One of the benefits of spending a great amount of time in Los Angeles is the opportunity to attend lectures like the one I did today at Cal Tech.

I went up to hear Dan Dennett give a talk focused on his most recent book, “Freedom Evolves.” Sadly, I’ve neither read, nor even purchased the book, else I could have gotten his signature. Having heard the lecture, however, I’m now determined to do both.

The lecture was at the smaller auditorium in Baxter Hall, above the Ramo auditorium. It was packed, standing (and sitting in the aisles) room only. I arrived late due to unanticipated traffic situations, so I stood in the back. That turned out to be OK, because the presentation on his laptop apparently hadn’t been coordinated with the video computer projector–several minutes were wasted in reconfiguring his machine in video resolution matching that of the projector, while the moderator (the event was sponsored by the Southern California Skeptics Society) read from an updated list of oxymorons to keep the audience entertained temporarily.

I was struck (as I always am at such occasions of meeting of scientists and engineers) by the incongruity of presumably high-tech people being flummoxed by the technological vagaries of modern computer equipment (in this case, of course, being Microsoft, so probably beyond the wiles of the brilliant Caltechies in the audience). It’s always interesting to be in a room full of people in which the average IQ is probably about 130. As representative examples, both Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker were in attendance. Fortunately, it wasn’t totally inscrutable–after about ten minutes or so, the appropriate menus were dragged down–Program/Settings/Control Panel/Monitor–and the appropriate resolution selected, and all was well.

And so the lecture finally started.

I should preface this by saying that I’ve read three other works by Dennett: Consciousness Explained, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and The Mind’s I (co-edited with Douglas Hofstadter). I admire his work, and consider him one of the most interesting thinkers on the planet on these subjects. That said, while I found the lecture entertaining and interesting, it was ultimately disappointing and unsatisfying. That said, it was, after all, a one-hour lecture, and it would be unfair for me to pass judgement on his theses without actually reading the book, and I hope to do so in the near future, time and dollars permitting.

The fundamental thesis that I took away was that he wanted to blow up the equivalence in peoples’ minds between determinism and lack of free will. Here are the most memorable bits (you can be assured that they were memorable because I took no notes, and I have a lousy memory, so anything that’s preserved, hours after the fact, and still available for blogging, is by definition, memorable…).

It is possible to have free will in a deterministic universe. (I suspect that if pressed to the wall, he would admit that this isn’t true in an ultimate, philosophical sense, but his thesis is about practical senses, as in how should society treat criminals). In an ultimate, philosophical sense, in fact, free will, like consciousness, may very well be an illusion. Of course, that statement always begs the question–who is being fooled?

The important point that he really wanted to make is that a deterministic universe is not only not antipathetic to free will, but actually makes it more useful, in an evolutionary sense.

As an example, he noted the case of walking across a field in a thunderstorm. In an undeterministic universe, a harm-avoiding agent would be at a loss as to what to do, because events would be utterly random. But suppose that lightning strikes could be predicted. In that event, knowledge would be available as to whether or not the trek across the field, at that time, would be safe. Therefore, a deterministic universe, with associated knowledge, could enhance the value of choice, so determinism actually increases freedom.

He has coined a new, and useful, word–evitability. You can figure out the meaning–just think of the opposite of ept, or ane, or gruntled, which are not true English words, but have counterwords.

He believes that contrary to determinism making all of life’s actions (including human life’s actions) inevitable, evolution, in its growth of complexity, has allowed us to make the unpleasant consequences of life evitable–that is, avoidable, to a degree, and because avoiders have an evolutionary advantage, they have even more of an advantage in a deterministic universe in which outcomes from bad decisions can be actually predicted, given sufficient knowledge and experience.

In his view, free will, and consciousness, like intelligence, are emergent properties of a congregation of entities that do not possess those properties. One of his quotes, in the context of the question about whether or not robots have souls: “Yes, there is a soul–but it consists of tiny robots!”

However, based on the book’s title, I think that the important, take-home correlary thesis, is that freedom, which is derived from free will, has evolved as well. It, like consciousness, and life itself, is an emergent property, that is derived from a quality provided by a sufficiently-large quantity. Freedom is more than the sum of non-free parts, just as smart entities can be created by congregating large numbers of non-smart things.

There are conditions that allow life, and there are conditions that permit freedom, not only in action, but in thought, and those conditions must be preserved for freedom of thought, will and action to be preserved. Just as, under certain conditions, life could go extinct, there are certain conditions that might allow life to go on, but for freedom to go extinct.

I found this a particularly topical subject, because in much of the world, the conditions that permit freedom continue to evolve, and we are perhaps on the verge of enhancing the conditions for it in one particular country, as we hope to liberate it from a sociopath who believes that the world exists for the fulfillment of his own desires and pleasure.

While I agree with Dennett’s basic idea, it remains a dangerous one to many people, as he admitted himself in the lecture. He believes that the notion that it is dangerous is a mistaken one, but that won’t prevent them from shouting him down, because they will sincerely continue to believe that a deterministic universe implies a lack of morality.

Here is the serious problem with it, not in terms of its validity, but in terms of societal acceptance of it.

There are a large number of people who are able to accept both the scientific theory of evolution, and the existence of a Biblical God. I’m not talking about the fundamentalist Christians who object to the teaching of evolution to their children, but the mainstream Christians (particularly Catholics, such as the Jesuits) who have the mental agility to balance these two concepts in their minds, and are not accordingly currently mounting petition drives against the teaching of evolution in the schools.

They reconcile the two seemingly-incompatible beliefs by calling the Book of Genesis a metaphor, and by believing that while man evolved from lower animals, something happened a few thousand years ago that made him unique. God gave him what the AI types call “the juice.” Or a soul.

Dennett is kicking the ladder out from under this philosophical balancing act by saying that while humans are special, and they do have a “soul” in some sense, that they are only somewhat more special than their non-human ancestors, who also possessed the same property–just to a lesser degree.

That doesn’t grate in any way on those of us who are provisional transcendental materialistic reductionists, but for those who believe that man is unique among all animals, it is not just unsettling–it is indeed heresy and unreconciliable with the foundation of their beliefs, because it doesn’t draw a bright line between man and ape. Or aardvark. If it’s a gradient, rather than a binary condition, he’s opened up a whole new front in the culture wars, drawing in vast new brigades of believers in the concept of man in God’s image.

He spent a good deal of his talk in describing how he understands his opponents’ concerns, and that they arise only from a mistaken understanding of the implications of current evolutionary theory.

I wish that he were right.