Lecture by philosopher Daniel Dennett | Radboud Reflects

Free Will is as Real as Colors, Promises and Euros
Saturday March 12, 2016 | 14.00 - 16.00 hrs | Concert Hall De Vereeniging, Nijmegen
Contents:
00:00:15 Welcome by philosopher and scientific advisor Paul Bakker
00:04:07 Lecture by philosopher Daniel Dennett
01:09:25 Interview Daniel Dennett with philosopher Marc Slors
01:25:24 Closing by Marc Slors
Most neuroscientists conclude, after stating that we are our brain, that there is no such thing as free will, and that our brain decides how we operate. Dennett does not share this view, and states that the free will does exist, even if there is no such thing as a soul.
More information
UK: www.ru.nl/rr/english/dennett
Dutch: www.ru.nl/rr/dennett

[@Rico-Suave_]

I loved Dr. Daniel Dennett, very sad to hear about his passing, I've would have loved to meet him, he was my absolute favorite, an intellectual giant, a legend, true sage, heard he was also very kind gentle person, huge loss to civilization, I will watch tons of his lectures in the next few days in his memory 1:25:25

[@rckli]

He debated Sapolsky I summarized Sapolsky’s arguments as “I can’t fly like a bird therefor I can’t be held accountable for my actions” and implying “you don’t understand what I’m saying - you haven’t thought about this” 😅 It was a very good debate

[@keithbertschin1213]

How such an esteemed academic could never get his head round the lack of free will is beyond me

[@Torrriate]

One remark regarding Penrose. His main goal in the context of his late work regarding consciousness is NOT to explain free will in terms of quantum mechanics. The target topic of explanation specifically of the orch-or hypothesis is "consciousness" and also rather in terms of space-time via quantum effects in the brain.

[@jameshicks7125]

I would encourage anyone with the interest (and time) to go through Robert Sapolsky's Stanford class lectures on human behavioral biology (KZbin). I don't think we have much free will in consideration of that course and many other lectures. What I mean by free will is that we can always make a clear choice -free of our psychological schema and organic neurological condition given our options- particularly in the sense of the folksy and comforting cliché that one can do whatever they put their mind to. So no, one can't listen to a self help course and become a millionaire by an act of "will". One may, but the decisions that determined that outcome were already set up in the individual's psychological schema. I think the best we can say and I agree with Dennett, is that we have a degree of neuroplasticity that allows us to alter our course and adjust our goals.

[@backtoschool1910]

19:26 *"I doubt that Lamme believes his book about free will is the secretion of a chatterbox." (He, he. Well, if he is truly a hard determinist, he would have to. Do I personally take credit for writing these words on my computer right now? Not really, if I'm going to be honest about it. They just appear in my mind one word or one phrase at time out of nowhere (out of the void).) *"It is the product of his conscious mind." (No, it most certainly is not, and all the neuroscientists will back me up on that point. It is, quite literally, anything BUT that.) *"If they don't have free will, why do they deserve our attention?" (Even if a person doesn't believe in free will, it is logically consistent for them to spread the word, to reveal the truth. In fact, neither you nor they "choose" what they believe, and they hold their beliefs so strongly that they feel compelled to write a book about them.)

[@Sam_on_YouTube]

