or thirty years
Daniel C. Dennett has been creating a body of work that explores the
relation of mind and brain. Each part of his theory has provoked
conversation and controversy along the way. His general method of
inquiry requires adopting “the intentional stance”; this orientation is
one of those debatable objects in his tool kit. Traces of all the
components of his model are visible in his most recent work. With his
new book, Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett has written yet
another surprising and controversial work. His previous books have
drawn a mixed audience of professionals and lay readers, and this new
work is meant to do the same. Dennett’s earlier notorious books include
Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room; The Varieties of Free
Will Worth Wanting (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987),
Consciousness Explained (1991), and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
(1995).
Dennett’s general
approach is to apply the empirical findings of neuroscience and the
methods of evolutionary game theory to the explanation of human
consciousness and cooperative social behavior. The reception of
Dennett’s work is consistently not what he would prefer. Professional
scientists and philosophers regard his summaries and juxtapositions of
their work accurate enough but usually irrelevant in a deep sense to
the issue at hand. They are slightly annoyed. The lay audience, on the
other hand, is swept away by his breathless reporting of new scientific
findings, his clever use of metaphor and thought-experiment, and with
his mischievous irreverence. They are non-critical; they have no basis
for evaluating his claims.
Neither response is
satisfying. As any writer knows, it’s difficult to serve two masters. I
fear Dennett’s latest book will fare the same with his readers. But
readers there will be. He’s got a reputation.
Let’s begin with a
note concerning the subject matter of Dennett’s books as indicated by
its title, Freedom Evolves. On the evolutionary side of the
equation, Dennett aims to show how evolutionary thinking can account
for everything “from senseless atoms to freely chosen actions.” He
doesn’t. To do so may be in principle a doable project, but it isn’t
accomplished here. It is a sketchy sketch, at best.
On the freedom side
of the ledger the reader must quickly realize that Dennett’s topic is
free will, not political freedom or psychological freedom from one’s
worries, or any of the other kinds of freedom that might legitimately
be of concern. But free will is no little thing. On it hangs our
humanity. If persons are not free in their choosing then they are not
moral agents responsible for the intentions and consequences of “their”
actions. In fact, without freedom of choice homo sapiens only behave;
they do not act. And so they are not persons at all.
But here’s the rub:
if evolutionary theory bases the life sciences on the non-life sciences
such that human life is at bottom causally determined, how can there
exist creatures with wills free of those causal chains involving the
familiar furniture of the world? How can a micro and macro
deterministic world give birth to freedom?
This puzzle is an
artifact of exaggerated notions of both free will and determinism,
according to Dennett. And so he embarks on a mission of revision: we
must deflate “hard determinism” and “radical libertarianism.” (pp.
97-98) Dennett means to put us on a diet, get us to substitute new
low-cal versions of these ideas for the overly rich ones we’ve been
used to eating. But as anyone who has seriously attempted a diet knows,
it’s torture. And it usually doesn’t work.
Dennett’s
prescription for intellectual health requires us to accept diminished
definitions of determinism and free will—soft bagels and “lite” cream
cheese. The revisionist versions of freedom and determinism are not
what we want or need. We’ve been baited and switched. We feel cheated.
We are already hungry again. And we are not amused. Dennett tries to
reassure us; you’ve got free will (don’t worry), but it’s not the kind
you thought you had. The modest kind you actually have “is all the
freedom worth wanting.” Get used to it. The freedom you are addicted to
is not good for you. Learn to live with less. Less is more.
So now we know. We
know what we are getting into when we let him get his foot in our door.
Dennett’s strategy is to substitute a “hermeneutical switch of
perspectives” (heuristically adopting an intentional interpretation of
“avoidance behavior” for the metaphysically and morally hearty choosers
we think we are; and then he substitutes “caused as inevitable effects”
as a definition of determinism. The second substitution may be more
acceptable than the first.
