Freedom Evolves

If you like what Daniel Dennett calls "toy universes" or "toy worlds," you will love this book. If, like me, you question the validity of contrived analogies between "toy" mental constructions and the actual human world, you will find the book less endearing.

Interspersed among lengthy digressions on toy mental constructions in the first half of this book are comments that sometimes appear to be germane to the issue at hand: scientific determinism versus free will. Dennett is a self-acknowledged "compatibilist"—one who takes a middle road between the "hard determinists" and the advocates of free will. "[C]ompatibilism [is] the view that free will and determinism are compatible after all, the view that I am defending in this book." (Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, Kindle ed. [New York: Penguin, 2004), 98.) How Dennett can take such a position without violating the principle of (non)contradiction is the central mystery of this work. He tries to accomplish it by utilizing semantic legerdemain: changing the historical meanings of such terms as "determinism," "inevitability," and "free will" so that they signify something other than what they have classically meant in the millennia of philosophical, scientific, and other debate on these issues. In Dennett's universe, "determinism" does not imply either inevitability or causation, and "free will" does not mean free will but rather something like free will. For example, Dennett remarks in chapter 4: "The hard determinists among you may find in subsequent chapters that your considered view is that whereas free will— as you understand the term— truly doesn’t exist, something rather like free will does exist, and it’s just what the doctor ordered for shoring up your moral convictions, permitting you to make the distinctions you need to make." (Dennett, Freedom Evolves, 98 [italics in the original].) Nevertheless, like the impossibility of following the ball in quantum mechanics, I still don't understand his exact position even after two readings of this book. The judgment of Dennett's hard-determinist friend Sam Harris (whose book on free will I have otherwise critically reviewed  here) may be on point:

"As I have said, I think compatibilists like Dennett change the subject: They trade a psychological fact—the subjective experience of being a conscious agent—for a conceptual understanding of ourselves as persons. This is a bait and switch." (Sam Harris Free Will, Kindle ed. [New York: Free Press, 2012], 22.)

About half-way through his book, Dennett transitions from an obsession with game theory to a preoccupation with genetic and cultural evolution. This change in focus was welcome to the present reader. At least here we are dealing with empirical fact (or, more precisely, Dennett's interpretation of empirical fact through more analogical reasoning). But the relevance of this large digression to the issue of determinism versus free will is less than apparent. "Freedom evolves," according to Dennett, but what does this mean exactly? Although the last two chapters delineate a picture of evolved human life that implies free will, he nevertheless maintains until the end of the book that scientific determinism remains valid. The entire book juggles these inconsistent concepts as though they are somehow compatible, but in the end Dennett never resolves the contradiction.

Alan E. Johnson
April 29, 2018

8/11/2021 NOTE: See also the discussion of Dennett in my book  Free Will and Human Life.

Whatever free will is, determinism is the wrong way to think about it!

Whenever I see a discussion of free will online, inevitably someone drags quantum mechanics into it. It's a confusing notion at first, for what does quantum mechanics have to do with volition? But the less woo-inclined (i.e. those who don't equivocate the mysterious nature of quantum mechanics and the mysterious nature of consciousness) see quantum mechanics an escape from determinism.

Whether Dan Dennett's book is a convincing argument for compatibilism, its framing of the issue of volition is important. Decisions form an integral part of our lives, and we are competent decision-makers. So when someone drops to quantum indeterminacy, are they getting any sort of will? Dennett persuasively argues not. An indeterminate path doesn't have an agent own the choice - the choice is randomness, the equivalent of following the outcome of a coin-flip.

That is the kind of argument throughout this book. Dennett's case isn't to give a comprehensive defence of compatibilism, but to look at whether the concerns that often are put forward in opposition to compatibilism are deflated.

The point is to come up with a variety of free will "worth wanting", and Dennett believes that through evolution we have become "agents of evitability". That is, as subjective agents, we are only going to understand human actions by understanding how it is our evolved (both genetic and cultural) talents allow us to make responsible decisions in the world. The consequence of Dennett's view is that responsibility comes in degrees, but as Dennett points out, this is already a latitude we ascribe in the real world already.

The elephant in the room, perhaps, is that consciousness is still not fully explained. One point Dennett kept returning to was that opponents of compatibilism kept making consciousness "too small" - a remnant of what he dubs the Cartesian Theater. Perhaps this is a problem, but Dennett's persistent referencing of the Cartesian Theater as the stumbling block was one of the many rhetorical flourishes he used on his opponents. The times he flat out accused his opponents of being afraid of his view detracted from the case.

