The deepest dive into philosopher Daniel Dennett’s mind.
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 – The Soul
03:18 – Most Important Philosophical Question
12:06 – Do Qualia Exist?
30:28 – Uploading Consciousness
39:55 – Thinking Differently
56:20 – Pragmatism
1:01:06 – Robert Sapolsky
1:12:57 – Philosophers and Scientists
1:29:30 – Patterns and Emergence
1:36:46 – Roger Penrose
1:42:39 – Sailing Boats
1:45:40 – Fictionalism
1:51:12 – Coming Up With Concepts
1:59:55 – Douglas Hofstadter
2:05:30 – AI Alignment Problem
2:11:31 – Q&A
NOTE: The perspectives expressed by guests don’t necessarily mirror my own. There’s a versicolored arrangement of people on TOE, each harboring distinct viewpoints, as part of my endeavor to understand the perspectives that exist.
THANK YOU: To Mike Duffey for your insight, help, and recommendations on this channel.
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LINKS MENTIONED:
– I’ve Been Thinking (Daniel Dennett): https://amzn.to/3RVffvf
– The Ego of the Mind (Daniel Dennett & Douglas Hofstadter): https://scholar.google.ca/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=3FWe5OQAAAAJ&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=3FWe5OQAAAAJ:HE397vMXCloC
– The Mind’s I ((Daniel Dennett & Douglas Hofstadter): https://amzn.to/3RK4JGa
– Determined (Robert Sapolsky): https://amzn.to/3RWMm0P
– Podcast w/ Robert Sapolsky on TOE: https://youtu.be/z0IqA1hYKY8
– Elbow Room (Daniel Dennett): https://amzn.to/3GT8u77
– The Extended Phenotype (Richard Dawkins): https://amzn.to/3GVyMW3
– The Emperor’s New Mind (Roger Penrose): https://amzn.to/3RVmiEb
– Podcast w/ Carlo Rovelli on TOE: https://youtu.be/r_fUPbBNmBw
– Engineering, Daydreaming, and Control (Daniel Dennett): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360998429_Engineering_Daydreaming_and_Control
– Am I a Fictionalist? (Daniel Dennett): https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003091073-23/fictionalist-daniel-dennett
– The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins): https://amzn.to/3RX38hu
– Consciousness Explained (Daniel Dennett): https://amzn.to/41BHPVO
– Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (Daniel Dennett): https://amzn.to/3S6lQmZ
– Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Daniel Dennett): https://amzn.to/3vi0VV2
– Freedom Evolves (Daniel Dennett): https://amzn.to/3THPIqL
– Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Daniel Dennett): https://amzn.to/3TDef0g
– From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (Daniel Dennett): https://amzn.to/41yKJL3
– Podcast w/ David Sloan Wilson on TOE: https://youtu.be/o3fG96gvgLU
– Podcast w/ Donald Hoffman on TOE: https://youtu.be/CmieNQH7Q4w
– Podcast w/ Donald Hoffman and Joscha Bach on TOE: https://youtu.be/bhSlYfVtgww
– Podcast w/ Donald Hoffman and Philip Goff on TOE: https://youtu.be/MmaIBxkqcT4
– Podcast w/ Donald Hoffman and John Vervaeke on TOE: https://youtu.be/EwTpdCVsttI
– Podcast w/ Anand Vaidya on TOE: https://youtu.be/0BPLcuHnS_A
Daniel Dennett, your recent paper with Douglas Hofstadter, The Ego of the Mind, starts by asking the questions, what is mind, who am I, and where’s the soul? So I ask you, who are you, and where is your soul?
Well, I’m an agent. I’m Daniel C. Dennett, a living human being. I’m not a counterfeit human being. I’m a genuine article. And the soul is a wonderful abstraction, which is a great way of thinking about a particular human body, a conscious, awake human body. It’s not a magical pearl of
Mind stuff or dualist stuff. It’s the organization. It’s the collaborative organization of literally billions of little microagents, the neurons and astrocytes and other cells inside my brain and body. There’s a nice line that my late friend Giulio Jarrello, Italian philosopher of
Science and journalist, used as a headline when he interviewed me way back in the 90s. The headline was, yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots. And that’s it. I have a soul that’s made of lots of tiny robots, made of robots, made of robots.
Motor proteins, ribosomes, and all the other millions and millions and millions of well-designed devices that are in every cell. Can mere matter feel? I can feel. I am a person. Nothing metaphysical or magical about that. Anymore, to use an analogy that my thesis supervisor used decades and decades ago,
It was Gilbert Ryle. He gave the example of somebody walking around Oxford and seeing all the colleges and saying, yeah, but where’s the university? As if the university were another building like the colleges. Well, the university is the organized collection. And it’s not just
The items enumerated, the buildings and the libraries and the grass and the trees and the people, but it’s, of course, the constitution of the university, the rules, the history, all of that makes the university. And there’s no other magic ingredient.
No ghost in that machine, and there’s no ghost in my machine either. It’s just, it’s machinery all the way down. So I’ve heard you mention that the hard problem is a distraction. If that’s the case, what do you feel like is the most pressing philosophical question of our time, and why?
Well, there seems to be a lot of interest these days in free will, which I’ve worked a lot on. Well, we’re going to talk about that. That’s good. Well, it’s perhaps, it’s, some days I think it is the most important philosophical issue that is attracting attention, and it’s attracting attention because some people,
Including some eminent scientists, are simply wrong about it, and their mistakes, their philosophical mistakes, are having a very negative effect, I think, on the world. It actually matters. People can talk themselves out of their free will, or they can be talked out of their free will by somebody authoritative,
Authoritative and persuasive, and that’s a real problem. We don’t want people to think of themselves as not responsible for what they do. We want them to accept the fact that they’re reliable, competent, and that they take responsibility for what they do. And we have people like Robert Sapolsky, but he’s not alone.
My good friend, Jerry Coyne, and another good friend, Sam Harris, they all say there’s no such thing as free will. And I have gone to some lengths to say why they’re wrong, and I’ve got some even further things to say on that score. I think it’s very important that we get this right.
So, when someone like Sam Harris convinces himself that he has no free will, does that then make it the case? That is to say, does free will depend on the belief in free will? So, he can actually wish his free will away and be correct about that.
Well, he could get all lethargic and just sit there like a tree in the forest and not do anything. I don’t think he’s able to persuade himself of that. But I don’t want him even to try, because I think it’s important that Sam Harris take responsibility for what he does.
And if he thinks he isn’t responsible for what he does, then he’s a dangerous person. What if he says that he’s just the observer observing his actions, and his body is responsible, but not him as the observer, and that’s the one that he identifies with? That’s the ghost in the machine.
That’s another aspect of the big mistake. It’s Cartesian gravity, as I call it. It’s the idea that when people think about the mind, they end up backing up into their own brains and thinking that who they are is this inner witness in the Cartesian theater. And then they decide they’re just the witness.
They’re not the agent. They’re not the decider. And if they actually convince themselves of that, I think they would collapse in a heap. But they don’t. But they say they do, and they work hard. In fact, one of the interesting things about Robert Sapolsky’s
Recent book, Determined, is that he’s honest enough to admit he can’t convince himself. He doesn’t have free will. And I say, write and don’t try, because we need you to stay among the people that take responsibility for what they do. Are people both the witness and the decider? Or just one or more?
Well, they’re both witness and decider. They are… What’s an agent? An agent is a… Let’s put it in really simple terms. Let’s put it in really simple terms. It’s a material structure that has been designed to utilize information it
Captures from the world around it and uses that to inform the decisions it makes. So, it has beliefs and desires. Its beliefs are based on what it hears and sees and smells and feels. Its desires depend on what it thinks is important. And it can adjust its desires. It can re-evaluate its desires.
Like a person agent. There are lots of agents that are much simpler than that. A bacterium can’t reconsider its objectives. A tree can’t perceive very much. It can perceive some and it takes action. It makes decisions on the basis of what it perceives.
If it perceives that the light that’s falling on it is reflecting more green, it means that the trees around it are growing up around it and it’ll shift some of its growth into vertical growth because it wants to… It doesn’t want to get overshaded, overshadowed by the other trees.
Now, it doesn’t know that it has that belief or that desire, but it’s a very good agent. It’s better than the competition. That’s why it exists. It’s been designed to be a good agent. When you speak to people like Sam Harris or Robert Sapolsky, who, just for those who are
Unfamiliar, take the view that there is no free will, they both take the view that there is no libertarian free will and that there is no compatibilist view of free will or that the compatibilist view is incoherent.
So, when you speak to those people, do you get the sense that when you use the word belief and deciding an agent, that it means something different to them? So, for instance, Sam may say that, well, belief and desire are just feelings. Just like you mentioned, we have the feeling of touching something.
They’re no different than other… Here’s a loaded word for you, qualia. But you understand what’s meant. In other words, do you feel like they are using terms not in the same way that you’re using, or is the disagreement somewhere else?
Well, I think many of the disbelievers in free will are still enthralled with really Cartesian ideas about what a mind is, what beliefs and desires are, what qualia are, and we’ve learned a lot since Descartes, and mainly because of Darwin.
Darwin doesn’t just overthrow the idea of God as the intelligent designer, also overthrows the idea of an individual agent, a human mind, like Descartes, as just a race cogitans, an immaterial thinking thing that is somehow situated in causal contact with the material body.
That’s a hopeless idea, and even people who recognize that dualism is a hopeless idea find it hard to remove the Cartesian thinking from their perspective. And that’s perhaps the most persistent philosophical error that I have encountered, and that’s why I’ve been battling it now for over 50 years.
How would Sam respond if you were to say, hey Sam, that’s dualistic thinking? Because it’s my understanding Sam is a monist, or non-dualist. Well, I think he thinks he is, but I don’t think he’s consistent. I think that he betrays his Cartesian hankerings in various ways, and I’ve tried hard to
To persuade him to see it otherwise, but so far without success. He’s very smart, he’s also very self-confident, and I think he’s overconfident on this issue. Do qualia exist? No. Qualia is a philosopher’s term of art. It’s a technical term in philosophy, but nobody knows.
No philosopher can tell you what a qualia is. That’s the singular qualia. I have a demo that I often run when I’m talking about consciousness, and it’s a change blindness experiment, and in it people see two variants of a single picture. There are photographs, and one of them has been doctored,
And first one flashes, then the other flashes, and there’s a brief flash of black in between them. Now, what happens is when they’re looking, I said, do any of you see a change in these two pictures? I deliberately chose one of the most hard to see ones, and it flashes a dozen times,
20 times. How many of you saw the difference? None of them did. Then I point to the difference. Easy enough, I take out my laser pointer and point on the screen, and they can see that there it is.
I won’t say what it is because I may want to use it again, don’t want to give it away, and they see a bright, large change of color on the screen, and it’s not red-green, it’s not color blindness, it goes from very light to very dark, and they don’t see it.
Okay, now everybody has that experience, so we’re all on the same page so far, and then I ask them, while you were looking at the picture, trying to find the change, were your qualia changing? And half the audience says yes, and half says no.
Well, they’ve all had the same experience, so they can’t mean the same thing by qualia. If a qualia has to be noticed to exist, to exist, well, that’s one line. Or if qualia can exist unnoticed, that’s another line. Which is it?
And the fact is, if qualia can exist unnoticed, then sure, sure, they’re qualia. Well, every time when you’re asleep, say, and you roll into an uncomfortable position, and then you roll out of that position because you had a pain qualia, and you’re entirely
Unaware of it, but there was a pain qualia then, if you take the route that qualia can exist unnoticed. On the other hand, if you don’t think that qualia can exist unnoticed, then you’re basically equating qualia with… your higher order beliefs about whether you’ve got them, whether you’ve noticed them.
And we can get rid of the qualia and just do the noticing. This is important now, and it’s important because of the red herring of do LLMs, does chat GPT and other large language models, are they conscious or not? And if people choose that, think of that as, well, do they have qualia?
You’re off on a philosophical wild goose chase. Forget about qualia. They’re not relevant, they’re just not, the answer to that host of questions is simply beside the point. LLMs exist, they’re dangerous, they’re powerful. And the question of whether or not they’re zombies, is a philosophical artifact that’s not only,
It’s not that it’s an unimportant artifact, it’s a very important and deleterious artifact. It’s a big mistake. So for the LLMs, we’ll get back to that later in the conversation, because I’m extremely interested to hear your thoughts on whether they are conscious, even if that question’s a red herring.
