The Evolution of "Why" as the Key to Free Will - Daniel Dennett (2009)

here okay let's start with some Dilbert so here's Dilbert thank goodness do you think the chemistry of the brain controls what people do of course then how can we blame people for their actions because people have free will to do as they choose are you saying that Free Will is not part of the brain of course it is but it's the part of the brain that's out there just being kind of free I love the hand waving so you're saying the Free Will part of the brain is exempt from the law natural laws of physics

obviously otherwise we couldn't blame people for anything they do you think the Free Will part of the brain is attached or does it just float nearby shut up now that is the Free Will problem and it is also the problem the problem with the problem which is to think that physics has anything to do with this and I want to argue it doesn't have anything to do with Free Will and that the key to Free Will is not physics it's evolutionary biology I'm going to try to explain that so evolutionary theory not physics is the

key to understanding the phenomenon of Freedom it explains how we can be free when our parts aren't free and if that first strikes you as well that's impossible just stop and think for a moment we can explain why things are red even though their smallest Parts aren't red we can explain why things are alive even though their smallest Parts aren't alive so why couldn't we explain how things are free and in an important sense even though their parts aren't free now I'm going to use Darwin's great idea and I want to say why it was

so great especially in this year 2009 the Darwin Year all around the globe what's great about it is that it unites the world world of purposeless causation the world of physics with a world of meaning from physics to to ethics and to poetry and even to free will this is the theory that unifies all of these under a single perspective well why is Darwin's idea dangerous people used to ask me this years ago when I wrote the book called Darwin's dangerous idea they don't ask me that so much anymore I think events have have sort

of overtaken people read realize why this is a dangerous idea but my my favorite answer to this is well suppose tomorrow they decided to drive on the right in the UK would that be dangerous oh yes oh yes that would be dangerous but stop and reflect uh in Sweden not so long ago in fact on Sunday September 3rd 1967 they switched from driving on the left to driving on the right we're almost no accidents I don't know if there were any fatalities just a few accidents that's because the Swedish Civil Service had worked for years

preparing for this day and everybody did it in unison all at once smooth now if the Swedish Civil Service could have arranged for the reception of Darwin's Origin of Species prepared the way then maybe we wouldn't have the Collision zones that we have but we have tremendous Collision zones because Darwin's theory really is revolutionary in a way that is I think still insufficiently recognized and that's part of what I'm going to be talking about and here is the key to what was so strangely revolutionary you'll recognize this as a part of the cine Chapel ceiling

and in the central panel we see one of the most famous uh visual representations of what I call the trickle down theory of intelligent creation uh it takes a big fancy smart thing to create still pretty darn smart thing but nothing as smart as the one that made it and this is an idea that is tremendously intuitive and this is what Darwin overturned and one of his earliest critics a man known for nothing else than this high dudgeon criticism summed it up in one of my favorite passages this is from the Atheneum which was sort

of the New York Review of Books of its today published in London shortly after the Origin of Species was published in the theory with which we have to deal absolute ignorance is the artificer so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system that in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine it's not requisite to know how to make it the capital letters are in the original this man was in was was outraged this proposition will be found on careful examination to express in condensed form the essential purport of the theory

and to express in a few words all Mr Darwin's meaning who by a strange inversion of reasoning seems to think absolute ignorance fully qualified to take the place of absolute wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill a strange inversion of reasoning yes exactly right and it's this strange inversion of reasoning which some people never get their heads around and don't accept and that's what causes all the problems years ago a student gave me this uh a little creationist pamphlet and it had this wonderful page in it which I love to show people test two

do you know of any building that didn't have a builder yes no do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter yes no do you know of any car that didn't have a maker yes no if you answered yes for any of the above give details take that you evolutionists but but in fact this the idea that this this propaganda exploits is precisely the idea that Darwin did overthrow and I want to align it with another idea another strange Inversion from another Great British thinker Alan touring who is Clos as anybody deserves the

title of inventor of the computer let's put them together remember before touring this is what computers looked like these these are pre- touring computers most of them most of them were women in the old days computers had to understand arithmetic they had to appreciate the reasons touring recognized that this was not necessary so here's Darwin still in caps in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine that's not requisite to know how to make it here's touring in order to be a perfect and beautiful Computing machine it's not requisite to know what arithmetic is you

put the two together and they really are closely related ideas and both of them cause conniptions in some people they have been sources of tremendous anxiety and I'm going to address them both tonight in very brief Compass many people just can't abide Darwin's strange inversion and we call those people of course creationists or intelligent design people but there are people that can't abide touring strange inversion too and I've got a new name for them I call them mind creationists and mind creationist include some very eminent thinkers here are three well-known mind creationist from my discipline

Jerry foder uh read his London Review of Books 2007 piece Tom Nagel read his latest philosophy of public affairs piece and John surl uh this is the idea of original intentionality which he's been pushing for 30 years roughly speaking all of them have a real problem with touring's strange inversion you might say that they think of the Mind as a Skyhook as a near miraculous device that is a an original F of intelligence and creativity not the product of a of a process which fundamentally consists of a bunch of biologically engineered gadgets now here's here's

a Skyhook this wonderful this wonderful drawing appeared in the Atlantic Monthly shortly after dar's dangerous idea came up and uh uh it was called deos exmachina and this of course is Bruno's Dome and what's particularly I I tried to find the artist and talk with him and I've never been able to get in touch with him because I wondered if he uh If he if he knew how AP this was cuz Bruno leki who built the Great dome in Florence um putting that so-called lantern that top piece on there was one of the great engineering

triumphs of of the day and in order to do it brunoski didn't use skyhooks of course like this but he did invent a series of unique novel cranes which did the picture now these in Dar D I did talk about Sky Hooks and cranes and I said sky hooks are Miracles they're impossible there are no such things but of course I didn't have this in mind somebody just sent me this picture a few weeks ago there a there's a blimp company that that they call their blimp Sky Hooks and so uh I do acknowledge I

think when dar's name just idea when I first used the term Skyhook I said you know I'm not talking about helicopters I'm not talking about blimps um uh well here are here are some of these uh Renaissance cranes that without which you could not have made uh the dumb it would have looked like a miracle if you didn't have these these ways these non-miraculous ingeniously designed ways of of of of lifting things so as long as you see the Mind as a Skyhook as a sort of device that just hangs there miraculously in the air

then you're going to find free will baffling as a sort of miracle and indeed some philosophers have said as much the people who are fans of the strange Doctrine called Agent causation have often said or quote Rod Chism as saying that on this view of free will uh a human Agent H has a power that normally is only granted to God being an unmoved mover uh so so some people they want the mind to be a Skyhook here's the question is mind and free will derivable from Mere living tissue by evolutionary processes can we get

here that is my Consciousness my ego My Free Will from there and if you think the answer is no then you're a mind creationist so let's just review how how that how that Journey from there to here might run and we're really really want to go back quite quite ways uh and see I know my answer is that yes and the only way it's the only way to make scientific sense of free will we're going to go right back to the basement and look at the simplest first step and that's what this is is a

motor protein it's not alive it's just a protein and it's marching along it carries things around inside cells you've got trillions and trillions of these in your body right now motor proteins they're little robots little nanor robots we're made in fact of trillions of mindless little robots and they don't have free will not one of them knows who we are or cares but we know and we care and the question is how come how can that happen that's the task of explaining How Free Will is possible next step I want to talk about very briefly

is one of the great transitional moments in evolutionary history of the eukariotic Revolution and it happened two roughly 2 and a half billion years ago when all there was on the planet were these simple cells are like bacteria called Pro carots and one day one pro carot was invaded by another a b now the question was was B eating a or was a invading B when you're a procaryotes is little hard to figure out basically if a takes B apart then a was eating B if B takes a apart then then then B isort of

eating from within and is is the Predator but what happened on this one occasion it may have only happened once was that b didn't take a a heart and they joined forces and they became AB a more potent and fitter combo than either A or B by themselves the result was a more complicated cell that was fitter not we call those UK carots U of course the the Greek for for good as in euphemism and so forth so this was or euphonious the eukaryotic was a better cell just more competent so here we see on

