Review of Freedom Evolves, by Daniel C. Dennett (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Naturalistic Account of Free Will with Reference to Daniel C. Dennett
From Ethos to Ethics: Theory and Practice (An Anthology of Peer Reviewed Research Articles), ISBN: 978-93-88207-55-3, 2019
Dennett is one of the foremost contemporary American Philosopher. His work synthesizes traditional philosophical themes such as mind, self, freedom and ethics with current scientific theories. Dennett aim is positive and concedes that we can accept the view science gives us of the world and still maintain human dignity and value. More than that Dennett argues that science offers us a better foundation for the things we hold dear than traditional philosophical, religious, or commonsensical accounts ever could. Daniel Dennett's mission has been to show how science and our self-conception can be reconciled, and, indeed, how both can be made stronger by reaching approachment. Dennett seeks to show that we can retain the richness of our concepts, the richness that is required to sustain what matters to us about our self-conception while reconciling them with naturalism. Within the worldview of natural science, it is usually assumed that, since all events are caus
An Evolutionary Elucidation of Natural Freedom and Moral Responsibility: A Dennettian Outlook
Philosophy and the calling of Global Responsibility, ISBN 978-93-5529-469-2, 2022
Daniel C. Dennett's 'perspectival' and 'emergentist' account of natural freedom upholds that human free will evolves through the process of biological, cultural and language evolution which compels us to cogitate beyond the classical free will-determinism dichotomy; that tends to remove the metaphysical misunderstanding which revolved around the notion of free will over the aeons. Dennett argues that biology provides the perspective from which we can distinguish the varieties of freedom that matter and this sort of freedom is compatible with the deterministic laws; which makes humans morally responsible for the action. Throughout, the history of life on this planet and interacting web and internal and external conditions have provided the frameworks for the design of agents that are freer than their parts from the unwitting groping of the simplest life forms to the more informed activities of animals to the moral dilemmas that confront human beings living in societies. Thus, this research paper attempts to show how Dennett's evolutionary conception of free will as self-control undermines the traditional metaphysical standoff between free will and determinism; along with that it shall also highlights whether the evolutionary account of freedom and moral responsibility has succeeded to provide a compatibilist account of free will.
Most of the free will debate operates under the assumption that classic determinism and indeterminism are the only metaphysical options available. Through an analysis of Dennett’s view of free will as gradually evolving this article attempts to point to emergentist, interactivist and temporal metaphysical options, which have been left largely unexplored by contemporary theorists. Whereas, Dennett himself holds that “the kind of free will worth wanting” is compatible with classic determinism, I propose that his models of determinism fit poorly with his evolutionary theory and naturalist commitments. In particular, his so-called “intuition pumps” seem to rely on the assumption that reality will have a compositional bottom layer where appearance and reality coincide. I argue that instead of positing this and other “unexplained explainers” we should allow for the heretical possibility that there might not be any absolute bottom, smallest substances or universal laws, but relational interactions all the way down. Through the details of Dennett’s own account of the importance of horizontal transmission in evolution and the causal efficacy of epistemically limited but complex layered “selves,” it is argued that our autonomy is linked to the ability to affect reality by controlling appearances.
Review of Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennett (2003)
Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization -- Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 3rd Ed 686p(2017)
``People say again and again that philosophy doesn´t really progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks. But the people who say this don´t understand why it has to be so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions. As long as there continues to be a verb ´to be´ that looks as if it functions in the same way as ´to eat and to drink´, as long as we still have the adjectives ´identical´, ´true´, ´false´, ´possible´, as long as we continue to talk of a river of time, of an expanse of space, etc., etc., people will keep stumbling over the same puzzling difficulties and find themselves staring at something which no explanation seems capable of clearing up. And what´s more, this satisfies a longing for the transcendent, because, insofar as people think they can see the limits of human understanding´, they believe of course that they can see beyond these.`` ´ This quote is from Ludwig Wittgenstein who redefined philosophy some 70 years ago (but most people have yet to find this out). Dennett, though he has been a philosopher for some 40 years, is one of them. It is also curious that both he and his prime antagonist, John Searle, studied under famous Wittgensteinians (Searle with John Austin, Dennett with Gilbert Ryle) but Searle got the point and Dennett did not, (though it is stretching things to call Searle or Ryle Wittgensteinians). Dennett is a hard determinist (though he tries to sneak reality in the back door), and perhaps this is due to Ryle, whose famous book ´The Concept of Mind´(1949) continues to be reprinted. That book did a great job of exorcising the ghost but it left the machine. Dennett enjoys making the mistakes Wittgenstein, Ryle (and many others since) have exposed in detail. Our use of the words consciousness, choice, freedom, intention, particle, thinking, determines, wave, cause, happened, event(and so on endlessly) are rarely a source of confusion but as soon as we leave normal life and enter philosophy(and any discussion detached from the environment in which language evolved) chaos reigns. Like most Dennett lacks a coherent framework-which Searle has called the logical structure of rationality. I have expanded on this considerably since I wrote this review and my recent articles show in detail what is wrong with Dennett's approach to philosophy. Let me end with another quote from Wittgenstein--´Ambition is the death of thought´. Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my article The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language as Revealed in Wittgenstein and Searle 59p(2016). For all my articles on Wittgenstein and Searle see my e-book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Wittgenstein and Searle 367p (2016). Those interested in all my writings in their most recent versions may consult my e-book Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 662p (2016). All of my papers and books have now been published in revised versions both in ebooks and in printed books. Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071HVC7YP. The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071P1RP1B. Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711R5LGX Suicide by Democracy: an Obituary for America and the World (2018) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQVWV9C
