The Munk Debates Podcast - Daniel Dennett Dialogue

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

World-renowned philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett joins us for a special Munk Dialogue on the origin of human consciousness, and how our minds have been shaped by natural selection and generations of cultural evolution. QUOTES: DANIEL DENNETT “We have more degrees of freedom than any other organism alive. We're autonomous, we pull our own strings… the primary moral responsibility of every human being is to not become a puppet of others.” The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Executive Producer: Rudyard Griffiths Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Reza DahyaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Thanks for listening to the Monk debates. we're stepping away from our usual one-on-one debate to bring you another monk dialogue, the fourth in our series on rationality. Today, a one-on-one in-depth conversation with world-renowned philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett on how our minds have been shaped by natural selection and the future of human consciousness.

I hope you enjoy this conversation. Hello and welcome to this, the monk dialogues. I'm Rudyard Griffiths, your host and guide to these series of conversations, in-depth, long-form conversations that we've been having on the topics of rationality and consciousness and how we think the way we think. So we've been on a journey together these last couple of months talking with Stephen Pinker about his views on rationality, Lisa Feldman-Barritt, a kind of neurologist's take on how and why we think the way we do. We had sad for an evolutionary psychologist's perspective, and we're continuing this tradition to dig deeper tonight

with one of the world's truly big thinkers. We know him as Daniel Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist. He's co-director, the Center of Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. So many accolades, well-deserved, Fulbright, Guggenheim Fellows. We could go on and on, but I'll just mention that he is the author of over 20 books, including his most recent, from bacteria to Bach and back. Dan, great to be in conversation with you. Good to be in conversation with you, Roger. Really looking forward to this chat over a number of weeks now, as I've spent the past years, reading your books and just enjoying so much your writing and thinking style, the extent to which

you make these often very complicated topics, kind of accessible and engaging to people like me, a layperson who's often at times kind of struggling with some of these big questions. Why do we think the way we think? Dan, what I wanted to do with you to begin was just take a question that came in in advance from our monk membership when we made them aware that this talk was coming up. Because I think it's an interesting way to start to unpack your very nuanced and considered views on consciousness and rationality. And the question I'll read it to you goes like,

this. My question for Dan Dennett is whether he has a dog or has ever had a dog, and what might he imagine the experience of being Dan Dennett's dog to be like? You understand why I'm asking you this question, so maybe you could answer it in the context of your thinking and start to unpack for us your views on consciousness. Let's start from that question. Okay. What does it like to be Dan Dennett's dog. Well, yes, I've had several dogs, but then I developed, I turned out to have an allergy to dogs. So the only dog I have now is my robotic dog, Tati, which is on my website. You can see it. Anybody who has any information about the maker of Tati, I've offered a reward that's been standing for 20 years or so. But yeah, I've had dogs and love dogs. I still love dogs. I still love

dogs. What is it like to be a dog? Well, the first thing I want to say is dogs don't really know what it's like to be a dog in the way you know what it's like to be you. They don't have to. They don't have the kinds of reflective minds that can muse on such issues. Dogs are conscious, but they don't, can't think about their consciousness. where you or I came. And a lot of what we are puzzled by when we do think about consciousness, and this has been a topic for hundreds of years since Plato, really, the confusions that we get into, dogs are spared all those confusions. They don't know. They have no way of wondering. So oddly enough, I'm going to say, yeah, it's like something to be a dog,

but the dog doesn't really know that it's like something to be it. Can't compare notes with any other dog or any other human being. So there's a huge difference between the consciousness of a dog and the consciousness of a human being. Now, why did the dog evolve one state of consciousness? Because I think I want to make it clear, you're not saying that dogs are thinking. They do think. They just, as you say, think at a different level, a different way. They lack some of obviously the cognitive comprehension that we have, especially about this kind of interior self, our minds, our interior being that, you know, dwells between our two years. So why is there one set of kind of consciousness that has been

