Daniel Dennett on Tools To Transform Our Thinking

I'm delighted to be here and to see you all on such a beautiful day, not outside in the sunshine. So, I'm going to 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 isn't a 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?

Oh, only a few. Okay. Named after Jim Flynn, James Flynn, psychologist. He didn't do the original research, but uh he's drawn attention to the importance of it. It turns out that since the in the 100 years that we've had IQ tests, scores have been going up. IQ tests are normalized at 100 being the average, and that so you have to keep tweaking that scoring system, but if you give the test that you gave in 1930 to people today, they'll score on average 130, not 100. At least as the whole world over, too. It's not it's not just in any one area. At least we're a lot better at taking IQ tests than we were 80 and 90 years ago.

But it seems to be a a real pattern, and what's what might cause that? Uh Flynn thinks that what's happened is that the tools for thinking that are developed and proven and and refined in in the sciences and in 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. They're actually better problem-solvers, they see patterns better, and so forth.

In any case, it's a it's a hypothesis that hasn't been disproven and and 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 these thinking tools actually make us smarter? I'm saying, yes. Yes, they do. Um So, what are some thinking tools? Well, par excellence, the thinking tools are words. Can't do much thinking without words. And I'm reminded of a famous line of Goethe's, uh when ideas fail, words come in very handy.

He really did say that. And uh uh when you think about it, you realize what wisdom is there. When the when the thinking gets 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, are thinking tools. Diagrams, maps, uh methods of all kinds, from finding the average to long division to cost-benefit analysis, you name it. Notice that these are all quite abstract things. They're they're 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. I coined the term way back in 1980 or 81 uh in order to talk about uh John Searle's 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, Socrates teaching the slave boy geometry, Descartes' evil demon, Hobbes' state of nature. These are 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, uh 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 are like that. They're much more like Aesop's fables. You get the end, there's a little moral. You hmm. Interesting you'd put it that way. And and if it really works, you pound your fist on the table and say it's got to be that way. That's the intuition that's been pumped. Now, they're persuaders, in other words. As somebody wrote me the other day saying, well, I've I've I've looked at your your book now, 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 it's very much uh interpersonal.

Uh and I wrote back said, yes, and in fact, I should have stressed that more. All really serious thinking is interpersonal, I think. I think that's in fact one of the keys to how we think is by challenging each other with our ideas. Lovely case in point, Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's last theorem a few years back, but nobody could be sure, even Wiles himself couldn't be sure he'd done it until his peers, his colleagues in mathematics, who would dearly love to have the honor of having proved Fermat's last theorem themselves, until they had signed off and said, darn it, yes, he's got it. Congratulations.

This competitive opponent process between people is actually one of the key intuition pumps or the key thinking tools all on its own. 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, you 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 can just refer back to them, and at least they give you a a a focus on a 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 as fixed 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 as 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.

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 MacCready, the late great green engineer, if you don't know who Paul MacCready is, I'll probably be able to identify him for you by drawing attention to the fact that he's the one who designed and built the Gossamer Albatross, the the human-powered airplane that flew across the British Channel. Um he pointed out that at 10,000 years ago, a twinkling in in in biological time, at the very dawn of agriculture, our species plus its livestock and its pets was a fraction of 1% of the by weight, if you like, of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass.

A minor primate. What is it today? 10,000 years later. Any guesses? 99%? 85? I don't 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 its domesticated animals, have completely transformed the biosphere in a way that really hardly I don't think any earlier global event can compete with that for the changes that have been wrought in just 10,000 years. And this is what This is what McCready 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.

That's true. And we have the same genes that our ancestors 10,000 years ago had, that 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 evolved tools make us 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, and 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 reductio ad absurdum, 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, saying, "Well, 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. In fact, we use this all the time in in more more informally, and don't even notice it, but it's really the same thing. I mean, if you say, um "If that's a bear, then bears have antlers."

Uh that's really uh a sort of reductio ad absurdum argument. Um I mention it in part because I want to point out that although we use reductio 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 one, one of those questions that isn't supposed to be answered, stop and think about it. It's an implied reductio. The idea is ha ha, you can't answer this question. It would be it's it's so obvious that the that that the answer to this question uh uh is so obvious that uh I don't even have to mention what the answer is.

