According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.
For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.
Do you take offense at my post title?
Posts
59 comments:
Crashed. Bricked.
Dan Dennett was a little too dogmatic for my tastes but did a lot of original thinking in the area of human consciousness. RIP. And atheist that I am, your post title doesn’t offend me at all ;-)
No offense, but "powered off" sounds inappropriately intentional, where there presumably is none. He simply perished, or disapated. I'm not sure if there is an appropriate, logical way to describe it from his point of view.
'Room temperature' would work for a title as well...
The title is actually funny. Fits. Imagine if that is all life and death really are. Not soul. No heavenly kingdom of the lord. No real connection of love to our ancestors that have moved on.
That's the part that does make sense. We do feel connected to those we've loved and lost. Those memories don't feed us,or help us breath. But they do something for us.
It's why "scientifically" I think there is more. So I'm sticking with Jesus, Marlboros, and Miller Lite.
I was not allowed to read the article. No, not offended. If he believed that his brain was just a "computer," well, he did him.
He is now powered off and thrown into the trash heap.
"Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said."
I take offense that the internal contradiction within the quotation above wasn't detected by Dennett's editor.
I have one of his books, which I have not finished. His misconceptions about evolution suggested reading to the end was wasting good jacking-off time.
I don't. I read some of his stuff, and I don't think he would be offended either.
No offense, and I think that Mr. Dennett would approve.
The refutation is from Coleridge, quoting Schelling: matter has no inwards. You remove one surface only to meet with another.
The modern version is "Why is it like anything to be me?"
It sounds like he substituted his own religious views as opposed to those of others. The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe. Much of it’s complexity and behavior is still a mystery to brain surgeons, and I’ll take their word over a philosopher’s dogma any day.
Perfect depiction of a nihilist
No, and neither would Dennett. It’s how he viewed the human person— just a complex biological machine, so complex as to give rise to a false sense of agency and will. Like everything else, a body is subject to the laws of thermodynamics and eventually powers off. So, no big deal when it does. To those who thought his view undercut the basis for crime-and-punishment, he replied that the common acceptance of agency and will was good enough for government work even if it was ultimately just a fairytale. At bottom, he thought everything was written in the stars and has been since the Big Bang. All just a story about matter/energy and how it rolls.
A bit grim and not a convincing picture of the human person, at least for me. But he certainly left his mark.
Religion is a behavioral protocol or model. Free will is measured in degrees. Evolutionary creation is an article of faith. Natural selection is the "invisible" hand (Her Choice) complemented by the Pro-Choice religion (her Choice). Science is a philosophy and practice in the near-domain.
No, not offended.
He’s powered off yet he’s recyclable in that earthly way.
"Do you take offense at my post title?"
Why should I? It wasn't your decision to write it.
As I understand it.
Actually, kind of cold. But you got penance points for the elephant sympathy above so you're good.
boy will he be surprised, that is the epitome of sophism,
The thing is, even if it's all chemicals people still have to resort to religion, because without the supervision of a higher authority we turn into stinkers pretty quickly.
Nope. It was a good joke, says this person who admires a lot of what Dennett did.
Blue screened.
Very little offends me.
The late atheist and mathematician Paul Erdos described the dead as having left.
I imagine Dennett awakening after his death and finding himself standing before the Pearly Gates, and St. Peter asks him, Why are you here?
And Dennett thinks, Uh oh!
I believe that God has a sense of humor (He made humans, after all!), so I think Dennett's OK. Speaking personally, I REALLY HOPE God has a sense of humor.
According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,”
Didn't he understand that this is a self-refuting statement? Or was that just a product of the algorithm?
"Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said."
I take offense that the internal contradiction within the quotation above wasn't detected by Dennett's editor.
This made me laugh, and then marvel at the operation of Quaestor's computer. Nice with, sir or madam!
I'm a huge fan of Dennett, and I'm not in the least offended. He had a good sense of humor, and probably wouldn't be either.
