Alan Saunders: Hello, I'm Alan Saunders, and this week on The Philosopher's Zone I'm delighted to be joined by one of the foremost thinkers of our time. He's been described as 'the great de-mystifier of consciousness', and his name is Daniel Dennett. Free will, robot consciousness, intentions and belief, are all ideas that he's grappled with. Professor Dennett's work can't be pinned down easily, but here's a little quote that might get us started. Of his time at Oxford, Dennett has been quoted as saying he developed a deep distrust of the methods he saw other philosophers employing, and decided that before he could trust his intuitions about the mind, he had to figure out how the brain could possibly accomplish the mind's work. Well, that's a rather major task. Daniel Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in the States. Daniel Dennett, welcome to The Philosopher's Zone.

Daniel Dennett: I'm glad to be with you, Alan.

Alan Saunders: What still excites you about human consciousness?

Daniel Dennett: Well I think we're getting closer, after many close starts in the last thirty or forty years, to having an understanding of how information is actually moved around in the nervous system; what the high level cognitive architecture for consciousness is. And it's tantalising, because there aren't any really good models yet, but we're making some wonderful progress on that. And what I particularly like about the progress is that it is, I would say, largely orthogonal to the traditional philosophical debates which are still going on in some quarters. And it's about the kind of consciousness that really matters, and is not only what we have access to so that we can talk about it, and adjust it and re-think it, but be, in effect, engaged in the considerations as they occur. That's what ties consciousness to morality, after all.

Alan Saunders: Do you think that in this area there are questions that we may never answer?

Daniel Dennett: Oh, sure. There have to be, because... You know, life is short, and the species is finite. But I think that we're closing in how consciousness works quite wonderfully. It's a great time to be working. I just look at the best students today, and they just know effortlessly things that the geniuses, you know, that taught me and that I looked up to, couldn't understand. And they start off with such a fluent, sort of dynamic model of how the brain works, for instance, which was just not obtainable, you just couldn't have that, you couldn't have that as part of your kit when you were thinking about these issues 34 years ago.

Alan Saunders: Well that's an encouraging thought. Now, given your enthusiasm for evolutionary theory, presumably you can provide an account of when in our development consciousness arises, and how our consciousness differs from that of other animals.

Daniel Dennett: Yes, I think actually some of my inspiration from [inaudible] was for that marvellous, wacky book by Julian Jaynes of some years ago; he boldly dated the arrival of human consciousness between The Iliad and The Odyssey. And he thought it was a very recent phenomenon. I agree with him that our kind of human consciousness is a very recent phenomenon, but not that recent! He's off by maybe an order of magnitude. Our kind of human consciousness may be a hundred thousand years old rather than ten thousand years old, but it's not millions of years old.

I think we have a very different computational architecture from even our closest neighbours, the great apes, our closest kin. And I think that this is hard for people to come to grips with, because there's a very natural, and indeed a generous and benign, tendency to anthropomorphise the minds of others. So we want to... Many people really want to stress how similar the mind of a chimpanzee, or a dolphin, or for that matter a dog or a cat or a bird, is to our minds. I think in fact they're profoundly different, and I think I have some pretty good hints about why they're different, and what the main features are that make them so different. So this bothers a lot of people, because they hear me saying that human consciousness is so different from the consciousness of other animals that it's almost a mistake to link them together. And they're afraid that in doing that I am, sort of, deliberately setting the stage so that I can, you know, justify being a carnivore, or justify treating animals badly in experiments, or something like that. There's a moral dimension to this!

But I say, 'look: of course there's a moral dimension to it, but that's not it! We're the only minds that have free will in a morally significant way. That's really important! We, our brains, our minds are enough different from that of any other creature that we can hold each other and ourselves morally responsible, and it would be a travesty to do that with any other animal, and that's a key difference.'