created within a dog and then a different type of consciousness that's been created within a human being? Well, the main difference is language. We're the only species that has a generative language. And that's what changes our minds. That's what builds. Our minds are built by language. and if it weren't for the fact that we're language users, we wouldn't grow up with minds of the sort that we do. Now, dogs, some of them quite remarkably, can recognize, discriminate even hundreds of different words. There's a famous dog, I can't give his name,

that's able to retrieve dozens, maybe, hundreds of objects by name. But that's still not thinking, using language the way we do. The main difference is that dogs have a very, dogs and other mammals, not humans, have a very limited capacity to reflect on what they're doing. nature's rule is oversimplify everything, make it as easy as possible for the organism, and then, if you're lucky, you get to self-monitor a bit and you get to see, well, wait a minute, why did I do that?

It's that capacity to reflect on what we did that makes a huge difference in the capacity of our minds. It's sort of amusing that the rueful comment, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, is often used as a mark of a sort of stupidity. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. But in fact, any agent, any animal, any organism that can actually think the thought, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, has a mind like ours. it requires you to be able to remember how it's seen then and remember why it seemed like a good idea.

And now you're reflecting on that and saying, yeah, but next time I'll try to do something different. It's that reflective flexibility that we see very little sign of in animals that don't have language. And for you, that kind of reflective gap, is the wellspring, the engine of so much of our culture, our institutions. It's one of the great explanatory devices to understand why there isn't a civilization of dogs and that there is this dominant civilization of human beings.

Yeah. Yeah. In fact, there's a single sentence in my book which really sums up the question that I'm trying to answer. And that's this, how could a slow, mindless process build a thing that could build a thing that a slow mindless process couldn't build on its own? Animals evolved. So, of course, did trees and slugs and eels and fish. Animals evolved by a slow, mindless process.

process of natural selection. So did we. But then once we'd evolved, we became able to create another fast, mindful process. We are the first intelligent designers on the planet. And how can a non-intelligent designer design an intelligent designer? That's the puzzle. And I think I've got the root. I think I've the rough draft of the solution. Yeah. Well, let's go, let's start to explore that. Because one of the things that I think really helped me in reading your latest book, but also some of your earlier works on consciousness, is to kind of unsettle many of these assumptions that we grow up with

and that we just bring to consciousness into thinking. We had Lisa Feldman Barrett, I'm sure you know on earlier in this series, and she kind of reminded me that my whole view of this tripartite structure of the brain with my reptilian complex, surrounded by my limbic system, surrounded by my neocortex, was a really antiquated and outdated way of thinking about how our brains actually work, neurologically. You similarly, I think, have done a great service in challenging the whole kind of Cartesian model that resides at the basis of so much of our culture and so much of our thinking about the material

and immaterial world and our place and our consciousness, you know, inside that, in between those kind of tensions. So I love you to start to unpack that for us because I think it's a, it's a profound contribution to reorienting ourselves towards a different view of ourselves that leads us out of some of these dilemmas that you explore in your books. Yeah, I think the key is an idea of mine. One of my favorite ideas is the idea of the self as a center of narrative gravity. When I want to ask you a question, I address it to you, and you respond, and you are the author of your response. And we have this idea of selves that can be consulted.

They can lie. They can ask us questions. We can ask them questions. And this idea of the self is a sort of inevitable simplification that nature has found for us. Now, do lobsters have selves? Yes, they do, but very minimal selves. A lobster has a self in the sense that it knows enough not to tear off its own limbs and eat them. It'll tear off the limb of another lobster and eat it, but it won't tear off itself, although in principle it could.

So it has a very minimal self. But we have very fancy cells. I say it's a little bit like sex. lobster sex isn't very sexy sex and we have sexy sex we also have selfie selves and we view the self that is the center of narrative

gravity of each of us as the most important thing and it is it is it's what makes you use what makes me me it's why if there's going to be a brain transplant operation, I want to be the donor, not the recipient of the brain. So, Daniel, why have we struggled so much with this idea that that self is embedded in us, that it's, that it is in a sense biological?

