I didn't really feel like it answered the complaint by incompatibilists and simply dismissed their complaints as irrelevant. This left me less invested for the rest of the book.

I am sorry to say that I was quite disappointed by this book. I did not know what to expect. However, I thought I would find a discussion of the evolution of individual’s freedom from instincts across natural evolution, or perhaps of the evolution of freedom during humankind development, or even of the evolution of the notion of freedom in human societies. I found nothing of the sort. First of all, there is nothing about evolution out of human society. Nothing about non-human primates, altruist birds, social insects (or rat-moles), non-organismal multicellular assemblies, etc. (so many interesting topics to discuss in relation with evolution of freedom). There are endless chapters of rambling on previously misrepresented ideas of the author (it is hard to find a page without a self-citation) with abundant criticisms of other authors. There are excruciating digressions about cell-automata (the “game of life”) that the author apparently discovered just before and felt compelled to show how much he learnt about. Unfortunately, he only barely brushed the subject, referring to works that were many decades old. Worse, he completely ignored the stochastic versions (a.k.a. the modern, useful, versions) in the discussion about determinism and learning. In general, the difference between determinism, indeterminism and randomness is entirely ignored; to the point where we can wonder if the author is actually aware of it. When talking about the fundamental (some would say “philosophical”) basis of free will, there is nothing about the physics concepts of block universes or the different interpretations of quantum mechanics, including the key many-worlds interpretation. The only chapters I found interesting were towards the end of the book that basically say “if you are not free but you don’t know it, just act as if”. So… nothing much to add since St Augustine and St Thomas.

Certainly brings a different perspective to the Determinism vs Free-will debate, especially for hard-determinists.

Daniel Dennett is my favorite philosopher, for many reasons. One trivial reason: he writes to communicate, not obfuscate. On second thought, that's not trivial at all. His works on paper include web links, for another, and he chooses accessible illustrations to make his points.

In the first section of Freedom Evolves, Dennett is discussing whether determinism—the idea that all outcomes/choices/decisions are set by the initial conditions, that "everything's fixed, and you can't change it," as Andrew Lloyd Webber's Judas complains to Jesus—means that no one is responsible for their choices in life.

To illustrate that whether or not you believe in it, determinism cannot affect guilt, Dennett tells the story of the French Foreign Legionnaire who is hated by all at the fort. Tom, knowing that he will be sent on patrol the next morning, poisons the water in his canteen. Dick, unaware of Tom's actions, empties the Legionnaire's canteen and fills it with dry sand. Harry, also unaware of the previous interventions, pokes a small hole in the canteen so its contents will trickle away as the hated fellow marches out in the morning. When the Legionnaire does march off into the desert with his adulterated canteen, and eventually perishes of the lack of potable water, which man is responsible for his death?

Dennett has said of Freedom Evolves, "If I accomplish one thing in this book, I want to break the bad habit of putting determinism and inevitability together. Inevitability means unavoidability, and if you think about what avoiding means, then you realize that in a deterministic world there’s lots of avoidance. The capacity to avoid has been evolving for billions of years. There are very good avoiders now. There’s no conflict between being an avoider and living in a deterministic world. There’s been a veritable explosion of evitability on this planet, and it’s all independent of determinism." [Emphasis mine, Dennet quote from a 2004 interview in ReasonOnline]

Exercise for the reader: Was the Legionnaire's death by dehydration avoidable?*

This review is a brief visit because this is not a book to be grasped in a quick scan; that's the main reason I like Dennett's work. I read several pages, then sit back, stunned by the light of reason. Aha! And I must go reread this article, or that book, or even turn back to reread a few pages in Dennett, in the light of that new understanding.

"Inevitable" is a word I'm hearing a lot these days. So is "guilt," and "blame." Dennet helps put them all into perspective for me.


Liner Notes:
My involvement with Dennett pre-dates this review by decades; n  Darwin's Dangerous Idean was the my first encounter. I enjoyed the philosophical exploration of this scientific revolution, with its the pro-and-con arguments from Darwin's time and ours so much that I went Dennett-hunting. n  Consciousness Explainedn was next. I found this the toughest to read, because I was also reading Stephen Pinker's n  How the Mind Worksn at the time, and many of Dennett's thoughts on Thought run counter to Pinker's. Then I got Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, and had to reread both of those books in the light of what I learned. All, including Freedom Evolves, are now available on Kindle.


*The Legionnaire's "inevitable" death? There was a fourth man involved with his canteen, the only one who ultimately needed to rely on its contents, whose responsibility it was to make sure the canteen was functional, and filled with clean water. A fourth man, who might, had he thought about it, suspected that the canteen might have been tampered with. So while his death in the desert was not his fault—I'm not blaming the victim—it certainly was avoidable.

