Freedom Evolves, by Daniel Dennett. Viking, 2003, 347 pages.

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Choose Your Own Adventure

by Timothy Sandefur

Daniel Dennett is the greatest philosopher alive. His uniqueness lies in the fact that he understands — more importantly, cares about — science, and his works do not consist of word-warping and hocus-pocus, falsely profound generalizations, or radical chic denunciations of the "tyranny of reality." He is interested in how the mind really works, and he produces theories that can be disproven. This alone would suffice to distinguish him from the general population of philosophers, but Dennett also possesses the rare virtue that he can write: clearly, cleverly, and concisely. Scattered through his books are brilliant sparks of insight, tied together by convincing conclusions.

Dennett's work is so rich, and so well written, that it is extremely difficult to pare it down for quick summary. But a brief overview reveals three major themes. First, in his 1991 "Consciousness Explained," Dennett describes his fascinating theory of the mind. Although it often seems like a tiny person (me) sitting in what Dennett calls the "Cartesian Theater" (some place in the brain where the little me listens to audio piped in from the ears and watches video from the eyes, and then makes decisions), the self is actually more like what computer scientists call a "user illusion," reflected back upon a pandemonium of simultaneous, automatic mental processes, more like a bureaucracy than a monarchy. Asking "when did John experience the stimulus" is like asking "when did England learn of the Battle of New Orleans": there is no single answer, because there is no single "meaner" in the brain. Instead, the self is a creation of the mind's resourcefulness, spun, says Dennett in a lovely analogy, like a spider spinning its web — not because it consciously chooses to do so, but because that is just how the spider, or the brain, lives its graceful, unique, naturally selected life.

What materials does the brain use in spinning this self-web? Memes — ideas which act much like biological viruses, leaping from brain to brain in a cultural infection. Memes can spread through a culture even when they are not true, because of their compelling nature — for example, the meme for "conspiracy theory" is especially virulent because it has a notorious built-in defense mechanism: anyone who denies it must be part of the conspiracy! This allows the meme to spread very rapidly, and last a long time. Some memes (like phrases on bumper stickers) are harmless; others (like the miracle bra) very rewarding; others (like the English language) useful; others (like communism) horrifying. Dennett's view of the self replaces the little man in the Cartesian Theater with something more like a campfire ghost-story session: as each speaker tells his story, he picks up a flashlight and shines it up at his face. So, too, in our minds, as each thought or impulse comes to the surface, it claims to be "me" or "my" idea.

This is the third theme in Dennett's work. "[H]olding out for perfection — a job-related disability in philosophers — [often] conceals the best path." In "Freedom Evolves," he concludes that it is not so much that man is tragically in the grip of the infinite power of infinitesimal causes — but rather, that we have set ourselves up a straw man labeled Free Will, and another labeled Materialism, while overlooking the real goals of our philosophical search:

"Suppose that once upon a time there were people who believed that an invisible arrow from a flying god was a sort of inoculation that caused people to fall in love. And suppose some killjoy scientist then came along and showed them that this was simply not true: No such flying gods exist. 'He's shown that nobody ever falls in love, not really. The idea of falling in love is just a nice — maybe even necessary fiction. It never happens.' That is what some might say. Others, one hopes, would want to deny it: 'No. Love is quite real, and so is falling in love. It just isn't what people used to think it is. It's just as good — maybe even better. True love doesn't involve any flying gods.' The issue of free will is like this."

Like Ayn Rand, Dennett sees that the primary fallacy in discussions of free will is the notion that it must somehow involve uncaused acts. "Free will is real, but it . . . is not what tradition declares it to be: a God-like power to exempt oneself from the causal fabric of the physical world." There can be free choice in a creature made of unthinking bits of matter, because the very notions of choice, avoidance, or involvement, make sense only at a level far enough removed from the thoughtless action of atoms as to give us the elbow room we seek. Not the radical freedom of uncaused choice (which would be just as useless as rigid determinism) — but "elbow room": room to act within determined boundaries.

