Daniel Dennett Retrospective

Josh Landy
If nothing is without a cause, can we ever have free will?

Ray Briggs
Is consciousness just an illusion?

Josh Landy
Does evolution explain the way our minds work?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about the life and thought of Daniel Dennett.

Josh Landy
Dan Dennett was a prolific American philosopher who passed away in April 2024 At the age of 82. He was famous for his philosophical writings on consciousness, free will, and evolution.

Ray Briggs
And he was also considered one of the four horsemen of the new atheist movement. He didn’t believe in anything supernatural. He thought science could explain everything.

Josh Landy
Okay, wait a minute, didn’t he believe in free will? That seems a little hard to square with a thoroughgoing scientific worldview? I mean, look, wouldn’t you have to believe that our brains do something completely uncaused every time they make a decision that the laws of physics suddenly don’t apply?

Ray Briggs
Come on, Josh, he didn’t believe in that kind of freewill, the kind that’s incompatible with our brains being subject to the laws of physics. He just thought freewill was a matter of having control over your own actions instead of being coerced or manipulated, now was done its whole deal. It was really cool. Instead of throwing away traditional concepts like freewill, he just found a way to interpret them that was in keeping with a scientific worldview.

Josh Landy
Hey, that’s not how he treated conscious experiences like the delicious taste of my old Grey tea. I mean for that concept, he seemed to want to throw it away. You wanted to claim that these subjective experiences are like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. He said consciousness is an illusion.

Ray Briggs
Or maybe there’s no contradiction there. He he wanted to follow the science wherever it takes us. With free will. It takes us to a more sophisticated understanding of human autonomy. But with consciousness, it takes us to a skeptical approach.

Josh Landy
I don’t know I still think Dennett should have been consistent he should have saved subjective experience the same way he saved free will.

Ray Briggs
Well, that’s one of the things we’re going to be talking about today will actually be listening to some excerpts from two episodes of Philosophy Talk. Were Dennett was John and Ken’s guest: “Intelligent Design” from 2006 and “Neuroscience and Free Will” from 2015.

Josh Landy
And we’ll be talking about them with our old friend geneticists, male professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins. She wrote a whole book building on danitz ideas about freewill and she’s going to help us untangle these different threads and debits thought

Ray Briggs
But first, let’s get a quick overview of Dennett’s impact beyond philosophy from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… In his lifetime Daniel Dennett was referred to as one of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism, with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. But that’s kind of a Biblical way to look at atheism, isn’t it?  Much less New Atheism, whatever that means.  Maybe old atheism was not as inclusive?  Anyway, why would you name atheists after the four horsemen.  Atheists want to end End Times, not join the parade. It’s like naming a cocktail after a teetotaller, or making Donald Trump a marriage counsellor.  Also, the outrage or whatever it is about an atheism has been muted since Madeline Murray O Hair died.  Conservatism has shied away from religious belief.  They might suck up to the Christian right, but we don’t see Trump at prayer breakfast, do we?  True, he’s selling his own Bible, but that’s just branding, really.  Entrepreneurs always bring out their own edition because it’s out of copyright.  It’s free money!  They still go on about woke – wouldn’t woke be godly though?- and immorality, and right to life, but there’s more gun thumpers than preachers out there, and if the name Trump comes out of a Christian mouth, it’s usually to usher in more unborn, get the right kind of judges, elect the right kind of delusional politicians. Certainly there’s a cult but he’s more like a teen idol, only old.  His Washington acolytes even went to his trial dressed like him, remember?   Ill-fitting suit and red neck tie down to the crotch?  Like what Reagan used to wear, except he shelled out for a tailor.  The point being that Dennet’s crusade against God, if such it was, kind of hit a wall of jello.  We don’t care if people believe in God or not, we only want those gestures of respect chosen at our discretion to remain in place- saluting, placing hand over heart, not allowing boys in the girl’s locker room, letting the Rio Grande dry up even as stop people from crossing it, wishing for a second Rav 4, maybe have an auto da fe or two at the local community college.  Kierkegaard called belief in God a leap of faith, but according to Dennett it actually comes from little mental hops over centuries.  God accrued in our brain, in history, in society, slowly, through the development of language, and memes, stories, the imagining of beginnings.  Keep in mind that Dennett was a very good charismatic teacher, he loved it when students argued with him.  He was also a singer.  Sang hymns!  Played Bach.  Hosted Christmas carol parties every year.  He made wine.  Knew how to drive a stick shift.  Taught his neighbors how to use a chainsaw safetly.  All in all, it seems, a good bourgeois faux-country-living intelligent Christian gentleman, only thing missing is the faith.  How is he different from so-called believers?  In the years before his passing, he was becoming alarmed by artificial intelligence.  He told an interviewer, “If we turn this wonderful technology … into a weapon for disinformation we are in deep trouble….   we won’t know what we know, and won’t know who to trust…. We may become either paranoid and hyper-skeptical, or just apathetic and unmoved. Both of those are very dangerous avenues. And they’re upon us.”  Sound familiar? It alarmed him that AI is being developed to actually fool people into thinking it’s human.  Eventually, it is feared, or hoped, if you’re an ardent capitalist, to replace us!  Writing for free, acting for free, kind of like the replicants in Blade Runner, only instead of toiling on Mars, they’re in show business, writing and making bingeable seven part mini series for Netflix that are watched by millions, only they’re AI too.  Dennett called them counterfeit humans, and wanted to make them illegal, while we still can.  So if counterfeit humans DO come to be, manning the self checkout lanes at drug stores, say, while writing stump speeches for fascists.  Counterfeit humans would make US real then, and WE created them, making us gods, kind of, which makes any god we dreamt up also real.  Well okay this is a  fallacy, but the fuzziness of logic does not diminish the warm cuddly fuzziness of the message.   We invented a machine, if you will, that generates faith.  And in return offers comfort and a reason to live.  God may not be real, but he sure is effective. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
That almost made me believe in angels. I’m Josh Landy with me as my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs and today we’re thinking about the philosophy of Daniel Dennett.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Jenann Ismael. She is professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and author of many things at the intersection of philosophy and science, including “How Physics Makes Us Free.” Jenann, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Jenann Ismael
So good to be back. Thank you for having me.

