LIGHTNING CRASHES

Pulling Our Own Strings: Philosopher Daniel Dennett on determinism, human "choice machines," and how evolution generates free will. (Interviewed by Ronald Bailey, May 2003, Reason)

Reason: Your new book is called Freedom Evolves. Why?

Dennett: Because people have this strange antipathy for evolution and for materialism. They think that if evolution is true, then they're just animals or automatons -- that they won't have freedom and they won't have responsibility, and life will have no meaning. The point of the book is to show that, on the contrary, it's only when you understand life from an evolutionary point of view that you understand what our freedom really is. You realize that it's real. It's different and better than the freedom of other animals, but it's evolved. It's not supernatural.

Reason: A response might be that you're just positing a more complicated form of determinism. A bird may be more "determined" than we are, but we nevertheless are determined.

Dennett: So what? Determinism is not a problem. What you want is freedom, and freedom and determinism are entirely compatible. In fact, we have more freedom if determinism is true than if it isn't.

Reason: Why?

Dennett: Because if determinism is true, then there's less randomness. There's less unpredictability. To have freedom, you need the capacity to make reliable judgments about what's going to happen next, so you can base your action on it.

Imagine that you've got to cross a field and there's lightning about. If it's deterministic, then there's some hope of knowing when the lightning's going to strike. You can get information in advance, and then you can time your run. That's much better than having to rely on a completely random process. If it's random, you're at the mercy of it.

The denial of free will is, it would seem, the rock upon which evolution will founder, even if the theory is true. It is just unacceptable to human beings to think that our freedom is so tightly circumscribed by material forces as deterministic Darwinism would have it. So, one of the key projects for advocates of evolution is to try and explain away, at least for public consumption, the full implications of their science, which others, unconcerned with popular acceptance, have had the unfortunate honesty to state more forthrightly, as Richard Dawkins:

We are survival machines--robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

But it's amusing for the onlooker to see how inadequate are the conciliatory arguments of folk like Mr. Dennett. Note in particular that he hasn't even addressed the human being in this equation, only the lightning. The question is not whether liughtning is random or determined, but whether the human's decision when or whether to run is. The example, as he presents it, suggests that both are determined. Because the lightning flashes according to a certain pattern, or at least so the human actor perceives, there will be a moment at which he runs, that will be safer than others. Thus has his action been determined by natural forces. Free will, on the other hand, consists of the battery of choices he truly has: he can decide not to
cross the field, can run immediately, can try to time his run, can walk slowly taunting the gods.... In this sense, Man is a (relatively) free actor within the realm of Nature, has removed himself from the rule of evolution, and this the theory can not explain, for it denies the programming and the truth by which Mr. Dawkins is awed. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 2, 2003 8:56 AM