[00:00:11] Host Create clip I'm delighted to be here to see you all in such a beautiful day. Not, uh, outside in the sunshine. So I'm gonna talk about tools for thinking, uh, one of my students famously said, or I love it. You can't do much carpentry with your bare hands. You can't do much thinking with your bare brain. Oh, by the way, can I have the house lights up? I really like to see faces. This is the drama. Thank you. I'll try to make it entertaining, but it's not. You know, uh, thank you. Um, how many of you know about the Flynn Effect? Who? Only a few okay. Made after Jim Flynn, James Flynn, psychologist. He didn't do the original research, but he's drawn attention to the importance of it. It turns out that since the 100 years that we've had I Q tests, scores have been going up. Mike, you tests are normalized at 100 being the average, so you have to keep tweaking that scoring system. But if you give the test that you gave in 1930 the people today, they'll score on average, 130 not 100 at least, as the whole world over to It's not. It's not just to anyone area. At least we're a lot better at taking I Q tests. Then we were, uh, 80 90 years ago, but it seems to be a real pattern. And what's what might cause that Flynn thinks that what's happened is that the tools for thinking that are developed in proven and refined in in the sciences and then the other academic disciplines have sort of filtered down into popular culture and become part of the ambient culture that you learn independently of school and that this is why people are actually thinking better.

[00:02:32] Host Create clip They're actually better problem solvers. They see patterns better and so forth. In any case, it's It's a hypothesis that hasn't been disproven, and it has a good chance of being the right, uh, the right answer to that question. And the reason I mention it is because if you ask me, wait a minute. Are you saying that he's thinking tools actually make us smarter? I'm saying yes, yes, they do come. So what are some thinking? Tools. Well, Pyrex Alonso, thinking tools or words can't do much thinking without words, and I'm reminded of a famous line of Curtis. But when ideas fail, words come in very handy. He really didn't say that. And when you think about it, you realize what wisdom is there when the when the thinking it's really hard. You can often use words as a certain sort of prosthetic device. A crutch to help you over some difficult stretches. Numbers. Obviously, you're thinking tools, diagrams, maps, uh, methods of all kinds from finding the average the long division to cost benefit analysis. You name it. Notice that these are all quite abstract things, their their techniques for handling information in your head rather than tools that you plug in or need a power source for, um, Then there's intuition. Pumps.

[00:04:14] Host Create clip I coined the term way back in 1980 or 81 in order to talk about John Searles famous or notorious Chinese Room Thought Experiment. I said, It's an intuition pump and because I was on that occasion criticizing a lot of people thought that I meant the term intuition pump pejoratively. No, I didn't, actually, and I've since explained that I think intuition pumps at their best, are wonderful. They are the best philosophical thinking tools. There are and they always have been. If you look at the history of philosophy, Plato's Cave of Socrates teaching the slave boy geometry the carts evil demon Hobbs, State of Nature, these air the These are the great melodies of philosophy that you remember long after you've forgotten the details of the arguments. So philosophers have always used intuition, pumps, little stories, scenarios, vignettes, and they're not typically formal arguments. They're little stories. It's not like doing sums. When you get to the end, you've got the answer. Very few intuition pumps, air like that. They're much more like Aesop's fables. You get the end. There's a little moral interesting. You'd put it that way, and if it really works, you pound your fist on the table. So it's gotta be that way. That's the intuition that's been pumped.

[00:05:47] Host Create clip Now they're persuaders. In other words, somebody wrote me the other day saying, Well, I've looked at your book. How and I think what you're really talking about. In every case you're talking about social thinking. You're talking about persuading others. It's very much interpersonal on. I wrote back, said yes, and in fact I should stress that more all really serious thinking is interpersonal, I think. I think that's in fact, one of the keys toe. How we think is by challenging each other with our ideas. Lovely case in point. Andrew Wiles proved Fairmont's last there, Um, a few years back, but nobody could be sure. Even whiles himself. Couldn't be sure he'd done it until his peers, his colleagues in mathematics who would dearly love toe, have the honor of having proved fare much last theorem themselves until they had signed. Offense it, Earn it? Yes, he's got it. Congratulations. This competitive opponent process between people is actually one of the key intuition. Pumps are the key thinking tools all on its own.

[00:07:10] Host Create clip And so this is a book very much about how to persuade others and yourself about difficult matters. They're also tools of discovery. By exploring these vignettes, Ewan, can't you encounter either problems that you hadn't anticipated or sometimes opportunities that you would not otherwise notice, and they hold our attention. You you could just refer back to them, and at least they give you a focus on the topic. That's very useful now. Some fields of academic inquiry have lots of fixed points, just immovable bedrock philosophy, I think has none. Hardly a one, maybe the law of non contradiction. According to Aristotle, what we have are candidates for fixed points. We say in effect, suppose for the sake of argument we treat this and this, and this is six points now what follows from those three points? Triangulate those. See what kind of a theory you can make of that. See how the questions look if we take those is fixed points. So very often an intuition pump is a is a wonderful fixer of a candidate for a fixed point, and that's a very valuable tool in itself.

[00:08:31] Host Create clip How powerful are these tools? They're this powerful. They drove what is one of the great biological phenomena in the history of life on this planet? Paul McCreedy, the late, great green engineer. If you don't know who Paul McCreedy is, I'll probably be able to identify and for you by drawing attention the fact that he's the one who designed and built the golf gossamer albatross, the human powered airplane that flew across the British Channel. Um, he pointed out that a 10,000 years ago, a twinkling in biological time at the very dawn of agriculture. Our species, plus it's live stuff in its pets was a fraction of 1% of the bi wait. If you like of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass, a minor primate, what is it today? 10,000 years later, any guesses? 99%. If I hear any others, you know that's not true. There are a few bears out in the woods, but it's actually it's 98%. Most of that's cattle. But in 10,000 years, our species plus it's domesticated animals have completely transformed the biosphere in a way that really hardly. I don't think any earlier global event can compete with it for the changes that have been brought in just 10,000 years. And this is what this is, what McCreedy says about it. 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 have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power. We now wield the paintbrush.

