Evolution on the radio

Dan Dennett was on the radio ("What Does Evolution Want?"), rejecting Simon Conway Morris's claim that human-type intelligence is inevitable and insisting on the limits of science, in a rebroadcast of  "To the Best of Our Knowledge" yesterday. (Also on TTBOOK, "Waiting for the Apocalypse": send it to anyone who seriously proposes your serious consideration of "Revelations.")

What are some important questions that are beyond the scope of science?

What should we do?  All the ethical questions are outside of science.  They’re the province of philosophy and particularly the province of a political process, where we try to get everybody to sit down and talk about what we ought to do.  Science isn’t about what we ought to do.  Science can tell you how we got to where we are in our moral thinking - how our moral attitudes evolved, both biologically and culturally.  But once science has done that, we have to sit down and figure out what we ought to do.  

He's clearly rejecting the Moral Landscape position Sam Harris has been defending, embracing a position associated with his old rival Stephen Jay Gould.

Did the tape of evolution play an utterly contingent tune when it played us? Hard to believe there's anything inevitable about our species, but it would be nice to think that intelligence in the universe is more than a fluke. And nicer to think that more of it is likely.

Listen, too, for Ken Miller's invocation of Carl Sagan in defense of  varieties of evolutionary possibility. Good show.

Another good rebroadcast yesterday: Anthony Appiah, the cosmopolitan ethicist and experimental philosopher, on Krista Tippett's On Being. He's a pluralist's pluralist, such a sane voice in these crazy times.

"one thing that makes us unique"

A seminal quotation in my own thinking about the future, from Dan Dennett. We are descended from remote ancestors for whom we were-- are-- the future they worked to secure. We're all links in the same chain. Will someone look back to us, someday, in gratitude?

"powerless"

Hitch on CNN: don't expect a death-bed conversion, and don't pray for him unless it makes you feel better - it won't do anything for him. (Unlike Dan Dennett*, though, he won't ask if you've sacrificed a goat.)

*Dennett:  I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were PRAYING for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond "Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?" I feel about this the same way I would feel if one of them said "I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health." What a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects! Don't expect me to be grateful, or even indifferent. I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you, but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it.

prayer and sacrifice

Theists sometimes claim that any problem with the concept of God can be fixed by downgrading His divine attributes. Here's how some atheists react to the idea of a non-omniscient Deity:

But seriously... I heard Tom Ashbrook sign off from his radio discussion of the Haiti tragedy yesterday with "Say a prayer for Haiti." Now really, if that was going to work would there have been a magnitude 7 quake in such a pathetic, impoverished backwater in the first place? What, you have to say the magic words if you want to incur divine favor?


I know, it's mostly rhetorical. People don't know what else to say. But as Dan Dennett asked, when well-meaning friends offered to pray for his damaged aorta, would they also offer to sacrifice a goat? Point is, those who reject the power of prayer need a new vocabulary of concern. Instead of praying for Haiti, what should we say? (We already know what we should do.)

Marcus Brigstocke is another Brit with some thoughts about all this:

"God" evolves?

Okay, I know I said in Intro class today that I'd like to discourage further work this semester on God... but I take it back, in case anyone wants to try and shed some light on the "God gene" issue (which Dan Dennett tackled in Breaking the Spell*). Is this good news or not?

...the evolutionary perspective on religion does not necessarily threaten the central position of either side. That religious behavior was favored by natural selection neither proves nor disproves the existence of gods. For believers, if one accepts that evolution has shaped the human body, why not the mind too? What evolution has done is to endow people with a genetic predisposition to learn the religion of their community, just as they are predisposed to learn its language. With both religion and language, it is culture, not genetics, that then supplies the content of what is learned.

It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group. Rituals also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.

The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago, to judge from living hunter-gatherers, would have lived in small, egalitarian groups without chiefs or headmen. Religion served them as an invisible government. It bound people together, committing them to put their community’s needs ahead of their own self-interest. For fear of divine punishment, people followed rules of self-restraint toward members of the community. Religion also emboldened them to give their lives in battle against outsiders. Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed over those that lacked it, and genes that prompted the mind toward ritual would eventually have become universal. Nicholas Wade, "The Evolution of the God Gene"

*

"Four Horsemen"

Students through the years have often told me that, so far as they knew, they'd never met or spoken with a real live atheist. They half-expected that such an encounter would be signaled by horns and cloven hooves and the acrid scent of sulfur.

So, whether you like these guys or not, please take note: no horns, no hooves (though some of the footwear looks questionable)... can't prove the absence of sulfur, that'll require some faith. Hitchens is a bit slouchy, sure, but whisky and smokes aren't exclusively devil's fare.

Here are Christopher Hitchens (God is not Great), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), and Sam Harris (The End of Faith).

And here's a fifth horsewoman, the sweet and charming Julia Sweeney, SNL vet & lapsed-Catholic convert to the cavalry:

Conscious planning

Dan Dennett once said something pregnant with meaningful implication, and I'm still not sure if it complements or squeezes his view of consciousness as some sort of chimera:

"One thing that does make us unique as a species is that for the last five or ten thousand years we have been the beneficiaries of conscious planning (my emph.) by our parents and their parents and the cultures in which we've resided. Today we are actively concerning ourselves with what the world is going to be like in the future. We have strong beliefs about this. They play a role in what Homo sapiens is going to be like a thousand years from now."