Alan Saunders: Just getting back to the Julian Jaynes book you mentioned, what Jaynes was arguing was that in The Iliad you have characters, the entire cast, in fact, who have no inner lives. The gods act within them, they're a bit like... I suppose almost like psychopaths, with the voices within them, but they don't have a sense of their own interiority. Whereas by the time we get to The Odyssey, which is the later work, that has changed. Now, you wanted [inaudible] agree with this account, but you want to push it back in time, do you?

Daniel Dennett: Yes, I was never convinced by the very ingenious way that he dated... Well, he illustrated the transition, and then he put a date on it, using scholarship about the likely dates of Homer and The Iliad and The Odyssey. A clever myth, and I think there's a deep truth hidden in it. I think that there are different kinds of subjectivity; that there's the kind of subjectivity that, you know, even a robot can have. It's got a limited view of the world, whatever it can take in. If it doesn't have colour vision, then colours are not part of its subjective state. It has a point of view in a quite obvious sense. But a lot of people are going to say 'yeah, but that's not real subjectivity'. Well, it's a kind of real subjectivity, and there's other kinds of real subjectivity that they're thinking of; and that is, I think, quite a recent development, and it's very much along the lines that Jaynes put forward.

It's one thing to talk, and it's another thing to realise what you're doing when you're talking; to be sort of self-conscious about talking. And I think people talked, used language, for a long time before they were sort of capable of tumbling to the fact that that's what they were doing. They weren't treating their own utterances as objects of reflection, as objects to think about. And that's something that I think Jaynes was on about, and that's just one aspect of it.

Alan Saunders: So this is in keeping with your view that in fact we have much less consciousness than we think we have?

Daniel Dennett: That too, yes. I love the theoreticians, and there are quite a few, who go on and on about the continuity of consciousness. To which I say: 'That's exactly backwards. The really remarkable thing about human consciousness is its discontinuity'. It seems to be continuous... It seems to be continuous but it isn't. And this is just obvious in some regards.

For instance, take vision: It seems as if you are continuously aware of the visual world, and it's a plenum of colour all the way out to the edges, but it just isn't so, and we can prove that: For one thing, your eye jumps in a little jump called a saccade. It jumps about four times a second. And during the jump you can't see a thing. Not a thing! You don't notice that, you don't notice your blind spot.

The fact is that there are lots of blind spot-type phenomena that we just don't notice for a very simple reason: You can't see a boundary unless you can see both sides of it. And so lapses of consciousness are hard to detect. So in fact our consciousness is nowhere near as continuous as we like to think, it's just that we don't notice, obviously, we don't notice that we're not conscious.

Alan Saunders: What, then, is a conscious state? I mean, are conscious states just those that are available to our verbal thoughts about them?

Daniel Dennett: No, not just to our verbal thoughts. The bottleneck of verbal expression is much more limited than the sort of constriction of consciousness itself, and I think that perhaps the hardest thing for people to understand about the view that I'm putting forward is, look, there's no... This idea of a show that's going on in your head is just wrong. There's no theatre; there's no Cartesian theatre where everything comes together for consciousness. There's this great competition going on, all the time, between information, sensory information and the different sense modalities, and lots of this is being put together and analysed by what we might as well call for the moment 'sub-conscious' mechanisms, and it's all vying for influence in the brain. And the stuff that succeeds in gaining and holding influence for some time, long enough so that you can talk about it later, that's what we're conscious of. It's only retrospectively that we can identify what we were conscious of.

Alan Saunders: What do you think that you have added to the philosophical canon? I mean, because you are, whether you like it or not, one of the pre-eminent living philosophers.

Daniel Dennett: Oh my... Well, I think that my idea of the 'intentional stance', and 'intentional systems', draws together a lot of things in a useful way. The intentional stance is the habit we have-and it is a habit; in fact it's like an instinct-when we see something complicated, moving, our initial reaction is to treat it as an agent; to think 'what does it want? What does it know?' Treating unknown things, complicated things, as agents is the heart of the intentional stance. It is the strategy of supposing the thing that you're dealing with is rational, has beliefs, has desires. It has the beliefs that it can get from its sensory equipment; it has the beliefs that it needs to have to do the job it's doing; it has the desires it ought to have to accomplish its ends. And that makes it an agent that is highly predictable.

