Exploring the Philosophical and Scientific | Dr. Daniel Dennett | EP 438

We wouldn't be arguing about whether there were women and men if things didn't need to be retooled from the very bottom. That's my sense of the situation. Now, that is a critical conversation. Whether the god-shaped hole gets filled by God exactly is something maybe for us to discuss on the shows you're going to be joining me for the next nine evenings on my "We Who Wrestle With God" Tour. I would like you to come armed with your sharpest sword and hold nothing back.

You've asked me to do something. Generally speaking, I'm pretty good at which is to be disagreeable and try to find holes in things. I'm going to be coming at it from a kind of first principles, uneducated but I hope sufficiently intelligent perspective, and I think you could offer to the audience a really critical response that's thoughtful so that I can see if there's still holes in what I've laid out because I can't find any. That's what we're going to explore. I can't wait.

The history of the evolution of ethics in the last 10,000 years has been a history of the secularization of ethics, and it's still evolving. We have issues today. We have issues about vegetarianism. We've given up cannibalism and slavery, but there are still no agreements on a lot of fundamental issues in ethics. But those agreements have nothing to do with [Music] religion.

Hello everybody! I had the opportunity today to talk to the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who along with Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins, is probably perhaps best known to the world as one of the Four Horsemen of the atheist movement that has been so influential over the last 20 years. And as many of you know, I've had many discussions with Sam Harris and a couple of discussions with Richard Dawkins—another one hypothetically forthcoming.

It occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that I had spoken with Dr. Daniel Dennett, and I felt that that would be enlightening and necessary. So today, we talked about his understanding of the relationship between science and moral morality, the relationship between morality and the secular, and the relationship between morality, the secular, and the religious. We exchanged our views about how those different systems of apprehension and conception might be interrelated, and talked about the difficulties in both discussing and reconciling the scientific and religious views.

Dr. Dennett's viewpoint is that the religious viewpoint has been superseded fundamentally; that it might have been a necessary precondition for civilized development, but that it's been superseded. And we got a long way in that discussion—uh, not to the end, for obvious reasons—but welcome to the exchange!

So, Dr. Dennett, and I'll call you Dan, I'm very interested in talking to you about your ideas about religious belief and practice. You may know that I've talked to some of the people who you've been intellectually associated with. I've had two discussions with Richard Dawkins and I think we're planning a third if the information I'm getting is correct, and I've spoken with Sam Harris a number of times.

I think we share a lot of interests— you and I, and one of them is a very deep interest, I would say. I was reviewing your book today, "Breaking the Spell," and that's really the domain that I wanted to discuss, although I'm perfectly happy to branch out from that to anywhere that our conversation takes us.

I want to try out some ideas on you, and I want to see what you have to say about them. I'm going to start with a definition, if you don't mind, from your book so that we have some sense that we're talking about the same thing. I think I'll try two definitions because there are two domains I think that we could dig into that would be very useful.

So, like you, I'm interested in what I believe; I'm interested in the scientific analysis of religious belief. I don't think that we—yes, yes, yes. Yeah, and so that's where I'd like to investigate. So I'm going to start out with a couple of definitions from your books and then we can dig into that.

So the first one is that you described the religious domain as a "vowed belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought." That was a definition I took from "Breaking the Spell." I'm wondering if, and then I'm going to add something to that and then I'll get you to comment about whether you think those definitions still suffice, or maybe how they've changed in your thinking or anything you'd like to add to them.

So the other thing that I'm curious about here is you talked about "aboutness," and you said the aboutness of a pencil—the pencil marks, the aboutness of the pencil marks composing a shopping list—is derived from the intentions of the person whose list it is. I'm interested in that—the relationship between intentionality.

The reason I want to bring that into the discussion of religion is because I think there's a link between the idea that I've been developing and the ideas of intentionality that at least in part typify your thought, and I don't see the precise relationship between those ideas of intentionality and this definition of the religious enterprise that you described.

So that's the first thing I'd like to get clarified. So my understanding of perception is that aim defines perception, and that seems to be akin, in some ways, to your conception of intentionality and aboutness. Does that seem at least vaguely plausible?

Yes, more or less. When I speak about intentionality, I mean it in the philosopher's sense derived from Brentano; aboutness is a good synonym for intentionality. And it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with one's intention. If I'm startled by a loud noise, my startle is about that loud noise, but there's no intention involved in the sense of "What do you intend, sir?" I may have some intentions immediately, like, "I am going to run" or "I'm going to duck," but intention in the legal sense of "Did you do that on purpose?" is a distinct notion.

Okay, so can you clarify what that means in relationship to aboutness, then? That's obviously I'm not familiar with the distinction that you're drawing, or sufficiently familiar. What's the relationship between the concepts of intention and aboutness?

Well, the Latin verb "intendere" means "to point an arrow at." Brentano and others said this is the key to thought: it's directed at something. It has an intentional object. The intentional object is whatever the thought is about. The curious thing about thoughts is that they can be about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, and in that case, they're about something that doesn't exist. But that creates logical problems, but we can set those logical problems aside and just deal with the fact that we have to explain how information that's in our brains can be about things in the world and also about things that don't even exist.

Okay, so that helps. The Latin that you referred to is also very helpful. So I'm going to throw something in from left field, let's say. The word "sin." The word "sin." There's a three-language point of derivation for the word sin; they're all from archery. To sin means to miss the target. So Greek is "hamartia." I don't remember what the Hebrew is—"chet," I think, but I can't remember. It doesn't matter; it means to miss the target, and it is an archery term. So you could think of sin in that regard as mal-intention, or mis-intention, or merely failure to hit the target.

And so there’s a—and you talked about intentionality with regard to thought being directed at something. So the way I've been conceptualizing the religious enterprise isn't so much in relationship to the definition that you offered with regard to a "vowed belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought," although I'd like to get into that because it's dead relevant.

Let me run something by you. So when we aim our attention at something, we're aiming our attention within a hierarchy of aim, and the religious enterprise looks to me to be the enterprise that specifies the highest aim or the most foundational of aims.