Dennett is motivated
to explain how free will could naturally evolve because he believes
that the “false belief” that free will is impossible in a causally
determined world is the driving force behind most resistance to
materialism generally and to neo-Darwinism in particular. (p.15) On
the contrary, Dennett insists: “Naturalism is no enemy of free will;
it provides a positive account of free will,” one free of superstition
and panicky metaphysics. (p.16) And then comes the confession in small
print, overlooked by some: “I can’t deny that tradition assigns
properties to free will that my variety lacks. So much the worse for
tradition, I say.” (p. 225)
When Dennett
complains that our use of exaggerated definitions of free will and
determination causes problems for empirical theorizing, we wonder this:
does he have a genuine concern for morality, or is it science he really
cares about? His answer, that “we are evolved animals without souls but
with free will” is ambiguous in this regard.
Dennett thinks of
himself as updating David Hume’s laudatory attempts to make philosophy
pay attention to science. Specifically, Dennett adds into the
philosophical conversation facts of brain science and models of
evolution. By doing so he causes us to rethink the meaning of choice,
the value of morality, and how brains can sponsor minds how “nature has
evolved choice machines.”
The tenor of
Dennett’s writing can be traced to the influence of his Oxford teacher,
Gilbert Ryle, who famously attacked Cartesian mind-body dualism in
The Concept of Mind, dismissing its view of the self as “a ghost in
the machine.” Dennett is concerned with debunking the ancient Greek
belief in an immortal Soul without getting rid of the Self which
possesses agency sufficient to create a personal “choice machine”
capable of freely adopting identities and ideologies, not only able to
invent action by intention. Most of Dennett’s books viciously bash the
Cartesian inheritors of antiscientific beliefs.
In his earlier books
Dennett has come off as an evangelical scientist who is out to slay
superstitious fools by “spreading the acid of Darwinian thought”
everywhere. His presumption that his readers are ignorant and
superstitious colors his rhetoric. He has, to be sure, softened his
attack here a bit; no longer does he ridicule Cartesians for the
“skyhooks” on which their ideas hang. (But see pages183-184 for new
name-calling; he couldn’t completely resist.)
Dennett’s claims
about the phenomenological contents of consciousness are less
controversial than his claims about their roles in constructing
consciousness in how this content constructs its own context. His
desire to see evolutionary frameworks and methods applied to every
issue is not so controversial. His strategy makes systematic use of
Brian Skyrm’s work in The Evolution of the Social Contract
(1996). But his extension of evolutionary techniques to include
multi-level selection theory, the “intentional stance” and memes, are
highly debated methods on which to rely for an account not only of
biology but, as he needs, of culture too. Here is where danger lurks,
according to his cultural critics.
In Brain Storm
(1998), a novel by Richard Dooling, which alludes to Dennett’s
Brainstorms, the author has Rachel Palmquist, an amoral, adulterous
neuroscientist console her partner in sin (or maybe herself) by saying
that humans do not have free will. (p. 228) She reports that in
Consciousness Explained, Dan Dennett uses the cartoon analogy of
Casper the Friendly Ghost to disparage belief in the soul and in the
free power of will that is supposed by some to reside therein. This has
peeved Dan. He intends to set the record straight in Freedom Evolves.
A soul, no; free will, yes.
Dennett points out
that Dooling gets his point dead wrong. In this work Dennett reiterates
that free will is not a fiction (that’s on page 222; but see
elsewhere). Dennett says that he has “finally come to realize that many
people like their confusion” about his issue. It’s their cop-out. But
two pages later (p. 224) he endorses Daniel Wegner’s comment in The
Illusion of Consciousness (2002) that “conscious will may be an
illusion, but responsible moral action is quite real.” Notice the creep
between Dennett’s two pronouncements. This sounds like a shell game to
some—a bait and switch. Who likes confusion now?