First, Levinas (Existents and Existence) on weariness and indolence, mentioning the decision to get out of bed:
Weariness by all its being effects [a] refusal to exist; it is only in the refusal to exist. It is, we might say, the very way the phenomenon of the refusal to exist can come about, just as in the order of experience, vision alone is the apprehension of light and hearing alone the perception of sound. Indolence is neither idleness nor rest. Like fatigue, it involves an attitude with regard to action. But it is not a simple indecisiveness, a being overwhelmed by the choices to be made. It does not arise from a lack of deliberation, for it is not deliberating over the end. It occurs after the intention has been formulated. As in William James' famous example, it lies between the clear duty of getting up and the putting of the foot down off the bed. But it also is not a material impossibility of performing an action that is beyond our strength, or the consciousness of that impossibility, since it can be overcome, and the certainty of this possibility constitutes the bad conscience of indolence. It is indeed a sort of aversion to effort b but in what sense? Is it the content of unpleasantness or the pain involved in the effort that it foresees and dreads? But indolence is not a fear of pain, nor even a species of that fear. The generic term pain does not express what is specific to the pain associated with effort, and consequently does not enable us to grasp the sense of indolence.
Indolence is essentially tied up with the beginning of an action: the stirring, the getting up. "Oh, don't make them get up That's disaster...," says Rimbaud of "the seated" who breathe essential and desperate indolence. Indolence concerns beginning, as though existence were not there right off, but preexisted the beginning in an inhibition. There is more here than a span of duration, flowing imperceptibility between two moments. Or perhaps the inhibition involved in indolence is also the revealing of the beginning which each instant effects in being an instant.
Indolence is an impossibility of beginning, or, if one prefers, it is the effecting of beginning.
NEXT, Ryle on the same getting out of bed (Concept of Mind)
The same objections forbid the identification with volitions of such other familiar processes as that of resolving or making up our minds to do something and that of nerving or bracing ourselves to do something. I may resolve to get out of bed or go to the dentist, and I may, clenching my fists and gritting my teeth, brace myself to do so, but I may still backslide. If the action is not done, then, according to the doctrine, the volition to do it is also unexecuted. Again, the operations of resolving and nerving ourselves are themselves members of the class of creditable or discredit- able actions, so they cannot constitute the peculiar ingredient which, according to the doctrine, is the common condition of any performance being creditable or discreditable.
Continued on getting out of bed, finale: volition is not simple.
Mow on the other hand it has been said that when a man, say, gets out of bed in the morning, all that happens may be this: he deliberates, "Is it time to get up?" he tries to make up his mind, and then suddenly he finds himself getting up. Describing it this way emphasizes the absence of an act of volition. Now first: where do we find the prototype of such a thing, i.e., how did we come by the idea of such an act? I think the prototype of the act of volition is the experience of muscular effort. - Now there is something in the above description which tempts us to contradict it; we say: "We don't just "find," observe ourselves getting up, as though we were observing someone else! It isn't like, say, watching certain reflex actions. If, e.g., I place myself sideways close to a wall, my wall-side arm hanging down outstretched, the back of the hand touching the wall, and if now keeping the arm rigid I press the back of the hand hard against the wall, doing it all by means of the deltoid muscle, if then I quickly step away from the wall, letting my arm hang down loosely, my arm without any action of mine, of its own accord begins to rise; this is the sort of case in which it would be proper to say, "I find my arm rising."
Now here again it is clear that there are many striking difference between the case of observing my arm rising in this experiment or watching someone else getting out of bed and the case of finding myself getting up. There is, e.g., in this case a perfect absence of what one might call surprise, also i don't look at my own movement as I might look at someone turning about in bed, e.g., saying to myself, "Is he going to get up?" There is a difference between the voluntary act of getting out of bed and the involuntary rising of my arm. But there is not one common difference between so-called voluntary acts and involuntary ones, viz., the presence of absence of one element, the "act of volition."
The description of getting up in which a man says "I just find myself getting up" suggests that he wishes to say that he observes himself getting up. And we may certainly say that an attitude of observing is absent in this case. But the observing attitude again is not one continuous state of mind or otherwise which we are in the whole time while, as we should say, we are observing. Rather, there is a family of groups of activities and experiences which we call observing attitudes. Roughly speaking one might say there are observation-elements of curiosity, observant expectation, surprise, and there are, we should say, facial expressions and gesture of curiosity, of observant expectation, and of surprise; and if you agree that there is more than one facial expression characteristic for each of these cases, and that there can eb these cases without any characteristic facial expression, you will admit that to each of these three words a family of phenomena corresponds.
Wittgenstein, The Brown Book, 11.
