Daniel Dennett Explains Consciousness and Free Will | Big Think

Daniel Dennett Explains Consciousness and Free Will

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Daniel Dennett explains consciousness and free will.

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DANIEL DENNETT:

Daniel C. Dennett is the author of Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Breaking the Spell, Freedom Evolves, and Darwin's Dangerous Idea and is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and a grandson. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996. Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, was published in 2005. He co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981 and he is the author of over three hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

Dennett gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987.

He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is consciousness?

Daniel Dennett: Most people think consciousness, whatever it is, is just supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. It’s something so wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, that we have to sort of divide the universe in two to make room for it. All in one side, all by itself and I understand why they think that and I think it’s just wrong. It is wonderful. It’s astonishingly wonderful but it is not a miracle and it isn’t magic. It’s a bunch of tricks and really is I’d like the comparison with magic because stage magic of course is not magic, magic. Its bunch of tricks and consciousness is a bunch of tricks in the brain and we’re learning what those tricks are and how they fit together and why it seems to be so much more than that bunch of tricks. Now, for a lot people the very suggestion that, that might be so is offensive or repugnant. They really don’t like that idea and they view it as in a sort of an assault on their dignity or their specialness and I think that’s a prime mistake. It’s a mistake because it means if you think that way, you’re going to systematically ignore the pads of the pads of exploration of research that, that might tend to confirm that and you’re going to hold out from mystery, you’re going to hold out for more specialness and it’s really there and some people just can’t help themselves. They can’t take seriously. They won’t take seriously. The idea, the consciousness is an amazing collection of sort of Monday and tricks in the brain. And they say, “I just can’t imagine it” and I say, “No you won’t imagine it. You can imagine it. You’re just not trying.”

Question: What scares people about this idea?

Daniel Dennett: I think, I think the hidden agenda and not so hidden very often for all of this is a concern about freewill. I think at the bottom of the barrel, what people are really worried about is that if we have an entirely naturalistic and...

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