Dennet, Daniel. Freedom Evolves. New York: Viking Press, 2003.

Vast and Vanishing

One widespread tradition has it that we human beings are responsible agents, captains of our fate, because we really are are souls, immaterial and immortal clumps of Godstuff that inhabit and control our material bodies rather like spectral puppeteers. It is our souls that are the source of all meaning, and the locus of all our suffering, our joy, our glory and shame. But this idea of immaterial souls, capable of defying the laws of physics, has outlived its credibility thanks to the advance of the natural sciences. Many people think the implications of this are dreadful: We don't really have "free will" and nothing really matters. The aim of this book is to show why they are wrong. (p. 1)

We don't have to have immaterial souls of the old-fashioned sort in order to live up to our hopes: our aspirations as moral beings whose acts and liuves matter do not depend at all on our having minds that obey a different physics from the rest of nature. The self under-standing we can gain from science can help us put our moral lives on a new and better foundation, and once we understand what our freedom consists in, we will be much better prepared to protect it against the genuine threats that are so regularly misidentified. (p. 1)

In just one species, our species, a new trick evolved: language. It has provided us a broad highway of knowledge-sharing, on every topic. Conversation unites us, in sput of our different languages. We can all know quite a lot about what it is like to be a Vietnamese fisherman or a Bulgarian taxi driver, an eighty-year old nun or a five-year -old boy boy blind from birth, a chess master or a prostitute. No matter how different from one another we people are, scattered around the glove, we can explore our differences and communicate about them. No matter how similar to one another bison are, standing shoulder to shoulder in a herd, they cannot know much of anything about their similarities, let alone their differences, because they can't compare notes. They can have similar experiences, side by side but they really can't share experiences the way we do. (p. 4)

Even in our species, it has taken thousands of years of communication for us to begin to find the keys to our identities. It has been only a few hundred years that we've known that we are mammals, and only a few decades that we've understood in considerable detail how we have evolved, along with all other living things, from those simple beginnings. (p. 4)

We are outnumbered on this planet by our distant cousins , the ants, and outweighed by yet more distant relatives, the bacteria.

Though we are in the minority, our capacity for long-distance knowledge gives us powers that dward the power of all the rest of the life on the planet. Now, for the first time in its billions of years of history, our planet is protected by far-seeking sentinels, able to anticipate danger from the distant future - a comet on a collusion course, or global warming - and devise scheme for doing something about it. (p. 4)

If you burn more calories than you take in, you soon die. If you find some tricks that provide you a surplus of calories, what might you spend them on? You might devote person-centuries of labor to building temples and tombs and sacrificial pyres on which you destroy some of your most precious possessions - and even some of your very own children. Why on earth would you want to do that. These strange and awful expenditures give us clues about some of the hidden costs of our heightened power of imagination. We did not come by our knowledge painlessly. (p. 5)

The more we learn about what we are, the more options we will discern about what to try to become. Americans have long honored the "self-made man," but now that we are actually learning enought to be able to remake ourselves into something new, many flinch. Many would apparently rather bumble around with their eyes closed, trusting in tradition, than look around to see what's about to happen. (p. 6)

When we academics aspire to have a greater impact on the "real" world (as opposed to the "academic") world, we need to adopt the attitudes and habits of these more applied disciplines. We need to hold ourselves responsible for what we say, recognizing that our words, if believed, can have profound effects for good or ill. (p. 17)

A naturalistic account of how we and hour minds evolved seems to threaten the traditional concept of free will, and fear about this prospect has distorted scientific and philosophical investigation of these issues. Some who have sensed the hangers of these new discoveries about ourselves have seriously misrepresented them. The implications of our newfound knowledge of our origins will prove, on calm examination, to support a stronger, wiser doctrine of freedom than the myths it must replace. (p. 22)

Our thinking about determinism is often distorted by illusions that can be banished with the help of a toy model, in which simple entities can evolve that are capable of avoiding harm and reproducing themselves. This demonstrates that the traditional link between determinism and inevitability is a mistake, and that the concept of inevitability belongs at the design level, not the physical leve. (p. 22)

