Brain Yoga

Keeping up with Daniel Dennett's train of thought is a bit like herding cats. Just when you think you've got a handle on one postulate he launches another, often in a totally opposite direction. Even with his weirdly exquisite analogies (e.g. frog in a beer mug) I couldn't always wrap my brain around his concepts on the first pass. There were many paragraphs, and at least one entire chapter, that I had to read twice.

That's not to say this book isn't fantastic—it is!. Dennett tackles the question of free will with surgical precision. He examines arguments, both pro and con, with such absence of malice that I really wasn't sure until the last few pages exactly what side of the debate he was on.

Not to be overtly deterministic, but I knew I was going to enjoy this book before I read it. After all, it's Daniel f-ing Dennett! My only criticism, and it's a small one, is the title. 'Elbow Room' doesn't exactly jump out at you and scream "buy me!" or "read me!" ...and yet I did and I did.

In "Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting", philosopher Daniel Dennett delves into an intricate exploration of the concept of free will. The book dissects a multitude of interconnected notions, including freedom, determinism, agency, consciousness, and more, providing a dialectic discourse that stimulates the mind.

Dennett's central thesis proposes that free will is a subjective entity. Regardless of whether human thoughts are deterministic or fueled by random processes, the belief in free will is pivotal in maintaining our happiness, personal accountability, and societal harmony.

To substantiate his viewpoint, Dennett presents a series of nuanced thought experiments illustrating how perceptions can drastically vary even when the underlying reality remains unchanged.

Consider the concept of agent control. We acknowledge that an airplane is controlled by a pilot using levers and pedals. Yet, the sense of control is reduced with remote-controlled airplanes. What happens when another agent intercepts and mimics our airplane control? Or, if someone else is controlling the plane while we pretend to, based on our perfect prediction of their actions? Despite these scenarios being indistinguishable to an observer tracking our thoughts, actions, and the airplane's response, our perceived agency varies dramatically depending on the perceived directness of control.

Another contemplative scenario delves into the complexities of freedom. Confinement in a jail cell limits our freedom. However, would this feeling persist if the cell were so vast that we would never venture beyond its limits, or if we were unaware of the cell walls due to our limited exploration? The revelation of this unknown confinement doesn't objectively influence our behavior or circumstances, but does it alter our perception of freedom?

A third scenario ponders over randomness. In a lottery, the winning numbers are presumed to be randomly drawn. But what if the outcome is determined by a pseudo-random sequence or if the winning numbers have been pre-drawn and kept secret? Despite our winning chances remaining identical, our perception of randomness could significantly differ in each case.

Through these thought experiments and more, Dennett contends that free will, while subjective, should not be dismissed as an illusion. Because it's subjective, it coexists with deterministic biological and neurological processes suggested by science, quantum uncertainty or not. Dennett argues that if the notion of free will serves individual and societal interests, it should be upheld, regardless of scientific evidence.

Dennett also probes into the multifaceted meanings and implications of free will, viewing it as a gradated concept. We may feel the liberty to consciously make decisions and choices, yet we're unconsciously confined by our predispositions and biases. These constraints, shaped by our biological traits, upbringing, and life experiences, limit our freedom to what Dennett refers to as "elbow room." As such, clarifying the meaning of free will becomes essential in any discussion about it.

"Elbow Room" is a noteworthy contribution to the enduring debate on free will. However, its writing style could have been more reader-friendly. The lack of introductions and conclusions in each chapter leaves readers in ambiguity regarding the direction of the discussion. Despite the author's attempts to provide occasional "where are we" metadiscourses to summarize and direct the conversation, subsequent discussions continue in a similarly unclear arc. References to other thinkers appear excessively and disjointedly. It is unclear to a reader what are the cited people, why they are brought into the conversation, and whether the author agrees with them. Furthermore, the audiobook's citation readings, including author names, publication years, and sometimes page numbers, prove distracting without immediate access to a bibliography. These factors hinder the overall reading experience.

Despite its limitations, "Elbow Room" presents an enticing philosophical exploration of free will and consciousness within the framework of subjective reflections. The scope of the book is limited. It does not discuss the logic behind these discussions (can we think about free will, or anything, if there is no free will?), the objective experiences (if the assumption of free will works well in society organization, should we continue to believe in free will?), and scientific methodology (is there an experiment that can determine the existence of free will? Or is such an experiment impossible in principle?). Nonetheless, I recommend that readers start with the final two chapters to grasp Dennett's fundamental stance before delving into the preceding chapters' arguments.

"The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is nothing to write home about either." pg. 87

It was really hard to rate this book. I have no use for most philosophy. I appreciate the premise but cannot abide so many self-important godless people hypothesizing themselves into oblivion. If that isn't enough, the rest of us are invited along with them. The book is really well written (other than some incorrectly conjugated verbs, but I'll blame the editor), and it is comprehensive in that it considers - or at least mentions - opposing points of view. The arguments are very thorough, if equally useless. The really compelling part to me was the clergy experiment mentioned in the epilogue. Wow! THAT was fascinating! The group is a bunch of anonymous clergy who struggle with their conscience about the vast dichotomy between their actual beliefs and what their liturgy says. This was really gripping information (though hardly astonishing), and I took time to reflect once again on the incredible conflict of interest that exists any time someone is "paid to preach the gospel". If that is your career, then it obviously behooves you to tell people what they want to hear, lest they quit your church and take financial support elsewhere. It is really sad to me that these people are living such a self-troubling double-standard, and see no way out. They report to a body who prescribes what is to be preached, and perhaps they believe the congregations are not ready for the truth or perhaps not be so amenable to a call to repentance. The only other interesting thing to me in the book was the debate of free will - whether or not it exists. Mostly this is a book full of philosophies of men. So interesting that people make a career out of studying such mind-numbing and useless conundrums. They're useful as an intellectual exercise, but I can't imagine spending a lifetime investing in or actually subscribing to such godless drivel.

There were some really interesting bits in here but I did not end up arriving at the destination that the author tried to lead me to. It may be that I just wasn't ready to process the ideas presented or it may be that the author did not do a good job of explaining. I truly do not know. Compatibilism is appealing but not convincing to me.

An interesting and thought-provoking look into the question of free will and its associated philosophical concepts of consciousness, luck, responsibility, control, fairness, and morality. Dennett walks a tightrope of considerations with a good mix of explanations, sarcasm, and nuance, starting chapters with outlandish scenarios that most readers can see the truth/falsity in and whittling them down to hypothetical scenarios that guide you into the crux of his argument is. I found sections that dealt with determinism/indeterminism vis-à-vis quantum mechanics to be weak but perhaps necessary given their philosophical popularity, while chapters that delved into the continuous spectrum of consciousness and the biological basis for self-control to be extremely convincing.

I can't help but write this review. I think the problem of free will boils down to humans are designed to interact in a social environment which is a little more than the simple neurons firing before your consciousness even knows what you are going to do. Maybe our brains are free and our minds aren't . . .

On the pitfalls of premature verdicts of stupidity in the wasp, see Dawkins 1982, pp. 48-50.

True, much of these causes occur 'inside' us--is it better to be a hand puppet than a marionette?

Note that this "can" is Austin's frog at the bottom of the beer mug.

Now it is open for some genius of pessimism to discover for us some sort of contra-Darwinian patterns of motiveless malignancy which would permit us to reconceptualize our view of nature as a sort of Manichaean struggle between Mother Nature and the Evil One, but so far as I know, no such patterns have been seriously entertained.

"Les choses sont contre nous"--that is the aphoristic heart of Resistentialism.

An act in equilibrium withstands knowledge of its own causes.

See Dawkins 1976, pp. 82-83, on the conditions under which a poker face is an evolutionarily stable strategy.

They give you an answer every time you ask, and who cares if it's "right"?

Designing a wise and workable method of ignoring things has proven to be one of the deepest and most intractable problems in Artificial Intelligence.

Nobody can do. Things only happen.

"How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?"

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is nothing to write home about either.

"After the temptation has been yielded to, the desiring 'I' will come to an end, but the conscience-stricken 'I' may endure to the end of life."

