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Daniel Dennett: A Retrospective
396 Plays6 months ago
Daniel Dennett, who passed away on April 19th at the age of 82, was one of the great philosophers of our time. Rolf and Joe discuss his ideas and his influence on the field of philosophy, including (especially) bringing consciousness back as a topic of serious study with his book "Consciousness Explained", as well as his work on free will, evolution, religion, and constructing a convincing argument.
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Transcript
Introduction to Daniel Dennett
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to Cognation. I'm Joe Hardy. And I'm Rolf Nelson. On this episode of Cognation, we're going to be talking about Daniel Dennett, who is a philosopher who passed away just about a month ago and someone who's been a major influence on philosophy in general and on
00:00:31
Speaker
philosophy of mind in particular, and someone who has been personally a big influence on me, and I know that Joe has certainly been influenced by him as well.
00:00:42
Speaker
Yeah, no, for sure.
Consciousness Research and Academic Background
00:00:44
Speaker
Yeah, Daniel Dennett was someone who was a major figure in the field of consciousness research. And so especially at this intersection of philosophy and science, and just sort of also really great writer. So tremendously influential for a lot of people.
00:01:03
Speaker
So he was 82 years old, so he lived a full long life. He was born in 1942. In terms of academic lineage, and this is sort of helpful when thinking about some of his ideas, he studied with the philosopher Willard Van Oran Quine at Harvard during his undergraduate career.
00:01:22
Speaker
And then during his graduate career, he was at Oxford in England, where he studied with famous philosopher Gilbert Ryle. And Gilbert Ryle was famous for his book, The Concept of Mind, and who originally coined the term ghost in the machine as a way of sort of deriding this idea of philosophical dualism, that consciousness might be sort of like a ghost in the machine that's something extra.
00:01:50
Speaker
And then I believe he taught it in California at Irvine for a few years and then spent most of his career teaching at Tufts University in Massachusetts here starting in 1971 until just a few years ago.
Challenging Dualism in 'Consciousness Explained'
00:02:06
Speaker
So I got introduced to Dan Dennett originally.
00:02:10
Speaker
when I took an undergraduate consciousness course at Macalester College where I went. And this was right around the time when he came out with his most famous book, which was called Consciousness Explained, which I believe, did that come in about 1991 or so? Sounds about right, yeah. Somewhere around then. That got me really excited and interested in the idea of thinking about consciousness as a topic that could be studied.
00:02:38
Speaker
Yeah, consciousness explained is a really thorough going introduction to a lot of the concepts in consciousness philosophy. But really weaving in ideas of brain science, and particularly evolution, as well as some physics and some chemistry. So really looking at
00:03:03
Speaker
How can you take this problem of consciousness and start to attack it in different ways that are not just purely introspective, but are using the tools of science, using the tools of empiricism to look at it from different angles, essentially?
00:03:26
Speaker
He builds an argument, but mostly it's problematizing others' arguments. It's largely, he's just described this work and other work as a materialist. But I think to me on reading it again recently, I'm struck by how much he's fundamentally a non-dualist first before a materialist.
Critique of Cartesian Dualism
00:03:54
Speaker
Yeah, and he certainly argues against the ideas of dualism, again, thinking back to Gilbert Ryle's arguments against dualism with his idea of the ghost in the machine. So one of Dennett's big bugbears, or one of the things that he hated and he kept talking about was
00:04:13
Speaker
this idea of Cartesian dualism and he suggested that people implicitly held this idea even if they would say that they didn't. So, Cartesian dualism, so after René Descartes, this French philosopher who famously said, I think therefore I am, introduced this problem in philosophy that we've been dealing with for the last couple hundred years, suggested that the mind was something different than
00:04:39
Speaker
the body and that there was something separate about mental states, sort of like the soul and the brain, right? So most philosophers don't buy into dualism and it tends to be a term of abuse actually in philosophy, right? Call someone a dirty dualist, right?
00:05:00
Speaker
But Dennett believed that in everyday life, we always talked, we use these kinds of Cartesian dualist terms when we thought about, we talk about my brain made me do it or something, as though my brain were something different than me. Yeah, absolutely. And he talks about, uses this analogy of the Cartesian theater, which is basically, I think,
00:05:22
Speaker
It makes sense to me, it feels like this to me that as the subject of experience, it's as though you're sitting in a theater watching the events of the world unfold, but those events are themselves generated internally by your own nervous system. And so what is this mind stuff
00:05:47
Speaker
that is generating this Cartesian theater upon which experience is projected. And he basically makes the argument, I think quite convincingly, that there's no place in the brain where such an operation could happen. There's no place in the brain where you could have a projection that a homunculus or other observer, the eye of the subjective experience could be viewing that projection.
00:06:17
Speaker
Right. And he thinks of that as something that would cause a kind of infinite regress, because, you know, to think of it as though, you know, there's stuff going on in our brain, and then there's someone kind of watching it and evaluating it, kind of looking out from our eyes, that, you know... Who's watching the watcher? Exactly. You have to keep going back, right? And who's inside that?
00:06:38
Speaker
Watch his brain and it's an infinite loop. Yeah, no, absolutely and so that that that's sort of where he kind of begins the argument There and I think that that kind of thinking pervades his you know, his work throughout his career of just feeling like the idea of supporting Cartesian dualism or
00:07:03
Speaker
you know, being comfortable with Cartesian dualism is a kind of giving up where you just haven't answered the question of like, what is this mind stuff? What is this matter that is in the mind that creates consciousness or is consciousness or is the thing that is experienced by the self? And so he sees it as, as do other, many other philosophers as kicking the can down the road and sort of just leaving this open question. Yeah.
00:07:30
Speaker
Right. So it doesn't count as a really satisfactory explanation, right? Like you say, you're just kicking the can down the road and you have to explain it at some point or another. So he thinks that everything should be explained in naturalistic terms, that we can have a complete theory of consciousness in naturalistic terms. We don't need to resort to, you know, anything supernatural, anything. Exactly. Exactly. And so in some ways,
00:07:56
Speaker
his work is a great counterpart to a lot of the work that we've been talking about more recently from people like Donald Hoffman, who is an idealist, you know, and coming from the perspective that consciousness is the only thing and that, you know, material and the natural world, quote unquote, is an epiphenomenon in some sense of consciousness. And, you know,
00:08:25
Speaker
Dennett very much so coming at it from the materialist perspective that there is matter and that is, you know, matter and energy, but physical naturalistic processes and consciousness is a part of that. Yeah. And another, so another main idea. So we've, we will have a few main ideas of Dennett's that we'll try to get across in this show.
Multiple Drafts Model of Consciousness
00:08:49
Speaker
Another main idea of his, besides this Cartesian theater or Cartesian dualism idea,
00:08:54
Speaker
that he talks about in consciousness explained is this idea of multiple drafts. And this is his attempt to provide an intuitive idea of what's going on in consciousness. So he talks about, you think about
00:09:09
Speaker
when you're writing a paper you know you may have one single canonical draft of the paper at one time and then you make a few edits on it and it changes a little bit a few minutes later it's different and you know it it gets changed over its entire history and he suggests that consciousness is like this that there's no one single canonical draft of where consciousness is happening there are so many different
00:09:33
Speaker
parallel processes going on in the brain that are happening sort of simultaneously. And there's no single time or place that consciousness happens, which is a tricky thing to get your head around. And it's sort of unintuitive at first, but he makes the case very convincingly. Yeah, and he's he's arguing against some philosophers and scientists who said, if you look at brain activity,
00:10:02
Speaker
that is associated with a certain experience, say seeing a particular thing move on a screen, that you can actually predict that a person is going to see that before the person can report that they have seen it. And basically making the argument that that does not, all the problems with those studies notwithstanding, because there are some methodological issues there,
00:10:31
Speaker
Let's assume that those are even true, that you can actually predict based on neural firings in the brain that someone is going to have a conscious experience before they can report that they've had that conscious experience. That's not actually a problem for consciousness being a function of material, you know, the naturalistic world. It doesn't mean that doesn't mean just to call in some kind of
00:10:57
Speaker
instantaneous process that is supernatural, but rather like it's actually just the fact that the brain is constantly updating its drafts about its beliefs of the world. This kind of figures into this Bayesian updating kind of concept that we've been talking about quite a bit.
00:11:17
Speaker
And he talks about including revising the past sometimes too, so that your conscious experience can be revised and changed so that you
00:11:28
Speaker
you don't remember the same conscious experience that you think you had, right? Yeah, absolutely. And this whole section of Consciousness Explained, when he talks about this, reminded me of the James Lang theory, which we have to bring up, I think, at least every other episode. Yeah.
00:11:48
Speaker
The conscious experience of being afraid of the snake may be an effect of your interpretation of the hardwired neural response of being pulling away from the snake and then having the heart rate increase as you prepare to flee potentially if you need to.
00:12:10
Speaker
Yeah. And so that sort of relates to that, right? That's like, so you could, that you could, if you had an electrode, you could actually detect that initial, you know, increase those, those processes that are going to increase the heart rate because those processes that are going to.
00:12:25
Speaker
you start leading to start sweating before you actually feel that fear. And so it's not a problem for the theory that those temporal orderings are happening in such a way it's actually not as you say not possible to simply locate in an instant in time when a conscious experience happens because it is this kind of ongoing iterative revisionist process.
00:12:46
Speaker
So if we think of just sort of painting broad brush strokes with Daniel Dennett's career. So we kind of started talking about consciousness explained. And again, I think that's probably his most famous or influential book. And it had a huge influence on raising the profile of consciousness studies, getting a lot of people interested in consciousness.
00:13:08
Speaker
Prior to this book, he wrote a couple other books and a number of articles on sort of traditional philosophical ideas. He wrote a book called
00:13:21
Speaker
a book called Elbow Room, which he mentioned was one of his favorite books that he wrote, and I think it's a great book too, on free will. Again, this sort of traditional philosophical topic. And he doesn't take a super scientific
00:13:39
Speaker
point of view in this book, sort of taken from a real traditional philosophical look. Before that, he had written one book called Content and Consciousness, and another one called The Intentional Stance, and we'll talk about the intentional stance a little bit later, because that's another one of his big concepts that he introduced.
00:13:58
Speaker
So again, so these first couple books that he wrote, first, you know, 15, 20 years of his career, he tackled some of these sort of fundamental questions in cognitive psychology and cognitive science about the nature of intentionality, that sort of thing. And then when you look at it sort of from consciousness explained on,
Impact of Evolution on Dennett's Philosophy
00:14:18
Speaker
he starts really taking this more scientific point of view and especially an evolutionary point of view so his next major book after consciousness explained is called Darwin's Dangerous Idea and in Darwin's Dangerous Idea he talks about it as being a dangerous idea so evolution as a dangerous idea as something that's sort of like a universal asset that burns through everything in its path that sort of
00:14:45
Speaker
because evolution is so explanatory towards why we do things, why we're built the way that we are, everything is influenced by it. So that was just sort of a book really about how much is influenced by Darwin. And then he wrote several more books with an evolutionary flavor to them. Again, he's a philosopher that takes into account a lot of scientific
00:15:10
Speaker
points of view, one called breaking the spell, religion is a natural phenomenon, where he takes this naturalistic view towards religion, sort of explaining why people might tend towards religion, what from evolution can we take for that.
00:15:26
Speaker
And then another book that he writes is one called Freedom Evolves, which is an expansion on his earlier book, Elbow Room, about free will and where free will comes from. And he takes, again, a naturalistic point of view towards understanding what free will is. That's something we can get into a little bit too if we want to.
00:15:49
Speaker
Yeah, I think probably would be good as a next step, we talked a little bit about, you know, his sort of anti dualism kind of stance. And then, you know, I think, you know, his work, later on evolution, it might be good to talk a little bit about his ideas around the evolution of consciousness.
00:16:08
Speaker
Yeah, so he writes quite a bit about this and he thinks about, he has a book called kinds of minds that take a look at different sorts of minds that get produced by evolution, but he thinks about it as the idea that there's no guiding force in creating minds, that evolution doesn't have an end point, there's no intelligent designer,
00:16:33
Speaker
But nevertheless, it produces something which is intelligent. So from all of these, what he would call mindless robots, you know, individual cells just doing their thing, there come these emergent properties called minds.
