>> Daniel Dennett: Well, in my own work I
find that in spite of all my labours for many
year there is a lot of scientists that are
still tone-deaf and obtuse about free will.
They pick the most simple minded definition
of free will that is out there and discover
that that kind of free will is an illusion.
Well yeah, we've known that for more than
a 100 years.
But that's not what the issue is, if they
think that is the issue than they should go
back to school and find out what the interesting
issues are.
But there are some neuroscientists and psychologists
that understand that very well and they are
a bit embarrassed to watch their colleagues,
sometimes very senior, very distinguished
colleagues sort of making fools of themselves,
talking about this and simply not coming to
grips with the real topic.
We can define a variety of free will, that
we can't have, no question so what is it there
a kind of free will that anybody should be
worried about?
Anybody should want?
The subtitle of my first book on free will
was 'the varieties of free will worth wanting'
and I am so glad I had that in the subtitle,
because I think ever since then there've been
people, both philosophers and scientists and
others who've worked on free will and have
laboured over varieties of free will but they
never really ask themselves - well would it
matter if we don't have free will in this
sense?
And typically the answer is - no.
So the whole libertarian idea that free will
is incompatible with determinism and that
we should, that we should of hope that indeterminism is true, we should hope that our decisions are
determent, that is a colossal confusion.
The real issues of free will are simply orthogonal
to the question of determinism, indeterminism.
It doesn't matter whether at the end of the
day psychics is deterministic or indeterministic.
Whether we have free will is really much less
a manner of physics than it is of biology.
There was no free will on this planet at the
dawn of life, bacteria don't have free will.
Sponges don't have free will, fish don't have
free will in any interesting sense.
We are the only ones that have free will and
that's something that evolved, it's morally
important that's why free will is important,
because we want to be and should want to be
morally competent agents, agents who can take
responsibility for their actions.
That is the heart of free will.
And moral competence has nothing to do within
indeterminism or determinism.
You can have a morally competent agent in
a deterministic world, or a morally competent
agent in a indeterministic world.
That's the kind of free will that really matters
once we start looking at what are the conditions
for moral competence then the science becomes
to be important, because some people indeed
due to problems in their brains let's just
put it simply at the moment are not morally
competent and we should treat them differently.
But it's not because they are determent
and the rest of us aren't it's, because they
are determent in a wrong way.
They are determent in simple ways, they are
unable to do things that we are able to do.
I think some areas of philosophy are dying
and probably should die, but there is a plenty
of work for philosophers to do.
My own view is that philosophers can be if
they have the knowledge and the training be
wonderful question clarifiers, we are better
at question than we are at answers.
In fact one way of looking at the history
of philosophy, history of thought, of knowledge
is that it all starts out as philosophy and
as you clarify the questions you shelved off
a science.
Mathematics, astronomy, physics, after all
of the American Philosophical Society is a
physics organisation.
Benjamin Franklin was one of the founding
members of that.
So philosophy has a very august tradition
of getting topics clear enough to kick out
of the nest and then they become sciences.
But wherever there is a topic that people
don't know exactly what the right questions
are, whether there are controversies over
what the questions ought to be, there is work
for philosophers to do there and that's the
kind of work I take myself to be doing.