So, overall it's a book full of stimulating conversation, and hopefully will help better frame the issue.

This book is powerfully verbose. This fact is both good and bad. Dennett is knowledgeable about a variety of scientific and philosophical issues and I enjoy the way he explains these things. From physics to biology to psychology. His narrative is interesting , sophisticated , educational and entertaining. However at some point I wanted to get to the fact of the matter concerning his view on free will. There is far too much information here that is outside the bounds of what is important to the topic of this book. Freedom Evolves would have been much better done as a lengthy essay without the verbose inclusions. Although the information in and of itself was interesting , the piece was too long and , to the best of my knowledge , inconclusive. Often times philosophers can attempt to redefine and mince words to get a different meaning from them. I'm not sure that that's what happened here. I'm not sure at all what happened concerning Dennett's view on freewill other than the fact that he is compatibilist. Far to much information here that is not organized well. I hoped to come out of this with an epiphany however I came out of it desperately thankful that it was finally over.

I tend to defer to authors when reading a book by someone, you know, smarter than me, but I'm fairly certain that this is one of the worst books I've ever read. If you read and liked this book, email me or message me on this website or something. I never bother to write reviews, but I've trudged through this book for a month now, and I hated it, so I feel compelled to write my feelings somewhere, and I'd love to hear from someone who tells me I misunderstood.

Here's the book's central concern, and it's one of those things that I used to think about and worry about and then just stopped caring about because it's an insoluble waste of time: we all make decisions, or whatever, but who is "we?" I am a product of genes and environment and I have nothing to do with those, and even those have nothing to do with themselves, and in fact the circumstances which allow a situation to happen are unbelievably complicated and may have nothing at all to do with "us." In fact maybe when you know like when whatever subatomic particles collided all the way back when, the future was already determined; they rebounded according to whatever path physical laws forced them to, and then we decided on chicken for dinner tonight. But we didn't decide. The decision was made the second the universe started. Our consciousness is an illusion.

I don't care to retype a lot of passages from Dennett's book, but here's what I think are a couple of key ones. From "Will the Future be like the Past?" in ch. 3 (p. 94 in my edition), in response to a straw-man critic insisting (as I assume many people will, since I did over and over again throughout the margins) that Dennett is not answering the question we picked up the books for:

"...Very well, if you insist. Maybe there is a sense of possible in which Austin could not possibly have made that very putt, if determinism is true. Now why on earth should we care about your question?"

Why wouldn't people care about this question? I mean, I long since threw up my hands because who cares, but -- after reading, in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, an account of Dennett's interesting "skyhook v. crane" argument re: something from nothing and the idea of God -- I thought this book could interestingly consider another spiraling, hope-nobody-mentions-it-when-you're-high-or-you're-all-going-to-freak-the-fuck-out philosophical riddle. The reason people wonder about all that is because people like to envision that we all know what good and bad is and that we make the choices ourselves, that we can blame Osama bin Laden for September 11 in a way we couldn't blame a comet falling through both towers. Your insistence that you could answer is why I, and presumably anyone, picked up this book.

Here is a piece of his conclusion (from "'Thanks, I needed that'" in the last chapter, on p. 302 in my edition):

"Yes, luck figures heavily in our lives, all the time, but since we know this, we take the precautions we deem appropriate to minimize the untoward effects of luck, and then take responsibility for whatever happens... [guy who did something bad:] can...face the much more demanding task of constructing a future self that has this terrible act of omission in its biography... This is indeed an opportunity for a Self-Forming Action of the sort Kane draws to our attention, and we human beings are the only species that is capable of making them, but there is no need for them to be undetermined."

Why, Dennett, is this a self-forming action? If someone wants to pick themselves up by the bootstraps, whence that? Was it not in their genes, maybe roused in them by inspiring speeches from their father or encouraging notes from a teacher? Would they not likely have turned out differently if they'd been starved in a basement and beaten all their lives?

I just don't get it. So many things he wrote seemed so obtuse that I wondered if I was simply stupid to not understand them. The whole "Life World" thing? I mean, just because it appears to us, in taking a large-scale view, that things are happening differently on this large scale, does not mean that it isn't simply happening according to the laws we impose, in the same way that us feeling consciousness does not mean we are somehow disobeying the law of physics.

And then there's the whole quantum indeterminacy thing. I can't say anything about this, but neither, it seems to me, does Dennett. Dennett doesn't ally with the libertarians who just use this as a way to say "see we're totally free because scientists can't pinpoint electrons" but it still hangs there as his only possible exception to physical laws governing the universe.