Josh Landy
So Jenann, you worked on some topics similar to those of Dennett. And you also knew him a little bit personally, what was he like?

Jenann Ismael
I actually didn’t meet Dennett until 2016, after my book came out, and he was kind of an amazing person larger than life. He contacted me after my book came out and just said, Oh, I’ve just read your magnificent book. And I have all sorts of things to say about it. And he wrote me he sent me actually notes that he’d written up about it. And he said, almost as a kind of minor side, oh, you got some things that I believe wrong. And also, some things about the story that I started with the book kind of fictional piece that I described as the best piece of philosophical fiction ever written, that I stand on as true. But I actually got the plot of the book wrong. And he didn’t mind at all. He was much more interested in talking about the ideas. He wasn’t so much interested in kind of quibbles about what I said about him. That’s the kind of person he was.

Ray Briggs
What a great example for us all. Dennett also had some unusual views about conscious experience. Can you explain what was going on with his views there?

Jenann Ismael
Yeah, I can. And in fact, it connects back to something that you said about how why he treats conscious experience differently than he does free? Well, I think he what he didn’t believe in was the phenomena that make us believe that we have these kinds of special ineffable experiences that only we can sort of have have direct access to. So he started with the phenomena that makes us believe that and he thinks that those phenomena make us think of our minds in a certain way. We think that there’s a kind of little self inside the mind and a Cartesian sort of what he calls the Cartesian theater experiences.

Ray Briggs
Wait, wait, I want to I want to make sure I understand what the what the picture is he’s arguing against so I take it it’s something like when I when I see the color red, there is something kind of just like your inducibly like, I don’t know, like sensation about seeing the color red are like when I feel pain, like there’s something to pain that I can’t convey in words and that I can’t convey to another person any way whatsoever. So I think I think Dennett use the word qualia for these, which is kind of a weird technical word, but like those kind of like essential like what it feels like.

Jenann Ismael
Yeah, he thought the that when people talk about qualia, they think that there’s an intrinsic quality to our experience, that only we have access. As to that’s distinct from reports or information that it conveys. That’s what qualia means that he thought was a philosopher’s invention.

Josh Landy
Okay, so this is what this is what confuses me, right? So I’m sitting here, drinking a delicious cup of Earl Grey tea. And I feel like, I mean, maybe he would say, I’m just wrong. I feel like I’m having those sensations. When I eat something with cilantro in it, I find it utterly disgusting. So I’m one of those weird people with the some kind of genetic difference. But I see all my friends, eating it and having a wonderful time. So it seems pretty clear to me that something’s going on in my sensory experience that’s very different from theirs. I’ll never fully know what it is like for them to taste cilantro or something delicious. They’ll never fully know what it’s like for me to taste it as something disgusting. Why should we reject that, that way of thinking about things?

Jenann Ismael
Right, so they sat what you said there, of course, it’s true that there’s something different that’s going on with you, for example, you’re not liking it, your face is going to show a particular look, you’re not going to eat it, you’re not going to pursue it. There’s all kinds of things that other people can see about the way that you behave and the function, that cilantro or the impact that Cilantro has on you. And the way that that your behavior is organized around that you’ll In addition, you’ll be inclined to say things like, I don’t like that you’ll report that your experiences, bitter or unpleasant. Dennett was happy with all of that with all of the visible behavioral and functional differences that you can report and that other people will have be able to observe in you. What he didn’t think, is that when you get rid of all of that there’s some ineffable remainder, the intrinsic quality of your experience that’s over and above all of that.

Josh Landy
But you know, I’m a Proustian, and I have to believe in that intrinsic quality. Why is it so if there isn’t anything leftover? Then why is it so hard to characterize? Why do we need poets to use, you know, pyrotechnics of language to convey to us the way in which you know that sunlight feels on our face? dappling through leaves, or, or the way in which something tastes on our tongue? It seems like, you know, if you’re with Dennett, you would just say, just observe the behavior. And that’s, that’s all you need. You don’t need all this poetry.

Jenann Ismael
So to a large extent, I’m with you on this. I share all of that. But I think there’s a sympathetic reason, a way of reading what Dennett says there’s a kind of frustrating thing that happens with dengue, which is you read some of the rhetoric that he uses around some of his most controversial positions, and you feel like it’s clear that he’s wrong, and then you talk to him about it. And he’s actually I mean, what you end up with at the end of the conversation is a much more reasonable view. So I’m gonna give you the sympathetic the parts of Dennett, on qualia that I find actually quite persuasive. So what what are you doing and what is someone like Proust doing when they’re describing their experience? They’re taking something and they’re giving you an articulated for kind of reflection, that shapes whatever’s going on in them into a rather articulated some, something that’s articulated by the language with which they describe it. So there’s no question that what Bruce does is he takes whatever happens to him and he delivers you this linguistically articulated, beautiful package, then it’s very happy with the the process of reflecting on your language and the product of that process, which is a linguistic package that has all kinds of, you know, words in it. And what he’s not happy with is the idea that what that linguistic package and is the artifact of reflection, that there’s something before that linguistic package that you’re describing.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the philosophy of the late Daniel Dennett, with Jenann Ismael from Johns Hopkins University.

Ray Briggs
What does neuroscience tell us about free will? In a moment, we’ll listen to excerpts from a 2015 episode where Dennett join John and Ken to tackle this question.

Josh Landy
John, Ken, and Dan—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Oasis
How long’s it gonna be before we get on the bus and cause no fuss, get a grip on yourself, it don’t cost much.

Josh Landy
We’re free to do whatever we want—or are we? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs and we’re thinking about the life and thought of Daniel Dennett with Jenann Ismael from Johns Hopkins University.

Josh Landy
Got questions about this wide ranging American philosopher? Email us comments@philosophytalk.org, or you can comment on our website—and hile you’re there you can also become a subscriber and question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
Dennet’s last time on the program was in 2015 for an episode about neuroscience and free will. Let’s listen to an excerpt from that show. Ken asks Dennett whether experiments in neuroscience prove anything at all about freewill?

Ken Taylor
How seriously should we take these claims from the neuroscientists about how we make choices? I mean, neuroscientists are fond of saying they shown that free will is an illusion.

Daniel Dennett
So they are but but their experiments only show what in reflection you should realize is obvious. You know, somebody says, my brain made me do it. Well, what would you want to make you do it? That’s how I want my brain to make me do it. And the only thing that’s at all striking is that it turns out, there are patterns in your brain under some conditions, but only very weird and special conditions, where a so called prediction can be made. Let’s take the soon article that you mentioned. First of all, the examples of free choices that started with Libet and that others have done are bizarre examples because they are deliberately chosen as choices, which don’t mean a thing. They are supposed to be absolutely arbitrary. on sheer whim. Just when the spirit moves, you push the left button, push the right button, flick your wrist, nothing hangs on them. So they are deliberately drained of all meaning and all purpose.

Ray Briggs
It sounds like Dennett is saying that some kinds of freewill are worth having or wanting, and some aren’t. What’s the difference between the ones that are worth having and the ones that aren’t?

Jenann Ismael
I mean, I was nodding all the way through that. I think the limit so the way that Dan thinks about freewill and the way that all right thinking people should think about free will, is that when when you’re exercising your free will paradigmatically you’re doing something like you’re making a choice that’s drawing on your plans and priorities and projects, and the kinds of things that matter to you. And it’s the capacity to develop exactly those things that makes us different from the things that we don’t think of as having free will. And when you’re making a deliberative choice of that kind, you’re drawing on something that’s deliberately in those limited experiments completely sidelined. It’s just not engaging the kinds of machinery that we think of as characteristic of the exercise of freewill. So I think he’s right to say, look, that stuff’s completely irrelevant.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. So So I think that the idea that like a choice has to be about something important that you have reasons to choose one way or the other, if free will is going to matter. I think that that makes a lot of sense to me, too. On the other hand, I feel like there might be a tension between that commitment and another commitment I have, which is that free will is about responding correctly to your reasons for doing something. So I worried that like, if free will is about sort of listening to my reasons and not making explainable mistakes, but it matters to exercise freewill in choices where there’s a wrong answer. And then puzzled about how I can ever freely choose the wrong thing. Which it seems like I can so if I choose the wrong thing. Seems like I’m not really responding to my reasons. What would Dennett say to that?