And then Tom Wolf piles on. In
Hooking Up (2000) Wolf lumps Dennett together with E. O. Wilson,
Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and John Maynard Smith as wild-eyed
“Darwinian fundamentalist” who have walked over the edge. They have
wandered beyond the pale. (Stephen J. Gould and Leon Kass throw the
same stones in The New York Review of Books, (December 6,1997,
and August 23, 1998, respectively). The critics claim that in their
earnest attempts to lead us away from one superstition, these bad boys
lead us right into another—the belief that we have no free will, thus
no morality and no humanity.
Of course our
lovable mavericks deny the charge. Dennett does so explicitly in
Freedom Evolves. (p. 97) But they waffle. They will not
unambiguously state whether free will exists only as an illusion (even
illusions are real, they say, in one sense of the word; and useful
fictions can be well, useful). They point to concepts like those of
”noble gas‚” or an absolutely straight line‚ as examples. In Freedom
Evolves, Dennett makes much use of ideas spread throughout David
Wegner’s The Illusion of Consciousness; and this makes people
suspicious. But here we will not stoop to convict on the basis of guilt
by association
Dennett, in his
defense, says that whether free will is real or illusory depends on
what you mean by “free will.” As an aside he points out that, in either
case, free will (when regarded as harm-avoiding behavior) could have
survival value—reproductive consequences. But what we want to know is:
can harm-avoiding capacity be free enough to make us responsible for
what we do, responsible enough that we might come to feel bad about
ourselves as the price of, hopefully more often, feeling good about
ourselves? We want buck-stopping responsibility. And that requires
“ownership” of our actions and attitudes. The measure of our
bad-avoiding success is whether we freely chose the good. Freedom is
not, as Dennett claims, merely “the capacity to achieve what is of
value in a range of circumstances.” Thermostats do that. What
thermostats don’t do is “own” the values they seek.
As one critic put
it; to capture our humanity Dennett must account for more freedom than
that of a chemically switched cell, a photographically responsive
flower, or a clever rat. Even more freedom than possessed by smart dogs
or chimps is involved in moral freedom—in ethical praising and blaming.
Dennett’s evolutionary psychology is not enough to account for moral
freedom.
Behaviorism and
neuroscience do not really eat away at the philosophical estate, as
Dennett claims, because they do not take seriously Kant’s arguments
that to treat oneself as a rational agent (not just as a cognitive
creature) one must assume that one’s reason has a practical application
or, equivalently, that one has a will. But one cannot assume a rational
will in oneself without already presupposing “the idea of freedom,” the
free endorsement of warranted beliefs, including beliefs about one’s
own nature. So, to regard oneself as acting (not merely behaving)
requires the actor to presume his or her freely chosen rational
endorsement of beliefs, values, and actions. Morally accountable
freedom is the form of the thought of oneself as a practically rational
agent. If one were not practically rational, what would be the point of
Dennett’s worry—his book?
Although some
reviewers of Dennett’s past books regard him as a good writer, I find
his writing problematic. First of all, his writing streams nicely, only
to suddenly clot. He moves from small sections of breezy explanations
full of homely metaphors and bizarre case studies—all designed to boost
the intuitions of lay people—into close cut and trust with critics or
into dense technical argumentation for readers of philosophical
journals. Dennett himself points to an architectural structure in
Freedom Evolves whereby the first chapters are meant for the
preparation of amateurs and the second five chapters are offered up for
the edification of professionals. For more than one reason I found the
experience of the text jerky.
Dennett clutters his
lecture in Freedom Evolves with long asides, explaining how
altruistic behavior can become an evolutionary stable strategy for some
organisms, or with compact recaps of what he argued in other of his
books and fighting with their critics, or with a gushing over some new
scientific report he’s sure you haven’t heard of yet. He fights flab
whenever he finds it, even if it is beside the point. Absorbing his
scatter-shot content, dealing with his in-your-face rhetoric, and
following his bait and switch tactics presents a challenge for
Dennett’s readers. The confusion, the attitude, the tricks—all these
will keep readers on their toes. Whether they are persuaded is another
matter.