I guess I could go on, but it'd just be a random jumble of thoughts on the various claims he makes throughout the book. Perhaps you can claim that my random jumble shows I didn't understand the book, but I'd say my thoughts are like that because the book's in such disarray.

Seriously, if anyone out there really liked this book or wishes to tell me how I'm wrong, I'd be eager to hear from you.

(I gave the book two stars because Dennett is obviously deeply intelligent and widely-read and thoughtful and it's not a useless read like an awful novel; though I disliked like the book itself, I don't think it was a complete waste of time, per se.)

To be honest I was expecting more than I got here,from a renowned author.Most of the book concerns theories,thought experiments and suppositions that should be familiar to most people with an interest in popular science and a beginners book in philosophy.He borrows heavily from Richard Dawkins/Matt Ridley and espouses Darwinian methods, by which conscious freedom evolves from the preconscious "situation action machines" that comprise more lowly creatures.
Most of the book seemed like an extended review of other books, but of particularly note was the hatchet job he does on Libet's famous experiment and the criticism of Daniel Wegner's' "The illusion of conscious will" in which he manages to both criticise and promote the authors work at the same time.In fact, he does a lot of direct quoting and never misses an opportunity to plug his own back catalogue as well.I started to get the impression that the whole project was cooked up at the annual faculty bun fight.
I found his writing style tiring at times,with sentences that where overly long and wandered off in other directions finally rejoining the initial starting point just as your attention had been subverted,requiring a reverse back to the start,to contextualise the middle.Too many of these occurrences tend to exhaust the concentration and I was beginning to begrudge spending the time and effort it took to read as I was page counting well before the mid-point.

You don't come across such a book often. For me it's the first book that I have given up (stopped with just 40 pages left). Not that it's boring or talks gibberish, NO...it's just that it is "overworded". The author could've executed it better by keeping it short and not giving five elaborate examples for each point he makes! None of the dots connect well enough to form a coherent narrative and often I was left confused by the end of a chapter; like, "what is the main point you are trying to make here?" Even the summary he provides at the end of every chapter beats around the bush. Philosophers...

We live in a deterministic universe.

Drop an apple and it will reliably fall to the ground, knock a snooker ball (or an atom) into another one at a particular speed and angle and you can predict the paths of both of them. Even the strange sub-atomic quantum realm operates within areas of probability that average out to give us the predictable effects that we can measure on larger scales.

As Douglas Hofstadter argues in 'Godel, Escher, Bach' our brains are composed of neurons with the simple function of switching off and on in response to the inputs from their neighbours and thus can be considered as formal systems acting in a deterministic fashion. Determinism implies that given a particular configuration of particles in the universe (including the states of the neurons in our brains) there is only one possible state that the system can advance at the next tick of the cosmic clock. How can the absolute inevitability of all things be reconciled with the sense of free will that we all experience?

It's a tricky question, and one that Dennett does not shy away from confronting in this book. It's a question that makes some people very nervous - if we don't have free will then what is the point of anything? Dennett likens this to Dumbo the elephant who believes that he can only fly when holding his magic feather until a pesky crow points out that the feather is not needed - stop that crow! Needless to say, Dennett sees himself in the role of the crow questioning the magic feathers that we insist on clinging onto.

He squares the circle by first explaining exactly what determinism is and what it implies, beginning with simple mathematical models such as Conway's Life game and chess playing computers, and then shown how rational agents can develop 'evitability' within such systems. He then argues that natural selection of both our brains and the cultural memes that govern our lives have given rise to consciousness and free will, as well as concepts such as morality and altruism that initially seem at odds with 'red in tooth and claw' style Darwinism.

If the book has any faults, it is that Dennett spends quite a lot of the time trying to anticipate the arguments that will be raised in objection to his thesis, thus making some of the early chapters somewhat convoluted in their presentation as he defines what determinism and free will are not before moving on to give his own ideas.

Absolutely fascinating, and full of optimism for our ability to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps of our own consciousness.

I learned that I want to be a philosopher when I grow up! Again (not a first-time dream). I love Daniel Dennett! If I could force everyone to read one book, this would be it. He's so lively and engaging that I'm tempted to simply rave about his writing and thinking persona. I shall update this again when the book is finished, but until then, be satisfied to know that this book is an unexpected oasis for the philosophically inclined who are unable to indulge on a day-to-day basis (not to point fingers).