FREEDOM

EVOLVES
Daniel C. Dennett

VIKING

VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2003 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
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Copyright © Daniel C. Dennett, 2003
All rights reserved
Figures 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 reproduced from Breakdown of Will by George Ainslie
(Cambridge University Press, 2001). Used by permission of the author.
Figures 8.1 and 8.2 reproduced from " D o We Have Free Will?" by Benjamin Libet from
The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neurosdence of Free Will edited by Benjamin Libet, Keith Sutherland,
and Anthony Freeman (Imprint Academic, 1999). UsecTby permission of the author.

/

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Dennett, Daniel Clement.
Freedom evolves / Daniel C. Dennett.
p.
cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-670-03186-0 (alk. paper)
1. Free will and determinism. 2. Decision making. I. Title.
BJ1461 .D427 2003
123'.5—dc21
2002028085
This book is printed on acid-free paper. @
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Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be
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For my family:
Susan, Peter, Andrea, Nathan, and Brandon
I

y

CONTENTS
Preface

xi

Chapter 1

NATURAL FREEDOM
Learning What We Are^

i

I Am Who I A m

6

The Air We Breathe

9

Dumbo's Magic Feather and the Peril of Paulina

13

Chapter 2

A TOOL FOR THINKING ABOUT DETERMINISM
Some Useful Oversimplifications

25

From Physics to Design in Conway's Life World

36

Can We Get the Deus ex Machinal

47

From Slow-motion Avoidance to Star Wars

51

The

Birth

of

Evitability

56

Chapter 3

THINKING ABOUT DETERMINISM
Possible Worlds

63

Causation

70

Austin's Putt

75

A Computer Chess Marathon

77

Events without Causes in a Deterministic Universe

83

Will the Future Be Like the Past?

89

Contents

V1U

Chapter 4

A HEARING FOR LIBERTARIANISM
The

Appeal

of

Libertarianism

97

Where Should We Put the Much-needed Gap?

103

Kane's Model of Indeterministic Decision-making

108

"If you make yourself really small, you can externalize
virtually everything"

122

Beware of Prime Mammals

126

How Can It Be "Up to Me"?

134

Chapter 5

WHERE DOES ALL THE DESIGN COME FROM?
Early Days

141

The Prisoner's Dilemma

147

E Pluribus Unum?

150

Digression: The Threat of Genetic Determinism

156

Degrees of Freedom and the Search for Truth

162

Chapter 6

THE EVOLUTION OF OPEN MINDS

y

"

How Cultural Symbionts Turn Primates into Persons

170

The Diversity of Darwinian Explanations

181

Nice Tools, but You Still Have to Use Them

186

Chapter 7

THE EVOLUTION OF MORAL AGENCY
Benselfishness

193

Being Good in Order to Seem Good

202

Learning to Deal with Yourself

207

Our Costly Merit Badges

213

Contents

Chapter 8

ARE YOU OUT OF THE LOOP?
Drawing the W r o n g Moral

221

Whenever the Spirit Moves You

227

A Mind-writer's View

242

A Self of One's O w n

245

Chapter 9

BOOTSTRAPPING OURSELVES FREE
H o w We Captured Reaspns and Made T h e m O u r O w n

259

Psychic Engineering and the Arms R a c e of Rationality

267

With a Little Help from My Friends

272

Autonomy, Brainwashing, and Education

281

Chapter 10

THE FUTURE OF HUMAN FREEDOM
Holding the Line against Creeping Exculpation

289

"Thanks, I Needed That!"

297

Are We Freer Than We Want to Be?

302

H u m a n Freedom Is Fragile

304

Bibliography

311

Index

325

/

PREFACE
/

H o w long have I been working on this book? As I was doing the final
editing, several people asked me and I didn't know how to answer: five
years or thirty years? Thirty years is closer to the truth, I think, since
it was roughly that long ago that I began thinking in earnest about the
topics, reading the relevant literature, drafting arguments, making lists
of further books and articles to read, plotting strategy and structure,
and engaging in debate and discussion. From the thirty-year bird's-eye
view, my 1984 book, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth
Wanting, counts as a pilot project. It relied heavily on a simple ten-page
sketch of the evolution of consciousness (pp. 34—43) accompanied by
two promissory notes: O w e d to the skeptical reader were properly
detailed accounts of both consciousness and evolution. It took me a
dozen years to keep those promises, in Consciousness Explained (Dennett
1991 A) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Dennett 1995). During that time
I continued to notice instances of the pattern that had inspired and
shaped Elbow Room: the hidden agenda that tends to distort theorizing in all the social sciences and life sciences. People working in quite
different fields with different methodologies and research agendas nevertheless often shared a veiled antipathy, trying to keep their distance
from the implications of two ideas: O u r minds are just what our brains
non-miraculously do, and the talents of our brains had to evolve like
every other marvel of nature. Their effort to keep this vision at bay was

Xll

Preface

bogging down their thinking, lending spurious allure to dubious brands
of absolutism and encouraging them to see small, bridgeable gaps as
yawning chasms. T h e aim of this book is to expose the misbegotten
defensive edifices people have constructed in response to this fear, dismantle them, and replace them with better foundations for the things
we hold dear.
In 2001, the home stretch, I had superb help, both institutional and
personal. My academic home all these years, Tufts University, gave me
a sabbatical semester. Once again the Rockefeller Foundation's Villa
Serbelloni in Bellagio provided the perfect setting for writing, and first
drafts of half the chapters emerged from an intense month of work,
illuminated by discussions and suggestions from the other residents,
especially Sheldon Siegel, Bernard Gross, Rita Charon, Frank Levy,
Evelyn Fox Keller, Julie Barmazel, Mary Childers, and Gerald Postema.
Then Sandro Nannini and his students and colleagues at the University
of Siena provided a vigorous and knowledgeable audience for the debut
of some of the book's central arguments.
In April I took up residence as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at
the London School of Economics, where I presented the first seven
chapters as weekly public lectures followed by seminars the next day,
supplemented by many informal discussions both at LSE and on several
visits to Oxford. John Worrall, Nick Humphrey, Richard Dawkins,
John Maynard Smith, Matteo Mameli, Nicholas Maxwell, Oliver Curry,
Helena Cronin, K. M. Dowding, Susan Blackmore, Antti Saaristo,
Janne Mantykoski, Valerie Porter, Isabel Gois, and Katrina SifFerd all
provided valuable reactions, rebuttals, refinements, and suggestions.
To Christopher Taylor I owe much of the perspective-shifting
thinking that is incorporated in our jointly authored paper and featured
in Chapter 3, as well as many penetrating suggestions on the drafts
of other chapters. To David Benedictus, an extraordinary writer and
friend for even more than thirty years, I owe thanks for a different kind
of perspective-shifting that eventually led to the book's title. R o b e r t
Kane and Daniel Wegner, whose books get criticized here (constructively, I hope!), were very generous with their comments on my treatment of their brainchildren. Other friends and colleagues w h o have
read large portions of various drafts and provided advice both editorial
and substantive are, in alphabetical order, Andrew Brook, Michael

Preface

xm

Cappucci, Tom Clark, Mary Coleman, Bo Dahlbom, Gary Drescher,
Paulina Essunger, Marc Hauser, Erin Kelly, Kathrin Koslicki, Paul
Oppenheim, Will Provine, Peter Reid, Don Ross, Scott Sehon, Mitch
Silver, Elliott Sober, Matthew Stuart, Peter Suber, Jackie Taylor, and
Steve White.
I was able to continue my tradition of playing Tom Sawyer and
the whitewashed fence with the penultimate draft of this book, which
was intelligently swarmed over and taken to pieces by a large and opinionated horde of students and auditors, undergraduate and graduate, in
my fall seminar. James Arinello, David Baptista, Matt Bedoukian, Lindsay
Beyerstein, Cinnamon Bidwell, Robert Briscoe, Hector Canseco,
Russell Capone, Regina Chouza, Catherine Davis, Ashley de Marchena,
Janelle DeWitt, Jason' Disterhoft, Jennifer Durette, Gabrielle Jackson,
Ann J. Johnson, Sarah Jurgensen, Tomasz Kozyra, Marcy Latta, Ryan
Long, Gabriel Love, Carey Morewedge, Brett Mulder, Cathy Muller,
Sebastian S. Reeve, Daniel Rosenberg, Amber Ross, George A. Samuel,
Derek Sanger, Shorena Shaverdashvili, Mark Shwayder, Andrew Silver,
Naomi Sleeper, Sara Smollett, Rodrigo Vanegas, Nick Wakeman, Jason
Walker, and Robert Woo all provided comments, leading to dozens of
improvements. The errors and shortcomings that remain are not their
fault; they did their best to set me straight.
I am grateful to Craig Garcia and Durwood Marshall for the
original figures; to Teresa Salvato and Gabriel Love in the Center for
Cognitive Studies for uncounted library runs and clerical help with the
preparation of the many drafts of the manuscript; and to the Collegium
Budapest, which provided an intellectually stimulating and gracious
home away from home during the final copyediting and revisions.
Last, and most important, once again, thanks and love to my
wife, Susan, for more than forty years of advice, love, and support.
DANIEL DENNETT
JUNE

20,2002

J

FREEDOM

EVOLVES

y

Chapter 1

NATURAL FREEDOM

O n e widespread tradition has it that we human beings are responsible
agents, captains of our fate, because what we really are are souls, immaterial and immortal chumps of Godstuff that inhabit and control our
material bodies rather like spectral puppeteers. It is our souls that are
the source of all meaning, and the locus of all our suffering, our joy,
our glory and shame. But this idea of immaterial souls, capable of defying the laws of physics, has outlived its credibility thanks to the advance
of the natural sciences. Many people think the implications of this are
dreadful: We don't really have "free will" and nothing really matters.
T h e aim of this book is to show why they are wrong.

Learning W h a t W e Are
Si, abbiamo un anima. Ma e fatta di tanti piccoli robot.
Yes, we have a soul. But it's made of lots of tiny robots.

—Giulio Giorelli
We don't have to have immaterial souls of the old-fashioned sort in
order to live up to our hopes; our aspirations as moral beings whose
acts and lives matter do not depend at all on our having minds that obey
a different physics from the rest of nature. The self-understanding we
can gain from science can help us put our moral lives on a new and
better foundation, and once we understand what our freedom consists
in, we will be much better prepared to protect it against the genuine
threats that are so regularly misidentified.
A student of mine w h o went into the Peace Corps to avoid
serving in the Vietnam War later told me about his efforts on behalf of

2

Freedom Evolves

a tribe living deep in the Brazilian forest. I asked him if he had been
required to tell them about the conflict between the USA and the
USSR. N o t at all, he replied. There would have been no point in it.
They had never heard of either America or the Soviet Union. In fact,
they had never even heard of Brazil! It was still possible in the 1960s
for a human being to live in a nation, and be subject to its laws, without the slightest knowledge of that fact. If we find this astonishing, it
is because we human beings, unlike all other species on the planet, are
knowers. We are the only ones w h o have figured out what we are, and
where we are, in this great universe. And we're even beginning to figure out how we got here.
These quite recent discoveries about w h o we are and how we
got here are unnerving, to say the least. What you are is an assemblage
of roughly a hundred trillion cells, of thousands of different sorts. The
bulk of these cells are "daughters" of the egg cell and sperm cell whose
union started you, but they are actually outnumbered by the trillions
of bacterial hitchhikers from thousands of different lineages stowed
away in your body (Hooper et al. 1998). Each of your host cells is a
mindless mechanism, a largely autonomous micro-robot. It is no more
conscious than your bacterial guests are. N o t a single one of the cells
that compose you knows w h o you are, or cares.
Each trillion-robot team is gathered together in a breathtakingly efficient regime that has no dictator but manages to keep itself
organized to repel outsiders, banish the weak, enforce iron rules of
discipline—and serve as the headquarters of one~ conscious self, one
mind. These communities of cells are fascistic in the extreme, but your
interests and values have little or nothing to do with the limited goals
of the cells that compose you—fortunately. Some people are gentle and
generous, others are ruthless; some are pornographers and others
devote their lives to the service of God. It has been tempting over the
ages to imagine that these striking differences must be due to the special features of some extra thing (a soul) installed somehow in the bodily headquarters. We now know that tempting as this idea still is, it is
not supported in the slightest by anything we have learned about our
biology in general and our brains in particular. T h e more we learn
about how we have evolved, and how our brains work, the more certain we are becoming that there is no such extra ingredient. We are
each made of mindless robots and nothing else, no non-physical, n o n -

Learning What We Are

3

robotic ingredients at all. T h e differences among people are all due to
the way their particular robotic teams are put together, over a lifetime
of growth and experience. The difference between speaking French and
speaking Chinese is a difference in the organization of the working
parts, and so are all the other differences of knowledge and personality.
Since I am conscious and you are conscious, we must have conscious selves that are somehow composed of these strange little parts.
H o w can this be? To see how such an extraordinary composition j o b
could be accomplished, we need to look at the history of the design
processes that did all the work, the evolution of human consciousness.
We also need to see how these souls made of cellular robots actually
do endow us with the important powers and resultant obligations that
traditional immaterial souls were supposed to endow us with (by
unspecified magic)T Trading in a supernatural soul for a natural soul—
is this a good bargain? W h a t do we give up and what do we gain? People j u m p to fearful conclusions about this that are hugely mistaken. I
propose to prove this by tracing the growth of freedom on our planet
from its earliest beginnings at the dawn of life. What kinds of freedom?
Different kinds will emerge as the story unfolds.
Four and a half billion years ago, the planet Earth was formed,
and it was utterly without life. And so it stayed for perhaps half a billion years, until the first simple life-forms emerged, and then for the
next three billion years or so, the planet's oceans teemed with life, but
it was all blind and deaf Simple cells multiplied, engulfing each other,
exploiting each other in a thousand ways, but oblivious to the world
beyond their membranes. Then finally much larger, more complex
cells evolved—eukaryotes—still clueless and robotic, but with enough
internal machinery to begin to specialize. So it continued for a few
hundred million more years, the time it took for the algorithms of evolution to stumble upon good ways for these cells and their daughters
and granddaughters to band together into multicellular organisms composed of millions, billions, and (eventually) trillions of cells, each doing
its particular mechanical routine, but now yoked into specialized service, as part of an eye or an ear or a lung or a kidney. These organisms
(not the individual team members composing them) had become longdistance knowers, able to spy supper trying to appear inconspicuous in
the middle distance, able to hear danger threatening from afar. But still,
even these whole organisms knew not what they were. Their instincts

4

Freedom Evolves

guaranteed that they tried to mate with the right sorts, and flock with
the right sorts, but just as those Brazilians didn't know they were
Brazilians, no bison has ever known it's a bison. 1
In just one species, our species, a new trick evolved: language.
It has provided us a broad highway of knowledge-sharing, on every
topic. Conversation unites us, in spite of our different languages. We
can all know quite a lot about what it is like to be a Vietnamese fisherman or a Bulgarian taxi driver, an eighty-year-old nun or a five-yearold boy blind from birth, a chess master or a prostitute. No matter how
different from one another we people are, scattered around the globe,
we can explore our differences and communicate about them. No
matter how similar to one another bison are, standing shoulder to
shoulder in a herd, they cannot know much of anything about their
similarities, let alone their differences, because they can't compare
notes. They can have similar experiences, side by side, but they really
can't share experiences the way we do.
Even in our species, it has taken thousands of years of communication for us to begin to find the keys to our own identities. It
has been only a few hundred years that we've known that we are mammals, and only a few decades that we've understood in considerable
detail how we have evolved, along with all other living things, from
those simple beginnings. We are outnumbered on this planet by our
distant cousins, the ants, and outweighed by yet more distant relatives,
the bacteria. T h o u g h we are in the minority, our capacity for longdistance knowledge gives us powers that dwarf .the powers of all the
rest of the life on the planet. Now, for the first time in its billions of
years of history, our planet is protected by far-seeing sentinels, able to
anticipate danger from the distant future—a comet on a collision
course, or global warming—and devise schemes for doing something
about it. T h e planet has finally grown its own nervous system: us.

1. In general, nature operates on a version of the Need to Know Principle made famous in
the world of espionage: Bison don't need to know that they are ungulates within the class
Mammalia—there is nothing they could do with that information, being bison; die Brazilians
didn't (yet) need to know much about the larger environment of which their intimately
known jungle environment formed a part, but the Brazilians, being human beings, could
almost effortlessly extend their epistemic horizons as soon as they needed to know. I am sure
they know it now.

Learning What We Are

5

We may not be up to the job. We may destroy the planet
instead of saving it, largely because we are such free-thinking, creative,
unruly explorers and adventurers, so unlike the trillions of slavish
workers that compose us. Brains are for anticipating the future, so that
timely steps can be taken in better directions, but even the smartest of
beasts have very limited time horizons, and little if any ability to imagine alternative worlds. We human beings, in contrast, have discovered
the mixed blessing of being able to think even about our own deaths
and beyond. A huge portion of our energy expenditure over the last
ten thousand years has been devoted to assuaging the concerns provoked by this unsettling new vista that we alone have.
If you burn more calories than you take in, you soon die. If
you find some tricks #hat provide you a surplus of calories, what might
you spend them on? You might devote person-centuries of labor to
building temples and tombs and sacrificial pyres on which you destroy
some of your most precious possessions—and even some of your very
own children. W h y on earth would you want to do that? These strange
and awful expenditures give us clues about some of the hidden costs
of our heightened powers of imagination. We did not come by our
knowledge painlessly
N o w what will we do with our knowledge? T h e birth pangs of
our discoveries have not subsided. Many are afraid that learning too
much about what we are—trading in mystery for mechanisms—will
impoverish our vision of human possibility. This fear is understandable,
but if we really were in danger of learning too much, wouldn't those
on the cutting edge be showing signs of discomfort? Look around at
those w h o are participating in this quest for further scientific knowledge and eagerly digesting the new discoveries; they are manifestly not
short on optimism, moral conviction, engagement in life, commitment
to society. In fact, if you want to find anxiety, despair, and anomie
among intellectuals today, look to the recendy fashionable tribe of postmodernists, w h o like to claim that modern science is just another in a
long line of myths, its institutions and expensive apparatus just the rituals and accoutrements of yet another religion. That intelligent people
can take this seriously is a testimony to the power that fearful thinking
still has, in spite of our advances in self-knowledge. The postmodernists
are right that science is just one of the things we might want to spend
our extra calories on. T h e fact that science has been a major source of

6

Freedom Evolves

the efficiencies that created those extra calories does not entitle it to any
particular share of the wealth it has created. But it should still be obvious that the innovations of science—not just its microscopes and telescopes and computers, but its commitment to reason and evidence—are
the new sense organs of our species, enabling us to answer questions,
solve mysteries, and anticipate the future in ways no earlier human
institutions can approach.
The more we learn about what we are, the more options we
will discern about what to try to become. Americans have long h o n ored the "self-made man," but now that we are actually learning
enough to be able to remake ourselves into something new, many
flinch. Many would apparently rather bumble around with their eyes
closed, trusting in tradition, than look around to see what's about to
happen. Yes, it is unnerving; yes, it can be scary. After all, there are
entirely new mistakes we are now empowered to make for the first
time. But it's the beginning of a great new adventure for our knowing species. And it's much more exciting, as well as safer, if we open
our eyes.