Jenann Ismael
So I think you have a notion of “I” in mind that’s very different from dense. So Dennett doesn’t think that there’s a single unified thing that is the me, he thinks that what we are is an embodied mind, and that our minds are irreducibly complex in the following way, you know, we are the product of a long history of evolutionary selection. And like other animals, we are in part, the emergent product of a bundle of kind of three deliberative modules that do things like seek food, and that produce language and do things like pursue meeting and feeding opportunities. And these things are cobbled together in a way that more or less produces emergent behavior. Sometimes one of those is stronger, sometimes another one is stronger, but he thinks there’s something else too, which is overlaid over top of that, the ability which is partly the product of culture and partly the product of evolution to make conscious decisions. But when we’re making conscious decisions were in some way. You’re taking stock of all of these other wants and desires, some of them pre deliberative, some of them innate, some of them developed over the course of our histories. And we’re saying what do I want to do here? So when you wake up in the morning, and you’ve got on the one hand, you do have reasons to do things like sleep then, on the other hand, you have other reasons to do things like no, I need to get up. And what you do in the end, just the product of the combination of those things. So I don’t think he would say, in either case, there’s a right or a wrong decision, one of them comes from you, and one of them doesn’t.

Josh Landy
Let’s listen to another excerpt. So Dan here is following up his previous comments with a callback to the Roving Philosophical Report in that episode, which featured a magician explaining some of his tricks.

Daniel Dennett
We all know the game of rock, paper and scissors. If you ever get in the situation where somebody’s just got your number, and they’re winning, and winning and winning and winning, it’s very spooky, because apparently, in those cases, you see that somebody really is either anticipating your choices very well, or in some subtle way, manipulating you. And that’s what magicians are actually very good at. And there’s been an arms race of sorts of covert manipulation that human beings have been engaged in, you know, since the Stone Age.

Speaker 1
Okay, are you willing to say on the basis of that kind of study? Because they’re all you’re right, there are tons of studies that show that all these things seem to be controlling our behavior of which we’re entirely unaware. And when we offer an explanation of why we did what we did, it’s mostly confabulation and it’s missing. Does that help convince you that free will is an illusion?

Daniel Dennett
No. It convinces me that free will is sometimes an illusion, because some people set out to manipulate other people knowing that if you know that you are a target of manipulation, you can and if you know the latest stuff about what’s being done, you can fend this off. And that is actually an important part of your freedom.

Josh Landy
So Jenann, Dennett seems to be saying that all we need is absence of coercion, manipulation, etc. And then you’ve got free will. But is that really right?

Jenann Ismael
I think what he has in mind there is something a little bit stronger. So what is it to have free will, is to be able to react and override something like coercion. So the remember what coercion is, in those examples, it’s something that’s trying to control your behavior in a way that bypasses your knowledge of it. I think freewill has to be something like the ability to override to have the last say, to react to anything that you know about. So as soon as somebody makes known to you, or as soon as you find out about the attempts to control your behavior, you have the last say.

Ray Briggs
I think that some free will skeptics have wanted more, that I have not just the ability to notice when something or someone is interfering with me. But the ability to do otherwise, like whether or not something is interfering with me. What would Dennett have said about that?

Jenann Ismael
So what does the ability to do otherwise mean? It means the ability for me to do otherwise than I would have done? Had I not made the decision to do this, it can’t be the ability for me to do otherwise than I did.

Josh Landy
Right,and that’s kind of a crucial question right in in the way in which Dennett is thinking about what free will is and what it isn’t, if I understand correctly, he’s saying, Look, people like to talk about freewill in those terms, could I have done differently or not? If I couldn’t possibly have done differently, then I’m not free in the sense that matters. And then I say No, that isn’t the sense that matters. The only the only real question is, were you coerced? affected? Could you rise above that? Could you you know, even if people were trying to tempt you to do something some way, you know, were you able to assert your own autonomy in response to that. I don’t quite understand why it isn’t important. Whether or not I could have done differently seems like that surely makes a difference. It makes a difference to whether I feel like I was really free, whether I was really responsible, or that was really down to me, what has done it reject that.

Jenann Ismael
So when you say that could have done differently, there’s always a question could have done differently given what so if it’s could have done differently, given my past history or given, you know, what, what’s going on outside of me? The things that make people worry about free will do not show that given the environment or given the facts as they are outside of you. You couldn’t have done differently. What they sometimes seem to mean is yes, but could I have done differently given my own beliefs and desires and plans and projects? And I think then it would say to that, but those things are me.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the late American philosopher Daniel Dennett with Jenann Ismael from Johns Hopkins University. And we’re listening to excerpts from Dennett’s last appearance on the program in 2015, recorded at an undergraduate philosophy conference at Pacific University in Oregon. This one’s from a member of that live audience.