00:16:49
Speaker
Yeah, and I think a bit of the argument has to do with the complexity of the brain as it evolves in order to do different tasks. So he describes how
00:17:08
Speaker
you know, you know, early species or evolutionary early species have, you know, who started develop nervous systems had relatively simple stimulus response kind of abilities like, you know, a mollusk, for example, you know, might be able to detect a stimulus that it needs to eat and then move towards it or the stimulus that it needs to avoid and move away from it.
00:17:35
Speaker
And this doesn't require a lot of ideation or contemplation or memory. It's very much so something in the moment and it can be quite hardwired in the sense that there's a circuit in the
Evolution of Consciousness
00:17:53
Speaker
nervous system that has the sense, senses a certain chemical and then it triggers some action quite mechanically.
00:18:03
Speaker
I mean, in some sense, all of these operations in, in Dennett's world are mechanical in that sense, but, um, but not, not especially complex, I think is the key here is then as variations develop, uh, randomly through mutation.
00:18:20
Speaker
and then some of these variations become advantageous, you create situations where some of these side effects of these mutations can be themselves quite beneficial, quite by accident. And so that you develop complexity of being able to now have some memory, for example, so that during your lifetime you can actually learn
00:18:47
Speaker
a bit, so there's some plasticity in the nervous system develops because now rather than having to have everything hardwired. Now, over time, through evolution, you've developed the capacity to actually have systems that are complex and flexible enough that they can actually change in response to things that occurred during their lifetime. You know, so that behavior can be essentially
00:19:15
Speaker
And consciousness, correspondingly, the experience, the subjective experience, can be tuned in the lifetime of the being. It's interesting to think, too. I mean, he talks about, you know, eventually consciousness coming out of these mindless systems, but also a genuine sort of free will or agency. I guess these two terms get used interchangeably a lot.
00:19:45
Speaker
agency that comes from a constellation of these mindless systems. And I mean, this has always been a philosophical, you know, it's been a tough philosophical problem, right? If you you know, in a deterministic world or a deterministic universe, where is there room for free will? Right, exactly. I mean, if we take the evolutionary stance, so we say, okay, well, I can see how the development of
00:20:13
Speaker
the ability to remember that blue fruits are delicious in my area and they keep me alive and then red fruits in my area are deadly and if I eat them, I'm not gonna pass on my genes. You can clearly see how the ability to differentiate red from blue and also to remember could evolve because the replication itself, which has no,
00:20:41
Speaker
the replication of the genes, the thing that is driving evolution, which is just this innate tendency. It's more of just like a mathematical fact that things that are evolutionarily adaptive replicate more just because they do. Because if it was less adaptive, they would die out. They would be removed from the gene pool. So you can see quite clearly how things like
00:21:11
Speaker
Without any goal or purpose, you could easily see how something like telling between red and blue and being able to remember what tastes good and doesn't, and what's good for you and is not good for you, how that could evolve, it's harder to see how free will can evolve. Why does there need to be a purpose or a goal that the individual has for themselves?
00:21:40
Speaker
Well, and one of the things he really argues against, and this is where his naturalist tendencies come into effect, because he thinks that a lot of people have almost a supernatural idea about free will, that free will is this idea where under the same circumstances I could have done something different, and that's sort of the libertarian idea of free will, or this idea that there's no other cause but my own sort of personal
00:22:09
Speaker
will that sort of comes out of nowhere, doesn't have a previous influence to it. So he argues strongly against that idea. Free will can still exist in a deterministic world, but he also thinks that indeterminism doesn't necessarily buy you free will. So you might think, OK, if the world is deterministic, then the only way I can have free will is if there's some sort of indeterminism, that there's something outside of that deterministic system that can work.
00:22:39
Speaker
But Dennett would say, no, this doesn't buy you anything because that's just random noise and it's not actually still coming from you as a person in the first place. Anyway, so that doesn't actually give you free will. And he thinks free will is something very different from this determinism and indeterminism. And it's really more about
00:23:02
Speaker
more about sort of a social contract for responsibility, taking responsibility for actions, that you can be a responsible member of your society if you
00:23:15
Speaker
And you can have agency. Not everyone gets agency in societies, but some people do. And the people who are sort of take responsibility for their actions are the ones that have agency. So it's something that sort of grows out and is almost a social contract and can be something very useful. If you have agency, then you're more likely to believe in agency and do actions that assume agency, which can be a huge benefit.