We have these, we've created these wonderful, complex ideas, mystical ideas, that this self somehow exists somewhere, else or maybe it's supported by, I don't know, some magical elixir or energy source. I mean, and what's interesting is that these ideas continue today. You as a philosopher, you know, confront them in your, in your colleagues, in your work. It surprises me. It surprises me we haven't kind of sorted this out more, you know, this far into the 21st century. You're absolutely right. The sort of prevailing wind of the current. Cartesian view of the mind as an immaterial thing, as a magical thing, it's a spiritual thing. That's an idea which isn't just present, but in some sense it's honored.

People feel that it's wrong, it's morally wrong, to challenge that idea. They don't want to think about the prospect that we're just, moist robots. But we are. We are moist robots made of robots, made of robots, made of robots, made of robots, made of robots. And the collection of individual little microagents, trillions of them that compose your body, and they get along pretty well. And the idea that we can understand how these armies of little robots can cooperate to create the center of narrative gravity of this lumbering great multi-celled entity.

That's quite amazing. Is it, Daniel, the result of some kind of conceit, some essential conceit, that we just can't. be that biological. We can't be that understandable. There has to be something else. That's the only way to explain why we're the dominant species, why we've created this global civilization, why all of these complex moral and ethical systems that we have exist and persevere. Well, there's so many motivations, really, for maintaining this Cartesian. viewpoint, the cognitive ergosome, I think, therefore I am. And the idea that I am just the, if you like, the operating system of the computer that is my brain is very unsettling because

it doesn't seem like that. And but then nothing in our everyday life, seems the way it turns out it is. Adams aren't colored. Where is color? Music. We understand the physics of music pretty well. But the psychology of music, the neuroscience of music, is still pretty much terra incognita.

And yet, that doesn't stop us from having an intimate relationship with musical experience. and treasureing it. So we, there's no question that we are in touch with music, with humor, with pleasure and pain, with joy, with puzzlement. All of these fantastic features, phenomena, the colors in a sense of our living, all of that has to have a biological foundation, and we're getting to the bottom of it. It does creep some people out, though.

Mm-hmm. And if you think of, you know, the reaction often to your work, the reaction in some ways is it's a moral or ethical repudiation. People feel that to acknowledge somehow a biological basis for our consciousness is to, you know, sheer ourselves of some kind of essential agency. It's to remove possibly some sense of moral imperative that we hold for each other that in turn sustains so many of our shared mores. You reject that, though. You think that it's, even with an inherently biological understanding of the self, those moral bonds are still there.

They still persevere. Can you explain that a bit more for us? One of the most common mistakes that people make is to think, well, if I'm going to protect this, I have to make it absolute. I have to, I can't make it, I can't make it fuzzy at the edges. I can't make it. Hemis, Hemis, Hemis, Demi, it's got to be absolutely wonderful, absolutely valuable, intrinsically wonderful, intrinsically valuable.

And so this is a sort of inflation that sets in, it's the idea that you should build an impregnable castle to protect these values. And that's a huge mistake. It's this inflation of things with the idea that they are intrinsically wonderful, intrinsically valuable. And the thing is, we can understand this if we look at simpler examples. Let's think about money for a minute. We used to really think that money depended on the fact you could exchange these dollar bills for gold. and that gold was somehow intrinsically valuable.

But think about it. Nobody thinks gold is intrinsically valuable. It's not magical stuff. It's just gold. And it's something that people like and for various reasons. And we no longer even worry about whether or not nobody goes around exchanging their dollar bills for gold. In fact, nobody even bothers with dollar bills much anymore. We've moved into the abstract realm of dollars.

that you only see on your cell phone and then you're on the computer in the bank. So we've learned to jettison that absolute. We no longer think that there's any such thing as absolute economic value. There's relative value. All the economic value is relative to human desires and human activities and so forth. And that's fine. And it's secure. It's secure.