Everybody knows. Nudge nudge. Well, that means that a good practice, a habit to get into, is when you see one of those question marks in an in a document document, a rhetorical question, try answering the question. And see if maybe it's not so ridiculous after all. Uh 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.

Then there's the surely alarm. I tell my students, "Every time you see the word surely, a little bell should ring. Ding." And you 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, is putting forward as true. It's not so obvious that it goes without saying. If it were, it would go without saying. And here the author is putting it in. But not bothering to argue for it.

Instead, trying to get by on the cheap with a little nudge, a little surely. So, if you have a surely alarm, and this becomes just a a 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, uh to tell send me examples where they catch they catch a surely marking a weak spot. I I did little research on this. I actually went and and string searched for surely in uh several dozen, actually more like 70 or 75 philosophy papers online, and found a couple of dozen surelies, and checked them out, and and about a third of them were were I thought clearly the weakest point in the case being made in that in that article.

It doesn't work all the time. There are a lot of false alarms. You can go ahead and use the word surely every now and then. But if you hear the word surely, you should ding. So, you just give it a little try, because surely if you I didn't hear it. If sure surely if you get in the habit of of whenever you hear the word surely, a little bell rings, practice surely. Ding. Thank you. Now, look what I've done. I've just downloaded an app to your necktop.

In the same way that an app on your on your smartphone adds to the functionality of gives gives your smartphone a new talent, a new capacity. It's like Google Alert or something like that. You now have another little tool in your kit that may very well alert you to a weak spot in some argument that you're otherwise impressed with. Okay. Computers are, of course, thinking tools par excellence, and I There's a lot about computers in the book, and I have learned from many years experience that a lot of people think they understand how computers work, and they don't really. And if they just understood a bit more, 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 at the back of the book. If you will spend a couple 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 uh who came up with the idea of a register machine around the same time, a little after Gödel's famous uh uh proof and Turing coming up with the Turing machine.

And the the Wang register machine is is is computes everything that's Turing computable. So, it's a it's a user-friendly alternative to a Turing machine. If you've ever tried to program a Turing 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 are some little exercises on that. Now, here's some thinking tools. Well, actually, this picture, I want to point out, this is a This picture is all by itself a thinking tool. It draws attention to a rather striking comparison.

Uh and provokes reflection. The one on the left is an Acheulean hand axe. The one on the right, I don't need to tell you. Notice, the Acheulean hand axe was used in this form, unchanged, without any noticeable improvements for over a million years. Weird. Really strange. The mouse, in comparison, has only been around for a few decades, and is 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 tool all on its own, the comparison between these two entities.

On the left, you see an Australian termite castle. On the right, you see Gaudí's famous church in Barcelona, the Sagrada Familia. 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. 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 Gaudi is the very model of an 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 termite-style design and construction to Gaudi-style design and construction? How did the second kind evolve from the first? That's a very deep and interesting question. That's the one that I am now devoting as much time as I can to, and 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. Or 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 are rendered so vivid. Um uh Here's the birth of the Earth, and time, this is 4 billion years ago. And And 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 the eukaryotic revolution, when an endosymbiotic event joined two prokaryotes, two simple cells, into a symbiotic union, and that was the first eukaryotic cell. And everything else These are all eukaryotes. To a first approximation, every living thing that's big enough to see with the naked eye is a eukaryote, including you and me and oak trees and fish and all the rest.

Um you can see some important events. Here's the Cambrian 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 7 billion years just from that crotch right there. 7 million years, excuse me. That's about the length of time that we has passed since we shared a common ancestor with the chimpanzee.

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 tools. And notice that on this whole tree of life, the termites are on there, the the birds building their nests are on there. The first intelligent designers show up on one twig in very recent times. In the last 100,000 years or so. And becoming more intelligent as they go. Now, uh give you a few examples of intuition pumps, uh just because of So far, I've just been talking about simple tools.

Here's the nefarious neurosurgeon. First, a little science fact. Damien Denys in Amsterdam has developed a little microchip that can 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. So, you see, one day this fellow who has OCD goes to see his neurosurgeon and asks her to implant the Denys chip, and she does.

And as she's sewing him up and shaking his hand and sending him out of her shiny surgery, uh she says, "Oh, yes, your Your OCD is a thing of the past. It'll be completely controlled by the chip. And by the way, our staff here will be monitoring you 24/7, and uh electronically, we will be controlling all your decisions from now on. You will have the illusion of free will, but it's just an illusion. Thank you, have a nice life." Sends him out the door. He believes her. Well, shiny lab, white lab coat, neurosurgeon.

And believing her, he begins to act a little bit irresponsibly. He's a little self-indulgent, indulging his worst whims, 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. 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, yeah, I 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, can we not? Here's the intuition I want to 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've 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 neuroscience shows that there is no free will, that free will is an illusion?" And I've got quotes to exactly that effect from a lot of very eminent people. I say, "Well, 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?" 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 it 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 more irresponsible. Vohs and Schooler, Jonathan Schooler out at the University of California at Santa Barbara, did a very clever experiment where they had subjects, undergraduate students as usual, put in two groups. One group was given a passage from Francis Crick's book, The Astonishing Hypothesis, all which 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 a test, or it's a a puzzle to solve, and they're going to get paid for how well they do on 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 Crick 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 a This is a real This is not just a fantasy of philosophers. But now you think, "But still, don't we learn from brain science that 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?" Well, let's see. I want to ask you whether um you think the follow Which of the two lotteries are fair? In lottery A, the winning ticket is chosen after the tickets are sold.

As most lotteries are like that. You buy a ticket then they make a have a ceremony where they choose the winning ticket. Lottery B is just the same except the winning ticket is chosen before the tickets are sold and the ticket stub is locked away in a vault until after the tickets are sold. Now, how many of you think that lottery B is unfair that that you don't really have a chance of winning lottery B that lottery A 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. They are There's They're equally good, both of them. Both of them. You have no And after all, Publishers Clearinghouse bets on this. They sent used send out those envelopes, you may already have won, you know, a million dollars or whatever. Uh People see that both of these are fair lotteries. With opportunities to win in both cases. But now look, if determinism is true then your 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 as you needed a a little bit of luck.

Right? So what? People say, well, you know, then you're determined to have good luck on some occasions and bad luck on others. Yeah, but that's true even if indeterminism is true. There's no difference between indeterminism and determinism as far as you're having opportunities in this life. So we should temper our conviction, very traditional conviction that there's 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. Yeah, cosmic unfairness of determinism. Yeah. Well, what about the cosmic unfairness of indeterminism? They're equal on this score. You're going to win some, you're going to lose some. The luck averages out in most cases, not perfectly. That's life. You can't get around that. Indeterminism doesn't give you any more luck, any more opportunities, any more free will, any more elbow room than you would have in a deterministic world.

I dare say I haven't persuaded many of you of that but give me time, I'm working on it. Okay, so there they are. The book is sort of like a tapas and then 77 thinking tools, 77 little chapters. And the point of the term intuition pump is that you're encouraged to think of these as gadgets, as devices. You should take them apart, see how they work, reverse engineer them. Turn all the knobs. See why they do what they do and then you can build your own. Thanks for coming.

So now, questions. We have microphones. Yes. Um earlier on you mentioned the Chinese room scenario as a thinking pump. As like a sort of base one. I was wondering if you can go into more detail about that. I'm going to decline for but I'm going to explain why I'm going to decline. John Searle's 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 systems reply but anybody who understands computers knows that the system reply is just obviously right. So you have to you have to take you have to read the chapter, you have to become computer literate in this rather strong way to understand why Searle's thought experiment is defective. In fact, I teach my students at Tufts how to program register machines in my regular undergraduate course on language and mind.

This is I say this is just a thinking tool that you should have. Later in the course, end of the course, they get to read Searle. And they all see right through it. But it would take me too long to lead you through all those exercises. That's why you have to buy the book, you see. Um but I want to add something to that, too. I notice when I try to explain this to a lot of people, Searle's, what's wrong with Searle? 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 AI is impossible. And that suits them just fine. They don't want to hear the details. They like the conclusion, don't bother me with the details. It looks to them like nitpicking. 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. Oh no, a different issue.

I will confess that I find the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics ugly, offensive. 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 in physics, in his book The Quark and the Jaguar, takes off after the Copenhagen interpretation.

