People weigh in on the meaning of life

March 22, 2025 • 12:00 pm

In 2013, I posed some questions to readers about the meaning of life, and there were a lot of responses (373 of them!). To quote part of my post:

Here’s survey I’m taking to see whether a theory I have, which is mine, bears any resemblance to reality. Here are two questions I’d like readers to answer in the comments. Here we go:

If a friend asked you these questions, how would you answer them?

1.) What do you consider the purpose of your life?

2.) What do you see as the meaning of your life?

There was general agreement that the meaning and purpose of life is self-made: there was no intrinsic meaning or purpose. Only religious people think there’s a pre-made meaning and purpose, and it’s always to follow the dictates of one’s god or faith. And there aren’t too many believers around here.

Now the Guardian has an article posing the same question, but asking 15 different people, many of them notables. The answers vary, and I’ll give a few (click the screenshot below to see the article). As Reader Alan remarked after reading the Guardian piece and sending me the link, “No one mentions God and none seem to have a God shaped hole in their lives.”

So much for Ross Douthat and what I call “The New Believers” to go along with “The New Atheists.” The New Believers I see as smart people who have thrown in their lot with superstition and unevidenced faith; they include Doubthat, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jordan Peterson, and, apparently, the staff of The Free Press.

Bailey’s intro:

Like any millennial, I turned to Google for the answers. I trawled through essays, newspaper articles, countless YouTube videos, various dictionary definitions and numerous references to the number 42, before I discovered an intriguing project carried out by the philosopher Will Durant during the 1930s. Durant had written to Ivy League presidents, Nobel prize winners, psychologists, novelists, professors, poets, scientists, artists and athletes to ask for their take on the meaning of life. His findings were collated in the book On the Meaning of Life, published in 1932.

I decided that I should recreate Durant’s experiment and seek my own answers. I scoured websites searching for contact details, and spent hours carefully writing the letters, neatly sealing them inside envelopes and licking the stamps. Then I dropped them all into the postbox and waited …

Days, and then weeks, passed with no responses. I began to worry that I’d blown what little money I had on stamps and stationery. Surely, at least one person would respond?

. . . . . What follows is a small selection of the responses, from philosophers to politicians, prisoners to playwrights. Some were handwritten, some typed, some emailed. Some were scrawled on scrap paper, some on parchment. Some are pithy one-liners, some are lengthy memoirs. I sincerely hope you can take something from these letters, just as I did.

And his question:

I am currently replicating Durant’s study, and I’d be most appreciative if you could tell me what you think the meaning of life is, and how you find meaning, purpose and fulfilment in your own life?

A selection of my favorites:

Hillary Mantel, author (I’m reading her Wolf Hall at the moment; it won the Booker Prize):

I’ve had your letter for a fortnight, but I had to think about it a bit. You use two terms interchangeably: “meaning” and “purpose”. I don’t think they’re the same. I’m not sure life has a meaning, in the abstract. But it can have a definite purpose if you decide so – and the carrying through, the effort to realise the purpose, makes the meaning for you.

It’s like alchemy. The alchemists were on a futile quest, we think. There wasn’t a philosopher’s stone, and they couldn’t make gold. But after many years of patience exercised, the alchemist saw he had developed tenacity, vision, patience, hope, precision – a range of subtle virtues. He had the spiritual gold, and he understood his life in the light of it. Meaning had emerged.

I’m not sure that many people decide to have a purpose, with the meaning emerging later, but some do. A doctor or nurse, for example, might see their purpose to save lives or help the ill. I suppose I could say my purpose was to “do science,” but that’s only because that’s what I enjoyed, and I didn’t see doing evolutionary genetics it as a “purpose.”

Kathryn Mannix, palliative care specialist. I always like to see what those who take care of the dying say about their patients, as I think I could learn about how to live from those at the end of their lives. Sadly, the lesson is always the same: “Live life to the fullest.” That is not so easy to do! Her words:

Every moment is precious – even the terrible moments. That’s what I’ve learned from spending 40 years caring for people with incurable illnesses, gleaning insights into what gives our lives meaning. Watching people living their dying has been an enormous privilege, especially as it’s shown me that it isn’t until we really grasp the truth of our own mortality that we awaken to the preciousness of being alive.

Every life is a journey from innocence to wisdom. Fairy stories and folk myths, philosophers and poets all tell us this. Our innocence is chipped away, often gently but sometimes brutally, by what happens to us. Gradually, innocence is transformed to experience, and we begin to understand who we are, how the world is, and what matters most to us.

The threat of having our very existence taken away by death brings a mighty focus to the idea of what matters most to us. I’ve seen it so many times, and even though it’s unique for everyone, there are some universal patterns. What matters most isn’t success, or wealth, or stuff. It’s connection and relationships and love. Reaching an understanding like this is the beginning of wisdom: a wisdom that recognises the pricelessness of this moment. Instead of yearning for the lost past, or leaning in to the unguaranteed future, we are most truly alive when we give our full attention to what is here, right now.

Whatever is happening, experiencing it fully means both being present and being aware of being present. The only moment in our lives that we can ever have any choice about is this one. Even then, we cannot choose our circumstances, but we can choose how we respond: we can rejoice in the good things, relax into the delightful, be intrigued by the unexpected, and we can inhabit our own emotions, from joy to fear to sorrow, as part of our experience of being fully alive.

I’ve observed that serenity is both precious and evanescent. It’s a state of flow that comes from relaxing into what is, without becoming distracted by what might follow. It’s a state of mind that rests in appreciation of what we have, rather than resisting it or disparaging it. The wisest people I have met have often been those who live the most simply, whose serenity radiates loving kindness to those around them, who have understood that all they have is this present moment.

That’s what I’ve learned so far, but it’s still a work in progress. Because it turns out that every moment of our lives is still a work in progress, right to our final breath.

This is more or less what Sam Harris has to say in many of his meditation “moments.” Sadly, living each day to the fullest is hard to do, at least for me.

Gretchen Rubin, author and happiness expert. She’s written and studied a lot about happiness, so she should know:

In my study of happiness and human nature, and in my own experiences, I have found that the meaning of life comes through love. In the end, it is love – all kinds of love – that makes meaning.

In my own life, I find meaning, purpose and fulfilment by connecting to other people – my family, my friends, my community, the world. In some cases, I make these connections face-to-face, and in others, I do it through reading. Reading is my cubicle and my treehouse; reading allows me better to understand both myself and other people.

I agree with her 100% on reading, and there are many times that I’d rather be curled up with a good book than socializing. However, we evolved in small groups of people and clearly are meant to be comfortable in these groups and bereft without them. Though we can overcome that, evolution tells us a bit about what kinds of things we should find fulfilling.

Matt Ridley, science writer.