[00:10:55] Host Create clip That's true, and we have the same genes that our ancestors 10,000 years ago had their our ancestors 100,000 years ago. Pretty much it's not genetic. It's thinking tools that have made this all possible. Which raises a chicken egg problem. Did evolve tools make a smarter or did we evolve to become smart enough to make tools? And the answer as to all good chicken egg problems is yes, it's co evolutionary. It's a sort of bootstrapping thing where we get a little bit smarter, smart enough to make a few tools, and then those tools make us smarter still, so it goes building and building and building. My next book is going to be about that process. So some simple tools from the book, uh, everybody knows reductive. What absurd him. Even if you don't know the name it is that you might say it's the great crowbar of thought. It is the way you budge people from their position by taking their premises. It's a work if we assume, for the sake of argument that your premises are such and such. Look what I can do and then you deduce logically from those premises a contradiction, something absurd.

[00:12:23] Host Create clip In fact, we use this all the time more more informally and don't even notice it. But it's really the same thing. I mean, if you say if that's a bear than bears have antlers. Uh, that's really, uh, that sort of reductive lot Absurd arguments. Um, I mentioned it in part because I want to point out that although we use reductive ad absurdum arguments in either expanded or truncated form, we also imply them all the time using rhetorical questions. A rhetorical question. Whenever you see what one of those questions it isn't supposed to be answered. Stop and think about it. It's an implied reductio. The idea is, huh? You can't answer this question. It would be it's. It's so obvious that the answer to this question eyes so obvious that I don't even have to mention what the answer is. Everybody knows that's nudge well. That means that a good practice, a habit to get into is when you see one of those question marks in the dock document a rhetorical question. Try answering the question and see if maybe it's not so a ridiculous. After all, In one of my favorite Peanuts cartoon strips, Charlie Brown says something like, Well, who's to say what is right and what is wrong, and Lucy says I will and try it. You'll like it. Sometimes you can really bring a person up short by just answering their their rhetorical question.

[00:14:07] Host Create clip Then there's the surely alarm. I tell my students every time you see the word shortly, a little bell to ring ding a new should pause, hearing the surely alarm. And you should look to see if you have just found the weak point in the argument. Why? Well, what follows the surely is a sentence that the author wants you to believe was putting forward is true. It's not so obvious that it goes without saying. If it were, it would go without saying and hear. The author is putting it in but not bothering toe. Argue for us, instead trying to get by on the cheap with a little nudge. A little surely so if you have a surely alarm and it's becomes if the ah habit in your mind this this will stand you in good stead. I've been inviting people to send me now that they've installed a surely alarm in their brain to tell. Send the examples where they catch. They catch a surely marking a weak spot. I did a little research on this. I actually went. And string search surely. And several dozen actually more like 70 or 75 Philosophy paper's online and found a couple of dozen.

[00:15:35] Host Create clip Sure lease and check them out. And about 1/3 of them were, I thought, clearly the weakest point in the case being made in that in that art doesn't work all the time. In a lot of false alarms, you can go ahead and use the word shortly Everything. But if you hear the word, surely you should thing. So we just give it a little try. Because surely if you I didn't hear, surely if you get in the habits of whenever you hear the word surely a little bell rings practice surely. Thank you. Now look what I've done. I've just downloaded an app to your neck top in the same way that an app on your smartphone adds to the functionality of gives gives your smartphone a new talent, a new capacity like Google alert or something like that. You know, I have another little tool in your kitchen that may very well alert you to a weak spot in some argument to your otherwise impressed with. Okay, Computers are, of course, thinking tools par excellence. And I was a lot about computers in the book, and I I've learned from many years experience that a lot of people think they understand how computers work and they don't really.

[00:17:07] Host Create clip And if they just understood a bit Maur, they would understand a lot more things that can be easily understood with the help of computers. So there's There's an interlude on computers, including What must be an eccentric first in a trade book. There's actually a chapter which teaches you how to program the world's simplest computer, a register machine, and there are even problem sets with the answers in the back of the book. If you will spend a couple of hours with that chapter, you will understand computers the way you never understood them before. But of course you're free to pass over that if you really don't care. Um, how long, by the way, was a philosopher, Ah, who came up with the idea of a register machine around the same time? Little after girdles famous, uh, proof and touring coming up with the Tory machine and the Wong Register machine, this is is computes everything that's touring computer ble. So it's a It's a user friendly alternative to a touring machine. If you've ever tried to program a touring machine, you know it's hard. It's very counterintuitive, but a register machine is very easy to understand. It's it's the world's simplest computer, and there were some little exercises.

[00:18:32] Host Create clip Now here's some thinking tools. Well, actually, this picture, I want to point out this is a This picture is all by itself of thinking to It draws attention to a rather striking comparison, uh, and provokes reflection. The one on the left is in actually in hand. Ax the one on the right. I don't need to tell you Notice the actual and hand axe was used in this form unchanged without any noticeable improvements for over a 1,000,000 years. Weird, really strange. The mouse, in comparison, has only been around for a few decades, and there's probably on the way out. The speed of tool use and improvement is picked up a little bit over biological time. Here's another thinking to all on its own the comparison between these two entities on the left you see a Knauss Trail Yin Termite Castle on the right. You see Gaudi's famous church in Barcelona this aground off Amelia. They're strikingly similar in appearance and actually in structure. Even internally, they're quite remarkably similar. So here are two artifacts made by animals looking very similar and yet profoundly different in both the the design and construction.