Daniel Dennett on Responsibility
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1984
The essays in Daniel Dennett's Brainsforms have been closely examined and widely debated. But suprisingly, Dennett's remarks on responsibility have received comparatively little attention. Suprisingly, since Dennett's discussion of responsibility is particularly creative. And doubly surprising, since Dennett not only includes two major essays on responsibility; he even seems to champion two quite different positions: a compatibilist soft determinism and an incompatibilist libertarianism. This essay will examine Dennett's two positions on responsibility; indicate the important common ground in the apparent diversity; and finally, argue that Dennett's imaginative efforts to establish responsibility are an instructive failure. Mechanistic Responsibility Dennett opens "Mechanism and Responsibility" by arguing that rational behavior may be mechanical: that it is sometimes possible to give an accurate mechanistic account of behavior that could also be described from an intentional stance, and there is no conflict between mechanism and intentionality.' I find Dennett's argument for that compatibility convincing. Thus an underlying principle in Dennett's essay-and in this paper-is the possibility of mechanisticdeterministic accounts of rational processes. My objections are aimed exclusively at Dennett's efforts to accommodate responsibility. In the second half of "Mechanism and Responsibility" Dennett attempts to establish the compatibility of mechanism and responsibility. His first step is to isolate the crucial factor in responsibility: The crucial point when assessing responsibility is whether or not the antecedent inputs achieve their effects as inputs of information, or by short-circuit.* Dennett attempts to justify this claim by examining "excusing conditions"in cases of manipulation (tampering, short-circuiting) of an intentional system. He illustrates with three stories about Tom, ".. . who wakes up to discover a non-rationally induced belief in his head (he does not know it was non-rationally induced; he merely encounters this new belief in the course of reflection, let us say).", In
A Darwinian Account of Self and Free Will
Evolution 2.0: implications of Darwinism in Philosophy and the Social and Natural Sciences, ed. by Weinert, F. and Brinkworth, M.H. (Springer), pp. 43-63., 2011
A Darwinian account can reinterpret Llinas’ and Dennett’s neurobiological claims against the existence of the self, as well as several experiments by Nielson, Walter, Libet and Wegner that conclude that free will, like the self, is an illusion. For Llinas there is no centralizing “organ” in the brain, no tangible self. The self is a form of perception, ultimately an invention of the brain. For Dennett the self is an abstract center of narrative gravity. Both Llinas and Dennett assume that the self, if it exists, should be a Cartesian, conscious self. Nevertheless, since most of the brain’s cognitive functions are unconscious, the self should also be mostly unconscious. To survive, any organism needs to demarcate self from other. In more complex organisms, meeting that need requires the coordination of external information with information about the internal states of the organism. Such coordination, to be useful, must take into account the previous experience of the organism, as well as its genetic inheritance in the form, say, of basic emotions that will guide it to survive, reproduce, etc., as Damasio argues. Experience must be interpreted on the basis of what the organism takes itself to be, a mostly subconscious task assigned mainly to the brain. The brain has evolved, then, to function as a self. The issue of free will is not about having a little “prime mover” in residence but, as Watson argues, about whether our selves determine our actions. And since free will would be merely the means by which the mostly unconscious self determines its own actions, our free will should be rooted in unconscious processes as well. Now, if consciousness of the self is a sort of internal perception, then we should expect certain perceptual illusions (which can be explained by a Darwinian strategy of adaptation).
Compatibilism evolves?: On some varieties of dennett worth wanting
METAPHILOSOPHY-OXFORD-, 2005
I examine the extent to which Dennett's account in Freedom Evolves might be construed as revisionist about free will or should instead be understood as a more traditional kind of compatibilism. I also consider Dennett's views about philosophical work on free agency and its relationship to scientific inquiry, and I argue that extant philosophical work is more relevant to scientific inquiry than Dennett's remarks may suggest.
Darwin's Evolving Legacy. Jorge Martínez Contreras & Aura Ponce de León (eds.), 2011
Free will can be defined, albeit imprecisely, as a property possessed by agents which allows them to make choices, that is, to modify their future voluntarily by choosing from a number of alternatives that they recognize. This would mean that, retrospectively, one could say that they could have acted differently if they had wanted to. Now, whatever agency and free will are, there is something we do know or at least we believe we know about these concepts: they are properties or human faculties that are products of natural selection, be it because they have an adaptive value or because they are collateral products (by-products) of other human traits, traits that are adaptive in order to assure the survival of the species. I will not attempt in this paper to address the question of what agency is, nor whether it really exists or whether it is an illusion. My question is why the experience of agency exists and what kind of adaptive function it has, or in which ways it became a collateral product of other adaptive functions, making it one of the most intense, clear and permanent experiences in human beings. My main thesis is that the experience of agency is the product of the overlapping of certain cognitive functions that have adaptive value, especially social intelligence, metarepresentation, simulation, episodic memory, language, extended consciousness and deliberation
A Pragmatic and Empirical Approach to Free Will
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
The long dispute between incompatibilists (namely, the advocates of the contemporary version of the illusory nature of freedom) and compatibilists is further exemplified in the discussion between Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. In this article, I try to add to the discussion by outlining a concept of free will linked to five operating conditions and put forward a proposal for its operationalization and quantifi-cation. The idea is to empirically and pragmatically define free will as needed for moral blame and legal liability, while separating this from the debate on global determinism, local determinism, automatisms and priming phenomena on a psychological level. This is made possible by weakening the claims of de-terminisms and psychological automatisms, based on the latest research, and by giving a well-outlined definition of free will as I want to defend it.