But regarding the qualia in the earlier experiment about the contrasting pictures, why can’t it just be that, yes, they indeed have qualia, they were just unable to compare their qualia or they are mistaken because of faulty memory? Well, you can take that line, but then qualia now become unimportant.
It’s only important if they make a difference. And if they don’t make a difference, then positing them is a sort of fool’s errand. Please explain further. Well, let’s look at the zombie concept. Philosopher zombies, not horror movie zombies. Philosopher zombies, you and I might be zombies.
No matter how animated, no matter how intelligent we are, no matter how much we scream when you kick us in the shins, philosopher zombies are not conscious, but they otherwise are behaviorally and cognitively identical to conscious human beings. That’s the sort of classical definition of a philosophical zombie.
And I’ve been telling people this is, it’s amazing to me that such a blatant mistake isn’t easier for many people to notice. I can remember one philosopher once saying, Dan, are you saying that if I believe in the concept of a philosophical zombie,
I should wear a paper bag over my head out of shame? And I said, yeah, yeah, I think it’s that bad an idea. Uh, uh. To be clear about the idea, the idea is that what if there were two Daniel Dennett’s, both acted exactly the same, they both would react.
Exactly, they act exactly the same way. They’re just as manipulable by threats of violence. They’re just as likely to be extorted if a loved one of theirs is threatened. They’re just as likely to need glasses or to say that they need glasses. Yeah, they’re just as creative, just as intelligent,
But there’s nobody home. Meaning that there’s no experiencer there. That’s what they say, yeah. Okay. There’s only a pseudo-experiencer. However, it turns out a pseudo-experiencer can do everything that an experiencer can do. For instance, where a conscious person on this ridiculous form of argument, whereas a genuinely conscious person
Has a stream of consciousness, a zombie has a stream of unconsciousness. But the stream of unconsciousness does all the work that the stream of consciousness does in the conscious person. After all, nobody can tell whether they’re a zombie or not. I mean, it strikes me as the most patently self-contradictory
And incoherent idea in philosophy. And it does amaze me and even embarrass me that philosophers take it seriously. Some philosophers. Yeah. So there’s a game called Grand Theft Auto. And well, any modern video game with great graphics, you shoot people and they react, but we assume that there’s no person there.
That’s just some graphics. Even though functionally we can say, if we were to put on VR and be convinced in the moment, we would say that there’s no person there. There’s no experiencer there. So what would be the difference in that case then? That’s because the agents in Grand Theft Auto
Are orders of magnitude simpler and less reactive than you and I. If they were actually as capable of reflective thought and sober as you and I are, then they’d be conscious. That is to say, they’d be, we’d say there’s a person there. By the way, there’s a story in the book
That Doug Hofstadter and I edited, The Mind’s Eye, by Stanislaw Lem, which examines this artificial world where there are all these perfect imitations. And I guess it’s Truro, one of the characters, who says, you know, the only difference is size. Why isn’t their pain as real as your pain?
If they really are functionally identical, then that’s pain. That’s suffering. Don’t think that just because these are artificial that there isn’t real suffering. So what if someone says, okay, functionally identical to who? So let’s say to you, you put on your glasses, you play Grand Theft Auto for about 20 minutes,
And you’re convinced during those 20 minutes, but you realize that that’s a small snippet. Alternatively, you interact with someone at the doctor’s office for five minutes, and it’s just a window of five minutes, but then you would ascribe consciousness to that person. You know, that’s just rule of induction,
But that’s an important point that you’re making. That’s why I’ve been arguing that large language models are in very serious social danger, because it’s now possible to make counterfeit people that are very convincing. And the fact is, they’re no way people. They’re counterfeit people. You can make a counterfeit $20 bill
That even experts couldn’t tell from the real thing, but it would be counterfeit, and it would be, that’s a crime, and it should be a crime. That’s social vandalism. And we similarly have respect for people, and we pay attention to them, and they hold our attention, and they convince us of things,
And we fall in love with them. And so forth. And if we’re falling in love with a counterfeit, or being convinced of something by a counterfeit, especially if it’s a counterfeit of some famous person that actually exists, and who has views other than the views that are being presented,
Then we have just been attacked by a technological weapon of amazing power, and we have got to make sure that we prevent the proliferation of those. There was the mention of the rule of induction. So what’s tricky about that is, one, something I’d like to ask you about later,
Which I can put a pin in right now, it’s about the problem of induction, and I just want to know your proposed solution to that. But also number two, which is that we’re alike in innumerable ways, but we’re also dissimilar in innumerable ways.
So how is it that we’re able to extract and say, okay, just because when I’m conscious, I do this and this and this, but also I don’t do X, Y, and Z. How do we extrapolate to then say, okay, but that person’s sufficiently like me, when there’s so many other aspects to them?
Well, that’s the perspective that I have argued for as the intentional states. You and I, I don’t know about your politics, Corey, you know, whether you’re religious, but I could list things that you believe and I believe that would run into the billions. We share just common knowledge,
Common knowledge that we never even bother expressing because we take it for granted that you know and that I know, and that I know that you know and you know that I know. For instance, I dare say it’s no news to you that zebras can’t fly. Okay, all right.
Have you ever been told that zebras can’t fly? Probably not. Could you date the moment where you learned that zebras can’t fly? If you could, it doesn’t make much sense. The fact is, there’s such a thing as mutual knowledge and it’s what makes civilization possible. And we don’t want to tamper with that.
It’s very important. And the trouble with LLMs is it makes possible the creation of counterfeit people that don’t have the mutual knowledge that we think they do. And it’s almost impossible not to attribute it to them. So we’re very easily seduced into taking systems that are not people and treating them as people
With all of the outcomes that real people obtain and deserve to obtain, because they’re making promises to us, they’re informing us about things that matter. If I’m told by my doctor that I have a certain condition and I should take some treatment, I want to be able to trust that the doctor
Has my best interests at heart. I can look into that. Some doctors don’t, but there’s ways of checking up on people that you’re suspicious about. But with LLMs, if you get told by an LLM that you have a condition, I’ll guarantee it all that the LLM wants to help you.
Right now, many people in the field of AI say, don’t worry, that’s the alignment problem and we can solve it. Show us, please, how you’re going to solve the alignment problem without making them vulnerable, autonomous agents like us. One of the significant differences between artificial agents like LLMs, counterfeit people, and us,
Is that counterfeit people are essentially immortal. So these counterfeit people, would that be analogized to the philosophical zombie? No, no, no. A philosophical zombie has all, all, all, the powers, talents, proclivities, disposition, beliefs, and desires of a conscious person. Counterfeit people, LLMs don’t. What if David Chalmers amended his statement and said,
Okay, for all intents and purposes, they’re 99.9% the same, the philosophical zombie. Then could you say that there could be a philosophical zombie or a counterfeit person without an experiencer? No. The percentages is not the issue. The issue is the competences, the powers, the skills, and also the fragilities.
I co-taught a course on autonomy and agency at Tufts with the AI researcher, Matthias Scheutz, and I gave the students as a problem to give me the specs. They didn’t have to make one. They just had to give me the specs of an artificial agent that could make a promise,
That they would make a promise to, not as the surrogate for the agent’s owner or creator, but on its own. Sorry, you’re making a promise to the computer or the computer’s making a promise to you? Well, you’re both doing it. You’re signing a contract. Okay.
And you start, if you start thinking about this, and you remember, you’re not signing a contract with the artificial agent’s owner, maker, any more than if I sign a contract with you, I’m making a contract with your parents or your teachers. I’m making it with you. You are a responsible agent.
You have free will. You are mortal. You can’t be reproduced down to the last atom easily the way an LLM can. That’s what makes them essentially immortal. You can’t kill them. Well, you can destroy all the copies, but we have reached the point now where we can artificially make agents
That then can reproduce independently of us. Would that depend on if the AI identifies with the software alone or with the software plus the hardware? So for instance, with us, if we could so-called mind upload, there is still a debate of whether that uploaded version is you or the cloned version is you.
Yeah, that’s a good question. Yeah, in principle, I could be uploaded. That is possible in principle. Philosophers like to talk about what’s possible in principle. Sometimes that’s misleading because it’s not possible in fact. It’s utterly impractical. Hey, it’s probably possible in principle to build a stainless steel ladder to the moon.
No it isn’t. Or it’s not an interesting fact. But in principle, yes, I could survive indefinitely. I could be immortal by a complete software copy of myself. And then that could be reproduced. I could have many super clones. This is all possible in principle. For LLMs, it’s possible in fact right now.
And that’s a big difference. Because if these things start evolving, the ones that evolve will be the ones that are fitter than the ones that don’t. That’s the truism. And the ones that are fitter are the ones that can manipulate people into making copies of them. Just like viruses.
In fact, you might say LLMs are the world’s largest artificial viruses. And once they get loose, we’re going to have a pandemic. Let’s stop that pandemic before it starts. One of the things we have to do is convince people that it’s not cool, it’s not fun, it’s
Not a tour de force to make counterfeit people. It’s like counterfeit money. It’s a crime. Don’t do it. If you want to make something that’s gee whiz convincing, do what Banksy did, the British conceptual artist. He made a lot of counterfeit British pounds.
But in one regard, they were obviously counterfeit, and he said they were counterfeit. So as long as we identified them as counterfeit, fine. As long as there’s their watermark, and as long as every hardware maker in the world who makes anything that can attach to the internet, so that’s phones, tablets, computers,
Who knows what else is coming on down the line, they all have to have software in them that will detect watermarks that are the high tech, more powerful version of the Euro constellation, which is what’s used to detect counterfeits in multicolored currency. Would this watermarking solve the alignment problem?
And if not, then is the alignment problem… It would mitigate it. It would mitigate it, because first of all, people wouldn’t… I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’ve ever looked closely at a $20 bill that I’ve received in change. I just don’t bother. Why? Because I trust the system.
Not because there aren’t would-be counterfeiters out there, but because it’s hard work to counterfeit, and if you get caught, the penalties are really severe. So let’s have the same rule. Let’s take a page out of the currency cops, in effect, and let’s make it both expensive
And extremely expensive in terms of penalties for anybody who makes and tries to fool the counterfeit detection machinery that’s in all the hardware. Let technology help us. Rather than train people… One alternative, let’s train everybody to tell real people from counterfeit people. Let’s train them in being super-duper Turing test judges. Right.
Do we want to do that? No. Because then we will have turned everybody into paranoid skeptics. Every time you call up your dearest friend, your dearest friend will run a few quick gotcha checks on you to make sure they are you and not a counterfeit version. We don’t want that.
We want to go on trusting each other the way we trust each other when we’re in person. When we’re interacting virtually as we are right now, I trust you, you trust me, that’s great. We want to keep it that way.
And that would be great if there were software on my laptop that would be flashing and screaming right now saying, this is not Curt, this is fake Curt, this is counterfeit Curt. It would be the end of the discussion right now.
So this to me sounds inextricably tied to the philosophical zombie, because if you can’t tell, functionally speaking, if you can’t tell, then do you not ascribe consciousness to it? Like, to me it sounds the same. If I can’t tell, it may be because a very good counterfeit has been made.
But if it’s not, as it were, a perfect counterfeit person, isn’t counterfeit, it’s just an artificial person, it’s just as real as you and me. It’s possible in principle to make, I’ve already acknowledged that, yes, in principle I could
Be downloaded into an astronomically huge file and go on living and could be immortal, just like any software. And I would have feelings and thoughts and such, but I’d be immortal, which would make a huge difference. Imagine how different the world would be if we could be backed up every Friday night. Completely.
And then reconstructed Monday morning. You could go out and throw yourself headlong off the Golden Gate Bridge to your death, and when you woke up on Monday, having been the Friday backup would have been reinstated, you wouldn’t have any personal memory of your going onto the bridge, but you could watch the videotape.
You could watch yourself falling to your death, and you’d think, oh, that’s pretty cool, how will I kill myself next week? That would be a very different world. The people in that world would have very different attitudes, principles than we do.
Our fragility, our vulnerability, our mortality are very important features of us as moral agents. Another way to think about this, can Superman make a promise that it would be reasonable to accept? The good Superman. Yeah, but what if he’s not good? Yeah, but bad Superman has an upside-down S, so it’s easy.