the left a simple Pro carot on the right we see a a eukariotic cell and and these here the mitochondria those those were some of those original Invaders and every cell every human cell in your body has mitochondria in it which are the direct descendants of of of this original Invader and uh they it has its own own DNA that's what that's mitochondrial DNA it has its own genome now why do I go on about this after this is Humanity Center this is here I am spending all this time sort of basic science because I

think this eukaryotic Revolution which was one of the great transitional moments in in the history of evolution on the planet is a nice model for what happened much more recently I'm going to get to that so as I say UK carots are more talented more versatile here it gives you an example I love this picture what is this sort of amazing San object it's in fact the house B made by an amoeba by difflugia Coronada which is a eukaryotic cell a single eukaryotic cell it has no nervous system but it can make one of those

no bacterium could make something like that so we have two different kinds of sand castles on the left and the right and the thing is to say how how can we make the transition from one kind of sand castle maker to another uh it's quite it's quite a journey so again UK carots this versatility permitted a division of labor and that was the necessary step for multicellular life every living thing that's big enough to see with a naked eye is a multicellular organism It's a UK carot it's made of eukariotic cells only made possible because

of the division labors you could have bone cells muscle cells uh blood cells brain cells you could have all these different kinds of cells because more moving Parts more complications uh uh in in more versatility in the individual cells here for instance is a fairly simple UK carot this is a catus fly obviously multicellular and it makes this amazing food SI if you study this you see this is very clever the the water comes in at the top and it's uh this is an in a moving stream and it goes down through this Civ where

the where the food sticks to the siiv and The catus larva can then just you know feed off the food uh it's in a very ingenious bit of engineering it Bears a certain interesting resemblance to another bit of engineering and that's a lobster trap well what's the big difference between these two ways of gathering food from water well in both cases there are reasons there are reasons for the arrangement of all the parts in the ctis larva's food s there are reasons why it's this way not that way but they're not represented anywhere they're not

represented in the ctis fly larvae and they're not represented in evolution itself but evolution has honored those reasons in coming up with that design I call these reasons the free floating rationals of evolution there's reasons why wings are the shape they are aerodynamic reasons there's reasons why eyes are the shape they are reasons of Optics and others these reasons are not represented by Evolution but are tracked by Evolution let's look at a few examples I want to look at a at a cuckoo chick um as you know cucko are uh brewed parasites cucko do not

lay their own eggs I mean they lay them that they don't they don't incubate them they they parasitize the nest of another species they wait the mother uh cuckoo Waits until the the parents the the the witless unwitting foster parents have flown away after they've laid their own eggs she swoops down lays her egg in the nest then often not always pushes one of the host eggs out this is in case the hosts can count and flies away never to return the host raises the incubates the eggs the the another clever reason the the cuckoo

eggs tend to hatch first there's a reason for that and the first thing that the little fledgling cuckoo does is it pushes and pushes and pushes to push the other eggs out of the nest oo so everybody I think everybody can see the reasons here and I but but just in case you might like to see I found this lovely bit of of video The Cuckoo's egg looks like the Warblers and the number of eggs hasn't changed everything appears normal but appearan is can be deceiving something is not quite [Music] right one chick has haded

way before the others and is ejecting the remaining eggs now I think you probably share my sense it's nice that the little cach chick doesn't know what it's doing it knows not what it does so natural selection tracks reasons creating things that have purposes but that don't need to know them the infamous need to know principle of the CIA also Reigns in the biosphere but for different reasons in the biosphere it's just a matter of economy if you don't need to know you can be the beneficiary without understanding there are reasons but you don't need

to know them now Birds baby cucko I'm quite sure have no clue why they're doing what they're doing they're just doing it because that's what they're wired up to do but that doesn't mean that birds are just completely idiotic and now I want to show you as a contrast another bird this is a new Cal ionian Crow there's no sound with this so it's trying to reach the food in the bottom of this Beaker and it's got a piece of wire in its beak it's not working can't get it persistent now look what it does

