Dennett: I think the book is politically optimistic. And it is opposed to a sort of paternalism that I find offensive.
Reason: What sorts of political and economic institutions maximize both freedom and responsibility?
Dennett: People all over the world are pretty smart. Some of them, through no fault of their own, are relatively uninformed. If you inform them, if you remove the disinformation and misinformation they have, they'll make good choices. You can trust democracy. This is all just Civics 101. Give the people the information, and they'll make wise choices.
Not that they'll always make good choices. Not that people can't ever pull the wool over their eyes. Not that they don't have other motives. But in spite of all of this, the capacity to tell truth from falsehood is pretty strong.
Now, if you think my account of human freedom is right, then the way to protect it is to make sure that your society is one in which the benefits of being a member of the society are so tempting and so great that people will take responsibility in order for it to happen.
Reason: Most of human history was not characterized by such societies.
Dennett: Well, that's right. That's why freedom evolved. That's why we're in better shape now than we were before.
Reason: You argue that ideas can evolve in a way analogous to genes in biological evolution. Some ideas survive better than others; they can mutate and recombine into new ideas. Such units of cultural evolution have been called memes. But unlike genes, memes are not discrete units.
Dennett: That's not necessarily true. The boundary conditions are problematic, yes, but so are the conditions for where a gene begins and where it ends. It's not just a straightforward sequence.
There's an area of the law that deals with this set of problems, and that's copyright and patent protection. Patentable ideas don't come in discrete units, yet we can do a pretty good job of treating them like they do. The boundary problems of copyright and patent law are exactly the same boundary problems of meme identification.
We have patent law and copyright law because there are ideas out there that are worth copying. Well, "something worth copying" is what a gene is.
Reason: Genes can be defined in terms of the proteins that they make: This sequence makes only this protein. Can you say that about memes?
Dennett: Genes are all pretty much in one language, DNA and RNA. Cultural production is more varied. There are more different routes to production, but maybe it was like that in the early days of genes too.
In culture we have lots of different alphabets. Potters have the alphabet of how you make a pot. If an expert potter or even a good apprentice watches a master make a pot, that potter can see something that you and I can't. He can parse what he's watching into a sort of alphabet of moves, of features that are more or less invisible to you and me, but if you're a potter you know them. They're recipes, basically, and wherever there are recipes made up out of parts that are copyable, you have a stabilizing influence. When you have a repertoire of moves, you have fidelity in copying.
Plato wrote thousands of years ago. We don't have the original texts, but we have very pure, highly reliable, 99-point-something-percent reliability. How do we know that? Because the alphabet has several different levels. At the word level and even at the idea level, there are places where we've corrected the text of Plato, found the corruption -- which is like a mutation -- and corrected it with proofreading enzymes. The proofreading enzymes in this case are scholars.
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|1.27.10 @ 2:37AM|#
I find Mr. Denetts arguments as expressed in this article very persuasive. Except for one thing, the statement at the beginning stateing that "Human Freedom ... is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species, us"
Leaving aside the tautology of "Human". I see little evidence that it can only be found in humans.
For example, I saw a NGC show about a couple of killer whales that killed a great white shark. Upon further examination, the biologists found that pod's members to be rather battle scarred compared to most killer whales.
The show described the phenomenom as a pod of killer whales that had a learned and shared culture of killing sharks.
Furthermore, other pods specialized in hunting fish, or seals. In the later case, by driving hard onto the shore nearly beaching themselves. The particular hunting culture seemed to effect the practical size of the pods involved.
While the show referred to this behavior as culture, I would not be surprised to learn of shunning or devotional behaviors involving killer whales that either refuse a pod's culture or somehow manage to change it, if only the biologists watch long enough.
If this is true, it would not be much different from the civilizing behavior applied to members of our society Mr. Dennett describes as increasing the scope of free will in humans.
|1.27.10 @ 2:42AM|#
A thoroughly impractical but interesting thought experiment would be what would happen to a pod of killer whales if you could attach a radar to each and every member.
I bet you would find a culture war as some of the whales chose to use the radar while others wanted to stick to the tried and true.
Pingback| 4.26.10 @ 10:41PM
Reason Magazine interview with Daniel Dennett links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
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