Big Daddy Bauer
Thank you. My name is Big Daddy Bauer. I’m from Boise State University. My question is simply this. Is it maybe that in a compatibilist framework, we have freewill in certain things and not in others. And in the compatibilist framework, if we don’t have free will, could we know it?

Ray Briggs
Let’s pause that for a moment. Big Daddy Bauer is using a technical term here: compatibilist. So compatibilism is the idea that free will is compatible with determinism.

Josh Landy
Good point, Ray. Let’s keep rolling that tape.

Speaker 1
Is that like being a little pregnant—free will and certain things and not others?

Daniel Dennett
That’s a very good question. Because we obviously have variable free will sometimes were overcome with emotion were overcome with gluttony with it with an obsession with whatever. And and we recognize that in ourselves, we recognize it’s a human problem. And, in fact, one of the interesting things to me about freewill in this area, is that over the centuries, we’ve invented helps prosthetic aids to improve our free will, for instance, and we all know them, it’s, you know, don’t buy the junk food and habit in the house because you won’t be able to resist it if it’s there. Or one of my favorites is the farmer who drops a quarter down the outhouse. When he’s pulling up his pants, and he swears and throws a $5 bill down after the quarter. And somebody says, Why are you doing that? He says you don’t think I’m going down there for a quarter, do you?

Ken Taylor
That’s called volitional engineering.

Ray Briggs
Jenann, Dennett is talking about this volitional engineering stuff, ways that we can use our environments to scaffold our freewill. Are there any new opportunities to do that in the digital age, or there may be some new challenges there.

Jenann Ismael
There are all kinds of ways to do that. I mean, you make commitments and you agree to schedules and people increasingly hold themselves accountable by having digital mechanisms that keep track of their behaviors. And sometimes they advertise their behaviors as a way of having bringing other people on board to keep them accountable. This is, you know, one of the pathologies I think, in some ways of, of having watches that will count anything that you do.

Josh Landy
We were talking a moment ago about compatibilism. Right. So this idea that Dennett had, that you can retain a notion of autonomy in spite of also believing in determinism and one thing I’m wondering is, how is his picture on that different from predecessors like Kitson Hume, some people think to the stoics Nietzsche says the desire for freedom of the will involves nothing less than to pull oneself up into existence by the hair seems very Dennett style. Schopenhauer says humans can do what they will, but they can’t will what they will, right. So you’re free to choose between chocolate vanilla ice cream, but you can’t reprogram your own desire. So you suddenly like vanilla. How is Dennett compatible this picture different from the ones that came before?

Jenann Ismael
I think it’s so much richer. So I mean, the determinism is in its traditional form, the problem of Free Will was a confrontation between what at the time the fundamental physical theory was, which was classical mechanics that tells you that you can derive every factor about the future if you knew the initial state of the Universe with our immediate kind of first personal experience of agency, what Dennett did and what was sort of characteristic of the way that he approaches these problems is, instead of taking that sort of immediate confrontation between your intuition of being, you know, free agent to act in any way you want, and what the fundamental physics says, He filled in all of these layers in between, and you said, let’s take a kind of side on look and look at the evolution first and primitive creatures that are that have some sort of, you know, rudimentary control over their behaviors and, and start to fill in the kinds of more sophisticated machinery between stimulus and response that was on the one hand that kind of early glimmerings of what would eventually be the sorts of highly evolved minds that we have. And I think once you fill in all of those immediate layers, you begin to see a route between the fundamental physics to something that looks very much like, you know, in the way that he would put it the kinds of Free Will worth wanting, where those two things are, are compatible in a way that they didn’t look compatible from that initial confrontation.

Ray Briggs
So Jenann, we’ve got another audience question from that 2015 episode with John, Ken, and Dan.

Caitlin
Thank you. I’m Caitlin from Lewis and Clark College. So if neuroscience did show that all of our actions could be predicted before we decided to do them, and so seemed to indicate that we didn’t have freewill, do you think it would impact society beyond philosophy at all? Or is it far too useful for us to think and act as though we have free will? And so we always will?

Daniel Dennett
Well, there’s a lot packed into the ifs there. First of all, if neuroscience can predict what we’re going to do, are the neuroscientists going to share their predictions with us in advance? And think about what that does, this is actually a subtle point. If they’re going to publicly predict what we’re going to do, then they have to calculate the effects of their public prediction on us. And that turns out to be an intractable problem. They can’t do it. So there’s a certain sense in which, even if determinism is true, and even if they can gather the evidence, they can’t tell us.

Ray Briggs
Jenann, what do you think would happen if neuroscientists or maybe AI could predict everything you’re going to do when people just give up and stop believing in free will?

