Dennett is a 'naturalistic' philosopher, that is, one who believes that philosophers should take into account changes in scientific thinking. In this book he is trying to reconcile the idea that humans have free will with the scientific picture of a deterministic universe.
He starts off by suggesting that the idea of souls "immaterial and immortal clumps of Godstuff that inhabit and control our material bodies rather like spectral puppeteers" has lost its credibility thanks to science. Having used Conway's Game of Life to probe what is meant by determinism and to suggest that there are levels of ontology (the level of the individual cell in the game, that of the clusters of cells that are assembled etc), he then considers whether we can 'recapture' free will by inserting a quantum discontinuity into the otherwise deterministic decision-making process but he shows that this cannot give us the moral responsibility that proponents of 'free will' are seeking (random chance is no more within our moral control than full mechanistic determinism).
He seems to suggest that contrasting 'hard' Determinism (everything is preordained so we don't have free will) with Libertarianism (we have free will, therefore determinism is false) is a typical philosopher's trick of making you choose between two extremes; he says that philosophers should beware of hard positions: “There are no such miraculous things as levitators, but there are some pretty good near levitators. Hummingbirds, helicopters, blimps and hang gliders come to mind.” (Ch 4) Dennett suggests that the truth lies somewhere in between. After all, free will is concerned fundamentally with moral responsibility and this relies on a different sort of causality, one that involves intention as in 'the lumberjack caused the tree to fall', and determinism is most commonly involved with physical causality, as in 'the lumberjack's axe caused the tree to fall'. This is another refocusing of ontology onto a different level and I'm not sure that this isn't another typical philosopher's trick, that he isn't really saying that he can't solve the problems on the atomic level so he's going to ignore them and argue elsewhere.
It seems clear that on the systems level there is something at least approximating free will. Dennett invokes (or seems to come close to invoking) chaos theory and the idea that our consciousness is not a single Cartesian 'self' but a chaos of competing thoughts. He makes the point that most people, when deciding what they want for lunch, don't always make the same choice, showing that despite most of the inputs being the same the output can be different (presumably because one of the inputs is yesterday's output fed back into the decision-making process).
He considers society as a competition between freeloaders and cooperatives and suggests that, in the end, a social animal such as man will evolve into a stable equilibrium because cooperatives tend to develop their own, cooperating, groups which ostracise freeloaders and a society made up entirely of freeloaders will have catastrophic competition. Of the freeloaders that are left, they may be coerced into cooperating if they think they are being watched, which may explain why old societies believed in a “vigilant, omnipresent God.” (Ch 7)
His next consideration is whether we can have (moral) responsibility for a decision, given that who we are has been shaped by our genes, by our upbringing and by our circumstances. Again, I think he ducks this question. He points out, sensibly, that the criteria we use to decide whether a person has moral responsibility shifts over time. In the end he suggests that whether we should be punished depends on whether we accept that we should be punished. If we are incompetent to make that decision (like a young child or a lunatic) or if we are competent to make the decision but reject the punishment (like a psychopath) we should not be admitted to the benefits of full citizenship (eg jailed).
I'm not sure that I fully understand Dennett's arguments and I'm not sure that I full accept his conclusions but this is a fascinatingly readable book and many of the things he says are very wise.
There were things in here which had me thinking back to Surfing Uncertainty by Andy Clark.
