right questions [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Sean Carroll

Views: 93,832

Keywords: philosophy, consciousness, science, atheism, evolution

Id: 8yZw4wxvnVQ

Length: 121min 37sec (7297 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 06 2020