I Am Who I Am
I read in the newspaper recently about a young father w h o forgot to
drop off his infant daughter at the day-care center on his way to work.
She spent the day locked in his car in a hot parking lot, and in the
evening on his way home when he stopped at the day-care center to
pick her up, he was told, "You didn't drop her off today." He rushed
out to his car to find her still strapped into her little car seat in the back,
dead. If you can bear it, put yourself in this man's shoes. W h e n I do,
I shudder; my heart aches at the thought of the unspeakable shame, the
self-loathing, the regret beyond regret that this man must now be suffering. And as one w h o is notoriously absentminded, w h o readily gets
lost in his own thoughts, I find it even more unsettling to ask myself:
Could I ever do anything like that? Could I be that negligent with the
life of a child in my care? I replay the scene with many variations, imagining distractions—a fire engine racing by just as I am about to turn
off to the day-care center, something on the radio reminding me of a
problem I have to solve that day, and later, in the parking lot, a friend

I Am Who I Am

7

asking me for help as I get out of my car, or perhaps I drop some papers
on the ground and have to pick them up. Could a series of such distractors pile up and bury my overriding project of getting my daughter safely to day care? Could I be so unlucky as to blunder into a
situation where events conspired to bring out the very worst in me,
exposing my weakness, and leading me down this despicable path? I
am so thankful that nothing like this has yet confronted me, because I
do not know that there are no circumstances in which I could do what
this man did. Such things happen all the time. I know nothing more
about this young father. It is conceivable that he is a callous and irresponsible human being, a villain w h o deserves to be despised by us all.
But it is also conceivable that he's basically a good person, a victim of
cosmic bad luck. Angt, of course, the better person he is, the greater
his remorse must now be. He must wonder if there is any honorable
way to go on living. " I ' m the guy w h o forgot his baby daughter and
let her bake to death in his locked car. That's w h o I am."
Each of us is w h o he is, warts and all. I can't be a champion
golfer or a concert pianist or a quantum physicist. I can live with that.
That's part of w h o I am. Can I break 90 on the golf course, or ever
play that Bach fugue through from beginning to end without any mistakes? I can try, it seems, but if I never succeed, will it have been the
case that I never could have succeeded, not really? "Be all that you can
be!"—a thrilling recruiting slogan for the U.S. Army, but does it conceal a mocking tautology? Aren't we all, automatically, all that we can
be? "Hey, I'm an undisciplined, ill-educated, overweight couch potato
w h o apparently doesn't have the gumption to join the army I already
am all that I can be! I am w h o I am." Is this fellow deluding himself
out of a better life, or has he seen to the heart of the matter? Is there
a legitimate sense in which although I really and truly can't be a champion golfer, I really and truly can break 90? Can any of us ever do anything other than what we end up doing? If not, what's the point of
trying? Indeed, what's the point of anything?
What we want to be true, one way or another, is that there is a
point. And for several millennia we've struggled with a family of arguments that imply that there may not be any point, because if the world
is the way science tells us the world is, there is no room for our strivings and yearnings. The ancient Greek atomists had no sooner dreamed
up the brilliant idea that the world was composed of myriad tiny par-

8

Freedom Evolves

tides bouncing off each other than they hit upon the corollary that in
that case, every event, including our every heartbeat, fib, and private
self-admonition, unfolds according to laws of nature that determine what
happens next down to the finest details and thus provide no options, no
real choice points, no opportunities for things to be one way rather than
another. If determinism is true, although there may well seem to be a
point, this is an illusion. Indeed, we may well be determined to go on
thinking that there is a point, but if so, we will be wrong. So it has often
seemed. Naturally this has fueled the hope that the laws of nature are
not deterministic after all. T h e first attempt to soften the blow of atomism was by Epicurus and his followers, w h o proposed that a random
swerve in the trajectories of some of those atoms might provide the
elbow room for free choice, but since wishful thinking was their only
grounds for postulating this random swerve, it was met from the outset
with deserved skepticism. But don't give up hope. Quantum physics to
the rescue! W h e n we learn that down in the strange world of subatomic
physics, different rules apply, indeterministic rules, this quite appropriately gives rise to a new quest: showing how we can harness this quantum indeterminism to open up a model of a human being as a striver
with genuine opportunities, capable of making truly free decisions.
This is such a perennially attractive option that it needs to be
given careful, sympathetic review, and in Chapter 4 it will get one, but
I will argue, as many before me have argued, that it just won't work.
As William James put it almost a century ago,
If a "free" act be a sheer novelty, that comes n^t from me, the previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how can
I, the previous I, be responsible? How can I have any permanent
character that will stand still long enough for praise or blame to be
awarded? (James 1907, p. 53)
H o w indeed? I advise my students to be on the lookout for rhetorical
questions, which typically mark the weakest link in any defense. A
rhetorical question implies a reductio ad absurdum argument too obvious to need spelling out, the perfect hiding place for an unexamined
assumption that might better be explicitly denied. O n e can often
embarrass the asker of a rhetorical question by simply trying to answer
it: "I'll show you how!" We will consider just such an attempt in C h a p ter 4, and we will see that James's challenge can in fact be met in most

The Air We Breathe

9

regards. He overstates the case in several ways when he concludes: "The
chaplet of my days tumbles into a case of disconnected beads as soon
as the thread of inner necessity is drawn out by the preposterous indeterminist doctrine." Indeterminism is not preposterous, but it is also
no help to those w h o crave free will, and our examination will reveal
some surprises about how our imaginations have been deflected in the
search for a solution to the problem of free will.

T h e Air W e B r e a t h e
People are surprisingly good at distracting themselves from ominous
prospects, and nowhere have they done a better j o b of diverting their
attention from the real problem than on the issue of free will. The classical problem of free will, defined and endorsed by centuries of work
by philosophers, theologians, and scientists, asks whether the world is
so constituted as to permit us to make genuinely free, responsible decisions. The answer depends, it has always seemed, on basic, eternal
facts—the fundamental laws of physics (whatever they turn out to be)
and definitional truths about the nature of matter, time, and causation,
and equally fundamental definitional truths about the nature of our
minds, such as the fact that a stone or a sunflower couldn't possibly have
free will—only something with a mind is even a candidate for this
blessing, whatever it is. I will try to show that this traditional problem
of free will is, in spite of its pedigree, a distractor, a puzzle of no real
importance that draws our attention away from some neighboring concerns that truly matter, that ought to keep us awake nights worrying.
These concerns typically get set aside as empirical complications that
muddy the metaphysical water, but I want to resist that deflection and
promote these tangential issues into the main topic. T h e genuine
threat, the submerged source of the anxiety that makes the free will
topic such a perennial riveter of attention in philosophy courses, arises
from a set of facts about the human situation that are empirical, and
even, in one sense, political: They are sensitive to human attitude. It
really makes a difference what we think about them.
We live our lives against a background of facts, some of them
variable and some of them rock solid. Some of the stability comes from
fundamental physical facts: The law of gravity will never let us down (it

10

Freedom Evolves

will always pull us down, so long as we stay on Earth), and we can rely
on the speed of light staying constant in all our endeavors. 2 Some of the
stability comes from even more fundamental, metaphysical facts: 2 + 2
will always add up to 4, the Pythagorean theorem will hold, and if A =
B, whatever is true of A is true of B and vice versa. The idea that we
have free will is another background condition for our whole way of
thinking about our lives. We count on it; we count on people "having
free will" the same way we count on them falling when pushed off cliffs
and needing food and water to live, but it is neither a metaphysical background condition nor a fundamental physical condition. Free will is like
the air we breathe, and it is present almost everywhere we want to go,
but it is not only not eternal, it evolved, and is still evolving. The atmosphere of our planet evolved over hundreds of millions of years as a product of the activities of simple early life-forms, and it continues to evolve
today in response to the activities of the billions of more complex lifeforms it made possible. The atmosphere of free will is another sort of
environment. It is the enveloping, enabling, life-shaping, conceptual
atmosphere of intentional action, planning and hoping and promising—
and blaming, resenting, punishing, and honoring. We all grow up in this
conceptual atmosphere, and we learn to conduct our lives in the terms
it provides. It appears to be a stable and ahistorical construct, as eternal
and unchanging as arithmetic, but it is not. It evolved as a recent product of human interactions, and some of the sorts of human activity it
first made possible on this planet may also threaten to disrupt its future
stability, or even hasten its demise. O u r planet's atmosphere is not guaranteed to last forever, and neither is our free will.
We are already taking steps to prevent the deterioration of the
air we breathe. They may be too little too late. We can imagine devising technological innovations (giant air-conditioning domes, terralungs?) that would permit us to live on without the natural atmosphere.
Life would be very different, and very difficult, but it might still be life
worth living. What happens, though, when we try to imagine living
in a world without the atmosphere of free will? It might be life, but
would it be us? Would life be worth living if we lost our belief in our

2. Or nearly constant. Some recent, and controversial, evidence from the far reaches of
space suggests to some scientists that there might be some change in the speed of light over
cosmological time periods.

The Air We Breathe

11

own capacity to make free, responsible decisions? And is the ubiquitous atmosphere of free will in which we live and act not a. fact at all,
but just a facade of some sort, a mass hallucination?
There are those w h o say that free will has always been an illusion, a pre-scientific dream from which we are now awakening. We've
never really had free will, and never could have had it. Thinking we've
had free will has been, at best, a life-shaping and even life-enhancing
ideology, but we can learn to live without it. Some people claim already
to have done so, but what they mean by this is not clear. Some of them
insist that although free will is an illusion, this discovery has no significant bearing on how they think about their lives, their hopes and plans
and fears, but they do not bother elaborating on this curious separation
of issues. Others excuse/the vestiges of the creed that persist in their ways
of speaking and thinking as largely harmless habits they haven't bothered
to outgrow, or as diplomatic concessions to the traditional manners of
the less advanced thinkers around them. They go along with the crowd,
accepting "responsibility" for "decisions" that were not really free, blaming and praising others while keeping their fingers crossed, knowing that
deep down, nobody ever deserves anything because everything that happens just spins out of the vast network of mindless causes that prevents
anything from meaning anything, in the final analysis.
Are these self-styled dis-illusioned ones making a big mistake?
Are they discarding a precious perspective for no good reason, dazzled
by a misreading of science into accepting a diminished self-image? And
does it matter one way or the other? It is tempting to dismiss the question of free will as just another philosophers' puzzle, an artificial
stumper created by a conspiracy of ingenious definitions. Do you have
free will? "Well," says the philosopher, lighting his pipe, "it all depends
on what you mean by free will; now, on the one hand, if you adopt a
compatibilist definition of free will, then . . ." (and we're off to the races).
To see that the stakes are higher, that the issues really do matter, it helps
to make them personal. Reflect, then, on your adult life and pick a
truly bad moment, as bad a moment as you can bear to contemplate
in suffocating detail. (Or, if that is too painful, just try putting yourself
for a moment in the young father's shoes.) So fix the terrible act in
your mind; you did it. If only you hadn't done it!
Now, so what? In the larger scheme of things, what is the
meaning of your regret? Does it count for anything, or is it just a sort

12

Freedom Evolves

of involuntary hiccup, a meaningless spasm provoked by a meaningless
world? Do we live in a universe in which striving and hoping, regretting, blaming, promising, trying to do better, condemning and praising make sense? Or are they all part of a vast illusion, honored by
tradition but overdue for exposure?
Some people—you may be one—may be momentarily comforted to conclude that they don't have free will, and that none of it
matters, neither the shameful violations nor the glorious triumphs; it's
all just the unwinding of pointless clockwork. This may seem to them
like a great relief at first, but then they may reflect, with irritation, that
they nevertheless cannot help caring, cannot keep themselves from
worrying, striving, hoping—and then go on to reflect that moreover
they can't help being irritated by their incessant desire to care, and so
forth, a downward spiral into the motivational equivalent of the Heat
Death of the universe: Nothing moves, nothing matters, nothing.
Other people—you may be one—are sure they have free will.
They don't just strive; they embrace their own strivings, defying their
so-called fate. They envision possibilities, trying to make the most of
golden opportunities and thrilling in narrow escapes from disaster.
They take themselves to be in charge of their own lives and responsible for their own deeds.
There might, it seems, be two kinds of people: those who
believe that they don't have free will (even if they can't help acting most
of the time as if they believed they did), and those w h o believe they
do have free will (even if this is an illusion). Which group are you in?
Which group is better off, happier? But, finally, which group is right?
Are those in the first group the undeluded ones, seeing through the
grand illusion at least in their reflective moments? Or are they the ones
w h o are missing the point, victimized by some cognitive illusions that
tempt them to turn their backs on the truth, disabling themselves by
discarding the very idea that gives life its meaning? (Too bad, but maybe
they can't help it. Maybe they are determined by their past, their genes,
their upbringing, their education, to reject the idea of free will! As the
comedian E m o Phillips has quipped: "I'm not a fatalist, but even if I
were, what could I do about it?")
This raises what may be yet another possibility. Perhaps there
are two kinds of normal people (setting aside those w h o are truly disabled and could not possibly have free will because they are comatose

Dumbo's Magic Feather and the Peril of Paulina

13

or demented): There are those w h o don't believe in free will and thereby
don't have free will, and there are those w h o do believe in free will and
thereby actually have free will. Might something like "the power of positive thinking" actually be great enough to make the crucial difference?
This might not give much solace, since it could still be, it seems, that
it's just the luck of the draw which group you're in, for better or for
worse. Might you switch groups? Might you want to? It is fiendishly
hard to keep this curious aspect of free will in focus. If it is a brute
metaphysical fact that people do (or don't) have free will, then this cannot be influenced by "majority rule" or anything of that kind, and your
only option (option?—do we really have options?) is whether or not you
want to know whatever the metaphysical truth is. But people often talk
and write as if they were, in effect, campaigningfor the belief in free will,
as if free will (not just the belief in free will) were a political condition
that might be under threat, might spread or go extinct as a result of
what people came to believe. Is free will like democracy, perhaps?
What is the relation between political freedom and (metaphysical, for
want of a better word) free will?
In the rest of the book, my task will be to bring this churning
of perspectives to a halt and provide a unified, stable, empirically wellgrounded, coherent view of human free will, and you already know the
conclusion I will reach: Free will is real, but it is not a preexisting feature of our existence, like the law of gravity. It is also not what tradition declares it to be: a God-like power to exempt oneself from the causal
fabric of the physical world. It is an evolved creation of human activity
and beliefs, and it is just as real as such other human creations as music
and money. And even more valuable. From this evolutionary perspective, the traditional problem of free will can be broken into some rather
unusual fragments, each of some value in illuminating the serious problems of free will, but we can undertake this reexamination only after we
have corrected the misdirection implicit in their traditional settings.

D u m b o ' s M a g i c Feather and the Peril o f Paulina
In Walt Disney's classic animated film Dumbo, about the little elephant
w h o learns to spread his giant ears and fly, there is a pivotal scene in
which a dubious—indeed terrified—Dumbo is being cajoled by his

14

Freedom Evolves

friends, the crows, to leap offa cliff into the air, proving to himself that
he can fly O n e of the crows has a bright idea. W h e n D u m b o isn't
looking he plucks a tail feather from one of his kind and then ceremonially hands it to Dumbo, announcing that it is a magic feather: So
long as D u m b o clutches it in his trunk, he can fly! The scene is presented with masterful economy No explanation is provided, since even
small children get the point without being told: T h e feather isn't really
magic; it's a prosthetic device, a belief-crutch of sorts that will get
D u m b o off the ground by the power of positive thinking. N o w imagine a variation on that scene. Imagine that one of the other crows, a
village skeptic w h o is smart enough to see what trick is being played
but not smart enough to see its virtue, starts trying to inform D u m b o
of the truth as he perches on the cliff edge, feather held tightly. "Stop
that crow!" the children would shriek. Stifle that smarty-pants, quick,
before he ruins it for Dumbo!
In the eyes of some, I am that crow. Look out, they warn. This
person is up to some serious mischief, however well intentioned. He
insists on talking about topics that are better left unexplored. "Shhh!
You'll break the spell." This admonition is not just for fairy tales; it is
sometimes quite appropriate in real life. A fact-laden disquisition on
the biomechanics of sexual arousal and erection is not a good topic during foreplay, and reflections on the social utility of ceremony and costume are unwelcome in a funeral oration or wedding toast. There are
times when we are wise to divert our attention from scientific detail,
when ignorance is indeed bliss. Is this another such case?
Dumbo's flying just happens to depend on Dumbo's believing
he can fly. This isn't a necessary truth; if D u m b o were a bird (or just a
more self-confident elephant!), his talent wouldn't be so fragile, but
being w h o he is, he needs all the moral support he can get, and our
scientific curiosity shouldn't be allowed to interfere with his delicate
state of mind. Is free will like that? Isn't it at least probable that having
free will depends on believing you have free will? And if it is even probable, shouldn't we avoid expressing doctrines that might rightly or
wrongly undermine that belief? If we can't go along with the gag,
aren't we at least obliged to button our lips or change the topic of conversation? Certainly there are those w h o think so.
In the many years that I have been working on this problem,
I've come to recognize a pattern. My fundamental perspective is natu-

Dumbo's Magic Feather and the Peril of Paulina

15

ralism, the idea that philosophical investigations are not superior to, or
prior to, investigations in the natural sciences, but in partnership with
those truth-seeking enterprises, and that the proper j o b for philosophers here is to clarify and unify the often warring perspectives into a
single vision of the universe. That means welcoming the bounty of
well-won scientific discoveries and theories as raw material for philosophical theorizing, so that informed, constructive criticism of both
science and philosophy is possible. As I present the fruits of my naturalism, my materialist theory of consciousness (e.g., in Consciousness
Explained, 1991A), and my account of the mindless, purposeless Darwinian algorithms that created the biosphere and all its derivative
products—both our brains and our brainchildren—(e.g., in Darwin's
Dangerous Idea, 1995)^1 encounter pockets of uneasiness, a prevailing
wind of disapproval- or anxiety quite distinct from mere skepticism.
Usually this discomfort is muffled, like a faint ramble of distant thunder, a matter of wishful thinking almost subliminally distorting the
agenda. Often, after the interlocutors have exhausted their supply of
objections, someone will expose the hidden agenda that has been driving their skepticism: "That's all very well, but then what about free
will? Doesn't your view destroy the prospect for free will?" This is
always a welcome response, since it supports my conviction that concern about free will is the driving force behind most of the resistance
to materialism generally and neo-Darwinism in particular. Tom Wolfe,
w h o is tuned into the Zeitgeist as well as anybody, has captured this
motif in a piece with the suitably frantic title "Sorry, but Your Soul
Just Died." It is about the rise of what he somewhat confusedly labels
"neuroscience," whose chief ideologue he identifies as E. O. Wilson
(who is, of course, not a neuroscientist at all, but an entomologist and
sociobiologist), along with his henchmen, Richard Dawkins and me.
Wolfe thinks he sees the handwriting on the wall:
Since consciousness and thought are entirely physical products of
your brain and nervous system—and since your brain arrived fully
imprinted at birth—what makes you think you have free will?
Where is it going to come from? (Wolfe 2000, p. 97)
I have an answer. Wolfe is just wrong. For one thing, your brain
isn't "fully imprinted at birth," but that's the least of the misunderstandings behind this widespread resistance to naturalism. Naturalism

i6

Freedom Evolves

is no enemy of free will; it provides a. positive account of free will, one
that handles the perplexities better, in fact, than those views that try to
protect free will from the clutches of science with an "obscure and panicky metaphysics" (in P. F. Strawson's fine phrase). I presented a version of it in my 1984 book, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth
Wanting. But I find that people often doubt that I could possibly mean
what I say. They are convinced, along with Tom Wolfe, that of course
materialism must find no room for free will, and whereas Wolfe is at
least sometimes mordantly cheery about this ("I love talking to these
people—they express an uncompromising determinism"), others are
not. Brian Appleyard, for instance, has written several alarm calls in the
form of books, but according to yet another alarmist, Leon Kass, he
himself has been seduced:
Appleyard dislikes, quite properly, the implications of genocentrist
thinking and expresses the hope that it may yet be found mistaken;
in any case, he insists that it must be resisted. But he is not himself
philosophically equipped to show what is wrong with it. Worse, he
appears to be an unwitting victim of such thinking, taken in by the
inflated pronouncements of the most reductionist and grandiose
bioprophets: Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett,
James Watson and E. O. Wilson. (Kass 1998, p. 8)
Determinism, genocentrism, reductionism—beware these grandiose
bioprophets; they are about to subvert all that is precious! Faced so often
with these condemnations (and misrepresentations, as we shall see), I
have recognized the need for something in the way of an apologia. Am I
doing something irresponsible in promulgating these ideas so vigorously?
Scholars in their traditional ivory towers have typically not
worried much about their responsibility for the environmental impact of
their work. The laws of libel and slander, for instance, exempt none of
us, but most of us—including scientists in most fields—do not typically make assertions that, independently of libel and slander considerations, might bring harm to others, even indirectly. A handy measure
of this fact is the evident ridiculousness we discover in the idea of malpractice insurance for literary critics, philosophers, mathematicians,
historians, cosmologists. What on earth could a mathematician or literary critic do, in the course of executing her professional duties, that
might need the security blanket of malpractice insurance? She might

Dumbo's Magic Feather and the Peril of Paulina

17

inadvertently trip a student in the corridor or drop a book on somebody's head, but aside from such outre side effects, our activities are
paradigmatically innocuous. O n e would think. But in those fields
where the stakes are higher—and more direct—there is a long-standing
tradition of being especially cautious, and of taking particular responsibility for ensuring that no harm results (as explicitly honored in the
Hippocratic Oath). Engineers, knowing that the safety of thousands of
people may depend on the bridge they design, engage in focused exercises with specified constraints posed to determine that, according to
all current knowledge, their designs are safe and sound. W h e n we academics aspire to have a greater impact on the "real" (as opposed to
"academic") world, we need to adopt the attitudes and habits of these
more applied disciplines. We need to hold ourselves responsible for
what we say, recognising that our words, if believed, can have profound
effects for good or ill.
N o t just that. We need to recognize that our words might be
misunderstood, and that we are to some degree just as responsible for
likely misunderstandings of what we say as we are for the "proper"
effects of our words. T h e principle is familiar: The engineer w h o
designs a product that is potentially dangerous if misused is just as
responsible for the effects of misuse as for the effects of appropriate use,
and must do whatever is necessary to ward off dangerous misapplications of the product by the uninitiated. Saying the truth as best we can
muster is our first responsibility, but truth is not enough. The truth can
hurt, especially if people misunderstand it, and any academic w h o
thinks that truth is a sufficient defense for any assertion has probably
not thought very hard about the possibilities. Sometimes the likelihood
of misunderstanding (or other misuse) of one's true statements, and the
anticipatable harm such misunderstanding could propagate, will be so
great that one had better shut up.
A former student of mine, Paulina Essunger, developed a vivid
example that takes the issue out of philosophical fantasy-land into cold
reality. She has worked in AIDS research, and knows the perils that face
that field well, so I will call her example the Peril of Paulina:
Let's say I were to "discover" that HIV can be eradicated from an
infected individual under ideal circumstances (total patient compliance, total absence of events inhibiting drug-action such as

i8

Freedom Evolves

nausea, etc., total absence of contamination with extraneous virus
strains, and so on) with four years of a certain therapeutic regime.
I can be wrong about this. I can be wrong in a quite simple,
straightforward way. Say I've miscomputed something, misread
some data, misjudged the enrolled patients, or perhaps extrapolated too generously. I could also be wrong in publishing these results
even if they are true, because of their potential environmental impact.
(Further, the media could be wrong in carrying the story, could
be wrong in how they carry the story. But some of their responsibility seems to fall back on me. Especially if I use the word
"eradicate," which in viral contexts usually refers to wiping the
virus off the face of the earth, not "merely" ridding one infected
individual of it.) For instance, an irrational complacency may
spread among, let's say, male homosexuals: "AIDS is curable now
so I don't have to worry about it." The incidence of unprotected
high-risk sex in this group might rise again due to this complacency. Moreover, the widespread prescription of the treatment
might lead to a dramatic spread of resistant virus in the infected
population due to periodic patient non-compliance. (Essunger,
personal correspondence)
In the worst case, you could have a cure for AIDS, know you
have a cure for AIDS, and yet be unable to find a way of making that
knowledge publicly available in a responsible way. It is no good fuming at the complacency or recklessness of the at-risk community, no
good blaming the irresolute patients w h o abandon their treatments in
midcourse—these are predictable and natural (if lamentable) effects of
the impact your publication would have. You should explore all the
practical avenues for preventing these abuses of your discovery, of
course, and make plans to implement whatever safeguards you can, but
maybe, in the worst case, the imaginable benefits of your discovery are
simply unattainable: You just can't get there from here. This would be
not just a serious dilemma; it would be a tragedy. (Her hypothetical case
is, of course, already coming true in some regards: Optimism about an
impending cure has already led to dangerously relaxed attitudes about
safe sexual practices in at-risk groups in the Western world.)
This, then, is a possibility in principle, but is it at all likely that
such systematic sources of frustration confront my attempt to promul-

Dumbo's Magic Feather and the Peril of Paulina

19

gate a naturalist "cure" for the free will problem? In fact, there are a
few such sources, and they are indeed frustrating. There are various
guardians of the public good who—with the best of intentions—want
to stop that crow! They are prepared to take whatever steps they can to
discourage, squelch, or discredit those they see as breaking the spell,
before some serious harm is done. They have been at it for many years,
and while their campaigns have grown threadbare, and their simple fallacies have been exposed over and over by their scientific colleagues,
the debris from their campaigns continues to pollute the atmosphere
of the discussions, distorting the understanding of the general public
on these topics. For instance, the biologists Richard Lewontin, Leon
Kamin, and Steven Rose once said that they consider themselves
a fire brigade, con^antly being called out in the middle of the
night to put out the latest conflagration, always responding to
immediate emergencies, but never with the leisure to draw up
plans for a truly fireproof building. Now it is IQ and race, now
criminal genes, now the biological inferiority of women, now the
genetic fixity of human nature. All of these deterministic fires
need to be doused with the cold water of reason before the entire
intellectual neighborhood goes up in flames. (Lewontin et al.
1984, p. 265)
N o b o d y ever said a fire brigade had to fight fair, and this
brigade throws a lot more than the cold water of reason on those they
see as incendiary. They are not alone. C o m i n g from the opposite pole
of the political spectrum, the religious right has also mastered the art
of refutation by caricature, and pounces on every opportunity to
replace cautiously expressed articulations of the evolutionary facts
with sensationalized oversimplifications that they can then hoot at and
warn the world about. I agree with the critics on both left and right
that there have been some unfortunate overstatements and oversimplifications by some of those they target, and I also agree that such lapses
from responsibility can have truly pernicious effects. Moreover, I don't
challenge their motives or even their tactics; if I encountered people
conveying a message I thought was so dangerous that I could not risk
giving it a fair hearing, I would be at least strongly tempted to misrepresent it, to caricature it for the public good. I'd want to make up
some good epithets, such as genetic determinist or reductionist or Dar-

20

Freedom Evolves

winian fundamentalist, and then flail those straw men as hard as I could.
As the saying goes, it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. Where
I think they go wrong is in lumping the responsible, cautious naturalists (like Crick and Watson, E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Steven
Pinker, and myself) in with the few reckless overstaters, and foisting
views on us that we have been careful to disavow and to criticize. As
a strategy it is clever: If you really think you have to tar something,
use a broad brush, just to be safe; don't let the evil guys hide behind
a shield of respectable hostages! But it does have the effect of assailing
some natural allies with friendly fire, and to be blunt, it is dishonest,
however well intentioned.
The Peril of Paulina that we naturalists face is that whenever
we put forward circumspect, precise versions of our positions, some of
these guardians of the public good turn their cleverness to transforming our careful claims into sound bites that are indeed foolish and irresponsible. I have found that the more care I devote to making my
message clear and compelling, for instance, the more suspicious these
guardians become. What they say, in paraphrase, is this: "Don't pay
attention to all the caveats and complications masked by slick rhetoric!
All he's really saying is that you don't have consciousness, you don't
have a mind, you don't have free will! We're all just zombies and nothing matters—that's what he's really saying!" H o w can I deal with this?
(For the record, that's not what I'm really saying.) And to make matters worse, there are some serious defections and disagreements within
our supposedly monolithic camp of "Darwinian fundamentalists." For
instance, R o b e r t Wright, whose recent book Nonzero: The Logic of
Human Destiny is in most regards a fine exposition of many of the
themes I will be presenting here, finds he is unable to endorse the central claim (as I see it) of our position:
Of course the problem here is with the claim that consciousness
is "identical" to physical brain states. The more Dennett et al. try
to explain to me what they mean by this, the more convinced I
become that what they really mean is that consciousness doesn't
exist. (Wright 2000, p. 398)
Wright retreats, alas, to the mystical vision of Teilhard de Chardin after
several hundred fine pages of stalwart naturalistic demystification. (A
less radical, but more frustrating, defection is Steven Pinker [1997],

Dumbo's Magic Feather and the Peril of Paulina

21

whose continued dalliance with mysterian doctrines of consciousness
is itself a mystery. Nobody's perfect.)
Evidently the stakes are high. W h a t we have here looks like an
evolutionary arms race, with escalation on both sides. But note that
instead of responding by trying to out-caricature my opponents, I am
wheeling out a different weapon on our side: I am trying to plant the
seed of suspicion in you that some of these eminent critics of ours may
even know in their hearts that we are right. The crow was right, after
all, but still, they think, Stop that crow! As we shall see in later chapters,
some of the most popular objections to a naturalistic account of free
will are propelled by fears rather than reasons. T h e fears themselves are
reasonable enough; if you think the box being offered to you might be
Pandora's box, by all means put suspicion on a hair-trigger and exhaust
all your objections before letting the box be opened, for then it might
be too late.
Why, in the face of this heated resistance, do I persist in
attempting to present my view, especially since I acknowledge that it
is not obvious that it mightn't do some harm? (The critics make the
peril greater, of course, by insisting on characterizing the views in dangerous versions; they are playing chicken with us naturalists, in effect.)
Because I think it is high time for D u m b o to be weaned from his magic
feather. He doesn't need it, and the sooner he learns this, the better.
In the movie, you may recall, the feather slips from Dumbo's grasp at
a crucial moment, as he is hurtling to his doom, and at the last instant
he wises up and saves himself by spreading his ears and pulling out of
the dive. It's called growing up, and I think we are ready to grow up.
Why is D u m b o better off without his myth of magic? Because he is
less dependent, more enabled, more autonomous in the undeluded
state. I will try to show that some of our traditional ideas about free will
are just plain wrong, and moreover that they actually get matters backward, in ways that create serious problems for the future of free will on
this planet. For instance, an undeluded view of free will can clarify
some of our ideas about punishment and guilt, and allay some of our
anxieties about what I call the Specter of Creeping Exculpation (is science going to show us that nobody ever deserves punishment? Or
praise, for that matter?). It can help reestablish the proper role of moral
education, and even explain the important role religious ideas have
played in the past in sustaining morality in society, a role that is no

22

Freedom Evolves

longer being well played by religious ideas but which we discard at our
peril. If we persist with the myths, if we dare not turn them in for scientifically sound replacements—which are available—our flying days
may be numbered. T h e truth really will set you free.

Chapter 1
A naturalistic account of how we and our minds evolved seems to threaten the
traditional concept of free will, and fear about this prospect has distorted the scientific and philosophical investigation of these issues. Some who have sensed
the dangers of these new discoveries about ourselves have seriously misrepresented
them. The implications of our newfound knowledge of our origins will prove,
on calm examination, to support a stronger, wiser doctrine of freedom than the
myths it must replace.

Chapter 2
Our thinking about determinism is often distorted by illusions that can be banished with the help of a toy model, in which simple entities can evolve that are
capable of avoiding harm and reproducing themselves. This demonstrates that
the traditional link between determinism and inevitability is a mistake, and that
the concept of inevitability belongs at the design level, not the physical level.

N o t e s on Sources and Further R e a d i n g , *~
The full reference for books and articles referred to in the text (e.g.,
Wolfe 2000) can be found in the Bibliography at the end of the book.
For each chapter I will provide some further comments and signposts
to other sources on the topics discussed.
It may have occurred to some readers that I get off to a bad
start in this book by contradicting myself on page 3. First I deny that
we have souls in addition to trillions of robotic cells and then I blithely
observe that we are conscious: "Since I am conscious and you are conscious, we must have conscious selves that are somehow composed of
these strange little parts." You may find yourself strongly tempted to
agree with R o b e r t Wright that I am actually claiming that consciousness doesn't exist. It would be a shame if you allowed that conviction

Notes on Sources and Further Reading

23

to distort your reading of the rest of the book, so please try to reserve
judgment, on the off chance that Wright is wrong! My uncompromising materialism really is an integral feature of the view I will be
defending, and I wanted to be up front about it, even at the risk of creating antagonism and skepticism in those w h o still hanker for a dualistic account of consciousness. The articulation and defense of this
material theory of consciousness can be found in my books mentioned
above, and is further elaborated and defended against various recent
criticisms in my Jean Nicod Lectures, delivered in Paris in November
2001 (forthcoming D), as well as in a series of papers published or
forthcoming in a variety of journals and volumes and also available on
my Web site: http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud.
T h e philosophical literature on free will is enormous, and only
a small fraction of the recent work on the topic will receive attention
in these pages. Those that are discussed will provide plenty of threads
leading to the rest. Two outstanding books by non-philosophers have
been published in the year I was putting the final touches on my book,
and these should be read by anybody interested in the topic: George
Ainslie's Breakdown of Will (2001) and Daniel Wegner's The Illusion of
Conscious Will (2002). I have worked brief reflections on these two
books into my own, but the richness of their contributions goes well
beyond what can be surmised from those reflections.

y

25

Chapter 2

A TOOL FOR
THINKING ABOUT
DETERMINISM
/
Determinism is the thesis that "there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future" (Van Inwagen 1983, p. 3). This is not a particularly difficult idea, one would think, but it's amazing how often even
very thoughtful writers get it flat wrong. First, many thinkers assume
that determinism implies inevitability. It doesn't. Second, many think
it is obvious that ^determinism—the denial of determinism—would
give us agents some freedom, some maneuverability, some elbow room,
that we just couldn't have in a deterministic universe. It wouldn't.
Third, it is commonly supposed that in a deterministic world, there are
no real options, only apparent options. This is false. Really? I have just
contradicted three themes so central to discussions of free will, and so
seldom challenged, that many readers must suppose I am kidding, or
using these words in some esoteric sense. N o , I am claiming that the
complacency with which these theses are commonly granted without
argument is itself a large mistake.

S o m e Useful Oversimplifications
These errors lie at the heart of the misconceptions about free will and
freedom more generally, so before we can make any progress on understanding how freedom could evolve (in a universe that may well be
deterministic), we need to equip ourselves with some corrective
devices, some tools for thinking that will make us less vulnerable to the

2,6

Freedom Evolves

siren songs of these powerful illusions. (If you have an aversion to
philosophical argumentation about determinism, causation, possibility,
necessity, and the indeterminism of quantum physics, you may skip
ahead to Chapter 5, but you must then forswear all reliance on these
three "obvious" propositions, no matter how intuitive they strike you,
and take it on faith when I assure you that they are the false friends of
a thousand misguided discussions. I almost guarantee that you cannot
keep that resolution, however, so a better choice is to plunge into my
demonstrations of these errors, which have their rewards and surprises,
and presuppose no background expertise.)
In Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, a character
makes the following portentous speech:
But you had taken on a greater, and more harmful, illusion. The
illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen. (Pynchon 1973, p. 34)
Pynchon's speaker has concluded that since atoms can't do anything,
and people are made of atoms, people can't do anything either, not
really. He is right that there is a difference between doing and mere
happening, and he is right that there is a harmful illusion lurking in
our attempts to understand this difference, but he gets the illusion
backward. It is not the mistake of treating people as if they weren't
composed of lots of happening atoms (they are), but almost the reverse:
treating atoms as if they were little people doing things (they aren't). It
arises when we overextend the categories appropriate to evolved agents
onto the wider world of physics. The world of action is the world we
live in, and when we try to impose the perspective of that world back
down onto the world of "inanimate" physics, we create a deeply misleading problem for ourselves.
Getting clear about this aspect of the complex relationship
between fundamental physics and biology sounds terrifying, but fortunately, there is a toy version of that relationship that is just what we
need. The difference between a toy and a tool can evaporate if the toy
can help us understand things that are otherwise too complex for us to
keep track of. Science often uses toy models to great advantage.
Nobody has seen an atom, but we all know what an atom "looks like":
a tiny solar system, with a nucleus like a tight bunch of grapes surrounded by electrons orbiting every which way in their little halos. This

Some Useful Oversimplifications

27

familiar friend, the Bohr model (Figure 2.1), is of course hugely oversimplified and distorted, but for many purposes it's a great way to think
about the basic structure of matter.

Figure 2.1

Bohr Atom

Becoming just as familiar in our common imagination is the gigantic
Tinkertoy construction of a double helix with lots of rungs, the CrickWatson model of the D N A molecule (Figure 2.2). It, too, is a useful
oversimplification.

Figure 2.2

DNA Double Helix

28

Freedom Evolves

The French physicist and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace gave us
a usefully simple and vivid image of determinism almost two centuries
ago, and it has structured our imaginations, and hence our theories and
debates, ever since.
An intellect which at any given moment knew all the forces that
animate Nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to
analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of
the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom:
for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future
just like the past would be present before its eyes. (Laplace 1814)
Give this all-knowing intellect, often known as Laplace's demon, a complete snapshot of "the state of the universe," showing the exact location (and trajectory and mass and velocity) of every particle at that
instant, and the demon, using the laws of physics, will be able to plot
every collision, every rebound, every near miss in the next instant,
updating the snapshot to yield a new state description of the universe,
and so on, for eternity.

Figure 2.3 Laplacean Snapshot
In Figure 2.3, this snapshot zooms in at time tl on just three of the
atoms in the world, on their various trajectories, and the demon uses
this information to predict the collision and rebound of two of them
at t2, leading to the positions at t3 and so on. A universe is determinis-

Some Useful Oversimplifications

29

tic if there are transition rules (the laws of physics) that determine exactly
which state description follows any particular state description. If there
is any slack or uncertainty, the universe is indeterministic.
There are too many fudge factors in this simple vision as it
stands: H o w exact must a state description be? Must we plot every subatomic particle, and just which properties of the particles need to be
included in the description? We can anchor these slippery factors arbitrarily by adopting another simplifying idea, WV.O. Quine's (1969)
proposal that we restrict our attention to simple imaginary universes,
which he calls "Democritean" universes, in honor of Democritus, the
most inventive of the ancient Greek atomists. A Democritean universe
consists of some "atoms" moving about in "space." That's all. T h e
atoms in a Democritean universe are not modern atoms full of quantum complexities but truly a-tomic (unsplittable, unsliceable) atoms,
tiny uniform points of matter with no parts at all, rather like those postulated by Democritus. T h e space they inhabit must be made ultrasimple, too, by digitizing it. Your computer screen is a good example of
a digitized plane, a two-dimensional array of hundreds of rows and
columns of tiny pixels, little squares, each of which has, at each instant,
one of a finite set of different colors. We want to digitize a space, a
three-dimensional volume, so we need cubes—voxels, in the language
of computer graphics. Imagine a universe composed of an infinite latticework of tiny cubical voxels, each one either utterly empty or utterly
full (containing exactly one atom). Each voxel has a unique location or
address in the latticework, given by its three spatial coordinates,
{x, y, z). Just as every computer color graphics system has a certain range
of values—different shades of color—that each pixel can take on, in a
Democritean universe, every voxel that isn't empty (value 0) contains
one of a limited number of different types of atoms. It may help to think
of them as different colors, such as gold, silver, black (carbon), yellow
(sulfur). Just as we can define the set of all possible computer-screen
images (for any particular pixel-color system) as the set of all permutations of fillings of the pixels with the defined colors, we can define the
set of all Democritean-universe moments as the set of all permutations
of fillings of all the voxels in space with the various sorts of atoms.
N o w w h e n we want to confront Laplace's demon with a
"complete" snapshot from which to work, we can say exactly what we
need to provide: a state description of a Democritean universe, which lists

Freedom Evolves

3o

the values of every voxel at some instant. So part of state description
S k might read:
at time t:
voxel {2,6,7} = silver,
voxel {2,6,8} = gold,
voxel {2,6,9} = 0,
. . . and so forth.
We don't have to worry about how "fine-grained" to make our
description, since a Democritean universe has a defined limit, a smallest difference, and we can compare any two state descriptions of the
universe and discover any corresponding voxels that are differently
occupied. As long as there are a finite number of different elements
(gold, silver, carbon, sulfur . . .) we can put all the state descriptions in
order—alphabetical order, in effect—by voxel and the element occupying it. State description 1 is the empty universe at time t; state
description 2 is just like 1 except for having a single aluminum atom
occupying voxel {0,0,0}; state description 3 moves that lone aluminum
atom to voxel {0,0,1}; and so forth, all the way to the last state description (in alphabetical order), in which the universe is filled—every
voxel—with zinc! N o w add time, the fourth dimension. Suppose that
at the next "instant," the gold atom at {2,6,8} in S k moves east one
voxel. Then in S k + 1 ,
at time t + 1:
voxel {3,6,8} = gold.
Think of each "instant" of time as like a frame of computer animation, specifying the color or value of each voxel at that instant. This
digitizing of space and time permits us to count differences and similarities, and to say when two universes, or regions or periods of universes, are exactly alike. A series of state descriptions, one for each
successive "instant," yields the history of a whole Democritean universe, for however long that universe lasts—from its Big Bang to its
Heat Death (or whatever replaces these openings and closings in these
imaginary worlds). In other words, a Democritean universe is like a 3-D digital video of some length or other. We can cut time as fine as we like; thirty
frames a second (like a movie) or thirty trillion frames a second,

Some Useful Oversimplifications

3i

depending on our purposes. The size of the voxels is minimal: one indivisible atom per voxel, max. Quine proposed a further simplification:
Imagine that the atoms are all alike (rather like electrons), so we can
treat each voxel as either empty (value = 0) or full (value = 1). This
option is just like replacing a color screen with a black-and-white
screen, a simplification good for some purposes, as we shall see, but not
necessary.
H o w many different ways are there of filling voxels with colors (or just with 0 and 1)? Even when we keep the size of a universe
not just finite but tiny, the number of possibilities gets huge in a hurry.
A universe consisting of just eight voxels (making a two-by-two cube)
and one kind of atom (empty or full, 0 or 1), and lasting only 3
"instants," has already/more than 16 million different variations (2 8 =
256 different state descriptions, which can be put together in 256 3 different series of three). A second's-worth of the universe contained in
a single sugar cube (at the slow rate of 30 frames a second and taking
the cube to be only a million atoms wide) would be a number of states
beyond imagining.

Figure 2.4 Three of the 256 different states of an
8-voxel Democritean universe.
In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, I introduced the term "Vast" as a
name for numbers that, though finite, are Very much larger than
ASTronomical quantities. I used it to characterize the not-reallyinfinite number of books in Jorge Luis Borges's imaginary Library of
Babel, the set of all possible books, and by extension, the number of
possible genomes in the Library of Mendel, the set of all possible
genomes. I also coined a reciprocal term, "Vanishing," to characterize,
for instance, the subset of readable books, nearly invisible within the
Library of Babel. Let's call the set of all possible Democritean universes,
all the logically possible combinations of atoms in space and time, the
Library of Democritus. The Library of Democritus is mind-bogglingly

32

Freedom Evolves

large, no matter how tightly we restrict it to a particular finite set of
parameters (types of atoms, durations, etc.). Things get interesting
when we look at particular subsets of the Library. Some universes in
the Library of Democritus are practically empty, and others are full
of stuff; some have lots of change over time and others are static—the
same state description, repeated forever. In some the change is utterly
random—one instant of atomic confetti after another, with individual
atoms flicking in and out of existence—and others show patterns of
regularity and hence predictability. W h y do some universes show patterns? Just because the Library of Democritus contains all the logically
possible universes, so every possible pattern whatsoever is to be found
somewhere in it; the only rule is that each state description should be
complete and self-consistent (only one atom to a voxel).
Once we start imposing additional rules about what can be
adjacent to what, and about how different state descriptions should succeed each other in time, we can get to more interesting subsets of the
Library. For instance, we could prohibit the "annihilation of matter"
by a rule that says that every atom that exists at time t has to exist somewhere at time t + 1, though it can move to a new voxel if that voxel is
unoccupied. This guarantees that the universe never loses an atom as
time passes. (More precisely, we "prohibit" this by just ignoring the
Vastly many universes that don't obey this rule and restricting our
attention to the Vast but Vanishing subset of those that do obey it:
"Consider the set S of universes in which the following rule always
holds. . . .") We could set up a speed limit (rather like the speed of
light) by adding that an atom can move only to a neighboring voxel in
the next instant, or we could permit longer leaps. We could say that
matter can be annihilated—or created—under such-and-such conditions: For instance, we could have the rule that whenever two gold
atoms are stacked one on top of the other, in the next instant they disappear, and in the lower voxel an atom of silver comes into existence.
Such transition rules are tantamount to the fundamental laws of physics
that hold in each imaginary universe, and we can usefully look at sets
of universes in which these regularities are the same, whatever other
differences there might be. Suppose, for instance, that we want to
"hold physics constant" but vary the "initial conditions"—the state of
the universe at its debut instant. We then consider the set of universes
in which a particular transition rule or set of rules always holds but the

Some Useful Oversimplifications

33

starting-state descriptions are as varied as we like. This is rather like
restricting our attention, in the Library of Babel, to those books written in (grammatical) English; there are regularities in the transition from
character to character ("z"' before "e" except after 'V . . . and Every question begins with a capital letter and ends with a question mark. . . .), but the
topics covered are as varied as can be.
A better analogy between Borges's Library of Babel and our
Library of Democritus would be the existence, in the Library of Babel,
of Vastly many books that start out just fine—as novels or histories or
chemistry textbooks—but then suddenly degenerate into nonsensical
word salad, typographical gibberish. For every book that can be read
cover to cover for enjoyment and profit, there are Vast numbers of volumes that start out well, with the regularities of grammar, vocabulary,
story line, character development, and so forth that are prerequisite for
making sense, but then degenerate into patternlessness. There is no logical guarantee that a book that starts well will continue well. The same
is true of the Library of Democritus. This was David Hume's point,
back in the eighteenth century, when he observed that even though the
sun has risen every day so far, there is no contradiction in the supposition
that tomorrow will be different, that the sun will not rise. To translate
his observation into Library of Democritus talk, note that there is a set
of universes, A, in which the sun always rises, and there is a set of universes, B, in which the sun always rises until [say] September 17, 2004,
at which point something else happens./There's nothing contradictory about
those worlds—theyjust don't turn out to "obey" the physics that always
holds in universes in set A. Hume's point can be put this way: No matter how many facts you gather about the past of the universe you find
yourself in, you can never prove, logically, that you're in a universe in
set A, since for each universe in set A, there are Vastly many universes
in set B that are identical to it at every voxel/time up to September 17,
2004, and then diverge in all manner of surprising or fatal directions!
As H u m e noted, we expect the physics that has held so far in
our world to hold in the future, but we cannot prove by pure logic that
it will oblige us. We've had conspicuous success discovering regularities that have held in the past in our universe, and we've even learned
how to make real-time predictions, about seasons and tides and falling
objects and what you'll find if you dig here, or dissect there, or heat
this or mix that with water, and so forth. These transitions are so reg-

34

Freedom Evolves

ular, so unexceptioned in our experience, that we have been able to
codify them and project them imaginatively into the future. So far so
good; it has worked like a charm, but there are no logical guarantees it
will continue to work. Still, we have some reason to believe that we
inhabit a universe in which this process of discovery can go on more or
less indefinitely, yielding ever more specific, reliable, detailed, accurate
predictions based on the regularities we have observed. In other words,
we may take ourselves to be finite, imperfect approximations of
Laplace's demon, but we can't prove, logically, that our success will
continue, without presupposing the very regularities whose universality and eternity we would like to establish. And there are some reasons,
as we shall see, to conclude that there are absolute limits on our capacity to predict the future. Whether these limits have any implications
about our self-image as agents making "free" decisions and choices, for
which we might properly be held responsible, is one of the treacherous questions we need to address, and we are approaching it gingerly,
getting clear about simpler issues first. We're gradually approaching our
target, determinism, by closing in on a Vast but Vanishing neighborhood
in the still Vaster space of logically possible universes.
Some sets of Democritean universes have transition rules that
are deterministic, and some don't. Consider the set of universes in
which we specify that whenever an atom is surrounded by empty voxels it has a one-in-thirty-six chance of simply vanishing—otherwise, it
stays put in the next instant. In such universes it Js as if Nature rolled
some dice whenever such an atom got itself isolated in this way; if the
dice come up snake eyes, the atom "dies"; otherwise, it lives another
instant and Nature rolls the dice again, unless that atom has just
acquired a neighbor. This would be an indeterministic physics, which
does not specify what happens next in all regards but leaves some of
the transitions to mere probability. Laplace's demon would have to wait
to see how the dice came up before continuing to predict the future.
Other sets of universes obey transition rules that leave nothing to
chance, that specify exactly what voxels are occupied by what atoms
in the next moment. These are the deterministic universes. There are,
of course, kazillions of different ways the transition rules for D e mocritean universes could be deterministic or indeterministic.
H o w do we tell what transition rules govern a particular D e mocritean universe? We can stipulate a rule and then consider what we

Some Useful Oversimplifications

35

must or might find to be true in all possible members of the set obeying the rule, but if we are somehow given a particular Democritean
universe to study, the only thing we can do is examine the entire history of all its voxels and see what regularities—if any—hold. We can
break the j o b into natural parts by looking for regularities that hold in
the early going and seeing if they continue to hold all the way forward.
Bearing in mind Hume's ominous discovery that we can never prove
that the future will be like the past, we can nevertheless set out to find
what regularities we can and make the huge but tempting wager—
what do we have to lose?—that the future will be like the past, that we
are not in one of those bizarre universes that leads us down the garden
path only to disappoint us by going haywire after a longish period of
regularity.
/
We now have a way of sorting Democritean universes into the
deterministic, the indeterministic, and then all the junk—we might call
these the nihilistic universes in which there is no permanent regularity
of transition at all. Notice that on this construal, all there is to being
deterministic or indeterministic is always exhibiting one sort of regularity or another—either a regularity with ineliminable probabilities
less than one, or a regularity in which all such probability is absent.
There is no room, in other words, for the claim that two Democritean
universes are exactly alike at each voxel/time, but one of them is deterministic and the other is indeterministic. 1
T h e difference between deterministic and indeterministic
Democritean universes is now clear, but the best way of understanding just what it means (and what it doesn't mean!) is to pamper our
overwhelmed imaginations even more and consider a still simpler toy
image of determinism. First, let's drop from three dimensions to two
(from voxels down to pixels), and let's also avail ourselves of Quine's
black-and-white-only option, so that each pixel is either ON or OFF at

1. Indeed, by definition, no two Democritean universes are exactly alike at each voxel/time.
One of the virtues of Quine's simplification is that it lets us count universes the same way we
count editions of books: If all the same elements are in the same places at the same times, that
establishes identity. Quine's proposed taming of possible worlds also eschews the dubious idea
that we need to know the identity of the individual atoms—not just their type, carbon or
gold—to identify voxel contents from one universe to another. (Maven alert: This is not
standard possible worlds lore; it avoids familiar problems of transworld identity.)

Freedom Evolves

36

any instant. We have now landed on the plane where Conway's Game
of Life spins out its astonishing patterns. This audaciously oversimplified toy model of determinism was developed in the 1960s by the
British mathematician John H o r t o n Conway. Conway's Life vividly
illustrates just the ideas we need in a way that requires no technical
knowledge of either biology or physics, and no math beyond the simplest arithmetic.

F r o m Physics to D e s i g n in C o n w a y ' s Life W o r l d
The complexity of a living individual minus its ability to anticipate (in respect of its
environment) equals the uncertainty of the environment minus its sensibility (in
respect of that particular living individual).
—Jorge Wagensberg, "Complexity versus Uncertainty"

Consider, then, a two-dimensional grid of pixels, each of which can
be ON or OFF (full or empty, black or white). 2 Each pixel has eight
neighbors: the four adjacent cells: north, south, east, and west, and the
four diagonals: northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest. The
state of the world changes between each tick of the clock according to
the following rule:
Life Physics: For each cell in the grid, count how many of its eight
neighbors is ON at the present instant. If the answer is exactly two,
the cell stays in its present state (ON or OFF) in the next instant. If
the answer is exactly three, the cell is ON in the next instant whatever its current state. Under all other conditions the cell is OFF.
That's all. This one simple transition rule expresses the entire
physics of the Life world. You may find it a useful mnemonic crutch
to think of this curious physics in biological terms: Think of cells going
ON as births, cells going OFF as deaths, and succeeding instants as generations. Either overcrowding (more than three inhabited neighbors)
or isolation (less than two inhabited neighbors) leads to death. But
remember, this is just a crutch for the imagination: the two-three rule

2. This introduction to Life is drawn, with revisions, from Dennett 1991A and Dennett 1995.

From Physics to Design in Conway's Life World

37

is the basic physics of the Life world. Consider how a few simple starting configurations play themselves out.

Figure 2.5 Vertical Flasher

Calculate birth cells first. In the configuration shown in Figure 2.5,
only cells d a n d / h a v e exactly three neighbors ON (dark cells), so they
will be the only birth cells in the next generation. Cells b and h each
have only one neighbor ON, so they die in the next generation. Cell
e has two neighbors ON, so it stays on. So the next instant will look
like this:

Figure 2.6 Horizontal Flasher

38

F r e e d o m Evolves

Obviously, the configuration shown in Figure 2.6 will revert
back in the next instant, and this little pattern will flip-flop back and
forth indefinitely, unless some new ON cells are brought into the picture somehow. It is called a, flasher or traffic light.
What will happen to the configuration in Figure 2.7?

Figure 2.7 Square Still Life
Nothing. Each ON cell has three neighbors ON, so it is reborn just as
it is. No OFF cell has three neighbors ON, so no other births happen.
This configuration is called a still life; there are many different still Ufe
configurations that do not change at all over time.
By the scrupulous application of our single law, one can predict with perfect accuracy the next instant of any configuration of ON
and OFF cells, and the instant after that, and so forth, so each Life world
is a deterministic two-dimensional Democritean universe. And to first appearances, it fits our stereotype of determinism perfectly: mechanical, repetitive, ON, OFF, ON, OFF for eternity, with never a surprise, never an
opportunity, never an innovation. If you "rewind the tape" and play
out the sequel to any configuration again and again, it will always
come out exactly the same. Boring! Thank goodness we don't live in
a universe like that!
But first appearances can be deceiving, especially when you're
standing too close to the novelty. W h e n we step back and consider larger
patterns of Life configurations, we are in for some surprises. The flasher
has a two-generation period that continues ad infinitum, unless some

From Physics to Design in Conway's Life World

39

other configuration encroaches. Encroachment is what makes Life interesting. Among the periodic configurations are some that swim, amoeba-like,
across the plane. The simplest is the glider, the five-pixel configuration
(Figure 2.8) shown here taking a single stroke to the southeast:

/
Then there are the 5aters, the puffer trains, and space rakes, and a host
of other aptly named denizens of the Life world that emerge as recognizable objects at a new level. In one sense, this new level is simply a
bird's-eye view of the basic level, looking at large clumps of pixels
instead of individual pixels. But, wonderful to say, when we ascend to
this level, we arrive at an instance of what I have called the design level;
it has its own language, a transparent foreshortening of the tedious
descriptions one could give at the physical level. For instance:
An eater can eat a glider in four generations. Whatever is being
consumed, the basic process is the same. A bridge forms between
the eater and its prey. In the next generation, the bridge region
dies from overpopulation, taking a bite out of both eater and prey.
The eater then repairs itself. The prey usually cannot. If the
remainder of the prey dies out as with the glider, the prey is consumed. (Poundstone 1985, p. 38)

\

40

Freedom Evolves

Notice that something curious happens to our "ontology"—
our catalog of what exists—as we move between levels. At the physical level there is no motion, only ON and OFF, and the only individual
things that exist, pixels, are defined by their fixed spatial location, {x,
y}. At the design level we suddenly have the motion of persisting
objects; it is one and the same glider (though composed each generation of different pixels) that has moved southeast in Figure 2.8, changing shape as it moves; and there is one less glider in the world after the
eater has eaten it in Figure 2.9.
Notice too that whereas at the physical level, there are
absolutely no exceptions to the general law, at the design level our generalizations have to be hedged: They require "usually" clauses ("the
prey usually cannot" repair itself) or "provided nothing encroaches"
clauses. Stray bits of debris from earlier events can "break" or "kill"
one of the objects in the ontology at this level. Their salience as real
things is considerable, but not guaranteed. An element of mortality has
been introduced. Whereas the individual atoms—the pixels—flash in
and out of existence, ON and OFF, without any possibility of accumulating any changes, any history that could affect their later history,
larger constructions can suffer damage, a revision of structure, a loss or
gain of material that can make a difference in the future. Larger constructions might also happen to be improved, made less vulnerable to
later dissolution, by something that happened to them. This historicity is the key. The existence in the Life world of structures that can
grow, shrink, twist, break, move . . . and in general persist over time
opens the floodgates to design opportunities.
Rushing in to explore those opportunities is a worldwide fraternity of Life hackers, hobbyists w h o delight in testing their ingenuity by devising ever more elaborate arrangements on the Life plane that
do interesting things. (If you want to explore the Life world, you can
download free a fine, user-friendly implementation Life 32 at the Web
site http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/Life32.html. It has a library of interesting configurations, and links to other sites. I require my students to
explore the Life world, because I have learned that it renders vivid and
robust a set of intuitions that are otherwise absent, and helps them think
about these issues. In fact—wonder of wonders—it sometimes leads
them to change their minds about their philosophical positions. So be
careful; it can be addictive fun—and it may lead you to abandon your