So my threadbare, threadbare because very accurate and usable, example is the chess-playing computer. You probably have a chess program on your laptop. If you want to play against it, forget about trying to predict its moves on the basis of the physics of your laptop; also forget about trying to predict it on the basis of your understanding of how the program is structured. Your best chance of beating it is to treat it as a rational chess player that knows the rules of the game, knows the positions of the pieces, and has a good sense of the value of particular moves. Then you can start predicting what it's going to do and what it isn't going to do.

And in fact one of the nice things about chess is that it-unlike, say, poker-it's a game of perfect information. There's no cards up anybody's sleeves, there's nothing hidden. You're simply trying to do a better job of thinking about what the best possible move under these circumstances is than your opponent. Now, when you do that you're adopting the intentional stance. We use it when we talk about computers, we use it when we talk about animals, we even use it when we talk about evolution.

Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National you're with The Philosopher's Zone, and I'm talking about the mind and the will with the very distinguished American philosopher Daniel Dennett. Dan, let's discuss your views on free will. On the question of whether we have free will or whether everything we do is predetermined, presumably by prior circumstances, you're what's called a 'compatibilist'. What does that amount to?

Daniel Dennett: Well, mainly it amounts to denying the disjunction that you just gave me. Saying, 'look, determinism has nothing to do with it actually'. We have free will whether or not determinism is true. Determinism is just not the issue. What I've argued for many years is that there are different varieties of free will; there are different concepts of free will. And some of them are really important, because if you don't have free will in these senses then you're not a moral agent, and in a certain sense your capacity as a person, as a normal human being, is not what you would want it to be, and these are the important varieties of free will; the varieties of free will that are worth wanting. And you look at those closely, and you see they have nothing to do with determinism at all. Whether or not determinism is true is simply an orthogonal issue. It doesn't interfere with them, doesn't enhance them.

One way of thinking about this again is evolutionarily. For billions of years there was no free will on this planet. Now there is. Physics hasn't changed. What has changed is that evolution has created nervous systems that have more and more power. And that access of power, that capacity to look ahead, that capacity to reflect, that capacity to respond to reasons, to give and respond to reasons, those capacities are the core of moral responsibility. And we're the only creatures that have them. And it evolved, and once it evolved-ta-da!-we have entities that have tremendous power, cognitive power, and that's what free will is. So it's sort of noblesse oblige: Those of us who have the powers are obliged to use them wisely. And a bear may kill a human being-that's not murder. Why? Because the bear doesn't have free will. The bear doesn't have enough smarts to be able to assess the situation in the terms that we require for somebody to have free will. Nor, of course, does a small child. Free will is something you grow into.

Alan Saunders: Well, you say it's something you grow into, so, presumably it's a matter of degree. I mean a bear...

Daniel Dennett: Yes. Yes!

Alan Saunders: A bear isn't actually forced to kill me; he might on that day decide he can't be bothered, or he's not hungry, or I look too much of a threat, or something like that, and he won't kill me.

Daniel Dennett: Yeah, but that uncertainty has nothing to do with the moral implications for free will.

Alan Saunders: No, it's certainly got nothing to do with moral implications... You say that when we're exercising our free will, when we're faced with an important decision, there's a two-stage process involved. What are the two stages?

Daniel Dennett: There's first consideration of reasons, and that's a process which has to be heuristic. You only... We say all things considered, but nobody ever can consider all things. But you can try. And at some point you just have to terminate your consideration and say 'Okay, I've thought about it enough, this is what I'm going to do. Boom'. Now, when you act in that way you may discover in the next instance, or the next day, or the next morning, that if you'd only thought about it a little harder, a little longer, then you wouldn't have done what you did. And you regret what you did, let us suppose, but you take responsibility for it, because you were able to do enough of this, this reflective consideration of reasons, for it to count, for you to count as a reason-guided agent.