[00:20:08] Host Create clip The one on the left is designed by Darwinian processes, clueless, mindless little termites. It's all local action. There's no there's no blueprint. There's no intelligent designer. There's no no boss. There's no hierarchy. It's bottom up construction in sort of every sense of the word. Whereas Gowdy is the very model of a kn intelligent designer, autocratic, full of manifestos and blueprints and orders ordering the underlings around, Uh, now they're both natural, and one of the really interesting questions is, How do we get in this on this planet? How did we get from termites, style design and construction to Gowdy's style design construction? How did the second kind evolve from the first? That's a very deep in interesting question. That's the one that I am now devoting as much time as I can, too will attack in the next book, and I hope I'll be back to talk about that. One more visual thinking tool is this my favorite picture of the tree of life? This is Leonard Eisenberg's and you can. You can get this as a big, beautiful, glossy poster to put up on your on your wall in your study or in your classroom. Now you can get T shirts and buttons and all sorts of things. What's really nice about it is that so many features that are important to understand or rendered so vivid.

[00:21:49] Host Create clip Here's the birth of the earth and time. This is four billion years ago on Here's the present out around the outside edge. So this represents all living things today, and this represents where it started, and we see that the bacteria and the archaea came first. Then we had this amazing event, the Eukaryotic revolution, when an endo symbiotic event joined to pro carrots, too simple cells into a symbiotic union, and that was the first eukaryotic cell and everything else. These were all you carry outs to a first approximation. Every living thing that's big enough to see with the naked eye is a you carry out including you and me and oak trees and fish and all the rest. You can see some important events. Here's the camera. An explosion 530 million years ago, when there was this sudden influx of many different life forms. New body plans, new ways of making a living Steve Gould famously wrote about that tremendous creative period and way over here. That little that little fork right there. That's about seven billion years, just from that crotch right there. Seven million, you refuse me. That's about the length of time that we has passed since we shared a common ancestor with a chimpanzee.

[00:23:25] Host Create clip And, of course, language and culture is just right out here, right out here. So in, in, in just what's happened just in the last fine fringe is everything that's transformed the world, thanks to thinking to us and notice it on this whole tree of life. The termites are on their the birds building. Their nests are on there. The first intelligent designers show up on one twig in the very recent times in the last 100,000 years or so, and becoming more intelligent as they go now give you a few examples of intuition pumps. Just because it's so far, I've just been talking about simple tools. Here's the nefarious neurosurgeon. First, a little science fact. Diamond Denise in Amsterdam has developed a little microchip that could be surgically implanted in your head. If you suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder, it will control your obsessive compulsive disorder quite well. It's It's being implanted in a lot of people today, and so far the results are good. It's experimental, but very promising. That's fact now fiction.

[00:24:48] Host Create clip So you see, one day this fellow who has O. C. D. Goes to see his neurosurgeon and asks her to implant the Denise ship, and she does. And as she's sewing him up and shaking his hand and sending him out of her shiny surgery, she says, Oh yes, your your O. C. D. Is a thing of the past. Be completely controlled by the chip. And by the way, our staff here will be monitoring you 24 7 and Elektronik Lee. We will be controlling all your decisions. From now on, you will have the illusion of free will, but it's just a delusion. Thank you. Have a nice life, sends him out the door. He believes her well shiny lab white lab coat. You're a surgeon and, believing her hey begins to act a little bit irresponsibly. He's a little self indulgent, indulging his worst twins becomes a little arrogant, a little aggressive, and before long he gets in trouble with the law. And he says to the judge, But Your honor, I don't have any free will.

[00:25:56] Host Create clip The neurosurgeon told me, I don't have any free will. You can't hold me responsible. They call the neurosurgeon to testify and she says, under oath, Yeah, I told him, All right, I was. I was just messing with his head, you know? I never thought he'd believe me. Now I think we can all agree. You can. We not? Here's the intuition I wanna pump. She did an awful thing that was That was a really bad thing she did to him. She actually accomplished with her words what she claimed to accomplish surgically electronically. She disabled him as a free agent. Now, if I have secured that intuition, then I can go on and say to the neuroscientists that it's designed for and so tell me exactly how is it that your own recent pronouncements in many books and popular articles that nurse science shows that there is no free will. That free will is an illusion. And I quote to exactly that effect from a lot of very eminent people. Why isn't that just doing wholesale? What she did retail? Why isn't that a really dangerous and irresponsible thing to do to a person to suggest that their free will is an illusion? Now this, of course, raises some questions about, well, what's the difference between what they're saying and what she said.

[00:27:24] Host Create clip There are differences, and they're important differences. But in the meantime, we have a lot of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists and philosophers going around saying Neuroscience shows that nobody has free will nonsense. It shows no such thing, and it's very important that we stop that bandwagon before, builds up a head of steam, or it will start doing some real damage. There is, by the way, empirical evidence that people who have been told this message become or irresponsible votes and schooler Jonathan Schooler, out of the University of California, Santa Barbara, did a very clever experiment where they had stubbed its undergraduate students as usual. But in two groups. One group was given a passage from Francis Crick's book The Astonishing Hypothesis. Oh, it's talked about consciousness. The other group was given another passage from the same book by Nobel laureate Francis Crick, which says Free will is an illusion. Both groups of students are then given a test, or it's a puzzle to solve, and they're going to get paid for how well they do in the puzzle and deliberately. The experimenters have made it possible to cheat on this test, And the students who saw who read the passage where Creek says that they don't have any free will. They cheated significantly more than the students who read the other passage, and that study has been replicated. So this is This is a real This is not just a fantasy of philosophers, but now you think, but still doesn't. Don't we learn from brain science, since brains are more or less determined and what's going on in them probably doesn't owe anything to quantum effects in the brain? Doesn't that show we don't have free? Will it? Well, let's see. I want to ask you whether you think the fall which of the two lotteries are fair in lottery, eh? The winning ticket is chosen after the tickets were sold.

