The 4 biggest ideas in philosophy, with legend Daniel Dennett for Big Think+

- If you see a magician cutting a lady in half and you want to know how it's done, and someone says, "Well, I'll tell you how it's done. They didn't actually see the lady in half. They just make it." "It looks like they're cutting the lady in half." And you're like, "Yeah, she's fine, great. How do they do it?" "Oh, that's not my department. That's someone else's job. I've already given you my explanation." Sometimes philosophers give answers like that. I

think

they just don't want to be bothered. They don't want to take responsibility for explaining what is really happening.

What I like to do is explain things and have them explained to me. Mainly, explanations are about how things work, why they happen the way they do. That's why I've been curious to know how philosophers get to the positions they do, how scientists make mistakes when they ask their own questions. I have often said that

philosophy

is better at questions than answers, and that is not trivial. They don't

think

it's their job to understand how things really work, whereas I think that should be the job of philosophers. I'm Daniel Dennett. I am the author of more than a dozen books on the mind, free will, and evolution.

And I'm a professor emeritus at Tufts University. Since I was little I wanted to know how things worked. He wanted to take them apart and see what motivated them, what made them tick. So deep down I was kind of an engineer. And it turns out that's not a bad attitude as a philosopher. Find out what makes

ideas

work and why. And that's why I've defended the idea that if you're going to be a philosopher, learn about the world, learn about science. I am happy to say that now, philosophers who have a much greater scientific background than I had are growing up and, for the first time in my career, scientists are taking them seriously.

Because scientists are just as capable of making philosophical mistakes or getting into philosophical confusions as any layman. But they need the help of informed philosophers if they want to clarify those questions and ask better questions. Many people simply dig deeper, struggle, and refuse to abandon a point of view that is under attack by their critics. That in itself is not a bad thing. I am glad that some of those whom I criticize so resolutely and fiercely resist my criticism; Otherwise, we would never get to the truth. I think it's very important to keep in mind: 'What if I'm wrong?' When I was a

philosophy

graduate student back in the '60s at Oxford, one day with a group of fellow graduates, we started talking about what happens when your arm falls asleep and you can't control it.

What's that all about? And I got interested and started asking questions about: Well, what is it, is it nerves? Do they pinch themselves? Is it blood flow? What is it? And they thought it was strange that a philosopher would be interested in the physiological questions of what was happening. They thought he was abandoning philosophy. I went to the medical library and tried to learn about how the nervous system works. And that was a major turning point for me. It suddenly dawned on me when I learned about neurons, the brain cells that send signals, that they could be the basis of an evolutionary process in the brain, which was learning.

That learning in the individual was nothing more than another Darwinian process. At that time I didn't know much about evolution, about natural selection, but I started to learn. And the more I learned, the more I thought, "This is the key. This is the big key to how things fit together." And we get rid of all the magic and we have a bottom-up theory of meaning, learning, truth, and consciousness. And, to this day, it amazes me how complacent so many philosophers are in their complete ignorance of the theory of evolution. They think that if we had a physiological, mechanistic and physical explanation of creativity, of genius, of understanding, this would somehow diminish and degrade these wonderful phenomena; absolutely.

If we understood how amazingly intricate, wonderful and ingenious nature is in allowing us to understand and create things, think about the future, we would dismiss magical

ideas

out of hand. And I think Darwin's ideas undo many of the

biggest

problems in philosophy, or at least subvert them and turn them into better problems. And the fact that so many philosophers continue to work trying to find the essence of this or that, when Darwin has shown us that nothing of interest has an essence; It is gradualism in every sense. This is an idea that does not occur to many philosophers, and for a very good reason.

They learn from Socrates, from Plato. And the first thing they do is "define their terms", "establish the essence of each thing", as Aristotle would say. And that turns out to be the great philosophical error. Forget about essences. Learn all the variations and details and penumbral cases. Then you'll know what you're talking about. One of the most eye-opening moments for me was when I read Richard Dawkins' book "The Selfish Gene" and learned about the concept of memes from him. When Dawkins coined the term “memes,” he had something very general in mind. The term became fashionable. It's in the dictionary now.

But only a small subset are what most people consider memes. And those are the ones that people deliberately and, presumably, cleverly design in the hopes that they will go viral. And some of them do. But many memes that have nothing to do with the Internet go viral. The words are memes. Every word in every language is a meme. It is not inherited genetically, it is transmitted culturally. They evolve over time. And Dawkins' theory was a very general theory of how human cultural evolution greatly expands the powers of the human brain. In fact, he would say it very clearly.

I would say that the difference between a chimpanzee and a human brain is that a chimpanzee's brain is largely devoid of furniture. While we fill our brains with memes. We download hundreds of thousands of memes and from there we get our power. Your computer or phone is not a very powerful device until you download some apps to it. They are like memes. We're inundated with toxic memes right now. One of the most toxic, I think because it allows for many others, is the idea that the truth does not matter, that the truth is relative, that there is no such thing as establishing the truth of anything.

Your truth, my truth, we all have the right to our own truths. That is harmful, attractive to many people, and used to exploit people in all kinds of nefarious ways. The truth really matters. I think one of my best ideas is the "intentional stance," the idea that we automatically adopt the strategy of treating anything complicated and interesting, if we can, as an agent. What does he want? Who knows? What do you think? We use the intentional stance all the time to endow other moving, complicated things with beliefs and desires, and the ability to do something rational given those beliefs and desires.

Well, that's fine, as long as we live in a world of concrete objects. But what is happening now is that AI is filling the digital world with fake intentional systems, fake minds, and fake people, who we are almost irresistibly drawn to treat as if they were real, as if they really had beliefs and desires. And these will be very dangerous memes, because they will replicate, they will evolve and we will not be able to divert our attention from them. They will get our attention and manipulate us. The difference between today's AI, the so-called big language models, things like ChatGPT and GPT-4, is that their goal is veracity, not truth.

They are more like historical fiction writers than historians. We are different in that we take the truth seriously. Maybe because we want to lie. But the LLMs, the AIs, still don't really have the ability to lie on purpose. They formulate falsehoods that they then spread. And there is only a difference of degree between us and them. Therefore, we are not used to our technology being in a position to ignore the truth and simply give us what makes sense to them. Technology has done everything possible to make it very difficult to make counterfeit money and very easy to identify it.

So we can do something similar for every phone, computer, tablet: every digital device can have software installed that will do a pretty good job of detecting fakes. And we won't accept it or we'll instantly flag it: "This is fake, this is fake, this is spam, this is a hoax, don't believe it." And to do that, well, you have to have laws. And to have laws, you need to have governments, legislatures that pass the laws, and they need to know enough about what they're doing to pass laws that can't be easily circumvented. This is something we need to work on now and I think we need to work on it full time.