And you could... some people have recently made much of this... I argued many years ago in a paper that it could be that you had quantum physics randomness involved in the consideration generator. So that whether or not particular considerations occurred to you, there really was an element of utter unpredictability in that. But I said 'yeah, that could be the case, but it's not in fact required. If we discover that it's the case it doesn't give us more free will than if we discover that it isn't the case.'

Alan Saunders: And you think that this model, this two-stage model, permits moral education to make a difference in our decision-making processes?

Daniel Dennett: Oh, sure. I think... I think that's an empirical claim and I think it's well borne out. What we are learning now, and some of this research is both troubling and also heartening, is that we can identify huge differences in self-control in very small children. And it turns out that if you follow these children into adulthood, and look at whether or not those varieties of difficulties of self-control were predictive, they turn out to be staggeringly predictive. And that's the sad news, because it shows that really this inability to control yourself at a very young age, at the toddler age, has a rather dire prediction that's pretty well confirmed in a number of studies. But the good news is that you can be trained. You can learn. You can become better self-controlled. And there are experiments that show that too.

So we really have some empirical evidence that shows that moral upbringing, if you like training or education, can and could play a bigger role than they've played in the past. We like to think that moral adults... that by the time you've become, you know, 'of age', that we're all pretty much on a par. We've all sort of reached the plateau of moral accountability. That's the myth. And of course we learn that some people don't make it.

Some people are disabled in one way or another; maybe because they're seriously psychopathic, or because they're just cognitively challenged, or... There's many reasons. And when we learn that, we really do learn that some people have diminished responsibility. But that doesn't mean that everybody has diminished responsibility. I mean, the fact that it's your brain that's doing it doesn't mean you're not responsible; it's only if your brain is doing it in a way which is pathological that you aren't responsible.

Alan Saunders: You say that this account provides some account of our moral intuitions, that we are the authors of our moral decisions. But can't our intuitions be simply wrong? I act purposefully, but my purposes are the products of antecedent circumstances, and they are the products of still earlier circumstances, and so on back in time. You say that I am the author of my moral decisions, but perhaps that's all that being the author amounts to.

Daniel Dennett: Well, let's stop and ask if that's maybe enough. In general, we are only too happy to have past conditions and experiences inform us about the way the world is, and use that information to guide our behaviour. If only the world will tell us how it really is and give us a bunch of choices, and if only we can have the competence to look hard at the choices that the world reveals to us, and to assess accurately their likely consequences, and to choose the ones that have the best consequences, what more could you want? Then you can be the author of your acts. It's not as if you have to have this flying carpet of indeterminism so that your decision at the point, at the moment of decision, is completely cut off from all higher influences. You wouldn't want that!

Think long and hard about whether you're going to engage in some political act, and let's suppose that it's maybe even dangerous; it may backfire, and you've thought about it long and hard, and you've totalled up all the pros and all the cons. Now the time has come, you're going to act or you're not going to act now. What a terrible time to introduce indeterminism! You want your consideration of those... of the pros, to overwhelm you.

You know, I am quite sure that I simply could not be induced, you know, to torture an innocent child for a thousand dollars, or not for ten thousand dollars, or not for a million dollars. And it doesn't matter, you know, whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, there are many, many, many, many variations in conditions and still I wouldn't do it. Fine! Does that mean I'm not responsible for not doing it? That I would only be able to take, you know, a modicum of satisfaction in my doing the right thing if there was this one in a billion chance that the atoms would run off in some other direction and I'd end up torturing the child. I don't see why that would make sense at all.

Alan Saunders: Daniel Dennett, thank you for exercising your free will and being with us today.

Daniel Dennett: It's been a delight talking with you, Alan.

Alan Saunders: For more on Daniel Dennett and his work, check out our website: abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone.

Professor Daniel Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. The show is produced by Kyla Slaven, the sound engineer is Charlie McCune, I'm Alan Saunders, and I'll be back next week.