Jenann Ismael
I love this question. And I think what Dennett says about it is exactly right. So if they made known to us their prediction of what we could do, I call this the I’m not sure if I’m allowed to use this word, but I call this the fu argument. Someone tells you their prediction of what you’re going to do, you can turn around and thumb your nose at them and do exactly the opposite. That kind of self control. That kind of ability to react in any way that you choose to your environment is partly what Dannette saw as absolutely central to the specifically human form of freedom. So and it connects to the stuff about coercion. So the only way that someone can coerce you is if they try to bypass your kind of evolutionary endowment of that kind of self control.

Josh Landy
Alright, let’s hear one more excerpt. Another question from the audience that that live recording in Oregon.

Craig
Hi there. I’m Craig from Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. And I was just curious, it’s always seemed to me that the idea of the self and the idea of free will are closely linked. So can we have a self without the concept of free will?

Ken Taylor
That’s a good question for Dan Dennett, who’s sort of tempted to revise the concept the self,

Daniel Dennett
that’s what a self is, the self is, what does those actions, just think about something very simple for a moment, think about looking at yourself in the mirror? How do you know that you? Because you know what you look like? No, but because you can go like this, and watch the mirror reflection, do the same thing. It’s because you know what you are doing. And you’re know that you can perform these actions in the world. And when you see the mirror image, perfectly in sync with it. That’s how you know that you’re looking at a mirror. And I think that right there, we see that self recognition, and the capacity. The can do, as John says, to act and to choose to act are really very tightly linked.

Josh Landy
I love this question. Can you say a little bit about this, Jenann—can you say just a tiny bit more about Dennett’s view of the self?

Jenann Ismael
Yes, this is one of the places where I think in some places he speaks misleadingly, as though the self is a kind of illusion and uses some misleading analogies. I think what he said in response to that question, was the more sophisticated view as a self where he thinks there is a self, but the self is sort of complicated product of a lot of pre personal processing in the mind, that ends up doing things like issuing all things considered judgments about what to believe and can make promises and more pointedly in this context, makes decisions take stock of its desires, its commitments, its plans and projects and says, All things considered, this is what I’m going to do here. It’s not some special object in the mind. It’s not something lodged behind the pineal gland. It’s not something that the neuroscientists are going to see if they subject all of the brain activity to kind of close microscopic scrutiny.

Josh Landy
And yet, it’s something real and efficacious. I really like this way of thinking about things. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re exploring the philosophy of the late Dan Dennett, with Jenann Ismael from Johns Hopkins University.

Ray Briggs
Dennett was a big proponent of Darwin’s theory of evolution. So what can and can’t we learn from Darwin? After the break, we’ll hear excerpts from an episode John and Ken recorded with Dennett in 2006 on intelligent design.

Josh Landy
Dan Dennett on Darwin’s dangerous ideas—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Chris Smither
I’ll just sit back in the shade while everyone gets laid—that’s what I call intelligent design.

Josh Landy
God, evolution and the toe-tapping rhythms of Intelligent Design. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Jenann Ismael from Johns Hopkins University. And we’re thinking about the philosophy of the late Daniel Dennett.

Josh Landy
So Dan’s first appearance on this program was way back in 2006, for an episode about intelligent design. Here’s John asking Dan a question about false theories that lead to true discoveries.

John Perry
Kepler was a real religious nut. And he mainly was trying to show that the way the planets worked, fell into some mathematical ratio that a reasonable God might have liked. Buried in all that was his discovery that the orbits are elliptical. Don’t we have to be a little careful about dismissing people with far out ideas like intelligent design, even if they do come from religion?

Josh Landy
Absolutely. But let’s see their ideas. Let’s see what they have to offer. There are lots of wild and wonderful and crazy revolutionary hypotheses out there in evolutionary biology land, that are not in the textbooks and aren’t taught in the schools because the people haven’t yet been able to marshal the case for them. For it. My favorite is the aquatic ape theory, which says that our ancestors went through a period of going into the sea, they were becoming more like sea otters or seals, and they spent some time pretty much living in the water before they came back on land. There’s actually a lot more evidence for that than there is for any of the Intelligent Design hypotheses.

Speaker 1
Look Dan, you’ve in your writings talked about something called the design stance. Yeah. And the physical stance and something else you call the intentional stance. I mean, design is all around us. I mean, the inference from, you know, the functioning of this thing, that complex functioning of this thing to the conclusion that it’s designed is an inference we make all the time.

Josh Landy
Absolutely. But there’s a fatal equivocation in the word design. Paley was right. The biological world is packed with design. Absolutely. What Darwin showed is how that design can come to exist without a designer. That’s what the theory of evolution is all about. When When Francis Crick makes a joke and talks about Warragul second law, which is that evolution is cleverer than you are. He’s not advocating intelligent design. He’s saying that the process of natural selection, which is itself, has no foresight, no intentions is completely stupid, nevertheless creates brilliant designs.