There never has been and never will be a scientific discovery as surprising, unexpected and significant as that which happened on 28 February 1953 in Cambridge, when James Watson and Francis Crick found the double-helix structure of DNA and realised that the secret of life is actually a very simple thing: it’s infinite possibilities of information spelled out in a four-letter alphabet in a form that copies itself.

I think he fluffed the question, which is given above. He says nothing about how he finds meaning, fulfillment, and purpose in his own life. Nothing!

One more:

Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit:

What is the meaning of life? I can honestly say: I have no idea. But I write this in London, where I am visiting with my wife and two boys. And they are healthy and safe, and (mostly) happy, and there’s joy in watching their delights: a clothing stall with a jacket they’ve long wanted; the way the double-decker bus carries us above the fray; a monument to scientific discoveries beside a flower garden and goats.

I’m surrounded by evidence – of the blitz, D-day, colonies despoiled, JFK and MLK and 9/11 – that all could be otherwise. I hear about bombs falling on innocents, an uncertain election, a faltering climate, and many of us lacking the will (or charity) to change.

Yet still I marvel that we flew here in under 12 hours – while my ancestors required months and tragedies to transit in reverse – and that I will send this note simply by hitting a button, and we can love whomever we want, and see and speak to them at any hour, and a pandemic did not end my life, did not kill my children’s dreams, did not make society selfish and cruel.

And, for now, that’s enough. I do not need to know the meaning of life. I do not need to know the purpose of it all. Simply breathing while healthy and safe, and (mostly) happy is such a surprising, awe-inducing, humbling gift that I have no right to question it. I won’t tempt fate. I won’t look that gift horse in the mouth. I’ll simply hope my good fortune continues, work hard to share it with others, and pray I will remember this day, this moment, if my luck fades .

Resurrected: Our conversation in Amsterdam

June 5, 2024 • 10:15 am

As I mentioned in the last post, after our discussion at the University of Amsterdam was canceled on grounds of Maarten Boudry’s and my sympathies for Israel, the sponsors who brought us to Amsterdam kindly had the discussion restaged in an empty room and professionally filmed. I haven’t listened to the whole 80-minute discussion as I can’t stand to see and hear myself, but as I recall it went smoothly, even without an audience.

The filming and appended notes on the screen are due to videographer David Stam, who did a great and professional job, clarifying any references that aren’t spelled out.

To reiterate, the subject of the discussion was a paper by myself and Luana Maroja published in the Skeptical Inquirer, “The ideological subversion of biology.” If you watch the video, you’ll see that the topic of the war and Israel wasn’t even raised. We did range beyond the ambit of the paper, for we talked about biology, philosophy, and other topics, but you’ll see that we were deplatformed for something we didn’t even intend to mention.

Here are David’s notes on the video:.

Welcome to an eye-opening discussion on “The Ideological Subversion of Science” featuring evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, philosopher of science Maarten Boudry, and embryologist Michael Richardson. In this thought-provoking video, our distinguished panel delves into the growing influence of ideology on scientific research and education. They explore how societal pressures and cultural trends can distort scientific integrity, the implications for scientific progress, and the importance of safeguarding objectivity in the pursuit of knowledge. Join us for a conversation that champions the true spirit of scientific inquiry.

Em. Prof. Dr. Jerry Coyne, Evolutionary Biology at University of Chicago
Dr. Maarten Boudry, Philosopher of Science at University of Ghent
Prof Dr. Michael Richardson, Evolutionary Developmental Zoology at University of Leiden

The moderator, who did an superb job of keeping the discussion going, is Gert Jan van ‘t Land.

Dan Dennett obituaries begin to appear

April 20, 2024 • 11:15 am

Dan Dennett died yesterday, and I still can’t believe he’s gone, though he’d used up a good portion of his nine lives in a series of cardiac events. His NYT obituary can be read by clicking the screenshot below, or you can find it archived here.

The subheading seems to me a bit inaccurate. For one thing Dennett certainly did not think religion was an illusion, though he’s quoted saying that below. Perhaps he thought it was a delusion, but he certainly took it seriously as a human behavioral phenomenon, even though he was an atheist. What the subheading means is that he thought the idea of god and its concomitants were an illusion, but that is not all that religion comprises.

More important, Dan certainly did NOT believe that free will was a fantasy: Dan was a compatibilist who didn’t believe in libertarian free will, but wrote two books and several other papers and half of another book defending the idea that free will was not a fantasy, but that we did indeed have it: it was, he said, simply different from what most people thought.

Dan and I disagreed strongly on Dan’s compatibilism (Sam Harris disagreed as well), but free will being a fantasy? Nope.

Finally, yes, Dan concentrated on natural selection as the only process that could produce the appearance of adaptation, but didn’t deny, as I recall, the fact that genetic drift could cause some evolutionary change. (For a rather critical review of his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by my ex-student Allen Orr, go here.) But Dan concentrated on adaptations, including human behaviors, because the appearance of design, for centuries imputed to God, is what really demands explanation.

(*Note the misplacement of “only” in the subheading; it should appear after “explained,” not after “could”. Where are the proofreaders?)

At any rate, here’s an excerpt from the NYT that is more accurate than the subheading:

Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82.

His death, at Maine Medical Center, was caused by complications of interstitial lung disease, his wife, Susan Bell Dennett, said. He lived in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Mr. Dennett combined a wide range of knowledge with an easy, often playful writing style to reach a lay public, avoiding the impenetrable concepts and turgid prose of many other contemporary philosophers. Beyond his more than 20 books and scores of essays, his writings even made their way into the theater and onto the concert stage.

But Mr. Dennett, who never shirked controversy, often crossed swords with other famed scholars and thinkers.

An outspoken atheist, he at times seemed to denigrate religion. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” he said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.

According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.

For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.

And on free will:

His first book to attract widespread scholarly notice was “Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology,” published in 1978.

In it, Mr. Dennett asserted that multiple decisions resulted in a moral choice and that these prior, random deliberations contributed more to the way an individual acted than did the ultimate moral decision itself. Or, as he explained:

“I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: ‘That’s enough. I’ve considered this matter enough and now I’m going to act,’ in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.”

Some leading libertarians criticized Mr. Dennett’s model as undermining the concept of free will: If random decisions determine ultimate choice, they argued, then individuals aren’t liable for their actions.

Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.

“We couldn’t live the way we do without it,” he wrote in his 2017 book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.” “If — because free will is an illusion — no one is ever responsible for what they do, should we abolish yellow and red cards in soccer, the penalty box in ice hockey and all the other penalty systems in sports?”

First of all, the notion of a separation between mind and body is not “outdated”: a huge number of people believe in libertarian free will: that your mind alone can, at any given moment, allow you to make any one of two or more choices. It’s outdated among scientists and philosophers, but not among the general public, as surveys have shown.

Further, “random decisions” aren’t really random to either libertarians or determinists. Even Libet-like experiments show that what you do is to some degree predictable using fMRI, and is probably entirely predictable if we had a complete understanding of the brain. No determinist argues that decisions are “random”, as they’re based on the pattern of your neurons produced by your genes and your environment. And libertarians would argue that decisions aren’t random, for if we were we’d have no ability to predict what anybody we know does. Finanly, determinists don’t claim that individuals aren’t liable for their actions. They are liable, but not in the way that most people think. If somebody murders someone else, we don’t just let him go and say, “well, he wasn’t responsible for the killing.”

Do note that Dennett is credited with believing something that I always maintained: he favored compatibilism, at least in part, because of “belief in belief”: without belief in some kind of free will, he said, society would fall apart (he said that at least twice):

Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.

But if religion is also thought necessary by some (not Dennett) as necessary to maintain a stable, society, then why is free will TRULY necessary to maintain a stable, functioning society? Perhaps our feeling of free will is necessary for that, but, like religion, that’s a delusion that we simply can’t avoid feeling. I function very well even though I’m a hard determinist, even though I feel like I have a choice. And, in the last sentence, I don’t think one can characterize Dan’s view of free will as an “illusion”. He argued strenuously for a form of free will that was not an illusion.

But I digress. Dan was an important figure in bringing philosophy and Darwinism to educated readers. How often do philosophers produce bestselling popular works? Yes, he could be wrong, and the force of his personality led some to adopt what I thought were erroneous ideas (like “we have the kind of free will worth wanting”), but more often his arguments were cogent, important, and vividly expressed.

And Dan was a nice guy, one who befriended me when I was just a stripling. One thing missing from the NYT piece—and something I hope they’ll add—are quotations from Dennett’s friends and colleagues. Where, for instance, is an assessment by Richard Dawkins? I expect that will appear on Richard’s Substack site, but we needed some quotes for the NYT obit. Here’s Richard’s tweet about Dan’s death:

Dan Dennett was a great philosopher, skilled with words, images, thought experiments & intuition pumps. But unlike many clever philosophers (to borrow from PB Medawar) he had something important to be clever ABOUT, namely science. Much more yet, he was a dear friend. So very sad.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 19, 2024

You can find other obituaries at the Torygraph, at Ars Technica, and at the Daily Nous, which is short but has a recent video interview, which I put below. And I’d recommend reading his recent autobiography, I’ve Been Thinking.

James Gleick favorably reviews a book arguing that humans have libertarian free will

January 14, 2024 • 10:00 am

The idea that we have libertarian free will, in the real sense of “being able to make any one of several decisions at a given time”, has made a comeback in the pages of The New York Review of Books, a magazine that never quite recovered from the death of editor Robert B. Silvers in 2017. It was once the magazine to read for thoughtful analyses of books, but it’s gone downhill. I had a subscription on and off, but quit a while back.

But I digress. In the latest issue, the respected author and historian of science James Gleick reviews a recent book on free will, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave us Free Will by Kevin Mitchell. I haven’t read the book, so all I can do is reprise what Gleick says about the book, which is that Mitchell’s case for libertarian free will is convincing, and that determinism—or “naturalism” as I prefer to call it, since I take into account the inherent unpredictability of quantum mechanics—is not all there is to our actions and behaviors. Mitchell, says Gleick, maintains that natural selection has instilled humans with the ability to weigh alternatives and make decisions, not only apparent decisions but real ones, decision that involve us weighing alternatives, thinking about the future, and then making make one of several possible decisions even at the moment you decide. In other words, determinism doesn’t rule all of our behaviors and decisions. Apparently, this is libertarian free will: facing a restaurant menu, with everything else in the universe the same (a classic scenario), you could have ordered something other than what you did.

The problem is that Gleick never defines “free will” in this way; he only implies that Mitchell accepts libertarian free will, and then tries to show how evolution gives it to us.

But I’m getting ahead of myself: click on the screenshot below to read:

here

Gleick argues that life without libertarian free will is pointless. I maintain that this is incorrect—that the point of our life is the gratification we get from our actions, and we don’t need libertarian free will for that. All we need is a sense of satisfaction. You don’t even really need that if you define “point” post facto as “doing what you felt you had to do.” But, say compatibilists like Dennett—and compatibilists are all physical determinists—we need to have some conception of free will, even if what we do is determined, for society would fall apart without it. And Gleick agrees:

Legal institutions, theories of government, and economic systems are built on the assumption that humans make choices and strive to influence the choices of others. Without some kind of free will, politics has no point. Nor does sports. Or anything, really.

. . . If the denial of free will has been an error, it has not been a harmless one. Its message is grim and etiolating. It drains purpose and dignity from our sense of ourselves and, for that matter, of our fellow living creatures. It releases us from responsibility and treats us as passive objects, like billiard balls or falling leaves.

One senses from these statements that the choices we make are not merely apparent choices, conditioned by the laws of physics, but real ones: choices that we didn’t have to make. In other words, we have libertarian, I-could-have-done-otherwise free will.

That construal of free will is buttressed by Gleick’s characterization of Mitchell’s argument as showing that we have purpose, and that purpose (again, not explicitly defined), is the proof that we have libertarian free will:

Agency distinguishes even bacteria from the otherwise lifeless universe. Living things are “imbued with purpose and able to act on their own terms,” Mitchell says. He makes a powerful case that the history of life, in all its complex grandeur, cannot be appreciated until we understand the evolution of agency—and then, in creatures of sufficient complexity, the evolution of conscious free will.

And this purpose is apparently an emergent property from natural selection, not only not predictable from physics, but somehow incompatible with physical law, which, are, says Gleick, are only descriptions of the universe and not really “laws” that the substance of our bodies and brains must obey:

This is why so many modern physicists continue to embrace philosophical determinism. But their theories are deterministic because they’ve written them that way. We say that the laws govern the universe, but that is a metaphor; it is better to say that the laws describe what is known. In a way the mistake begins with the word “laws.” The laws aren’t instructions for nature to follow. Saying that the world is “controlled” by physics—that everything is “dictated” by mathematics—is putting the cart before the horse. Nature comes first. The laws are a model, a simplified description of a complex reality. No matter how successful, they necessarily remain incomplete and provisional.

The incompleteness apparently creates the gap where you can find libertarian free will.

And the paragraphs below, describing the results of natural selection, seem to constitute the heart of the book’s thesis:

Biological entities develop across time, and as they do, they store and exchange information. “That extension through time generates a new kind of causation that is not seen in most physical processes,” Mitchell says, “one based on a record of history in which information about past events continues to play a causal role in the present.” Within even a single-celled organism, proteins in the cell wall respond chemically to changing conditions outside and thus act as sensors. Inside, proteins are activated and deactivated by biochemical reactions, and the organism effectively reconfigures its own metabolic pathways in order to survive. Those pathways can act as logic gates in a computer: if the conditions are X, then do A.

“They’re not thinking about it, of course,” Mitchell says, “but that is the effect, and it’s built right into the design of the molecule.” As organisms grow more complex, so do these logical pathways. They create feedback mechanisms, positive and negative. They make molecular clocks, responding to and then mimicking the solar cycle. Increasingly, they embody knowledge of the world in which they live.

The tiniest microorganisms also developed means of propulsion by changing their shape or deploying cilia and flagella, tiny vibrating hairs. The ability to move, combined with the ability to sense surroundings, created new possibilities—seeking food, escaping danger—continually amplified by natural selection. We begin to see organisms extracting information from their environment, acting on it in the present, and reproducing it for the future. “Information thus has causal power in the system,” Mitchell says, “and gives the agent causal power in the world.”

We can begin to talk about purpose. First of all, organisms struggle to maintain themselves. They strive to persist and then to reproduce. Natural selection ensures it. “The universe doesn’t have purpose, but life does,” Mitchell says.

My response to this is basically “so what?” Natural selection is simply the differential reproduction of gene forms, which, when encased in an organism, can leave more copies when they give that organism the ability to survive and reproduce. Organisms thus evolve to act as if they have purpose. But that “purpose” is simply anthropormorphizing the results of the mindless process of natural selection. So, when we decide to go hunting for food, or get pleasure from being with a mate, we can say that those embody our “purpose”. But there’s nothing in all this that implies that, at a given moment, we can make any number of decisions independent of physics.

But, Gleick implies, there is a way we can do this: by leveraging the “random fluctiations” in our brains:

It’s still just chemistry and electricity, but the state of the brain at one instant does not lead inexorably to the next. Mitchell emphasizes the inherent noisiness of the system: more or less random fluctuations that occur in an assemblage of “wet, jiggly, incomprehensibly tiny components that jitter about constantly.” He believes that the noise is not just inevitable; it’s useful. It has adaptive value for organisms that live, after all, in an environment subject to change and surprise. “The challenges facing organisms vary from moment to moment,” he notes, “and the nervous system has to cope with that volatility: that is precisely what it is specialized to do.” But merely adding randomness to a deterministic machine still doesn’t produce anything we would call free will.

That’s correct, though what Mitchell or Gleick mean as “random fluctuations in the brain” is undefined. Robert Sapolsky argues, in his recent book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, that there are no “random” fluctuations in the brain: neurons interact with each other according to the principles of physics. To have true free libertarian will, those neurons would have to fire in different ways under exactly the same conditions in the brain. Sapolsky spends a lot of time convincingly showing that this cannot be the case. Ergo, no brain fluctuations.

But, as Gleick says above, randomness alone doesn’t give us agency. Still, under Mitchell’s model it’s essential for free will. And this is the big problem, for how does one’s “will” harness that randomness to come up with decisions that are independent of physical processes? Gleick:

Indeed, some degree of randomness is essential to Mitchell’s neural model for agency and decision-making. He lays out a two-stage model: the gathering of options—possible actions for the organism to take—followed by a process of selection. For us, organisms capable of conscious free will, the options arise as patterns of activity in the cerebral cortex, always subject to fluctuations and noise. We may experience this as “ideas just ‘occurring to you.’” Then the brain evaluates these options, with “up-voting” and “down-voting,” by means of “interlocking circuit loops among the cortex, basal ganglia, thalamus, and midbrain.” In that way, selection employs goals and beliefs built from experience, stored in memory, and still more or less malleable.

Ergo we have to have the brain’s “randomness”, which is neither defined nor, at least according to Sapolsky, doesn’t exist. Then one harnesses that randomness to come up with your decisions:

Mitchell proposes what he calls a “more naturalized concept of the self.” We are not just our consciousness; we’re the organism, taken as a whole. We do things for reasons based on our histories, and “those reasons inhere at the level of the whole organism.” Much of the time, perhaps most of the time, our conscious self is not in control. Still, when the occasion requires, we can gather our wits, as the expression goes. We have so many expressions like that—get a grip; pull yourself together; focus your thoughts—metaphors for the indistinct things we see when we look inward. We don’t ask who is gathering whose wits.

Well, we can always confabulate “reasons” for what we do, but, in my view, the whole process of pondering is simply the adaptive machinery of your brain, installed by natural selection, taking in environmental information and spitting out a solution that’s usually “adaptive”. And because different people’s brains are wired differently (there is, after all, genetic and developmental variation), people tend to have somewhat different neuronal programs, so they behave in somewhat different ways, often predictable. This is what we call our “personalities”: the programs that are identified with different bodies. “Pondering” is not something we do freely; it’s what’s instilled in our brains by natural selection to produce adaptive behavior. We ponder just as a chess-playing computer ponders: working through programs until one produces the best available solution (in the case of a computer, to make a move that best insures you’ll win; in the case of a human, to make a move that gives the most “adaptive” result).

In none of this, however, do I detect anything other than giving the name “free will” to neuronal processes that we get from natural selection, and spitting out decisions and behaviors that could not have been otherwise in a given situation. (That situation, of course, includes the environment, which influences our neurons.) In none of this do I see a way that a numinous “will” or “agency” can affect the physical workings of our neurons. And in none of this can i see a way to do something differently than what you did.

In the end, and of course I haven’t read Mitchell’s book, Gleick doesn’t make a convincing case for libertarian free will. Yes, he can make a case for “compatibilist” free will, depending on how you define that (“actions that comport with our personalities,” “decisions not made under compulsion,” etc.). But as I’ve emphaszied, all compatibilists are at bottom, determinists (again, I’d prefer “naturalists”). Remember, determinism or naturalism doesn’t mean that behaviors need be completely predictable—quantum indeterminacy may act, though we’re not sure it acts on a behavioral level—but quantum indeterminacy does not give us “agency”. “Compatibilist” free will still maintains that, at any given moment, we cannot affect the behaviors that flow from physics, and we cannot do other that what we did. It’s just that compatibilists think of free will as something other than libertarian free will, and there are as many versions of compatibilism as there are compatibilist philosophers.

I can’t find in this review any basis for libertarian free will—not in natural selection, not in the “random” fluctuations of the brain, not in the fact that different people have different personalities and may act differently in the same general situation. You can talk all you want about randomness and purpose and “winnowing of brain fluctuations,” but until someone shows that there’s something about our “will” that can affect physical processes, I won’t buy libertarian free will. Physicist Sean Carroll doesn’t buy it, either. He’s a compatibilist, but argues this:

There are actually three points I try to hit here. The first is that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood. There is an enormous amount that we don’t know about how the world works, but we actually do know the basic rules underlying atoms and their interactions — enough to rule out telekinesis, life after death, and so on. The second point is that those laws are dysteleological — they describe a universe without intrinsic meaning or purpose, just one that moves from moment to moment.

The third point — the important one, and the most subtle — is that the absence of meaning “out there in the universe” does not mean that people can’t live meaningful lives.

(See also here.)

We are physical beings made of matter. To me that blows every notion of libertarian free will out of the water. I’ll be curious to see how Mitchell obviates this conclusion.

h/t: Barry

LA Times: Philosopher critiques Sapolsky’s book on determinism, touts free will

October 27, 2023 • 9:35 am

I’m reading Robert Sapolsky’s new book Determined now and like it a lot, but of course I’ve always agree with him about the hegemony of naturalism. Because Sapolsky is a hard determinist, and many people, even philosophers, won’t accept the form of unrelenting naturalism that both Sapolsky and I accept, we can expect a lot of uninformed criticism of the book But now we have uninformed criticism by somebody who’s informed, for the book has been negatively reviewed in the L. A. Times by John Martin Fischer, identified by the the paper as ” a professor of philosophy at UC Riverside [who] has written widely on free will and moral responsibility.” Fisher has also been characterized on Wikipedia as “a leading contributor to the philosophy of free will and moral responsibility.”

So I was pretty appalled to see Fischer, in a critical review of Determined, saying some things that seemed deeply uninformed, even to a philosophical tyro like me. It may be because he’s trying to summarize complex arguments for the public in a short review, but if that’s the case, Fischer’s concisions have led to mischaracterization of the book (I’ve read about 100 pages of Sapolsky’s 450-page book, but he’s advanced his thesis in other writings as well). Click on the screenshot to read, or find the piece archived here.

Here are a few statements by Fischer (indented) and my comments about them (flush left).

Perhaps surprisingly, these views — which seem so unintuitive — have become more influential in contemporary philosophy and even legal theory. They are, nevertheless, a minority opinion. Although philosophy isn’t about majority rule (nor should it be!), many of us inside the field — and likely outside it, too — find this skepticism toward free will and moral responsibility deeply problematic.

Most philosophers aren’t libertarian “you-could-have-done-otherwise” believers in free will, but are determinists who accept, like Sapolsky, the idea that at any time, there is only one behavior possible (with the exception of behaviors that could be changed by the fundamental indeterminism of quantum mechanics; see below). Yet they are determinists who say that their view of free will is not a libertarian view, so that free will is compatible with determinism. That’s why these philosophers (who hold the majority view on free will) are called “compatibilists”.

While Fischer may be right in that most philosophers accept moral responsibility, he misleads the reader, most of whom take free will to mean that you could change your mind at a single moment and do or choose more than one thing. (Without that ability, the “free” in “free will” is meaningless.) Here Fischer plays into the popular libertarian conception of free will—the one that Sapolsky spends the whole book attacking—but may be referring to compatibilist free will (“yes, we’re determined, but we can semantically construct another form of “free will”). The problem is that Fischer never defines what he means by free will, while Sapolsky starts off his book with definitions to avoid this kind of muddle. The onus was on Fischer to define “free will”, but he dropped the ball.

Here’s more:

Some neurobiologists, including Sapolsky, hold that neurobiology supports determinism — that the brain activity science has uncovered reveals essentially mechanical procedures that cause human decisions. Other neuroscientists believe that at a fundamental level the brain works indeterministically, perhaps in accordance with quantum mechanics, which allows for randomness and unpredictability. In other words, whether the past and laws of nature dictate my choices and actions remains scientifically controversial.

There’s only one form of pure indeterminism in nature (I’m not talking here about “unpredictability”): quantum mechanics. And if our behaviors and choices are unpredictable because they are affected by quantum phenomena (note: WE DON’T KNOW THIS), that gives us randomness and unpredictability, but does not give us libertarian free will. (We can’t move electrons via our “will”.) And doesn’t Fischer realize that the laws of nature happen to include quantum mechanics? Sapolsky and I are both naturalists: we accept that behaviors proceed only from the laws of nature: laws that can have acted eons ago to produce a behavior we evince today. No, determinism is not scientifically controversial, at least among the majority of philosophers who accept that the laws of nature dictate our choices and actions.

Further, unpredictability can result from absolute, pure determinism, simply because, though determinism be true, we don’t know enough to be able to predict with great accuracy. It is a fundamental error to say that determinism is incompatible with unpredictability. It’s just a matter of not knowing enough! Let me put it in caps: “UNPREDICTABILITY IS NOT THE OPPOSITE OF DETERMINISM”.

But wait; there’s more! You also get a free set of Ginsu knives!:

But let’s say determinism were true. Why exactly would it follow that we lack free will? Even if our choices and actions are shaped heavily by external factors, couldn’t they still be caused in a way that involves the human capacity for reasoning? Coughs, sneezes, seizures — these behaviors are easy to dismiss as beyond our control. Not all causal chains, however, are like those that trigger involuntary movements. Equating all human behavior to a cough is an egregiously hasty generalization.

Consider, as a simple example, my decision to sit down at my computer to write these sentences. Yes, my past and the laws of nature may have crucially led me here. But I did so also because of deliberation. I weighed the pros for writing against the cons and chose to do it. It wasn’t like a sneeze; it was a process that involved reasoning. Determinism helps explain why I started typing, but it does not in itself rule out my free will.

Well, that depends on what Fischer defines as “free will”, doesn’t it? The problem with the two paragraphs above is that Sapolsky’s entire book is devoted to showing exactly why a decision to sit down and write is precisely like a cough or sneeze: both depend on a concatenation of causal events that extend way back to the past, well before you’re born. Reasoning is just a brain process, and is itself conditioned by the past history of the neurons in one’s brain and of the body that carries them. That history includes genetics, environment, and experience, things that extend way back into the past since there are long chains of causation. Fischer is showing here that he either hasn’t read Sapolsky’s book or doesn’t understand it.

The “why” might additionally involve exercises of free will that confer responsibility — and thus we cannot dismiss moral responsibility because we are machines. We are biological machines, but the biology does not get in the way of free will. It enables it, just as our neurobiology enables our thoughts and feelings.

Yes, Sapolsky (and I) do dismiss “moral responsibility” (but not “responsibility”) because it violates determinism (I call it “naturalism”, which equals determinism plus fundamental indeterminism caused by quantum mechanics.) And what does Fischer mean by “the biology does not get in the way of free will”? Since he hasn’t defined “free will”, we don’t know what he means, nor what he means by saying free will is “enabled by biology”. Here Fischer is misleading the reader. Even if he’s a compatibilist, Fischer is responsible for not only defining free will, but explaining his critique. By the way, Sapolsky’s book is largely about neurobiology, and Fischer shows no evidence of having read Sapolsky’s neurobiological argument for determinism.

And even if Fischer is accepting a compatibilist form of free will, he then goes way off the rails by implying that determinism, by absolving us of “moral responsibility,” completely lets us off the hook when we do something bad. Like most ignorant critics of determinism (but Fischer shouldn’t be that ignorant!), he argues that without a notion of free will, we can rape, pillage, plunder, and murder at will, without fear of punishment. To wit:

We live in a world with horrors almost too terrible to imagine. That no one could fairly be blamed or punished for anything is a view as disturbing as it is radical. It would entail that Vladimir Putin could not be morally blamed or punished for documented war crimes; he would not deserve such treatment. Moral responsibility skepticism implies that Hitler did not deserve to be morally blamed or punished, nor did Stalin or any mass murderer.

The skeptical view asks us to do what is almost humanly impossible: to let even our worst actors off the hook. Of course, the same point applies to good behavior: Heroes such as Sully Sullenberger would not deserve our gratitude, and your friend who sacrifices her plans so she can pick you up at LAX wouldn’t merit it either. (Sometimes, though, even this requires heroism!)

Yes, Sapolsky says that determinism means that people don’t deserve what happens to them, whether it be good or bad, but he doesn’t argue that people don’t need to be blamed or punished! No rational determinist thinks that. Blame and punishment are social tools for encouraging good behavior and discouraging bad ones, and we can confer praise or opprobrium without having to think that a person had a choice of showing good or bad behavior. As a determinist, one can praise someone to elicit further good behaviors (another mistake of critics is to think that behavior is unchangeable), or discourage bad ones. That’s why Sapolsky thinks that judicial punishment is still needed. Again, Fischer shows no sign of having read Sapolsky’s book, for he’s constantly misrepresenting Sapolsky’s views.

Fischer does that one last time at the end, when he levels what seems like a gratuitous swipe at Sapolsky, managing to argue that his views justify—wait for it—the cheating scheme of Sam Bankman-Fried!

In a beautiful vision of the no-responsibility world, people are liberated from forces over which they have no control. But there is an ugly side too. Consider that Barbara Fried, a professor emerita at Stanford Law School, has argued against free will and moral responsibility. Right now her son, Sam Bankman-Fried, is on trial for allegations that he looted billions from customers of his collapsed crypto exchange FTX. Under the skeptics’ view, Bankman-Fried deserves no blame or responsibility. How convenient, but deeply wrong.

Here Fischer is not only wrong, but stupid as well. Sapolsky does not think that criminals should get off. The sentence argues that those who criticize free will, like Barbara Fried, whose views he mischaracterizes—read the link, which goes to an essay written, of course, by Fischer himself—also think that nobody should be punished. (Fried says we should “move past blame,”, which is a reasonable view and does not say we should not punish.)

In the end, here we have a philosopher who doesn’t define his terms (isn’t that de rigueur in philosophy?), doesn’t explain himself, and appears not to have read the book he’s reviewing. It’s a horrible review of a very good book, and I continue to highly recommend Determined.

Oh, and Fischer should be kept away from popular writing until he can understand what he’s writing about and be honest in his criticism.

h/t:Barry

Scientific American on a philosophical grift: panpsychism

October 1, 2023 • 9:30 am

Well, Scientific American has published an article that, while on a subject of questionable interest, is at least neither woke nor wrong. The topic is panpsychism, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines this way:

Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. The view has a long and venerable history in philosophical traditions of both East and West, and has recently enjoyed a revival in analytic philosophy.

The old and new forms of panpsychism were advanced because of our present failure to completely understand where consciousness comes from. Thus panpsychism offers an easy way out: we’re conscious because everything is conscious. That, of course, doesn’t solve the “hard problem” of how a brain-carrying organism can be conscious. Our failure to completely understand where consciousness comes from, say the panpsychics, is because we’re working on the wrong level: we just need to show that all bits of the universe are inherently conscious. Problem solved!

No, not solved!

First, a failure to understand something doesn’t mean that we’re taking the wrong approach; it could just mean that the problem is a difficult one. We don’t know where and how the first self-replicating organism evolved, but we don’t say that every bit of the universe has a form of replication, and thus the problem is solved.

In the “revival” forms of panpsychism (about which I’ve written many posts), promulgated most vociferously by Philip Goff, the claim is that every bit of the universe has some form of consciousness, however rudimentary. This includes particles like electrons. (They never specify the form of consciousness enjoyed by, say, electrons.) When the particles, though evolution, are assembled into a creature like a human, this assembly somehow makes the entire creature “conscious” in the way we think of (go here for a discussion of what consciousness is; I’m just referring to the common construal: self-awareness and the ability to perceive sensations).

But there has been no progress in understanding whether panpsychism could be true since it was proposed a long time ago, and that’s for several reasons:

We know no way of demonstrating that inanimate objects, like rocks and neutrons, have some form of consciousness.
We know no way of showing that the combination of rudimentary consciousnesses, as in the constituent particle of our brain, will somehow, when assembled in an organism, make it conscious. This is called the “combination problem.”
As far as we know, consciousness requires a complex nervous system in a living organism, which isn’t present in inanimate constituents of the universe or in dead individuals.
We are making progress in the conventional view of consciousness, e.g, it’s either a byproduct of having a sufficiently complex nervous system or an evolved condition in which the brain was selected to create the phenomenon. (In both cases it’s a material phenomenon connected with how neurons are arranged.) We can change consciousness with brain stimulation, use psychological tricks to fool people into thinking they’re doing something consciously when they’re not, or vice versa, and we can take away or restore consciousness with drugs (e.g., anesthesia).

It’s because of these issues that panpsychism has made no scientific progress while the “materialistic” view of consciousness, the one that doesn’t assume that particles themselves are conscious, has made progress. Panpsychism, in my view, is promulgated by philosophical grifters, who crave the attention they get from propounding novel and counterintuitive theories. And surely on some level they must realize that there’s no way to go any further with their scientific program. They keep singing the same old tune without adding any words, i.e., evidence.

At any rate, the Sci Am piece below, by science journalist Dan Falk, gives an account of the arguments in favor of and against panpsychism made at a recent meeting at Marist College, a college founded as a Catholic school (but now denying any religious affiliation) in Poughkeepsie, New York. The meeting was organized by panpsychist proselytizer Philip Goff, who found it all too easy to get funding from the John Templeton Foundation, which loves stuff like panpsychism because it’s anti-materialistic and conjures up the numinous (“an electron is conscious?. Weird!”)

Goff, of the University of Durham in England, organized the recent event along with Marist philosopher Andrei Buckareff, [JAC: he seems to be a philosopher of religion as well as religious] and it was funded through a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In a small lecture hall with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson River, roughly two dozen scholars probed the possibility that perhaps it’s consciousness all the way down.

You can read the article for free, though if you know about panpsychism, you don’t need to. But if you don’t know about it, it gives a good summary of the arguments against it (there are no arguments for it except its claim that everything is conscious). As usual, physicist Sean Carroll injects some sense into the discussion; he also had a big debate with Goff, as he has several times before (see below):

The crazy part of this all is that a lot of philosophers accept panpsychism, despite its numerous problems and scientific intractability. From the article (my emphasis):

Yet panpsychism runs counter to the majority view in both the physical sciences and in philosophy that treats consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, something that arises in certain complex systems, such as human brains. In this view, individual neurons are not conscious, but thanks to the collective properties of some 86 billion neurons and their interactions—which, admittedly, are still only poorly understood—brains (along with bodies, perhaps) are conscious. Surveys suggest that slightly more than half of academic philosophers hold this view, known as “physicalism” or “emergentism,” whereas about one third reject physicalism and lean toward some alternative, of which panpsychism is one of several possibilities.

How can philosophers fall for a panpsychic grift? I suppose it’s because they don’t really understand science, want to do down science (yes, some philosophers have that motivation), or apprehend the value of evidence in supporting or weakening a theory. Here’s more (my bolding):

Many philosophers at the meeting appeared to share Goff’s concern that physicalism falters when it comes to consciousness. “If you know every last detail about my brain processes, you still wouldn’t know what it’s like to be me,” says Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosopher at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. “There is a clear explanatory gap between the physical and the mental.” Consider, for example, the difficulty of trying to describe color to someone who has only seen the world in black and white. Yanssel Garcia, a philosopher at the University of Nebraska Omaha, believes that physical facts alone are inadequate for such a task. “There is nothing of a physical sort that you could provide [a person who sees only in shades of gray] in order to have them understand what color experience is like; [they] would need to experience it themselves,” he says. “Physical science is, in principle, incapable of telling us the complete story.” Of the various alternatives that have been put forward, he says that “panpsychism is our best bet.”

First of all, those philosophers seem to be ignorant about how real scientists (as opposed to philosophers) are attacking the problem of consciousness and understanding its physical basis. More important, I think Goff would (and believe has) said that panpsychism is a physicalist theory. We just don’t know, physically, how the consciousness of electrons works. If it’s not physicalist, then it’s supernatural. But if you claim it’s an inherent property of matter, that’s a physicalist assertion, for one then needs to show how it’s an inherent property of matter. If you can’t, find another line of work.

Here’s some critique of the theory from the article (there’s no evidence offered in support of the theory except that it sounds good):

But panpsychism attracts many critics as well. Some point out that it doesn’t explain how small bits of consciousness come together to form more substantive conscious entities. Detractors say that this puzzle, known as the “combination problem,” amounts to panpsychism’s own version of the hard problem. The combination problem “is the serious challenge for the panpsychist position,” Goff admits. “And it’s where most of our energies are going.”

Others question panpsychism’s explanatory power. In his 2021 book Being You, neuroscientist Anil Seth wrote that the main problems with panpsychism are that “it doesn’t really explain anything and that it doesn’t lead to testable hypotheses. It’s an easy get-out to the apparent mystery posed by the hard problem.”

. . . During a well-attended public debate between Goff and Carroll, the divergence of their worldviews quickly became apparent. Goff said that physicalism has led “precisely nowhere,” and suggested that the very idea of trying to explain consciousness in physical terms was incoherent. Carroll argued that physicalism is actually doing quite well and that although consciousness is one of many phenomena that can’t be inferred from the goings-on at the microscopic level, it is nonetheless a real, emergent feature of the macroscopic world. He offered the physics of gases as a parallel example. At the micro level, one talks of atoms, molecules and forces; at the macro level, one speaks of pressure, volume and temperature. These are two kinds of explanations, depending on the “level” being studied—but present no great mystery and are not a failure on the part of physics.

Bringing up the gas laws was a smart thing to do, showing emergent physical properties that do not demonstrate a failure of physicalism. The gas laws may not be predictable from the laws of physics, but are consistent with the laws of physics. One more critique:

Seth, the neuroscientist, was not at the workshop—but I asked him where he stands in the debate over physicalism and its various alternatives. Physicalism, he says, still offers more “empirical grip” than its competitors—and he laments what he sees as excessive hand-wringing over its alleged failures, including the supposed hardness of the hard problem. “Critiquing physicalism on the basis that it has ‘failed’ is willful mischaracterization,” he says. “It’s doing just fine, as progress in consciousness science readily attests.” In a recently published article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Seth adds: “Asserting that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous does nothing to shed light on the way an experience of blueness is the way it is, and not some other way. Nor does it explain anything about the possible functions of consciousness, nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma.”

It’s clear that I think panpsychism is a big philosophical grift, and although I could be more charitable, I get angry when a philosophical equivalent of creationism, which is what panpsychism is, gets popular. Perhaps Goff and his colleagues really believe it, but unless they’re thick-headed they surely realize that there is no evidence in its favor and they haven’t offered a solution to the most crucial part of their theory: the combination problem. I predict with some confidence that panpsychism will go nowhere. As the Encyclopedia notes, the theory has a “long and venerable history”. I’d disagree with the “venerable” part, but the fact that its history is long, but yet no progress has been made in documenting or understanding it, shows that it’s an intellectual dead end.

Here’s a three-year old video, which I believe I put up before, giving an audio debate between Carroll and Goff. There’s no doubt that the physicist is the winner; Goff comes out licking his wounds.

For another video dismantling of panpsychism by Carroll, go here, and you can also see a paper by Carroll on the phenomenon here.

When I first read the Sci Am piece, I had the following email conversation with Matthew, also a critic of panpsychism:

Me: Why not a symposium on flat-earthism?
Matthew: I bet Templeton funded it. Good guess. I mean, it’s right up their street. Imagine the real good they could do with all their dosh if they funded sensible things!

I hadn’t read the article when I had this exchange, but, sure enough, Matthew was right: the sticky fingers of Templeton are all over this symposium. To wit:

But I’ve had some second thoughts about Sci Am publishing this article, and don’t oppose it now. Panpsychism is not precisely equivalent to “flat earthism”, but only because a lot of people still believe in panpsychism, and if you pay attention to intellectual currents you’ll have heard about it. In my view, though panpsychism is nearly as scientifically worthless as flat earth theory or the “Loch Ness Monster” hypothesis, the public needs a place to understand what panpsychism is. Author Falk fills that bill, also showing (necessarily) panpsychism’s profound weaknesses. In that sense, Falk has done a good job, and I can’t fault Scientific American for publishing his piece.

Dan Dennett: a new book and an interview in the NYT

August 27, 2023 • 12:00 pm

I recently finished Dan Dennett‘s new autobiography, I’ve Been Thinking (cover below; click to get an Amazon link), and I was deeply impressed by what a full life the man has had (he’s 81). I thought he spent most of his time philosophizing, writing, and teaching philosophy at Tufts; but it turns out that he had a whole other life that I knew little about: owning a farm in Maine, sailing all over the place in his boat, making tons of apple cider, hanging out with his pals (many of them famous), and traveling the world to lecture or study. Truly, I’d also be happy if I had a life that full. And, as Dan says in his interview with the NYT today, he’s left out hundreds of pages of anecdotes and other stuff.

Although I’ve taken issue with Dan’s ideas at times (I disagree with him on free will and on the importance of memes, for example), you can’t help but like the guy. He’s sometimes passionate in his arguments, but he’s never mean, and of course he looks like Santa Claus. Once at a meeting in Mexico, I was accosted by Robert Wright, who was incensed that I’d given his book on the history of religion a bad review in The New Republic. Wright plopped himself down beside me at lunch, so I was a captive audience, and proceeded to berate and harangue me throughout the meal. It was one of the worst lunch experiences I’ve ever had.

Because of Wright’s tirade, I was so upset that, after the meal was done, I went over to Dan, jumped in his lap, and hugged him (telling him why). I was greatly relieved, for it was like sitting on Santa’s lap. Now Santa, who’s getting on, has decided to sum up his career. The book is well worth reading, especially if you want to see how a philosopher has enacted a life well lived.

In today’s paper there’s a short interview with Dan by David Marchese, who has been touted as an expert interviewer. I didn’t think that Marchese’s questions were that great, but read for yourself (click below):

I’ll give a few quotes, mostly about atheism and “other ways of knowing,” First, the OWOK. Marchese’s questions are in bold; Dennett’s responses in plain text. And there are those annoying sidenotes that the NYT has started using, which I’ve omitted.

Right now it seems as if truth is in shambles, politics has become religion and the planet is screwed. What’s the most valuable contribution philosophers could be making given the state of the world?

Well, let’s look at epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Eric Horvitz, the chief scientist at Microsoft, has talked about a “post-epistemic” world.

How?

By highlighting the conditions under which knowledge is possible. This will look off track for a moment, but we’ll come around: Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s last theorem. 1990s, the British mathematician Andrew Wiles proved a theorem that had stumped mathematicians since it was proposed by Pierre de Fermat in 1637.

It was one of the great triumphs of mathematics in my lifetime. Why do we know that he did it? Don’t ask me to explain complex mathematics. It’s beyond me. What convinces me that he proved it is that the community of mathematicians of which he’s a part put it under scrutiny and said, “Yep, he’s got it.” That model of constructive and competitive interaction is the key to knowledge. I think we know that the most reliable path to truth is through communication of like-minded and disparate thinkers who devote serious time to trying to get the truth — and there’s no algorithm for that.

Note this bit: “the most reliable path to truth is through communication of like-minded and disparate thinkers who devote serious time to trying to get the truth.” This means that all knowledge, including the “other ways of knowing” of indigenous people, has to be vetted by like-minded and disparate thinkers. If it hasn’t been, it’s not another way of knowing, but only a way of claiming to know.

But wait! There’s more!

There’s a section in your book “Breaking the Spell” where you lament the postmodern idea that truth is relative. How do we decide which truths we should treat as objective and which we treat as subjective? I’m thinking of an area like personal identity, for example, where we hear phrases like, “This is my truth.”

The idea of “my truth” is second-rate. The people who think that because this is their opinion, somehow it’s aggressive for others to criticize or reject them — that’s a self-defeating and pernicious attitude. The recommended response is: “We’d like to bring you into the conversation, but if you’re unable to consider arguments for and against your position, then we’ll consider you on the sidelines. You’re a spectator, not a participant.” You don’t get to play the faith card. That’s not how rational inquiry goes.

Marchese asks too many questions about AI and ChatGPT, topics which, while they may be important, bore me to tears. He also gets a bit too personal. He should have stopped inquiring after the first answer below.

There was something in your memoir that was conspicuous to me: You wrote about the late 1960s, when your pregnant wife had a bowel obstruction.

Yeah, we lost the baby.

You describe it as “the saddest, loneliest, most terrifying” time of your life.

Yes.

That occupies one paragraph of your memoir.

Yes.

What is it indicative of about you — or your book — that a situation you described that way takes up such a small space in the recounting of your life?

Look at the title of the book: “I’ve Been Thinking.” There are hundreds of pages of stories that I cut at various points from drafts because they were about my emotional life, my trials and so forth. This isn’t a tell-all book. I don’t talk about unrequited love, failed teenage crushes. There are mistakes I made or almost made that I don’t tell about. That’s just not what the book’s about.

Finally, the good stuff about atheism and religion. Although regarded as one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism” along with Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris, Dan has been the least demonized of them, probably because he’s not a vociferous anti-theist and regards religion as a phenomenon deserving more philosophical study than opprobrium. Nevertheless, he makes no bones about his unbelief:

We have a soul, but it’s made of tiny robots. There is no God. These are ideas of yours that I think a lot of people can rationally understand, but the gap between that rational understanding and their feelings involves too much ambivalence or ambiguity for them to accept. What is it about you that you can arrive at those conclusions and not feel adrift, while other people find those ideas too destabilizing to seriously entertain?

Some people don’t want magic tricks explained to them. I’m not that person. When I see a magic trick, I want to see how it’s done. People want free will or consciousness, life itself, to be real magic. What I want to show people is, look, the magic of life as evolved, the magic of brains as evolving in between our own ears, that’s thrilling! It’s affirming. You don’t need miracles. You just need to understand the world the way it really is, and it’s unbelievably wonderful. We’re so lucky to be alive! The anxiety that people feel about giving up the traditional magical options, I take that very seriously. I can feel that anxiety. But the more I understood about the things I didn’t understand, the more the anxiety ebbed. The more the joy, the wondrousness came back. At the end of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” I have my little hymn to life and the universe. That’s my God — more wonderful than anything I could imagine in detail, but not magical.

So how do you understand religious belief?

No problem at all. More people believe in belief in God than believe in God. [Marchese takes issue with this in a sidenote.] We should recognize it and recognize that people who believe in belief in God are sometimes very reluctant to consider that they might be wrong. What if I’m wrong? That’s a question I ask myself a lot. These people do not want to ask that question, and I understand why. They’re afraid of what they might discover. I want to give them an example of somebody who asks the question and is not struck down by lightning. I’m often quoted as saying, “There’s no polite way of telling people they’ve devoted their life to an illusion.” Actually, what I said was, “There’s no polite way of asking people to consider whether they’ve devoted their life to an illusion, but sometimes you have to ask it.”

There are better questions that could have been asked. For example, I would have asked Dan, “What do you think has been your greatest contribution to philosophy?” and “What has been your biggest error in your work on philosophy?” Readers might suggest other questions below, though I’m not going to convey them to Dan!

A photo of Dan en famille, with caption, from the interview. I knew him only after his beard turned white, so I wouldn’t have recognized him:

Two of my photos of Dan. The first is in Cambridge, MA, on the way to the “Moving Naturalism Forward” meeting in 2016. We drove the three hours from Boston to Stockbridge, and Richard had to fly back early because of a hurricane warning. Ergo Dan argued with me about free will for three hours’ return drive on the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston (it was not covered with snow). That was something to remember, but I gave no ground:

And Dan at a symposium on religion at the University of Chicago in 2019. It was tedious at times, and I think Dan is showing some impatience here with the annoying lucubrations of Reza Aslan.

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