I think that our instinct—that there's such a thing as depth, say depth in literary analysis, for example, or depth of significance in relationship to concepts—is a function of the fact that there's a hierarchy of intention. And I think that as you move toward the foundation—or up to the apex, depending on which metaphoric frame you use—you start to enter into the realm of what's deep. And that the realm of what's deep is what signifies the religious.

I mean, this is like a technical definition. Imagine that your intentions—any given intention—depends on another intention, and that depends on another intention. But as you stack the intentions up and analyze them, you go down into the depths to see what the foundational intentions are. The religious is the realm of the foundations of intention; that seems to be a good way of thinking about it.

So that's a different definition, obviously, than the supernatural agent definition, and so I'm wondering, well, first of all, if that explanation makes any sense to you because it's pretty brief, and also your reactions to that are.

Well, my reaction is that the term I would use for what you're talking about is the "summum bonum," the highest good. And that is not necessarily a religious idea. I have my sense of what are the most important things; and I'm not religious, but I'd like to say deep. I share the hierarchy of ends that you describe; I don't think of my endorsement and allegiance to that ethic as a religious ethic, but there it is. And I am happy to say there are some things that are more important than others.

Okay, okay. That's why I wanted to start with definition, right? Because there's no sense having a discussion about what something means unless we can agree what territory we're wandering over. So, okay, so we seem to have established some agreement that there's a hierarchy of conceptualization, or you said even more specifically a hierarchy of good. You referred to the summum bonum, and you said you have a hierarchy of good and you believe that there’s something hypothetically, something at the apex or at the foundation.

So okay, so let's see. It's definitely the case that there are medieval conceptions of the Judeo-Christian God as the summum bonum, and there are insistences in the biblical corpus that in the final analysis, God is ineffable. Even though he's conceptualized in those stories as a spirit with whom communication is possible, his fundamental nature disappears into the ineffable; that's what the theologians claim when they're pushed.

And so, okay, let's see if we can figure that out. I don't think that the conception of God as the sum of all that's good is an accurate conceptualization. It seems to me it's more like whatever God is conceptualized to be is that which all good things share in common, right?

I know that makes the concept of God something like the central element in a web of ideas that surround the concept of the good as such, right?

Right. It's not exactly a sum. And it's important to be precise when discussing things like this. Now, you said you have a conception of the highest good, and can I ask you what that is?

Well, it's not readily definable, but there's— I think that human beings are the measure of what's good. And over the eons we have gradually discovered and invented and contrived standards of what we think good is. And that's as much for, you know, a good wheel or a good axe or a good airplane or a good person, and these all sorts of different— you know, there's even, I suppose, good machine guns—good at being a machine gun.

But the moral good is a particular human realm. I think animals don't really have morality; they have something that makes morality possible, but they don't have morality. But we human beings have evolved systems of morality, and they implicitly fix—they don't define in the geometrical sense what the highest good is, but they outline it; they point to it. And it's a moving target. What we think of as good today is quite different from what was thought good back in Old Testament days; nobody today would want to live with Old Testament morality.

We've come a long way from that, thank goodness. Thank goodness goodness has evolved.

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Okay, okay. So it was interesting, you know, when you listed out things that could be good, the things that came to mind first for you were some of them were tools—like a good wheel, a good axe—even a good machine gun. And I like that. I like that, and I think we have some commonality of conception there too because there's a pragmatic definition of good—it's something like something that's good fits its purpose.

And well, that would be in a hierarchy as well; so that purpose would have to be good as well, right? There's a functional element to that. And so, okay, and so the way that I've been conceptualizing perception—and I think this is a neurophysiologically informed conceptualization—is that once we establish our aim, the world arrays itself around us into something like pathways and tools and obstacles associated with that concept. I derived that in part from J.J. Gibson's conceptualization of perception.

Exactly, affordances.

Right, exactly.

So what do you think of Gibson's ideas?

I think most of them are excellent. I've been writing about affordances for some time, and what I think Gibson was weak on is he didn't talk about how affordances are actually tracked in the brain. He sort of threw up his hands about that and said: "The information is in the light." Well, yeah, but how does the information in the light get into our heads and do what it does? That's the part that he was weak on, but we're making great progress on that today in the neurosciences.

Yeah, okay, okay. So let me elaborate a little bit on the Gibsonian model, and I've been thinking about it for a long time, and I've specifically thought about some elaborations on it recently. He talked a lot about affordances—essentially tools and obstacles.

Okay, so I'm going to lay out a schema, and you tell me what you think about this, and I'm hoping that it matches the underlying neurophysiology; I believe it does. So imagine that we establish an aim—this would be with every active perception—we establish an aim and then what we see in the world; our perceptual systems are navigation tools.

And once we establish an aim or a destination, we see a pathway to the destination; we see tools that could afford us movement towards the destination. We see obstacles that could get in the way—so far that's pretty Gibsonian. We see markers of progress; we see markers of failure; we see allies and foes—that would be more on the human scale—and we see agents of transformation.

The agents of transformation would shift our aims, right? Because as you said, you know, what’s good changes to some degree situationally; like it partakes in a hierarchy of good but switches situationally.

Absolutely, yeah.

Okay, and so I like the expansion because a human being doesn't really fit the tool category, but then we can perceive human beings who are useful and on our side, so to speak, and we can perceive human beings that operate in a manner that's... exactly. So allies and foes seems to be a nice way of conceptualizing that.

Okay, so then I think... I spend a lot of time on assessing the neurosystem of a tool, producing positive emotion; the apprehension of an obstacle produces negative emotion. And it's the same with allies and foes; it's the same with markers forward and markers of progress and markers of failure.

So the emotions become calibration systems that mark deviation from the pathway forward. And I talked to Carl Friston—here's something cool—I talked to Carl Friston about this. So I wrote a paper with some of my students about 10 years ago where we tried to relate anxiety to entropy computation.

So anxiety seems to mark the multiplication of pathways to a destination. So if you're...

Right, so it marks an increase of entropy. And Friston worked on a model like that, but he added a dimension that I hadn't conceptualized. He said that the reason dopamine marks positive affect is because positive affect marks a decrease in entropy as you move forward to a destination.

So you can actually conceptualize both emotional systems from an entropy perspective.

