This is a very interesting interview taken by Robert Wright, the American journalist, scholar, prize-winning author of best-selling books on popular science including subjects like evolutionary psychology, history, religion, and game theory, to Daniel Dennett; Dan is an American philosopher whose research focuses on the philosophy of mind, consciousness, philosophy of science and philosophy of evolutionary biology.

The interview begins with a discussion about God, natural selection, and the probability that evolution could lead to highly evolved intelligent conscious beings like humans.

The subject of Free Will is thoroughly debated. Dan is arguing against the widely accepted – but confusing when we consider this with hindsight – idea that Free Will is incompatible with determinism. He says that every variety of free will worth wanting we can have in a deterministic world. Paradoxically, quantum randomness cannot give us free will, it is just an illusion that it can. The phrase “The future is inevitable in a deterministic universe”, Dan argues, has no meaning. Why? Because the future is going to happen, whatever that is, in a in-deterministic universe also.

So, what we really need to talk about, when discussing the subject of free will, is avoidability (harm avoidance); that is what evolved beings do; they try to avoid harm, and attract what is good, by using “cognitive virtual reality simulators” that train the evolved, but not perfect, agent (human, animal, etc) to properly react to the future possible scenarios that life might face him with (one such cognitive virtual reality simulator is REM dreaming).

Furthermore, Dan says natural selection helps the evolution of free will : Evolution is an explosion of evitability! Freedom Evolves. From order comes freedom.

The other major subject of the debate is consciousness. Dan thinks Consciousness is the state of the brain, that is, the competition or “political fame” (“fame in the brain”) between content fixation mechanisms (daemons or neuronal structures) or more exactly between alliances of these neural structures. This is consciousness. THE PANDEMONIUM! THE TURMOIL! The fight for control. The act of those structures fighting with each other, over and over again, that is what it means for a person to be conscious.

Also, Dan argues against the absurd concept of Epiphenomenalism. That is, “Influenced by the brain, but does not in turn influence the brain” or more explicitly “The functioning of the brain creates consciousness, but consciousness does not have any effect in the functioning/activity of the brain”. Dan argues this is as absurd as saying “Seven ephiphenomenal gremlins exist in an internal combustion engine; there caused by the actions of the cylinders, they cause nothing in return; they are undetectable by any machine or test”. But consciousness is not like that because if the fact that you’re now telling us that you detect your consciousness is an effect of your “detecting it“, then your “detecting it” is an effect of the epiphenomenon and that is ruled out by its definition. So here we have it : Epiphenomenalism is false, therefore consciousness is causal.

Enjoy this brilliant interview! Here is the second part!

References:
- Who is Daniel C. Dennett? – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Who is Robert Wright? – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia