Dan Dennett Looks Back on His Career
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The Michael Shermer Show # 376
Daniel Dennett, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist, has spent his career considering the thorniest, most fundamental mysteries of the mind. Do we have free will? What is consciousness and how did it come about? What distinguishes human minds from the minds of animals? Dennett’s answers have profoundly shaped our age of philosophical thought. In this episode, he reflects on his amazing career and lifelong scientific fascinations, as well as the value of life beyond the university, one enriched by sculpture, music, farming, and family.
Daniel Dennett is Professor Emeritus at Tufts University and the author of numerous books, including Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Breaking the Spell, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and Consciousness Explained.
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Dan passed away yesterday. Very sad news. Dan was everything you would want to say - kind, generous and talented in many areas of life. Not least, he made excellent cider from his own orchard. I had the privilege (and pleasure) of sampling his best at Tufts University, Medford in 1992. I wrote to Tufts in the throes of a personal crisis, asking whether I might sit in on his classes as a PhD student from the UK. He immediately accepted me, no charge, so I was able to sit in on his classes when he was going through some of his new book, 'Consciousness Explained'. We got into some stimulating and animated exchanges, something I will always treasure. Thank you Dan. Your kindness and generosity at that time means a huge amount to me.
That's fantastic. Well done!
Thank Goodness for his life
Nice words.
His talks and books helped me as I was breaking free from religious dogma.
You just swapped one illusion for another illusion lol
@Corteum not really. More of a freethinking person. Didn't take on another religion, accept the best in most. Independent in my politics. Believe in critical thinking. Come have a beer with me and see for yourself. But you're correct in one sense: We all have blinders on at times, and we all are susceptible to group-think and indoctrination.
@@majorkade Dennet's claim to fame is that it's illusions all the way down. Presumably he includes his own assertions and claims in that category. But at least you got disentangled from the religious illusion!
@Corteum Thanks. It's all I wanted and needed.
@@majorkade It's a tough illusion to crack, as many will attest. Good on you 👍
Loved this talk! I collect quotes, “What you can imagine, depends on what you know.” Thank you! I love those kinds of thoughts on clear thinking!
*YAAAAAAY!!!* Daniel Dennet!!
*Yay yay yaaaay!!!*
What a great interview. Be sure to watch it until the end.
Dan has been a great skeptic. One of the four horseman, and looks like Charles Darwin. 😂
I've just ordered the book. Over the years Dennett has been my philosophical role model. The only thing I disagree with him on are his views on free will. Other than that he has always played a central role in my philosophical thinking.
I think I have a much better understanding of Daniel's position on free will as a result of this interview. Thanks Michael and Daniel!
Dennett has the best take on free will that I have ever heard. As bright as Sam Harris is, Dan completely wiped him out on that subject.
Awesome! Thank you Professors!
I loved Dr. Daniel Dennett, very sad to hear about his passing, I've would have loved to meet him, he was my absolute favorite, an intellectual giant, a legend, true sage, heard he was also very kind gentle person, huge loss to civilization, I will watch tons of his lectures in the next few weeks in his memory, I made a playlist of his lectures and interviews for myself to work through, listening to Dr Dennett lectures would be my idea of Heaven 11:02
Looking forward to this discussion
It is wonderful to hear Dan Dennett talking just like Bernie Sanders.
A living treasure!
This comment aged like Dennet.
Again, a masterclass in logical reasoning. Thank you.
I define free will as the ability to move against the force of gravity on its own. As far as Consciousness, it has to do with the actions of living neurons. It's not some magical object. It's a concept or the actions of the brain. Mind is to brain what beat is to heart.
21:38 10 years after he retired from a lifetime of filling blackboards with complex equations faster than Marvin the Martian, and 50 years after he'd told me that he had a "problem" with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, my old man said the thing fell perfectly into place while sitting at home watching a TV show about it on the Discovery Channel. Or whatever. PBS maybe.
Good bless you, Dan
Two of the brightest intellectual stars in our universe - if only we had more!
Would ,t it be great to have a man like this in government 👍
This was a wonderful discussion!
Love these guys forever.
My favorite living philosopher. Great interview Michael.
oof :(
It was inevitable that I would watch this interview 😎
Daniel Dennett died today. 😢. He was a wonderful influence for me. Maybe, he lives on through the one he influenced.
Dan seened like a truley kind man. I really learned a lot from him.