And of course, a bad Superman would claim to be a good Superman. So, you know, kryptonite was invented for a reason. It couldn’t tell stories about Superman. Superman’s invulnerability would have made life stories incoherent. The creators of Superman needed to give Superman some vulnerability so that we can trust him.
You can’t trust an invulnerable agent because an invulnerable agent that wants to convince you that it’s vulnerable will do a very good job with it, presumably. Vulnerability is a very important part of our predicament, and it’s a good part. We’ve evolved civilization so that we, in spite of our vulnerability and fragility
And our sometimes bad attitudes and bad motives, can live in peace and security most of the time. We can be protected from life in the state of nature, where it is indeed nasty, brutish and short. This is great because a question I wanted to ask you is, how do you do philosophy that’s
Different than other philosophers? How is it that you think differently? And something that I’m noticing is that many of your statements come in the form of, if that were the case, then society may destabilize. Or so-and-so is important, we want to reserve that, and then somehow the philosophy is generated
To be consistent with that. But that’s just how I see it. Now, is that the case? Do you see that as working backward or opposite to first principles? Well, as I’ve said for decades, my alternative career as a sculptor has made a big difference.
Because unlike, say, an artist who’s drawing, say, a draftsman, when you’re a sculptor you have the luxury of nibbling away until you get it right. You can adjust and adjust and adjust, and you can’t do that with many art forms.
You’ve got to get it right the first time, and if you don’t, throw it out and start again. But as a philosopher, I like to take a problem and sort of go around the edges, nibbling
Away, look at it from all sides, try to look at it from all sides, and avoid the heartbreak of premature definition. Philosophers often say, define your term, and we’re now off to the races for 10 years while people argue about definitions. I say, no, don’t define your terms.
Get in there and let’s look at the phenomena, let’s look at the puzzles. Save definition for later. And that’s really a huge difference from the work of many philosophers. It goes back to Plato, really, it goes back to Socrates, who basically starts this game of defining your terms.
And this leads to essentialism, and it leads to counterexample mongering and fuss budgeting over the penumbral cases of whatever you’re trying to define, and it’s mainly a waste of time. I mean, biologists are smart enough not to sit down and say, well, we’ve got to define life before we do anything else.
No, they don’t. They know what life is, roughly. And today, we can argue about what the proper definition of life is if we want to. And there’s, of course, interesting penumbral cases like viruses, are they alive? How about motor proteins, are they alive? Are ribosomes alive? What’s the smallest thing that’s alive?
Who cares? There are many candidates, and we should just say, it’s all right, tigers are alive, volcanoes aren’t, there’s lots of things that aren’t alive, sodium fluoride is not alive, DNA, it’s not really alive, no, it’s just a macromolecule.
So you see it as a diversion, this whole emphasis on definitions, as a diversion because it’s too difficult to get a consensus on it, or it’s impossible to articulate the phenomenon? Well, it’s a bad practice because it ignores one of Darwin’s great truths, which is anything
Interesting enough to talk about doesn’t have an essence. Things don’t look for essences. I’ve always loved David Sanford, philosopher about my age, I guess he’s probably retired now from Duke, who has this lovely little argument about mammals. Do mammals exist?
Well, if you define a mammal in such a way that every mammal has a mammal for a mother, seems plausible, seems intuitive, yeah. But then there would have to have been an infinity of mammals, but there haven’t been, so there aren’t any.
Now, we know what’s wrong with that argument, this is a so-called argument, it’s the heap of sand or the hairs on the head of a bald man, and we definitely walk away, do not waste your time on this sort of argument because it’s a fool’s errand.
Anything that’s interesting will not have that type of definition. In geometry, it’s different. In Euclid, boy oh boy, you’ve got these really crisp definitions. And many philosophers since Plato have wanted, in effect, to Euclidify everything, all knowledge. It ain’t gonna work.
And in fact, one of Descartes’ great mistakes was in following that Platonic ideal, wanting to get everything clear and distinct in his own mind. And what he should have realized is, no, your own clearest and most distinct ideas may be wrong. You may not even know what they are.
The best way to get clear about something is to gather some of the smart people around you and get them to talk with you and share notes and collaborate, cooperate, don’t bother with definitions, teach each other the facts that matter. And I think a lot of philosophy is done with breathtaking…
Ignorance of facts and complacency about that ignorance. I remember getting really worked up about this some years ago when I was a guest speaker at an annual conference of philosophy graduate students at Brown University. They were from all over the country. They’d submitted papers. These were presumably the next generation
Of the top young philosophers in the country, one would hope. And over drinks and dinner, several of them, warming to my generally conversational and affable spirit, confessed to me that one of the reasons they were a philosopher, you didn’t have to know anything.
All you had to do is be clever and know some of the classics in philosophy. And I thought, what a recipe for a wasted life. So I wrote a little piece on that called The Higher Order Truths of Schmess. C-H-M-E-S-S. Schmess. It’s just chess. So what’s Schmess? I invented the term.
I invented the game. I probably didn’t. Who cares? Schmess. In Schmess, you can move the king two squares in any direction, one or two squares in any direction. So it’s not chess. Now, there are just as many truths of Schmess as there are of chess.
That is to say an infinite number of them. Now, people could spend their lives identifying and arguing about whether P, some proposition, is the truth of Schmess. And somebody else could argue that, no, it’s not. And somebody else could say, no, the second person got that wrong, and so forth.
And if you devote yourself to the higher order truths of Schmess, you may win fame in a small coterie of like-minded philosophers, but you won’t make any difference in the world, and you’re on a fool’s errand. You’ve wasted your life arguing about how to define things about the topic
That nobody’s really interested in. So I published that little piece on the higher order truths of Schmess, and every year I get fan mail from young philosophers who say, that turned their life around. And I think, yeah, good. They’re not going to make that mistake. They can watch other people make that mistake.
So I think that was a warning that I’m very happy to have given to my young philosopher friends. So this is fascinating. If I hear you correctly, there are two tendencies in people. One tendency is in the philosopher to explicate further and to make precise.
And then the tendency for the more mystical types, the more spiritual types, is no, you should undifferentiate and not speak about it, because doing so somehow derides the concept. And you’re saying that it’s not a middle ground. There’s another ground where you speak to as many people as you can
And take on as many perspectives as you can, and then develop the concept for yourself. Now I don’t know if that’s actually what you’re saying. Pretty much you’ve got it right. But mainly I’m suggesting don’t be solitary, because you’re not even authoritative about what your own thoughts mean.
That’s one of Ruth Milliken’s great points. She calls it meaning rationalism, and she’s devoted her career to showing that it is a mistake, and so it is. What does that mean? Does that mean don’t trust your own thoughts because you could be delusional? No, it’s don’t wander down Descartes’ path of thinking,
If you’re just careful enough, you can get clear, so clear about your own clear and distinct ideas, all on your own, that you can trust them because, as Descartes said, God wouldn’t fool me, would not be a deceiver. That appeal to God, Descartes needs it, otherwise he’s stuck in his skeptical circle.
Well, if you’re not going to appeal to God, who do you appeal to? Well, the next best thing. A group of smart, intelligent human beings like yourself, you can get together and you can learn a lot of facts. And one of the things that I think a lot of philosophers don’t sufficiently realize
Is that what you can imagine depends on what you know. And I love to catch philosophers saying, such and such is just flat impossible. And I was like, no, in fact, it’s actual. I’ll give you some examples. I can remember a distinguished philosopher of mine who told me that
If a subject were shown, say, a red square and a green triangle, and that’s what they saw, they’d get a red square and a green triangle. What they would never do is get a green square and a red triangle. They couldn’t think that’s what they saw. That’s just not possible.
And I said, oh, read Anne Treisman’s papers on illusory conjunction. That’s exactly actual. There are many conditions under which people can get the shapes and the colors mismatched. So you learn something. You learn something that you thought was flat and possible is in fact possible. Not only possible, but actual.
And there are other cases. Philosophers have a habit of thinking that the path to security is absolutism. And so they inflate things. They think you don’t have real responsibility, real moral responsibility, unless you have absolute responsibility, absolute moral responsibility, prime moral responsibility. No, we’ll settle for almost prime responsibility. We all make mistakes.
None of us is perfect. That leads to the whole fantasy about indeterministic special choices. That you have to have one of these in the background or you’re not responsible. Luther famously said, I can do no other, when he put his 95 theses, nailed them to the door. Well, was he ducking responsibility?
No, he was taking responsibility. He was saying, I am determined to object to this. He certainly wasn’t ducking responsibility. So when I use that example with libertarian, in the free will sense of philosophers, they say, well, Luther wasn’t responsible for his act unless there was some earlier act in his history,
Which was completely undetermined, which was quantum undetermined. You have to have such an ancestor in your decision making if you want to be completely responsible for anything you do. Well, that’s like the prime mammal, the first mammal, the one that didn’t have a mammal for a mother. Forget it. No such thing.
And the look, the search for a moment in time where you make a decision, which is completely divorced from all causes and effects, is a huge mistake. And it’s a mistake. I want to diagnose the mistake. It’s a mistake of inflation.
It’s a mistake of thinking, I want to be super sure of this. So I’m going to be an absolutist. I want this to be absolute moral responsibility. I want this to be absolute free will. No such thing. And there’s no absolute mammals either. Every mammal that’s ever existed has non-mammals in its ancestry.
I guess that disqualifies them. They’re not real mammals. Of course they’re real mammals. You just have to abandon essentialism. Yeah. I’m not the scholarly student of pragmatism, especially American pragmatism, that I should be. But yes, I think of myself in that tradition, certainly. Why do you say you should be?
Well, Quine was a pragmatist. And Quine was one of my heroes. Dewey was a pragmatist. I haven’t read enough Dewey. I read some as an undergraduate. I’ve hardly looked at him since then. I admired him. I haven’t delved deeply into the varieties of pragmatism
Because pragmatism has always seemed sort of obvious to me. In the immortal words of Willard Van Orman Quine, where it doesn’t itch, don’t scratch. Can you please outline the difference between your pragmatism and what you perceive Dewey’s to be? I know that you’re not an expert in it, but maybe even Quine’s?
No, I don’t want to answer that. I don’t want to answer that question because I would almost certainly irritate, rightly, Dewey experts who would say, Denon doesn’t know his Dewey. And you know, they’d be right. Okay, so then forget about distinguishing. Please just explicate more, even though there’s some dangers there.
Please explicate more your views on pragmatism. And also, is it the same as, pragmatism is tied to truth in some of the philosophical traditions. So please outline that. It’s the best we can do. I would rather mark it by talking about Dick Rorty. Sure, just a moment.
Because Sam Harris famously went against Jordan Peterson because Jordan Peterson had a pragmatist theory of truth and Harris is more of the correspondence sort. Yeah, and I think that’s a sort of misbegotten debate. My favorite way of putting it is by looking at the work of Dick Rorty, who is correctly, but unfortunately,
Seen as one of the philosophical godfathers of postmodernism and relativism. And he made quite a thing about how truth is all relative and it’s all a conversation and so forth. That’s not the Rorty that I admire. That’s the Rorty who went overboard. He wanted to be a radical, and that was his radical.
And he tried late in his career to push back against some of his adoring fans, especially on the continent. I had many wonderful talks with Dick. He was a really good philosopher. In spite of our disagreements, I mean, I always learned something from him. And I said, come on, Dick.
There’s good maps and bad maps. I’m a sailor, I’m a navigator. Boy, oh, boy, if I get a map which is out of date and it doesn’t have some of the markings on it, it doesn’t have some of the beacons in the right location,
I’m in trouble because that map has a falsehood on it. There’s truth and falsity. It’s how you know where you are. There’s all sorts of truths about where people are, who’s got the money, who committed the crime, is that a pine tree, and so forth. There’s lots of common knowledge, and it’s true.
And that’s a notion of truth. It’s not truth with a capital T. It’s not absolute truth, but it’s true. That’s good enough. And Vardy acknowledged there was such a concept of truth, and he said it’s the vegetarian concept of truth. And I said, okay, I’ll go vegetarian.
It’s only the absolutist philosophers that want to go whole hog. Wait, what did he mean by that? Well, those who hold out for absolutes are shooting themselves in the foot. Absolutes, outside of geometry, are hard to come by. And look even at an area which comes as close as any area at all
To being hard-edged and crisp and clear, truth and false in no penumbral cases. Look at mathematics. I love the example of Andrew Wiles and his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Now, brilliant mathematicians have been trying to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem ever since Fermat for hundreds of years.