[00:29:47] Host Create clip That's most lotteries air like that. You buy a ticket. Then they make have a ceremony where they choose the winning ticket. Lottery B is just the same, except the winning ticket is chosen before the tickets were sold and the ticket stub is locked away in a vault until after the tickets were sold. Now, how many of you think that Lottery B is unfair? That you don't really have a chance of winning lottery? Be that lot of IAI may be fair, but lottery B is is just some kind of a hoax. How many of you think that? Hardly anybody. I think. I think the audience is right there. There's they're equally good. Both of them. Both of you have no, After all, publishers clearing house bets on this they sent you send out those envelopes, you may already have one $1,000,000 or whatever. Uh, people see that both of these air fare lotteries with opportunities to win in both cases. But now look, if determinism is true, then you're all your lottery tickets were chosen before you were born and put in an envelope for you to use as you needed. A coin flip is you needed a little bit of luck, right? So what people say? Well, we know.

[00:31:07] Host Create clip Then you're determined to have good luck on some occasions and had luck on others. Yeah, but that's true. Even if in determinism is true, there's no difference between in determinism and determinism as far as you're having opportunities in this life. So we should temper are conviction, very traditional conviction that there is a deep incompatibility between determinism and free will and moral responsibility. It just isn't there. It takes a lot of intuition pumps to get people to see that. But here's one. Okay. The philosopher David Wiggins once said many years ago, talking about this issue, he talked about the cosmic unfairness of determinism. And I think a lot of you say, Yeah, I know what he means yet. Cosmic unfairness of terminals. Well, what about the cosmic unfairness of in determinism? They're equal on this score. You're gonna win some. You're gonna lose some. The luck averages out in most cases. Not perfectly. That's life. You can't get around that in determinism. Doesn't give you any more luck any more opportunities anymore, Freewill Any more elbow room than you would have in a deterministic world? They're say, I haven't persuaded many of you of that, but give me time. I'm working on it.

[00:32:40] Host Create clip Okay, so there they are. The book is sort of like a tapas in a 77 thinking tools. 77 little chapters and the point of the term intuition pump. Is that your encouraged to think of these as gadgets as devices, you should take them apart to see how they work. Reverse engineer. Um, turn all the knobs, see why they do what they do. Then you can build your own. Thanks for coming. So now questions. We have microphones. Yes. Earlier, when you

[00:33:33] Daniel Dennett Create clip mentioned a Chinese room scenario as a thinking pump, it's like a sort of based won. I was wondering if you go into more detail about

[00:33:40] Host Create clip that. Uh huh. I'm going to decline for, but I'm going to explain why I'm going to decline. John Searles. Chinese Room has been amazingly successful as a persuader for now, over 30 years, and I have spent many hours every year in the last 30 trying to explain to people why It is not a good intuition pump, why it is defective. And I've learned several things from this. One of them is that if you don't understand how computers really do their work, you don't get it. Searle is rudely dismissive of what he calls the system's reply. But anybody who understands computers knows that the system replies, just obviously right. So you have to you have to take you have to read the chapter. You have toe become computer literate in this rather strong way to understand why Cyril's thought experiment is defective. In fact, I I teach my students that toughs how to program register machines in my regular undergraduate course on language of mind. As I said, this is just a thinking tool that you should have later in the course. And of course, they get to read Cyril and they all see right through it.

[00:35:15] Host Create clip But it would take me too long to lead you through all those exercises. That's why you have to buy the book. Okay, um, but I want to add something to that tube. I noticed when I try to explain this to a lot of people. Charles, what's wrong? with Cheryl. Their eyes glaze over, and I realize that if I prod them a little bit, I know why they hate the idea that artificial intelligence is possible. They love the fact that a Berkeley professor has an argument, which has, as its conclusion, that strong eyes impossible and that suits them just fine. They don't want to hear the details they like the conclusion. Don't bother me with details. It looks to them like nit picking. Well, I used to hold that attitude in contempt. I thought this was This is the worst sort of anti intellectual attitude. And then I caught myself doing it on a related issue or no, a different issue. I will confess that I find the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics ugly offensive.

[00:36:37] Host Create clip I just don't want it to be true, and I don't want it to be accepted. And I know a lot of people share that attitude with me. But never mind. That's not the point. My what I've always felt oppressed by the Copenhagen interpretation and thought, Uh, gosh, I hope I just don't want that to be right. And then Murray Gell Mann, Nobel laureate and physics in his book, The Quark in the Jaguar takes off after the Copenhagen interpretation, and he just beats the tar out of it. He is just hither Begin Murray. Is it a chapter called Quantum Flapdoodle? He no holds barred. He just lets the quantum interpretation have it between both barrels right between the eyes and I found myself reading that him again. Mary, I love this. I love this. And then I realized I'm not qualified to Judge Murray Gilman's argument. Maybe I'm just being taken in by the rhetoric and the fact that he's got a Nobel prize. I'm so pleased that there's a Nobel laureate who's on my side, and that's the way people feel a lot of them about Searle. That's why it's an uphill battle. A lot of people want surreal to be right. They are offended by the idea of artificial intelligence, and they don't want to listen to some MIT picker who says the argument doesn't work.

[00:38:13] Host Create clip So I've come to temper my view. I realized that there can be deep aesthetic and emotional antipathies to a certain view, which can get in the way of a patient consideration of the arguments. So, uh, you see, I've mellowed. But I've also explained to you at great length why I'm not going to talk aboutthe,

[00:38:43] Daniel Dennett Create clip um, professor than it come up here upstairs. I I agree with you about the system's reply, so I suppose that they need to buy the book or anything. Do you think that the logical end point off our thinking tools is the what some people call whole brain emulation of the up loading of the human mind thio, an artificial system where we can have tools far beyond our current imagining. Do you think it's possible?