So this is pretty interesting, Jenann. If I’m understanding Dennett correctly here, he seems to be very confident that we can ditch the beliefs that, you know, he thinks are wrong with no cost. Does that seem right to you?

Jenann Ismael
Depends on the belief, obviously. I think what’s going on in that, in his mind is the ultimate adjudicator of what’s true, should be science, no matter where the beliefs came from. He’s all for people inventing ideas and putting them up, or adjudication doesn’t matter where they come from. But the ultimate adjudicator of what’s true should be science.

Ray Briggs
I am really interested in this view, which which Dennett was like very all about. I mean, I think particularly in his atheism, so on the one hand, I find this kind of appealing. On the other hand, it makes me want to know, like what sciences on one reading science is a set of methods. And on another reading sciences, a set of social institutions like that include universities and labs and journals. Do you think that Dennett had an idea about which of those was really science? Or are they both science in some sense? And like, does it make a difference if we want science to be the ultimate adjudicator of things?

Jenann Ismael
No, I’m trying to remember if I know, a particular part of his work, where he’s explicitly discussed this so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna give you a Dennett like idea, which is he thinks of everything as everything valuable in kind of collective human activity as a product of a lot of individual people doing a lot of individual things in a way that somehow leads to a sort of cultural product that is valuable. So I think he would think that science is not a method. It’s not an algorithm of any kind for delivering truths. It’s a lot of people searching in a very complex space and checking one another’s work and in a way that has produced theories that survive because they do well in predicting and controlling and explaining and that kind of thing.

Josh Landy
But it makes you wonder whether it can be a fully adequate replacement for the thing he wants it to replace. I mean, he he seems to think that not only is evolution the correct way of thinking about how the various species came into being, and how they how they changed across time, but it’s, it’s a good story. And that’s kind of striking to me. You know, the narratologists Porter Abbott made this lovely point that evolution isn’t a good story, because there are no characters, right? There’s no agents. There’s no intentions, the timescales too vast, the pace is way too slow. It doesn’t make a good story. Do you think that it was maybe just a tiny bit over optimistic? I mean, I will kind of like that about him. Right. He was a good kind of salesman for certain way of thinking about things. But I think it was his evolution with the good story.

Jenann Ismael
So it depends what you mean, by good story. So stories play a lot of different functions. And I think then it would be all on board was saying they in play, you’re having enchanted stories about our own origins, for example, plays a important role in certain functions that we have. I mean, they help us imagine, maybe they make us behave better in certain contexts and so on. But he also thinks that they’re incredibly dangerous, maybe because of some of the power that they have over having a you’re making us behave, I think he would think that the historical record for non scientific ways of viewing ourselves has been pretty bad. It’s justified all kinds of bad behaviors. One thing that science is really good for, is getting rid of dangerous myths.

Ray Briggs
Jenann, this leads really nicely into our next excerpt from the same 2006 episode. So in this excerpt, a caller has a question about a then-recent article by our old friend Paul Bloom.

Caller
There’s an article that’s in the Atlantic Monthly of December 2005, “Is God an accident?” And I think, well, it goes into the biological basis of perhaps our belief in God. And I think that’s interesting. You This is a Philosophy Talk program. And I was wondering if you could comment on it from that standpoint, from the standpoint perhaps of the limitations or the way that we think based on evolution, one of the points they make in this is we’re all creationists we’ve evolved into being creationists, we must see patterns and things. It’s part of our survival mechanism. So anyway, I was just wondering if you would if you knew the work of Paul Bloom and these other people that he mentioned Scott Atran, and Pascal Boyer.

Daniel Dennett
Not only do I know the work, I talked about it at some length in my new book and breaking the spell, and I agree entirely, that it is appropriate to look at the evolution of religious ideas, and to look in the evolution of our own psychology and our biology. To see why it is that these ideas have such a holdovers why we have, if I may put it this way, such a sweet tooth for the idea of God. Why do we have a sweet tooth for for sugar? That’s an interesting evolutionary story. And we can tell the same sort of story about why we have a sweet tooth for the idea of God.

Ray Briggs
This is really interesting. Let’s say that we have some evolutionary explanation for why we have this sweet tooth for the idea of God, as Dennett says, Would that count as evidence that beliefs in God aren’t true? What do you think?

Jenann Ismael
No, it doesn’t. I mean, there are some debunking explanations and some exponent evolutionary explanations and some evolutionary explanations that aren’t debunking. So one has to distinguish between what was selected and what was selected for and the environment in which something was selected and whether something that was selected in a certain environment and leads to behaviors and another environment that turns out to be disadvantageous.