Selected quotes:
- “One widespread tradition has it that we human beings are responsible agents, captains of our fate, because we what we really are are souls, immaterial and immortal clumps of Godstuff that inhabit and control our material bodies rather like spectral puppeteers. ... But this idea of immaterial souls, ... has outlived its credibility thanks to the advance of the natural sciences.” (Ch 1)
- “You are ... an assemblage of roughly a hundred trillion cells ... The bulk of these cells are ‘daughters’ of the egg cell and sperm cell whose unison started you, but they are actually outnumbered by the trillions of bacterial hitchhikers." (Ch 1)
- “Look around at those who are participating in this quest for further scientific knowledge ... they are manifestly not short on optimism, moral conviction, engagement in life, commitment to society. In fact, if you want to find anxiety, despair, and anomie among intellectuals today, look to the recently fashionable tribe of post-modernists, who like to claim that modern science is just another in a long line of myths.” (Ch 1)
- “‘Be all that you can be’ ... Aren’t we all, automatically, all that we can be?” (Ch 1)
- “One can often embarrass the asker of a rhetorical question by simply trying to answer it.” (Ch 1)
- "A fact-laden disquisition on the biomechanics of sexual arousal and erection is not a good topic during foreplay.” (Ch 1)
- “The religious right has also mastered the art of refutation by caricature.” (Ch 1)
- "Why is Dumbo better off without his myth of magic? Because he is less dependent, more enabled, more autonomous in the undeluded state.” (Ch 1)
- "even though the sun has risen every day so far, there is no contradiction in the supposition that tomorrow will be different.” (Ch 2)
- “In a totally chaotic, unpredictable environment, there is no hope of avoidance except sheer blind luck.” (Ch 2)
- “In order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it.” (Ch 2)
- “We know that in the early days - the first few billion years - of life on this planet, self-protective designs emerged, thanks to the slow and non-miraculous process of natural selection.” (Ch 2)
- "A predicate is necessary when there is no possible world in which the opposite is true. ... "A predicate is possible when there is at least one possible world in which the predicate is true." (Ch 3)
- “We are designed by evolution to be ‘informavores’, epistemically hungry pursuers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.” (Ch 3)
- “We have evolved to be entities designed to change their natures in response to interactions with the rest of the world.” (Ch 3) This sounds contentious but it really only claims that ‘humans learn’.
- “You can rightly be held responsible for the outcome of a deed that includes a chance or undetermined element, if that is what you were trying to accomplish” eg assassin’s lucky shot (Ch 4)
- “Your immune system is composed of cells that are now members in good standing of the host team, but they began their career in your ancestors as an invading army, which was gradually co-opted and turned into a troop of mercenary guards, their own genetic identity merged with that of the more ancient lineages they joined forces with, another instance of horizontal transmission of design.” (Ch 5)
- “We are the species that discovered doubt.” (Ch 5)
- “(Those who don’t get this parenthesis may consider themselves fortunate to be in the dark.)” (Ch 6)
- “A person is a hominid with an infected brain, host to millions of cultural symbionts, and the chief enablers of these are the symbiont systems known as languages.” (Ch 6)
- “In at least one chimp community, the slyly lascivious stroking of a plucked blade of grass by a male apparently means, to an onlooking female, something like ... ‘Would you like to come up and see my etchings’?” (Ch 6)
- “Religion is ubiquitous in human culture and it flourishes in spite of its considerable costs.” (Ch 6)
- “The only position on reasons that memetics contradicts is the well-nigh incoherent position that supposes reasons somehow exist without support from biology at all, hanging from some Cartesian skyhook.” (Ch 6)
- “The trick to gaining the reputation for being good, a valuable prize indeed, is actually being good.” (Ch 7)
- “Our free will, like all our other mental powers, has to be smeared out over time, not measured at instants.” (Ch 8)
- “You are not out of the loop; you are the loop.” (Ch 8)
- “If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.” (Ch 8)
- “The process of self-description begins in earliest childhood, and includes a good deal of fantasy from the outset.” (Ch 8)
- “If you are free, are you responsible for being free, or just lucky? Can you be blamed for failing to make yourself free?” (Ch 9)
- “Those whom we end up punishing are really paying a double price, for they are scapegoats, deliberately harmed by society in order to set a vivid example for the more ably self-controlled, but not really responsible for the deeds we piously declare them to have committed of their own free will.” (Ch 9)
- “90 percent and more of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back billions of generations.” (Ch 9)
- “We almost always adjust our behaviour to harmonize with ... the social demands of the current circumstance.” (Ch 9)
- “Like everything else evolution has created, we’re a somewhat opportunistically contrived bag of tricks, and our morality should be based on that realization.” (Ch 9)
- “How shall we draw the line between ... he couldn’t control himself - and people who do evil ‘of their own free will’ ... If we set the threshold too high, everybody gets off the hook; if we set it too low, we end up punishing scapegoats.” (Ch 10)
- “One of the few uncontroversial propositions in ethics ... is, ‘ought implies can’ - you are only obligated to do something you are able to do.” (Ch 10)
- “The ideal for an institution of punishment ... would be that every punishment should be justified in the eyes of the person punished.” (Ch 10)
- “You can’t readily uneducate people.” (Ch 10)
- “The economic realities of the twenty-first century make it clearer and clearer that education is the most important investment any parent can make in a child.” (Ch 10)
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