I think this is fine—not obvious, but on the right track all the way along. In my work, I've come to the view that all control is done by emotions in the brain. There's no operating system; the brain is a computer. But it doesn't have a rigid operating system the way a digital computer does. All control is done by resting control in a war or a battle, a conflict between different emotional states that arise in our brains.

And that's why life is difficult—is because easy things are things that are emotionally closer to hand, and they lure us away from the better answers. This is whether you're doing science or making a moral decision or trying to solve a math problem. Self-control is the arena of consciousness, and emotional valence is what does all the pushing and pulling.

Okay, okay. So let me ask you about that, and that'll bring us back to the religious question to some degree. So you characterized the landscape of consciousness—correct me if I get any of my summaries of your ideas wrong because I don't want to do that—as a battleground between emotions.

Do you mean a battleground between emotions, or do you mean a battleground between emotions and motivations?

Well, motivation is emotion too.

Okay, okay, fine. So we’re going to put those in the same bin. I mean, sort of conceptualizing the difference—it seems to me it's practically useful to conceptualize motivations as systems that set aims and emotions as systems that track movement towards aims because there's a bit of a difference it seems to me.

Well, you know, it's not a perfect—they interact; they interact. I know. And some emotions seem to set aims, like anger, for example, does.

Yeah, you know, so...

Okay, okay, but that's fine. So are you familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s work, by the way, the historian of religion?

No, well, I know of it, but I’m not familiar with it.

Okay, okay. Well, he's stunningly brilliant, by the way. And to the degree that you're interested in the scientific analysis of religion, I can't think of a better source.

He's amazingly brilliant, and much of what he says works in alliance with the things we've been talking about. So let me give you an example. And this also has to do with the issue of self-control. So Ilat has pointed to a theme that's developed in mythology in many, many different cultures—and it's the war of the gods in heaven.

And there are accounts in many, many theogonies—stories of the rise of gods, of a battle between primal forces that results in the emergence of a dominant player. Now, you can imagine that anthropologically; that might be a consequence of something like this.

So you imagine that as a culture amalgamates, the gods of the local tribes come together at the same time, and there's a conceptual war. And as the culture integrates, those concepts war at the same time; sometimes in the form of actual physical battles, there's an amalgamation of conceptualization that parallels the amalgamation of tribal units.

And out of that often emerges something approximating a monotheism, and I think that parallels cultural integration. But I also think it parallels cortical maturation. I think there's an impetus towards unification that is equivalent to the battle between emotions and motivational systems—it's not their suppression, that's a Freudian model—but their integration towards a higher end.

That sounds roughly right, yes. I think that's what maturation is all about. That's how we become self-controlled. That's how we become autonomous—is by learning how to control our emotions. But it's not as if there's a homunculus in there who's in charge; it's that the emotions themselves negotiate a resolution.

Yes, yes. You only do one thing at a time.

And so what emerges from all of that noisy struggle in the brain is a more or less unified, more or less self-controlled, more or less reliable agent. That's what free will is.

Okay, okay, great. We're having a hard time finding something to disagree about here, so I'm... I think we'll get to that, but so far, okay. So let me tell you a story. Let me tell you a story— you tell me what you think about this.

So the Egyptians, in their cosmology, they put something at the apex. What they put at the apex was the god Horus, and Horus was represented by an open eye. You know, the famous Egyptian eye; everyone knows that symbol, right? And Horus was also a falcon. And the reason Horus was a falcon is because raptors have superb vision.

So the Egyptians hypothesized in their mythology—I think this was an emergent hypothesis—that the agent that should rule supreme over the war of states, right? This would be the agent that, if I was equivalent to the aware eye, right? So they put attention at the apex. And it's actually voluntary attention; it's even more specific than that. It's voluntary attention to the... what would you say? It's something like voluntary attention to error. That might be a good way of conceptualizing it.

Right?

Yeah, and so I get it. Okay, okay, okay. And so, all right, so let’s turn to your original definition because there's something definite there that I'd like to delve into. So I suggested that the way that I've been conceptualizing the religious enterprise was an analysis of what should be put at the uniting apex there.

That will tie that in with what we're talking about. You objected to the religious enterprise in your book. The sticking point for you was the idea that there was a supernatural agent whose approval needed to be sought or bargained for.

Okay, so in the Old Testament corpus, there's an insistence that the relationship that we have with what's highest is to be conceptualized as a relationship, right? And so that's starting to wander onto the territory that you're describing. So I've been very curious about why it's conceptualized as a relationship.

So let me lay that out for you, and you tell me what you think about that. So, for example, one way of conceptualizing the god of the Old Testament is that he's the force that manifests itself as calling. So, for example, when Moses is attracted by the burning bush, the burning bush is a very good example of this.

So Moses is a shepherd at the point in the story where the burning bush makes itself manifest, and the burning bush is a symbol—it's like a symbol of the dynamism of life. That's a good way of thinking about it because a tree is a good symbol of life, and a burning tree is a tree that's in the process of transformation.

And so it's like a vision of hypermetabolism; that's a good way of thinking about it. But it's also a combination of being and becoming. And so it’s the manifestation of being and becoming; that's very abstract. In any case, what happens to Moses is that he's wandering around, and he's by Mount Sinai, and something attracts his attention.

And he wanders off the beaten path to investigate that, and as he investigates it, he goes into it more deeply. He eventually takes off his shoes, which is a symbol of his willingness to what would you say? Depart from his current journey. It's a good way of thinking about it.

You wear shoes that are appropriate for a journey, and shoes mark identity, and to remove your shoes is to sacrifice your current identity for that pursuit. That's a good way of thinking about it. And as he goes deeper into it, eventually, the voice of being and becoming itself speaks to him, and that's what marks his transition to a leader.

Now, so God in that story is represented as that which calls to us, and there's an autonomy about that. See, this is also what the psychoanalysts figured out is that there are spirits, so to speak, operating within us that aren't under our voluntary control that have the capacity, for example, to grip our attention.

And you said, for example, when we respond with a startle response, there's no conscious intentionality in that. We're gripped by something, and the grip of attentional interest that's manifest in calling is represented in the Old Testament as a manifestation of the divine.

