We live in a world that is subjectively open. And we are designed by evolution to be “informavores”, epistemically hungry seekers of information, in an endless quest to improve our purchase on the world, the better to make decisions about our subjectively open future.
Freedom Evolves
by Daniel C. Dennett
Freedom Evolves is a 2003 popular science and philosophy book by Daniel C. Dennett. Dennett describes the book as an installment of a lifelong philosophical project, earlier parts of which were The Intentional Stance, Consciousness Explained and Elbow Room. It attempts to give an account of free will and moral responsibility which is complementary to Dennett’s other views on consciousness and personhood.
Dennett’s stance on free will is compatibilism with an evolutionary twist – the view that, although in the strict physical sense our actions might be pre-determined, we can still be free in all the ways that matter, because of the abilities we evolved. Free will, seen this way, is about freedom to make decisions without duress, as opposed to an impossible and unnecessary freedom from causality itself. To clarify this distinction, he coins the term ‘evitability’ as the opposite of ‘inevitability’, defining it as the ability of an agent to anticipate likely consequences and act to avoid undesirable ones. Evitability is entirely compatible with, and actually requires, human action being deterministic. Dennett moves on to altruism, denying that it requires acting to the benefit of others without gaining any benefit yourself. He argues that it should be understood in terms of helping yourself by helping others, expanding the self to be more inclusive as opposed to being selfless. To show this blend, he calls such actions ‘benselfish’, and finds the roots of our capacity for this in the evolutionary pressures that produced kin selection. In his treatment of both free will and altruism, he starts by showing why we should not accept the traditional definitions of either term. This strategy comes down to dissolving problems, instead of solving them. Rather than try to answer certain flawed questions, he questions the assumptions of the questions themselves and undermines them.
科学の栞
by 瀬名秀明
自由は進化する
人間には視点の位置を切り替えられる能力がある。だがこの能力はときに、「神の視点」と「人間（エージェント）」の視点の混乱をもたらす。神の視点で見て決定論的に思える状態でも、エージェントの視点で見れば未来の選択は可能であり、つまり決定論は不可避性を意味しないのだという指摘は、多くの半端な決定論者を粉砕するのに充分な破壊力を持つ。また私たちは意思決定の「瞬間」というものを想像しがちだが、デネットにいわせればそれこそが心身二元論の元凶だ。意思決定の作業とは脳内で時空間的な広がりをもってぶんぷしているものであり、どこかの部位や瞬間に原因を帰着させるのはナンセンスだということである。
Every living thing is, from the cosmic perspective, incredibly lucky simply to be alive. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. You spring from an unbroken line of winners going back millions of generations, and those winners were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a thousand or even a million. So however unlucky you may be on some occasion today, your presence on the planet testifies to the role luck has played in your past.
If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.
Isn’t it true that whatever isn’t determined by our genes must be determined by our environment? What else is there? There’s Nature and there’s Nurture. Is there also some X, some further contributor to what we are? There’s Chance. Luck. This extra ingredient is important but doesn’t have to come from the quantum bowels of our atoms or from some distant star. It is all around us in the causeless coin-flipping of our noisy world, automatically filling in the gaps of specification left unfixed by our genes, and unfixed by salient causes in our environment.
Daniel C. Dennett
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm