Daniel Dennett: Why Darwin’s idea was the greatest ever

In this terrifically engaging and accessible video interview, Daniel Dennett (talking with Richard Dawkins) explains his view that Darwin's idea was the greatest idea ever. Dennett, who authored Darwin's Dangerous Idea explains that natural selection unified the world of mechanism/material/physical and the world of meaning/purpose/goals which, until Darwin, seemed to be unbridgeable. Many people feel that Darwin's idea destroyed their sense of meaning, but Dennett argues that this "immaterial immortal soul" is a "crutch," and that Darwin replaced that idea with that of a "material mortal soul." Dennett describes our material souls as made of neurons. "They are blind little bio-robots . . . They don't know; they don't care; they are just doing their jobs." If you put enough of these simple little bio-robots together, you end up with a soul. Out of these little bio-robots, you can assemble the control system of a complex organism. Simple little parts can self-organize into sentient being that can "look into the future . . . because we can imagine the world in a better way, and we can hold each other responsible for that." There's no need to assume that a God implants any sort of soul. Rather, according to Dennett, a functional soul can "emerge" from soul-less little individual parts. The simple little parts don't need to exhibit the functions and abilities of the assembled groups of parts, but this illusory jump is a huge stumbling block for many theists. They wonder how you can "make a living thing out of dead stuff," but that is exactly what happens, "and that's the wonder of it." Science has also shown that you can also "make a conscious thing out of unconscious stuff." Over great periods of time, natural processes can constitute the design function that allows these incredible results we see in the world. It is not necessary that complex things need to be created by even more complex things. Darwin's ideas destroyed this misconception and "this is a really stunning fact. Purpose can emerge from the bottom up." The brain itself is a fast-paced evolutionary device; the learning process is a matter of generation and testing and pruning, over and over. Dawkins asks Dennett to explain further how "cranes" (simple natural processes) can really account for the wonderful complexity of life in the absence of "sky-hooks" (supernatural beings). You could argue that our planet has grown a nervous system and it's us. The above summarizes only the first ten minutes of the fifty-minute interview. Numerous other topics are discussed in the video, including the following: - Modern wars and strife constitute growing pains resulting from our being flooded with great amounts of information about each other. (15:00) - Cultural evolution clearly exists. Languages and musical ideas evolve, for example, without anyone initially consciously "laying down the law." - Dennett's recent brush with death (his aorta suddenly burst), resulting in many intriguing observations (21:00), including a deepened understanding of the phrase "thank goodness." You can put goodness back into the world, "and you don't need a middleman" (God). You can directly thank the doctors, nurses and medical journalists, the peer reviewers and the entire scientific enterprise that allows elaborate cures such as artificial aortas. According to Dennett, don't bother thanking God, "go plant a tree, go try to teach somebody something . . . let's make the world better for our children and our grandchildren." - Dennett elaborates on being part of this elaborate social and scientific fabric, this complex exploratory process. He finds this view much more inspiring that the idea that he is "a doll made by God . . . to pray to him." (24:00) - The scientific process is double-edged, exacerbated by the Internet. We can't tightly control this information, and their effects might be detrimental. We need to think "epidemiologically" about this possibility, and to better prepare people to deal with the ideas gone awry to protect them. (26:00) Knowledge can be a "painful process," yet we need to honor other people to make their own considered decisions. - Darwin offers some consolation regarding our impending deaths: that they had the opportunity to walk on this planet "for awhile." (29:00) Dawkins adds that it is a huge privilege to have been born, in that "you are lucky to have had anything at all . . . stop moaning." Dennett adds that we are not aghast at the thought that there were many years that passed before we were born when we were also not alive . . . it shouldn't bother us that we will someday again no longer be alive. Our grief at someone's death is a measure of how wonderful someone was. - The urge to thank someone for the many good things in one's life is a great temptation for believing in God. (33:00). Dawkins argues that contemplating that amazing process that gave rise to you "is better than thanking because it is a thoughtful thing to do . . . You're not just thanking your Sky-Daddy." He argues that the urge to thank should be "sublimated" into the drive to understand how it all happened. Atheists, too, can feel the sense of "awe." Dennett exclaims, "Hallelujah! It's just spectacular. It's so wonderful! The universe is fantastic!" Dawkins adds, "Hallelujah for the universe and for the fact that we . . . are working on understanding it." This June 2009 video is uncut; it is the full Dennett interview by Richard Dawkins. Parts of this interview were used in a British television documentary entitled "The Genius of Charles Darwin."