[00:39:14] Host Create clip I think it's possible, in principle, very unlikely. In fact, there's lots of things that are possible in principle but would be nevertheless technologically unrealistic. My favorite example is, um, would it be possible to build a robotic bird that could perch on a twig and catch insects on the fly on way? You know, a few 100 grands? Ah, yeah, possible in principle. Don't expect it. I say that knowing that some of my robotics friends were developing little robotic insects with cameras on them, that sort of be the fly on the wall. So we're getting closer, but still, uh, I think the sort of adroitness oven insect Everest bird will probably evade technology indefinitely, and there's no real reason to do it. And I think the same thing is true about sort of whole brain emulation you've got recently, by the way, sort of changed my mind about about the brain as a computer. As I told I said into your neck top, I do think your brain is a computer. It's not at all like your laptop.

[00:40:42] Host Create clip Well, it is. It is because it's a computer. But the organization and the construction of the cerebral computer has some fundamental differences from any device that we've built so far out of silicon. For one thing, in a computer, every memory place, every flip flop, every lodging it they're all exactly alike, right down practically to the Athens. And the reliability of the system depends on that tremendous uniformity. It's a it's a masterpiece of precision engineering. Your brain has somewhere between, say, 100 and 200 billion neurons. No two are alike, and they have their own agendas. They're not as slave ish as the flip flops in the machine they are computing. There are a whole bunch of slightly willful, selfish, interacting slaves. And they do compute, but not really the way your laptop computes. So I think the task of emulating all of that in silicon is possible in principle, but really unlikely. After all, not only do you have some hundreds of billions of neurons, you've got 10 times more Astra sites, glial cells in your brain. And although we used to think of them a sort of little pillows that just protected the neurons no, no, no turns out their computing to.

[00:42:32] Host Create clip So the brain, we now realize, is orders of magnitude more complicated than we thought just a few years ago. So don't hold your breath. All right, who's at the mike? Okay, here and then there. Go ahead.

[00:42:55] Daniel Dennett Create clip Given the natural and acquired deficiencies and limitations for mines, where do you see the the greatest dangers in the way we make decisions? And what is the change or what are the changes that need to happen?

[00:43:14] Host Create clip Oh, that's very good, Um, and because it permits me to to illustrate one of my main things. Many of the thinking tools that we've developed over the centuries have been designed as prosthetic improvements on our natural equipment, which is really faulty as we've discovered, were lousy, for instance, of probability. Naturally, where, as as George Anjali points out, we're exponential discounters of future events, and that's just wrong. It's a fallacy, but nature has built us that way. We have lots of foibles, little cognitive glitches, and a lot of people have pointed the mountain recent years. Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky and a famous Siri's of papers. And now, more recently, Danny's got the book out on thinking fast and slow. But the point is that we can't think slow. And when we think slow, using words, tools and using the methods that we've devised, we can overcome the natural limitations of our brains, and we can become, to put it bluntly, more civilized and more rational.

[00:44:34] Host Create clip And the very fact that you asked the question in a little recursive loop shows that we can be indefinitely self critical and critical of what we're doing. So far, as as we discover problems in collective irrationality, we can start devising solutions or workarounds to those problems. I think we can. I don't see any thing like, you know, a sound barrier, a brick wall that will prevent us from continuing to transcend our current cognitive limits with further limits. I don't see any any natural stopping point that I'm sure there will always be things we'll never understand. But that doesn't impress me because never is a long way away. And the things that matter to us, I see no reason why we can't understand him now. Where somebody

[00:45:39] Daniel Dennett Create clip Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah. I struggled with your talk. I was intrigued by the problem. You set up the beginning which said that like you has increased Andi. I struggled because what I heard afterwards was a long list of thinking tools. But what? I didn't hear waas statistical, uh, measurable analysis of what caused that change or how it could be demonstrated. Last week, there was an article in The Times newspaper that said that thinking speeds have decreased significantly since the Victorian times thinking skills, speeds average, thinking speeds have just agreed feeds young that speed people take to come to a certain decision. We'll work. Something out is actually slowed down. Another example In the UK some people might not agree with me, but many people think that educational standards, particularly secondary school, have been dumbed down significantly. Universities certainly complaining about that A lot eso wouldn't one see, actually a decrease in I. Q. In certain advice, advanced countries because of that, so can you give any examples of how people have statistically all scientifically measured? What actually increases I do? Well, decreases it.

[00:47:05] Host Create clip Um, Jim Flynn and many others have have done a lot of statistical research and have explored various hypotheses. And it's not diet. And it's not wealth in its worldwide. And, uh, the results seem to be quite robust and culture independent. And I mean, I can't I can't cite chapter and verse except to say, Just just google it and thinking of talking about thinking, too Google, James Flynn and the Flynn Effect, and you will find a feast of online materials to peruse. Now, I I'm interested in this Times reported study of slowed down thinking, and I want to see what's involved. One possibility, of course, is that by slowing down, people are thinking better, just taking a little more time because their tools take a little more time to work. After all, one of the messages of Dan economies book thinking fast and slow is There are things that thinking fast is good at, and there never things that you better think slow or you won't get it right. And it might be that we've shifted the balance since Victorian days, whether whether this is part of the increase in general capacity to not make mistakes or whether it's a decreased, I don't know. But it's an interesting question. It might well be that it pays to slow down on some of these tasks. And that's something we've learned.

[00:48:37] Host Create clip I'll look into that. Yes. I'm

[00:48:42] Daniel Dennett Create clip sorry. This is moving too

[00:48:44] Host Create clip far away. They are leaving too far away from topic, but really interested. Tiu Tiu here. What do you think? Victims Stein would make off the four horsemen off atheism? Well, I don't know. I'm happy to answer the question that low. I don't think, um, when I was a student, I was a, uh, very great appreciator of the later Wittgenstein along with my fellow Oxford students. Although I did not think of him as the sort of intellectual saint that they did. And in fact, I found a lot of it. Einstein's later work to be suspiciously mysterious, and I I fled that It's interesting, you know, we had some training, is an engineer, and I've met other engineers who, at a certain point in their life, suddenly take a swan dive into philosophy. And it's usually disastrous. Um, Victor Stein clearly wasn't that kind of thinker. He was. I think himself a great constructor of intuition pumps what he would make of the of the four Horsemen of Atheism. I I have no idea. Um, uh, I would expect probably he would have a mixed reaction, but I won't try to untangle it.