it gets the edge of the wire sticks it in someplace and bends it and makes a [Music] hook now well we have here Ruth milikin one of my favorite philosophers has a nice passage where she describes not this case but similar case where she talks about animals that represent their goals in the same representational system in which they represent their facts this is a big step forward this is an evolutionary innovation of considerable importance so we're not the only ones that have it but we have it uh in in Spades I want to move on

now so as I say it's a long way from from uh the amoeba to the kids in their sand castles and let's look briefly at the tree of life this is uh may not look like a tree to you until you realize this is a bird's eye view of a tree you're looking down from on top uh the root at the center is is uh where uh that that uh sort of why there is uh the last common ancestor Luca the last common ancestor of all the living things on the planet today and we have

the bacteria the archa and down at the bottom here we have the we have the ukaria the ukar Nots us and you'll see that the scientists who did this is already a little bit out of date the some the lines have been a bit redrawn since this was done about 10 years ago um has put has put three species I'll come back to that in a minute um uh first let me a little digression here's David Brooks writing in New York Times not so long ago according to this view human beings presumably the sort of

view that I'm you know promoting tonight uh according to this view human beings like all other creatures are machines for passing on their genetic code we are driven primarily by a desire to perpetuate ourselves and our species we are driven primarily by a desire to perpetuate ourselves as spe species that sentence I call the standard mistake it is not true and if you think it is you're simply being taken in by a very common caricature uh uh a a feeble caricature of what the evolutionary perspective actually is so let's go back to our tree of

life so all of these are genetically related of course and we see on the ukaria if we close up on close up on we see the last three branches we see three closely related Gena coprinus homo and Za that's mushrooms corn and us our close cousins the mushrooms and the corn and we are closer genetically to mus to mushrooms and corn than we are to all the other things on the Tree of Life Of course that was only a partial drawing of the tree of life so it probably isn't all about genes so the whole

tree of life has been growing for about three and a half billion years so for the first billion years they were just procariotas and you there were no UK UK carots but it's only six million years since we have evolved away from our common ancestor with the bonobos and the chimpanzees and all the differences between us and the bonobos and the chimpanzees are due that are due to R&D that has occurred in the last six million years only now I want to move much more recent in time just 10,000 years ago this is about the

time of the dawn of Agriculture and Paul mccre makes a calculation that I just love to point out to people so 10,000 years ago the human population was pretty small but it had started it was starting it had livestocks and they had pets they had domesticated some animals and he calculates that at that point human beings plus their livestocks and pets amounted to about a tenth of a percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass now that doesn't include the insects or the worms it doesn't include the fish we're talking about vertebrates animals really in the everyday

sense of the word tenth of 1% this was only 10,000 years ago and what do you suppose the percentage is today 50 40 98 we have simply swamped the planet now most of that's cattle but that in 10,000 years that is a stupendous biological change to the planet due to one species us Paul mccre late Paul mccre uh wonderful Visionary uh engineer he's the man who built the gossamer Albatross the human pedal uh bicycle driven uh plane that crossed the English Channel uh the the the first great green engineer over billions of years on a

unique sphere chance has painted a thin covering of life I love that image chance has painted a thin covering of Life complex improbable wonderful and fragile suddenly we humans a recently arrived species no longer subject to the checks and balance is inherent in nature have grown in population technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power we now wield the paintbrush all that in just 10,000 years I want to compare it with the famous Cambrian explosion that Steve Gould made so so well known which occurred over millions of years about 530 million years ago that's

when all those strange and wonderful body plans emerged that was a truly momentous period of R&D for evolution but the mccre explosion if we may call it that has occurred over just 10,000 years only 500 Generations it's can't be about genes it's got to be about technology and culture and language carried by a second information highway from parents to offspring and here's where I bring in Richard Dawkins famous or notorious idea of memes as cultural replicators memes are analogous to genes he says or he says they're analogous to viruses which are sort of naked genes