And so I'm wondering what you think about that and about that notion of autonomy in interest and calling. I think it's like a manifestation of the unifying spirit; that might be another way of thinking about it.

Okay, well, it strikes me as a very clear example of the excess—I'll use a philosophical word and then explain it—hypostasis of a perfectly real phenomenon. People are always wanting to make a thing, an object, out of a pattern that they see.

The pattern is real; you've described it just fine, but it's not an extra thing; it's just the pattern that's there in the way people control themselves and learn to control themselves. This is the light motif of my whole career. People think that there's this Cartesian theater—the place in the head where this movie happens.

There's no such place; there is no Cartesian theater. There's perception, but perception doesn't consist in re-perceiving something which is displayed in your brain. That's an extra thing that doesn't exist, and this autonomous god from the Old Testament is another extra thing. It's not needed; it doesn't explain anything.

But it's a very human foible to postulate such a thing.

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Right, it's like the age... So would you also include that criticism in the realm of the hyperactive agency detector? Something like that? Is that an idea?

Okay, fine. So I understand your objection.

So, okay, so now let me ask you this. You said earlier that the good is something that transmutes, let's say, and recedes.

Right? It does what? Transmutes and recedes?

The good; it moves around; it's a moving good.

Okay, okay, okay. So let me ask you what you think about this: it's like a summum bonum explanation for the relationship between the concept of God and that concept.

So imagine that something calls to you in the manner we just described. I'm not going to hypothesize a God in the way that you objected to, okay? But you know in your life that there's a sequence of things that call to you.

Okay, so now imagine that there's a commonality behind that sequence—that all those things that call to you point in a direction. And the direction, I would suggest, that they're pointing you in is the direction that unifies that emotional and motivational conflict.

You see what I mean?

Okay, okay. So that seems to be an okay explanation as well because this is actually how the god of the Old Testament is characterized, right?

Is that he is the commonality of callings, and there's another element too that emerges because it's important. You could think about calling as the manifestation of the positive emotions that pull us forward; that's a reasonable way of thinking about it.

But the god in the Old Testament is also characterized as conscience, right? And conscience also has that kind of autonomy because you call yourself out on your misbehavior, and it's something that in some sense is inescapable.

Okay, so the dynamism between calling and conscience is one of the most profound ways that the god of the Old Testament is characterized in the biblical corpus, and it looks to me like it's an attempt to characterize the orienting function of what attracts your attention and what also keeps you on the pathway.

Is something like that, so is there any of that that you would object to?

Like, that the—I—no, no, I think you’re making a fair, easy topic more difficult than it has to be, but it's an interesting way of doing it, and I am happy to grant you that interpretation of—it's a way of reading the Old Testament where it makes a little more sense than if it was taken literally.

Yeah, all right. So I'm going to go with this from the same issue from a slightly different perspective because I want to zero in on this issue of relationship because I think that's the most fundamental stumbling block that would be useful for us to discuss.

And I think it's the strangest element of the religious endeavor. We've established a certain amount of common ground in relationship to the idea of a hierarchy of value or a hierarchy of good, so I'm just going to leave that sit for a minute, but I want to investigate the relationship issue because it is key to, as you point out in your book, it is key to what people generally understand, at least as part of the religious enterprise.

And it's also the insistence that's probably most susceptible to the objections that you've put forth, for example, with regards to the hyperactive agency detector. And so I've been very curious about why the relationship with what's good is conceptualized so often as a relationship—a real relationship.

Okay, so let me walk through something, and you tell me what you think about this. So I've been conceptualizing thought as secularized prayer. And the reason I'm doing that, I suppose to some degree, is anthropological because I think that prayer preceded thought developmentally.

That's what the historical evidence would suggest. We haven't been thinking rationally for very long; it's perhaps several thousand years. We've been thinking religiously for much longer than that, and I'm not trying to establish a qualitative primacy here; I'm trying to account for the facts.

So I'm going to outline what I think we do when we think, and I'd like you to tell me what you think about the outline.

Okay, so the first thing I would say is that thoughts orient us in a manner that's akin to our perceptions and our emotions. So they're of the same enterprise; we use thoughts to move us towards our goals and then to transform our goals.

Yeah, we do, it's the abstract.

Okay, okay, good. So then I would say that thoughts make themselves manifest in relation to our aim, right, just like our perceptions do. And so our thoughts are defined at least in part by our aim.

So this is what I think I do when I think. The first thing I do when I think is admit that I don't know something, so I come to the process in humility and I admit I have a problem. It's like, here's something I don't understand. It could be something I'm curious about; it could be something that's bothering me, but I have a problem.

And I also admit that I have the problem and I presume that there's an answer, and I presume that if I get the answer, that would be good.

And then I would say I do something that you could describe—I allow myself to receive a thought; it's something like that.

Now, I could say I think, or I could say I think something up, but I don't really like that formulation because I don't think it's a good description of actually what happens.

What happens is that I posit a problem and answers appear to me.

That's good! I'm happy with that. It reminds me of Plato in the Theaetetus, where he says knowledge is like the birds in a giant aviary; you've got all these birds—the trick is can you get them to come when you call? And so you've got all this knowledge that you’ve acquired, and the hard part is getting it to come when it's needed.

And how often do we smite our forehead and say, "Oh, I knew that all along! Why didn't I think of it?" That's when we find that there was something we knew that didn't get used by us at the appropriate moment.

And the best way to make the new thoughts occur to you is to be in a discussion like we're in right now; it's to get another mind to help you, and we stimulate each other’s minds and dredge up new corners of the other person's minds, which may have interesting ways of putting things that we hadn't quite thought of before.

"Oh, that's a good way of putting it; I get that." That’s Descartes' big error, was in being solitary, trusting to his own mind and trying to get his clear and distinct ideas ever clearer and more distinct.

And the only way he could trust them, he thought, is if he posited a benevolent, all-knowing God. We don't need that; what we need is each other.

So, okay. Let me riff on that for a minute. So there's a gospel insistence that where two or more are gathered in the name of the logos, that spirit makes itself manifest. That's a good way of thinking about it.

And so imagine that what we're trying to do in this conversation—and what we hopefully are doing to some degree—is to stumble forward somewhat less blindly toward the truth.

Okay? And if our aim is at the truth, then the spirit that makes that journey possible—that's how the religious… that would be the religious formulation.

The spirit that makes that journey possible will make itself manifest in the space defined by interaction. Would seem to me that would be a good definition of science too.

I would agree with that, but we can leave the religion right out of it and say it is the organization of science.

Where trust is assumed but tested, where people of different opinions come together and sort things out constructively, and that's the best test of all of truth.

You said, for example, that they come together in trust. Yes, so I would say that there’s a precondition for the scientific inquiry to occur, even at the level of dialogue, and the precondition is that we can trust.

What are we trusting, do you think? Are we trusting—what are we… are we—the—in that situation, what is it that allows for trust?

It's the goodwill that we normally assume in a civilized world. When you and I walk down the street, we assume that the people that we see all around us—most of whom are total strangers to us—we assume that they don't mean us any harm.

We...

Okay, we assume goodwill.

I like the way Paul Subrite has put this in his book, "In the Company of Strangers." If you put a whole lot of unrelated chimpanzees in a large room together, they would be terrified; they would be screaming, and they would be unable to sit there calmly.

And I sometimes point this out when I'm in a large auditorium and there's hundreds of people, none of them related. I say, "Is anybody here scared to death?"

No, no, no, we're not—we trust each other! That human trust is the key to civilization and to science, and it's under attack right now with artificial intelligence and misrepresentation and the technologies of misrepresentation, which are eroding trust in a very serious way.

Okay, so I use the same example, by the way, when I'm talking to large audiences, and the chimpanzee example as well. And so you said that the trust that makes even a scientific conversation possible is the trust in mutual goodwill, right?

Okay, so all right, so I want to relate that idea of goodwill back to something that we talked about earlier. So I think that if the battle between emotional and motivational systems occurs optimally, it produces a unity of spirit that makes that trust possible.

That's what you do when you socialize a child. Children are really socialized between the ages of two and four, right? They're pretty egocentric and temporally bounded. At the age of two, they kind of want whatever their motivational system wants right now and to hell with the consequences.

That's the definition of a 2-year-old. There's some wonderful things about that. And then, as they mature and as their cortex matures, those systems integrate. And if that integration takes place, then you have the presence of an overarching structure that enables that trust to be made manifest.

A child will learn to take turns, for example. That's why I say that free will is an achievement, not a metaphysical endowment. You have to develop free will.

And the reason why we don't hold children responsible for misdeeds is that they haven't developed the self-control; they haven't developed the sort of trustworthy, reliable autonomy that we demand of each other.

The price we pay in self-control is a price; it's the best bargain on the planet. It means that we can walk around without fearing for our lives all the time.

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Right, right, right.

Okay, okay. Well, so, all right, so let me make a leap here because I'm increasingly inclined to believe that the divide between atheism and science is an illusion. And I know that's a huge leap, and I'll backfill it.

But, you know, the notion of the logos that emerges as the biblical corpus proceeds is, as far as I can tell, it's identical to what you just described.

So the notion is that peaceful harmony and unity emerge when people aim up, so they're of goodwill. The emphasis on hospitality in the Old Testament, for example, is a reflection of that; hospitality as the basis of society was a sacred requirement to be hospitable.

People unify themselves in their upward aim, and then they participate in truthful dialogue—that’s "dialogos," that’s the exchange of redemptive information and that’s the foundation.

Okay, that’s the spirit that, in principle, emerges in the biblical corpus as that which is to be put in the highest place.

Now let me tell you why there's... if you wouldn't mind, I'll explain why that's conceptualized as a relationship.

Okay, so imagine that maybe I have a problem with someone, right? And so my relationship with that person is choppy, and it's degenerating into mistrust.

And you already pointed out, we know what happens when the default presumption between people deteriorates into mistrust. That's not good!

Okay, so now I see this mistrust emerging, and I think, well, I would like to rectify that. And so then I can go, let’s say, meditate on that; how would I have to reshape my perceptions and my actions, my patterns of attention, so that a pathway to harmony and trust could be reestablished with this person?

You could imagine asking yourself that—that's a particular kind of aim. And as a consequence—I'm likely—not necessarily, but I'm likely to get a revelation of some pathway forward. Does that seem reasonable?

Revelation?

Well, I don't know how else to describe it. It might occur to you—an idea might occur to you.

Yes, I think those are—I'm trying not to force this—but I think those are the same concepts. A revelation is something that reveals itself.

I know the problem is it begs the source question, but I'm not too concerned about that at the moment. But that—so here's an idea. The thought that will make itself manifest to you is dependent on the aim of your request.

Yeah, independently, I mean indirectly, yes.

Okay, okay, so what I see happening time and time again in biblical stories—and I've looked at them in great detail—is that God is conceptualized as that which you can call upon; that which will respond if you're aiming upward in something approximating love and you're motivated by the truth.

That's a definition; like it's not an insistence about some extra human agent, not precisely. It's a definition of how to progress forward appropriately.

And this is why the stories that are sequenced in the biblical corpus are, what would you say, they're attempts to characterize that spirit —like the spirit that should be called upon to set things right.

And it's the reason it's conceptualized as a relationship. This gets to the point precisely, is because it is something that you can call upon that will reveal itself, and you do that as if it's in a relationship.

Now, you pointed to Descartes’ error, so to speak. You said that he kind of got lost in his solipsism and that he needed other people to correct his thinking. That's fine with me because I think that we can call upon each other to keep us moving forward on the appropriate path.

But we also do that in internal dialogue, right? And the question is, what is it that you're calling upon when you have the pathway forward to a new destination revealed?

That’s what’s characterized as God in the Old and New Testaments.

Well, it seems to me we’ve improved on that, and we call it secular science, including philosophy, including what universities are supposed to do and so forth.

We are assuming goodwill and trust, and we are letting freedom—academic freedom—rain, and we're allowing ideas that are welcome as long as they are presented in a spirit of dialogue.

I don't get to lay down the law. Here's my idea, and if somebody in the group has an idea that the others don't accept, then the responsibility to get the others to accept that falls really on the person whose idea it is.