Maybe there is no such thing as free will and the universe is fully determined... the point is that knowledge about the future is limited, so the only smart way to behave is to maximise your probability of surviving in a situation with limited knowledge about what will happen... this is how we evolved as a species and is the basis of our survival instinct... the smart way to behave is to assume you have free will... even if its not actually true.
PS this is not the only case where it may be smarter to believe in things which may not be true ... for example I hate anthropic arguments that say things like ... if the universe wasn't the way it is then we wouldn't be asking the question... we have to keep trying to find out why no matter what !
Dennett is a brilliant spokesman for reason and common sense, he has no axe to grind, his arguments are very well thought out and well argued. This is a brilliant thought provoking book, in my opinion his best book.

PS If the universe wasn't determined then you can forget about free will, there would be nothing you could do to influence future events in a random universe...

Hoped to get some insight on the free will vs. determinism issue, but Dennett didn't deliver. Guess I've gotten used to better writers like Dawkins and Pinker. Dennett talks all around the issue but doesn't give a hard answer. Plus he has an annoying tendency to (frequently) interject tangential comments (of very little value) into (just about) every sentence. (Stop that crow!) I can't remember the last time I read a book that I felt I got nothing out of. Definitely not recommended.

Dennett presents a splendid defense of free will in the face of materialism and Darwinism. He also puts to bed the notion that quantum mechanics could somehow "save" free will from determinism. This book is an excellent antidote to a lot of muddled thinking about free will including Blackmore's The Meme Machine.

I was interested in this book because of the hypocritical inconsistency exhibited by many secular types who, reasonably enough, deny the existence of "God" but bristle at the prospect that we all live in a completely determined universe. They (and I include myself here) reflexively feel that while science rightly treats the entirety of the natural world as subject to the same universal (deterministic) laws, they must preserve an idea of human free will as an exception to the laws of physics, in exactly the same way that theists allow for intervention by "God". As Dennett puts it, this indeterminism insists that human beings are little godlets, or miracle workers, able to defy the otherwise universal laws of physics. Dennett understands that we want to believe that we are always "able to choose otherwise" in a given situation because, if we're not, there seems to be no basis for moral responsibility: praise and blame only make sense in relation to free choices, and why care about anything if we can never deserve praise or blame for whatever good or bad we do? His thesis, in short, is that it is unnecessary to invoke miraculous powers to solve this apparent problem. Thanks to natural selection, humans have more freedom than has ever existed in the history of the universe. Although this freedom is not exempt from the physical laws governing every particle in the universe, and is hence determined, it is only determined in the same sense that a coin toss is determined. That is to say our choices are determined by so many intervening variables that no observer can possibly know their outcomes. Dennett's view is that in the important sense of everyday life, humans make free choices. The key distinction here is between the physical level, the fundamental variables that determine the outcome of the coin toss, versus the design level, what agents are actually able to observe and experience. The latter is what matters to all of us, and the observable operation and evolution of freedom on that level--in our everyday experience--gives us a sufficient (Dennett argues, more well-founded) basis for moral responsibility.

All of this makes pretty good sense to me, despite my ingrained aversion to determinism. My only problem with Dennett, and I am still mulling whether I think it taints his whole philosophical outlook, is that he is utterly uncritical of his own implicit mainstream views of technological progress (which he presumes even now to be an inevitable, unstoppable impulse of human culture) and the state (which he presumes to be the only solution to organizing human society). He reaffirms these positions in his pejorative use of the terms "anarchy" and "Luddites" and in his praise of "civilization". "Science" is his main affinity, and those very institutions are prerequisite for its existence. It should not be a surprise then that they aren't in question here. What remains to be answered for me is, what is the benefit of a scientific deterministic worldview when we have concluded that the state system and the technological progress that created it (and that it demonstrably perpetuates in return) were not, are not, and cannot be desirable? Early in the book, (with none of his characteristic well-reasoned argument) Dennett parodies postmodern critics of science who characterize it as "just another in a long line of myths". But he proves himself, disappointingly, to be an equally simple-minded partisan of "science"; he sees history and the future going in only one direction, that of more elaborate guns, memes, and steel for which our "freedom" is evolving to help us to be prepared. The book leaves me more worried about the possibilities of a future with more science than about the question of my own free will. Personally, I hope that imperialistic science eventually becomes a detour, albeit an informative one, from which a freer, wiser humanity was able to return, instead of the dead end of absolute control which is its inexorable instinct.