In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, I introduced the term "Vast" as a name for numbers that, though finite, are Very much larger than ASTronomical quantities. p. 31

Evolution is the blind watch-maker, and we must never forget it. But we shouldn't ignore the fact that Mother Nature is well supplied with the wisdom of hindsight. (p. 53)

The process of natrual selection, slowly and without foresight, invents processes or phenomena that speed up the evolutionary process itself - cranes, not skyhooks, in my fanciful terminology - until the souped-up evolutionary process finally reaches the point where explorations within the lifetime of individual organisms can affect the underlying slow process of genetic evolution, and even, in some circumstances, usurp it. (p. 53)

Today we human beings can see and hear things at a distance, and don't have to wait for them to sidle up to us. Thanks to our long -distance perceptual organs and our prosthetic extensions of tehm, we can pose and solve problems at a temp approaching the amximum speed limit of the physical universe: the speed of light. (p. 53)

Thanks to our technology, for example, we can detect the liftoff of a nuclear missile within microseconds of its occurrence thousands of miles away, and then use that precious lead time to design a countermeasure that has some non-zero chance of working. It's a breathtaking feat of avoidance, of dodging an incoming brick. (p. 54)

We are virtuos avoiders, preventers, interferers, forestallers today. We have managed to get ourselves into the happy situation of having enough free time to sit around systematically looking into the future and asking ourselves what to do next. (p. 54)

The main point of this chapter is to show that we need to take the etymology of "inevitable" seriously. It means unavoidable. Curiously, its negation is not used, but we can easily enough coin the new term, and note that some things are evitable by some agents. We have seen that in a deteministic world such as the Life world we can design things that are better at avoiding harms in that world than other things are, and these things owe their very persistence to this prowess. (p. 56)

The concepts of causation and possibility lie at the heart of anxiety about free will, and an analysis shows that our everyday concepts do not have the implications they are often assumed to have: Determinism is no threat to our most important thinking about possibilities and causes in our lives. (p. 62)

Horizontal transmission of design, of information that cn be put to good uses, is the key feature of human culture, and undoubtedly the secret of our success as a species. Each of us is the beneficiary of the design work done by counteless others who are not our ancestors. We don't each have to "reinvent the wheel" or invent calculus or clocks or the sonnet form. It is sometimes claimed, erroneously, that this cultural transmission, being between genetically unrealted individuals, shows that human culture cannot be interpreted as an evolutionary phenomenon governed by the principles of neo-Darwinean theory. In fact, as we have just seen, horizontal transmission of good design elements between unrealted individuals is recognized as an important feature of evolution of early (single-celled) life, with a growing list of proven instances, a centerpiece, not an embarrassment, of contemporary evolutionary biology. (p. 146)

Human culture is neither a miracle nor a straightforward addition to the tool kit provided to us by our genes to enhance their own fitness. In order to understand how a person can be both a creation of and a creator of culture, we need to explore the multi-stage evolutionary process from which cutlrue, and human sociality, have emerged. (p. 166)

But there is one species, Homo sapiens, that has made cultural transmission its information superhighway, generating great ramifying families of families of familes of cultural entities, and transforming its members by the culturally transmitted habit of vigoously installing as much culture as possible in the young, as soon as they can absorb it. This innovation in horizontal transmission is so revolutionary that the primates that are its hosts deserve a new name. (p. 173)

We could call them euprimates - superprimates - if we wanted a technical term. Or we could use the vernacular and call them persons. (p. 173)

A person is a hominid with an infected brain, host to millions of cultural symbionts, and the chief enabklers of these are the symbiont systems known as languages. (p. 173)

But it is language that opens the floodgates of cultural transmission that set us apart from all other species. Elaborate linguistic culture has apparently evolved only once on this planet - so far. (p. 174)

Memes are thus analogous to genes. What is a meme made of? It is made of information, which can be carried in any physical medium. (p. 176)