Dennett gets his
idea to reduce “free choice” to “fate-avoiding behavior” from John
Conway’s computer simulated “Games of Life” developed in the 1960s (see
W. Poundstone, The Recursive Universe, 1985). The capacity to
avoid fate has been evolving for billions of years, Dennett reminds us.
Through the operation of natural selection organisms evolve greater
degrees of fate-avoiding freedom. A crude kind of fate-avoiding is
already programmed into primitive organisms as a chemical switch that
responds to danger. Sophisticated fate-avoiders operate with internal
“hypothesis-considering” strategies; they take up an “intentional
stance” toward themselves and others.
Primitive
fate-avoiders are programmed with a single, direct way to avoid harmful
effects of causes. Sophisticated choosers, on the other hand, can
invent novel ways to avoid the usual effects of causes. There is no
conflict, Dennett points out, between being an inventor of
fate-avoiding strategies and the existence of determined causes of
effects (which may or may not be avoided). Primitive “situation-action
machines” have genetically programmed simple rules: “When P happens, do
Y in order to avoid its usual consequences.” Sophisticated
“choice-machines,” however have memetically learned hypothetical design
strategies: “Would X, Y or Z best avoid an otherwise bad fate in this
situation?” Such a reflective selection of a response to determined
causes assumes a value posited for “best” and a prediction of the
consequences of X, Y, and Z, among other things.
Determinism is
usually defined as the thesis that “there is at any time exactly one
physically possible future.” (Peter van Inwagen, “An Essay on Free
Will,” 1983) This follows tradition. In 1814, the French physicist
Pierre-Simon Laplace gave us our common image of determinism in what we
now call “Laplace’s Demon” an all-knowing mind who when given a
complete physical snapshot of the state of the universe (showing the
exact location, velocity, and direction of every particle) could by use
of the laws of science, plot everything that happens in the future, for
eternity. “Nothing would be uncertain for this Intelligence: the past
and the future would be present to its eyes” (Laplace, “A Philosophical
Essay on Probabilities.” Note well, however, that this vision did not
incorporate effect-avoiders.
The traditional,
misleading notion of determinism is all over the place, even in the
mouths of characters in contemporary novels like Thomas Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973): “You had taken on a greater and more
harmful illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that
was false. Completely. No one can do anything. Things only happen.” (p.
34)
On the contrary,
says Dennett. An effect can have several causes, and often it is the
case that typical effects can be avoided. It depends on the nature of
that which would suffer or enjoy the effects. Determinism is about
sufficient causation, not about necessary effects. (p. 83) When
fate-avoiding behaviors are over-determined (i.e., have a variety of
causes) and sufficient causation does not lead to its typical effects
because they were avoided, freedom has been exercised.
One well-done
argument in Freedom Evolves is Dennett’s explanation (pp.
108-122) of why the attempt to account for free will in the mind by
attributing it to quantum uncertainties (of events in the brain’s
electrical and hydraulic systems) will not work. Here he bashes Robert
Kane in the head (The Significance of Free Will, 1996; who
follows Roger Penrose in Shadows of the Mind, 1994).
Freedom requires
intervention (fate-avoiding). One cannot intervene what cannot be
predicted. We cannot avoid what we cannot predict. That which is
predictable is a product of statistically uniform causes. Therefore,
consciously-chosen avoidance strategies depend on determinism, not on
randomness. Luck, perhaps. But not randomness. A roulette wheel in our
heads does not make us rational or free; it does not make us subject to
being held morality accountable for our choices.
At the micro-level,
quantum effects usually cancel each other out. And even when quantum
uncertainties do lead to random neurophysiological events, they do not
spawn free will. This only adds another causal factor—one that is
random rather than nonrandom. A cause is still a cause even when
unpredictable. The nature of the cause and its usual effect depends on
whether the object which is subject to the effect can avoid it. This
fact is independent of scientists. Not all things in the universe are
fate-avoiders. Among those that are, there exist radical differences in
degrees of freedom.