And he just beats the tar out of it. He is just hit him again, Murray. And there's a chapter called Quantum Flapdoodle. He no holds barred. He just lets the quantum interpretation have it between, right, both barrels, right, between the eyes. And I found myself reading that and sort of hit him again, Murray. I love this. I love this. And then I realized I'm not qualified to judge Murray Gell-Mann'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 Searle to be right. They are offended by the idea of artificial intelligence and they don't want to listen to some nitpicker who says the argument doesn't work. So I've come to temper my view. I realize 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 about the Chinese room.

Um uh Professor Dennett, um I I'm up here. I'm up here. Upstairs. Upstairs. Hello. Um I agree with you about the systems reply so I suppose I don't need to buy the book or anything. Um do you think that the the logical end point of our thinking tools is the um what some people call whole brain emulation of the uploading of the human mind to an artificial system where we can have tools far beyond our current imagining? Do you think it's possible? I think it's possible in principle, very unlikely in fact.

Um there's lots of things that are possible in principle that 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 and weigh, uh you know, uh a few hundred grams. Yeah. Possible in principle. Don't expect it. I say that knowing that some of my robotics friends are developing little robotic insects with cameras on them that can sort of be the fly on the wall. So, we're getting closer, but still I think the sort of of adroitness of a of an insectivorous 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 I recently, by the way, sort of changed my mind about about the brain as a computer. As I told I said in your neck top, I do think your brain is a computer. It's not at all like your laptop. Well, it is it is cuz 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 logic they're all exactly alike. Right down practically to the atoms. And the reliability of the system depends on that tremendous uniformity. It's a it's a masterpiece of 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 slavish as the flip-flops in the machine. They are computing. They're 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 astrocytes, glial cells in your brain. And although we used to think of them as sort of little pillows that just protected the neurons, no, no, no. Turns out they're computing, too. 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.

Who's got the mic?

Here and then there. Go ahead. Given the natural and acquired deficiencies and limitations of our minds 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? Oh, that's very good. Um and because it permits me to to illustrate one of my main themes. 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. We're lousy, for instance, at probability.

Naturally. We're as as George Ainslie points out, we're exponential discounters of 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 who pointed them out in recent years, Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky in a famous series of papers. And now more recently, Danny's got the book out on thinking fast and slow. But the point is that we can 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. And the mere fact that you ask 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 or 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 to 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 them. Now, where? Somebody? Over here. Yeah, over here. Okay, good. Yeah. I struggled with your talk. I was intrigued by the problem you set at the beginning, which said that IQ has increased. And I struggled because what I heard afterwards was a long list of thinking tools. But what I didn't hear was statistical or 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 decreased. Yeah. The the the speed people take to come to a certain decision or 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 at secondary school, have been dumbed down significantly. Universities certainly complain about that a lot.

So, wouldn't one see actually a decrease in IQ in certain advanced countries because of that? So, can you give any examples of how people have statistically or scientifically measured what actually increases IQ? Or decreases it? 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. And it's worldwide. And 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 tool.

Google James Flynn and the Flynn effect and you will find a feast of online materials to peruse. Now, I had I'm interested in this Times reported study of slowed down thinking and I 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 Danny Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow is there are things that thinking fast is good at.

And then there are 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 decrease, 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. I'll look into that. Yes. I'm sorry if this is moving too far away. Yeah, there you are. Okay. Moving too far away from the topic, but I'm I'm really interested to to hear. What do you think Wittgenstein would make of the four horsemen of atheism?

Well, I don't know. I'm happy to answer the question, although I don't think when I was a a student, I was a a 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 Wittgenstein's later work to be suspiciously mysterious. And I I fled that. It's interesting. You know, we had some training as 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 Wittgenstein 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. Uh uh I would expect probably he would have a mixed reaction, but I wouldn't try to untangle it. Thank you.

Yeah, this is a non sequitur, so feel free not to answer, but I'm Could Could you think of an intuitive way to um explain to a color blind person that uh there's information in the visual spectrum that they're missing out on as as a person who's not color blind? Oh, sure. I think in fact my experience with people who are color blind is that they understand color fully well. They can't pass the Ishihara tests, but they know what it what it's like to pass the test as well as somebody After all, I think I can explain to you what it's like to be a pigeon who's a tetrachrome instead of a a trichromatic vision and and 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 I we can go into the details. Uh uh I don't think there's I don't think it's impossible to do the hard work of imagining what this is like in detail. Hello. Hello. I don't know. There we are. Okay. The lights are down so low I can't really see back there. Okay. Hi. We've been thinking about intuitive tools and I just wondered whether you um uh think that women are more intuitive than men as they often think they are.