Wiles, by common acknowledgement, is the one who came up with the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Why? Because his ideas were perfectly clear and distinct and guaranteed by God? No. In fact, if you want to know why I believe that he came up with the proof,
It’s not because I can follow his proof. I’m not that kind of a mathematician. But I trust his colleagues, his competitors. There are many people out there with tremendous amounts of mathematical ability and skill and insight, and they all had the desire to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.
And they, as a group, conceded that he had won and congratulated him. That social fact is the only reason why anybody in the world, including Andrew Wiles, should trust that he’s proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. And that’s in mathematics. So how did the debate with Robert Sapolsky go? It was entertaining.
But Robert makes one big mistake. And it’s right at the center of his work. He wants to—in fact, it’s a sort of version of the mammal’s paradox. He says, you’re not making a free choice because every act you perform depends on things that
Happened earlier and happened earlier and happened earlier, and we go back to the Big Bang. And determinism is true, and so you can’t make a free choice. And what he’s missed is the difference between control and causation. Let me illustrate that with an example.
There’s an earthquake, and a boulder starts to roll down one of the Rocky Mountains. Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy, down it goes. And it’s caused to roll down the mountain by gravity, wind pressure, bumps from away, material, etc., etc., etc.
Now, if we rewound the tape of life and replayed that exact circumstance, it would roll in exactly the same way. That’s determinism. But if we don’t get it exactly right, then who knows? In fact, the path of the rock is uncontrolled.
But the only way you can tell it’s uncontrolled is by varying the circumstances and seeing whether the behavior is varied. Now, compare that with a really good skier. She’s a downhill specialist, and she skis down the mountain. We want to know if that’s controlled or not.
Well, have her run down again and again and again. Have her do 10 runs. She’ll end up crossing the finish line in all of those cases in almost exactly the same amount of time. Very reliable result. That’s control. Now, if she goes out of control, she becomes more like the boulder.
Now, the path of the boulder is determined. The path of the skier is determined. But the difference is that the skier’s path is controlled, and the rock’s path is not. The rock’s path is like a coin flip. Coin flips, we call them random for good reason, because they’re not predictable and they’re
Not controllable. That’s the key. They’re determined. You can’t prove that determinism is false by flipping coins. Ridiculous. And you can’t prove that determinism is false by saying, look, evolution depends on random variation and mutation, because the randomness of evolution isn’t quantum randomness. It’s physical chaotic randomness. It’s deterministic randomness, if you like.
So, if you make the distinction between control and causation, then Sapolsky’s argument simply falls apart, because it doesn’t go back to the Big Bang, because once life gets started, you start making… What life does is it generates controllers. It generates self-controlled little agents, things that are alive.
And they’re alive because their parts are better suited for reproduction than the other variants. That’s the whole key to evolution, right? Now, we know that evolution doesn’t depend on quantum randomness, because we have lots of models in computer science, computer science models of evolution, where evolution happens in virtual worlds,
Where the only randomness is the pseudo-randomness of the random number generator, which is, of course, not a quantum device. Oh, it could be, but it doesn’t have to be. All it has to be is uncontrolled, like a coin flip. Now, here’s a case where philosophers made the mistake of thinking,
Well, it’s very important not to be too predictable, because if you’re too predictable, you can be exploited by other agents. Right. So, let’s all have our coin flippers in our head. Then we’re not practically, practically predictable. Here’s my pragmatism coming out. We don’t need randomness. We just need a good coin flipper.
Supposedly, if you’re going to play rock, paper, and scissors, your best strategy is to play randomly. Quantum randomly? Should you invest in a Geiger counter and a quantum device? No, you don’t need it. In fact, you could coin flip or roll a three-sided die or a six-sided die
With three choices, rock, paper, scissors, and you could write down a list a million elements long, which would determine what your next move would be. Just keep the list secret and you’re all set. Nobody can beat you. They can tie you, but they can’t beat you in the long run.
But you’re determined, but you’re not predictable. Now, this is something that everybody should know, and it’s amazing that people don’t realize it. Indeterminism is not required for unpredictability. And determinism doesn’t prevent you from acting locally, making your own choices, and not being controlled by the past. The past doesn’t control you.
So would the difference between you and Sapolsky be that you’re saying if you have impartial information, then you can have something that’s unpredictable to someone on the outside, but he’s speaking cosmically, like, well, the universe has all its information. If you have a generator of pseudo-random numbers at your disposal,
And you can keep that generator secret from agents that want to control you, then you’re unpredictable and you’ve got the freedom you need. And you do need that freedom. And the amazing thing is that evolution discovered this. Evolution discovered that because evolution pseudo-randomly makes a lot of mutations,
The ones that survive survive because they do things that the competition doesn’t do, and this is what gives them a kind of control, a kind of reliability. The first replicators that ever existed had a minimal kind of control. The whole history of evolution can be viewed as the amplification of control mechanisms.
What is Robert’s response when you tell him this? Well, I didn’t tell him that exactly because I didn’t have the time, but I laid out the main points. And his response is, no, no, you’re still determined by the events going way back to before your birth.
And David Haig has this lovely example which shows the fallacy in that, and he calls it the parable of the bathtub. Right, right, there’s a quotation, just a moment. If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything. Right, that was a quotation from my book Elbow Room,
And it was probably the most important sentence in the book, and I had the stupid idea of putting it in parentheses as a sort of joke. But it’s actually the most important sentence in the book. Look, I’m not an extensionalist point that makes undetermined decisions. I’m a big thing.
I’m a big thing made of lots of design parts, and those design parts, each one of them creates a basin of attraction. Now, this is the parable of the bathtub. We’ve all heard about the butterfly that flaps its wings in South America and causes a storm in Sydney, Australia.
That’s the butterfly effect where tiny things have huge effects. And what Haig does is he simply turns around and says, yeah, and huge things have tiny effects. And he gives some wonderful examples. And the simplest one is a bathtub. It’s a lovely example because, as he says,
A bathtub is literally a basin of attraction. You fill it up with water. Where does the water come from? Who cares? You can pour it in from bottled water. It can rain. You name it. All those water molecules get into the bathtub.
Then you pull the plug and it all drains out the same hole. And which water molecules, where they go, this cancels out all the differences in causation that went before. It simply cancels them out. A basin of attraction is just the opposite of a butterfly effect. And because it’s just the opposite,
It means that you are reliable in spite of variations in your past. Okay. And this simply undoes the main premise of Sapolsky’s book. So, by the way, I’d like to point out, here is a philosopher telling a biologist, Sapolsky, something that I learned from another biologist, David Haig.
And the difference between David Haig and Robert Sapolsky is that Haig is also a philosopher in a very good way. And Sapolsky has a tenure for philosophy and tends to look down his nose at it. And so he makes big philosophical mistakes because he does not have respect for the philosophers
That try to point these out to him. And it’s an occupational hazard of philosophy. He’s not alone. There are lots of scientists who have no time for philosophy. But there are also lots of scientists who do. And so what separates those two? I’ve wondered that.
I’ve tried to see what are the features that make for a scientist who takes philosophy seriously. And first of all, I think, there’s a lot more today than there used to be. For a very good reason. Science is so good, it’s getting to the point
Where the questions that remain about consciousness, about control, about free will, about information, are philosophical questions. And philosophers have been thinking about them, sometimes very ignorantly, sometimes very cleverly, for several millennia. And we actually have something to offer. And the scientists working on consciousness and neuroscience have come to appreciate that.
So you have groups around the world now made up of the best cognitive neuroscientists in the world and their colleagues, philosophers, who are informed about cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, computer science, and so forth. And that’s why we’re making progress. Now, Carlo Rovelli, good physicist. Sean Carroll, good physicist. Lee Smolin, good physicist.
Murray Gell-Mann, good physicist. But they all took philosophy seriously. So there are physicists and others. I’m happy to say that there are physicists that are taking my paper, Real Patterns, seriously. Whole conferences are happening about the implications of that philosophical paper published in the Journal of Philosophy. Similarly for biologists.
David Haig is a wonderful philosopher. So is Richard Dawkins. So is George Williams. And then there are the biologists who are not good philosophers. Oh, John Tooby, I mentioned him too. What is philosophical about Richard Dawkins? Well, you could read the afterword to his most philosophical book, The Extended Phenotype.
And I wrote that afterward, and I talk about what he’s doing is philosophy. It’s a long story. But I think he broke through a lot of misguided oversimplification of a lot of biologists and replaced it with some wonderful oversimplifications. Science depends on oversimplifications, but there’s good ones and bad ones.
And his idea of replicators and vehicles and memes and the selfish gene, these were all major illuminators of the process of evolution. And some evolutionists resisted this not only passionately, but eloquently. I think of Steve Gould and Dick Flemington, two great biologists,
But they got it wrong in their famous paper. On the Spandrels of San Marco is a rhetorical gem, a brilliantly written paper, which is full of just falsehood. And the thing is that graduate students in biology and graduate students in philosophy
And biology have all read the Spandrels paper, and they’ve been sort of told, treat this as gospel. No, that’s a big mistake. They were just wrong. In fact, they were wrong before the paper was first presented at a Royal Society meeting in England. Richard
Dawkins was telling me just a few weeks ago that at that meeting, Tim Cluttenbrock and others gave papers before Gould and Lewontin gave their paper that showed what was wrong with the paper before it was even presented. They didn’t acknowledge his contributions
At all and never have. Now, I think that some scientists get it in their head that they can just be bullies. They don’t have to pay attention to philosophy. They can express disrespect for philosophy, and they can get away with it. And I want to make them feel,
I want to at least get them to have second thoughts about that. I would like to say that both Crick and Watson took philosophy seriously. For example, I think that you know, undergraduate education is a variable compromise between oversimplification and getting the goods. And some of the oversimplifications are very valuable,
And some of them are not so valuable. And a lot of young biologists are taught a sort of reductionist approach, which doesn’t take seriously purposes, design, reasons, that confuse reasons and causes. And they’re encouraged to do that, and they’re warned about teleology. But in fact, you can’t make sense of biology without teleology.
And is it because they have an aftertaste of superstition associated with teleology? They associate teleology with old-fashioned and wacky views of some philosophers. And some philosophers, and right, they’re right about those philosophers. There are lots of bad ideas about teleology. There are some new ones that are bad too. But teleology,
Darwin explained how teleology comes about, how purposes come about. My way of putting it is to say there were reasons long before there were reasoners. Evolution is not a reasoner. It’s a blind mechanical, it’s not a mind. But the evolutionary algorithm has the wonderful but
Non-miraculous property of quality control. It does generate and test, and the things that get replicated are better, better than the things that don’t. Better in some regard. They have a skill, or a talent, or a feature that makes a difference. It’s a difference that makes a difference.
And that snowballs and snowball, and living things become more and more capable, more and more adept, have better and better eyesight, better and better capacity to fly, better capacity to be predators, better capacity to avoid predators, better capacity to survive
Variations in the weather. All of these capacities, we can treat them with the eye of an engineer. We can say, why is this better? Why is this here? We can reverse engineer all living things and ask the question, why? Where we mean not by what process did this happen,
But why is this good? How does this serve the organisms in this lineage? And if you don’t adopt that perspective, you just miss. You’re tying really both hands behind your back. Reverse engineering is the key to biology, and reverse engineering is always trying to figure
Out what difference does this make that in some way benefits, and who benefits from this difference? What agent benefits from this difference? This notion of better, does this not depend on a prior philosophical commitment to pragmatism? So that if someone is not a pragmatist, then they would say, well, like, of course you
Have teleology in your theory, because you have pragmatism in it. But I don’t. Like, I not being me, but the hypothetical interlocutor. Well, I don’t know, the non-pragmatist about truth, does the non-pragmatist think that truth is better than falsehood? I don’t think so.
I mean, if you view living things as things that are designed to extract information, and utilize it in producing better future acts, better decisions, brains are devices for producing future. But if they produce futures that don’t match reality, if they’re misinformed, then they’re in trouble. If a new element appears in the environment
Of some lineage, and it’s something that the lineage is better off engulfing, endorsing, it’s like food, then those who treat it as poison are at a huge disadvantage. Because it’s food, not poison. Notice that food is itself a teleological term. What counts as food? All depends on the organism
In question. You can’t define food independently of purpose and teleology. Perfectly natural candidate, perfectly natural category, but you can’t help yourself to the concept of food without indulging, as some biologists would say, in teleology. I have said to my students sometimes, here’s an interesting exercise.