If our behaviors are
completely unavoidable effects of other causes or they are completely
random (i.e., not a response to anything), then we are not responsible
for them—for their motives or consequences. Bottom line? Free will does
not emerge from some “crack in the deterministic armor.” To make such a
claim is to misuse Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Dennett suggests
that those who are thoroughly grounded in using evolutionary reasoning
will avoid these extreme definitions and will discover middle-ground,
realistic definitions that naturalize both freedom and determinism.
Free will must co-exist with (1) external determinism; (2) internal
determinism; and (3) luck. (p. 158) But in this case, free will is
incompatible with “hard determinism” (p. 97) and “radical
libertarianism.” (p. 98)
According to
Dennett, evolutionary neuroscience has not shown that there is no self,
only that it is distributed (i.e., its pinpoint feel from a
first-person point of view is an illusory result of neuro events). The
self is spacious. (p.123) And (in a section called “A Self of One’s
Own,” pp. 245-255) Dennett says that evolutionary neuroscience has not
shown that there is no free will, only that its feeling of being a
prime-mover is an illusory effect of a lag-time between brain activity
and its registration in mental consciousness. (Dennett gets his
“gap-theory” of will from Benjamin Libet’s The Volitional Brain:
Toward a Neuroscience of Free Will, 1999).
The illusion of free
will is compatible with real fate-avoiding behaviors, even “chosen”
ones. The take-home message here? The facts that science describes and
explains, the facts that technology implements, expand rather than
shrink our freedom.
But both of these
“facts”—the distributed but apparently pin-point self, and the lagging
but apparently prime-mover will—are problematic for a regress-stopping
account of self-forming actions, according to the “agent-causation”
theory of selves. (See “Human Freedom and the Self,” Roderick Chisholm,
p. 32, in Free Will, ed. by Gary Watson, for such an account.)
For Dennett, “the
self” is merely a metaphor for the unity of distributed neural events,
which create the illusion of a punctuated consciousness with powers of
invention. We have real illusions of being agents. But we’re not
agents. These illusions come from our genetically based and memetically
nuanced ability to “take-up the intentional stance.” The pathology of
autism seems to result from a systematic failure to take-up the
intentional stance toward oneself as well as others. (More on the
“intentional stance” in a moment.)
Dennett claims that
both neurophysiology and behaviorist psychology reveal the Self and its
Will to be illusory by-products of other activities. Daniel Wegner’s
research disposes the self-as-object tradition; and Benjamin Libet’s
research destroys the self-as-agent myth, according to Dennett. Real
brains; fake selves and wills.
Earlier, in The
Content of Consciousness, Dennett had characterized selves and
their will power as “heads of minds” and “virtual captains” of their
fate. In Freedom Evolves, although not eliminated, our concepts
of these phenomena are further “deflated”; now humans are
“choices-machines” composed of “robotic parts.” (see Dennett’s
Philosophy, ed. by D. Ross, A. Brook, and D. Thompson, 2000, pp.
369-370). Evolution has made it impossible for humans not to think of
themselves as free agents, even though they’re not. We should adjust
ourselves to both facts, says Dennett. Acknowledging all this will lead
as to “a stronger, wiser doctrine of freedom.”
Dennett does not
squarely address the issue of whether the twin illusions of the
“object-self” and its “prime-mover” powers are results of direct or
indirect trajectories through evolutionary design-space. In the past
Dennett has joined the “Darwinian fundamentalists” in saying that the
contents of consciousness are not mere by-products of Mother Nature
seeking a solution to some other design problem. The impression left by
Freedom Evolves is that evolving nature has directly “sought”
free will as a sophisticated solution for avoiding fate. (For the
opposition the “coincidentalist” see the famous paper by Steven J.
Gould and Richard Lewontin for their critique of the “adaptationist
program,” in “The Spandrels of San Marcos,” 1999.)