fact I like to say that what's a virus it's not alive it's it's just a big Macro Molecule what it is is it's a string of nucleic acid with Attitude what means that it means it has simply because of its shape in the end it has the power to provoke its own replication when it when it gets in another cell it commanders the the the reproduction Machinery of a cell and gets the cell's reproductive Machinery to make copies of it rather than copies of its own genome that's what a virus is a meme is a

similar sort of thing it's a data structure it's made of Information With Attitude it provokes its own copying in a certain sort of copy machine called a brain and every time a meme gets reproduced in your head every time you rehearse it or say it to yourself you make another copy say it to me every time you rehearse it you make another copy every time you rehearse it you make another copy those are Generations they're copies of the one that went just before and there's a competition among these items for what just to replicate and

that process has fueled driven another evolutionary process a darwinian process cultural Evolution and without that we wouldn't have the mccre of the Revolution at all so what I'm saying is that we're Apes with infected brains and that what they're infected with what well with virtual machines designed by natural selection and these virtual machines give us Powers which give us the versatility to take organization up a level remember the ukar outs they they got invaded and that gave them great versatility pause for a moment and think about this when when the the ancestors of mitochondria entered

that other proar that there was a billion years of R&D already invested in that before it ever came in it was it was a well-designed thing before it ever joined forces and some of our ideas some of the things that we transmit culturally are also well-designed none of us had to design long division or or the wheel or writing we were simply given these wonderful Technologies whole and allowed to then build on them our power depends on the culture that permits us to divide labor and share expertise in a way that nothing else has ever

been able to do uh friend former student of mine B album famously said you can't do much carpentry with your bare hands you can't do much thinking with your bare brain I think that's exactly right you need Thinking Tools the chief variety of them are words Unfortunately they lot of them lying around so if we think of words as tools and we think of the diversity of words where do they all come from very few words are coined not probably not one in in 10,000 is coined one that is of course is meme Dawkins coined

that word but I don't think I any other word that I will have used tonight will have been coined by an individual they all have uh uh ancestries going way back uh into earlier life languages and so forth there have been thousands of languages did they have a common ancestor that's a question for another day since words travel between languages a biologist would call that anastomosis Branch joining horizontal transmission since this is right in language it's much easier to track words than to track languages to see that a word will move from Latin to French

to English and so forth and so it's useful to think of the word itself as the unit that is up for replicative Challenge and is up to out replicate the competition since Chomsky we've been used to the fact that words are parts of grammars and the gr parts of languages that have grammars but I just want to draw your attention to the fact that that words are not always elements of grammatical constructions they can be remarkably uh free of of particular grammatical uh limitations they can even change from nouns to verbs and so forth as

they move from language to language passwords labels imprecations or examples of Words which have uses as tools quite independently of any grammar at all what are they made of well there isn't a good word for this technique they're they're sort of recipes for Action yeah after all what's long division made of wonderful tool it's it's a sort of algorithm it is an algorithm it's sort of like a Java applet what's cost benefit analysis made of we have lots of these Thinking Tools that are made out of information they are virtual machines made of information and

it is this technology that's remade the brain and that makes our minds Doug Hof I'm so pleased to see that he was one of my predecessors a few years ago giving a presidential lecture uh uh also of course Stanford uh graduate and in one of his books he has a toolkit just a short list these are terms in Doug's toolkit and it's a nice list Wild Goose chases tackiness stdy tricks sour grapes elbow grease feet of clay loose cannons crackpots lip service one of my favorites slam dunks if you have these tools you can do

things you can't do without them of course as the old saw has it when the only tool you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail and so when you get a new one of these tools you tend to overuse it for a while right but they are tools and he didn't invent a one of them so now we have to confront this delicate transition from bottom up darwinian R&D to top down creative genius type R&D intelligent design because certainly today we are capable of Designing things with foresight with intention we've crossed some kind

of important divide well let's stop just take stock a little bit who designed the treasures that we share well in some cases we can name particular great Heroes of of of intellectual design Pythagoras and Plato and decart and Newton Shakespeare and Austin and Madame curee and the rest but nobody designed language but it's beautifully designed nobody designed tonal mic music but it's elegantly designed did anybody invent the decimal number system not really did anybody invent the map not really did anybody invent money it's an interesting question economic historians argue about it I think we should