🎉🎉🎉great interview 🎉🎉🎉❤❤❤❤
So sad that Dan went out on a losing battle in defending free will. 'Self control' would be better seen as controlled self... Locating an enduring authorial Self is difficult enough. If you accept edge cases as lacking in free will, or that allowances should be made for mitigating circumstances regarding responsibility etc. then all you need to do is take the logical step of regarding all of the circumstances pressing in on an individual's behavior over a life time (and due to genetics and so on) and you have the same situation for everyone, there is no merit nor blame that can be attributed to free agency. Maybe the best way to put it is 'life is brain damage'. I think Dennett was a great mind, but I think he was somewhat naive where determinism and qualia are concerned. Or possibly I don't have the intellect to appreciate his counter arguments. Either way, respect to a powerhouse thinker. Breaking the Spell was an important read for me.
Lucky to be alive, thanks.
The infidelity example doesn’t disprove Sapolskys argument. It only demonstrates what some partners would accept or not.
Dennett is absolutely correct that all Scientists have or make philosophical assumptions that they either examine critically or not. Im wondering if Dennett has ever read Karl Popper and what his opinion is of him if he has?
To me philosophy is the foundation of all kind of intellectual and intelligent being - reasoning, processing, and prediction.
Philosophy is often involved in inventions and discoveries.
A cannabinoid-infused salve will help your body heal that wound on your head, Dan Dennett. Peace and Cheers!
Here's my take on "luck": Luck is JUST a label we attach after the fact. Things went in my favor, I was "lucky" - things DIDN'T go in my favor, I was "unlucky"...
I hope at least SOME of you out there find that useful.
Dan is the man!
The four horseman👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍Thank You
baked ideas have a crust to them, they resist poking, its a funny and great analogy
Is part of the interview missing?
mailchi.mp/skeptic/dennett
31:30
Some people have bad machinery and some people have good machinery.
But did they choose to have the good machinery? Did the “disabled” ones choose to have the bad machinery?
This is a weird thought to me that we wouldn’t hold people with bad machinery responsible for their actions but we would hold good people responsible for their actions. The point is, the one with the food machinery no more decided to have that than the one with the bad machinery. That’s the whole point.
I love daniel
Any practical reason not to divide the West Bank and the land from Gaza to Jerusalem, North and South?
One of the smartest brains ever. His book really screwed me up and showed how much i had to learn LOL
which one?
@@skepticmagazinebreaking the spell was quite overwhelming to me.
@@skepticmagazine it started with intuition pumps
Perhaps making a decision IS free will, even if you could not possibly have made a different decision based on the information you had at the time. Either you make a decision based on the information you have at the time, or you act randomly. The latter is not really what we think of as free will.
wish Michael Shermer would have some/all of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe (SGU) podcast panel on his program and vice versa.
is there some kind of schism in the skeptic "community" that prevents this?
He frequently visited their show in the past, that much I know. But considering that the SGU has turned more to the left it's possible Shermer as a centrist doesn't fit their profile anymore.
Remove the mysticism from religion and what remains is, essentially, philosophy. Philosophy can be inspected, accepted, neglected, corrected or rejected without the empty threat of eternal punishment or the false promise of a celestial reward.
Sure. But remember, remove the mysticism from religion, and lose the poetry, art, music, and architecture. Lose the fellow-feeling that emerges only in the communitarian commitment to transcendental principles. Lose the sense of reverence and meaning that can only occur within such a comprehensive spiritual and aesthetic gestalt. Win some / lose some.
@@willmercury
Not so. None of the arenas of human creativity you listed necessarily rely on substantiated proof of a supernatural dimension or mysticism in order to be attempted or accomplished.
Why did this end suddenly?
But the chat GPT doesn't notice that it is noticing. Nor does it even notice.
I want to meet Danial Dennett how do I do that?
The episode cuts out at the end. Bad edit?
mailchi.mp/skeptic/dennett
thank you!
In answer to Michael Shermer's thought experiment. Determinism is not an explanation for anything. But if Jane knew her husband doesn't have libertarian free will, it would help her. Michael says "of course he could have done otherwise" but does he know what that means in a deterministic universe. How could he?
Comments are being shadowbanned.
2:15 Dan looks kind of impatient here. :)
at a time before engineering, which puts science to the test, "philosophy" where "anything goes" was like grasping in all direction while blind. There was a time when that's all we could do. Today, we have many answers that constrain our search. This old style "anything goes" philosophy feels like wasteful word masturbation. The human brain doesn't contain universal truths that navel gazing can reveal. After all, it's just the product of evolution, a 100% physical process.
The desire of getting an intuitive feel for how human intuition works (qualia) is ridiculous. I'm not saying we can't build a machine that thinks EXACTLY they way we do. A system that makes models such as our brains can't model itself 100%, that would require an infinite regression. So our intuition appears like magic to yourself, as it must.
But you can convince yourself that it's 100% machinery in action by depriving your self of air for a couple of minutes.
Penelope Maddy is good too.
We are THE highest order creature. We are the pinnacle of human evolution.
That's a bit tautological
@@onlynormalperson Thats called making a point.
@@williamrunner6718 not very well
Okay troll.
@williamrunner6718 that would imply I'm disingenuous. I'm pointing out you gave a literal tautology.
Google can see your private decisions, but you can't see Google's private (secret) decisions. - This is the future of the world you will inhabit.
34:18
49:30 I like the husband cheating example. Good discussion.
Well, that ended abruptly.
mailchi.mp/skeptic/dennett
Dan Dennett will be greatly missed :/
"... what it would take for poeple to move from their current position to some other position"
People will only change their position if the change is not accompanied by a serious loss of competence. This is true even for the sciences. For example, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn (Kindle: page 151) states:
"The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced. Lifelong resistance, particularly from those whose productive careers have committed them to an older tradition of normal science, is not a violation of scientific standards but an index to the nature of scientific research itself."
Therefore, one will not be able to (easily) convince someone for whom the integration into his religious environment is of importance that there is no God and that all living beings have come into being by evolution.
Is it free will? Did he finally change his mind on free will?
Change his mind to what?
@@sulljoh1
He is a compatibilist. He thinks free will is compatible with determinism.
@@d_e_a_n That makes sense to me. You can accept the human brain as part of the natural world, subject to the laws of physics, while preserving many of the elements traditionally called "free will" that are "worth wanting" - as Dan puts it.
@@sulljoh1
I’ve listened to him discuss this with Sam and I’m on Sam’s side. Dennet mostly likes the idea of us being responsible for our actions. But that misses the point about what many (or at least me) thinks of when they think of free will. If I remember correctly it really seemed like he just wanted free will to exist.
I guess it depends on how you define free will.
Cherry picking does happen in "science" although it obviously is not real science when it occurs. Studies commisioned by businesses cherry pick all the time. They may throw out 10 studies and only pubish the one which favours their interests.
Darwin spent twenty years crafting his work.
rip
Dennett is a good philosopher.
Like George Gale, Helena Cronin, Gilbert Ryle, Hilary Putnam, Ned Block, Ruth Milikan, Patricia Churchland, Paul Kurtz, George H. Smith, Adolf Grunbaum, Diderot, Ludwig Buchner, Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, Harry Binswanger, Leonard Peikoff, Tara Smith, Tibor Machan, etc.
How can it be proven that the tumor was responsible for the man's feelings towards children? After it was removed I doubt he would tell the truth about his feelings and of course would say I'm cured having a perfect excuse. Later being caught again and having the tumor return could have been a coincidence.
If it was a tumor that is responsible,1 then any sort of sexual deviance should be attributed to a malfunctioning brain.
Epiphenomena has intentions and recursive actions all by it self? How? By evolution? That IS the hard question! We don't have access to our own qualia? Nonsense on stilts. This is not skepticism, this is outright ignorance.
My wife was atheist blood, bone muscle and skin. I forced her to marry me at the Russian Orthodox Church in Washington DC. St.Nicolas on Wisconsin Avenue in 2003. In 14 years of marriage she showered me with books by famous local American atheists. The list is long, and I personally met many. Needless to say, -“I am a lost soul in the vastness of infinite universe looking for one simple question. Who am I?
What am I? “
I believe this question is at the bottom of everyone’s existence .
I don’t claim to have them answers, but I would like to inspire some questions in young people
#Bogoslowsky .🦁🤴
Dan Dennett is just a professional storyteller. It's also sad that Shermer was compelled to insert a thumbnail that suggests he's 20 yrs younger.
he has always looked like an old man i don't think the thumbnail is misleading
A priest turned me into z as n atheist by admitting to a friend that he didn’t believe in the virgin birth.