"Some souls one will never discover, unless one invents them first."

What it means to say a dog can bark is that one may not rely on its silence. These same deliberators, to whom barks are so important, may not care much just how a dog barks when it does. So such deliberators will for these purposes partition dogs as systems with a two-state degree of freedom: the barker is either ON or OFF.

Which direction gravity works in is never up to me.

Sartre sees the importance of this, and with his customary cool understatement defines a free agent as "a being who can realize a nihilating rupture with the world and with himself."

There is a difference between being optimally designed and being infallible.

I had to go and google "compatibilism" after finishing it lmao. sometimes an argument is too nuanced that you don't see the forest for the trees. It was an interesting dissection of the different false metaphors, "bug-bears", that philosophers use to make the notion of free will more scary/dramatic, but I feel like it could have had a bit more synthesis/construction rather than deconstruction. in general his view can be summarized by saying that free will is an emergent phenomenological aspect of how we experience the human condition and not an essential/structural property of our biology/metaphysics.

Excellent discussion on free will. Must ponder. Look forward to reading more of Dennett.

Dan Dennett's Elbow Room is pretty good. It's about free will, a perennial subject that's intriguing for any person who's ever stopped to wonder if the regularities of the universe mean that we're all somehow less free. It may, at first blush, seem like a fool's errand to wonder about such things, or to even get into the mindset to see what the so-called problem is. But it basically comes down to this. We live in a world where God or Nature has inscribed laws on the way the world works. This goes all the way up from the movement of the planets all the way down to how the cells in your mother's uterus divided to make you. Not only do these laws show an astonishing regularity but they're never any different. Gravity always wins and cells during the reproductive process split. So the question arises: Where do we fit into all this? How is it I have control over my body and freedom to act as I please if I'm subject to the same laws that brought the world into being?

Dennett attempts to tackle these worries about whether or not we have free will little by little, looking at a particular fear, and then showing why we can dismiss it. Probably one of the most interesting to me, and one that I buy, is the "could have done otherwise" claim. What I mean is this. There's this feeling that we have that we could have done otherwise in the exact same situation. But the fact of the matter is that if our minds were in exactly the same state as that time, and we proceeded to act in the same way, it would be impossible, in the exact same situation to act differently than we did. The way out of this kind of dilemma, though, is to realize that we really want when we say that we could have the ability to do otherwise is just to say that in a similar situation, we could have acted differently, and we don't really care that it's the same. Well, the world offers us up similar situations to act differently all the time, and sometimes we make different decisions than we did. So no harm, no foul.

Maybe general audiences would like this book, maybe not. Dennett, I think, tries to write in an open inviting style for readers of all stripes but sometimes, maybe he gets bogged down in some technicalities. You be the judge.

Dennett promotes (his) version of compatibilism.

Essentially, the kind of "free will" where we "could have done otherwise" is only of esoteric metaphysical interest. As agents in the observable universe, of course we are affected by our environments, of course our past affects every single decision we make in the present, and of course a "Laplacean demon" could theoretically "compute" every possible state of the universe. But of what use would such a theoretical possibility be?

In order for us to make "sense" of the world, to survive and reproduce in it, we must make models, approximations, and get on with heuristics. The perfectly rational being is impossible, since "theoretically" it is always optimal to deliberate upon deliberations upon deliberations...but "real" creatures have time and computational constraints. We don't have universe upon universes of neurons to compute how electrons in the nearest galaxy affects our decision whether to eat pizza today. So we make approximations of others, and of ourselves, and introduce concepts such as "reason", "self", "responsibility", "morality", "control" and "meaning" as helpful social and personal compasses. Of course those constructs, in the strictest sense, aren't "real", but who cares?

An interesting question is posed towards the end: if humans are "irrational", how can anyone dream of a "rational" creature? How will this creature have a "freer will" than us? Wouldn't it just be a more computationally complex entity? How complex does it have to be to have "done otherwise"?

I have my stance on hard determinism, but Dennett's work is still down-to-earth and very much worth the read. Again, not easy read, and some digressions in arcane philosophy that one might be tempted to skip.