Go to the most hard-bitten biology journal you can find. Find the most technical, advanced, sophisticated, hard-bitten papers you can find, and see how long it takes you to find terms in it that require a teleological perspective. Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. You can’t
Explain. We now know how ribosomes work, and how they’re put together. Brilliant reverse engineering. Good for Nobel Prizes. We now know how motor proteins work. Again, brilliant. And we know what motor proteins are for. We know we couldn’t live without them. We know that they are responsible
For the motility and variability, both the mutability and the exploratory powers of cells. So is this what you’re referring to when sometimes I’ve heard you say that scientists are making philosophical assumptions and they don’t realize it? Yeah. Yeah. I’ve said that there’s no such thing as philosophy-free science,
And it’s just that some scientists take a deep breath and actually explore to see what their philosophical propositions are, and sometimes learn that they’ve been making a mistake. And others just fly by the seat of their pants, ignoring the question, and those are the ones
That tend to dismiss philosophy out of hand without realizing that their work is not just knee-deep, but eye-deep in teleological presuppositions. Now is that the case even for physics? Not for physics, no. The best explanation of that, I think, is in a TED talk made by
The physicist David Deutsch in Oxford, and he talks about the great monotony, and he talks about how for billions of years since the Big Bang, nothing changed, nothing happened, nothing did anything. It’s only when life emerges, at least on one planet, probably on others,
We don’t know yet, when life emerges, now we have things that do things. It’s not just things happening. Carbon atoms don’t do things. But… I didn’t mean to say that there could be teleology in physics. What I meant to say was that these assumptions that are being made unconsciously by scientists
That are philosophical, do those also include some physicists? Like, physicists are making philosophical assumptions without realizing it. — Yeah, well, I’ll simply point to a few that have articulated this well. Carlo Rovelli is one, I mentioned him before. Sean Carroll is another. And there’s some others
As well that I think take seriously these issues. David Kronkauer at the Santa Fe Institute is another. And I could go on and on. Michael Berry… — So, to the physicist who believes that modern physics hasn’t been furthered by any philosopher, what do you say?
— I would say that physics has been on occasion hampered by the work of philosophers of the past. And the work of setting them straight has been partly the work of philosophers, less famous philosophers, but philosophers of science and others, who have gradually shown the oversimplifications that the physicists were taking seriously.
A good example is Karl Popper. A lot of scientists think that Popper’s ideas about disconfirmation are the last word on evidence and theory. But that actually turns out to be a very one-sided and problematic view, and there’s very few philosophers of
Science that accept it now. And I think we still encounter scientists who swear by Karl Popper, and they’re hampering their own efforts. They’re falling for oversimplified arguments. — What are real patterns, and are they related to strong emergence?
— I think the word emergence is a dangerous word, because it’s very popular among people who have sort of woo-woo ideas of what it means. They think emergence is something that’s strictly unpredictable. No, that’s inflation. A traffic jam is a lovely example of emergence.
You’re not going to predict it at the atomic level. You need to predict it knowing about daily life of human beings, jobs, cities, all sorts of things like that. That’s the level at which that’s a real phenomenon. Perfectly real, but you don’t use physics to explain it.
You don’t use atomic physics to explain the fact that the Dow Jones average hit a new high yesterday. Physics is powerless to describe the patterns, the higher-level patterns, that are readily available to even journalists, not just economists and certainly investors.
Strong emergence is, I think, a term to be avoided. Weak emergence, innocent emergence, is fine. John Holland, one of the brilliant thinkers at the Santa Fe Institute and a brilliant colleague of Doug Hofstadter’s, the creator of many wonderful artificial life programs, wrote a book called Emergence. I warned him, I said,
Please, right at the very beginning of the book, say a word about what emergence isn’t and what it is, and make sure that you realize that you’re disowning the strong version. And he did. And I’m very happy that he did that because, well, my favorite example of emergence is John Horton
Conway’s Lifeworld, where you have gliders and even a touring machine and all sorts of amazing structures that do things. They’re emergent. Who would ever have guessed? That you could get those things out of such a simple virtual physics as Conway Life. Is it unpredictable? No, it’s absolutely predictable. It’s just impractical to predict.
If you want to predict what a life form is going to do, identify the gliders and see where they’re going, and you’ll be able to tell where they’re going to be 20 time steps from now without any difficulty, you just look in the area to see if anything can
Intersect them before they get there. You know where they’re going. The Lifeworld is full of very predictable, high-level patterns that, in one sense, are absolutely correctly predictable from the physics of the Lifeworld. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not good examples of emergence. They are. They’re excellent examples of emergence.
I’ll give you another example. Sure. You take two sides that are absolutely identical, the lettering on them, the fonts, everything about them exactly the same, they’re the same size, and they’re both placed in the window of restaurants, two different restaurants. One customers run into, the other one not. Why?
Because they both say, free beer. One of them is on a restaurant in New York or in London or Australia, and the other one is on a restaurant in Mongolia where nobody speaks English. That’s an effect easy to predict. It’s an emergent phenomenon.
Big things can make differences, and they can also swallow up differences. That’s the bathtub. That’s the parable of the bathtub. All the causes that go in there get neutralized by the design elements of the system. A bathtub is a design thing. It’s important that it is.
It’s the bathtub’s design that cancels out the previous history of all the water molecules in the bathtub. We know where they’re going. The plumber knows where they’re going. They’re all going the same place, and they’re going the same place because they’re in a basin of attraction, and basins of attraction create real patterns.
In the bathtub case, its robustness makes it not fragile. If it were fragile, it would be sensitive to small changes. If it were sensitive to small changes, is that what Robert Sapolsky would say would undermine free will? Well, bathtubs are big clunky objects with almost no moving parts.
In this case, all we need to have is a plug. With a plug, out comes the water. The water has no free will, but the bathtub cancels out the differences in the causal history of all those water molecules that enter the bathtub.
In the same way, your brain and my brain cancel out lots of differences. When I ask you, tell me, please, how much is 2 plus 5? Answer? Seven. Seven. I could have made a million dollars if anybody would bet against that. Very predictable. It doesn’t matter.
It’s because you’re a good mathematician, or at least you know your arithmetic. And all of these create real patterns that are reliable, that are robust, that are non-mysterious, that are not metaphysically suspect in any way, and that put the lie to Sapolsky’s vision of what the world is really like.
As I said to him, I said, it’s hard for me to say this, but I’m telling a biologist he’s not taking evolution seriously enough. Okay, let’s now talk about Roger Penrose, because I believe you had an argument, you
Had an argument, that even if our brain is algorithmic, it still doesn’t, sorry, it can escape Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Yeah, ever since Gödel published his paper, and Turing published his work, there’s been a tempting argument that somehow Gödel’s theorem shows that we, or at least the mathematicians
Among us, are not machines, because we can do something that no machine can do, which is prove its own Gödel sentence. And that’s, I’ve written about that since the 70s, and it’s a bad argument, first propounded
By a philosopher in Oxford, John Lucas, J. R. Lucas, and a number of us pointed out the flaws in his argument. Then Penrose took it up, and he recognized that Lucas didn’t have it right, and he wrote The Emperor’s New Mind to try to set it right and to establish this conclusion.
But his argument is full of holes. So this is a case of a brilliant physicist, mathematician, whose main argument in that famous book of his, The Emperor’s New Mind, makes some fundamental philosophical mistakes. The main one being that he confuses, he does not see that algorithms can be very good at
Something without being algorithms for demonstrably doing x. He thinks that no algorithm, Turing’s sense, can prove its own Gödel sentence. That’s true, but irrelevant, because there are algorithms that can learn mathematics, learn Gödel’s theorem, learn English, write papers, showing whatever you want to show about Gödel’s theorem and what its implications are.
There’s no reason an algorithm can’t do that. It just won’t be a perfect algorithm for proving its own Gödel sentence. But it may be an imperfect algorithm for proving its own Gödel sentence, if we can even say what its Gödel sentence is, and I think that’s a simplification that is much overlooked.
In my review of Penrose, which was, I think, the first review that book got in the Times Literary Supplement, I trotted out an argument to show what was wrong. Chess is a finite game. It’s huge. It’s an unbelievably huge game.
There are gazillions of possible chess games, but it’s finite because there’s a stop rule. There are only finitely many legal chess games. So in principle, there’s an algorithm for playing perfect chess. We don’t know whether it’s a win for white or a tie, a guaranteed tie or a guaranteed win for white.
It might be a win for black, very unlikely, but we don’t know. So when I say, look, there’s no algorithm for playing perfect chess that’s feasible, and that’s true. It would use up every atom in the universe, because it would have to go through all the cases. And it can’t. Not enough time.
The heat death of the universe would overtake it before it would succeed. Well that means, of course, that computers can’t play chess. No, it doesn’t mean that. Computer chess algorithms are not algorithms for checkmate, they’re algorithms for playing legal chess. And how many of those are there? Gazillions.
Some are much better than the other. Some would beat me every time. Some would beat any human player every time. But they’re not algorithms for checkmate, they’re just algorithms for playing good chess. And when Penrose thinks he’s got an argument against, you know, strong AI, he’s just wrong.
Jordan’s theorem doesn’t say anything about what the talents of an algorithm might be that is not provably an algorithm for task X, but which nevertheless performs task X with such reliability you can bet your life on it. And in fact, that’s what we all do.
We bet our lives on the algorithms that run our brains. And they’re not perfect. And they’re algorithms for trying to stay alive. And some of them also play great classical guitar, and others write novels, and some of them do all kinds of mischief.
You can’t prove, as Penrose tried to do, that AI is impossible because of Turing’s… Strong AI. And that strong AI is… You can’t prove that strong AI is impossible by citing Riddle’s theorem or Turing’s paper. Professor, you have a passion for sailing. Yes. How has sailing influenced your philosophical thought?
In a number of ways. First of all, sailing on a sailboat with a bunch of graduate students or postdocs or good friends who are in academia one way or another is a great way to engage in the sort of constructive discussion that I think is the key to making progress.
And so when I had my big boat, my 42-footer, we’d have these cognitive cruises where my postdocs and I would invite somebody, a thinker we admired and thought could teach us a lot, to just come sailing with us. And I mention these cognitive cruises in my book, I’ve Been Thinking.
And they were all really intelligent, creative people. Stanislaus Dehaene, Nick Humphrey, Andy Clark, Brian Cantwell-Smith, wonderful, great opportunities for people. When you’re sailing a boat, cruising a sailboat long distances, there’s hours of just sitting around in the cockpit. What are you going to do? You’re going to talk.
And you interrupt the conversation when a whale surfaces near you or interesting birds you go by on an island where you get in some jam of some sort. And so I view a sailboat as sort of my laboratory or one of my laboratories.
It’s a very good place to get people just to sit around together and talk without any time limit. So that’s one way. But another way is there’s a line in a song, I can’t control the wind, but I can trim the sails. That’s an important observation about free will.
I can control the sails. But I can trim the sails. That’s doing. That’s control. There’s all the difference in the world between a sailboat without a skipper and a sailboat with a skipper who knows what he or she is doing. They’re both determined.
But count on the one with the knowledgeable skipper, with the one with the talent, the with all those basins of attraction, that’s the one that’s going to get the boat back to its home port safely. Who knows what the other one will do. It’s like the rock rolling down the mountain. Yeah.
There’s a paper by you published last year, 2022 called Engineering Daydreaming and Control, if I’m not mistaken. Yeah. And that’s right. Yes. In a book about sailing. Yes. Yeah. So there’s another paper by you from last year called Am I a Fictionalist? So I ask you, are you a fictionalist? Yes and no.
Surprise, surprise. Yes. Fictionalism is one of those isms that suffers from over-emphasis on definition. So we have N different varieties of fictionalism. And I think the answer to that is in a very minimal sense, yes, I’m a fictionalist because
I think that our consciousness, the contents of our consciousness is a very useful user illusion that we are the beneficiaries of. And so there’s a lot of fiction in that. For instance, there aren’t any colors out there in the physical world, not really.
Color is not definable independently of color vision agents, it just isn’t. You can talk about a visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, but which part is visible depends on who the eyes belong to. Are they tetrachromats like us or trichromats like us or tetrachromats like pigeons?
