Determined to Disagree
by rsbakker
So I had the privilege of seeing Dan Dennett speak for the first time. It’s nice to discover than an author you’ve followed your entire adult life possesses genuine charisma. The presentation, which was entitled “My Brain Made Me Do It” was as much a comedy act as a philosophical discursus. The auditorium was packed, but thanks to my friend Nandita, I enjoyed everything from the second row.
His argument was that all the neuroscientists making alarmist claims regarding volition and freedom were being socially irresponsible in addition to getting the philosophy wrong. He cited a recent study where college students became more inclined to cheat after reading that responsibility is an illusion, the suggestion being that a post-responsibility society wouldn’t be much of a society at all. Then he basically repeated several of the arguments he made in Elbow Room years back, and more recently in Freedom Evolves.
Dennett is an exceedingly slippery thinker. Depending on the frame of reference you take to him, he’ll sound like an eliminitivist (someone who thinks all our psychological categories are so mistaken that we need to replace them wholesale) one minute, then an intentional realist (someone who thinks our psychological categories are generally right on the button) the next.
He’s also brilliant at expressing his ideas: reading him, I often find myself nodding and nodding, thinking that it all sounds so obvious, only to screw my face up in confusion while I’m making a coffee several moments later.
But he’s neither an eliminitivist nor an intentional realist. He’s a kind of Quinenan pragmatist. He doesn’t care so much whether intentionality is real, as he cares whether its useful–and there’s no denying the latter. It simply doesn’t pay to consider others as machines, even though that’s what they are. What does pay, is taking what he calls the ‘intentional stance,’ treating things and others as agents, as a kind of cognitive shorthand, a way to successfully manipulate and interact with monstrously complicated systems. For all intents and purposes, the ‘metaphysical reality’ of the intentional is beside the point (do you smell the circularity here?).
So when it comes to the issue of free will, he argues in numerous ways that we have the only free will that matters, so allowing him to preserve all the concepts further down the implicative foodchain. So for instance, it makes no sense to say “my brain made me do it” because we are our brains. We’re literally just saying that we did something.
Of course, the problem is that ‘we’ are just a small part of our brains.
Dennett is after a kind of ‘semantic compatibilism’: he wants to find ways to make our old psychological vocabulary fit with the findings of cognitive neuroscience, and so preserve the institutions raised upon the former. Over the years, he has waged an ingenious guerrilla campaign of equivocation. So with free will for instance, he takes our ‘common sense’ understanding, shows how it’s so ridiculous that it can’t be the ‘free will’ we want, then redefine into something that gives us all the things we really want, even if we didn’t realize as much in the first place. If you say, “No, that’s not what I wanted,” he just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Well, good luck with your magic. I’m quite fine, thank you.”
For me, the traditional philosophical debates about determinism are now beside the point. The problem is the chasm that seems to be opening between the world we experience versus the world we know, thanks to the accumulating horror that is science. More and more, the intuitions of the former jar against the findings of the latter. Dennett seems to assume that our intuitions turn on our concepts: if we could just get clear on our concepts, then the conflict between our experience and our knowledge would simply dissappear. Personally, I think the situation is muddier: that our concepts turn on our intuitions turn on our concepts turn on… and so on. In the particular case of free will, I think the intuitions drive the concepts more than vice versa.
So, for instance, I think the intuition that tells me my sense of willing is behind my actions, rather than something that happens to accompany them (as the research suggests), is damn near universal. I find the notion that my sense of willing could be selectively shut down out and out terrifying. And I would suggest that the reason so many people intellectually agree with Dennett, only to suffer a subsequent experiential revolt, is a result of ‘mandated intuitions’ like this.
I think we are hardwired to believe in magic of various kinds, and that an immense amount of specialized training is required to get us believing otherwise. Far too much for Dennett’s prescriptive conceptual approach to even begin commanding the kind of consensus he needs to justify–let alone realize–his social project.
Like I say in the Afterword to Neuropath: what Dennett is doing is like telling us at the funeral of our beloved Gramma Mildred to simply begin calling our dog ‘Mildred.’ When we object, he just shrugs and reminds us that the dog was Gramma Mildred all along anyway…
But he never quite explains the body in the coffin next to him.
Three Pound Brain 
I’m curious how you reconcile the consensual scientific objectivity to the seemingly universal human existential experience? Thanks for the words as always, Bakker.
Before your question can even begin to be answered, I think you need to say something more about what you mean by “consensual scientific objectivity” and “seemingly universal human existential experience.”
I assume you mean something like this: science is unique among claim-making institutions in that it seems capable of generating (at least temporary) consensus among those with sufficient familiarity with its procedures; yet what happens when its conclusions clash with apparently ‘given’ facts of human experience, e.g., the exercise of free will? In other words, how can we reconcile a clash between human-being-as-subjectively-experienced and human-being-as-objectively-studied?