According to
Dennett, there are three explanatory stances one can take toward
phenomena: the physical stance, the design stance, or the intentional
stance. (He ignores the moral stance.) From a view already oriented
toward physical problems we can explain the structure and behavior of
something in material and (statistically) mechanical terms. From an
orientation toward design problems we can explain a subset of physical
phenomena as genetically heritable, metabolic and sentient activity
that solves functional problems of reproduction within trophic
opportunities and constraints.
From the intentional
stance we can explain a subset of living phenomena as engaging in
intentional activities memetically heritable practices, reflectively,
and freely endorsed—as if in conscious pursuit of its “own” goals.
Just how the
fate-avoidance behaviors of squirrels historically emerged naturally
out of the earlier absence of such avoidance behavior in rocks is not
explained. Also not explained is the transition to the fate-avoiding
behavior of humans from the earlier absence of agency in chickens. (For
an attempt to answer these questions see John Maynard Smith and Eors
Szathmary, The Major Transitions in Evolution, 1995.) The
intentional stance reveals illusory experience in humans, Dennett
claims, but the illusions themselves are real. Our sense of an
object-self with inventive power (even though there is no such self or
power) is a real feeling.
The three nested
kinds of explanation, ordered by emergently different kinds of object,
lead to an ordered set of tasks. First, describe behavior as conscious
goal seeking. Second, eliminate the intentional reference and explain
the same behavior as naturally selected design solutions given internal
and external ecological constraints and opportunities. Third, eliminate
those teleological references and explain the same behavior as
materially and mechanically possible in the brain and its environments.
The intentional
stance has the great advantage of simplicity. Instead of worrying about
thousands of casual relations (the concern of the physical stance) or
hundreds of functional rules and their qualifiers (the concern of the
design stance), all we have to notice is a single goal, desire, or
belief that motivates a behavior.
But this simplicity
comes at a cost. The assumptions are costly: we must assume minds, not
merely brains. We have to assume mental goals (beliefs that X is
valuable and worth pursuing). We have to assume mental means
(motivations and calculations for getting X). Mental values, desires,
and strategies must be assumed or else the intentional stance does not
get off the ground; we cannot turn around and use the intentional
stance (goals) to test its own presuppositions (goals). The simplicity
of the intentional stance is purchased at the cost of substantial
assumptions that can only be posited. The intentional stance itself
must be freely adopted as rational if it is to be a legitimate filter
for our observation and explanation.
Just what is the
epistemological status of a metaphysical claim that free will is a felt
illusion? If the epistemological claim is warranted only if freely
endorsed upon reflection, can that freedom be rational if the freedom
exercised while endorsing the illusory status of free will is itself
illusory? What is the ontological status of an illusory source of
fate-avoiding behavior? Bewildered? Now I understand Dennett’s recent
admission to critics that his ontological intuitions about intentional
capacities are “in happy disarray.” (Dennett’s Philosophy, 2002)
Dennett’s “deflation” of the “folk psychology” of the cheaper classes
is a bust. His illusions bear little metaphysical or moral weight.
The eagerness with
which some scientists and philosophers go after the soul, freedom of
will, and God in order to show their nonexistence, betrays their deep
misunderstanding of symbolic phenomena—of positing ideal measures of
value. All three concepts, Soul, Will, and God, circle around value,
not being. They are not purported to be things to be discovered as
existing or not existing (as real or illusory); but rather they are
values (goals) to be created or killed.
This is the
same point that shallow readers of Nietzsche miss. His madman does not
discover the nonexistence of God, but rather he declares that a
“murder” has taken place that value, not being, has been destroyed.
Dennett might understand neuro-physiology without correctly
understanding its implications for being human. This would be so if our
humanity, though evolved, is invented by certain kind of regard—a
“moral stance” rather than by chemicals. If so, what we have here with
Dennett’s new book may be a murder, not a scientific discovery. Dennett
claims to have discovered that morally free will—as necessary to
secular ethics as it is to religious ethics is missing. But in fact, he
killed it.
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