There are colors that are visible to pigeons that aren’t visible to us. And of course, colorblind people, there’s colors that aren’t visible to them. So color is a nice example of an extremely useful fiction. It’s a metaphor that nature has invented through natural selection, not through any intelligent design.
Nature has invented color to be an extremely valuable clue and cue about all sorts of things. Think of poisonous snakes, think of how folklore around the world says, be very wary of putting in your mouth anything that’s very brightly colored.
It might be a poisonous frog, a poisonous bird, a poisonous fish, a poisonous spider, you name it. Poison is almost always advertised for a very good reason. Poisoner does not benefit from being eaten. A poisoner benefits from being ignored or shunned by the eaters. So it has to advertise.
And of course, since false advertising is cheaper than true advertising, you get Bayesian mimicry where you get snakes that look almost identical to poisonous varieties of snakes, but they’re not poisonous. They get the benefit, they falsely advertise that they’re poisonous when they are.
So color is a wonderful fiction, which is even exploited by devious arrangements. Notice the Bayesian mimic snakes. They don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know that they’re the beneficiary of this. They don’t have to know. They’re just blessed with a feature which does them a lot of good.
They don’t have to appreciate. But we, the biologists, can figure out what the reasons are for it. Those reasons are real. Those are real reasons. They just aren’t reasons that any reasoner has thought of until some clever reverse engineer has figured it out.
That’s why I say there were reasons long before there were reasoners. Just as there were numbers long before there were mathematicians. Well, that one’s controversial. Some mathematicians aren’t Platonists. Well, how many planets were going to throw out Pluto? How many planets were there before there was life on Earth? I don’t know.
I believe there were eight. Okay. Nine counting Pluto. Sure, sure. That’s a fact. It was true before there were any mathematicians. Before there were Roman numerals or Arabic numerals or arithmetic. But it was true. So numbers and reasons are perfectly good abstractions. Centers of gravity, another good of basins of attraction.
There are lots of abstractions that are extremely useful. But they’re not made of anything. They’re not made of material. But they’re real patterns. Okay, right. They’re real patterns. So something I’ve wanted to ask you is that when Richard Dawkins published his book, The Selfish Gene, he had a few concepts that were introduced.
One was extended phenotype. The other is meme. And a couple others. But for you, you just mentioned real patterns. For you, there’s like an avalanche of concepts. And something I’ve always wanted to ask you. And I keep a catalog of them. Like right here, I have DPD, intuition pump.
And I’ll list these somewhere and people can look them up. And then what? And quotations for a response to the hard problem. Cartesian theater. Skyhook. Zimbo. Intentional stance. Design stance. Physical stance. Multiple drafts. Model. Heterophenomenology. Greedy reductionism. Real patterns, which we just talked about. Homuncular functionalism. Joy scene machine. Competence without comprehension.
The Library of Mendel. Stance stance. Elbow room. Cerebral celebrity. Orwellian and Stalinist revisions. Fame in the brain. Free-floating rationales. Informational vaccine. Okay, so Dan, how the heck do you come up with so many concepts? And how do you know when to coin a concept?
Of course, I don’t have an authoritative answer to that. Even though they’re, in a sense, creations of mine. They bubble up in my mind by processes that I have only some control, partial control of and dim understanding of. I often find that I’m simply renaming an idea that somebody else has already had.
But unintentionally, in that case. Unintentionally, sure. I try not to plagiarize. Yeah, yeah. I try to give credit where credit’s due. And I certainly give a lot of credits over the years. I think the way I come up with these is one of the things about the
Environment in which I’ve done almost all my thinking is that I have taught only a few all-graduate seminars in my life. There are almost always undergraduates, along with graduate students, in my courses, wherever I am. And I think it’s taking on the task of making sure the undergraduates
Understand what I’m saying has challenged me to come up with these ideas. And many of them, if I had, you know, if I’d kept a diary, I could have told you the day on which I first thought of that idea.
And maybe it was when I was sitting home at night writing a paper. But earlier in the day, I’d been trying to explain to students about the first- and third-person point of view, and I’d come up with hetero- and auto-phenomenology. So, sorry, in that case, you wouldn’t have said hetero-phenomenology.
You would have said its definition, and then later you coined it? I would have explained some of the facts that distinguish the first-person point of view from the third-person point of view. And I would have explained that cognitive science, like all science, depends on the third-person point of view.
Even when we have human subjects in the experiments, we’re asking them questions or giving them tasks, and we’re interpreting their tasks in the light of their briefing and their debriefing. And this lands you in phenomenology. It lands you in the intentional stance. You can’t do human subject experiments without adopting the intentional stance.
So you’re attributing content to their mental states just from the get-go. But you’re using the third-person point of view, which means you’re taking what they do, their behavior, which includes all their verbal behavior and all their pauses and wrinkled eyebrows and all the rest,
And you’re interpreting it as the behavior of an intentional system. And some of it are speech acts where you interpret them as meaning them, and some of them are like the tells that a good poker player is looking for. They’re not deliberate, but they’re very informative.
And some of them are lies, either innocent or not. If you think about experiments with human subjects, you realize you want to have what are called naive subjects. You really don’t want them to know what you’re trying to find out in the experiment
Because it’s very hard for human subjects not to either cooperate or be obstreperous with a researcher. You don’t let them in on what you hope to find. Yeah. That is a key element. Notice that this is not a key element in chemistry or physics.
You don’t have to tiptoe around in the lab if you’re in the chemistry lab. You don’t have to lie. You don’t have to debrief or brief the chemicals that you’re putting together. But when you get into the social sciences and biology and psychology and neuroscience,
Then, of course, you have to adopt a whole range of practices and principles of good design which exploit what we know about the intentional stance. So with regard to the development of your ideas and the concepts that you generate that are novel or that at the time you believe them to be novel,
That comes about from contending with undergrads? Contending with them, yes. That is trying to help them. And they push back earnestly with fundamental questions. I encourage them to push back. In fact, I think freshmen are particularly valuable because they’re excited to be in the university and they’re not afraid.
They haven’t learned to fake it. I just love it when students say, now this may be a really dumb question, but those are usually the best questions. Yes, I agree. Sometimes they’re dumb, but many times they’re just the questions that you needed to be asked. Graduate students don’t do that. Yeah.
They’re afraid of appearing stupid to their fellow graduate students and to the professor. They’ve got to get a recommendation letter from that professor later. So they nod judiciously when they don’t understand what they’re being told. I see, I see.
And they’re so grateful when that sophomore in the back row says, wait a minute, professor, I’ve got a question. It’s probably a dumb question. And they think, I was going to ask that question, but I didn’t dare. So are your cruises filled with these sorts of questions? Yeah.
That you as professors, you no longer have this fear of looking foolish. You see it as progress, and so your cognitive cruises are fun and productive. A philosopher who’s afraid of looking foolish is going to have a pretty uneventful life because philosophers make fools of themselves, even the best, lots of times.
In fact, it’s almost part of the job description. So, and I know in advance that there are a lot of scientists, for instance, if that’s who I’m hanging out with at the time, who have a sort of low opinion of philosophy. So, you know, I’m pretty thick skinned.
I don’t mind the rolling eyeballs, the shakes of the head, or sometimes the outright expressions of disrespect or even contempt. That comes from the territory. I do sometimes blame my philosophical colleagues for fostering, for nurturing that attitude with some of their own foolishness.
I have two terms, which I use with a few close friends. Foolishness spelled with a P-H. Okay, I got to write that one down. And silliness spelled with a P-S-Y. And there’s lots of psychological silliness and lots of philosophical foolishness.
And let’s admit it, and then let’s sit down and stop insulting each other and say, all right, now, what should we take seriously here? Your dear friend, Douglas Hofstadter, someone who I may be interviewing as well, by the way, shortly, maybe in the next film. I’ll encourage him to accept.
You all have worked together, but you’re not the same person, which means you have disagreements. So what are your two largest disagreements? What do you go back and forth on? Well, Doug, I’ve never convinced him about free will.
But I’ve sort of given up because he really doesn’t seem to want to talk about it. No, he has a sort of fatalist streak in him, which I regret and have tried to talk him out of. And I don’t know what more I can do. I think we sort of dropped the subject.
Mutual convenience or something like that. And he may have changed his mind and hasn’t gotten around to telling me. I don’t know. What else? Well, I’m coming around to his view on the dangers of large language models and generative pre-trained transformers, GPTs.
And it all goes back to a conference that Doug organized at Stanford some years ago where we looked at David Cope’s book at his program, Experiments in Musical Intelligence, which then became the book Virtual Music. There’s a paper by me in it. Doug organized the conference.
He was very upset by David Cope’s elegant program for writing virtual music in the style of Bach, Cole Porter, Puccini, Wagner, you name it. Amazing. Because that removes romanticism from it? Well, Doug was shocked at what he viewed as the shallowness of musical brilliance if it
Could be so readily copied by such a simple, far from simple for me, but such a simple algorithm. He wanted music to be deeper than that. And I remember quoting to him one of my favorite jokes from the novelist Peter DeVries. In one of his novels, he has a character who says,
Oh, superficially he’s deep, but deep down he’s shallow. You think about that, and you think, right, look, superficially music’s deep, deep down it’s shallow. Well, everything is if you go deep enough. He just wanted it to be deeper than he now had to admit it was.
And I thought, well, look, it’s still deep. It’s still flippin’ wonderful. He wants it to escape his rational grasp? Yeah, I think Doug wanted music. He was the last, he absolutely, one way of reading Gödel, Escher, Bach is as a disproof of Penrose and Lucas on Gödel’s Theorem.
So he’s the last one to try it out. I mean, he’s one of the first to trot in a proper refutation of those ideas. But he still wanted to stress the depth of computational power. And he was just distressed that Cope’s program wasn’t deep enough for him.
And similarly, very distressed by the success of CHAT-GPT, first one, or GPT-3, and large language models in general. He was amazed, fascinated, and appalled by how good they were. And I was saying, look, the intentional stance, you can’t set it aside.
It’s simply not possible for human beings to adopt the design stance or the physical stance with regard to an eloquent speaker of your native language. You just can’t. You can’t hear that as, you can’t. And of course, this is a fact that has often been used by clever people to catch spies.
You’ve got a putative American in New York City in 1942, speaks flawless English. So what do you do to unmask him? Tell him a joke in German. Ah, that’s brilliant. If you go, you’ve got him, simple as that. Yeah. That’s why LLMs are so dangerous.
So the alignment problem with AI, is that an in-principle problem or a practical one? It’s such a big practical problem. It might as well be in principle, I think. I mean, it’s the people who wave their hands and calmly and optimistically say, well, we’re solving the alignment problem.
Their very statement of that is a sign they don’t have an appreciation of how deep the problem is. Why? Because it would be like somebody saying, I know the solution to the problem of Israel in the Arab world, the Palestinians. It’s simple. No, it isn’t. No, it isn’t.
And if you think it is, that’s almost self-disqualifying. It is such a complex issue. You have to know so much and appreciate so much and set aside so many misconceptions and oversimplifications to make any sense of it. And I think the alignment problem is like that.
That is, like all rules of thumb, this is defeasible. It isn’t perfect. But I would say, if somebody tells you they’ve got the alignment problem solved, that’s two strikes against them. They are wildly optimistic in one way or another. For one thing, for one thing, let me say something which often isn’t noted
That I’ve been trying to remind people of it. They say, look, we know how to write the control architectures that will prevent them from doing X, Y, and Z. Oh, really? These systems are, first of all, huge. They’re gigantic software entities. Has Microsoft or anybody else ever invented a program remotely that size
That didn’t have bugs in it? No, no, absolutely not. What a lot of people don’t realize is that software writing is a sort of an art, and although it is an art with tremendous amounts of precision and reliability built in at the very basis, Turing is brilliant on that topic
In his famous paper on the Turing test about the rigid dictatorial control of the operating system in effect. That’s true, and it’s exploited brilliantly by programmers, but it’s almost impossible to write bug-free software. And there’s no particular reason to think that programs that themselves
Write software, which is now happening at a great pace, are that much better than human programmers. Programs can get out of control. This has been true for decades, and there’s no magic bullet that’s going to make such huge systems transparent. And people have known this for decades. In computer science, they’ve known it.