Finally here's William James, the man who started it all
We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, "I must get up, this is ignominious," etc.; but still the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of bursting the resistance and passing over into the decisive act. Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day's life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, "Hollo! I must lie here no longer" - an idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the cold during the period of struggle, which paralyzed our activity then and kept our idea of rising in the condition of wish and not of will. The moment these inhibitory ideas ceased, the original idea exerted its effects.
Do I take offense? No.
@ Jamie,
Quaestor answers to sir or hey, you!
His computer thanks you.
In a philosophy lecture long ago, the speaker was explaining that experience was all measurable excitement of neurons, for example pain, and that's all it is.
I raised my hand and asked: so do I have two ways to know that I'm in pain?
He rejected the question.
I thought the blog post title was simply brilliant. I got a very nice chuckle out of it.
Tcrosse in the first comment also made me laugh out loud.
No. I am not a snowflake, easily offended.
My bladder makes me get up in the morning.
Perfect title. A+
A bit callous, but not really rising to the level of offense.
I’ve read several of his books, and found them entertaining and thought-provoking. Seems he led a good life. RIP.
No offense taken. But what a bleak point of view. Why bother if we’re just ants doing what we’ve been programmed to do.
"My bladder makes me get up in the morning."
Ah, if 'twere only the morning…
'Indolent' is one of my favorite words, ever since my oncologist used it to describe my cancer.
His naturalism is simple and appealing in its own way, yet there is also reason to hope we are or can become more than this.
Dude wasted his life as a professor.
But that’s how it is.
You cab choose a ready guild in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose Freewill
Freewill by Rush
Take offense at the title? No.
That rarity, an actual intellectual.
As Quaestor has pointed out, Dennett revealed that he didn't really believe his own schtick about free will and determinism, with a neat little performative contradiction. (Or else he was pre-destined to spout contradictions :) )
A bit more on the subject :
1. If you're really a determinist, then there's no point in ... anything. Least of all criticising other people for thinking they have free will, or supporting political causes you disapprove of. I recall a conversation with a friend a while back who was explaining that it was unreasonable to favor harsh punishments for offenders because they had no free will. I responded that it must then be just as unreasonable to criticise people for favoring harsh punishment because they had no free will either. His mouth dropped open like a guppy.
2. There's this thing called expected value. Broadly you multiply the probability of X happening by the outcome if X happens, and likewise for the other probabilities for Y,Z etc, add up the totals and decide what to do. Thus we tend to look before crossing the road. The cost of doing so is very small. But the consequences of not doing so, in the unlikely event that a truck happens to be passing when you launch yourself across the road is very large, and negative. Hence you look before you cross, even though 99% of the time you'd be fine without looking.
And the same goes for free will and determinism. If determinism is correct then it doesn't matter what you choose to do, because your choice is pre-determined. But however confident you are that free will doesn't exist, there's still some probability that it does exist, and so choosing what you think will have the best outcome is worth doing. You maximise your expected value by humoring even a small probability that you have free will.
Even if you think that free will has a zero probability, then acting as if it does exist cannot make you worse off. So it's irrational not to humor the illusion of free will. (Though if there is no free will, then we cannot fairly criticise you for failing to humor the illusion, because you were destined not to :) )
In short determinism is a rancid and tedious bore that can - even on its own terms - safely be ignored. Even if it is correct.
Narr said...
"The late atheist and mathematician Paul Erdos described the dead as having left."
My favorite is, "He forgot to wake up.".
I first came across Dan Dennett in the mid 1990s with his book " Darwins Dangerous Idea". It is a masterpiece. He is genuinely a genius.
Interesting NYT article. I shall certainly read his book (From Bacteria to Bach...). Perhaps it will enlighten me about why he thinks the brain is not non-fungible)
The brain has quite a number of different neurotransmitters operating, and even neurons using the same neurotransmitter (e.g. 5-HT or glutamate) have many different receptor systems to mediate their effects. Doesn't this imply that these systems are NOT exchangeable (i.e. non-fungible)? They must do different things, otherwise why didn't one neurotransmitter / neuronal type suffice (albeit more and more complexly connected)? Anyway, the brain is 'wet' and self-modulating at a material level, while computer systems are 'dry' and fixed (apart from their software). Biology employs quantum connectedness, do computers? So comparing one with another is superficially interesting but ultimately limited. I just don't buy into AI superintelligence.
I probably need a bigger brain to understand his thinking, but I'll start with his book.
Lee Moore - so, Pascal's Wager? [shrug] I'm good with that.