understand this process with the background of what I call Darwin's Trio this is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species and if you haven't read it you should it is a great book it is it's a great read it's just wonderfully written and pedagogically it's brilliant too he begins the book by talking about what he calls methodical selection animal breeding plant plant breeding pigeon fanciers cattle breeders where they have intention they're setting out to improve the breed then he Segways into what he wonderfully calls unconscious selection this is where human beings without

realizing it without trying to do it they're changing their domesticated animals unconsciously by simply favoring some over others they're not trying to improve the breed there's no intent but never L it's changing and then he Segways from this then into natural selection which where you eliminate the middleman all together there's no intelligence at all it's just the vicissitudes of nature that are doing this selection now it's important to remember actually all three are varieties of natural selection methodical selection is simply natural selection where one species like a cow is being subjected to very severe col

some pressures by another species Homo sapiens today we can add a fourth genetic engineering where we actually we don't wait for the right genomes to be created by methodical selection we we tweak it together in advance now I want to say the same the same Trio in fact the same quartet can be found in the land of culture first of all of memes we have natural selection I'm going to do it in sort of historical order of what I call synanthropic Memes these are the memes that are like squirrels and rats and pigeons they're not

domesticated but they are welld designed to thrive in human company welld designed by natural selection and only by natural selection Not By Any Human tinkering nobody owns those animals and nobody is favoring them and nobody owns a lot of the memes either and nobody favored them they they're like habits some of them good some of them bad then we have unconscious selection differential replication of tunes what the Germans love to call earworms you know that tune that you can't get out of your head and it copies itself and it copies itself and you're not trying

to copy it you're not memorizing it but you can't help it it's just in there and then there's methodical selection of domesticated memes I'll give you a good example calculus calculus is like a laying hen how is calculus like a laying hen many species of laying hen would go extinct if it weren't for the laborious intervention of their domesticators because the broodiness is all bred out of them they would they don't know enough to sit on their own eggs so it takes a lot of careful attention similarly with Calculus you have to read rehearse and

rehearse and rehearse or am I wrong maybe it's Stanford people just can't get that calculus out of their head it's just you know it's just so catchy I doubt it I doubt it maybe for a few people and of course we have mimetic engineering too advertising Spin Doctors people trying very hard to engineer memes that that will fly that will really spread sometimes they succeed usually they don't bootstrapping I'm say a little word about bootstrapping it's worked in the past and it can work again okay here's a simple example how do you draw a straight

line well simple get a piece of paper a pencil and a straight edge and you draw the line oh where'd you get the straight edge how do you make a straight edge well you go to a straight edge manufacturer who's got this real really good tool which is they got a really straight edge where do you get that the history of straight edges turns out to be pretty interesting I went and researched it a few years ago and and and tremendous progress was made over the years and you you got to start somewhere and you

know pulling a a wire tight is a good start but it's not good enough here's here's I got this from a book about about straight edges actually this is a box type straight edge this is in the 50s and that was a pretty dar darn good straight edge it was it it it it was had good properties didn't it didn't Flex too much and it didn't expand too much and sort of self-proving in various ways so that's that's about as good a straight edge as you can make back in there in the 50s but here

is a graph showing the imperfections in that straight edge doesn't look very straight does it that line that's that's the surface of that straight edge magnified uh uh a million s why I think this is important to look at is what can think of what this is by representing the task of making a straight edge and representing the error we can Define and refine the very ideal of a perfectly straight edge the form of the straight As Plato would say was arrived at by a series of approximations both the artifacts and of the idea itself

and in particular representations of the ideal serve to guide the Improvement of that ideal making ever better and better straight edges I think the form of the good again to speak with Plato had a similar history what makes us human is our brain children not our biological children by the way I really dislike this use of the word biological to mean genetic there is so much more to biology than genes when somebody says well the biological parents or are you adoptive parents they're both biological you're not the genetic parents but you are the biological parents