00:23:43
Speaker
So he can see it, you know, you can see free will as something which, you know, the idea of free will itself even can have a benefit to it. Yeah. I mean, I mean, and I think in terms of just a question that I had and thinking about this today, I was thinking about this is where the, this is where the challenges come in. Is, is this, is this move from
00:24:07
Speaker
the naturalistic observations of things like evolution that, you know, for example, we see that, you know, human beings have complex brains that are more complex than our ancestors, including, you know, our closest ancestors evolutionarily. And we believe that we have this thing called consciousness.
00:24:32
Speaker
And so we want to draw some relationship between that. And that's a lot of the work that he's doing. But I'm still a little bit confused as to where consciousness comes from in the world.
The Intentional Stance
00:24:49
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So I think one of the things that really links things up is this idea of the intentional stance. And that's where
00:25:00
Speaker
We mentioned that or I mentioned that just a little bit before. So the intentional stance, and it gets complicated because intentionality means sort of different things in philosophy and psychology, but you can just think of intentional as meaning that someone has beliefs or desires or goals or interests or things like that. The intentional stance is sort of like the idea of theory of mind in psychology, the idea of
00:25:30
Speaker
I know that you know, that I know kind of thing, like understanding that someone else's goals and intentions can be different. But what Dennett says is that the intentional, taking a stance towards other things, other people, other animals, other things, as though they have real goals and motivations is actually a very useful, it's a useful trick to have, right?
00:25:58
Speaker
me saying when a plant starts drying up and me saying, oh, that plant is thirsty and it needs water, right? I don't exactly mean it in the same way. You know, I'm not anthropomorphizing in the same way and thinking that it has the same, goes through the same processes that I do, but I know that it doesn't look good. And if I were to add water, it's going to in some sense feel better, right? These are all kind of anthropomorphic terms.
00:26:25
Speaker
And they're not very precise, but they're a really good shortcut and they work pretty well, right? If you were to try to describe, you know, Adam for Adam, what's going on in the plant, it's going to be a lot more complicated and it's not going to help for explanation too, right? Likewise, you know, when we're, you know, we're interacting with, you know, like your cat or something, you know, you say it wants to be petted or it loves me or, you know, it's got all these emotions and,
00:26:53
Speaker
then it would say, yeah, that's actually a really good idea. If you were to try to explain all that stuff in...
00:26:58
Speaker
lower term ways of thinking, it's not actually all that useful and it would be convoluted and complex. But mental terminology is actually a useful way to speak about things. And sometimes it's not actually there. We might talk about your computer as being not cooperating or pissed off or something like that. When you know there's no real mental activity going on. So it may misfire sometimes.
00:27:27
Speaker
And when he talks about religion, I think he thinks that at some point religion is a misfiring of this taking an intentional stance so that we anthropomorphize rocks and trees and clouds and stuff in the sky and all of that stuff. This is almost like a fake it till you make it kind of thing, right?
00:27:49
Speaker
You assume other people have goals, intentions, motivations, all that kind of stuff. And you attribute that to other people and it just becomes normal and it becomes just the default way of thinking about it, right? And there's no reason to think that these are not real intentionality or it's not real consciousness.
00:28:13
Speaker
if this works well, then we can just consider other, you know, we'd consider other people to be conscious. We don't really give a whole lot of thought to it most of the time. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, certainly with humans, it makes a lot of sense to talk about it this way. Right. Because you're trying to develop a theory about what someone is going to do in the future. So it's wise to think about it as if they are
00:28:42
Speaker
Acting with some intentionality, like they have a goal. And so you may even develop a theory about what their goal might be. And if they had that goal, how would they behave? And that's actually a very good predictor of future behavior. Obviously, a quite imperfect one. You may miss their goal. You may miss their response to the goal. You may fail to realize that they're going to act irrationally.