Oh, you're trying to lead me into the 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's sense of something that occurs to you that you just think it'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 pub paper I ever published was about artificial intelligence and Hubert Dreyfus had written his famous Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence diatribe against AI years before Searle.

And in that piece Dreyfus said that they'd never uh make a computer with intuition. That no computer program would ever have intuition. And in my first publication I said, "Actually, it's child's play to make a 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 ask it a 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."

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 going to touch the rest of that question. Yes. 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 and worse at using thinking tools? Um and if so, where do you see the future?

Well, first of all, let let's let's confirm that people get worse. Um how many in this room know how to run a slide rule? Is there anybody under 40 who knows how to run a slide rule? Uh 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 probably seriously diminishing our capacity to read maps. Wonderful thinking tool which is you know, becoming more and more sort of obsolete uh and so forth.

Um So, I think that with the times different tools play roles of greater or lesser importance in what we're doing. Uh that will no doubt continue and the use it or lose it uh maxim will I dare say uh be maintained uh in full force. Um 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. 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 we'll go on. I think Andy Clark, wonderful philosopher uh of cognitive science in Edinburgh, um uh puts it very well when he says that we we uh we make smart tools uh to take the load off our brain so that we can we can be stupid and still be sort of smart uh 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 a was a simulated computer on a computer. A uh 12-bit computer with 256 registers and but you could watch the instruction cycle happen. You could You could completely see, slow down about a millionfold and enlarge about a millionfold 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 a really vivid and reliable, robust tool for imagining things with computers.

Then we did the same thing for population genetics and we had a program called Gene Wright after Sewall Wright, which had this these wonderful simulations of population genetics and you could you could sort of see at a glance, once you use how to learned how to use that tool, um um uh what was the recessive characteristic and why and so forth. And it was good enough tool so that the 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 talked to a dear 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 and brainstormed it for a couple of hours and realized that what we just invented was the piano. It's wonderful. You get the auditory and you get two different visualizations.

You've got 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 um sort of sell the idea to funders and people like that, we'd say, "Look, there's two ways that technology can make you smart." The same way there's two ways that technology can make you strong.

There's the bulldozer way. You're still a 98-lb 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 and your coordination and so forth. And we said, "What we're trying to do here is make the Nautilus machines of the technology so that 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 uh 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 Tube map does for the underground. Color-coded, simplified, straighten out the lines, throw away extra geographical information that isn't really important so you can see the connectivity. And we were going to have this lovely big three-dimensional color-coded system that would permit students to to see what was fastened to what and why in the brain, and we would update it as we went. I still think that's a great idea. And like the tube map, the idea was you can you can take the London Tube map and you can then you can impose it on a map which is geographically accurate, and you can 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. 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 shrink-wrap the whole thing to fit in the skull, and then you can understand why certain things are 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.

Yeah. Do you have a mic? Yep. I I was just curious if you had the opportunity right now to upload uh 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 in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and because many philosophers view that as you know, Dennett's popular book about Darwinism, not really a philosophy book, they 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 an issue several issues that metaphysicians have been scratching their heads about for for 25 years. And we'll see maybe second time around they'll pay attention to it. Thanks. Do you think you can teach a humorless person to have a sense of humor?

No, probably not. No. Um in Consciousness Explained, at one point I sort of promised to come up with a theory of humor and laughter. And then I couldn't. And I sort of wished I could have erased that sentence cuz I couldn't keep that promise. And then in some 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 we did that book together with Reg Adams, Inside Jokes, using humor to reverse engineer the mind. And I'm really glad that I did that cuz I learned a ton. And I 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 it 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, and and 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. Um The uh One of the ways we did the research on that is actually to uh spend some time not only reading the works of but talking with comedians and comedy writers to find out sort of how they how they go about their trade and how they use their own brains as sounding boards, and then their brains get um sort of distorted in its they can't clear their palate in effect.