From Physics to Design in Conway's Life World

4i

life-defining hatred of determinism!) To become a Life hacker, you
simply ascend to the design level, adopt its ontology, and proceed to
predict—sketchily and riskily—the behavior of larger configurations or
systems of configurations, without bothering to compute the physical level.
You can set yourself the task of designing some interesting supersystem out of the "parts" that the design level makes available. It takes only
a few minutes to get the hang of it, and w h o knows what you will be
able to concoct. What would you get if you lined up a bunch of still
life eaters, and then sprayed them with gliders, for instance? After
you've dreamed up your design, you can readily test it; Life 32 will
swiftly inform you of any overlooked problems in your design stance
predictions. You can get a glimpse of the richness of this design level
from a few quotes Lronce pulled off an excellent Life Web site,
http://www.cs.jhu.edU/~callahan/lifepage.html#newresults. The Web
site is now defunct, sad to say, and don't bother trying to figure out
these comments; they are just meant to illustrate the way Life hackers
think and talk.
The loaf reacts with all the junk the R-pentomino produces as it
naturally transforms into a Herschel, and miraculously reappears
some time later leaving no debris at all. It is necessary to prevent
the first Herschel glider from hitting the fading remnants of the
reaction, and there is no room for an ordinary eater. But luckily
a tub with tail and a block can be used instead.
Dave Buckingham found a faster stable reflector that does not use
Paul Callahan's special reaction. Instead, the incoming glider hits
a boat to make a B-heptomino, which is converted into a Herschel and moved round to restore the boat. A compact form of
the 119-step Herschel conduit is needed here, as is a non-standard
still life to cope with the 64 64 77 conduit sequence.
These Life hackers are playing God in their simplified twodimensional universe, trying to design ever more amazing patterns that
will propagate themselves, transform themselves, protect themselves,
move themselves around on the Life plane—in short, do things in the
world, instead of merely flashing back and forth or, worse, just persisting unchanged for eternity (unless something encroaches). As the
quotations reveal, the problem that confronts anyone w h o plays God
in this world is that no matter how nice your initial pattern is, it always

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Freedom Evolves

runs the risk of annihilation, of turning into debris, of being eaten by
an eater, of vanishing without a trace.
If you want your creations to persist, they have to be protected.
Keeping the physics constant (not changing the basic rule of the Life),
the only thing you can play with is the initial state description, but you
have so many to choose from! A set of Life worlds only 1 million pixels by 1 million pixels already gives you 2 to the trillionth power of different possible universes to explore—the Library of Conway, a Vast but
Vanishing branch of the much, much Vaster Library of Democritus.
Some of these Life worlds are very, very interesting, but finding them
is harder than hunting for a needle in a haystack. The only way to do
it, since random search is practically hopeless, is to think of the search
as a design problem: H o w can I construct a Life-form that will do x or do
y or do z? And once I've designed something that can do x, how can I
protect my fine x-er from harm once I've constructed it? After all, a lot
of precious R & D (research and development) went into designing my
x-er. It would be a shame if it got smashed before it could do its thing.
H o w can you make things that will last in the sometimes toxic
world of Life? This is an objective, non-anthropomorphic problem.
The underlying physics is the same for all Life configurations, but some
of them, in virtue of nothing but their shape, have powers that other
configurations lack. This is the fundamental fact of the design level. Let
the configurations be as un-human, as un-cognitive, as un-agent-like
as you can muster. If they last, what is it about them that explains this?
A still life is fine until it gets plowed into. Then what happens? Can it
restore itself somehow? Something that can nimbly move out of the
way might be better, but how can it get any advance warning of incoming missiles? Something that can eat the incoming debris and profit
from it might be better yet. But the rule is: Anything that works is fine.
Under that rule, what emerges is sometimes strikingly agent-like, but
this may be more a function of a bias in our imagination—like seeing
animals in the clouds just because we have lots of animal "templates"
in our visual memory—than because it is necessary. In any case, we
know a set of tricks that work: a set of tricks that is strongly reminiscent of our own biology. T h e physicist Jorge Wagensberg has recently
argued that this resemblance to life as we know it is no accident. In an
essay that does not mention Conway Life, he develops definitions of
information, uncertainty, and complexity from which he can derive

From Physics to Design in Conway's Life World

43

measures of "independence with respect to the uncertainty of the
environment" and use these to show that persistence, or what he calls
"keeping an identity," in a complex environment depends (probabilistically) on various ways of maintaining "independence"—and these
ways include such "passive" measures as "simplification" (Hke seeds and
spores), hibernation, isolation (behind shields and shelters), and sheer
size, and above all, the "active" measures that require anticipation. "A
biota progresses in a particular environment if the new state of the biota
is more independent in respect of the uncertainty of that environment"
(Wagensberg 2000, p. 504).
A wall is sometimes a good bargain, if it is strong enough so
that nothing can smash it. (Nothing? Well, nothing smaller than G, the
most gigantic projectile we've thrown at it yet.) A wall just sits there
and takes a beating,jiot doing anything. A mobile protector, on the
other hand, must either move in a fixed trajectory, like a sentry marching around the perimeter of a camp; or in a random trajectory, like the
swimming-pool vacuum-sweepers that prowl at random, cleaning the
walls; or in a guided trajectory that depends on its obtaining some
information about the environment through which it moves. A wall
that can repair itself is another interesting possibility, but much harder
to design than a static wall. These fancier designs, the designs that can
take steps to improve their chances, can get quite expensive, since they
depend on reacting to information about their circumstances. Their
immediate surroundings (the eight neighbors around each pixel) are
more than informative—they are utterly determining; it is "too late to
do anything" about a collision that has begun. If you want your creation to be able to avoid some impending harm, it is going to have to
be designed either to do the right thing "automatically" (the thing it
always does) or to have some way of anticipating it, so that it can be
(designed to be) guided by some harbinger or other down a better path.
This is the birth of avoidance; this is the birth of prevention, protection, guidance, enhancement, and all the other fancier, more expensive sorts of action. And right at the moment of birth, we can discern
the key distinction we will need later on: Some kinds of harms can, in
principle, be avoided, and some kinds of harms are unavoidable, or
inevitable, as we say. Advance warning is the key to avoidance, and this
is strictly limited in the Life world by the "speed of light," which is
(for all practical purposes) the speed at which simple gliders can swim

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Freedom Evolves

diagonally across the plane. Gliders, in other words, could be the photons, the light particles, in the set of Life universes, and reacting-to-a-glider
could be a way of turning a mere collision or encroachment into an
informing, a simplest case of noticing or discriminating. We can see why
it is that calamities that arrive at the speed of light must "blindside" any
creations they encounter; they are truly inevitable. Slower-moving
problems can, in principle, be predicted by any Life-form that can
extract guidance from the incoming rain of gliders (or other, slower
sources of information) and adjust itself appropriately It may pick up
information about what to expect from other things it encounters, but
only if there is information in those patterns that is predictive of patterns elsewhere, or at other times. In a totally chaotic, unpredictable
environment, there is no hope of avoidance except sheer blind luck.
Notice that I have been intermixing two distinct informationgathering processes in this discussion, which now need to be more
clearly separated. First, there is the activity of our hacker Gods, w h o are
free to cast their eyes and minds over huge manifolds of possible Life
worlds, trying to figure out what will tend to work, what will be robust
and what will be fragile. For the time being, we are supposing that
they are truly God-like in their "miraculous" interactions with the Life
world—they are not bound by the slow speed of glider-light; they can
intervene, reaching in and tweaking the design of a creation whenever
they like, stopping the Life world in mid-collision, undoing the harm
and going back to the drawing board to create a new design. Wherever
they can foresee a source of difficulty they can set themselves the task of
designing a way of countering it. Their creations will be the unwitting,
foresightless beneficiaries of the foresight of the hacker Gods, w h o have
designed them to thrive in just such circumstances. Hacker Gods have
their limitations, however, and will economize whenever they can. For
instance, they might interest themselves in such questions as: What is
the smallest Life-form that can protect itself from harm x or harm y,
under conditions z (but not under conditions u>)? After all, gathering
information and putting it to use is a costly, time-consuming process,
even for a hacker God. The second possibility is the prospect of the
hacker Gods designing configurations that do their own information
gathering, locally, bound by the physics of the world they inhabit.
Expect that any finite creation that uses information will be thrifty,
keeping only what it (probably) needs or (probably) can use, given the

From Physics to Design in Conway's Life World

45

vicissitudes in its neighborhood. After all, the hacker God who designs
it wants to make it robust enough to fend for itself not in all possible
Life worlds but only in any of the set of Life worlds it has some probability of encountering. Such a creation will, at best, be in a position to
act as if it knew it was living in a particular sort of neighborhood, fending off a particular sort of harm or securing a particular sort of benefit,
instead of acting as if it knew exactly which Life universe it inhabited.
Speaking of these smallest avoiders as if they "knew" anything
at all involves a large dose of poetic license, since they would be about
as close to clueless as you can imagine—they are much simpler than a
real-world bacterium, for instance—but it is still a useful way of keeping track of the design work that has gone into them, giving them
capabilities to do thingssthat any randomly assembled clumps of pixels
of about the same size would lack. (Of course, "in principle"—as
philosophers love to say—a Cosmic Accident could produce exactly
the same constellation of pixels with exactly the same capabilities, but
this is an utterly negligible possibility, beyond improbability. Only
expensively designed things can do things in the interesting sense.)
Enriching the design stance by speaking of configurations as if
they "know" or "believe" something, and "want" to accomplish some
end or other is moving up from the simple design stance to what I call
the intentional stance. O u r simplest doers have been reconceptualized as
rational agents or intentional systems, and this permits us to think about
them at a still higher level of abstraction, ignoring the details of just
how they manage to store the information they "believe" and how
they manage to "figure out" what to do, based on what they "believe"
and "want." We just assume that however they do it, they do it rationally—they draw the right conclusions about what to do next from the
information they have, given what they want. It makes life blessedly
easier for the high-level designer, just the way it makes life easier for
us all to conceptualize our friends and neighbors (and enemies) as
intentional systems.
We can move back and forth between the hacker God perspective and the "perspective" of the hacker God's creations. Hacker
Gods have their reasons, good or bad, for designing their creations the
way they did. T h e creations themselves can be clueless about these reasons, but they are the reasons those features exist, and if the creations
persist, it will be thanks to those features. If, beyond that, the creations

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Freedom Evolves

have been designed to gather information to use in action guidance,
the situation becomes more complicated. The simplest possibility is
that a hacker God has designed a repertoire of reaction-tricks that tend
to work well in the environments encountered, analogous to the IRMs
(Innate Releasing Mechanisms) and FAPs (Fixed Action Patterns) that
ethologists have identified in many animals. Gary Drescher (1991) calls
this architecture a situation-action machine and contrasts it with the more
expensive, more complex choice machine, in which the individual creation generates its own reasons for doing x or y, by anticipating probable outcomes of various candidate actions and evaluating them in terms
of the goals it also represents (since these goals can change over time,
in response to new information gathered). If we ask "at what point"
the designer's reasons become the designed agent's reasons, we may
find that there is a seamless blend of intermediate steps, with more and
more of the design work off-loaded from designer to designed agent.
O n e of the beauties of the intentional stance is that it allows us to see
clearly this shift in the distribution of "cognitive labor" between the
originating design process and the efforts of the thing designed.
All this fanciful talk about configurations of Life-pixels as
rational agents may strike you as outrageous overstatement, a blatant
attempt by me to pull the wool over your eyes. It's time for a sanity
check: Just how much, in principle, can a designed constellation of
Life-pixels do, given glider-discrirnination and its kin as the "molecules" of the design level, the fundamental building blocks of higherlevel Life-forms? This is the question that inspifed Conway to create
the Game of Life in the first place, and the answer he and his students
came up with is staggering. They were able to prove that there are Life
worlds—they sketched one of them—within which there is a Universal Turing Machine, a two-dimensional computer that in principle can
compute any computable function. It was far from easy, but they
showed how they could "build" a working computer out of simpler
Life-forms. Glider streams can provide the input-output "tape," for
instance, and the tape-reader can be some huge assembly of eaters,
gliders, and other bits and pieces. What this means is mind-boggling:
Any program that can run on any computer could, in principle, run
in the Life world on one of these Universal Turing Machines. A version of Lotus 1-2-3 could exist in the Life world; so could Tetris or any
other video game. So the information-handling ability of gigantic Life-

Can We Get the Deus ex Machina?

47

forms is equivalent to the information-handling ability of our real
three-dimensional computers. Any competence you can "put on a
chip" and embed in a 3-D contraption can be perfectly mimicked by
a similarly embedded Life constellation in a still larger Life-form in two
dimensions. We know it exists in principle. All you have to do is find
it—that is to say, all you have to do is design it.

C a n We G e t t h e Deus ex Machina?
N o w it is time to ask whether we might eliminate the miracle-working
hacker Gods from our picture, replacing their ingenious design efforts
with evolution within the Life world itself. Is there any Life world, of any
size, in which the sorts of human R & D just described are carried on
by natural selection? More precisely, are there configurations of the Life
world such that, if you started the world in one of them, it would eventually do all the work of the hacker Gods, gradually discovering and
propagating better and better avoiders? This move, to an evolutionary
perspective, carries with it a family of ideas that can seem paradoxical
or self-contradictory from our everyday perspective, and it takes some
strenuous exercise of thought to get comfortable with the transitions
between the two perspectives. O n e of Darwin's earliest critics saw
what was coming and could scarcely contain his outrage:
In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is
the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT
AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW
TO MAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the
Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning;
who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute
Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom
in all the achievements of creative skill. (MacKenzie 1868, p. 217)
MacKenzie identifies what he calls a "strange inversion of reasoning," and he is right on all counts. The Darwinian revolution is
indeed an inversion of everyday reasoning in several regards, and it is, for
that reason, strange: a. foreign language, full of traps for the unwary, even

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Freedom Evolves

after considerable practice, all the more so because there are so many terms
that are what linguists call false friends—terms that seem to be cognates or
synonyms of terms from your mother tongue but differ in treacherous
ways. O n e man's Gift is another man's poison; one man's chair is another
man's flesh. (Hint: Look in German—English and French—English dictionaries.) In the case of the Darwinian perspective, the problem of false
friends is exacerbated because the terms that invite confusion are, in fact,
closely related and relevant to each other—but just not quite the same.
W h e n we invert the top-down perspective of tradition and look at creation from the bottom up, we see intelligence arising from "intelligence,"
sight being created by a "blind watchmaker," choice emerging from
"choice," deliberate voting from mindless "voting," and so on. There will
be lots of scare-quotes in the explanations to come. We will see—talk
about paradox!—how a whole can be more free than its parts.
So the straightforward technical question of whether an evolutionary process could replace the effort of the hacker Gods in the Life
world has some far-reaching implications. Moreover, the answer has
some curious twists in it. In such a Life world, there would have to be
self-reproducing entities, and we do know that they can exist, since
Conway and his students embedded their Universal Turing Machine in
just such a contraption. They devised the Game of Life, in fact, in order
to explore John von Neumann's pioneering thought-experiments
about self-reproducing automata, and they succeeded in designing a
self-reproducing structure that would populate the empty plane with
ever more copies of itself, rather like bacteria in a petri dish, each one
containing a Universal Turing Machine. Wha/d oes this machine look
like? Poundstone calculates that the whole construction would be on
the order of 10 13 pixels.
Displaying a 1013-pixel pattern would require a video screen about
3 million pixels across at least. Assume the pixels are 1 millimeter
square (which is very high resolution 3 by the standards of home
computers). Then the screen would have to be 3 kilometers
(about two miles) across. It would have an area about six times
that of Monaco.
3. When Poundstone was writing (1985) this was very high, but today it would be low. The
pixels on my laptop are almost four times smaller, so the whole screen at that resolution
would be somewhat less than 1 kilometer across. Still a big screen.

Can We Get the Deus ex Machina?

49

Perspective would shrink the pixels of a self-reproducing pattern to invisibility. If you got far enough away from the screen so
that the entire pattern was comfortably in view, the pixels (and
even the gliders, eaters and guns) would be too tiny to make out.
A self-reproducing pattern would be a hazy glow, like a galaxy.
(Poundstone 1985, pp. 227-28)
In other words, by the time you have built up enough pieces into
something that can reproduce itself (in a two-dimensional world) it is
roughly as much larger than its smallest bits as an organism is larger than
its atoms. That shouldn't surprise us. You probably can't do it with anything much less complicated, though this has not been strictly proven.
But self-reproduction is not enough by itself. We also need
mutation, and adding this is going to be surprisingly expensive. In his
book Le Ton Beau de Marot (1997), Douglas Hofstadter draws attention
to the role of what he calls spontaneous intrusions into any creative
process, whether it is achieved by the exertions of a human artist or
inventor or scientist, or by natural selection. Every increment of design
in the universe begins with a moment of serendipity, the undesigned
intersection of two trajectories that yield something that turns out, retrospectively, to be more than a mere collision. We have seen how
collision-detection is a fundamental capacity that can be made available to Life-forms, and indeed how collision is a major problem facing all Life hackers, but how much collision can we afford in our Life
worlds? This turns out to be a serious problem when we set out to add
mutation to the self-replication powers of Life configurations.
Computer simulations of evolution abound, and show us the
power of natural selection to create strikingly effective novelties in
remarkably short periods of time in one virtual world or another, but
they are always, perforce, orders of magnitude simpler than the real
world, because they are always much more quiet. What happens in a
virtual world is only what the designer specifies to happen. Consider
a typical difference between virtual worlds and real worlds: If you set
out to make a real hotel, you have to put a lot of time, energy, and
materials into arranging matters so that the people in adjacent rooms
can't overhear each other; if you set out to make a virtual hotel, you
get that insulation for free. In a virtual hotel, if you want the people in
adjacent rooms to be able to overhear each other, you have to add that

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Freedom Evolves

capacity. You have to add now-insulation. You also have to add shadows, arornas, vibration, dirt, footprints, and wear-and-tear. All these
non-functional features come for free in the real, concrete world—and
they play a crucial role in evolution. T h e open-endedness of evolution
by natural selection depends on the extraordinary richness of the real
world, which constantly provides new undesigned elements that can be
serendipitously harnessed, once in a blue rnoon, into new design elements. To take the simplest case, can there be enough interference in
the world to produce an appropriate number of mutations without, in
the process, simply breaking the whole reproductive system? The
reproductive system of Conway's Universal Turing Machine was noisefree, making perfect copies every time. There was no provision for
mutation at all, no matter how many copies of itself it produced. Could
a still larger, more ambitious self-reproducing automaton be designed
that could allow for the occasional unblocked glider to arrive, like a
cosmic ray, and produce a mutation in the genetic code being copied?
Can a two-dimensional Life world be noisy enough to support openended evolution, while still quiet enough to permit the designer parts
to do their good work unassailed? Nobody knows.
It is an interesting fact that by the time you specify Life worlds
that are complex enough to be candidates for such capacities, they are
much too complex to run in simulation. Noise and debris can always
be added to a model, but it has the effect of squandering the efficiency
that makes computers such great tools in the first place. So there is a
sort of homeostasis or self-limiting equilibrium here. The very simplicity, the of simplicity, of our models can prevent them from modeling
the things we are most interested in, such as creativity, either by a human
artist or by natural selection itself, since in both cases that creativity feeds
on the very complexity of the real world. There is nothing mysterious
or even puzzling about this, no whiff of strange new complexity-forces
or unpredictable-in-principle emergence; it is simply an everyday, practical fact that computer modeling of creativity confronts diminishing
returns because in order to make your model more open-ended, you
have to make your model more concrete. It has to model more and
more of the incidental collisions that impinge on things in the real
world. Encroachment is, indeed, what makes life interesting.
So it is unlikely that we can ever prove by construction that somewhere in the Vast reaches of the Life plane, there are configurations that

From Slow-motion Avoidance to Star Wars

5i

mimic the full open-endedness of natural selection. Still, we can construct the parts piecemeal, providing the important existence proofs
we need. Yes, there exist such configurations as Universal Turing
Machines, and self-protective persisters, and reproducers, and limited
evolutionary processes. Formal arguments such as Wagensberg's (and
Conway's and Turing's) take us beyond construction to fill in the gaps
of impracticality, so we can say with some confidence that our toy
deterministic world is one in which all the necessary ingredients exist
for the evolution of. . . avoiders! This proposition is what we need to
break the back of the cognitive illusion that yokes determinism with
inevitability. But before turning to this, it will help to return from toyland to reality, to see what we know about the evolution of avoidance
on our planet.
,

