The 4 biggest ideas in philosophy, with legend Daniel Dennett

If you see a magician sawing a lady in half and you want to know how it's done, then somebody

says, well, I'll tell you how it's done. They don't really saw the lady in half, they just

make it appear that they're sawing the lady in half. And you say, yeah, okay, great. How

do they do that? Oh, that's not my department. That's somebody else's job. I've already

giving 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 on the responsibility to explain what's actually

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. So I've been curious about how

philosophers arrive at the positions they arrive at, how scientists make mistakes when they frame

their own questions. I've often said that philosophy is better at questions than at answers

and that's non-trivial. They don't think it's their job to understand how things actually work

whereas I think that should be the job of philosophers. I'm Daniel Dennett. I'm the author

of more than a dozen books on the mind, on free will, on evolution, and I'm an emeritus

professor from Tufts University. Since I was a little boy, I wanted to know how things worked. I wanted to take them apart

and see what made them think, what made them work. So I was sort of an engineer at heart

And it turns out that that's not a bad attitude to have as a philosopher

Figure out what makes ideas work and why. And so I've championed the idea that if you're going to be a philosopher, learn about the world, learn about the science

I'm happy to say that now philosophers who are scientifically trained way beyond what I ever was is growing larger

And for the first time in my career, they're being taken seriously by the scientists

Because scientists are just as capable of making philosophical mistakes or getting into philosophical confusions as any lay people

But they need the help of informed philosophers if they're going to clarify those questions and ask better questions

A lot of people just dig in, double down, and refuse to abandon a point of view which

is under attack from their critics. That in itself is not a bad thing

I glad that my criticisms are resisted so resolutely and ferociously by some of those I criticize otherwise we never get at the truth I think it very important to keep in the back of your

mind, what if I'm wrong? When I was a graduate student in philosophy way back in the 60s in

Oxford. One day with a group of fellow graduate students, we got talking about what happens when

your arm goes to sleep and you can't control it. What on earth is that all about? And I got

interested and started asking questions about, well, what is it? Is it the nerves? Do they get

pinched? Is it blood flow? What is it? And they thought it was bizarre that a philosopher would

be interested in the physiological questions of what was going on. They thought I was abandoning

philosophy, I went off to the medical library and tried to get myself educated on how the nervous

system works. And that was a main turning point for me. It suddenly hit me when I learned about

neurons, the cells of the brain that do the signaling, that they could be the basis for an

evolutionary process in your brain, which was learning. That learning in the individual was

just yet another Darwinian process. I didn't know much about evolution at the time, about natural

selection. But I began to learn. And the more I learned, the more I thought, this is the key

This is the great key to how things fit together. We get rid of all the magic, and we have a

bottom-up theory of meaning and learning and truth and consciousness. And I'm to this day

amazed at how complacent so many philosophers are with their utter ignorance of evolutionary theory

They think that if we had a physiological, mechanistic, physical explanation of creativity, of genius, of understanding

that this would somehow diminish and demean these wonderful phenomena. Not at all

If we understand how amazingly intricate and wonderful and ingenious nature is in allowing us to understand things and create things

think ahead. we would dismiss the magical ideas out of hand. And I think that 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 keep hammering away trying to find the essence of this or that

when Darwin has shown us that nothing of any interest has an essence, it's gradualism all the way

this is an idea that has just not dawned on a lot of philosophers and for a very good reason They learned from Socrates from Plato that if the first thing to do is define your terms establish the essence of each thing as Aristotle would put it

And that turns out to be the great philosophical mistake. Forget about essences

Learn about all the variation and the details in the penumbral cases

Then afterwards, 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 his concept of memes

When Dawkins coined the term memes, he had in mind something very general

The term caught on, it's in the dictionary now, but only a small subset are what most people think of as memes

And those are the ones that people deliberately and presumably intelligently design with the hopes that they'll go viral

And some of them do. But lots of memes go viral that don't involve the internet at all

Words are memes. Every word in every language is a meme. It's not genetically inherited

It's culturally transmitted. They evolve over time. And Dawkins' theory was a very general theory of how human cultural evolution hugely expands the powers of a human brain

In fact, I would put it very strongly. I would say the difference between a chimpanzee and a human brain is that the brain of a chimpanzee is largely unfurnished

Whereas we fill our brains with memes, we download hundreds of thousands of memes

and that's where we get our power from. Your computer or your phone isn't a very powerful device until you download some apps to it

Those are like memes. We are awash in toxic memes right now

One of the most toxic, I think because it enables so many others

is the idea that truth doesn't matter. The truth is just relative, that there's no such thing as establishing the truth of anything

Your truth, my truth, we're all entitled to our own truths. That's pernicious, it's attractive to many people

and it is used to exploit people in all sorts of nefarious ways

The truth really does matter. 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 it want What does it know What does it believe We use the intentional stance all the time to endow other things that are moving and complicated with beliefs and desires

and the ability to do the rational thing given those beliefs and desires

Well, that's fine as long as we're living in a world of concrete objects

But what's now happening is that AI is filling the digital world with fake intentional systems

fake minds, fake people that 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 indeed, because they will replicate, they will evolve

and we won't be able to take our attention away from them

They will capture our attention and manipulate us. The difference between current AI, large language models

so-called things like chat GPT and GPT-4, is that their goal is truthiness, not truth

They are more like historical fiction writers than historians. We're different in that we take truth seriously, maybe because we want to lie

But LLMs, AIs, don't yet really have the capacity to lie on purpose

They do formulate falsehoods that they then spread. And there's only a difference of degree between us and them

So we're not used to having our technology in a position to ignore the truth

and just feed us what makes sense to them. Technology has gone a great length to make it very hard to make counterfeit money

and quite easy to identify it. So we can do something similar for every phone, computer, tablet

but every digital device can have software put in it, which will do a pretty darn good job of detecting counterfeit people

and will not accept it or will brand it instantly. This is fake. This is fake. This is bad

This is a hoax. Don't believe it. And in order to do that, well, you have to have laws

And in order to have laws, you've got to have governments, legislatures that will pass the laws

and they have to know enough about what they're doing so they pass laws that aren't easily circumvented

This is something we have to work on now, and I think we need to work on it full time