Ray Briggs
Jenann, you mentioned this distinction between debunking and non debunking explanations. So like, just for our listeners, a debunking explanation is one that if it’s an explanation of a belief, it explains sort of why the belief might seem to be true, but isn’t and we shouldn’t trust it. Whereas a non debunking explanation explains why the belief might seem to be true and actually be true. Like, my beliefs that there are dangerous spiders in my environment, if they evolved to track the presence of dangerous spiders are really likely to be true. And so that’s non debunking. Whereas my belief that sugar is a good thing for me to eat, might be given a debunking explanation, because sugar maybe wasn’t a good thing for me to eat in my ancestral environments where it was rare, but not such a good thing for me to eat now in my current environment, where it’s too abundant, so given that distinction, do you think that evolutionary explanations of religious belief are debunking or non debunking?

Jenann Ismael
I think they’re debunking so is there based on the kind of instinct that we have to look for patterns? That was a good instinct because it leads us to find things like natural laws and to find regularities that we can project into the Future. If it leads us to invent things that aren’t there is obviously not a good thing. In particular, it leads us to invent things that then become alternative explanations or end the, the search for real causes. And it’s not a good thing.

Josh Landy
Well, that’s great. So that gives us a pretty nice flavor of Dennett’s atheism: there’s that debunking explanation for belief in God. That’s the claim that evolution isn’t just true, but a good story. And and also, this has concerns about the dangers of certain forms of theism. Let’s hear one more excerpt from this 2006 episode. Ken has just asked Dan about teaching evolution in schools, should we teach it a settled truth or as one theory among others, including intelligent design.

Daniel Dennett
When Copernicus theory was first put forward, it was controversial, and there were those who argued very passionately that it shouldn’t be taught in the schools because it was too upsetting. But children have no trouble with the idea that the Earth goes around the sun. They don’t have nightmares or anything like that. And we’re quite used to the fact that anybody thinks otherwise it’s just benighted. It’s just wrong. And I think the case for evolutionary biology is now so secure, that it’s simply out of date to suppose that we shouldn’t teach it if it’s controversial to people that are going to have to suck it up and get used to the fact that that’s they way the world is.

Speaker 1
The case is so overwhelming, if you accept the canons of scientific rationality, but there are people who don’t accept the canons of scientific rationality, and their their citizens, they’re one citizens, among other have equal rights to their fundamental beliefs. So should we be telling those parents who aren’t quite, you know, kind of 21st century secular scientific rationality types? Too bad for you? I mean, do we have the right to do that in a democratic society?

Daniel Dennett
Actually I find that we have not just the right I think we have the duty. Right now we are facing the danger of a worldwide pandemic of bird flu. And if it happens, it will happen because the current bird flu, which is in birds, will evolve into a virus, which can spread readily in human beings, and there’s no immunity to it in human beings. And if we don’t understand the evolutionary phenomena that are occurring right in front of us, we are we are risking the lives of our children and grandchildren, we’re risking the lives of all it’s very important that people know the facts.

Josh Landy
This is amazingly prophetic on Dennett’s part. He’s talking in 2006 about a possible pandemic and predicting the deadly consequences of disbelief in science. I feel like we all kind of flunked his tests pretty badly. Can you tell us a bit more generic about Dennett’s commitment to the truth?

Jenann Ismael
That commitment, I think, was absolute. He sort of followed the science where it goes in. I mean, I think the thing about the science and in contrast with sort of other kinds of origin stories for us, in the case of evolution is it’s a sort of universalizing story. And it’s responsible not just to cherished beliefs, or that we have about ourselves, it’s responsible to the phenomena of nature. That’s what Dan was committed to. He thinks it’s one of our most important cultural products, and that it will be better for everyone if we follow it, where it leads.

Ray Briggs
So we’re now entering into kind of a new and different era of misinformation about science and mistrust of science. What’s one thing that our audience could take from Dennett going forward to help us through this new time?

Jenann Ismael
I think the real heart of Janet’s approach to things is, don’t rest on lazy ideas. And I think this thing that philosophy should learn also from Dennis commitment to science, don’t rest on things that you believe, look, look in the world, listen to the data, listen to real empirical sources of information.

Josh Landy
Amen to that. Thank you so much for that inspiration. And thanks so much for everything that you have shared with us today.

Jenann Ismael
Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be back.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Jenann Ismael, Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and author of many wonderful things, including “How Physics Makes Us Free.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
So I did want to recommend my favorite Dennett story, which is one that Jenann alluded to earlier in the show. It’s called “Where Am I?” And it’s just this delightful work of science fiction that raises deep questions about the self. I recommend that our listeners check it out.

Josh Landy
That’s a great idea. We’re gonna put a link to that and to everything else we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and listen to the episodes we’ve been dipping into today, plus nearly 600 more.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2024.

Our Executive Producer is Ben Trefny.

The Senior Producer has Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler, and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from subscribers to our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy
And from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and explore our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Surviving Confession
Honestly, what is the appeal of the New Atheists? Just a retreading of old arguments only less eloquently stated. Try Sartre—makes for a better read.