I remember John McCarthy, who coined the term artificial intelligence. I spent a year with him at Stanford at the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Sciences, and we spent the whole year on AI and philosophy. And at that time, that was way back in 1980, 1980-81, or 79-80, he was
Worried then. He predicted the rise of the home computer, the personal computer, because there he was, one of the world’s geniuses of computer science, and he was at the mercy of the technical people on their staff that were the system operators of the giant mainframes that were the
Computers that were being used then. He said, look, these system operators are brilliant computer scientists, but they have to sit there all day long, eight-hour shifts, you know, eight hours a day, and they get bored. They’re sitting around, so they fiddle with the system.
They have their own little projects that they do as one of the privileged users of the system. And being normal, adventurous human beings, they often do not, make proper annotations of what they’re doing. So they create all sorts of little fun things which run on the mainframes.
Now, what happens if one of them gets hit by a bus? There will be parts of that mainframe that are no longer reliable. We won’t know how to fix it if it breaks, because we don’t know what the guy did. You can’t look in the manual, because the program that was on the
Deck 20 that was sent to you by Digital Equipment Corporation, that’s obsolete, almost immediately because of all the people writing programs on it. So even though there’s been tremendous disciplined progress on how to write code the right way, the honest way, the reliable, you know,
Best practices way, everybody knows that’s an unsolved problem. And if that’s an unsolved problem, the alignment problem is the unsolved bigger problem. So we’ll finish up with some questions that I have from professors. There are three professors. Hang on a second, please. Yep.
If you want to know some of the dark history of what goes on in the cyber world, this is the book for you. Scare the bejesus out of you. All right. That book will be in the description for people if you’re interested in
If they want if they want to know the kinds of I was at a meeting at the University of New Mexico once when I was out at the Santa Fe Institute on cyber security. And this was scary, a scary, scary meeting. This was some years ago.
And I realized that one of the best ideas running at that meeting. Was security through obscurity by which they meant deliberately deliberately make the systems non-transparent so that our cyber enemies can’t get into them. In other words. Don’t try to maintain strict control over the whole system because
It will only be beaten because our our enemies will exploit the transparency the strictness the clarity of our organization to do a sin. It’s this when you think about it. It’s a it’s a famous point from game theory. You got to keep your own thinking to yourself. Otherwise, you become a money pump.
Other agents will be able to treat what you do is tells and they’ll be able to exploit you. That’s the point about free will it’s worth preserving. You got to keep you got to keep your own thinking secret. If you want if you want to be a free agent, otherwise, you’re going
To become a puppet. You’re going to you want to be self-controlled not hetero controlled not remote controlled. Okay. So as we wrap professor, I have some questions from other professors. Their names are David Sloan Wilson Anand Vidya and Donald Hoffman. You should know that I’ve spoken to David Sloan Wilson on a podcast
For theories of everything and that’s on screen as well as in the description. You should know that I’ve spoken to Donald Hoffman on theories of everything several times one with Joscha Bach another with Philip Goff another with John Vervaeke and those are all on screen and in the description.
Anand Vidya has also been on theories of everything. There’s a solo talk with him and then there’s a podcast with me and him one-on-one. It’s a banger podcast on epistemology link in the description. All right. Who’s the second one? I don’t Anand Vidya.
He’s a professor who was a colleague of David Chalmers actually. Okay, like they went to school together. He’s a philosopher as well. So David Sloan Wilson says dear Curt. It would be fun to draw Dan out on multi-level selection and religion as largely a group level cultural adaptation. Oh good.
I haven’t said a word about religion. David and I have our have our differences on religion. I say it’s was a wonderful nurse crop for civilization. We needed the oversimplification the exploitation of irrationality and passion art and music ceremony. We needed all that to provide the social cohesion and cooperativeness
That got us to the point where we can begin to shed those things. We can be grown-ups and take secular democracy seriously. So I think religion is evolved not genetically but by memetic evolution and many of its most interesting features were not invented by anybody, but they’re brilliant.
They’re like they’re like the brilliant wings of the Eagle and the brilliant starting behavior of the of the gazelles. Let’s take a very simple case. Unison chanting. Brilliant idea when you don’t have writing. Because basically what it is, it’s von Neumann multiplexing an idea that John von Neumann reinvented in the computer age.
Because you’ve got you’ve got multiple copies. Any one of them can be as imperfect as you like. But as long as you’ve got enough of them majority rules, you have a vote taker and and you’ll you’ll correct errors. It’s an error correction device so that instead of relying on the written
Text you can rely on the group memory, but only if you do you have to preserve this by doing occasional group chance where everybody does group chance. An example that I’ve used is square dancing. And you know when I was a kid in high school back in those days, they
Taught us square dancing in gym class. So we all could do the Virginia Real and lots of other things and I’ve even called square dances and yeah with with string band. So can I do the Virginia Real today? I can sort of half remember all of it, but I’ll make some mistakes.
But if I got together with a bunch of my ancient cronies who were in gym class with me, we could put together a perfect Virginia Real in about 10 choruses because oh, yeah, I remember that’s how we do it. Because we’d correct each other’s errors and we wouldn’t and we wouldn’t
Even have to talk about it. We would just be good conformists and do what the others do and pretty soon we’d be lockstep. That’s the rationale of public chanting, public recitation. Did anybody have to know this isn’t the groups that did that?
Thrive in the ones that didn’t? Didn’t. That is the practices, the religions that had that as one of their practices tended to have longer shelf lives than the religions that didn’t. You have to remember there have been thousands of religions that have come and gone, leaving almost no trace.
Okay, so the next question comes from Anand Vaidya. He says, yes, I have three for Dan. Number one, how can we make sense of truth or accuracy conditions if phenomenal states are an illusion? Well, phenomenal states are a useful user illusion. They’re like the user illusion on
Your cell phone. That’s a beautiful, brilliantly designed metaphorical description of what’s actually going on. And a lot of it’s just plain false. But you replace complicated falsehoods with reliable metaphors and that makes them illusions in a sense. That’s a good term from computer science, a user illusion. So phenomenal experience
Isn’t what people think it is. It’s real, but it isn’t what people think it is. It’s very useful and it can be used to tell truth from falsehood. I’ve given several examples earlier in the talk today, so I don’t need to do that again. So that’s the answer to the first question.
Do you know Donald Hoffman, by the way? I’ve not met him. No, I have met him. I met him at one of the Tucson conferences. So he is an idealist who is similar to you in that he describes our reality and our quote-unquote
Quality or our experience as a user interface, a useful one, but it’s not true. He has a question later today. We’ll get to that. So number two from Anand Vaidya, even if our experience is an illusion, don’t we need truth to make sense of the illusion?
Yeah, we do. We need a concept of truth. As I’ve already said, talking about Dick Rory, we need the vegetarian concept of truth. It’s the one that piles up the truths in all the sciences and in good history and in good
Reporting in the newspaper and in reliable information you get from your neighbors and your friends and your family. There’s plenty of truth and we depend on it. It’s the world of mutual knowledge and civilization wouldn’t work without it, but we don’t need to found that on any foundation of phenomenal experience.
Okay, and then the last question that he has is how could it be true that we have no free will and draw that as a conclusion if drawing a conclusion is a mental action that requires freedom?
Well, we do have free will. We have the only kind of free will worth wanting, which is we are autonomous, self-controlled agents who can think about why they’re doing what they’re doing and go meta indefinitely. They can worry about their worries and reconsider their policies and reconsider the policies
They have about their policies and so forth. Those are skills. Small children don’t have them, adults pretty much do. The ones that don’t have those skills, we have to excuse and we have to take care of them and we have to keep them out of harm’s
Way and keep them from doing harm to others. But that’s actually a very small proportion of the world’s population. And so that is the skills required to be an honest, reliable, trustworthy citizen are far less hard to learn than the skills of being a guitar player or a jump roper or a
Shooter of basketball free throws. Or a mathematician. There’s lots of skills and they’re unevenly distributed, but it doesn’t matter that much because the vast majority of normal human beings, of course that’s almost a tautology when I put it that way, are quite capable of the sort of self-control that we
Honor when we let somebody get a driver’s license, sign a contract. Take care of themselves, walk freely around in the state. If you lose that, you’ve lost your free will. Okay, now the question from Donald Hoffman. It’s a paragraph long because there’s some context prior to the question itself.
After decades of effort, no physicalist theory can account for any one specific conscious experience, e.g., what is the orchestrated collapse of quantum states of the neuronal microtubules that must be the taste of chocolate, even the illusory taste of chocolate, and
Could not be, say, the taste of vanilla or the illusory taste of vanilla? What is the IIT Q-shape that must be the experience of something visual or the illusion of it and could not be the experience of something auditory or the illusion of it?
There is no physicalist theory that can account even for one specific conscious experience or one specific illusion of conscious experience. Question. Is this failure principled? If not, why have physicalist theories so far utterly failed to account for even one specific conscious experience or even one specific illusion of conscious experience?
Oh, well, that’s a good question. But it has, I think, a very straightforward answer. The human brain and nervous system is one of the most complex entities in the known universe. It has not millions or billions but trillions of moving parts.
We’re not going to make sense of that by building up from the atoms or even building up from the knowledge of what one particular neuron does. Notice, by the way, that that’s different in the case of computers. Modern computers have elements, flip-flops, that are as close to atom-for-atom duplicates
Of each other as you could want. They are unbelievably reliable. They all do the same thing. They all do the same thing at the same time. The level of sort of bureaucratic control in a digital computer, thanks to Turing’s vision, is superb.
The brain is a computer, but it is not a von Neumann machine. It’s not digital. It doesn’t have an operating system. So, of course, this is as big a puzzle as you could have, and you’re going to have to go to a higher level to understand.
But that doesn’t mean abandoning the physical. It just means adapting to the innocently emergent properties at higher levels. That’s why neuroscience can’t succeed without psychology. Because psychology has levels of description of complex actions that people perform, say in experiments, that are needed as the targets for neuroscientific explanation.
I remember many years ago—I just thought of this the other day—Vernon Mountcastle, one of the great neuroanatomists of the 20th century, started a Center for Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins, sort of late in his career.
And he invited me, of all people, to come down and advise him on how to set up his center, which was sort of fun and sort of flattering. And he proudly announced that he was getting with the times, and he had a behaviorist on his team.
And I thought, well, that’s a start, but why a behaviorist? Why not have a cognitive psychologist? Because the behaviorists had tied two hands behind their back with their Skinnerian strictures. And what you really want to do is adopt the intentional stance so that you can get at
The real patterns that are readily evoked in heterophenomenological experiments. So we need collaboration between cognitive psychology, computer science, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and philosophy to understand the mind. And you don’t have to be an idealist. I think that’s a dead end.
I see that Hoffman is getting on the IIT bandwagon, Giulio Tononi’s integrated information theory, which I think is largely a mistake. It’s a bit of metaphysics dressed up as science. But Tononi’s a very smart guy, I give him credit for that.
I don’t think he’s a fraud by any stretch of the imagination, but I think he’s a deeply ambitious, nothing wrong with that, deeply misguided theorist about consciousness. I’ll give Tononi one point which I really do appreciate. What’s the difference between
Two oxen pulling a sled filled with stones, a brace of oxen, and a sperm whale? The sperm whale has a giant brain, and it has one eye on one side of its body, and one eye on the other. There’s no binocular overlap.
So the left side and the right side of the sperm whale are actually quite isolated from each other, almost like two oxen. In fact, it’s even possible to discover that, oddly enough, sperm whales are sort of braces of oxen that are joined like Siamese twins.
They’re physically joined, but there’s two minds in there. Now I think the integrated information theory at least has a way of putting the question, how do you tell whether there’s one or two? And that’s not nothing. Now once you get into it, you begin to see, right, and multiple personality disorder,
Which is pre-proved by many people and has been renamed, what do they call it now? Dissociative identity disorder? Dissociative identity disorder, yes. I think that’s theoretically possible, and I think there’s some pretty good cases of it.
I studied it with Nick Humphrey for some time, and we arrived at a sort of Solomonic middle ground, and the people that thought it was a fraud hooted at us, and the people that thought it was real, real, real, real, and not iatrogenic, not caused by the therapists, they thought we were wrong.
And I think we just about hit the nail on the head. It’s a possible condition of which there are various approximate instances. And I think Tononi’s idea enables that conclusion to stand and to be explored experimentally. And we can. Just to be clear, Donald Hoffman’s not a proponent of IIT.
He was just saying, like, it doesn’t account for the taste of chocolate. He was critiquing it. It’s my understanding Donald Hoffman’s an idealist, and given that you’re not, can you please outline briefly what your issues are with idealism?