anyway we alone we represent our reasons we're the only species on the planet that does that finally you understand my title we say things every child says why did you do that or he gets asked why did you do that this word why introduces a very important practice the practice of sharing reasons comparing reasons criticizing reasons rebutting reasons give and take of reasoning together this is what enables us to devise moralities to compare them to persuade each other in other words I'm suggesting that the word responsibility wears its meaning on its sleeve it's because we

can respond to this question that's what gives us the freedom that matters we say free is a bird but seagulls aren't as free as we are for a very simple reason they can't represent their reasons and so they can't have very fancy reasons we can be moved by reasons that we represent including reasons about things that might happen hundreds of years from now and this is unlike The evolutionary process itself remember which does not represent its reasons unlike Evolution itself and all of its other creatures we can see Across The Valleys of the fitness Landscapes

Fitness Landscapes are an interesting somewhat controversial uh uh meme uh in evolutionary theory where we use them to understand that that Evolution can only hill climb it can't get from one Peak to a neighboring Peak unless it can somehow get down in the valley and up and in general it can't Hill Climb evolutionary processes with no foresight can't get across those gaps but we can because we can represent the Hills and Valleys and then we can see the goals that would otherwise be invisible we the reason representers can now look back today and we can

discover the reasons everywhere in the tree of life it took Darwin to discover that a Mindless process created all those reasons we intelligent designers are among the very recent effects not the cause of all those purposes thank you for your attention I think philosophy is what anybody's doing when they haven't yet figured out what the right question to ask is uh once you figure out what the right question is then you go and use whatever tools are right and that's physics or history or whatever to answer the question but when you're in that initial stage

where everybody's sort of scratching their head and they're they can't even agree on what the right question is that's philosophy and and the purpose of philosophy is to turn that quandry into answerable questions yes Dr is it uh saying that only humans can represent their reasons kind of like defining a straight line I mean if we look closely enough wouldn't we find representation to a degree in other species good question and and I think I maybe slightly overstated the case I I have been working and talking with uh cognitive ethologists and animal psychologist for some

time trying to explore the various ways of getting at that question and but to a first approximation I think all of the attempts to show that that animals really do represent their reasons uh are fairly underwhelming um I showed you what is as as good a case as I know that that new Caledonian Crow uh uh making the hook um there are other striking cases but it's very good to remember how however smart your doggy is when he when his leash gets wrapped around the tree can he undo it probably not now that is not

rocket science but it does seem to escape even the smartest of doggies interestingly a lot of the most impressive behavior that we see in other species has a very strong genetic component like like um Border Collies uh very interesting case because Border Collies have this incredible talent for herting sheep which is partly genetic it really is um uh they will they will when they sort of reach puppy maturity they'll just start hurting sheep without any training at all and that's interesting because this is a case where cultural Evolution raising sheep has interacted with genetic evolution

in in a in a in another species so this is an interaction between cultural Evolution and genetic Evolution interestingly I'm pretty sure that the children of Basque shepherds are no better at hurting sheep than anybody else on the face of the globe but the children of their dogs are I think I see where this is headed but yeah I thought I got there I know unless freedom is just defined as acting on reasons that are represented I don't see how we've gotten the freedom yet and it seems to me there need to be some argument

that freedom is just acting unrepresented represented but I didn't see that arum well I only had a little time and you're right of course uh now uh uh there are two whole books Elbow Room and freedom evolves where I attempt to provide precisely those those arguments and that's that's where it goes from here but the main point that I wanted to stress is that uh bird freedom is maybe wonderful but it isn't the kind of Freedom that matters to us if what matters to us is moral responsibility and and in the end I think that

the hidden agenda not so hidden sometimes that drives most of the anxiety about both touring and Darwin and about materialism in general is that people want to be held responsible they want to think of themselves as having Free Will and they have it in their head that this is impossible unless um as I've said at one point it's sort of like moral levitation you know it's only if they can make their choices from some elevated spot which is not part of the causal fabric of the rest of the universe uh they think that that's a

requirement for having the kind of free will they want I think that's a deep mistake but it takes a while to argue for it you're right that will be it thank you thank you very much thank you very much