If you're in favor of planning, aren't you tacitly also acknowledging the reality of consciousness as something more (and less) than brain activity? But what? Can we even hope to say?

The quote, by the way, comes from a remarkable filmed roundtable discussion several years ago that included Dennett, the late Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, Stephen Toulmin, Freeman Dyson, and Rupert Sheldrake, also published in book form as A Glorious Accident. It's hard to find on disk or online, but the separate Dyson interview has turned up (with German subtitles) on YouTube.

Sweet, Sexy, Cute, Funny...

& inverted. In a brisk TED Talk from earlier this year, Dan Dennett says Darwin's great insight was to turn conventional wisdom about what it means to be sweet, sexy etc. on its head.

In March, Dennett expounded his Darwinian perspective on religion at greater length in London. (You can't break a spell without studying and discussing it in the open.) And in an earlier talk about consciousness, he drew out the implications of questioning authority even with respect to the supposedly intimate awareness of our own minds.

Gratitude

I love Dan Dennett's thoughts on gratitude, in his recent conversation with Richard Dawkins and in "that thing" he wrote about surviving heart failure, "Thank Goodness" - his naturalistic humanism did not merely survive the ordeal but was greatly strengthened by it.

Yes, I did have an epiphany. I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now...

The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God is that there really are lots of ways of repaying your debt to goodness—by setting out to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come...

Active gratitude is something pragmatic meliorists understand implicitly, happily paying forward what some of us don't mind calling a spiritual debt, not to a God but to the conditions favorable to life. Just as gratitude does not require a divine object, neither must it target specific persons, typically. But there are always persons to thank, those closest to us certainly, but also those "strangers" whose contributions to medical science, for instance, as in Dennett's case, are literally life-sustaining.

Ronald Aronson has interesting things to say about this too:

So much and many to thank: my parents, people on the other side of the world, those who set aside and today preserve this area as a state park, and on and on. One's map of dependence stretches in every possible direction and across every possible plane, but it is always real and it is always concrete. And it sketches the paths for one's gratitude. It tells, after all, the story of our connections with the world and the universe, and it gives us a core of obligations and a core of meaning. To give thanks is to honor this.

Dawkins and Dennett on Darwin and spirituality

"Can we be spiritual but not religious?" Jesus and Mo say no, I say yes... and I have strong ("bright") allies in Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett.

If by "spiritual" you mean something like, "outside of space and time, and continuous with the same conscious memories and experiences forever," they agree: No, we can't.

But, if by "spiritual" you mean something more like "alive to our actual place in an evolving cosmos, unblinking in the face of personal mortality but fully open to the possibility of some naturalized sort of transcendence or other," they agree emphatically: Yes, we can.

(But be forewarned: the video techs intrude themselves regrettably into this uncut post, and really disrupt the flow of a very engaging conversation, about ten minutes before the end; but stick with it, or "ff" thru it... the end is well worth suffering the annoyance. Dawkins' reading from his Unweaving the Rainbow definitely belongs in an anthology of humanist "hymns" that will certainly include Carl Sagan, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, and all my other favorite philosophers. But, somebody please slap those techs for me!)

Oh, by the way: Dan Dennett, like Jackie Robinson and William James and many others on whose shoulders we humanists proudly stand, is another pragmatic meliorist in the rich American tradition: there's plenty of goodness is the world, but it needs more. Let's make some.

Dawkins, Dennett, & James on religion

Is religion one of our species' most valuable "springs of delight," even when it veers (as so often it does) into absurdity and unreasoning dogma? (I don't share Richard Dawkins' view that it pretty much lives there permanently, though he scores plenty of points in that direction in The God Delusion).

William James thought religion to be one of our most important cultural achievements, even while admitting the absurdity of its many and contradictory doctrinal intransigences. In Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) he defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Elsewhere James wrote that religion is not about God, it's about life and our quest for a richer, more meaningful experience thereof.

By sharp contrast with James's neutrality about supernaturalism in religious persons' designation of their own sense of "the divine," Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell proposes to define religions as "social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought... a religion without God or gods is like a vertebrate without a backbone."

I confess some ambivalence about all this. I like the open-endedness of James's receptivity to all kinds of religions, which for him really was just a way of saying "hands off" other people's personal enthusiasms. But I also find myself cheering many of Dawkins' and Dennett's acid repudiations of casual supernaturalism and mysticism, their "Bright"-ness (see www.the_Brights.net).

I plan to discuss some of this tonight, when I teach the second and last installment of an adult evening (fundraiser) course at my kids' school. It'll probably come up in class this afternoon, too, at ESU (my particular Enormous State University) -- today's topic is "the problem of evil." That always provokes students' religious reflexes, and often instigates discord, not a bad thing in a philosophy classroom if it can be constructively harnessed. I look forward to good conversations today.