I generally agree with Dennet's picture of what free will is but my dispute comes early in his argument. He is correct that artificial neural networks tend to be well behaved and not chaotic (not sure he actually said this, but I've heard it from others who make similar arguments). That's a flaw. Natural systems complex enough to have intelligence (and quite a bit that isn't intelligent of course) are universally chaotic. Any natural system with enough variables is almost always chaotic. Even something as simple as the three body problem and a double pendulum are chaotic. By definition, a system is chaotic if it is so sensitive to initial conditions that any change in those conditions leads inevitably to a change as large as the system permits. The weather is the classic example and the butterfly effect is the classic metaphor to understand this. Second, and this he definitely said, quantum states are irrelevant. They are difficult to create, as he said, but only if you mean in a useful and controllable way. If you don't care about that, they are unavoidable. You cannot simultaneously have the precise position and momentum of any particle at one time. That's not to say you cannot know it, as Bell proved (and I'm bit getting into that complex argument here) these are properties that simply don't simultaneously have values. There is a true metaphysical indeterminism there. One of these uncertainty relationships is energy-time uncertainty. That means the precise strength and timing of neural firings do not have precise values. There is a VERY small uncertainty there. But if there is ANY uncertainty, then in a chaotic system, the uncertainty blows up to one as large as the system permits. Now lay these scientific facts on top of Dennet's view of what free will is. The advantage of this view is that it is attractive not only to those, like Dennet, who have a compatibilist intuition, but also to those who are incompatiblists. Incompatiblists sometimes think free will must be absolute to exist. They would still require convincing, but if you add the real uncertainty to what is essentially a compatibilist view, it starts to look more attractive. Incompatiblists who don't insist on absolute freedom are easier to convince. It is worth noting that my view is much better than Dennet's on "could have done otherwise". That's the point where the intuition differs for compatibilists and incompatiblists. Dennet spends a great deal of effort trying to convince Incompatiblists that they shouldn't include that about what they mean when they talk about free will. That effort is likely to be doomed. He is setting up a situation where he is taking about something different from what the Incompatiblists mean. On my view, you can have either intuition and arrive at the same result at the end. If you are a compatiblist like Dennet, there is very little difference between his view and mine. But if you are inclined toward incompatiblism, (and in the end we're talking about the definition of a term, so intuition and opinion are highly relevant here) then my version of the argument becomes much more attractive. My version also explains Soon's experiment much more naturally. There's nothing wrong with Dennet's explanation, but my view allows for a much more natural and equally valid explanation. In my view, Soon showed the decision process nears conclusion and becomes almost inevitable about 8-10 seconds before it becomes conscious.

[@AlexanderGolovatiy]

Love your comment

[@CopperKettle]

Дякую

[@rstevewarmorycom]

Niels Bohr, one of the main architects of quantum theory, insisted however that no connection could be made between indeterminism of nature and freedom of will.

[@PartlySunny74]

Bohr died in 1962. Before fMRI machines helped neuroscientists discover what is now known about our thoughts, behavior and will.

[@rstevewarmorycom]

@@PartlySunny74 The fMRI stuff has been shown to be irrelevant to the question of indeterminacy and free will (whim), because neural delays don't prove anything about awareness. It doesn't matter if we start the thinking process before we are aware of it. We're machines. We're still totally determined as physics . Bohr went through that argument as well. Just like radioactive decay doesn't have to be predictable to still be deterministic. Predictability is NOT required for determinism to be true.

[@jacek_poplawski]

what happened to questions from the audience?

[@stephenlawrence4821]

What Dan Dennett also says is free will is an illusion, though he wouldn't use those words he does say we are deluded about CHDO, which is the standard free will illusion. He's quite right to straighten it out to make sense of things it's just incredibly misleading if you don't know the move he's making.

[@justincase1660]

I cant believe this is the 1st time ive seen this video. glad you commented. what you said makes it make more sense.

[@tgyul]

He briefly mentions but does not elaborate on the notion of [practical] free will not being a binary thing. With the prerequisites of moral responsibility also moving on a continuous scale, I think it remains an elusive phenomenon, and the legal systems that act upon it are like surgeons with hammers.

[@JCMcGee]

Twice he asks those who deny free will - "Then why did you do that?" (Why did you write the book? etc) and everyone laughs......yet their reply would be ridiculously simple: "I had no choice but to............"

[@nateellenberger6043]

This type of lectures blows my mind (free will, god debates, evolution debates, etc...) and when I think about it too much, it's makes my head hurt!! lol It's awesome but I don't have the brain power capabilities like DD does and will never understand totally what "free will" is. I can only "try"......:)

[@MrDorbel]

@ Nate Ellenberger Few of us do Nate, but keep listening. You may not grasp it all (and certainly not to the extent of being able to expand on it or critique it) but it will expand your consciousness and understanding to some extent, which is all that we can hope for. Starting from base, the only way is up!

[@NameRequiredSoHere]

You should check out the KZbin Series Closer to Truth that looks at these subjects from all viewpoints.

[@circular17]

I agree 100% with Daniel Dennet and I am always surprised someone has to explain this. Causality is not contradictory to making choices according to preferences and moral considerations. The only thing where I would disagree would be about punishment as I find that at least to a large extent, the use of punishment is immoral.

[@henlofrens]

You should look into Derk Pereboom then. He has a lot to say about the free will/punishment interaction if I recall correctly.

[@circular17]

Thanks for that. He indeed talks about rehabilitation and moral responsibility without the traditional "free will".

[@slyjokerg]

So if someone abducts, rapes, and kills a 13 year old girl, that someone doesn't deserve any punishment? We should pity that person and merely impose "treatment"?? There should be no penal repercussions? I find that position absurd and impossible to defend.

[@joemartin2644]

"There should be no penal repercussions? I find that position absurd and impossible to defend." That is certainly not the position of Daniel Dennett. I’d wager it’s practically nobody’s position. Dennett has discussed this elsewhere, my best paraphrasing (EDIT: I went a whole heckuva lot further than I thought I would and used some imagery that Dennett would not LOL): This is perhaps a place where there is a difference in the "manifest image" and "scientific image" and our disagreements and misunderstandings can come from people speaking from different sides of that divide. Roughly speaking: *the ‘Manifest Image’ is the world we know and grew up in and live. It is the world of apples, baseball, colors, deer, elephants, feelings, sounds, smells, tastes, touches. *the ‘Scientific Image’ is the world that we ***know*** through science, but don’t ***experience*** or have good inborn intuitions for. This is the world of atoms and subatomic particles, photons, neutrinos, dinosaurs, black holes, galaxies, special relativistic time dilation, evolution by natural selection, the rules of VERY large and VERY small numbers, the VERY fast or slow, and the very very very old. The practical effect of accepting the philosophical idea that punishment is immoral (which comes from the scientific image, NOT the manifest) is NOT that we get rid of legal ramifications for criminals. But what we SHOULD do is shift our emphasis from a "retributive" stance to a "consequentialist" one. BUT part of the consequences that need to be accounted for include how societies of homo sapiens with their particular evolutionary history and particular cognitive biases, strengths, weaknesses etc. will react to a given set of policies and practices. In a certain sense, things don't necessarily have to change that much, its more a matter of tweaking how our system works rather than tearing down and erecting a new structure all at once: A person who would do the heinous things you describe is NOT someone we want running around on the streets. Wether or not we think he "deserves" "punishment" (NOTE THE SCARE QUOTES), it makes sense to set up our laws to minimize the chance that such crimes happen again. To GROSSLY oversimplify things, if your primary goal is simply "minimize child-murder-rape", there are several ways you could go about doing that, and they may or may not involve "punishment". Compare these two scenarios: 1) every convicted child-murder-rapist is sent on a one-way trip via rocketship to a distant, personal, utopia-like paradise, but will be physically unable to return to Earth and harm anyone ever again. So no one will suffer because of anything he does EVER AGAIN (its a thought experiment, so make it a one-way force field that destroys anything that leaves if you want) 2) every convicted child-murder-rapist is summarily executed. If a swift gunshot to the head or hanging or beheading isn't enough for you, feel free to concoct something gruesome enough to be appropriate. every convicted child-murder-rapist is castrated by a hungry pig, has their fingers and toes snipped off and the wounds immediately cauterized by placing the stubs into molten iron, and is then slowly submerged in liquid nitrogen until everything under their diaphragm is frozen (so they can still breathe, of course), then they are force-fed a liter of gasoline through a funnel, set ablaze, and then skewered by a dozen spears with TINY but LONG sharp points until they die. Make the whole process take as long as you see fit. Nobody is harmed by them EVER AGAIN. Both of those accomplish the task of "keeping rapists off the street". Suppose if you must that the public doesn't actually know what happens in the first case. Again, its a thought experiment so we can simply deem that the fact that the "prison" in case 1) is a "paradise" does NOT encourage any more child-murder-rapes 'than would have happened otherwise'. Even it were possible, most of us probably want something in between 1 and 2, but they starkly illustrate the difference between * "consequentialist" criminal justice = just get rid of the child-murder-rapists, doesn't matter HOW as long as they are gone * "retributivist" criminal justice = child-murder-rapists must be PUNISHED. Its not enough to merely stop them, they must 'pay for what they have done'. (again, its a thought experiment! we can stipulate that the "punishment" does not have any deterrent effect, if we think its relevant to the discussion. The point being "pure retributivism" is just about paying back the wrongdoer, nothing more or less) WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE REAL WORLD?: Most people who are in prison are going to come back into society eventually. Even if we think they "deserve" some punishment, we should also think of the consequences of having a system that works just the way ours does, where prison is basically graduate school for violent criminals*, our recidivism rates are very high, and we have the highest per-capita prison population in the WORLD. The USA, land of the free, home of the brave, puts more of its citizens in prison (per capita) than authoritarian countries like China and Russia, for feck's sake. To the extent that we can discover ***why*** someone behaves criminally and we can address it so as to minimize future harm wether from this particular person or people like him in the future, we may need to find a way to stomach that we may be doling out less "punishment" then we intuit is necessary. We may have an appetite and craving for "punishment" much like our cravings for fats, salt, and sugar: we evolved in an environment where they were relatively hard to come by, so our brains wired us to get as much as we can. Now, we can get (or "give", rather, in the case of retributive criminal justice) more "punishment" than our current society should want, if we are trying to "optimize" things using what we know about us and the world through the lens of the "scientific image", with a sensitivity to the peculiarities of the "manifest image”… tl,dr; - We should be more “consequentialist” and less “retributivist” in our application of criminal justice. But the consequentialist policy needs to acknowledge our innate retributivist tendencies and either accommodate or compensate for them. (* h/t Sam Harris for great phrase)

[@circular17]

When we react with anger to people doing horrible things, our reaction is because we want to ensure our security, compassion and trust. Punishment is only a method and it is not necessary. Sometimes we need to restrain someone for protection, but we don't need to do that in the spirit of vengeance. We can do it simply with the idea of protection.

[@stephenlawrence4821]

The trouble with the title is the free will people actually doubt is impossible nonsense and Dan Dennett says so. To make the case that free will is as real as colours, promises and Euros is so misleading because people aren't usually questioning that. So people get the impression the free will that Dan Dennett says is impossible (or at least not real) is as real as colours, promises and euros.

[@konstruktivismuskonstru9360]

Dennett is so right about free will. I cannot understand why so many philosophers have problems getting this point. For example Sam Harris is astonishingly wrong on this subject...

[@lupo-femme]

Sam Harris is astonishingly wrong on almost every subject, such that it becomes not astonishing that he's so wrong all the time.

[@micahdelaurentis6551]

And Sam Harris's cocksure attitude when dismissing free will is endlessly frustrating.

[@stephenlawrence4821]

Then you don't understand that Sam Harris and Dan Dennett agree on free will.

[@arkadebsengupta7702]

​@@stephenlawrence4821I understand what you mean, but a point i think you're neglecting is that they differ on what to call free will, which nullifies any agreement they have. If you call dogs pigs and i call pigs pigs, can we ever be said to agree on our opinions on pigs?

[@alphaomega1089]

We have imposed limited freewill due to our moral obligations to the collective. Freewill is non-deterministic. External inputs are merely instructions. The steps taken to complete any task is down to the installed software and any accessible peripheral apparatus - like chess what pieces are played can be perfect or willed.

[@wormalism]

Colours are "real" (they have a wavelength) going from red to green to blue, the colours going back from blue to magenta to red are "false" (no wavelengths, your eye is detecting red and blue info but not green). You can not tell the difference between yellow produced by the actual wavelength between green or shining blue and green light at a screen.

[@blaster-zy7xx]

The point is that no wavelength is really a "color". A wavelength is a wavelength. There is no yellowness to a wavelength. The yellowness in painted inside your brain so you can distinguish the outside world. It is no different than a temperature map on the news that allocates temperature ranges to colors. It is just how evolution has chosen to map out various wavelength so your mind can generate a meaningful model of the outside world.

[@joeschmo2693]

~ 23:00 I don't like the term free will. I believe that we have constrained will, and that moral competence is based on whether or not our will operates on an informed basis. Responsibility is assigned based on our comprehension of the expectations of others and our understanding of social obligations. I don't think I really disagree with Dennet, I just don't like the term: (limited, conditional) freedom, constrained will (identity).

[@thejackanapes5866]

Well, no. We have a will, but it isn't free in any meaningful sense. Our capacity to make a choice at all is really the result of the limits of our capacity to be aware of any number of causal chains and interactions.

[@chemquests]

The Jackanapes the level of awareness of factors causing choices is just a matter of degrees of freedom. Whether you’re aware & consciously considering all factors or barely aware & choosing by reaction, you’re brain is still producing a choice for which you will be held responsible and that is practical free will.

[@thejackanapes5866]

@@chemquests Yeah and if P then Q, Q therefore P... You can't argue for contra-causal and contra-physical agency without question begging, and ignoring empirical evidence. But you're right about one thing. Idiot Humans will "hold you responsible" to satiate their own delusional, retributive bloodlust. And then, when they suffer the unavoidable effects of their own ignorance, those same Humans will beg for clemency.

[@thejackanapes5866]

@Khaled Rapp Yes, just as free. I can't view the rest of your comment after "under the threat of..." for some reason, so I'll respond to what I can read. Conviction is causal (whether or not causality has underlying physics, as it seems to, or some helpless apophenia Humans suffer is irrelevant here - it's a thing.) This is a different issue from whether or not it is morally right or wrong. Given an understanding of how a moral heuristic emerges from nociception regulated by pain and suffering states, and the ability to think in counterfactuals about the experiences of other people, murder is morally wrong. It isn't that one could have done otherwise, it's that one should have. "Could have done otherwise" is falsified empirically by the fact that people "do or don't." It is literally the counterfactual -fallacy- It is instrumentally useful to be able to imagine *if* we could have done otherwise, so that when faced with similar circumstances, we can do other than we have done before. That is responsibility.

[@blah87241]

Dennett goes wrong early on by 'switch and bait' between free will and moral responsibility that he insists on. Deciding or not to move your foot or not is free will but not necessary a morally responsible. It is that free will he needs to consider. None of his arguments apply to that case.

[@MrDorbel]

You can't have listened to the whole debate.

[@johnhausmann2391]

He deals with this explicitly. He talks about what we (should) want free will to be about. It is about having the capability to act in a way that one wants to based one's own reasons. It should not be gaged based on artificial thought experiments (devised usually by philosophers) where a person is to decide whether to move a foot to the left or right. This is a deficient example on which to base conclusions about free will. His arguments approach the subject from a much fuller humanist point of view, and so yes he does not take up your example, but there are reasons for that. He believes that your experiments lead to faulty conclusions.

[@hisxmark]

I know some folks have to believe in free will, but I choose not to.

[@rasmith_99]

If only Dennett could have been one of the 1500 left behind on the Titanic that night.

[@janklaas6885]

🇺🇳1:15:36

[@justincase1660]

is dennett losing his mind ? pun intended. free will exists even if we dont have a soul ? what is a soul ? what does free will have to do with what we might have ? we can define free will , correct ? if there is a definition then it can be measured, tested etc ? ok. next there is no definition of a soul therefore it cannot be tested, correct ? just sayin.....

[@user-qi4nh4hh9r]

One and a half hour of talking about nothing. No clear definition of a subject. He talks about "absolute free will" and "practical free will" but didn't explain what does it imply. He says "free will exists, but it is not what you think it is", but doesn't explain what we think it is and what he think it is. "A usefull social construct" - is a useless zero-infomative definition of Dennett's free will.