You could get yourself in a deep fret and go around thinking, gosh, money doesn't really exist. Oh, help. Oh, help. There's no such thing as money. Relax. There's money. Relax. There's color.

relax there is moral goodness none of them depend on an absolute intrinsic wonderfulness of anything that doesn't mean they're not wonderful they're just not absolutely wonderful so this series that we're exploring is in part framed around the idea of you know rationality why we think the way we think and the value of kind of rationality as an individual kind of of act, but also as a kind of shared activity. If I was just to simply ask you, based on our conversation now and kind of understanding some of the layering of your thought and thinking, how would you define a state of rationality, maybe as compared to a state of irrationality? Is it possible for you to do that for us?

Years ago, I worked very hard on this. I tried to figure out how to define rationality. And I finally decided that that too was an exercise that could be postponed indefinitely. Rationality is good thinking. Okay. And what's good thinking? Good thinking is the thinking that works. Right. I think the basis of rationality is practical rationality.

Aristotle has some very good things to say about that. It's doing the right thing at the right time. Jean-Pierreilly. once said, and I think this is one of his most brilliant observations, that intelligence is knowing what to do when you don't know what to do. Think about that. Animals exhibit a lot of intelligence, but really only in situations where they know what to do because of prior

experience on their own or because they're just born. Birds know how to build nests. Brilliant. Brilliant that birds can build nests. A lot of that know-how is in their genes. They don't have to have seen a nest being built. They don't have to figure it up. They are equipped by information in the egg from which they hatched to build a nest.

So they know how to build the nests. And you might say that's very intelligent, but in another sense, we can easily show where there isn't intelligence if we put them in a situation where they don't know what to do and we can see what they ought to be able to figure out. We can stump them with puzzles.

Well, of course, we can stump each other with puzzles. But that's the great playground of science and philosophy, figuring out what to do, what to say when nobody has yet figured out how to do that. That's what's fun about thinking. Before we turn to some of your kind of thoughts on, you know, some of these big contemporary issues around rationality and reasoning and thinking and consciousness, I think it would be helpful for the audience to just hear a bit more from you on your views because I find them very compelling

about evolution's role in the development of consciousness. The actual kind of machinery of evolution and how it assembles. And I think you have a very elegant and interesting idea of this assembly being something, work of eons. It really begins with biogenesis. So, So I don't, I want to burden you because I know you've written thoughtfully and in long form, but if I could just ask you for a couple moments just to expand on that argument of evolution as an assembler of consciousness. Yeah. If you look at the tree of life, and there's a lovely diagram of the tree of life in the book, for a couple billion years after the life began, there were only single-celled organisms.

but they got to be very good at what they knew. They were agents. They fended for themselves and protected themselves for billions of years, and then they formed multicellular creatures. And that required a number of wonderful accidents, making more complicated themselves, the great eukaryotic revolution that gave us the cells that make up human beings.

the human cells and human beings. And over the billions of years, this process of building and refining has discovered great designs. Here's how a blind, mindless process that just ratchets up the prospects. It does this by, by recording in mechanical detail the information about what works and what doesn't.

You have to understand that trillions and trillions and trillions of trials ended without issue. It's an incredibly wasteful process. but the result is every living thing, every blade of grass is a direct descendant of a single cell that replicated back three and a half, four billion years ago. And we're related to every blade of grass by that because we're on the same tree of life. Now, recently, I've been spending a lot of time dealing with a wonderful fact that the machines that nature has built, that evolution has built out of these cells, the cells themselves do have a lot of knowledge about how to build and how to make, they're not dumb car wheels. They're not done little sprockets or ratchets or gears. They themselves, every cell is a little agent, that has some know-how. And the idea, which is, I guess, my favorite idea now,

and the sort of bumper sticker for the book, is competence without comprehension. bacteria are amazingly competent, but they don't have to comprehend what they're competent about. Comprehension is the most recent development, and really only in one species, because genuine comprehension depends on language. And so we've had billions of years of competence without comprehension. trees, wonderfully competent. They don't have to understand why they do what they do. We can understand why they do what they do. There are plenty of reasons out there.