Please just get Sapolsky and Dennett in the same room, or the same episode. It’s painful watching both sides here misrepresenting Sapolsky’s views, and then strawmanning.
Bad civics classes? They have not taught civics in school for 30 years.
49:00 That thought experiment doesn't do anything. Sam's point stands just fine. No, you could not have chosen to do otherwise, or you would have. Whatever your choice was you did not have any control over the factors that made you choose what you did. To say "of course you could have chosen to do otherwise" is just not seeing the argument. You chose what you chose for reasons beyond your control. And no, Dennet, it is not a "good example". You have zero input on what your neurons will make you do or say next, or NOT say or do. Consciousness does not control consciousness, neurons do. Just like the pressure in a room is determined by the density of air molecules. The pressure doesn't control the pressure!?!? The pressure is the thing that is controlled. Same for consciousness and neurons. If your argument is "of course you could have chosen to fire a different pathway of neurons" then you'll have to explain that one to me.
Dennett is saying that it makes no sense to create a fictional scenario where everything in the world is EXACTLY the same down to the find structure of the universe, and then ask if I could have done otherwise. He is saying that that is just not a useful way to discuss freewill. This point is used in his argument against the general idea of free will, saying that free will adherents assume that a 'will' that is some kind of spark that exists apart from the world and that in any given situation, it can generate a choice of its own origin, even in exactly the same situation. He also uses this point against strong determinists like yourself, saying that it just doesn't make sense to use the example you want to use as an argument that a person could not have made any different decision in that fictional scenario. He then follows up with his explanations about how we should view freewill. It's an interesting argument, and very difficult to get across in few words.
One thing that frustrates me about the Sam Harris view on determinism is it always sounds absurdly dualistic to my ears. "You can't punish me for that action, my brain and body did it, not me!" The complaint seems to be that you can't imprison my innocent soul just because the body it inhabits is a machine determined to have committed the crime. If nothing we do truly matters, then why do you care if you are imprisoned? If you were free, nothing you would do anyway would be caused by you either (by this way of thinking). Presumably, Sam Harris makes his argument because he wants to cause changes in the system of jurisprudence - he apparently thinks actions (such as writing his books) do matter, even though his argument is that they don't. Quite perplexing!
Imagine we have a robot programmed poorly and it goes and kills people. An angry mob wants the robot dismantled. No, says Sam, you can't dismantle the robot, the robot was determined by its programming to kill. But, in fact, if it's all machinery, and the machinery is dysfunctional, that's actually grounds for dismantling. If we could install in the robot a free will chip, then and only then would it maybe make sense to give the robot another chance. Now, at least, it might change its ways.
Eeeh eeeehm eeeeeh eeeeehhhhm
Daniel Dennet doesn’t have free will.
Could Dennet just decide to believe the opposite of what he believes? No. He can only say the things in his mind. He has no freedom beyond that. It’s not just that he can’t say or believe things he doesn’t know. He can only believe that which he knows. He could never wake up tomorrow and just choose to believe the opposite.
We can choose what we want is better stated: We can only “choose” what we want, and that’s not much of a choice, because we don’t choose our wants.
If Dennet’s free will exists, it exists in the same way that a computer chess game has free will.
Daniel Dannett. He is to materialist philosophy what Jordan Peterson is to psychology: a genius to beginners and easily discarded by veterans of the field.
He's a step or ten up from Peterson...
I hope you have a more in depth knowledge in other areas than you do about the EU. What a ridiculous response. I think you lost the questioner as a listener. It is better to explain you have little expertise in the area than showing it.
Whether God exists is the wrong question.
Universe. As we know, it is a perpetual process, most likely mathematical structure continuously evolving. Universe is not an item. It’s not a thing it’s not an object. It’s a process. Questioning, the establishment about the existence of deity is truly admired as every other questioning an authority. Just in case authority has too much power. Contributions of spiritual inheritance to contemporary world is certainly undeniable. At the beginning of 21st-century humanity is craving more than ever spiritual reincarnation, a.k.a. new format of spirituality, perhaps even without reference to GOD. I encourage everyone of my followers to engage on your own tireless quest. Nothing is for sure. What was true yesterday, today is just a fog of illusion. Keep your mind open to every scientific idea. At the same time keep in mind your own nature reflects the nature of the universe: process, process, process. You are not an item you are a process. #Bogoslowsky .🦁🤴
His career was just an illusion.