From S l o w - m o t i o n A v o i d a n c e to Star Wars
We know that in the early days—the first few billion years—of life on
this planet, self-protective designs emerged, thanks to the slow and
non-miraculous process of natural selection. It took on the order of
1 billion years of replication for the simplest life-forms to work out the
best designs—still susceptible to revision today, of course—for the basic
processes of replication. Along the way there was much avoidance and
prevention, but at a pace much too slow to appreciate unless we artificially speed it up in imagination. For instance, the incessantly
exploratory process of natural selection occasionally spewed forth
counterproductive D N A sequences, parasitic genes or transposons, that
hitched a free ride on the genomes of early life-forms, contributing
nothing to the well-being of those life-forms but just cluttering up
their genomes with extra copies (and copies of copies of copies) of
themselves. These parasites created a problem; something had to be
done. And in due course the incessantly exploratory process of natural
selection, by a more or less exhaustive search, "found" a solution (or
two, or more): designs for structures in the valuable, constructive parts
of genomes that prevented the excessive flourishing of these parasites,
counteracting their actions with reactions, and so forth. The parasitic genes
reacted in turn to this new development by a counterthrust of their
own, developed over many hundreds or thousands or millions of gen-

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Freedom Evolves

erations, and so it went, and so it continues today. Here the speed limit
for avoidance is not the speed of light but the speed of generation. The
simplest "act" of discrimination—-just "noticing" a new problem and
getting in position to respond to it—takes a generation, and the trialand-error process of "figuring out" a solution involves the sacrificial
explorations of hordes of variant lineages over many generations. Eventually, though, the good designs emerge victorious—or the lineage
perishes, which is the much more likely outcome of all these "efforts"
at self-preservation of lineage. A few lucky lineages happened to "find"
good countermoves. (They weren't doing anything, they were just part
of what was happening—the lucky part, as it happens, that happened
to be born with useful mutations.) These lucky ones had descendants,
whose descendants—the lucky ones, again—had descendants, and so
forth, till you get to us. We—lucky us—are made of such useful parts,
exquisitely designed to be good at contributing to avoidance, but now
on a much swifter timescale.
And the process continues in the present. Matt Ridley
describes the well-studied recent case of the so-called P element, a parasitic "jumping gene" that emerged in a laboratory lineage of fruit flies
(Drosophila willistoni) in the 1950s, and spread to wild populations of
their cousins, Drosophila melanogaster.
The P element has since spread like wildfire, so that most fruit
flies have the P element, though not those collected from the wild
before 1950 and kept in isolation since. The P jdement is a piece
of selfish D N A that shows its presence by disrupting the genes
into which it jumps. Gradually, the rest of the genes in the fruit
fly's genome have fought back, inventing ways of suppressing the
P element's jumping habit. (Matt Ridley 1999, p. 129)
H o w long did it take these genes to "recognize" the problem and "fight
back"? Many generations, but notice that there was no central noticer,
no decider. W h a t happened is just what always happens in natural
selection. T h e impact of the P elements was not uniform on all lineages of fruit flies; there was variation in the genomes of fruit flies, some
of which were better able to cope with this new challenge. Those that
coped prospered, and then those of their offspring that coped even better prospered even more, so that in due course "solutions" to the problems posed by those P elements emerged and were "discovered" and

From Slow-motion Avoidance to Star Wars

53

"endorsed" by Mother Nature, otherwise known as natural selection.
It can't happen any faster than that in nature; the exploration cannot
precede the posing of the problem (that would be evolutionary precognition), and thereafter each step takes a whole generation at the
least. Fortunately, the exploration can take advantage of "parallel processing" by exploring in all actual (though not all possible) lineages of
fruit flies at once, so that the problem-solving can happen quite swiftly,
in less than a half-century in the case of fruit flies.
O n e of the standard (and much-needed) correctives issued to
those who study evolution is the old line about how natural selection
has no foresight at all. It is true, of course. Evolution is the blind watchmaker, and we must never forget it. But we shouldn't ignore the fact
that Mother Nature is yvell supplied with the wisdom of hindsight. Her
motto might well be""If I'm so myopic, how come I'm so rich?" And
while Mother Nature is herself lacking in foresight, she has managed
to create beings—us human beings, preeminently—who do have foresight, and are even beginning to put this foresight to use in guiding and
abetting the very processes of natural selection on this planet. I occasionally encounter even quite sophisticated evolutionary theorists w h o
find this paradoxical. H o w could a process with no foresight invent a
process with foresight? O n e of the main goals of my book Darwin's
Dangerous Idea was to show that this is not paradoxical at all. The
process of natural selection, slowly and without foresight, invents
processes or phenomena that speed up the evolutionary process itself—
cranes, not skyhooks, in my fanciful terminology—until the soupedup evolutionary process finally reaches the point where explorations
within the lifetime of individual organisms can affect the underlying
slow process of genetic evolution, and even, in some circumstances,
usurp it.
Today we human beings can see and hear things at a distance,
and don't have to wait for them to sidle up to us. Thanks to our longdistance perceptual organs and our prosthetic extensions of them, we
can pose and solve problems at a tempo approaching the maximum
speed limit of the physical universe: the speed of light. Anything faster
than that would be precognition, which we can't do, but we actually
do butt right up against the speed of light in our problem-recognition
and problem-solving capacities. Thanks to our technology, for example, we can detect the liftoff of a nuclear missile within microseconds

54

Freedom Evolves

of its occurrence thousands of miles away, and then use that precious
lead time to design a countermeasure that has some non-zero chance
of working. It's a breathtaking feat of avoidance, of dodging an incoming brick. (Can we really? Haven't I myself often claimed that Ronald
Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative and its descendants—often called
Star Wars—are a technologist's fantasy, systematically incapable of successful implementation? But if Star Wars is currently impossible, as I do
indeed believe, that is only because it is at the cutting edge of the avoidance arms race today, and the readily imaginable countermeasures seem
to have the upper hand; they -would almost certainly succeed in preventing the prevention that is the goal of Star Wars, though surely many
of the missiles would be successfully intercepted, which is all that I am
claiming. I am not a fan of Star Wars, but I am nevertheless delighted
to find that this criminally expensive and irresponsible system can be
put to some modest use after all, if only as a philosopher's example!)
We are virtuoso avoiders, preventers, interferers, forestallers
today. We have managed to get ourselves into the happy situation of
having enough free time to sit around systematically looking into the
future and asking ourselves what to do next. We are squeezing every
drop of information out of the world that we can, and then we massage it all into breathtaking new vistas onto what will come. And what
do we see? We see that there are some inevitabilities, but actually the
list gets shorter every week. It used to be that there was nothing we
could do about tidal waves, or flu epidemics, or hurricanes (we can't
yet deflect them, but we have plenty of advance'warning so that we
can hunker down and minimize the damage). It used to be that a person w h o fell out of a boat in the dead of night in the middle of the
ocean was a goner for sure. N o w we can fly in helicopters guided by
homing devices and pluck people out of the deep for all the world like
the phony miracles of the old deus ex machina of Greek drama. This is
all a very recent biological development. For billions of years there was
nothing like it on the planet. Processes were either entirely blind or at
best myopic, clueless and reactive, never foresightful or proactive.
As -we have seen, it is easy for us, inveterate and imaginative
agents that we are, to discern the pattern of avoidance and prevention
at many different timescales, from the supersonic to superglacial. We
can effortlessly extend it to atoms and even subatomic particles if we
like, thinking of them as if they too were tiny agents, worrying about

From Slow-motion Avoidance to Star Wars

55

their own futures, hoping to contribute to some great campaign, persisting as best they can in the world of hard knocks. We can imagine,
if we like, that atoms cringe just before the anticipated collisions occur.
That would be silly, of course. Atoms have no foresight, no interests,
no hopes; they are just tiny places where there is happening, not doing.
But that doesn't stop us from simplifying our vision of them by treating them as if they were agents—very simple, single-minded agents.
That carbon atom clings tenaciously to those two oxygen atoms, preventing them from wandering off, forming a persistent molecule of carbon dioxide—a modest task for a carbon atom. Other carbon atoms
play more exciting roles holding together gigantic mega-atom proteins,
so that the proteins can do their thing, whichever thing it is.
I suspect that \jfe find it natural to keep track of the complexities of atoms and the stranger denizens of the world of subatomic
physics by treating them rather like tiny agents because our brains are
designed to treat everything we encounter as an agent if possible—just
in case it really is one. In the early days of human culture, the childhood of civilization, you might say, we found it useful to overuse this
animism, treating all of nature as made of gods and fairies, malevolent
and benevolent sprites, imps and goblins in charge of all the natural
processes we observed. It was intentional systems all the way down, you
might say. This tactic has been moderated and sophisticated—ever since
Democritus, in fact—so that now we are quite comfortable thinking
of atoms as just little mindless bouncing grains. They don't quite act
but they still do things—repelling and attracting, wobbling in one place
or dashing off.
I am not suggesting that there is a clear-cut division, in the end,
between things that merely happen and things that do things, valuable
as that opposition is. As usual, we get a grading off of instances from
florid to pastel to invisible, a diminution of the appropriateness of the
family of concepts anchored to our predicament as agents trying to preserve ourselves. After all, an avalanche can destroy a village and kill p e o ple just as surely as a marauding army can, and even simple helium
atoms can push against the inside of a balloon, keeping it stretched taut.
Yes, and enzymes can be busy little agents indeed. I suspect, in fact,
that it is our inability to make ready sense of subatomic events in such
familiar agency terms that makes the world of subatomic physics such
an alien and hard-to-conceive arena of events. The familiar concepts

Freedom Evolves

56

of cause and effect, as we shall see in the next chapter, are much better anchored to our macroscopic world of agency than to the underlying world of microphysics.

T h e Birth o f Evitability
It is time to take stock and consider some objections that I have postponed. The main point of this chapter is to show that we need to take
the etymology of "inevitable" seriously. It means unavoidable. Curiously, its negation is not used, 4 but we can easily enough coin the term,
and note that some things are evitable by some agents, and some things,
in contrast, are not evitable by those agents. We have seen that in a deterministic world such as the Life world we can design things that are better at avoiding harms in that world than other things are, and these
things owe their very persistence to this prowess. Of all the things -we
see on a particular Life plane, which will still be there a billion time steps
from now? T h e harm-avoiders have the best chance. We can put the
main point of the chapter as the conclusion of an explicit argument:
In some deterministic worlds there are avoiders avoiding harms.
Therefore in some deterministic worlds some things are avoided.
Whatever is avoided is avoidable or evitable.
Therefore in some deterministic worlds not everything is inevitable.
Therefore determinism does not imply inevitability.
/ ,
This argument seems a bit fishy, doesn't it? That's because it exposes
hidden assumptions about avoiding and inevitability that have gone
largely unnoticed. Pointing to particular instances of avoidance as proof
of "evitability" seems odd because it runs contrary to a typical way of
thinking about inevitability:
If determinism is true, then whatever happens is the inevitable outcome of the complete set of causes that obtain at each moment.
This may be a familiar way of speaking, but what does it mean? C o m pare it with the trivially true claim:
4. The Oxford English Dictionary lists "evitable" as a word recorded in 1502, marking it as
obsolete, except in the negative.

The Birth of Evitability

57

If determinism is true, then whatever happens is the determined
outcome of the complete set of causes that obtain at each moment.
If "inevitable" is not just a synonym for "determined," what
does it additionally convey? Inevitable outcome? Inevitable by whom?
Inevitable by the universe as a whole? That makes no sense, since the
universe isn't an agent with an interest in avoiding anything. Inevitable
by anybody? But that is false; we've just seen how to distinguish the skillful avoiders from their less talented kin in some deterministic worlds.
W h e n we say that some particular outcome is inevitable, we might
mean that it is inevitable by all the agents living at that time and in that
place, but whether or not this is true is independent of determinism. It
depends on the circumstances. This all needs some further unpacking,
and w h o better to help me than Conrad, your ombudsman. 5
C O N R A D : The configurations in the Life world that
happen to—that seem to—avoid this and that are not really
avoiding anything, of course. After all, each of them "lives"
in a deterministic world, and if you rerun the tape a million
times, each of them will " d o " exactly the same thing—
exactly the same thing will happen—no matter how much
"evolution" has gone on in that world. In the Life world
evolution scenario, each particular avoider, situated on the
plane exactly where it is, comes to the particular fate it was
always destined to come to—it either avoids harm until after it
replicates or it doesn't. If it confronts a thousand
"avoidance" opportunities before it's killed off, that's
exactly the life it was always going to have. You speak
above of the avoiders "having the best chance" of
surviving, but, of course, chance doesn't enter into it! Those
that survive survive and those that don't don't, and that's
all determined from the outset.
5. Conrad is the cousin of Otto, the fictional articulator of various objections and challenges
to my theory of consciousness in Consciousness Explained. Otto has been variously described
in reviews as my "stooge" and my "conscience," but for better or worse he expressed as
vividly and sympathetically as I could muster the most common misgivings I encountered
to my views on that topic. Everything Conrad says in this book is a distillation of, and—so
far as I can manage it—an improvement on, the most common and pressing objections and
misgivings I have encountered to the claims in this book. He often speaks for the critics I
thank in the Preface, and if I have calculated correctly, you will find that he often speaks
for you.

58

Freedom Evolves

As we'll see in the next chapter, there is a perfectly good concept of chance that is compatible with determinism, and it's the concept we invoke to explain evolution, among other things. (Evolution
doesn't depend on indeterminism.) But, meanwhile, you are right that
each trajectory in the Life world is perfectly determined, but why do
you insist that determined avoidance isn't real avoidance? The longterm process of which each such simple avoider (or pseudo-avoider, if
you insist) forms a mindless part, just happening along and playing out
its "destiny," has a remarkable power: It gradually produces better and
better (pseudo-) avoiders, more and more adroit copers with Life's
problems—though, of course, the problems become more severe, too;
it's a rat race. The fact that the -whole process is determined doesn't
detract from the fact that as time passes it generates more and more of
something that looks for all the world like avoidance.
C O N R A D : It may look like avoidance, but it's not real
avoidance. Real avoidance involves changing something that
was going to happen into something that doesn't happen.
I guess it all depends on what you mean by "going to happen."
Are you perhaps being misled by the simplicity of the imaginary examples in the Life world? There is a contrast between simple, "hard-wired"
avoidance responses and fancier varieties, but you can't use it to contrast
real-world avoidance with Life-world avoidance. A nice example is the
blink reflex, which is tuned on a hair trigger in us, so that most of the
time when -we blink in response to a swiftly looming something, it is a
false alarm. No incoming debris was destined for our eyes after all; there
was nothing for our eyelids to form a temporary wall against. In the tradeoff between the costs of wasting energy and interrupting one's vision
briefly, and the costs of passing up an opportunity to blink that would have
saved an eye, Mother Nature has "erred on the side of caution," probably because the costs (in time and energy) of getting more information
before committing to action rise much too steeply. Blinks are, in general,
involuntary, but other reactions can be suppressed. The human brain
devotes an elaborate subsystem to analyzing motion-in-depth,
with the lion's share of representational space devoted to the cone
of directions which intersect the head. Again, the rationale for this
representational scheme is intuitively obvious—we are most

The Birth of Evitahility

59

"interested" in objects that are quickly approaching our heads.
Intuitively, that is, it is the baseball that's going to hit you smack
in the face that's of interest, not the ball about to clear your left
shoulder—and the representational system reflects this fact. (Akins
2002, p. 233)
But in what sense was that baseball "going t o " hit you smack in the face?
You dodged it; you were caused to dodge it by the elaborate system evolution has built into you to respond to photons bouncing off incoming
missiles on certain trajectories. It was "never really going t o " hit you
precisely because it caused your avoidance system to go into action. But
that avoidance system is more sophisticated than a simple blink reflex,
and it can respond to,further information, when it is available, and
countermand its initial decision. Noticing that you can win the game
for your team by being hit by the incoming pitch, you can decide to
take the hit. You avoid doing the avoiding that was well -within your
power—thanks to {caused by) the advance notice you had of the wider
context. And you can also avoid avoiding avoiding, when circumstances
warrant it. This open-ended human ability is a far cry from the simple
harm-ducking configurations we've imagined in the Life world, but if
you're tempted to think that only simple, "hard-wired reflexes" (mere
pseudo-avoidance, one might call it) can evolve in the Life world, you're
mistaken. All the layers of sensitivity and reflection we human beings
exhibit are accessible in principle to Life configurations. After all, there
are Universal Turing Machines in the Life world.
C O N R A D : I take your point, but I still think that what
happens in the Life world, of whatever complexity or
sophistication, doesn't count as genuine avoidance, which
involves actually changing the outcome. Determined avoiding
isn't real avoiding because it doesn't actually change the
outcome.
From what to what? The very idea of changing an outcome,
common though it is, is incoherent—unless it means changing the
anticipated outcome, which -we've just seen is exactly what happens in
determined avoiding. The real outcome, the actual outcome, is whatever happens, and nothing can change that in a determined -world—or
in an undetermined world!

6o

Freedom Evolves

C O N R A D : But still, those entities in the Life world that
have these various powers of so-called avoidance inevitably
have just the powers they have and are inevitably placed in
the world just where they are, at all times, thanks to the
determinism of that world, and the initial position in which
it starts.

N o , this is precisely the use of "inevitably" that I am calling
into question. If all you mean is that the powers each of them has to
avoid things is determined by the past, then you are right, but you must
break this bad habit of yoking determinism with inevitability. That is
the reflection that needs to be disabled at the outset, for if it doesn't
apply to your dodging—or not dodging—the baseball, then it also
doesn't apply to the many apparent feats of avoidance exhibited by
simpler dodgers in the deterministic Life world. If we want to make
sense of the biological -world, we need a concept of avoidance that
applies liberally to events in the history of life on Earth, whether or
not that history is determined. This, I submit, is the proper concept of
avoidance, as real as avoidance could ever be.
It is worth noting, finally, that just as evitability is compatible
with determinism, inevitability is compatible with indeterminism.
Something is inevitable for you if there is nothing you can do about it.
If an undetermined bolt of lightning strikes you dead, then we can
truly say, in retrospect, that there was nothing you could have done
about it. You had no advance warning. In facft if you are faced with
the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts
are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and
location are determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not
the foe, of those w h o dislike inevitability.
This should serve to break the traditional, or perhaps habitual,
link between determinism and despair. There are other familiar habits
of thought that should also be broken, or at least set aside for skeptical
scrutiny. To speak about prevention or avoidance in the pre-biological
or a-biological universe is to project a concept beyond its home base
in our manifest image as agents, not always in illusory ways, but at least
with the prospect of opening up unwanted implications. H o w much
prevention is there in our world? We speak of gravity preventing the

The Birth of Evitability

61

underpowered rocket from entering orbit, because this is a topic that
interests us. We are less Hkely to speak of gravity preventing the beer
in a glass from floating around the room, but not because it is any less
reliable a regularity. As you read this, your beating heart is postponing
your death, and your attention to the page is preventing you from seeing all manner of other things in your immediate environment. You
may well be avoiding a sprained ankle by not walking at this time, but
also hastening the decay of the chair you are sitting in. We can easily
conjure up scenarios in which these regularities get dramatized as cases
of prevention, enabling, thwarting, deflecting, undoing, counteracting,
and the like, and this is often a useful perspective to adopt toward these
regularities, but the habit of thought or policy should be recognized
for the anthropocentri^ (or at least agentocentric) projection that it is.

C O N R A D : OK. I see that I can't just help myself to the
term "inevitable" in the standard way, but I still have a
strong suspicion that you're pulling a fast one on me. I
think there must be some sense of "inevitable" in which
what happens in a determined world is inevitable. And I
don't see anything that looks like what I call free will
happening in the Life world.