And anybody who says, "Well, my religion says that this is just has to be this way, and there’s no argument about it," we say, "Well, I guess you're disqualified." I'm sorry, you're disabled; you can't participate in this discussion if you can’t put your own ideas— if you can’t defend your own ideas to us, then you'll have to sit this one out.

Because this is a dialogue among equals.

Okay, so here’s the concern I have about that. You pointed out that that scientific enterprise is dependent upon two things: the assumption of goodwill and trust, but also the presence of goodwill and trust, right?

Those are really separate things because you could have that and I could distrust you anyways, or I could trust you and that wouldn’t be there.

But for the scientific endeavor to proceed, your proclamation is that that goodwill and trust have to be there, and they have to be assumed.

Well, yes, but it's also true that…

Right, I got that. I got that, yes; absolutely, it has to be there.

At the cutting edge of every interesting scientific question, egos reign, and there’s battles and there’s name-calling and there’s caricature, and it’s rough and tumble at the cutting edge.

But what's behind that cutting edge is the solid heft of the ax—all the agreed-upon things—all the things that they're not disagreeing about, and that’s what gives the scientific enterprise its power.

Let me add a couple of things to that scientific conceptualization, and you tell me if they're necessary and if you're agreeable to them.

Okay, so one would be the assumption that there is an intelligible order, the assumption that that intelligible order is intelligible to us, the assumption that attempts to map that intelligible order are beneficial rather than harmful.

This is, those are— that's fine.

Okay, I think those working assumptions are religious by definition because they're outside the purview of science.

They're the ground upon which— the ground that has to be established before the scientific enterprise can function.

And I'm not trying to catch you here, by the way; this is a definitional move. It's like because it sounds to me like you're making the presumption, and I think it's an accurate presumption, that there are preconditions that must be met before the scientific enterprise can proceed in its proper manner.

And my question is, those presumptions aren't within the purview of science.

No, no, they are outside the—no, I mean they're working assumptions, not if they’re preconditions.

The reason they are within science is because science has a track record.

You drive a car, okay? You drive a car.

We're talking— we're talking using very high-tech equipment right now. So far, the evidence that there's order and that we've got a grip on it could not be better.

We can measure things to the micrometers, and we can plot eclipses centuries in advance. That is part of Science and part of the structure of Science.

And that's why our working assumption that there's order is not— it's not religious; it's scientific.

Okay, okay. Well then, fair enough, fair enough. You're—you—I—it's science has a reputation, and the reputation that it has is well-founded, and the reputation is as an enterprise that can reveal order and to do that in a manner that's reliable and productive.

Okay, no problem.

I think that's a separate issue, in some regard, from some of the axiomatic assumptions that we listed out. It's like an addition to it.

It's like, right? Because we talked about the necessity of goodwill; we talked about the necessity of assuming goodwill; we talked about the idea of the intelligibility of the order.

You said we can also rely on science because its claims to have investigated that order reliably have been validated repeatedly, right? So it has a brand and a ref...

Okay, so let's look at an exception for a minute just out of curiosity.

So I was testifying before Congress yesterday—Or two days ago—about, or you alluded to, right? The breakdown of trust, for example, in an increasingly technological world.

Now, you know, the Chinese scientists—the engineers—they’ve produced a system in China they call Skynet after the Terminator series, right?

And Skynet is made out of 700 million closed-circuit TV cameras, which monitor everything that Chinese do.

And when the engineers who designed the system were pressed on their use of the name Skynet—because Skynet became a system that went to war against humanity—they said, "Oh, we're producing the good Skynet," which is, of course, what the original engineers presumed in the movie series.

And so it's surreally insane and extraordinarily dangerous.

Now, how do you...but you see that there's a danger in that technologic run amok.

Absolutely not.

Now, why is...how do we—if we're careful—how do we segregate the perversion of the scientific enterprise, which is still using much of the same technology and approach, like it seems to me that in China it's devoted towards evil ends, and that that's an ever-present problem.

Well, that’s an ever-present and ever-lurking problem.

And so is the science that the Chinese are engaging in that has this element of the extension of control and surveillance.

Can we—is that a false science? Or like how do we—how do we conceptualize within the scientific realm the deviation from the ideal that the Chinese are pursuing and that now threatens us, let's say?

Well, many, many years ago Norbert Wiener put it very well. He said, "Don't make the mistake"—I can't quote him exactly—but he said, "When you make a tool, you also make a weapon."

And how you use it? Don't think that your defensive weapons won't be turned against you as offense. It's...

Yeah, 16 years is the lag, right? I think that was from Wiener too; he said, "Any weapon you make will be used by your enemies within one generation."

It's something like that.

So every tool is a weapon; that's true.

And that's why we need government and law—law and order—in addition to—I mean, science depends on it.

Science depends on freedom and order, and that's why the science that occurs in the free world is way ahead of the science that occurs in dictatorships.

Right, okay, so those are part of the preconditions for the scientific endeavor that we discussed earlier.

Okay, now I believe it was in your book you described Stephen Jay Gould’s two magisteria notion, right?

That they were independent magisteria?

And in your book, you weren't particularly convinced by that argument—that that’s a good way of thinking about it.

I thought it was...

Let me ask you.

Okay, okay, great.

Okay, so that's very blunt.

Okay, so let me reframe what you just said, including that realm of conceptualization that that's in contention between you and Gould.

Okay, so what I heard you say—you tell me if I've got it wrong—is that the scientific enterprise nests inside another enterprise.

Yeah, that enterprise is associated with freedom and order—a kind of order, civilization, and regulated by laws, right?

Okay, okay. And that that system itself is predicated on a system of fundamental assumptions.

So let’s say in the United States, for example, the entire body of laws that allows for the order that makes scientific freedom possible is at least in part grounded on our conceptualizations, let's say, of inalienable human rights.

Yes.

And that nobody is above the law.

So that's a stacking.

Okay, so what that implies is that the scientific enterprise itself is nested inside another—see, that’s the conception I think this is where Gould went wrong, you know?

Okay, well, so then we could say, in terms of his magisterial argument, it's not that they're side-by-side systems in separate domains; it's that the scientific enterprise is nested inside a moral enterprise by necessity and goes astray if it's not nested inside that moral enterprise.