In the domain of memes, the ultimate beneficiary, the beneficiary in terms of which the final cost-benefit calculations must apply, is: the meme itself, not its carriers. (p. 177)

Culture didn't just descend on a band of hominids one day like a cloud of airborne germs. In order to understand how culture-borne ideas came to enlarge our selves, we have to look at the structure of the environment in which these ancenstral agents must have acted. When we do this, we see a wide and largely unexplored variety of Darwinian hypotheses to test in our investigation of the history that has created our cultural heritage, and the reasons for the various parts of it. (p. 181)

When the cultural environment changes, a culture-borne habit can evaporate overnight, and this can send ripples back through the selective environment, so that there is a potent feedback cycle that speeds up evolution, often in directions we may come to regret. (p. 181)

A culturally enforced habit may long outlive its usefulness, persisting thanks to sanctions imposed by the members of the culture, who may be oblivious to or only dimly appreciate the original rationale of their habit-turned-tradition. A taboo against eating pork, for instance, could have had an entirely sound rationale (free-floating or not) when it was first established, a rationale that lapsed long ago but is no longer required for the maintenance of the taboo. (p. 182)

Memes depend on human brains as their nesting places; human kidneys or lungs wouldn't do as alternative sites, because memes depend on the thinking powers of their hosts. Being involved in thinking is a meme's way of being put through its paces and tested by natural selection, just as getting one's protein recipe followed and getting the result out in the world is a gene's way of being tested. If memes are tools for thinking (and many of the best of them are just that), they have to be wielded for their phenotypic effects to show up. You still have to think. (p. 186)

A Darwinian approach to human culture permits us to sketch an explanatory path that can account for the major differences between us and our nearest animal relatives. Culture is a major innovation in evolutionary history. It proces one spcies, Homo sapiens, with new topics to think about, new tools to think with, and - since the media of culture open up the possibility of cultural replicators whose own fitness is independent of our genetic fitness - new perspectives to think from. (p. 191)

The complexities of social life in a species with language and culture generate a series of evolutionary arms races from which agents emerge who exhibit key components of human morality: an interest in discovering conditions in which cooperation will flourish, sensitivity to punishment and threats, concern for reputation, high-level dispositions of self-manipulaiton that are designe to improve self-control in the face of temptation, and an ability to make commitments that are appreciable by others. Innovations such as these can thrive under specifiable conditions that co-evolve with them, supplanting the myopic "selfishness" of simpler organisms inhabiting simpler niches. (p. 218)

What was it that arose in the world to encourage the evolution of a less unwitting implementation of Popperian behavioral control? What new environmental complexity favored the innovations in control structure that made this possible? In a word, communication. It is only once a creature begins to develop the activity of communication, and in particular the communication of its actions and plans, that it has to have some capacity for monitorying not just the results of its actions, but of its prior evaluations and formation of intentions as well. At that point, it needs a level of self-monitoring that keeps track of which situation-action schemes are in the queue for execution, or in current competition for execution - and which candidates are under consideration in the faculty of practical reasoning, if that is not too grand a term for the arena in which the competition ensures. (p. 248)

Once we begin talking about what we're doing, we need o keep track of what we're doing so we can have ready answers to these inquiries. Language requires us to keep track, but also helps us keep track, by helping us categorize and (over)simplify our agendas. (p. 251)

Mental contents become conscious not by entering some special chamber in the brain, bot by being transduced into some privileged and mysterious medium, but by winning the competitions against other mental contents for domination in the control of behavior, and hence for achieving long-lasting effects - or as we misleadingly say, "entering into memory." (p. 254)

And since we are talkers, and since talking to ourselves is one of our most influential activities, one of the most effective ways - not the only way - for a mental content to become influential is for it to get into position to drive the language-using part of the controls. (p. 254)

The demands of communication don't just create the need for the sorts of self-monitoring arrangements that create the illusion of the Cartesian Theater. They also open up human psychology to a rich variety of further elaborations. The fact that the primary complexities in our environments are not just other agents - potential friends or enemies, potential fellow citizens - has further implication for our evolution of human freedom. (p. 255)