The answer, I think, is that science is (increasingly) capable of explaining _why_ our ‘existential experience’ is an illusion, at least insofar as, e.g., we take our consciousness to be causally efficacious. We eliminate the apparent dilemma by cutting off one of its horns.
At least, that’s how _I_ would respond. Not sure what Bakker would say.
Ah, “an ingenious guerrilla campaign of equivocation” — the philosopher’s bread and butter! Love it.
It’s the same, I find, with most institutional responses to philosophical skepticism: let’s just redefine the domain of the ‘known’ and, lo and behold, the skeptical problems disappear! “What, you thought you had knowledge of the _world_? No, silly, you only have knowledge of sense data, or experience, or appearances, whatever — and that’s fine! That’s all your ‘world’-talk has ever _really_ been about anyway!”
Bullshit.
Such responses, whether to skepticism or to the disturbing conclusions of neuroscience, simply miss the point. Too many philosophers view language as the high road to human rationality. “I fear we’ll never rid ourselves of God so long as we still believe in grammar…”
You can explain a dead body?
What’s your problem with his approach? The best I’m gathering is that it’s like the human eye can only see a tiny part of the light spectrum – knowing that doesn’t make you suddenly see the rest of the spectrum. Here, from what I gather, you think he’s saying that once you get the concepts down, what you experience and what you know actually match up. But really it’s like the eye – knowing your blind to a large amount of spectrum doesn’t make you see it. Knowing a number of cognitive errors, the same.
Or way off?
Also I hate the ‘oh, were all machines’ thing. I’ve written it before – if your mind is so poor at grasping things, why attach so much feeling to the poor, cartoon grasp of circumstance that is ‘machine’? Again with a vision analogy, it’s like if you had really fuzzy eyesight with blotches, then you look at yourself in a mirror and think you are all fuzzy and made of blotches. It’s taking the weakness of your perception as some grand and horrible realisation. You are not complex enough to realise how complex you are. Or atleast that’s my social project – come take me down with some evidence, mofo, before I perpetuate it further! 🙂
Roger, my question rolled more like this: “consensual scientific objectivity” is the agreed upon worldview of the totality of scientific fact. Their “objectivity,” if there were such a thing. In the case of Bakker’s post, the implications of neuropsychology and the like. “Seemingly universal human existential experience” is to me what Bakker says with “So, for instance, I think the intuition that tells me my sense of willing is behind my actions, rather than something that happens to accompany them (as the research suggests), is damn near universal. I find the notion that my sense of willing could be selectively shut down out and out terrifying.” We all can generally agree that our internal mental interpretation of our individual physical experiences is more or less the same.
Help at all? My girlfriend always tells me how vague I am; I have some issues with communicating clearly.
Then you mean what I took you to mean: how can we reconcile the interpretation of human beings offered by science with our own ‘internal’ interpretation of ourselves? Again, the answer has got to be that there is no real (explanatory) dilemma as long as science can _explain_ the source and power of our delusive self-interpretation.
I might not have all the sociological details right here, but it seems to me that when brain-science first got going, its procedures and conclusions were altogether too tentative to offer substantial challenges to what philosophers like to call our ‘folk-psychological’ explanations (meaning our own ‘commonsense’ interpretations of ourselves as, e.g., beings with free will). Given the overwhelming sense we all have that the conclusions of introspection are (at least for the most part) indubitable, it’s natural to assume that any scientific study of humans will tend to verify our folk psychological insights — and that in the case of a clash between the two, the ‘indubitable’ (the introspective) will triumph over the tentative (the empirical). But the procedures of brain-science improved by leaps and bounds, its conclusions piled up, and it soon found itself capable of going toe-to-toe with our folk psychology. And in such a battle, could there be any real doubt which side would come out on top?
Even so, as long as our folk psychology was taken to be ‘indubitable,’ then it quite simply could not be seriously challenged. Yet the supposed indubitably of introspective insights has been assaulted from numerous quarters, with hard science coming on the field rather late, actually: it’s but one of numerous ‘Cartesian myths.’ Still, any theory that would rob us of our folk psychological categories must also _explain_ the presence and persistence of those categories. And this is where hard science steps in, for science does seem uniquely capable of generating consensus: Nietzsche and, thousands of years before him, the ancient Greek skeptics could go on and on about the depths of human self-delusion, but no one had to listen to them — nothing is easier to ignore than philosophers; but hard science won’t be — can’t be — ignored, especially not given its propensity to issue in technological innovations.
Science is increasingly able to explain away our folk-psychological theories — to redescribe them, as it were, in its own terms. It follows from this that there is no real clash between the two, not because our folk psychology has survived in a new form, but because it’s been relegated to the status of delusion on a par with the illusory sense we all have that the earth stands still while the sun revolves around it.
Not trying to close the circle because I don’t feel I have enough elements.
Just a few suggestions.