They can't They can't uh 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 it will always be sort of an art, not a not a science. But that doesn't mean there isn't a science of why it's an art. Somewhere? Here. Huh? Hi. Um we run a decision-making company. We help teams think through complex problems. And I was I was really struck by your comment that uh all serious thinking is interpersonal, which would run counter to what we hear a lot every day or the resistance we face. So, I'm just interesting to know what leads you to that conclusion.

Well, many things do. Um one of them is a very recent paper in Behavioral Brain Sciences by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber on the flaws in our reasoning. And they argue that as part of our evolutionary heritage, we're better at detecting the flaws in an opponent than in our own case. We're the the we just are 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 in 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 are sort of in a constant tug-of-war with each other, pulling this way and that, but that's a very sort of friendly tug-of-war. But then in the frontal eye fields, we've got this other opponent process going on where there are little teams of neurons that are saying about wherever fixation is. Some of them are saying, "Home sweet home. Nice. I like this. Familiar." And the others are saying, "Boring. Been there, done that." They want to move.

And there's this constant opponent process between different groups of neurons trying to say, "Look over here." No, "Look where we're looking." And and they 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 saccading. And if you have abnormal saccading, that means you're not looking where you should be looking when you should be looking, and that is a profound deficit.

There's strong evidence, for instance, that autistic children do not have normal saccading. 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 at uh uh joint attention. And this means that whereas a normal uh infant is just sucking from a firehose of information all the time. Uh 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. I was fascinated by your approach on um free will and I don't know about anybody else here, but I remember coming in into into touch with the idea, the kind of sexy, rebellious idea that that free will is an illusion. Um it seemed to gel with I think what I and a lot of people were intuiting uh surely about um kind of non-religious uh heading towards a more material explanation of things. It's very leftist to think anti-free will, but you argue very powerfully um pro-free will. And so, I just wanted to find out what if you could explain where 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 to they want to say that look, there's a certain class of people who are populating our prisons, um pe- politicians mainly in this country, but you Where Yeah, where would you like to see that debate go? What's its useful application and and and yeah, and the neuroscience. Thank you. There's a lot in that, but let and I and 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 review I did of Adrian Raine's wonderful book in Prospect last month. Uh that's Adrian Raine is the neuroscientist, psychologist who's studied the brains of uh uh psychopaths on death row, uh murderers, a lot of them. And even more amazing is the experiments he did

where he got a lot of of psychopaths in the wild. That is, they'd 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 that sure enough, when he gave them all the tests that are used in the prisons for psychopathy, so it's the sort of gold standard measure. The um there were psychopaths among the temps at a rate about three times the the average in the regular population.

So, now we had a group of psychopaths that had never been in prison, had any trouble with the law. And under the uh certificate that his work was done, get his graduate assistants 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 and he's got the tools to study them. Psychopaths are different, there's but there's other people with other sorts of uh 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 Raine's uh proposals. I don't think he does either, by the way, but it's he's raised the issue very well in his what's called the anatomy of violence.

Uh 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 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 to have in it? 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.

And because they have free will, they are proper and because they're morally competent, it they are appropriate bearers of full responsibility for their deeds. And this includes their eligibility for punishment uh when they uh commit misdeeds. That's a long story, but I think that's a a constructive way of proceeding. Um most of us I I I dare say everybody in this room believes they have free will in this sense. If you believe that you are competent enough to sign a contract, a 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 indeterminism. It 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? Yeah. One more up top. Yes, let's go. Um thank you for your presentation. I have a question with regards to the connection between um the physical part of our brain, how this is impacted in our networked and um computerized communication as we move on more and more into online uh networking and communication and how this will impact our history of philosophy going forward. So, you know, what would would would our thinking be different uh let's say compared to the Greeks and how this will be changing and what we need to be thinking about.

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 that not the that the smartest people in Athens couldn't master. Um not just about science, but certainly about science. I think uh we have a hugely enlarged conceptual repertory today compared with the ancient Greeks. That doesn't mean that they weren't wise, but it I think it does does 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 and 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 uh favorite books when I was a graduate student in Oxford, first learning about the brain and trying to think about the mind as the brain. And there wasn't very much that was written that 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 um I think the uh the average smart 14-year-old could put quite aptly in a few simple sentences of cyberspeak.

Thanks. I think that's a good point on which to stop. Thank you very much. Thank you.