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.

A few reviews of Dennet's book:

Matt Ridley in The Telegraph

John Gray in The Independent

Kenan Malik in The New Statesman

(links via Arts & Letters Daily)

Thanks for the writeup on his talk. I too am looking forward to reading the book.

Jim

While I haven't read the book either, it does sound as though he's making a point that is also made in a subtle way in Stephen Baxter's new book Evolution. It follows man's historic and future genetic lines from the Cretaceous on into millions of years in the future. I haven't finished it yet but part of his point seems to be that sentience is indeed a gradient and that all of it is a mere expression of evolution's cutting knife.

The word "evitable" is not a new coinage; it turned up decades ago in the title of a short story by Isaac Asimov. If I remember correctly, it was the last story in the "I, Robot" collection.

Interesting - I've also read some of Dennett's work, and Pinker's. He may well be right - and I have no problem ascribing some level of free will or "soul" to animals anyway... but what I have always found really strange in these discussions is something that can perhaps best be expressed as the question: why me? What explains the unique association between the entity that I think of as my "self", and the one body that it has always "inhabited"? What is this thing that makes us a "subject" of subjective experience? Nothing in any of these mechanistic explanations quite explains that... of course one can't really expect objective science to explain the subjective, and it is hard to even find words to talk about it clearly, but still, there's something there that just doesn't seem to match with this sort of explanation...

With the caveat that I have not read Dennet (although I will), from what I understand of your post, this does not seem like an especially unique or new position.

I have read other authors (Rollo May, general works on psychotherapy) which assert that human free will is constrained within certain boundaries of determinism.

I look forward to reading Dennet's writings, to see what insights he brings to the subject.

I don't know why you're surprised that they wasted fiddling with the output res of the laptop. Intelligence isn't knowledge or vice versa. A much lesser wit would have the problem dealt with in less than a minute just by virtue of experience with common laptop design. (Since Microsoft created neither the video driver nor the laptop they don't really figure into it except for people who have ongoing need to always blame MS.)Heck, somebody who actually experience in using laptops for presentation on other people's projectors would know just to right-click on the desktop and select 'properties' to go directly to the needed control panel. The whole operation shoul;d take less than a minute assuming the res of the projector is known.

A lot of technically very bright people are complete idiots when they get away from what interests them. Their ability to focus intently can be their undoing when it comes to everyday life. A lot of my job is going to the homes and offices of various sorts of professionals to configure their systems and show how to get their work done. I try to get them to explore to the point they'll become increasingly competent and self-supporting. Often this is just a waste of time. If they're motivated they'll become expert, if they aren't they'll struggle through forever.

These people aren't stupid. They're often major names in their fields, allowing them to afford my services at the same rate paid by companies and municipalities. Many of their colleagues who do not need my help are by their own admission less accomplished in their field but are more generally competent as humans.

Compare this to average folks who azen't masters of any field but get by pretty well in anything they need to do. They may not change their own oil but they don't need someone else to keep track of their Jiffy-Lube appointments lest they burn out a motor every year.

The amusing thing is that this ties in so well with Dennett's work. One of the great achievements of human evolution is the creation of an environments in which such overfocused people can survive and prosper, in turn hugely benefitting the general population. Without the freedom to pursue their narrow interests the rest of us would still be in the Stone Age.

Well, I wasn't really surprised, because I see this happen all the time, even with engineers in technical briefings. What surprised me was that Professor Dennett, who's obviously no stranger to public speaking, wouldn't have verified that things were OK ahead of time, though I suppose it's possible that he was late, as I was.

Two more reviews of Dennett's book, from Reason and TechCentralStation. I wrote the second one:

Freedom Evolves

Degrees of Freedom