“a way to successfully manipulate and interact with monstrously complicated systems”
Niklas Luhmann is a sociologist I studied that I still base my fundamental beliefs on. His theory has a place for pretty much everything and is usually dead on (explaining from the evolution of men till modern days).
One of the fundamental ideas is that beliefs systems, religion and modern systems were essentially created to go against uncertainty. Linguistic acts. If the answer to whatever question is always “yes” and “no”, then you need some kind of system that reduces the complexity and makes something just “yes”, or just “no”. Put linguistic order into chaos.
So religion is basically a way to set a “yes” (or “no”) and have no one who can go against it (it’s more elaborated and, well, convincing of this, but the essence is this). “Faith” being the premise for this system to work, so the prohibition of returning to ambivalence and complexity.
Today, he says, it’s pretty much the same but the reduction systems are much more elaborated and he calls them something that translated sounds like “media of communication symbolically generalized”. And so more complex relationships about values, truth, love, art, money, property, rights and so on.
I was thinking about this: anthropology basically tells us the same. Religion we know as being totally “wrong”. We know it doesn’t rain because a god is pissed, so the belief system is wrong. Yet today we also know that all these belief systems had a pragmatic purpose and helped societies to survive.
Which means that in the end the same structure you describe is repeated: “He doesn’t care so much whether intentionality is real, as he cares whether its useful”
Religion too. Doesn’t matter if religion says something true. The point is that it says something useful that leads us (somewhere?).
“Of course, the problem is that ‘we’ are just a small part of our brains.”
And this reminds me a comment I wrote down on the Malazan reread. Where I go from the ideas of Kabbalah (I explain them wrong btw, but serve the point) to the idea that “magic” is still well alive under the stream of consciousness.
If I can link it, since I think it’s tied to this discussion:
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/01/malazan-re-read-of-the-fallen-deadhouse-gates-chapter-6-and-7#158805
And I also want to quote one of those poem of Erikson I just read:
“There are tides beneath every tide
And the surface of water
Holds no weight”
“The problem is the chasm that seems to be opening between the world we experience versus the world we know”
What about the chasm between the world we don’t see (deep symbolic level) and still has a determinant impact on us?
(thanks to the accumulating horror that is subconscious)
“I think we are hardwired to believe in magic of various kinds”
But magic in the end is a linguistic structure. I’ve studied a bit of Chomsky and I know that we are hardwired for language before we are hardwired for anything else.
Thinking on it further, is the issue being raised that you just shift to calling the dog Mildred without admitting you ever tried to call something else that?
I mean, it’s not so much that grandma Mildred is dead, because she isn’t. She never existed in order to be dead. There is no body to explain. Yet that’s no reason to deny that we thought otherwise.
Roger, thanks for you words. Some of it might be over my head, though I feel I’m grasping most of what you are trying communicate. However, apologies but my question remains.
You and I, and realistically anyone with the abstract comprehension of our subject matter could join the conversation and agree that we have comparable, if not downright similar, experiences of our sensory awareness and even our individual interpretations of them. Yet I can agree completely with, and exercise avid effort in internalizing, Science’s – specifically Neuroscience’s – worldview.
No matter how much effort I exert, “I” am still here every morning, “You” and “I” carry on this conversation.
Personally, I’ve found many of Neuropsychologies interpretations to be downright useful, even allowing for degrees of skillfulness.
How to bridge the gap? Is it simply the evolutionary kluge effort? Perhaps a redefinition of the paradigm of self and ego might showcase “consciousness” as an emergent mutation rather then simply a kluge illusion.
Still curious. Thanks for the time, Roger, and anyone else who might respond.
What’s the objective with that? The practical objective? We just must know ourselves utterly? I mean, in terms of trying to reduce to nill the way people kill each other, directly or indirectly, over their self fantasies, that seems a practical outcome. But just knowing yourself utterly for the sake of knowing yourself utterly?
Sometimes, I think, goals that have no practical outcomes become the most irrational pursuits of all.
Callan, you may or may not read this, I know I can’t keep up with comments from past posts. Isn’t knowing ourselves a worthwhile objective in and of itself? Especially when so many academic, social, and cultural avenues seek to irrevocably alter our humanity?
Your right on keeping up – by chance only I came back to this.
Mike, I’m mulling over your words and I think there’s some feedback loop in there. “Isn’t knowing ourselves a worthwhile objective in and of itself”. I’m kind of thinking the self blindness simply makes oneself seem some sort of facinating existant thing to examine. Perhaps that’s Scotts problem and the source of his absurd fiction conclusion. I think you may be facinated by your own self blindness and perceptual anomalies it creates, confusing the anomalies for yourself.
Geez, I don’t sound jolly in saying that, but atleast I’m on the right blog to say it… :`
Especially when so many academic, social, and cultural avenues seek to irrevocably alter our humanity?
Well, now your moving on to a practical concern, which is quite the opposite of the issue I raised.
[…] today I was reading a post of Scott Bakker about free will, perception of reality and whatnot. My comment was a reply to […]