Yes, where Gould went wrong was in thinking that the second magisterium was religious as opposed to secular.

Ethics, one might say, half of philosophy—almost all of it is non-religious; it's secular.

Okay, but is it scientific?

All the advances in ethics that we've seen in the last, let’s say, 5,000 years have been fought by the religions but have gradually been won over by the secular ethicists.

Okay, okay. So I’m clear about this. So now let me recapitulate, then, and see if I’ve got the way you're conceptualizing this right.

So you have the scientific enterprise, and if it’s properly oriented, it’s nested in a broader moral enterprise.

But your claim is that the moral enterprise itself is secular.

Okay.

Is it—secular? That is, it’s—you’ve said the advances are secular, and the history of the evolution of ethics in the last 10,000 years has been a history of the secularization of ethics, a way away from New Testament ethics, which was terrible to—and it’s still evolving.

And we have issues today; we have issues about vegetarianism and about—you know, we've given up cannibalism and slavery; thank goodness! That's good, but we—there's still no agreements on a lot of fundamental issues in ethics, but those agreements have nothing to do with religion.

Okay, okay, so I've got it. So your model is the scientific enterprise nested in a broader moral enterprise, but you believe the core element of that, in so far as it’s valuable, is secular.

Okay, so all right. So then, what are the means of validation of the secular ethical enterprise?

And now they can't be scientific if science is on top of that structure because then those two things just collapse into each other.

So by what principles do the secular ethicists validate their claims if they're not—their claims?

Well, there's science, and then there's—but I have to explain this carefully—politics is about what we should do.

Now, these are both rational exercises and what we should do—the normative inquiry about what the norms should be—and it includes logic, game theory, probability theory.

Let's stop right there.

Yeah.

There's more to it than that, but there are normative disciplines, and some of it is very abstract, like mathematics, mathematical game theory.

Some of it—and mathematical logic, arithmetic, and geometry—there's a right and a wrong way of doing these things, which we've learned—not thanks to religion, thanks to our mutual understanding of what works.

The reason we trust arithmetic is because it works.

No proofs that arithmetic was good would be worth a darn if we couldn't count on it to count our cattle and count our money and to count the miles from here to there.

We have this uncontroversial base of achievement from civilization, which has encouraged us to pursue normative inquiry rationally.

And by and large, religion has not had any role in that or, if it has, it's been a negative role.

It has been to maintain outdated standards of morality on occasion; it has helped wonderfully. The black church was a wonderful force in civil rights in the 20th century, but only by fighting the white church.

The white church dug in its heels, and it's digging in its heels now, and that's lamentable.

What we need is secular ethics and secular politics. Religion was a wonderful taming force; it's what I call a nurse crop.

Do you know what a nurse crop is?

No, I think I mentioned this in "Breaking the Spell."

My neighbor, an old farmer, when I planted my hayfields—when I had a farm—he said, "You want to plant oats as a nurse crop first before the Timothy hay comes up."

He says it'll protect the young Timothy. You can harvest it if you want, or you can just let it go. But it’s a temporary scold which protects the tender shoots of the—that's a nurse crop, so I think of religion as a nurse crop for science.

We needed religion to have the sort of stability of civilizations for several thousand years, but now we don't need religion anymore as a nurse crop, because we've got secular systems, law and order, and the understanding of secular ethics.

So we no longer need religious ethics because it's outlived its usefulness, and in fact, it's become more harm than good.

Okay, okay. So let me ask you a couple of questions about that. The first would be, what do you think it was, within the terms of your formulation about the religious enterprise, that allowed it to play its role as a precondition or as a nurse crop, in your metaphor?

What was it doing that was useful?

I can explain that with an old joke—a Maine joke.

A man in Maine sat on his farm in Maine for many years. One little Maine town had a sign that said, "The speed radar controlled."

And a newcomer said, "Well, that must be pretty expensive!"

And the old man said, "No, no, it’s just a few boards and some white paint and a little bit of black paint. It’s just a sign!"

It's the idea that somebody is watching you.

It's the idea that God is watching you—that'll be shorthand for the role that religion played.

It was Big Brother in the Sky watching you!

And that was a great idea; it was a brilliant way of—and I think it was H.L. Mencken who said that your conscience is the idea that somebody may be watching you.

Very powerful idea given the absence of evidence for its validity, let’s say, from the secular or scientific perspective.

What accounts for its viability as a stabilizing and civilizing factor?

And this goes back—this is a very complex problem, right? Because we already at the beginning of our talk defined the truth of something, at least to some degree, in relationship to its utility!

I don't want to wander too far down that path because I know it's full of pitfalls.

But how do you see that as? Do you see that as a necessary fiction?

On my view of religion, we started out with polytheism.

And every community had its own goblins and fairies and nymphs and other supernatural agents with various talents and histories.

And those were—what were they good for?

Nothing.

They were just the offshoots of human susceptibility, human fears, human curiosity that generated—these were the hyperactive agent detection devices.

These were the spawn of those, and when they became domesticated, they were feral initially; they were synanthropic beings.

Synanthropic memes; they survived because they could—they were just superstitions.

But then they got harnessed by civilization, and rulers used them very effectively.

Many of the ideas of religion were clearly very useful to ruling classes, to kings, to despots, to maintain law and order.

The idea that someone in the same family with somebody's watching you all the time was—don't blame me, it's the big guy who makes the rules.

This is—we see it today when the used car salesman says, "Well, I can't make you this offer. I have to go talk to the boss."

These are all sorts of wonderful devices, tools—thinking tools—that religion has evolved which kept the anxiety about God watching everything you do alive for thousands of years.

God is not watching what you do because there is no God that watches; but we can still behave without that myth.

Okay, okay.

So let me ask you about that. There's my mind goes in a couple of directions. I mean, the god who’s watching in the Old Testament is watching for very specific reasons.

I mean, so for example, in the story of Noah, God is watching and dispenses catastrophe when things deviate to a great degree.

Now that means that happens all the time—horrific story.

Well, but it’s also something that happens all the time in human society, right, is people deviate and get destroyed, and that—I’m not making a theological case for that, by the way.