00:29:12
Speaker
But nevertheless, it's like a very good shortcut in terms of thinking about the world. Yeah, if you were to think about, OK, if I were to call you up and say, hey, Joe, you want to go out and get some coffee at Starbucks, right? Let's meet there in half an hour. You could have this picture of the world as deterministic. You measure every single atom in the universe.
00:29:40
Speaker
you know, expand everything and you predict, you know, using your gigantic mega supercomputer that in one half an hour that your body is going to be at that Starbucks takes all the computing power in the universe. Or you could just assume that I'm telling the truth. That's sort of a reasonable way to assume. And that, you know, with much less processing power, almost no processing power, you can make the same kinds of predictions. So you can be wrong sometimes, but, um,
00:30:10
Speaker
the amount of processing pirate saving is huge. And you can apply this to other, other beings, other animals as well. So for example, if you take like a dog, you could say, I think this dog, you know, is scared and therefore might react negatively towards me and might bite me. And if you see the dog gritting, you know, bearing its teeth, moving towards you,
00:30:39
Speaker
Yeah, you're probably going to be right. It's a pretty good bet. It's a decent model to think about. I understand anger. I deal with anger all the time with other humans. It's something that I want to avoid. This dog is angry because it's scared. Therefore, I should probably get away from this dog. Then he contrasted this with two other ways of thinking about things, which is the physical stance.
00:31:10
Speaker
which is just like everything responds to gravity and all of the physical constraints of the universe. And then there's a design stance, looking at something as though it may have been designed for a certain purpose. So knowing how an alarm clock works, you can get a good idea of how it's going to behave.
00:31:35
Speaker
where a lot of, you know, just all the design stuff that we have around us. So three levels of kind of understanding what something's gonna do next, right? And we all, you know, we're all encapsulated by the physical stance, like we would all fall down and all that stuff would happen, but we're better understood through the intentional stance by understanding what kind of goals and desires we might have. Yeah, I think, you know,
00:32:02
Speaker
It still leaves me, again, back to the question of some folks have criticized Dennett for, I don't know if it's even necessarily criticism. Some writers have said that Dennett didn't believe in consciousness. What do you what do you think about that? I think it's wrong. And he's I know that he's responded to this, too. And I think he's he was upset by the idea that
00:32:30
Speaker
People said he didn't believe in consciousness. I think it was more along the idea of consciousness exists. It's just not quite what you think it is. If you think consciousness is magic and somehow different than the material world and something ineffable and something we can never really understand if you're a mysterious about it, then that kind of consciousness doesn't exist.
00:32:58
Speaker
But he would say that, of course, we all have subjective experiences. Of course, we all understand consciousness intimately from a first-person perspective, right? But it's not magical. It's something that we can understand through naturalistic terms.
Consciousness as a Natural Phenomenon
00:33:15
Speaker
And some philosophers object to this and say, no, there is something more about it. You're just missing out. You're too
00:33:27
Speaker
to hardcore dry science-y or something, I guess. Yeah. Well, what I appreciated about his writings were that, as a lot of philosophers and a lot of scientists do when they're writing, they are highly critical of other ideas and derogatory in their remarks regarding certain theorists or concepts.
00:33:57
Speaker
You know, Dennett is not, you know, he doesn't escape that entirely. I mean, certainly his response to dualism is, you know.
00:34:05
Speaker
is somewhat scathing. But nevertheless, he writes in such a way that really does pull the reader in and invites you to participate in the thought rather than making it something that is, oh, it's too complicated. You could never understand or trying to write in this Kantian kind of way that's just like almost intentionally so esoteric as to be an uninterpretable.