Well, ever since Barclay, idealism has looked to me like a non-solution to a big problem. If idealism is true, we simply have to reproduce all the rest of science in the idealistic framework, and then go on asking the questions that physicalistic science continues to ask using the tools of the physical sciences,
Not using any tools that idealism provides. It’s a metaphysical view which doesn’t advance thinking. In that way, it’s like panpsychism. I think panpsychism is an obvious non-starter, because if panpsychism is true, then everything is conscious, including carbon atoms and Higgs bosons and all the rest. All right, now what? And then what happens?
It doesn’t explain anything. Panpsychism is a slogan, not a theory. Nothing, no new problems are solved. No new mysteries are exposed to either explanation or dismissal. So it’s, if that floats your boat, okay, but it’s just a slogan. It’s not a theory.
I have compared it, perhaps rudely, but sometimes rudeness, I think, is called for, to panniftyism. Panniftyism is a theory that everything is nifty. Everything. Yeah. Every atom, every subatomic particle, every tree, every mountain, every planet, everything’s nifty. I want to ask the panpsychist, what follows from their theory of panpsychism that doesn’t
Follow from my theory of panniftyism? It’s just an empty term. Yeah. There’s no hooks in it. It doesn’t generate anything. It just sits there as a slogan. If you like it, be my guest. Okay. I would love to explore that with you next time, but we’re running out of time. So I only
Have two more questions for you. One is in your book, I’ve Been Thinking, which will be on the screen now, and the link is in the description. That’s Daniel Dennett’s latest book. What was there in it that you had to leave out for some reason, whether it’s for space or just didn’t
Thematically fit? What did I have to leave out? Oh, my. I left out lots of stories about sad failures by various people who maybe paid a terrible price for them, or maybe didn’t, but I don’t want to hurt them, and they’re not doing any harm now.
So, you know, I don’t want to be a tattletale. I could tell stories about scientific misconduct, and for that matter, about sexual abuse by professors that are long dead, and so forth. I don’t tell any of that stuff. I know it. Everybody knows it, or everybody knows their own
Set of cases, and there was no place for that in the book. I see. What piece of advice do you wish you had received earlier in your career? Well, I got lucky. I got some good advice very early on, which was learn some science.
And especially biology. Because I think biology, I think Darwin’s dangerous idea really is the idea that ties everything together. Purpose, control, information, consciousness, life, civilization, art, music, ties it all together. And I wish I’d become a proper biologist, not just an autodidact and an eager student and interlocutor of biologists much earlier.
But it didn’t seem to matter much. I picked up my pace, and I’m still trying to drag philosophers into seeing that they are ignorant of Darwin at their peril, if they want to be philosophers. Okay, how about rather than you giving your former self advice,
What advice do you give your graduate students? And I’ll give you an example. I heard you in the Michael Shermer podcast say that David Chalmers and Christoph Koch, that they butt heads about the hard problem of consciousness. And you said that, look,
When you see two people locking for quite some time, you could find out what’s going on. What do they agree on? And then you either attack that, or you question that. I forgot what the exact reasoning was, but that would be an example. You said you give that piece of advice to your
Graduate students. So can you recount that and also tell us what other pieces of advice do you give? Well, I’ve already mentioned a few of them. One of them is what you can imagine, and philosophers really depend on their imaginations, depends on what you know.
So don’t think of philosophy as an ivory tower discipline, because the philosophy that’s done in an ivory tower, it’s not impossible to do good philosophy in the ivory tower, but it’s darn hard to get it right, and very few philosophers ever have. And if you look at the history of philosophy,
Aristotle, I’ll just pick out Aristotle and Hume and Descartes and Leibniz, all great philosophers, also great scientists. The distinction between a philosopher and a scientist is a recent development. Socrates, not a scientist. And a lot of philosophies, foibles, trace back, I think, to Socrates.
And what was the piece of advice with David Chalmers and Christoph Koch? Oh yeah, the advice was, when you see an apparently interminable conflict between two thinkers, here’s a way of finding out where somebody’s got to be wrong, somebody’s misinterpreting something. And I think I know what it often is,
And I’ve described this. It’s a chapter in my book on intuition pumps and other tools for thinking. Get the two experts, get Christoph and David in the same room with a group of bright undergraduates, and have first one of them explain what the issue is to the undergraduates. Okay.
And listen, cold. These are not philosophy students, necessarily. Yes. Or neuroscience students. Explain what the issues are. While the other one sits there and listens. So that neither of the experts will make the almost irresistible tactical mistake of underexplaining. When experts talk to experts, they underexplain because to overexplain is to
Insult. And they’re nice, they don’t want to insult. So they deliberately have a target audience that is not their fellow experts. That was the strategy behind Consciousness Explained. It was a trade book. It was for everybody. It was for, you know, the educated lay person.
Not just for scientists, but it is actually for scientists and philosophers. But I wrote it as a trade book so that the scientists and the philosophers could sort of make book on me. They can see how I explain these things to undergraduates or to educated lay people. And
This would have the effect of saying, oh, well, the parts of my field that he explains, he gets pretty much right. He understands my field pretty well. And then that means they’re more apt to think that maybe I’m going to be right about some of
The rest of it. And very often, I mean, I’ve actually done this experiment, not as much as I would like to have done. You actually do this with a group of bright undergraduates and two warring experts. And what can happen is one of them listens, you know, eavesdrops on the first
And says, oh, now I get it. That’s what you mean. I never realized that was the real heart of your position. Now, would that happen with Christoph and David? I’m not sure. It might, but they’re mighty entrenched. And I’ve argued with both of them many, many hours, and I haven’t really been
Able to budge either one of them very much. But they would say the same to you, no? They would say, I haven’t been able to budge Daniel. Well, of course they say that. And they’re right. So, let’s see if we can find something that all three of us agree on that’s wrong,
And maybe that’s the place to dig for gold. Many people who are watching are researchers in philosophy with some graduate students in philosophy and professors of philosophy, but many people are not, but they’re interested in philosophy, and they want to know, okay, we can do so. We can philosophize, like you mentioned,
In the ivory tower. But in day-to-day interactions in my everyday world, how do I enrich my life with philosophy? You’re speaking directly to those people now. The so what, like, so what to all of this? So what, there’s a problem with induction. So what? Oh, well, of course the obvious answer
Is they should read all my trade books. And then they will have a large, detailed, and quite unified set of answers to many of the most important philosophical questions. Now, some of them, I’m sure, are not right. But at least they will have armed themselves with some pretty good
Candidates. Then they can read my critics. And then I don’t think they’ll be wasting their time. I could tell you a lot of philosophical books that they’d be wasting their time reading. I could also tell you a lot of scientific books that they’d be wasting their time reading.
But I’m not going to do that. So the written works of Daniel Dennett are in the description, and I encourage you to browse through, see one that the title vivifies you, and click on it, purchase it, read it. I would say, if you’re interested in free will, if you’re interested in consciousness,
If you’re interested in evolution, if you’re interested in the nature of life, or the meaning of life, or if, in fact, if you’re interested in ethics, punishment. Daniel Dennett is widely recognized by philosophers, even his critics, as one of the most original thinkers of our time.
Daniel Dennett, thank you for coming on The Theories of Everything Show. Thank you, Curt. You’ve done a very good job interviewing me. Very good. Nice to talk with you. The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven’t subscribed or clicked
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21 Comments
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!WRONG!
Daniel Dennett, you are wrong
Illusion or not, please say something new or helps with the inquiry of how or why the "illusion" arises at all…otherwise you are simply relabeling phenomenal consciousness to that of illusion, not saying much in the end.
By just stating that "nature has produced these illusions for us that is of great use to us" makes complete 0 account of the analytic process of how this even occurs
46:40. The confessions he speaks about: depending on the ratio of this occurrence, I would argue hit guests were attempting their own experiment with reason and moral logic at his expense.
Yeah, they were having a go at him for an assertion he probably made that evening.
Eternally grateful for Dennett's work! Almost every time I encounter one of his positions, I know the correct answer lies somewhere in the complete opposite direction 😉
Thank you so much Curt. An incredible guest and brilliant interview, as you do so consistently. Watching other appearances your guests make, it is always clear how much they truly value the quality of your work as a host and insight as a person. This adds immensely to the pleasure of following the discussion. Dennett is the man, and so are you
While I agree with the argument against Sapolski, I believe some assumption made are just not true. For example, the best rock/paper/scissors strategy is certainly not ALWAYS to be random, as you are playing against a human where the complexity of game theory is entirely applicable. What happened in the past rounds should certainly usually your decision in the next round, especially if your opponent is not acting as a computer playing randomly. Therefore, if your opponent is playing randomly then randomness IS the best strategy. If they are not playing randomly, randomness will not exploit their weaknesses fully. If you don't know what their strategy is, then randomness might be the best approach, but there is a more realistic chance that they are not playing randomly (most likely true in everyday life, as people do not usually use computers to make decisions and their actions are consciously or subconsciously influenced in some way by they past), you are missing chances to exploit there biases.
It seems like free will is the capacity to not react impulsively to life’s demands and to not give in to instant gratification. That ability seems quite rare and limited in most of us, including myself at times (as I stare at the bag of Sour Patch Kids I’m about to rip through).
Jeebus man. I hear Dennett is a respected man, but this nonsense slight of hand with what 'free will' is, surely isn't the reason.
He base his biased belief on two things:
Firstly he conflates a complex system with magical self agency. What he describes are just the increased computing/decision power from a rock, to a tree, and to us, and then he claims that, that power is equal to self determinism aka free will. However, it has nothing in common. That 'we' have more concentrated computing/decision power than a rock or a tree, doesn't mean we have free will. It just means that our dynamic deterministic cognitive system have more options to react to our environment.
Secondly, he's afraid of what the truth will do to people, so his fear makes him attack the truth of our reality. However, his idea of what science says about behavior from people that don't believe in free will, are absolutely primitive and biased by his original pov. Those studies are flawed, scarce and definitely not worrying enough to keep lying to people about free will. Also, may I remind mr Dennett of how much death and suffering belief in free will causes ? All hate, all revenge, all blame are caused by the primitive belief in free will, and that's only scratching the surface. But this primitive man still have the balls to say that non-believers are dangerous ??
What an anti intellectual relic he is 😞
Absolute treat! Love daniels methaphors/comparisons in his explanations
In the intro there was a mention of the recent paper "The Ego of the Mind" by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. I can't find it, anyone got DOI link or exact title?
One of the most powerful scenes in all of movie history is the opening scene in The Godfather, voted by many as the greatest movie of all times. Americo Bonasera the undertaker is talking to Vito Corleine. Bonasera means goodnight in Italian. Just as night always follows day and death is inevitable, the movie is all about the freewill of Vito's son Michael who unlike his older brothers that are drawn into the family business, Michael does everything to avoid it. Just as Bonasera's daughter winds up with a broken jaw, and he demands death for the two boys who assaulted her, in a later scene Michael sits in that same room with a bruised jaw plotting the assasination of McCluskey and Salozzo. In the wedding garden scene Michael dressed in his uniform speaks with his innocent fiance about his own non-involvement in family business while the monster Luca Brasi sits at a nearby table. Michael becomes a monster. Of course on can argue Michael could have done otherwise except he is driven by family loyalty and inner ambition. We can argue free will but it is also our sociology that shapes and drives us.
https://youtu.be/rog7kB0NYCo?si=7m36X2JYGiDhM-ej
I’m in the middle of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Might I request that Prof. Dennett reissue the text in a pared down edition for a more general readership.
But what is my body? It could actually be the whole universe or something unusual like that. My body apparently generates this abstraction of my self, as he says.
And again Kurt, you give us the best interview (I've seen) for this important philosopher. Best wishes Daniel you have a beautiful mind
This was marvelous.
I need some help using ai ChatGPT ….can someone help?
They work for 30 years to have $1 million when they retire, while some people put just $10,000 into a crypto market for just a few hours and are now millionaires, all thanks to Ms.Katherine. God bless you ma'am…
"I am a person–nothing magical about that!" This guy is an atheist, and a little defensive about it. Listening to him is like watching an intellectual rodeo!
Disappointed that you did not find Shapiro's and Hollands books in the description? For those that missed it:
Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks, by Scoot J. Shapiro
Emergence: From Chaos To Order, by John H. Holland