Over the past couple years I’ve had some unflattering things to say about the ideas of Daniel Dennett — especially his views on free will. But this interview in Reason with Dennett has me rethinking his ideas.
I’m impressed with his distinction between a deterministic and a fatalist world view,
Reason: Would a deterministic world mean that, say, the assassination of John F. Kennedy was going to happen ever since the Big Bang?
Dennett: “Going to happen” is a very misleading phrase. Say somebody throws a baseball at your head and you see it. That baseball was “going to” hit you until you saw it and ducked, and then it didn’t hit you, even though it was “going to.”
In that sense of “going to,” Kennedy’s assassination was by no means going to happen. There were no trajectories which guaranteed that it was going to happen independently of what people might have done about it. If he had overslept or if somebody else had done this or that, then it wouldn’t have happened the way
it did.People confuse determinism with fatalism. They’re two completely different notions.
Reason: Would you unpack that a little bit?
Dennett: Fatalism is the idea that something’s going to happen no matter what you do. Determinism is the idea that what you do depends. What happens depends on what you do, what you do depends on what you know, what you know depends on what you’re caused to know, and so forth — but still, what you do matters. There’s a big difference between that and fatalism. Fatalism is determinism with you left out.
If I accomplish one thing in this book, I want to break the bad habit of putting determinism and inevitability together. Inevitability means unavoidability, and if you think about what avoiding means, then you realize that in a deterministic world there’s lots of avoidance. The capacity to avoid has been evolving for billions of years. There are very good avoiders now. There’s no conflict between being an avoider and living in a deterministic world. There’s been a veritable explosion of evitability on this planet, and it’s all independent of determinism.
Dennet goes on to posit that humans are essentially “choice machines” and uses evolutionary psychology to really tie together a neat solution to some vexing moral questions, including the problem of where values initially come from.
I guess now I’m going to have to go out and buy his book, Freedom Evolves.