Also, what would be the opposite of "analysis paralysis"? Perpetual indolence? Is that what we end up doing, or being, if we eliminate volition from the question of why we do a thing?
I recall an old Dilbert in which our hero is struggling with whether to get out of bed. Eventually he muses that a toasted bagel sounds really good. Minutes later, standing at the toaster, he asks himself whether toasted bagels might be the purpose of the universe.
Quaestor, let me correct my earlier typo: good WORK, sir!
"Do you take offense at my post title?"
Prof. Dennett wouldn't take offense, so I don't take offense on his behalf. If he is totally wrong about everything and reading this from heaven, he'd probably have a hearty and grateful laugh.
n.n:
Evolutionary creation is an article of faith.
As "evolutionary creation" is an oxymoron, it would have to be.
God pullled the plug. Another atheist bore. Just repeating the same crap that's been said a 1000 times. Mencken was pushing it in the 20s, and Russell was pushing it back in the 40s and the ones that followed just copy their arguments.
I'm always amazed that outspoken atheists always think they're smart and everyone is stupid. Somehow they've unlocked the secret, there is no God (or Gods) and only they and a select few know it. And here's the proof. Only when you look at the proof, its not proof, its just assertions. Most of them can't understand religious feelings. They're brain isn't wired for it. Its like someone who cant enjoy music, or doesn't have a sense of humor, going "Why is everyone Laughing?" "Why is everyone wasting their time on that noise"?
At bottom, he [Daniel C. Dennett] thought everything was written in the stars and has been since the Big Bang. All just a story about matter/energy and how it rolls.
If so, then despite Dennett's seeming nod toward science, he's really only pushing a kind of fake science-fandom or “scientism”—because real science (physics) these days knows that the world is inherently (not completely, but partly) nondeterministic. {1/2}
What do we mean by that? That the future of the universe does not causally depend solely on any of its previous states—so that, even if an earlier state were somehow completely-known (an impossibility in itself, but supposing), one could not proceed through applying the known equations of motion to that earlier situation in order to successfully predict any future consequence (which is basically what “deterministic” means—i.e., one could do that).
Thus, there is no certain “fate” in the universe! It also implies that “free will” may be possible.
But how do we (science) know that? I'm no physics expert myself, but I'm aware of a couple of lines of evidence/ argumentation in this regard that (at least to my mind) are quite convincing—not to speak of immensely intriguing. Let's consider these in turn.
One manner in which the behavior of our universe is clearly nondeterministic lies in the realm of subatomic particles and radioactive decay. An illustrative example of this can be seen in the case of the free neutron: a subatomic particle (actually composed of 3 quarks) which when flying “free” of an atomic nucleus (making it unstable) can be observed to decay—with a “halflife” of about 15 minutes (~1% of day)—into a proton, electron, and a neutrino (note: the last is a very different kind of particle from the neutron).
Even though the halflife period for the free-neutron is around 15 minutes, the way that “halflifes” work in radioactive decay is that there's no predicting when actual decay in a particular (pun intended!) case is to occur; rather, decay might possibly happen at a wildly different moment from any time even roughly close to average—such as, perhaps, less than a microsecond (unlikely but possible) hence—or alternatively maybe not for a billion years (ditto).
But—regardless of when it happens—when such a flying, free-neutron does decay, what causes it? Nothing, modern physics tells us! But… if there were to be such a cause, how would it work? Well, each neutron might contain what are termed “inner variables”—an inner mechanism ticking along like clockwork (with an initial time setting set by, e.g., a pseudo-random-number generator, but averaging 15 minutes), until eventually an alarm goes off—then the neutron decays.
So, what's wrong with that picture? Why doesn't—can't—the foregoing happen that way? For at least two compelling reasons (that I know of):
1. Bell's theorem
2. Fermi-Dirac statistics
Let's consider these in turn:
1. Bell's theorem—developed by physicist John Stewart Bell in 1964—explores the possibility that there are complex “inner variables” hidden within minuscule, seemingly-simple subatomic particles, whose activity (as laid out above) deterministically cause observed radioactive decay. Bell discovered in his “theorem” or “inequality” that inner variables which could determine such results would necessarily possess certain characteristics which could be experimentally verified. Such experiments have since—repeatedly—been performed; inner variables fail the tests—ergo, inner variables don't exist.
As as result, we know that particles like neutrons and electrons really are fundamentally simple—despite neutrons really consisting of 3 (simple) quarks—so that their nature and behavior can be completely described by a handful of “quantum numbers” (charge, spin, parity, along with a few others).
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2. Fermi-Dirac statistics—developed independently by physicists Enrico Fermi and Paul Dirac in 1926—describe how fermion particles (protons, neutrons, electrons, etc.), which all obey the Fermi Exclusion Rule, behave statistically—and just how they behave is intensely interesting indeed!
In our large-scale macroscopic world, when we throw, say, a pair of coins, one can get 1 of 3 possible outcomes, which I'll call: H-H (for heads-heads), T-T (for tails-tails), and H-T (for heads-tails). Therefore, the chance of getting each one would be 1 out of 3 (or 1/3), right?
No, because the H-T (heads-tails) case is actually dual, with 2 distinguishable cases in our macroscopic world—which is to say, 1 physical coin (call it α) can be heads (i.e., αH), while the other physical coin (viz. β) can be tails (βT), giving us αH-βT—or, alternatively, the reverse: where α is tails (αT) while β is heads (βH), giving us in the second case αT-βH. These 2 distinct and separate cases must both be accounted for in (conventional, macroscopic-world) statistics.
As a result, there are 4 equal-probability cases in our conventional, macroscopic world—which we depict as: αH-βH, αT-βT, αH-βT, and αT-βH. Each case carries an equal 1 out of 4 (or 25%) probability; to show this more particularly—1/4 (25%) αH-βH, 1/4 (25%) αT-βT, 1/4 (25%) αH-βT, and 1/4 (25%) αT-βH. These cases can be consolidated somewhat into: 1/4 (25%) H-H, 1/4 (25%) T-T, and 1/2 (50%) T-H (of either type).
The foregoing is observably how the world works in our large-scale, macroscopic domain when one tosses coins (and not just coins)—and our common-sense fueled human intuition understands this.
But when one performs (the equivalent of) the same thing in the microscopic, subatomic (i.e., quantum) realm—by “tossing” subatomic particles—the results are strikingly, tellingly different. The probabilities observed there, in that minuscule corner of reality are: 1/3 (33%) H-H, 1/3 (33%) T-T, and 1/3 (33%) H-T.
What does this mean? The inescapable conclusion is that the 2 (ostensibly different) heads-tails cases αH-βT and αT-βH cannot be distinguished in the subatomic realm; and therefore they (αH-βT and αT-βH) are not really different (and thus cannot be discriminated between—by nature, much less by humans) at all. One must therefore conclude, as a result of the operation of Fermi-Dirac statistics, that all (fermion-class) subatomic particles of any given type (such as neutrons—and unlike, e.g., coins or any other macroscopic objects) must be absolutely identical.
Thus, even if there could be complex hidden variables operating within subatomic particles, whose progression causes their eventual decay (i.e., even if that weren't ruled out by Bell's theorem), then from the foregoing one would conclude that all such (identical) subatomic particles must contain identical inner variables, which therefore must keep the same time (barring relativistic time distortion). As a result, if such were true (once again, ruled out by Bell's theorem, but if…), all subatomic particles of a given type ought to decay (almost) simultaneously—but they don't.
Such decays don't occur nearly simultaneously, far from it—ergo, inner variables (whether they exist or not—but via Bell's theorem, they don't) cannot pre-determine radioactive decay outcomes.
Well, then, what does determine radioactive decay timing for (e.g.) a free neutron? Nothing! It's not determined! That's the point.
Note that these kinds of radioactive decays can and do happen all the time; the released (nuclear!) energy from any of them can cause a “butterfly-effect” cascade of causation which can perceptively affect our macroscopic world; it could even mutate living cells, causing cancer potentially in you, or perhaps a mutation showing up only in future generations.
Ergo, the world is not (wholly) deterministic—and, moreover, there is no “fate.”
IMHO, we don't have any choice but to act as if free will exists.
Michael McNeil — Kevin Mitchell (professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity, Dublin) recently published a book on the same thesis as your comment. It’s titled Free Agents, and argues that over the eons of evolution agency and will have developed— ultimately as a combination of the centrality of the processing of information combined with the development of self consciousness . Worth a read.
why do computers come with restart and snooze/hibernate buttons on the power switchboard?
If you are going to decide the question of free will, you must appoint yourself as an observer outside of the universe considered. No truth can come from a person who has no free will.
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