[00:50:28] Daniel Dennett Create clip Thank you. Yeah, this is a non Sokratis feel free not to answer, but could you think of any jury's a way toe explain to a call a blind person that there's information, the visual spectrum that they're missing out on Azaz, a person who's not colorblind?

[00:50:53] Host Create clip Oh, sure, I think. In fact, my experience with people who are color blind is that they understand colorfully well, they can't pass the Ishihara tests, but they know what what it's like to pass the test as well as something. After all, I think I can explain to you what it's like to be a pigeon who's a tetra chrome. Instead of, Ah, try chromatic vision. And and they see more colors than we do. And things that you and I would find indistinguishable in color are sharply different to them. And we can go into the details. Uh, I don't think this. I don't think it's impossible. Two. Do the hard work of imagining what this is like in detail. Hello? Hello? Okay, the lights are down so low. I can't really see that. Why?

[00:51:51] Daniel Dennett Create clip We've been thinking about intuitive tools, and I just wondered whether you I think that women are more intuitive than men, as they often think they are.

[00:52:05] Host Create clip Oh, you're trying to leave me Waters where I do not want to go. But actually, I'm glad you asked me the question, because by intuition pump, I sort of don't mean that everyday sense of intuition. I'm talking about intuition in the philosopher sense of something that occurs to you that you just think he's got to be right, and you're not quite sure why? I mean, it happens all the time. I remember, actually, uh, the first pump paper I ever published was about artificial intelligence, And Hubert Dreyfus had written his famous alchemy and artificial intelligence diatribe against a years before Cyril. And in that piece, Dreyfuss said that they'd never, uh, make a computer with intuition. But no computer program would ever have intuition in my first publication. Is it? Actually it's child's play to make your computer that has intuition. You take your computer program that solves any problem you like. It might be long division or weather prediction or whatever. And you asked the question. It gives an answer and you say, How did you work out that answer? And it says, I don't know. It just came to me.

[00:53:37] Host Create clip Intuition is when you've got a conviction, you haven't the faintest idea how you got it when you have an intuition pump you and you know that before the intuition pump, you didn't have the idea. Now you do. You can be pretty sure that the causation runs through that pump somehow. Now you take the pump apart, see how it works, and you get insight into how you arrived at that intuition. And I'm not gonna touch the rest of that. Yes,

[00:54:12] Daniel Dennett Create clip in the same way that we're not quite as good with axes as some of our forebears. Do you think that generations get better on worse as using thinking tools on def. So where do you see the future?

[00:54:26] Host Create clip Well, first of all, let's let's confirm that people get worse. How many in this room know how to run a slide rule? Is there anybody under 40 who knows howto Ah, or how many of you can actually do the algorithm for finding a square root? Yeah, but not many. Um, use it or lose it when you can do it all on your hand calculator. You don't bother learning the technique anymore. And, you know, GPS is probably seriously diminishing our capacity to read maps. Wonderful thinking tool, which is becoming more and more sort of obsolete on so forth. Um, so I think that with the times, different tools play rolls of greater or lesser importance in what we're doing that will no doubt continue and the use it or lose it. Maxim will I dare say, uh, be maintained, uh, in full force. I've always admired and envied my British colleagues who were required in their youth to memorize lots of poetry, and I love it. I love the way they can just find the right line from Shakespeare play or a poem, and I wish I could do that.

[00:56:05] Host Create clip Um, I can't. Of course, if I really want to get that line, I can. I can get on the Web and usually find something appropriate pretty fast, but it's not the same talent they have. But after all, nobody today bothers to memorize train timetables. But people used to do that as a sort of intellectual exercise. I would think we would find better ways of being intellectual athletes than than that. Um, and our new tools permit us to do that. So I think we'll go on. I think Andy Clark, wonderful philosopher of cognitive science and Admiral, puts it very well when he says that we way make smart tools to take the load off our brain so that we can. We can be stupid and still be sort of smart, thanks to the help we get from our tools. Uh, and I think that's, uh, years ago, actually, let me let me expand on that a little bit more years ago at Tufts, George Smith, my wonderful colleague, and I created something called the Curricular Software Studio, and this was to bring computers to bear on the toughest thinking problems. We knew this was creating what what we called prosthetics of the imagination, and one of them was it was, ah, simulated computer on a computer, a 12 bit computer with 256 registers. And Matt, you could watch the instruction cycle happen. You could you could completely see slow down about a 1,000,000 fold and enlarge about a 1,000,000 for what was going on inside the very box that it was simulated on. That was a lovely thinking tool for expanding people's imagination, giving them really vivid and reliable, robust tool for imagining things with computers.

[00:58:13] Host Create clip Then we did the same thing for population genetics, and we had a program called Jean right after Sewall Wright, which had this wonderful simulations of population genetics. And you could you could sort of see at a glance once you used to learn how to use that tool. What was the recessive characteristic and why and so forth. And it was good enough tools so that the evolutionary biologist who helped us create it would use it in her own research to test her hunches before she went to the trouble of seriously modeling them, and we did other, Uh, we called them concept pianos. The reason we called them concept pianos was that in my eagerness to find other fields where we could apply this, I talkto your friend of mine in the music department who taught harmony courses and said, Could we could we make a software device that would help you teach students harmony theory? And we sat down a brainstorm for a couple of hours and realize that what we just invented was the piano. It's wonderful. You get the auditory and you get two different visualizations. You get the keyboard and then you've got the music in front of you. It's it's very user friendly. You can get it running right away, but it's indefinitely expandable. There's really no better instrument for learning harmony theory than a piano. We couldn't really improve on it, so we were. But we were making concept pianos in other areas, and the way we used to sell the idea to thunders and people like that, who's they? Look, there's two ways the technology can make you smart the same way. There's two ways that technology can make you strong.

[01:00:04] Host Create clip There's the bulldozer way. You're still a £98 weakling, but in your bulldozer you can move mountains. And then there's the Nautilus machine way. You use the technology to actually improve your muscles in your coordination and so forth. And we said, What we're trying to do here is make the Nautilus machines of the technology, so they actually you walk away with something in your head that makes you smarter by expanding by giving you these imagination tools, I think that's we don't want to lose sight of the fact that we can use technology that way and actually increase the imagination, powers and the adroitness of thinkers. An example that we started work on this and then for various reasons, had to abandon it. But it's still a dream of mine, and it's the we call it the Tube, which stands for Tufts University Brain Explorer. But the idea was that it would do for the brain what the wonderful London to map does for the underground color coded, simplified straighten out the lines, throwaway extra geographical information that isn't really important. So you can see the connectivity, and we were gonna have this lovely Big Three dimensional color coded system that would permit students to to see what was fastened or what why in the brain and we would update it is even I still think that's a great idea. And like the to map, the idea was, You can you can take the London to map and you can. Then you can impose it on a map, which is geographically accurate. And you condemn discover things that you can't see when you're looking at the map in its regularized, simplified, idealized form. And we want to do the same thing with the brain.

[01:01:58] Host Create clip When you when you look at the thing in its idealized form, the cortex is all unfolded and it's this great dome of a sheet. With all this regular, all the columns and all the layers beautifully laid out and you can see it looks like a computer. Then you sure in crap the whole thing to fit in the skull. And then you can understand why certain things were right next to each other in the brain, even though they're not connected. So I think that it's possible to use computer technology to enhance our imaginations, not just bypass our imaginations and I'd like to see more of that done. Yup. I was just curious if you had the opportunity right now to upload to the rest of humanity. One intuition pump and only one which one would that be? And why? Oh, the trouble is that they're for different, different people. In some cases, um, the one that I would upload for philosophers is one which I published environments. Dangerous idea. And because many philosophers view that, as you know, then it's popular book about Darwinism. Not really a philosophy book. We didn't read it, but there's That's the two black boxes thought experiment, which I think just drives a spike through the heart of, ah, issue. Several issues that meta physicians have been scratching their heads about for 25 years.

[01:03:45] Host Create clip We'll see. Maybe second time around, they'll pay attention to it.

[01:03:54] Daniel Dennett Create clip Thanks. Do you think you could teach a humorless person to have a sense of humor? Good.

[01:04:04] Host Create clip No, probably not. No. Um, in consciousness explain. At one point, I sort of promised to come up with a theory of humor and laughter, and then I couldn't I sort of wished I could erase that sentence because I couldn't keep that promise. And then in a few years ago, a student showed up. Matthew Hurley. He wanted to do a theory of humor with me, and at first I thought his theory was hopeless. Didn't like it at all. But he gradually convinced me of it. And we did that book together with Ridge. Adam's inside jokes, using humor to reverse engineer the mind. And I'm really glad that I did that because I learned a ton and I'm really proud of the theory. It's the Hurley model. It's not mine in the first place, although I've tweaked it a good deal. Um, but, uh, among other things that explains, is sort of why you can't have an algorithm for being humorous. Even though we argue it's the brain is a computer on dhe we want It is a computational. It's an evolutionary, computational model of humor, but it's it's not an algorithm for funny, and we don't think there is one. And we say, Why come the, uh, one of the ways we did the research on that is actually to, uh, I spent some time not only reading the work so but talking with comedians and comedy writers to find out how they how they go about their trade and how they use their own brains as sounding boards.

[01:05:49] Host Create clip And then their brains get, um, sort of distorted. And it's they can't clear their palate and effect. They can't they can't find the touch because they've, uh, used it too much in certain ways. It's that's that, Among other reasons is why I think humor will always be sort of an art, not a not a science. But that doesn't mean there isn't the science of why it's an art somewhere here. But

[01:06:29] Daniel Dennett Create clip hi. We run a decision making company. We help teams think through complex problems. And I was I was really struck by your comment that a ll serious thinking is into personal, which will run counter to what we hear a lot every day of the resistance we face. I'm just interesting to know what leads you to that conclusion.

[01:06:52] Host Create clip Well, many things do. Um, one of them is a very recent paper on behavioral brain sciences. By you go. Merci. A and Dan spare bear on the flaws in our reasoning on they argue that is part of our evolutionary heritage. We're better at detecting the flaws in opponent than in our own case, where way just constitutionally bad at gritting our teeth and looking for errors in what we believe and our reasons for it. But we're very good at ferreting out the errors and what the other side believes. Well, if that's true and they make a good case for it, then as just about everywhere else in nature, the way to do this is with an opponent process. Our eyes work with an opponent. Process in several ways. First of all, the muscles that determine where your eye looks. Next, those air sort of constant tug of war with each other pulling this one that. But that's a very flower of friendly tug of war. But then, in the frontal I fields, we've got this other opponent process going on where their little teams of neurons that they're saying about wherever fixations, some of them were saying Home sweet home Nice. I like this familiar.

[01:08:21] Host Create clip And the others they're saying boring. Been there, done that. They want to move on. This is constant opponent process between different groups of neurons trying to look over here. No, look where we're looking and and they duke it out constantly all day long. And the result is that you have very good patterns of eye tracking because in the opponent processes among the little, uh, groups, they get the job done very well, unless you've got a problem. And if you've got a deficiency there, then you get abnormal PSA catting. And if you have abnormal PSA catting, that means you're not looking where you should be looking when you should be looking on. That is a profound deficit. There's strong evidence, for instance, that autistic children do not have normal psychotic. They don't look where they should. They're not good at gaze monitoring their mothers, and and they don't They're not good at that, uh, joint attention. And this means that whereas a normal, uh, infant is just sucking from a fire hose of information all the time, some are not sort of attending to the right place at the right time, and it changes the way their whole brain works, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst. So I think opponent processes are nature's way of getting jobs done very often, and we should just acknowledge that and exploit it and refine it for whatever it is that we're trying to do.

[01:10:07] Host Create clip I

[01:10:07] Daniel Dennett Create clip was fascinated where your approach on free will and I don't know about anybody else here. But remember what coming into into into touch with the idea of the kind of sexy, rebellious idea that free will is an illusion it seemed to gel with. I think what I and a lot of people were into eating surely about, um, kind of nonreligious, heading towards a more material explanation thing that's very leftist to think anti free will. But you argue very powerfully, pro free will. And so I just wanted to find out what if you could explain when the neuroscience sources are that explain materially, where free will occurs and when it occurred, and also and also if we want to debate whether it exists or not, where you want to see the debate moving on. You know there's a lot of sociologists who want us to be talking about free will purely because they want. They want to say that. Look, there's a certain class of people who are populating our prisons politicians, mainly in this country. But where where would you like to see that debate going. What? It's useful application and and you and the neuroscience. Thank you.

[01:11:21] Daniel Dennett Create clip It

[01:11:21] Host Create clip was a lot in that. But I appreciate all of it, actually. And I've been, um, thinking and talking a lot about what prison reforms we might want to do And what? Whether the system of punishment needs any revision. Some of you may have seen the revue idea of Adrian Raines. Wonderful book in prospect last month. Uh, Adrian Raine is the neuroscientist psychologist who's studied the brains of, uh, psychopaths on death row murderers. Ah, lot of them. And even more amazing is the experiments where he got a lot of of psychopaths in the wild. That is, they've never been in any trouble with the law. Well, how do you How do you find psychopaths in the wild? He had a hunch. He got a grant. He hired dozens of temp workers in Los Angeles and found it. Sure enough, when he gave them all the tests that were used in the prisons for psychopathy. So it's the sort of gold standard measure. Um, there were psychopaths among attempts at a rate of about three times the average in the regular population.

[01:12:38] Host Create clip So now we had a group of psychopaths that had never been in prison, had any trouble with the law, and under the certificate of confidentiality that his work was done, he was able to get his graduate assistance to interview these in depth, and they all confessed to armed robberies, rapes, even murders. So they really are psychopaths, and they're really out there. And he's not the tools to study them. Psychopaths are different through, but there's other people with other sorts of, uh, brain differences that we have to treat differently in our in our system of of law and punishment. I don't agree with all of rains, uh, proposals. I don't think he does either, by the way, but he's raised the issue very well in this book's called the Anatomy of Violence. But in my own work, what I want to do is turn the tables a little bit and say, Instead of looking at the metaphysical foundations of free will, and whether or not quantum indeterminacy plays a role, work backwards, start with the idea of the free agent as being morally competent, being a morally competent agent, and ask yourself what are the specs for a morally competent agent. What does it have? Tohave, innit? What does it What should you be able to do to be morally competent? And we can work that out? I think quite well. And it turns out that neuroscience has next to nothing to say about about how normal people might not be morally competent. I think normal people are morally competent and hence in that sense, have free will.

[01:14:29] Host Create clip And because they have free will, they are proper. And because they're morally competent, they are appropriate bearers of full responsibility for their deeds. And this includes their eligibility for punishment when they, uh, commit misdeeds. That's a long story, but I think that's a constructive way of proceeding. Um, most of us, I dare say everybody in this room believes they have free will. In the sense, If you believe that you are competent enough to sign a contract that binding contract, then then you have free will. In this sense, I mean, then you believe you have free will, in this sense, has nothing to do with determinism or indeterminacy. That has to do with your ability to assess outcomes, probabilities, consequences, costs and benefits the value of reputation and so forth. If you've got all of that, then when you sign a contract, you mean it. And so it counts anybody else yet one more up top. Yes, let's go. Thank

[01:15:56] Daniel Dennett Create clip you for your presentation. I have a question with regards to the connection between the physical part of our brain, how this has impacted in our network and computerized communication as we move on more and more into online networking and communications and how this will impact our history of philosophy going forward. So you know what we would would are thinking be different. Let's say compared to the Greeks and how this will be changing about, we need to be thinking about

[01:16:28] Host Create clip Oh, I think the answer is yes. It's very clear that our thinking today is different from the ancient Greeks because as small children, we can master all sorts of concepts. But not the smartest people in Athens couldn't master. Um, not just about science, but certainly about science. I think, uh, we have ah, hugely enlarged conceptual repertory today compared with the ancient Greeks. That doesn't mean that they weren't wise, but I think it does. Doesn't mean that it was harder for them to work these things out. And if you look at Plato's dialogues, for instance, at least to my eyes, often what I see there strikes me as heroic, heroic attempts to think about topics that Plato and his interlocutors don't have the terms for. And they're sort of inventing distinctions in terms as they go along and sometimes making rather embarrassing mistakes by today's standards. Um, I had the same impression when I went back some years ago and read the books that were my favorite books when I was a graduate student in Oxford. First learning about the brain and trying to think about the mind is the brain, and there wasn't very much that was written. It was good. What was good was in its way brilliant, but they just didn't have the tools. They didn't have the thinking, tools, the expression tools that we have today. And they labored brilliantly and eccentrically and ingeniously to explain things that now I think that the average smart 14 year old could put quite athlete in a few simple sentences of cyberspeak.

[01:18:31] Host Create clip Thanks. I think that's a good point on which to stop. Thank

[01:18:34] Daniel Dennett Create clip you very much