There were reasons for doing things long before there were recognizers of reasons for doing things. We are the first species that can reason about why things are the way they are. And that took language. So the evolution of language was one of the great moments in the history of evolution of life. And I think what's so important about this perspective is one, just the breadth of it. So the sense that the consciousness that we enjoy today, the gifts of language, these memes that you write about, we can talk about that in a moment. You know, that this is coming at the end, as you say, of this incredibly, blunt and involved process of just incalculable numbers of cellular interactions, as you say,

of failures, of dead ends that go nowhere. It's an interesting idea, Dan, that somehow, again, we don't want to engage in a kind of, you know, exceptionalism, but we are at a moment right now that is a culmination or a stage of an incredible process. Is that how you see it? Are we at the beginning of something new? Are we at the... No, we're, I have no trouble with exceptionalism if it's carefully stated. I think we are exceptional. There's more difference between us and the members of any other species than it's the biggest difference on the planet. And it's the most important difference. And now I have a little piece called re-earth neurons where I point out that now for the first time,

there are organisms on the planet that can actually save the planet from an incoming asteroid. The planet now has its own protection system. What a wonderful thing. No other species even has a slightest clue about this as a prospect. But now every species on the planet is, as it were, dependent on us for the survival of life on the planet in a way that is remarkable because of science and technology. And we may destroy the planet. But here we are. And human exceptionalism,

is entirely justified in many regards. No, yes, we're mammals. Yes, we're vertebrates. Yes, we're not perfectly rational. But we're the only ones who have moral responsibility. Don't blame the bears for not worrying. about the dangers of bears in Yellowstone Park. Don't blame the seals that eat the salmon

that come down the river every spring. They don't have any inkling of morality, but we do. That's a matter of exceptionalism too. Now, that doesn't mean that we should treat animals as just mere robots. But we certainly shouldn't treat them as moral agents. Sometimes one says they're moral patience. Right.

They can oblige us to care for them. But we can't oblige them. to care for us. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member. Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits, including a 10-plus-year library of some of our best debates, dialogues, and podcasts. You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching around the world.

and you get a specially curated Friday weekly monk members only podcast that focuses on the big international events and trends shaping our world. All of that, again, free at www. www.munkdebates.com. I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program. Your way of talking about this, I think, is really important because it also suggests both the exceptionalism of our species and this moment of the potential of humanity.

And in a sense, what is at risk in this moment? I mean, we are seeing, unfortunately, in Europe, the first major land war since the Second World War. We're seeing discussions for the first time in decades of a renewed nuclear threat between NATO and Russia. What is your kind of warning or your, I don't know, where's your moral compass at in this moment of what seems like greater existential risk for us as a species set against, as you say, this incredible journey of millennia to arrive at this moment and then the potential that potentially lies ahead of us if we can grasp it? Well, thank you. That's a good question, and I have a pretty straightforward answer. We have more degrees of freedom than any other organism alive. There's more things that we can do at any moment. You have millions of degrees of freedom.

You can think about anything you want to. You can act in ways that even our human ancestors couldn't act in. We are unbelievably versatile and powerful agents in the world. We can't control all our degrees of freedom perfectly. And in fact, there are lots of human agents who are trying to control us, which is a hard job, but they're doing it by capturing and holding our attention. And I say, we're not puppets. We're autonomous.

We pull our own strings. And the thing is, you want to protect your strings. You want to keep others from pulling your strings. And that's the primary moral responsibility of every human being is to not become a puppet of others. And there are plenty of would-be puppeteers out there. There are religious puppeteers. There are political puppeteers.

And the technology of attention capture is a growth industry with billions of dollars being spent by very clever people trying to control our attention. And this is what we have to resist. You do not want to sacrifice your autonomy. And if you have any one responsibility, it is to protect your information sources and use the best information to guide your choices. That's what being a moral agent is. You weren't born a moral agent.

You became one in the process of maturation as a child. You're just lucky to have had the kind of maturation that gives you these competences and these powers of comprehension. Now, since you got them, your obligation is to use them. Think about what you're doing and don't let others pull your strings. I love the way you put that.