Fair enough. We'll keep looking in later chapters for that elusive sense of "inevitable," but you agree that in the meantime I've
shifted the burden of proof: There shall be no inferring inevitability in
any sense from determinism without mounting a supporting argument.
And I agree that we are still a long way from free will. There is nothing that looks remotely like freedom at the level of the physics of the
Life world. Gliders and eaters aren't the slightest bit free, and what they
do is what they have to do, every time. It seems to stand to reason that
nothing composed of such unfree parts could have any more freedom,
that the whole cannot be freer than its parts, but this hunch, which is the
very backbone of resistance to determinism, will turn out, on closer
examination, to be an illusion. In the next chapter, we will look at this
agent's-eye vision of cause and effect, possibility and opportunity, more
closely, to see in more detail why the important issue of inevitability
has nothing whatever to do with the question of determinism.

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Freedom Evolves

Chapter 2
A toy model of determinism demonstrates that in the Vast space of possible configurations of "matter" there are some that persist better than others, because
they have been designed to avoid harm. The process by which these entities
emerge uses information gleaned from the environment to anticipate general and
sometimes particular features of likely futures, permitting informed guidance.
This proves that evitability can be achieved in a deterministic world, and hence
that the common association between determinism and inevitability is a mistake. The concept of inevitability, like its source concept of avoidance, properly
belongs at the design level, not the physical level.

Chapter 3
The concepts of causation and possibility lie at the heart of anxiety about free
will, and an analysis shows that our everyday concepts do not have the implications they are often assumed to have: Determinism is no threat to our most
important thinking about possibilities and causes in our lives.

N o t e s o n Sources and Further R e a d i n g
There are more extended arguments for the conclusions drawn in this
chapter in my "Real Patterns" (1991B), Darwin's Dangerous Idea
(1995), Kinds of Minds (1996A), and, most recently, "Collision Detection, Muselot, and Scribble: Some Reflections on Creativity" (2001A).
A "simple" Life -world Turing machine, expandable (in imagination, not practically) into a Universal Turing Machine, has been
executed by Paul Rendell, and can be seen and explored at his Web
site: http://www.rendell.uk.co/gol/tm.htm. His list of parts—all
crafted from gliders, eaters, and their kin—is inspiring: lGap3, lGap4,
lGap8, Column Address, Comparator, Control Conversion, Fanout,
Finite State Machine, In Gate, M e m o r y Cell, Metamorphosis II,
MWSS Gun, Next State Delay, N O T X O R Gate, Outgate, Output
Collator, P120 Gun, P240 Gun, P30LWSS Gun, P30MWSS Gun, Pop
Control, Push Control, R o w Address, Set Reset Latch (a), Set Reset
Latch (b), Signal Detector, Stack, Stack Cell, Takeout, Turing Tape.

Chapter 3

THINKING ABOUT
DETERMINISM

Determinism seems ta rob us of our opportunities, seems to seal our
fates in the total web- of causal chains extending back into the past. We
generally ignore this dire prospect. We all spend quite a lot of time
thinking about how things may go today or next year, or might have
gone if only such and such. We seem, in other words, to assume that
our world is not deterministic.
Possible W o r l d s
We readily distinguish in our deliberations between ways things could
have gone and ways things couldn't have gone, between how things
won't go no matter what happens and the way things may well go, if
we so choose. As philosophers say, we often imagine possible worlds:
In World A, Oswald's shots missed Kennedy and hit LBJ instead,
changing subsequent history in millions of ways.
And we use these imaginings to guide our choices of action, although
only a philosopher would be apt to put it that way:
I just imagined a world just like the actual world except that I
didn't eat that eclair and hence didn't experience the regret I'm
now feeling.
In World A, I propose to Rosemary. In World B, I send her
this farewell note I'm writing and join a monastic order.
Familiar as this exercise of the imagination is, it often plays
tricks on us when we try to think rigorously about determinism and

64

Freedom Evolves

causation. In this chapter, I will argue that determinism is entirely
compatible with the assumptions that govern our thinking about what
is possible. The apparent incompatibility is a cognitive illusion, plain
and simple. There is no such conflict. Both in our everyday thinking
about what to do next, and in our most careful scientific thinking about
the causes of phenomena, we employ concepts of necessity, possibility,
and causation that are strictly neutral with regard to the question of
whether determinism or indeterminism is the truth. If I am right, then
more than a few eminent philosophers are -wrong, so expect some
heavy artillery—but rumbling in the distance, since I am not going to
do direct battle with them here. Christopher Taylor has greatly clarified my thinking on this topic and shown me how to launch a deeper
and more radical campaign in support of my earlier claims to this effect,
and our coauthored paper (Taylor and Dennett 2001) provides more
technical detail than is needed here. Here I will attempt a gentler version of our argument, highlighting the main points so that n o n philosophers can at least see what the points of contention are, and how
we propose to settle them, while leaving out almost all the logical formulae. Philosophers should consult the full-dress version, of course, to
see if we have actually tied off the loose ends and closed the loopholes
that are passed by without mention in this telling. And since what follows in this telling is due in large measure to Taylor, there will be a
temporary shift in authorial pronouns to "we."
O u r task, then, is to clarify the everyday concepts of possibility, necessity, and causation that arise in our thinking, our planning, our
worrying, our imagining, as we cope with the -world and its challenges.
We can simplify our task by restricting our thinking about possible
worlds to thinking about Quine's Democritean universes. Quine was
famously skeptical about all attempts to speak seriously about possibility and necessity—the topic of modal logic—and his Democritean universes -were concocted in order to provide a maximally tame, orderly
base of operations from which the issues could be explored. As you
will recall from Chapter 2, each of the Vasdy many Democritean universes consists of a swarm of point-atoms -whose trajectories through
space and time are given by their four-dimensional coordinates {x, y
z, t]. A complete state description of the world at time t is simply the
exhaustive catalogue of the occupied addresses {x, y z,} at t. We call
the set of all logically possible worlds the Library of Democritus, and

Possible Worlds

65

let's call the subset that contains just the physically possible worlds O—
phi. Of course, we don't yet know all the laws of physics, and don't
know for sure whether they are deterministic or indeterministic, but
we can pretend that we know them. (Now that we have Conway's Life
world under our belts, we can always check our intuitions by recasting
the issue into Conway's Life world, where we do know the physics perfectly and know that it is deterministic.)
Given a possible world, we have many ways to make assertions
about it. As we saw in the case of the simple world of Life, it will typically be natural to leap up above the atomic level and describe the
world in terms of larger chunks of stuff. Just as we could trace the career
of some particular glider from its birth to its death on the Life plane,
so we can track the trajectories through time and space of such "connected hypersolids" (four-dimensional objects) as stars, planets, living
creatures, and everyday paraphernalia—the familiar objects found in
human lives. Plato speaks in a famous image of carving nature at its
joints, and the joints we start with—literally, where one thing leaves off
and the next thing starts—are the patterns that are salient and stable
enough for us to identify (and track, and reidentify) as macroscopic
things. As we saw in the Life world, the underlying "physics" (the state
transition rule) dictates which configurations are robust enough over
time to constitute macroscopic (not microscopic) regularities, and we
use these to anchor our imaginations when we think about causes and
possibilities. We can describe such middle-size patterns of atoms using
the familiar system of informal predicates that apply to these entities, such
as (in order of increasing contentiousness) "has a length of 1 meter,"
"is red," "is human," "believes that snow is "white." These informal
predicates unleash a horde of problems concerning vagueness, subjectivity, and intentionality, and it is these problems—the problems that
arise when you leap up from the basic level of atoms and space to
higher ontological categories—that fueled Quine's skepticism about
the likelihood of making sense of talk about possibility and necessity.
We think that by highlighting the move, and concentrating all the slippage into the move from the atomic physical level to the everyday level,
we can keep these problems isolated so that they do not imperil our
basic approach. Proceeding gingerly, then, and assuming that we can
get some tentative grip on informal predicates, we may then in good
conscience form sentences like

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Freedom Evolves

(1) There is something that is human.
and determine whether they apply in various different possible worlds.
There are no human beings in any Life world, since human beings are
three-dimensional beings, but there may be two-dimensional entities
that are wonderfully reminiscent of human beings in some of them.
Closer to home, would a possible world in which the language-using,
technology-exploiting, culture-creating bipeds had feathers instead of
hair on their heads and had descended from ancestors of ostriches be
a world in -which there was something that was human? Or would -we
call such a creature a non-human person? Is " h u m a n " a biological category or, as the word "humanities" suggests, a sociocultural or political category? Opinions may differ on h o w to interpret the informal
predicate "human." Often enough one will encounter borderline
worlds where incontestable verdicts prove elusive.
Worthy of special note are identification predicates of the form
"is Socrates." "Is Socrates," we shall suppose, applies to any entity in
any possible world that shares so many features with the well-known
denizen of the actual world that we are willing to consider it the same
person. In the actual world, of course, "is Socrates" applies to exactly
one entity; in other -worlds, there may reside no such being, or one, or
conceivably two or more to w h o m the predicate applies equally well.
Like other informal predicates, identification predicates suffer from
vagueness and subjectivity, but these vexatious issues can be isolated and
dealt with as they arise in particular cases.1
N o w -we are ready to define the fundamental concepts we
need—necessity, possibility, and causation—in terms of possible worlds.
Such a sentence as
(2) Necessarily, Socrates is mortal.
-we may translate as
(3) In every (physically?) possible w o r l d / the sentence "If anything is Socrates, it is mortal" is true.

1. Maven alert: Yes, we are sidestepping the battles over rigid designation, at our peril. Catch
us if you can. (Rigid designation is a concept due to Kripke [1972], and opinion is divided
over whether it succeeds in resurrecting essentialism. We think not, but would rather not
spend the rest of the year defending our view.)

Possible Worlds

67

In other words, when we cast our minds around canvassing all the possibilities we can contemplate, -we find there is not a single possible
world that has an immortal Socrates in it. That's what it means to say
that Socrates is necessarily mortal. Here "is Socrates" and "is mortal"
are informal predicates of the sort just introduced. Deciding -whether
the sentence is true does present many challenges, of course, stemming
in large part from the unavoidable blurriness of the predicates: Is a
Socrates-candidate that is mortal but can fly like Superman less worthy of the predicate "is Socrates" than a Socrates-candidate that is
earthbound but miraculously unaffected by his cup of hemlock? Who's
to say? Moreover, we haven't yet decided whether the set of possible
worlds over which we should allow f to range should be the whole
Library of Democritu/(all worlds) or <I> (the physically possible worlds)
or even some still more restricted set X. Logic alone can't resolve this
issue, but logical language does help us to pinpoint such questions and
discover more precisely the sorts of vagueness we face.
N o w we can define possibility. What is possible is whatever isn't
necessarily not the case, so
(4) Possibly, Socrates might have had red hair.
means
(5) There is a (at least one) possible world/in which the sentence
"There is something that is Socrates and he has red hair" is true.
Once again, we have to decide whether this is physical or logical possibility we are talking about. It is physically possible if there is a "world
in set <I> with a red-haired Socrates. Otherwise, this is ruled out, physically, no matter how common red-haired Socrates is in logically possible but physically impossible -worlds.
N o w we are in a position to clarify the definition of determinism given at the beginning of Chapter 2: There is at any instant
exactly one physically possible future. To say that determinism is true is to
say that our actual world is in a subset of worlds that have the following interesting property: There are no two worlds that start out exactly
the same (if they start the same, they stay the same forever—they are
not different -worlds at all), and if any two worlds share any state description exacdy, they share all subsequent state descriptions. The Life -world
illustrates this crisply. It is deterministic in only one direction; you can-

68

F r e e d o m Evolves

not in general extrapolate the previous instant the way you can always
extrapolate the next instant. For instance, a Life plane containing a single square-of-four still life at time t (see Figure 3.1) has an ambiguous
past. The next state (and the next, and so forth) is exactly the same—
unless something encroaches—but the previous state could have been
any of these five (or indefinitely many others with more distant evaporating ON pixels).

So if determinism—thus defined—is true, we can conclude that even
if many different pasts might have led to exactly our present state, our
future is "fixed" by our present state. From this perspective, determinism seems to be just the opposite of our standard vision, in which
the past is "fixed" and the future is "open." We could define a stronger
(and non-standard) form of determinism that excludes such ambiguous pasts, ruling out what I have called inert historical facts—facts about
the past that, so far as the laws of physics are concerned, could have
been one way or another without leaving any subsequent effect. The
ability of cosmologists to "run the movie backward" and thereby calculate facts about the early moments after the Big Bang shows that with
regard to some properties, we can read the past off the present with
stunning precision and reach, but this goes no way at all to show that
there are no inert historical facts. T h e fact that some of the gold in my
teeth once belonged to Julius Caesar—or its negation, the fact that
none of it ever did—is a plausible example of an inert historical fact.

Possible Worlds

69

It is certainly practically inert. Since we don't happen to keep track of
the chain of ownership of bits of gold the way we do for, say, paintings by Rembrandt, it is well-nigh unimaginable that any investigation
of the current state of the world's distribution of atoms would enable
one to figure out which of these two sentences is true, but one of them
surely is.
And when we look into the future, it is next to impossible to
tell when a heretofore inert historical fact will emerge to "make a difference" in what happens next. Suppose determinism is true and we
know the laws of physics perfectly, the way Laplace's demon knows
them. Still, unless we have perfect and complete knowledge of one state
description of the universe, we will not be able to tell which of Vastly
many microscopically ^different possible worlds in the set <l> is the actual
world. It is because our knowledge is inevitably incomplete that thinking in terms of possible worlds is such a good fallback.
O n e of the most useful applications of possible- world talk is in
interpreting counterfactual sentences, such as
(6) If Greenspan had sobbed in Congress, the market would have
crashed.
and
(7) If you had tripped Arthur, he would have fallen.
Following David Lewis (1973), we can see that {roughly) sentence (7)
is true if and only if in every world approximately similar to our own
where the antecedent holds, so does the consequent. In other -words,
(8) Take the set of worlds X similar to our actual world: In each
world in that set where there is an instance of you tripping Arthur,
there is also an instance of Arthur falling
Sometimes when we make counterfactual claims like this, we actually
find ourselves checking them by imagining a few variations along these
lines ("Let's see, suppose Arthur was wearing a red shirt, would that have
kept him from falling? Suppose the radio had been turned down, suppose the heat was turned off, suppose he was "wearing knee pads. . . .
No, he still would have fallen. Suppose the room was filled with inflated
air bags or the whole building was in free fall with zero gravity, now
that would have kept him from falling. . . . But that is too dissimilar to

Freedom Evolves

70

count"). And in controlled experiments, -we don't just imagine, -we
actually investigate the variations. We vary the conditions systematically,
seeing what changes and what doesn't. This is not as straightforward as
it first appears, as we shall see.
Whether or not we conduct any actual experiments or thought
experiments, what we imply by asserting the counterfactual is that
some such set of worlds X similar to our actual world has this regularity in it. And in general, we can express the interpretation of a counterfactual like (6) or (7) as
(9) In the set of worlds X, A => C,
where A is the antecedent and C is the consequent.
But how similar to our world should the worlds in set X be?
Choosing an optimal value for X in these cases is not always easy, but
we can follow loose Guidelines:
In sentences like (6) and (7), X ought to:
•

contain worlds in which A holds, not-A holds, C holds, and
n o t - C holds

•

contain worlds otherwise very similar to the actual world
(insofar as the preceding clause permits).

So when analyzing (7), choose X to contain worlds in which you trip
Arthur, worlds where you refrain from tripping him, worlds where he
falls, and worlds where he remains upright. (Nojtice how we use our
higher-level ontologies to gather these similai worlds together. We
don't grade the similarity of worlds by counting how many different
voxels there are filled with iron or gold; we use the informal predicates,
with all their slop and vagueness, to determine which worlds to
include. It turns out, as we shall see, that many of the quandaries that
arise for claims about causation and possibility hinge on how we choose
set X, the comparison set of nearby possible worlds.)

Causation
Finally, what about causation? Some philosophers hope someday to
unearth the one "true" account of causation, but given the informal,

Causation

7i

vague, often self-contradictory nature of the term, -we think a more realistic goal is simply to develop a formal analogue (or analogues) that helps
us think more clearly about the world. O u r preexisting hunches about
causation will provide some guidance, but we should mistrust any
informal arguments that masquerade as "proofs" validating or debunking particular causal doctrines. 2 W h e n we make an assertion like
(10) Bill's tripping Arthur caused him to fall.
a number of factors appear to be at work supporting the claim. In an
approximate order of importance, we list the following:
•

Causal necessity. O u r assent to sentence (10) depends on our
conviction that had Bill not tripped Arthur, he would not have
fallen. Using the interpretation of counterfactuals just given,
we choose set X, the set of worlds similar to our own, as a set
including worlds in which (i) Bill trips Arthur; worlds in which
(ii) Bill doesn't trip him; worlds in which (iii) Arthur falls; and
worlds in which (iv) he doesn't fall. And we check to make
sure that in this set X, in all the worlds where Arthur falls, Bill
tripped him.

•

Causal sufficiency It may well be that whenever we affirm (10),
we do so partly because we believe that Arthur's fall was an
inevitable outcome of Bill's tripping: In any world where Bill
places the obstruction in his path, Arthur goes toppling.
(There's that word "inevitable," and it does mean unavoidable
here: Arthur—for one reason or another—cannot avoid falling,
and Arthur's friends cannot prevent him from falling, and
there's nothing else in the offing to interfere with his falling, and
so forth; gravity will not be defied on this occasion.) This second condition is logically entirely distinct from the first, and
yet the two seem to get badly muddled in everyday thinking.
Indeed, as we shall see, confusion often originates precisely

2. These are fighting words to some philosophers, of course. Fine; we happily shift the
burden of proof to them. If they can come up with some unproblematic, counter-examplefree theory of the whole ordinary concept of causation, we will then compare our more
modest, sketchy project to it and see whether we've left out anything important. Meanwhile,
we can get on with our analysis using our partial account of what strikes us as the most
important aspects of the everyday concept.

72

Freedom Evolves

here. Below we will discuss at greater length the relations
between these two conditions.
•

Independence. We expect the two sentences A and C to be logically independent. That is, in possible-world terms, there must
exist worlds, however remote from reality, in which A obtains
but not C, and vice versa. Hence "Mary's singing and dancing
caused her to dance and sing" has a decidedly odd ring. This
condition also helps rule out "1 + 1 = 2 causes 2 + 2 = 4."

•

Temporal priority. A reliable way to distinguish causes from
effects is to note that causes occur earlier. (Maven alert.)

•

Miscellaneous further criteria. Although less critical than the
preceding points, a number of other conditions may increase
our confidence when we make causal judgments. For instance,
in textbook examples of causation, A often describes the
actions of an agent, and C represents a change in the state of a
passive object (as in "Mary causes the house to burn down").
Further, we often expect the two participants to come into
physical contact during their transaction.