Dennett distinguishes between determinism and inevitability. In-creasing the number of options available to an agent increases its range of freedom, even if the agent is forced to follow the rules. Not far from my office is a freeway off-ramp with two lanes. Those in the left lane must turn left, but those in the right may turn either left or right. In a sense, all the drivers are "determined" by the traffic laws — they must turn one way or the other. But those in the right lane have more freedom, even though within determined boundaries. Thus it is possible for a materialistic conception of the universe to give us the traction we need to drive in our own directions, if we first confront the assumptions behind our false conceptions of free will and materialism. "We don't have to have immaterial souls of the old-fashioned sort in order to live up to our hopes," he writes; "our aspirations as moral beings whose acts and lives matter do not depend at all on our having minds that obey a different physics from the rest of nature."

Opponents of free will routinely trot out "Laplace's demon": a hypothetical creature that, according to the French scientist Laplace, somehow knows the position and velocity of every particle in the universe at one instant. The demon, Laplace argued, would be able to predict the future entirely, and without some non-materialistic, essentialist explanation of the mind, the demon must also be able to predict our every decision. If that is so, how can there be free will? Dennett does not argue with this hypothesis — on such a wide and pointless level, the determinist wins. But Dennett points out that the demon would have to know such an incalculably vast sea of information as to paralyze its ability to comprehend anything — an argument familiar to readers of Hayek. More importantly, choice, and life, and meaning do not take place at this level. The human mind, that complicated engine of choice and avoidance, is affected by other minds and by happenstance encounters on a level of description so far removed from microscopic particles that it is senseless to extrapolate from one level to the other. Add to this the fact that greater levels of complexity allow greater degrees of combination: we now have options that our grandparents could never have imagined, and even if we are "determined" in the sense that stimulus X results in response Y, the increased number of stimuli we have still means an immensely greater variety of potential responses than our grandparents had.

This may not seem satisfying at first, but consider what can be accomplished by freedom within fixed boundaries. A jazz soloist cannot pick any notes he wants, but has a wide array of colorful notes from which to choose. John Milton wrote that the blank verse of "Paradise Lost" was "an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover'd to heroic Poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of Rimeing," because it provided the writer with creative elbow room without abandoning all constraints. Moreover, humans have a unique faculty for creating new options. Our ability to imagine the future outcomes of our choices today opens up a vast realm of freedom without challenging the "determinism" of being required to obey the rules:

"[E]ven a simple switch, turned on and off by some environmental change, marks a degree of freedom. . . . Switches (either on/off or multiple-choice) can be linked together in series, in parallel, and in arrays that combine both sorts of links. As arrays proliferate, forming larger switching networks, the degrees of freedom multiply dizzyingly. . . . A brain, with its banks of sensory inputs and motor outputs, is a localized device for mining the past environment for information that can then be refined into the gold of good expectations about the future. These hard-won expectations can then be used to modulate your choices."

By looking ahead to the outcomes of our policies, we can choose routes which not only open up new opportunities, but close off options we don't want to face. We can choose between determinisms, so to speak, for our own reasons — creating what Dennett calls "evitability." Consider a man who sets his watch ahead by five minutes (and who somehow doesn't subtract that whenever he looks at his watch!) in order to fool himself into getting to meetings on time. He has manipulated his own determinism to achieve his purposes. This is no different than the schizophrenic who chooses to take medication to prevent his symptoms, or the astigmatic who wears glasses. "Scientific knowledge is the royal road," writes Dennett, "the only road — to evitability."

What does all of this mean for political freedom? Dennett points out that our ability to choose between possible futures does require us to accept responsibility for the futures that we choose, just as we admire those who have chosen good futures (who have been very "determined," as we say) by putting themselves on diets or going through college. We willingly make such exchanges: for receiving credit for our good choices, we accept blame for our bad ones. "People want to be held accountable." The enemy of free will, then, is not science, but the state. By depriving us of options, it deprives us of the diverse potential implicit in those options. By shutting off experiments — be it the ban on "cloning," or the prohibitions on experimenting with narcotics — we close off avenues to destinations we cannot now imagine: destinations that may be dark, or bright — we'll never know. Unfortunately, many people "respond . . . by turning off their minds and turning up the volume on their 'hearts,'" writes Dennett. They then create reactionary policies against science in order to protect the ghost in the machine. These people, I suspect, will be dissatisfied with Dennett's conclusions. He acknowledges that a Darwinian account of the mind will require us to revise our assumptions about free will, rather than soothing our fears.

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