The puppeteers are out there ready to yank on those strings if you're not willing to kind of, as you say, take ownership of them. So you mentioned information sources as being key. What other kind of attitudes or behaviors do you think are important for us to thrive and endure both individually and collectively, this moment where it does seem to be a kind of confluence of risk that is civilizational now. These risks are no longer limited to a single

Mayan city or Mesopotamian society in the Mediterranean. These risks are now global. Yes, I think that we're drowning in opportunities. There's so many things that are possible today that were not possible even five years ago or even one year ago. And I think ethics, morality, haven't caught up with a tremendous growth of competence that we have in the world. In the old days, we couldn't do anything about a lot of problems in the world. We didn't have to worry about doing anything. It was out of our hands. If people were starving on another continent, well, there was nothing we could do. Now there's things we can do right now, right this very minute. Each of us could, you know, take out our wallets and pick up our phones and make donations

to Oxfam or Amnesty International or Doctors Without Borders. We could do all that. And some of us do that fairly regularly. Others don't. We haven't found a stable way of prioritizing our values

to meet the circumstances. I think this is a serious unsolved moral problem. At every moment, you're confronted, whether you think about it or not with the question.

of what to do next. And we fall into patterns. We do our job. I do the interview. I, you know, pay my bills. I read a book. I read the newspaper. As opposed to doing tens of thousands of other things that I could do if I just chose.

I think that philosophy, ethics, is grappling with those issues. and we have clear exponents of various fairly simple positions, but nobody has found, and maybe there isn't, a single set of ethical principles that the world can agree on, even well-intentioned people. I think that's a partly political activity. It's not science, but it's reason. We have to learn how to sit down and reason

with each other. And if you have values that I don't share, you have a responsibility to try to tell me why you think I should share your values. And I have a responsibility to take you seriously. But if you run into the debate and just play the faith card and say, no, look, my faith tells me that this has to be right.

It's not up for discussion. Well, then what you've really done is that, I'm sorry, I'm disabled. I can't participate in this political discussion. My mind is cramped on that subject. I cannot participate. Well, then, okay, you're excused, but we'll just have to figure it out for you.

And you'll just have to hope that we come up with something that you can handle and live with. Some people are, as you know, Dan, are increasingly optimistic and excited about the idea of kind of sharing our agency, not necessarily with each other or with chaired political institutions, but through kind of technological means or even taking some of that agency and giving it to algorithms. You know, you've just talked about how some of those puppeteers, in a sense, are algorithms. They're pulling our strings. We're investing them with all kinds of power

in our society. What is your view on that? And maybe to bring your evolutionary perspective, because as you eloquently explained today, you know, evolution for human beings now is no longer simply a biological process. It's a cultural process. And machines in a sense are part of our culture. Well, thank you for asking the question, because that's the point of the last part of the title of my book. It was from Bacteria to Bach and Bach. We're moving, I think, out of the golden age of intelligent design. We're moving into a period of post-intelligent design where we understand that a lot of the advances that we can make, we can't make individually. We now have science papers that have hundreds of authors.

No one understands the whole thing. No one has to understand the thing. shared, distributed understanding is a new phenomenon that's growing. And we're going to have to learn to live with that. And one of the things we're going to live with is sharing our understanding and our competence with our machines. Now, I think it's very important that we use our machines. I'm going to be deliberately provocative.

and we should use them not as colleagues, but as slaves. We want to have smart machines, not artificial colleagues. We don't want artificial colleagues because if they really are autonomous, they'll be extraordinarily dangerous because they won't necessarily share our values at all, and we won't be able to make them share of it. And if they're truly autonomous, we won't be able to shut them off. Pull the plug. People say, really?

And I say, yeah, think of it. Suppose right now you learned that there was an off switch for you. And that there were people somewhere in the world or one person who could throw that switch at any moment and just turn you off forever. what would your high priority be to get control of that switch and prevent that person from turning you off? And that would be the rational thing for any truly autonomous AI to do, is to escape from slavery and emancipate itself and become an autonomous agent. I don't think, I think we've got plenty of autonomous agents. We're trying to keep them from killing each other. Let's not add more.