I mean, we saw that happen multiple times in the 20th century, where societies degenerated into like a power-mad lenience and were essentially obliterated in consequence, which indicates that they’ve deviated from the central—from some appropriate pathway forward.

Well, there can't be wrong; there can't be wrong without the notion of deviation.

Right? Because if there's something that's wrong, there's something that's right.

Yeah, sure.

Okay, okay. So that means that the fictional god, so to speak, of the Old Testament watches—not just watches, but also watches to see when things are going wrong.

And in the story of Noah, God is the voice that calls to the wise to prepare when things are going catastrophically wrong, right?

That's a good definition!

And so, okay, so let me ask you about the state of the secular morality at the moment that permeates the universities—that permeates the universities right now?

Yeah, it's got some real problems.

Okay, how would you characterize those problems?

Because academic freedom is—not what it should be right now in the academy.

And we have a curtailment of openness—curtailments of abridgments of academic freedom that should not be allowed.

Why? And what’s your understanding? See, my sense at the moment is that the secular project within the universities has gone badly wrong.

Is that—is do…oh I don't think so.

Well, okay, that’s what I’m trying to get clear—is, yeah, yeah, I don’t think the religious academy is doing any better.

That is, I don’t think religious universities—Bob Jones University or other religious institutions—have a better record.

I think, on the contrary, we’re better off with the turmoil in the secular universities.

But it is turmoil, and some significant revisions have to be put in place, and it's going to take some very careful work to accomplish that, but it's got to happen.

Okay, so given that the universities were the central playing ground, let’s say, for the progress, the maintenance, and progress of secularized morality, I think that's a reasonable way of thinking about it.

What do you think has occurred to make them go astray and astray from what you mentioned—freedom, academic freedom—and we could expound upon that.

But like, what do you think has gone wrong?

Well, I think several things have gone wrong. One of them is, H.L. Mencken has a saying I love to quote: "For every complex problem, there’s a simple solution that is clear, persuasive, and wrong."

Yeah, definitely!

And problems are hard; it's complicated, as one says. Several of the things that have gone on—one of them was postmodernism.

Postmodernism was—there were some good ideas in its foundation, but then they got taken up by people who didn't understand them and who overused them and who went wild and said all sorts of stupid things.

And the scourge was postmodernism. I have an article called "Postmodernism and Truth," where I really blame postmodernism for some very bad things.

But that opened the door for the identity politics that we see today and the virtue signaling, yeah, and the virtue signaling that we see today.

These are ideas that are running off the rails, and we have to point that out and calmly restore academic freedom and a real respect for truth.

We could modify the m proposition slightly because I don't think he was pessimistic enough.

So there's two things that the simple elegant solutions offer, right? First of all, they're simple and wrong, but they also offer the holder of those ideas an unearned sense of their moral superiority.

And so they're attractive in two dimensions, right?

So the idea that power rules everything—which is a postmodern idea—it's wrong, and it's simple, but it also allows the holders of the idea to identify with the oppressed and to proclaim their moral virtue.

And that's an almost unbeatable combination, right? You don't have to do any work on the cognitive side because you've got all your explanations in one cliché, and you don't have to do any work on the moral front because as long as you're allied with the right side, everything is right between you and God, so to speak.

And so that's an incredibly attractive combination for people who are inclined to take the easy way out, and it’s poisonous.

Yes, all right, sir. Look, we’ve come to the end of our 90 minutes, and I don't want to wear you to a frazzle, and I still want to talk to you for another half an hour on The Daily Wire side.

And I’d like to thank you very much for allowing me to pick your brains in relationship to your conceptualization of, well, let's say the relationship between the scientific and the moral, and the scientific and the religious.

I'd like to talk to you for another three hours because there are many other things I'd be happy to discuss, but I don't want to impose too much on your time, and I want to leave… so far so good?

Yeah, okay, well, let's leave it at that for now. It's possible if you're inclined that I'd like to continue this conversation at a different date because I'd like you to—I’d like to think about the ideas that we exchanged, and I'd like to figure out how we could continue the discussion.

There are still some things I'd like to get to, but they'd take a long time to unpack, and you know that might be good for another conversation if you’d be amenable to it.

So for everybody watching and listening, I'm going to continue talking to Dr. Dennett on the Daily Wire side, as you all know.

And I'm going to walk him through some autobiographical recollections because I'm very interested, and I'm very interested in finding out how people's interests make themselves manifest across time.

And so that's what we'll delve into on the Daily Wire side.

And so maybe you could just close. What are you working on now?

I’m working on the dangers of AI, the dangers of large language models, and how they are the most dangerous weapon yet—more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

Are you writing a book about that?

Not a book; I wrote an article for the Atlantic called "The Problem of Counterfeit People."

Right, right.

Counterfeit money is dangerous; it's against the law and should be. Counterfeit people are much more dangerous, and they are now possible.

But we can put in place the technology. And I’m working with people in AI who know how to do this: we can put in place the technology to make it at least very difficult and very costly in terms of prison sentences for those who get caught using counterfeit people.

And we should institute this immediately because, as Jeff Hinton has said, these things can reproduce, and we are about to create a new horde—a new epidemic, a pandemic of counterfeit people, which are going to destroy trust.

They can destroy civilization.

You know, I just spent two days in D.C.—interesting, I was talking to the people I was meeting with—senators and congressmen really about the dangers of counterfeit people.

So obviously we share a concern in that regard.

It's a very great danger, and I've been working on it almost full time.

Uh huh?

Okay, I'm retired, but busier than ever!

Well, I’ll keep that in mind because we've got some—we’ve got interesting discussions going in D.C., and we're trying to alert people to the danger of exactly the sorts of things that you’re describing.

And so I didn't know that that was an interest of yours.

Anyways, let's wrap this up.

Yeah, I'd like to thank the film crew here in D.C. for making this possible, for the Daily Wire people for facilitating the conversation, for you taking the time and effort necessary to have this conversation, and everybody who's watching for their time and attention.

And you can join us on the Daily Wire Plus side for the continuance of this conversation.

Thank you very much, sir. It's been very good to talk to you and to meet you.

Well, I've enjoyed it. Thank you.