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More of my favorite quotes

I love good quotes. There's a novel in every sentence. Some of them are explosive. I collect them from many sources, though I see many of them on my homepage, which is set for The Quotations Page. Here are my favorite quotes that I've collected over the past few months: -If you would cure anger, do not feed it. Say to yourself: 'I used to be angry every day; then every other day; now only every third or fourth day.' When you reach thirty days offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the gods. Epictetus (55 AD - 135 AD) -Life is a series of things you're not quite ready for. Rob Hopkins, of the Post Carbon Institute -An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today. Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1988) -The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking. John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 - 2006) -The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make a criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal . . . If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. Malcolm X Speaks, p.93 -As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities. Voltaire [more . . . ]

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The roots of morality: It’s time to look far beyond religion.

Many articles purporting to examine morality bore me. They tend to be laundry lists of personal preferences--the writer's catalog of things that personally annoy and delight him or her--completely un-anchored by the scientific method or, for that matter, by any sort of disciplined thinking. Such articles have been around for a long time. Many of them were written prior to 1785, when Immanuel Kant wrote his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, where he urged that we get serious about morality's underpinnings. Though Kant's categorical imperative leaves much to be desired as a full description of phenomenon of morality, it should be noted that Kant did not have access to the modern findings of cognitive science. At edge.com, Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard Professor of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology and Biological Anthropology, has published an article entitled "It Seems Biology (Not Religion) Equals Morality." Hauser's article, based on many of his prior writings, is a rigorous, insightful and succinct account of the roots of human morality. Hauser starts his article with an attack on the commonly heard claim that religion is a major source of our moral insights. There is not a drop of evidence suggesting this, as should be obvious. After all, morally deficient believers and morally enlightened nonbelievers are ubiquitous (and vice versa). Hauser does acknowledge that religions do endow their members with a sense of meaning and community. His sharp attack, however, is on the narrow claim that religions provide "the only-- or perhaps even the ultimate-- source of moral reasoning." This raises an obvious question: If our sense of morality is not based on religion, on what is it based? Hauser argues thatscience has demonstrated that each of us is endowed with a gift from nature: "a biological code for living a moral life." Our biologically endowed "cold calculus" takes the form of rules such as these: Actions are seen as worse than omissions; and forcing someone to do something for the greater good is worse if you make a person worse off in the process. Hauser describes this set of rules as a "moral grammar . . . and impartial, rational and unemotional capacity . . . an abstract set of rules for how to intuitively understand when helping another is obligatory and when harming another is forbidden." This impartial grammar has been revealed through experiments in which people were presented with unfamiliar moral dilemmas (he avoided such well-worn topics as abortion and euthanasia). For instance, is it permissible for a hospital to involuntarily take various internal organs from a healthy person walking by the hospital in order to save the lives of five patients needing transplants? When these sorts of dilemmas are presented to people of wildly divergent cultural backgrounds, the surprising finding is that their particular backgrounds are virtually irrelevant to determining how they will resolve such dilemmas. The work of Frans de Waal dovetails nicely with Hauser's writings. In particular, De Waal has argued that humans have evolved to be predominantly groupish and peace-loving beings who are well-tuned to look out for each other. Therefore, the question arises: what has gone wrong where we see moral atrocities? Hauser's answer is that these atrocities arise due to culturally constructed emotions that fuel "in-group favoritism, outgroup hatred and ultimately dehumanization." Essentially, we become just like psychopaths with regard to those we perceive to be in out-groups. Psychopaths are generally this way toward all others--they know the "rules" but they don't care. The rest of us are psychopaths toward every who we characterize to be our outgroup. We see these people in outgroups as "disposable." We allow children overseas to die, even when we have the money to prevent these deaths, and even when we would not allow the child of a sibling or a neighbor's child (who we perceive to be in our ingroup) to suffer.

Here lies the answer to understanding the dangers of nurture, of education and partiality. When we fuel in-group biases by elevating and praising members of the group, we often unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, denigrate the "other" by feeding the most nefarious of all emotions, the dragon of disgust. We label "the other" (the members of the outgroup) with a description that makes them as subhuman even an adamant, often parasitic and file, and thus disgusting. When disgust is recruited, those in the ingroup have only one way out: purge the other.
Hauser's work also dovetails well with the research of Jonathan Haidt, who has argued that disgust is one of the five pillars of morality. Haidt considers in-group/outgroup tension to be another one of those five pillars of morality (a separate pillar), whereas Hauser appears to be consolidating these two factors (people in outgroups disgust us). This consolidation seems to be the case, at least on an intuitive and anecdotal basis. Xenophobia and disgust do seem to go hand in hand. Mistreatment of members of outgroups not only allowed, but sometimes encouraged by those who preach universal love. Consider, for instance, the way that the members of many religions characterize gays--they are usually relegated to the outgroup. Hauser's argument also comports with the basic findings of those who have studied human reactions to ingroups and outgroups. If left unexamined and unchecked, our evolved system of simplistically categorizing people into ingroups and outgroups leads to moral catastrophe. This simplistic and intuitive system evolved while we lived in small groups of highly familiar people (many of them family members), and during times when there were no formal laws that coordinated large numbers of widely diverse individuals. According to Hauser, this genesis of the problem also presents a potential solution. Although all animals have evolved the capacity to distinguish between members of the in group and out groups, these features are not calibrated in the genome. They are "abstract and content free," much as our biologically endowed rules of moral grammar. We learn how to define our ingroup (and consequently, outgroups). Even seemingly compelling distinctions among humans, such as "racial" differences can be diminished or even eliminated by spending time with different-seeming others. Moral education requires introducing all children, early in life, to a wide varieties of religions, political systems, languages, social organizations and races. Research shows that those who dated or married people of other "races" don't so readily characterize those of other "races" to their outgroup. Exposure to diversity is perhaps our best option for reducing, if not eradicating, strong outgroup biases. Hauser urges that we take our intuitive moral intuitions to task. We need to consciously push ourselves beyond our local family and community and train ourselves to "listen to the universal voice of [our] species." We need to become "champions of plurality." At bottom, we need to recognize that diversity is not simply a buzzword. It is a critical part of the moral curriculum. We need to make ourselves spend time with different others, so that we are more likely to see one race, not many. We need to learn to see only fellow humans, rather than "our people" versus sub humans. Only when we have trained ourselves this way can our universal instinct toward empathy and our biologically endowed abstract moral grammar work together t pragmatically resolve differences peacefully. This would be a much better alternative to cracking heads and going to war based upon our ancient impulses toward unexamined, unenlightened and unjustified disgust.

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The Possibilities are Emptiness!

"Emptiness is described as the basis that makes everything possible" - The Twelfth Tai Situpa Rinpoche, Awakening the Sleeping Buddha “The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.” - Pema Chodron Buddhism makes people uncomfortable when it talks of emptiness. Most Western minds immediately go to "nothingness" as the equivalent, which I am learning is not accurate. Mingur Rinpoche has a fantastic chapter on emptiness in The Joy of Living. In it he makes my language geek happy by explaining the Tibetan words for emptiness - "tongpa-nyi". He says Tongpa does mean empty, but only in the sense of something we can't capture with our senses, and better words would be inconceivable or unnameable. Nyi, he says, has no particular meaning but when added to a word conveys a sense of "possibility". Suddenly, instead of nihilism, we have an "unlimited potential for anything to change, appear, or disappear." That is cool stuff. We, as human beings, simply can't conceive emptiness in that sense. Our minds are limited - they can only deal with so much - even with training. The assumptions we make and the perspectives we develop and yes, even the absolutes we live (and too often die) by, are simply our own constructions helping us navigate a reality that would otherwise overwhelm us. I'm not just talking about moral or ethical realms here, I also mean our physical reality. We are comforted by the thought that the chair we sit in and the floor we walk on are "solid" but science teaches us something else. The history of science itself demonstrates our understanding of the world is evolving. Quantum mechanics shows us things we didn't dream of 100 years ago. We keep learning new and better ways to grasp how the world works - our knowledge shifts constantly like sand in a desert storm. Facing the possibility of everything being in flux frightens us, and so we create shields that offer protection, that make us comfortable. We then think we can know ourselves, the world, and those around us. We know what to expect, we know what to accept. We order our existence, and we feel safe. Often we don’t know that we are creating a structure with which to experience the world. We are born into them as much as we seek them out, but the effects are the same. Habits of knowing, like habits of behavior, are comfortable, like well-worn shoes or a tasty turkey pot pie. Fear of losing that comfort and the accompanying feeling of safety is why we, collectively, often lash out at anyone or anything that is different from us. In those situations our core concepts of who we are and how we live are at risk. But when our worldview is so rigid it prevents us from adapting to what is, our carefully constructed truths are no longer places of refuge, they more resemble prison cells. Consider a man who has been laid off from his job as a machinist who can only see himself going into work at a factory, but all of the factories in his town have closed. His options for factory work in his town are nonexistent. If that is all he can see for himself his options are very bleak. But if he can open his mind and see another way to put his skills to use - not as an employee of a factory - he can devise a plan of action. I don’t mean that he will transform himself into something different with brand new skills. But if he can let go of the rigidity of what work once meant to him, he has a better chance of finding ways to leverage what he currently has to offer. The challenge is to hold lightly to everything I believe, and to see the lack of fixity as a source of possibility instead of a recipe for loss. As someone just getting started on this practice, I can say it feels much like standing and stretching luxuriously after being stuck in a painfully cramped space. One can learn to do a fine backstroke in the abyss, and abyss is more a fertile sea of possibility than terrifying vacuum. What a happy surprise. Image: © Rozum | Dreamstime.com

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