Daniel Dennett: Stop Telling People They Don't Have Free Will | Big Think

Daniel Dennett: Stop Telling People They Don't Have Free Will

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Philosopher Daniel Dennett takes issue with neuroscientists who argue that humans don't have free will. In this video, Dennett demonstrates an intuition pump (or thought experiment) featuring a "nefarious neurosurgeon" who lies to a patient with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Dennett argues that telling people that free will is an illusion makes them less concerned about the negative implications of their actions.

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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:

Daniel Dennett: Well, let me trot out one of my recent favorites which I devised to jangle the nerves of neuroscientists who've been going around saying that neuroscience shows that we don't have free will. I think their reasons for saying that are ill considered and moreover that what they're doing is apt to be mischievous and doing some real harm. So I concocted a little thought experiment. A little intuition pump to suggest that. So this is the case of the nefarious neurosurgeon who treats a patient who has obsessive compulsive disorder by inserting a little microchip in his brain which controls the OCD, the obsessive compulsive disorder.

Now there is such a chip. It's been developed in the Netherlands and it works really quite well. That's science fact. But now here comes science fiction. So the neurosurgeon, after she's operated on the guy, sewed him all up. "So I've got - your OCD's under control now you'll be happy to learn. But moreover our team here will be monitoring you 24-7. And we're going to be controlling everything you do from now on. You'll think you have free will. You'll think you're making your own decisions but really you won't have free will at all. Free will is an illusion that we will maintain while controlling you. Goodbye, have a nice life." Sends him out the door.

Well, he believes her. She had a shiny lab and lots of degrees and diplomas and all that. So what does he do? Well, he -- thinking he doesn't have free will anymore he gets a little self-indulgent, a little bit aggressive. He's a little negligent in how he decides what to do. And pretty soon by indulging some of...

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