00:34:32
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah, I yeah, this is and this is totally the reason why I love Dennett so much is his writing style is accessible and you're right. It makes you feel like you're kind of invested in it. And part of the art of the conversation. Yeah. Yeah, the conversation and like you really get it. And I think one I mean, I think he uses a lot of strategies for that. One of them is he uses a lot of thought experiments, right? So rather than sort of really dry
00:35:01
Speaker
logic, logical progression, he uses a lot of what he calls intuition pumps, things that are meant to not necessarily prove something beyond a shadow of a doubt, but to get you to sort of open your mind to the relevant aspects of. So in his writing, he always has stories and bringing in things to sort of get you to see a part of a more complicated
00:35:30
Speaker
view of the way things work. And one of the books that he wrote was called Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, too, where he talks a lot about the kind of ways to make your thinking clear to other people, how to communicate clearly to other people. One of the things that I loved the best about this, or one of his strategies, was something that he lifted from
00:36:00
Speaker
Rappaport, something called Rappaport's rules, which is, but I think he expanded on this, which is always state your opponent's idea in a way that they would appreciate or they would believe, right? In a way that they would say, ah, I wish I could have said it. Steelman, their argument, basically. Exactly. So really, and I think he was really good at this. He didn't try to construct a straw man argument and just knock it down and
00:36:29
Speaker
And I think he really objected strongly when other people did this to him when they saw his arguments and just made a simple version of them and knocked them down. So I think he was all about being honest in intellectual debates. Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, and I think that actually led to a lot of the
00:36:49
Speaker
energy that kind of surrounded his work in the sense that because it was accessible and people could understand what he was saying, you were reading this as an undergraduate. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. It got me really excited as an undergraduate too, where I didn't feel like I had to know the complete history of philosophy in order to understand what he was talking about. Yeah, absolutely. I love that.
00:37:17
Speaker
And the other thing that I found so interesting is just how much as a hardcore anti-dualist or non-dualist, his arguments in some ways mirror the arguments of idealists coming at it from the other perspective that
00:37:38
Speaker
After we talked, we thought about Don Hoffman. Yeah, exactly. Especially with Hoffman, you're so engaged in the idea of evolution and evolutionary models being necessary for the development of consciousness. And then where Hoffman takes it in this direction of saying, well, actually, that leads you to believe that there is no such thing as reality.
00:38:08
Speaker
Dennett starts with the assumption that there is a real world and develops consciousness from there. Yeah, right, you're right. He's sort of the flagship of that naturalism in thinking about consciousness, and Hoffman's way on the other side. Yeah, exactly. But it's interesting that they undercoming, they use similar style, they use similar
00:38:34
Speaker
examples, some similar thought experiments. Uh, I mean, so one of the things that non dualists will bring up a lot on both sides is the idea that our conscious awareness is not one to one with the world.
00:38:53
Speaker
that we can experience illusions. We experience illusions. There's lots of stuff that we just don't see or hear or feel that exists. So for example, you know, Dennett talks about if you have two points on your back and you poke two points on your back, how close do they have to be together before you feel, you know, how far apart do they have to be before you feel there's two points? It's pretty far. The two point threshold is pretty big and there's a lot of
00:39:21
Speaker
wavelengths that you don't see visually and there's a lot of things outside your auditory spectrum and all this. And it's just interesting that these people take these same facts and draw the opposite conclusions of them. And what I got me thinking about was like a little bit what I studied and kind of what we studied in graduate school.
00:39:46
Speaker
My research was coming in visual perception as was yours coming from slightly different perspectives. But, you know, the linear systems approach that the Devalois, Karen and Russell Devalois, my mentors took was basically the idea that the visual system is a kind of set of filters can be thought and the brain's processing information can be thought of as a set of filters. It lets in some information and filters out other information.
00:40:16
Speaker
And I think that's an interesting, it's a kind of metaphor, but I think it's a useful metaphor in this same frame because it's like the world out there, let's just start from the materialist perspective, let's assume there is a world out there and your experience of it, your conscious experience of it is not the same as that world.
00:40:45
Speaker
But that doesn't necessarily have to mean that there's something different, some mind stuff in your brain that is consciousness that is different from the matter. It's just that consciousness is a kind of melding and participation in the material world that has this qualia.
00:41:12
Speaker
And so it doesn't have to mean that there's a separate observer in a Cartesian theater. And I think it's just interesting that materialists and idealists fundamentally agree on that point.
00:41:28
Speaker
You know, there's some kind of flow, some kind of ongoing flow of information that exists in the world. And that also talks about the second law of thermodynamics, the idea that entropy is increasing, increasing, you know, in a world of increasing entropy, where time flows forward, right? That your conscious experience is in that flow, right? It's being, this idea of like, you're constantly revising
00:41:59
Speaker
your model, but it's all moving forward as part of that forward direction and time. Hoffman talks about that same exact thing. Yeah, and that's, I mean, that sounds very William Jamesian too. So one other thing that is certainly worth mentioning because it formed a big part
Dennett and New Atheism
00:42:24
Speaker
of
00:42:24
Speaker
Dennett's identity, too, was his sort of affiliation with the new atheism in the early part of the 21st century. So he was sort of generally thought of, and there was this term, the four horsemen of the new atheism that included Daniel Dennett, what was it, Christopher Hitchens, Dawkins, and Sam Harris.
00:42:53
Speaker
So these four writers who each wrote books on atheism and sort of influenced this movement. And I mean, Dennett had written a lot of articles about this, but then again, there was this book that we talked about breaking the spell religion as a natural phenomenon that influenced this. So this was a big part of his identity and how people perceived him in the public sphere. And I think that may have been one of the
00:43:24
Speaker
one of the ones where he took the most flack from too, because of course you can imagine stating clearly that God doesn't exist can piss a whole bunch of people off and it did. Yeah, predictably. It's interesting to think about
00:43:43
Speaker
how each of those people have been controversial in different ways over time. I feel like Dennett though managed to avoid a lot of the stickier conflagration or the more, I guess, the hotter. Who do you think has the worst of it? Well, I mean,
00:44:07
Speaker
part of it is like, who's still alive and still working, you know, Sam Harris, for example. Yeah, yeah. You know, but yeah, Dawkins, but yeah, the
00:44:19
Speaker
these guys, I mean, they're all yeah, controversial in their own ways. But I thought I thought, you know, that's again, back to Denna, I think he did a good job of inviting people in, from the perspective of, yeah, sure, he makes a strong argument, he makes a clear point, he has a perspective and a point of view. But he does, he presents in such a way that is more inviting than I think some of the others. Yeah. Yeah, inclusive, more inclusive in some ways. Yeah.
00:44:46
Speaker
And I think he did a lot of engaging with, you know, engaging across the aisle, this particular issue too. So he had lots of, you know, flat out debates with people with religious tendencies or philosophers who had opposing viewpoints. I think that helped too. The other
00:45:08
Speaker
I guess one thing to mention too is in terms of Dennett's biography, if anyone's interested in sort of learning more about his life, he had almost perfect timing because just last fall, so, you know, six months or so before he passed away, he came out with his memoir. I believe this is available on audio too, but it's called, I've Been Thinking. So just sort of his own personal,
00:45:36
Speaker
recollections and thoughts. So I think he lived a pretty interesting life, so well worth checking that out too. That's great. Is there anything else that we want to cover on Dennett?
00:45:49
Speaker
I mean, I guess we've covered the basics. I think, you know, if people are interested, I always I always try to recommend reading some Daniel Dennett, too. And he has so many accessible books. So just about anything you find of his will be good and readable. But picking up his memoir might be a nice way to start. Yeah, I think especially the later works are, you know, as you say, sort of after that that movement towards away from like pure philosophy is a little bit a little bit more readable.
00:46:18
Speaker
Unless you're a philosopher, in which case, maybe you like those earlier ones. Yeah, I personally, my personal favorite is, I think Elbow Room, I really liked a lot too. And also the pair of that, Freedom Evolves, the one also about free will, I thought were just really good books. But I enjoy everything you write, so I'm a big fan, obviously. Yeah, Daniel Dennett, we will certainly miss you as a voice of sanity and
00:46:47
Speaker
Absolutely interesting person. Yeah. May he rest in peace or enjoy his transition to whatever is next, however that works out, however that you feel about that. I'm sure he would feel like he's just decaying, but maybe not. Maybe there'll be a philosophical zombie. He'll turn into a philosophical zombie, we don't know. That's right.
00:47:16
Speaker
All right, well, thanks for listening again. If you like the show and you want more people to listen to it, the best way to do that is to rate and review us. So on whatever podcast tool you use, whether that be Apple Podcasts or Spotify, et cetera, rate and review us, that's the best way to get people to know about us. And if you have any questions or comments or would like to be on the show or know someone who'd want to be on the show,
00:47:45
Speaker
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