Evolution Sets Us Free

PW: What is the main idea behind Freedom Evolves [reviewed above]?

Daniel Dennett: People are terribly afraid of determinism, and this distorts their thinking on many topics, including free will. I want to show that the evolutionary perspective on these issues is your friend, not your foe. One of the beautiful things about evolutionary processes is that they can occur in different media and on different time scales. Learning from experience, learning from family and friends, is ultimately an evolutionary process, so we can use what we know about evolution to understand how we develop individual moral agency naturally.

PW: You compare belief in a supernatural soul and free will to the "magic feather" Dumbo thinks makes him fly.

DD: For thousands of years, people have been comforted by the idea of an immaterial soul from which our free will emanates, that makes us different from the animals. It's a deeply mistaken belief and it dies hard. The reason it's so hard to uproot is that people think that without it, life has no meaning, and they erect all these barriers to prevent themselves from thinking about our biological nature.

PW: One factor you say enables freedom to evolve is the human ability to think beyond one's immediate situation.

DD: It's both our blessing and our curse. It allows us to conceive of our future, take on the goal of achieving security not just for ourselves and our kin but for whole societies and for the whole planet. It's our independence as thinkers that leads us to moral dilemmas.

PW: Couldn't somebody say, "If free will is an evolved trait, some groups of people will have developed less free will than others?"

DD: Quite independently of evolutionary theory, we already know some living human beings are mentally incompetent or otherwise not capable of full adult moral agency, such as small children. We recognize the transition that has to be made from infancy to proper moral agency, and we recognize not everybody can make it. Over the millennia, philosophers and theologians have invented various miraculous transitions nobody can take seriously today. We have to understand how that transition can be explained naturally, and what we can do to protect it. The imagined loss of free will is entirely possible. Freedom evolves, and that means it could go extinct. We need to learn how that could happen, so we can protect against it.

PW: You've written that philosophers aren't really doing their jobs unless they pay attention to what's going on in fields like psychology and biology.

DD: That idea is the main source of friction within the discipline of philosophy today, and I know philosophers who resist it vigorously. If you look at the history of philosophy, though, you see that all the great philosophers have been deeply involved in the science of their day. Their self-image was tightly interwoven with the quest for scientific knowledge. Just look at Aristotle, or Hume, or Kant, or Mill, or William James.... The vision of philosophy as somehow isolated from the sciences may be a tradition, but it's a recent and reversible tradition and not one to be honored.

PW: What's next?

DD: I'm revisiting the theory of consciousness explained. We've had more than a decade of research, and some of the phenomena I predicted have since been shown to exist. Meanwhile, we've had a lot of antiscientific theorizing about the philosophy of the mind. So I'm writing a book which will expand upon the empirical theory and defend it against a series of misbegotten philosophical arguments.