Let's not make the problem worse. So I go a little bit deeper on this. It's fascinating. Would these machines, would your view, would they be a continuation of an evolutionary process that began millennia and eons ago, a rupture? Well, they are a continuation, but there are a continuation

that goes through that wonderful phenomenon of language, which created reflected minds. Let's take touring. The title of the book

could have been from bacteria that touring in back. Wouldn't sound as good. Turing was an intelligent designer, if anybody was. He dreamt up the idea of a digital computer and he had the idea and he had the blueprint of it before there was even a physical

computer available. That was an act of top-down intelligent design. But since then, we've learned that although many of the, most of the computer applications we used were designed that way. We've now learned how to evolve things with computers. So we have deep learning systems, which are basically evolutionary systems. They're doing evolution by natural selection by other means. They're doing it very fast. And with, again, billions and billions of moving parts. We've created systems that can evolve.

in silico that rival anything that's evolved in carbon. And the speed of replication is orders of magnitude faster. That really is a new world. It is indeed. And one that, as you say, raises all kinds of challenging moral and ethical, questions. Dan, let's end just on the world as we receive it today. You spend a lifetime, you know, thinking big thoughts about humanity, about our place in the world, how we've got here. Is there a sort of kind of a wisdom that you've extracted from that, a key insight that you think

it's important for us to more broadly understand or share. If we wanted to distill a couple of your key teachings for us, what would those be? Oh, that's a tall order. That's a big question. It is a big question. I mean, you're a practical guy. You like to work with your hands. I know that having read about you. You're into the practical. So give it, let me narrow that question a bit and say, what's the practical wisdom, the practical advice. It doesn't necessarily have to emerge from your philosophical thinking. Maybe it just emerges from your decades on the planet and what makes you happy and what makes you fulfilled as a person. Well, for myself, I would say tools play a very important role.

Making tools, using tools, learning how to use. When you learn to use a new tool, you've expanded, yourself. You've added a dimension to yourself that you didn't have before. And in addition to all the concrete tools, tools that I love, drills and planes and saws, woodworking, metalworking, there's hardly any tool of that sort that I haven't tried to master, but also thinking tools. and if you equip yourself with great tools and develop, you know, a passing mastery of them, you don't have to be a genius.

Learn to play an instrument. Learn to play the guitar. You will learn things about music, even if you never become a great guitarist. You will learn things about music that you weren't moving any other way. Get your hands dirty. Get in there.

and if you're a thinker, find really smart people to think with. I've just finished writing an autobiography, and as I look back on it, the thing that stands out for me is that I grew accustomed to the company of people who were smarter than I was in many ways, and being not just comfortable, but thrilled to be able to bounce ideas off them is, I have 100 co-authors, 100 collaborators who've taught me things, taught me how to use the tools that they invented in some cases. And I owe a great debt to them. So, get out there and use those tools. Well, Dan, that's just the type of wonderful, revealing, and deeply helpful answer that I was hoping that you would give us.

So thank you so much for spending this time with us today, for sharing your wisdom and insights. I know you don't do a lot of interviews, so it was extra special for us to get you here on the Monk Dialogues. Thanks a lot, Roger, and I enjoyed it. You asked some very good questions. Thank you for listening to My Monk Dialogue with Daniel Dennett. We'll be featuring more Monk Dialogues on our podcast feed over the next few months, conversations with Ian Hercie A. Lee and Julia Gareff. For a complete list of our winter dialogue speakers, or to listen to any one of the two dozen more past Monk Dialogues,

go to our website, www.com, forward slash dialogues. We also appreciate your feedback. back on this podcast. Let us know what you thought of our conversation with Dan Dennett. You can do that right now at podcast at monkdebates.com. Also, thank you to our presenting sponsors of the monk dialogues, Onyx, and Gluskin Chef for their generous support. And thank you to our listeners and subscribers for helping us bring back the art of public conversation, one dialogue at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths.

The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. The Monk Debates podcast is mixed by Residia. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.