Only three stars because it took me so long to get through it. Some interesting ideas, but I feel a lot of the objections he spends answering (like Kane) is answered better by LessWrong.com, such as determinism and free will. If things are deterministic, it doesn't mean you don't have free will. In order for someone to determine what you would do, they would need to simulate you, and it would be "you" making the decision. You are still determining your choice. Another way of looking at it, if your actions aren't determined by the laws of physics, how could they be determined by you?

Having read a lot in the area of consciousness and free-will and being a researcher in neuroscience, I can say that Dennett has a good grasp of the most important aspects of this field. For anyone not in the field, they can get an excellent review of the many sides of the debate. In addition to reading the scientific and philosophical journals, out of professional interest, I was also reading Wegner's "The illusion of Conscious Will". I can't be completely objective, because both authors were preaching to the choir. But as far as the writers out there who are in the field and trying to simultaneously get their latest theories out there while making them somewhat accessible to anyone interested, Dennett does a good job. I liked this as much, maybe more than Breaking the Spell, his book on explaining religion and his position on atheism. All in all a highly recommended read for anyone wondering how anyone could believe we don't have free will.

Dennett is a 'naturalistic' philosopher, that is, one who believes that philosophers should take into account changes in scientific thinking. In this book he is trying to reconcile the idea that humans have free will with the scientific picture of a deterministic universe.

He starts off by suggesting that the idea of souls "immaterial and immortal clumps of Godstuff that inhabit and control our material bodies rather like spectral puppeteers" has lost its credibility thanks to science. Having used Conway's Game of Life to probe what is meant by determinism and to suggest that there are levels of ontology (the level of the individual cell in the game, that of the clusters of cells that are assembled etc), he then considers whether we can 'recapture' free will by inserting a quantum discontinuity into the otherwise deterministic decision-making process but he shows that this cannot give us the moral responsibility that proponents of 'free will' are seeking (random chance is no more within our moral control than full mechanistic determinism).

He seems to suggest that contrasting 'hard' Determinism (everything is preordained so we don't have free will) with Libertarianism (we have free will, therefore determinism is false) is a typical philosopher's trick of making you choose between two extremes; he says that philosophers should beware of hard positions: “There are no such miraculous things as levitators, but there are some pretty good near levitators. Hummingbirds, helicopters, blimps and hang gliders come to mind.” (Ch 4) Dennett suggests that the truth lies somewhere in between. After all, free will is concerned fundamentally with moral responsibility and this relies on a different sort of causality, one that involves intention as in 'the lumberjack caused the tree to fall', and determinism is most commonly involved with physical causality, as in 'the lumberjack's axe caused the tree to fall'. This is another refocusing of ontology onto a different level and I'm not sure that this isn't another typical philosopher's trick, that he isn't really saying that he can't solve the problems on the atomic level so he's going to ignore them and argue elsewhere.

It seems clear that on the systems level there is something at least approximating free will. Dennett invokes (or seems to come close to invoking) chaos theory and the idea that our consciousness is not a single Cartesian 'self' but a chaos of competing thoughts. He makes the point that most people, when deciding what they want for lunch, don't always make the same choice, showing that despite most of the inputs being the same the output can be different (presumably because one of the inputs is yesterday's output fed back into the decision-making process).

He considers society as a competition between freeloaders and cooperatives and suggests that, in the end, a social animal such as man will evolve into a stable equilibrium because cooperatives tend to develop their own, cooperating, groups which ostracise freeloaders and a society made up entirely of freeloaders will have catastrophic competition. Of the freeloaders that are left, they may be coerced into cooperating if they think they are being watched, which may explain why old societies believed in a “vigilant, omnipresent God.” (Ch 7)

His next consideration is whether we can have (moral) responsibility for a decision, given that who we are has been shaped by our genes, by our upbringing and by our circumstances. Again, I think he ducks this question. He points out, sensibly, that the criteria we use to decide whether a person has moral responsibility shifts over time. In the end he suggests that whether we should be punished depends on whether we accept that we should be punished. If we are incompetent to make that decision (like a young child or a lunatic) or if we are competent to make the decision but reject the punishment (like a psychopath) we should not be admitted to the benefits of full citizenship (eg jailed).

I'm not sure that I fully understand Dennett's arguments and I'm not sure that I full accept his conclusions but this is a fascinatingly readable book and many of the things he says are very wise.

An insightful and fascinating book. Dennett was very convincing in his arguments for moral responsibility, the evolution of morality and abilities, and critiques of metaphysical libertarianism. While I am convinced of almost all of his premises, I am unsure as to whether I believe that we really have free will, but I will need to think about it more.