In order to understand these conditions better, let's try them
out on a few test cases, some of-which derive from Lewis (2000). First
consider the sharpshooter aiming at a distant victim. Suppose that
scrutiny of the sharpshooter's past record shows that the probability of
a successful hit in this case is 0.1; if you think it makes any difference,
we might imagine that irreducibly random quantum events in the
intervening air, or in the sharpshooter's brain, help determine the outcome. Let us suppose that in the current case the bullet actually hits
and kills the victim. We unhesitatingly agree then that the sharpshooter's actions caused the victim's death, despite their causal insufficiency.
Accordingly, it appears that at least in cases like these, people rank necessity above sufficiency when making judgments about causes.
Still, sufficiency does retain some relevance. Suppose that the
king and the mayor both have an interest in the fate of some young
dissident; as it happens, both issue orders to exile him, so exiled he is.
This is a classic case of overdetermination. Let At stand for "the king issues
an exile order," A 2 stand for "the mayor issues an exile order," and C,
"the dissident goes into exile." In this scenario, neither Ai nor A 2 alone

Causation

73

is necessary for C: For instance, had the king failed to issue any order,
the dissident would still have been exiled thanks to the mayor, and vice
versa. Instead, sufficiency comes to the rescue and permits a choice
between the two. In this instance A 2 fails the test: It is easy to imagine
a universe where the mayor issues his decree, yet the dissident gets off
(just change the king's order into a pardon). T h e king's order, on the
other hand, is truly effective; whatever small changes we make to the
universe (including changes in the mayor's orders), the dissident's exile
follows from the king's command. Accordingly we may dub A t the
"real cause" (if we feel the need to satisfy that yearning).
Finally, consider the tale of Billy and Susie. Both children are
throwing rocks at a glass bottle, and, as it happens, Susie's rock, traveling slightly faster, reaches the bottle first and shatters it. Billy's rock
arrives a moment later at exactly the spot where the bottle used to
stand, but of course encounters nothing but flying shards. W h e n
choosing between Ai ("Susie throws rock S") and A 2 ("Billy throws
rock B"), we vote for Ai as the cause of C ("The bottle shatters"),
despite the fact that neither sentence is necessary (had Susie not thrown
her rock, the bottle would still have shattered thanks to Billy, and vice
versa) and both are sufficient (Billy's throw suffices to produce a broken bottle, whatever his playmate does, and likewise with Susie's).
Why? T h e general notion of temporal priority (introduced above in
connection with distinguishing cause from effect) strikes us as one critical consideration. As with priority disputes in science, art, and sports,
we seem to put a premium on being the first with an innovation, and
since rock S arrived in the vicinity of the bottle earlier than rock B, we
give credit to Susie. Further, it is clear that, although the bottle would
still have shattered without Susie's throw, the shattering event would
have been significantly different, occurring at a later time with a different rock sending fragments off in different directions. (Notice that
this problem arises precisely because we've leaped up to the everyday
ontology of bottles and breakings, and their vexed identity conditions.
What is to count as the "same effect" is the problem here, not any
underlying uncertainty about what has happened.)
We can choose set X to reflect this fact (in keeping with the
Guidelines): Let it contain worlds in which either (1) the bottle doesn't
shatter at all, or (2) it shatters in a way very similar to the way it shatters in reality. Then for every world in X,

Freedom Evolves

74

C = > Ax
obtains; wherever in X the bottle shatters, we find Susie throwing her
rock first. On the other hand,
C=>A2
may well fail in X; X can certainly contain worlds where the bottle
shatters but Billy refrains from throwing. In short, Ai is "more necessary" than A 2 , provided that we choose X right. T h e vagueness of X,
though sometimes irksome, can also break deadlocks.
N o t that deadlocks must always be breakable. We ought to look
with equanimity on the prospect that sometimes circumstances will fail
to pinpoint a single "real cause" of an event, no matter how hard we
seek. A case in point is the classic law school riddle:
Everybody in the French Foreign Legion outpost hates Fred and
wants him dead. During the night before Fred's trek across the
desert, Tom poisons the water in his canteen. Then, Dick, not
knowing of Tom's intervention, pours out the (poisoned) water
and replaces it with sand. Finally Harry comes along and pokes
holes in the canteen, so that the "water" will slowly run out.
Later, Fred awakens and sets out on his trek, provisioned with his
canteen. Too late he finds his canteen is nearly empty, but besides,
what remains is sand, not water, not even poisoned water. Fred
dies of thirst. W h o caused his death?3
Many will feel a temptation to insist that ther^ must be an answer to
this question and others like it. It is certainly true that we can agree to
legislate an answer if we feel we must, and some legislative proposals
will no doubt be more attractive, more intuitive, than others, but it is
not clear that there are any facts—about the way the world is, or about
what we really mean, or even about what we really ought to mean—
that would settle the issue.

3. A doubly elaborated version of the example due originally to McLaughlin (1925), first
elaborated in Hart and Honore (1959). The Hart and Honore version has one less twist:
"Suppose A is entering a desert. B secretly puts a fatal dose of poison in A's water keg. A
takes the keg into the desert where C steals it; both A and C think it contains water. A dies
of thirst. Who kills him?"

Austin's

Putt

75

Austin's Putt
N o w that we have a clearer understanding of possible worlds, we can
expose three major confusions about possibility and causation that have
bedeviled the quest for an account of free will. First is the fear that
determinism reduces our possibilities. We can see why the claim seems
to have merit by considering a famous example proposed many years
ago by John Austin:
Consider the case where I miss a very short putt and kick myself
because I could have holed it. It is not that I should have holed it
if I had tried: I did try, and missed. It is not that I should have
holed it if conditions had been different: that might of course be
so, but I am talking/about conditions as they precisely were, and
asserting that I colild have holed it. There is the rub. Nor does "I
can hole it this time" mean that I shall hole it this time if I try or
if anything else; for I may try and miss, and yet not be convinced
that I could not have done it; indeed, further experiments may
confirm my belief that I could have done it that time, although I
did not. (Austin 1961, p. 166)
Austin didn't hole the putt. Could he have, if determinism is true? T h e
possible-worlds interpretation exposes the misstep in Austin's thinking. First, suppose that determinism holds, and that Austin misses, and
let H be the sentence "Austin holes the putt." We now need to choose
the set X of relevant possible worlds that we need to canvass to see
whether he could have made it. Suppose X is chosen to be the set of
physically possible worlds that are identical to the actual world at some
time t 0 prior to the putt. Since determinism says that there is at any
instant exactly one physically possible future, this set of worlds has just
one member, the actual world, the world in which Austin misses. So,
choosing set X in this way, we get the result that H does not hold for
any world in X. So it was not possible, on this reading, for Austin to
hole the putt.
Of course, this method of choosing X (call it the narrow method)
is only one among many. Suppose we were to admit into X worlds that
differ in a few imperceptibly microscopic ways from actuality at t0; we
might well find that we've now included worlds in which Austin holes
the putt, even when determinism obtains. This is, after all, what recent

76

Freedom Evolves

work on chaos has shown: Many phenomena of interest to us can
change radically if one minutely alters the initial conditions. So the
question is: W h e n people contend that events are possible, are they
really thinking in terms of the narrow method?
Suppose that Austin is an utterly incompetent golfer, and his
partner in today's foursome is inclined to deny that he could have
made the putt. If we let X range too widely, we may include worlds
in which Austin, thanks to years of expensive lessons, winds up a
championship player w h o holes the putt easily. That is not what Austin
is claiming, presumably. Austin seems to endorse the narrow method
of choosing X when he insists that he is "talking about conditions as
they precisely were." Yet in the next sentence he seems to rescind this
endorsement, observing that "further experiments may confirm my
belief that I could have done it that time, although I did not." What
further experiments might indeed confirm Austin's belief that he
could have done it? Experiments on the putting green? Would his
belief be shored up by his setting up and sinking near-duplicates of
that short putt ten times in a row? If this is the sort of experiment he
has in mind, then he is not as interested as he claims he is in conditions as they precisely were. To see this, suppose instead that Austin's
"further experiments" consisted in taking out a box of matches and
lighting ten in a row. "See," he says, "I could have made that very putt."
We would rightly object that his experiments had absolutely no bearing on his claim. Sinking ten short putts would have no more bearing on his claim, understood in the narrow sense as a claim about
"conditions as they precisely were." We suggest that Austin would be
content to consider "Austin holes the putt" possible if, in situations
very similar to the actual occasion in question, he holes the putt. We
think that this is what he meant, and that he would be right to think
about his putt this way. This is the familiar, reasonable, useful way to
conduct "further experiments" whenever we are interested in understanding the causation involved in a phenomenon of interest. We vary
the initial conditions slightly (and often systematically) to see what
changes and what stays the same. This is the way to gather useful information from the world to guide our further campaigns of avoidance
and enhancement.
Curiously, this very point was made, at least obliquely, by
G. E. Moore in the work Austin was criticizing in the passage quoted.

A Computer Chess Marathon

77

Moore's examples were simple: Cats can climb trees and dogs can't, and
a steamship that is now traveling at 25 knots can, of course, also steam
at 20 knots (but not, of course, in precisely the circumstances it is now
in, with the engine set at Full Speed Ahead). T h e sense of "can"
invoked in these uncontroversial claims, the sense called "can (general)"
by Honore (1964) in an important but neglected article, is one that
requires us to look not at "conditions as they precisely were" but at
minor variations on those conditions.
So Austin equivocates when he discusses possibilities. In truth,
the narrow method of choosing X does not have the significance that
he and many others imagine. From this it follows that the truth or falsity of determinism should not affect our belief that certain unrealized
events were nevertheless "possible," in an important everyday sense of the
word. We can bolster this last claim by paying a visit to a narrow
domain in which we know with certainty that determinism reigns: the
realm of chess-playing computer programs.

A Computer Chess Marathon
Computers excellently instantiate the Laplacean, Democritean ideals
of determinism. It is trivial to get a computer to execute a few trillion
steps, and then place it back in exactly the same (digital) state it was in
before, and watch it execute exactly the same few trillion steps again,
and again, and again. T h e subatomic world in which computers live,
and hence the subatomic parts of which they are made, may or may
not be deterministic, but computers themselves are brilliantly designed
to be deterministic in the face of submicroscopic noise and even quantum randomness, absorbing these fluctuations by being digital, not
analog. T h e fundamental idea behind digitizing in order to produce
determinism is that we can create inert historical facts by design.
Forcibly sorting all the pivotal events into two categories—high versus
low; ON versus OFF; 0 versus 1—guarantees that the micro-differences
(between different high voltages, different flavors of being ON, different shades of 0) are ruthlessly discarded. Nothing is allowed to hinge
on them, and they vanish without a trace, facts about actual historical
variations that make no difference at all to the subsequent series of states
through which the computer passes.

78

Freedom Evolves

C O N R A D : Computers are deterministic? You can get
them to replay exactly the same trillion steps over and
over? Gimme a break! Then why does my laptop crash
every so often? W h y does my word processor freeze on
Tuesday when I was doing the very same thing that
worked just fine on Monday?
You weren't doing the very same thing. It froze not because it
is indeterministic, but because it was not in exactly the same state on
Tuesday that it was in on Monday. Your laptop must have done something in the interval that raised a hidden "flag" or called up some part
of the word processor that had never before been activated by you,
which flipped a bit somewhere that got saved in its new position when
you shut down, and now the word processor has stubbed its toe on that
tiny change and crashed. And if you somehow manage to put it back
in exactly the same Tuesday-morning state a second time, it will crash
again.
C O N R A D : What about the "random number generator"?
I thought my computer had a built-in device for creating
randomness on demand.
Every computer these days comes equipped with a built-in random number generator that can be consulted whenever needed by any
program running on it. The sequence of numbers it generates isn't really
random, but just pseudo-random: It is "mathematically compressible"
in the sense that this infinitely long sequence can be captured in a
finitely specified mechanism that will crank it out. Whenever you start
the random number generator from a cold start—whenever you reboot
your computer, for instance—it will always yield exactly the same
sequence of digits, but a sequence that is as apparently patternless as if it
were generated by genuinely random quantum fluctuations. (It is rather
like a very long loop of videotape, recording the history of a fair roulette
wheel over millions of spins. The loop always returns to "the beginning" when you start up your computer.) Sometimes this matters; computer programs that avail themselves of randomness at various "choice"
points will nevertheless spin out exactly the same sequence of states if
run over and over again from a cold start, and if you want to test a program for bugs, you will always test the same "random sample" of states,

A Computer Chess Marathon

79

unless you take steps (easy enough) to jog the program to dip elsewhere,
now and then, into the stream of digits for its next "random" number.
Suppose you install two different chess-playing programs on
your computer, and yoke them together with a little supervisory program that pits them against each other, game after game, in a potentially
endless series. Will they play the same game, over and over, until you
turn off the computer? You could set it up like that, but then you wouldn't
learn anything interesting about the two programs, A and B. Suppose A
beats B in this oft-repeated game. You couldn't infer from this that A is
a better program in general than B, or that A would beat B in a different game, and you wouldn't be able to learn anything from the exact
repetition about the strengths and weaknesses of the two different programs. Much more informative would be setting up the tournament so
that A and B play a-succession of different games. This can be readily
arranged. If either chess program consults the random number generator during its calculations (if, for instance, it periodically "flips a coin"
to escape from cases where it has no handy reason for doing one thing
versus another in the course of its heuristic search), then in the following game the state of the random number generator will have changed
(unless you arrange to have it reinitialized), and hence different alternatives will be explored, in a different order, leading on occasion to different moves being "chosen." A variant game will blossom, and the third
game will be different in different ways, resulting in a series in which the
games, like snowflakes, are no two alike. Nevertheless, if you turned off
the computer and then restarted it running the same program, exactly
the same variegated series of games would spin out.
Suppose, then, we set up such a chess universe involving two
programs, A and B, and study the results of a lengthy run of, say, a thousand games. We will find lots of highly reliable patterns. Suppose we
find that A always beats B, in a thousand different games. That is a pattern that we will want to explain, and saying "Since the program is
deterministic, A was caused always to beat B" would utterly fail to
address our very reasonable curiosity. We will want to know what it is
about the structure, the methods, the dispositions of A that account
for its superiority at chess. A has a competence or power that B lacks,
and we need to isolate this interesting factor. W h e n we set about
exploring the issue, we need to avail ourselves of a high-level perspective at which the "macroscopic" objects of chess decision-making

8o

Freedom Evolves

appear: representations of chess pieces, board positions, evaluations of
possible continuations, decisions about which continuations to pursue
further, and so forth. Or it might be that the explanation lies at a lower
level; it might turn out, for instance, that program A and program B
are identical chess-move evaluators but program A is more efficiently
coded so that it can explore further than program B can in the same
number of machine cycles. In effect, A "thinks the same thoughts"
about chess as B but just thinks faster.
It would actually be more interesting if one program didn't
always win. Suppose A almost always beats B, and suppose A evaluates
moves using a different set of principles. Then we would have something
more interesting to explain. To investigate this causal question, we would
need to study the history of the thousand different games looking for
further patterns. We would be sure to find plenty of them. Some of them
would be endemic to chess wherever it is played (e.g., the near certainty
of B's loss in any game where B falls a rook behind), and some of them
would be peculiar to A and B as particular chess players (e.g., B's penchant for getting its queen out early). We would find the standard patterns of chess strategy, such as the fact that when B's time is running out,
B searches less deeply in the remaining nodes of the game tree than it
does when in the same local position with more time remaining. In
short, we would find a cornucopia of explanatory regularities, some
exceptionless (in our run of a thousand games) and others statistical.
These macroscopic patterns are salient moments in the unfolding of a deterministic pageant that, looked at from the perspective of
micro-causation, is pretty much all the same. What from one vantage
point appear to us to be two chess programs in suspenseful combat can
be seen through the "microscope" (as we watch instructions and data
streaming through the computer's CPU) to be a single deterministic
automaton unfolding in the only way it can, its jumps already predictable
by examining the precise state of the pseudo-random number generator. There are no "real" forks or branches in its future; all the "choices"
made by A and B are already determined. Nothing, it seems, is really
possible in this world other than what actually happens. Suppose, for
instance, that an ominous mating-net looms over B at time t but collapses when A runs out of time and terminates its search for the key move
one pulse too soon. That mating-net was never going to happen. (This is
something we could prove, if we doubted it, by running exactly the same

A Computer Chess Marathon

81

tournament another day. At the same moment in the series, A would
run out of time again and terminate its search at exactly the same point.)
So what are we to say? Is this toy world really a world without
prevention, without offense and defense, without lost opportunities,
without the thrust and parry of genuine agency, without genuine possibilities? Admittedly our chess programs, like insects or fish, are much
too simple agents to be plausible candidates for morally significant free
will, but the determinism of their world does not rob them of their
different powers, their different abilities to avail themselves of the
opportunities presented. If we want to understand what is happening
in that world, we may, indeed must, talk about how their informed
choices cause their circumstances to change, and about what they can
and cannot do. If we want to uncover the causal regularities that account
for the patterns we discover in those thousand games, we have to take
seriously the perspective that describes the world as containing two
agents, A and B, trying to beat each other in chess.
Suppose we rig the tournament program so that whenever A
wins a bell rings and whenever B wins a buzzer sounds. We start the
marathon running, and an observer w h o knows nothing about the program running notes that the bell rings quite frequently, the buzzer
hardly ever. What explains this regularity, she wants to know. T h e regularity with which A beats B can be discerned and described independently of adopting the intentional stance, and it stands in need of
explanation. The only explanation—the right explanation—may be
that A generates better "beliefs" about what B will do if. . . than B
generates about what A will do if. . . . In such a case, adopting the
intentional stance is required for finding the explanation.
Suppose we find two games in the series in which the first
twelve moves are the same, but with A playing White in the first game
and Black in the second. At move 13 in the first game, B "blunders,"
and it's all downhill from there. At move 13 in the second game, A, in
contrast, finds the saving move, castling, and goes on to win. "B could
have castled at that point in the first game," says an onlooker, echoing
Austin. True or false? T h e move, castling, was just as legal the first time,
so in that sense, it was among the "options" available to B. Suppose we
find, moreover, that castling was not only one of the represented candidate moves for B, but that B, in fact, undertook a perfunctory exploration of the consequences of castling, abandoned, alas, before its

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Freedom Evolves

virtues were revealed. So could B have castled? What are we trying to
find out? Looking at precisely the same case, again and again, is utterly
uninformative, but looking at similar cases is, in fact, diagnostic. If we
find that in many similar circumstances in other games, B does pursue
the evaluation slightly further, discovering the virtues of such moves
and making them—if we find, in the minimal case, that flipping a single bit in the random number generator would result in B's castling—
then we support ("with further experiments") the observer's
conviction that B could have castled then. We would say, in fact, that
B's failure to castle was a fluke, bad luck with the random number generator. If, on the contrary, we find that discovering the reasons for
castling requires far too much analysis for B to execute in the time available (although A, being a stronger player, is up to the task), then we
will have grounds for concluding that no, B, unlike A, could not have
castled. Castling, we may discover, was one of those moves that gets
followed by "(!)" in the chess column in the newspaper, a "deep" move
that was out of B's league. To imagine B castling would require too
many alterations of reality; we would be committing the error m e n tioned earlier of making set X too large.
In sum, using the narrow method to choose X is useless if we
want to explain the patterns that are manifest in the unfolding data. It
is only if we "wiggle the events" (as David Lewis has said), looking not
at "conditions as they precisely were" but at nearby neighboring worlds,
that we achieve any understanding at all. Once we expand X a little, we
discover that B has additional options, in a sense both informative and
morally relevant (when we address worlds beyond the chessboard).
Many philosophers have assumed without specific argument that when
we ask a question about what was possible, we are—and should b e —
interested in knowing whether, in exactly the same circumstances, the
same event would recur. We have argued that in spite of its traditional
endorsement by philosophers, this policy is never followed by serious
investigators of possibility and is, in any event, unmotivated: It couldn't
give you an answer that could satisfy your curiosity. T h e burden now
rests with those w h o think otherwise to explain why "real" possibility
demands a narrow choice of X — o r why we should be interested in such
a concept of possibility, regardless of its "reality."
So deterministic worlds can quite comfortably support possibilities of the broader, more interesting variety. Indeed, introducing mde-

Events without

Causes

in a Deterministic

Universe

83

terminism adds nothing in the way of worthwhile possibilities, opportunities, or competences to a universe. If in our deterministic chess
tournament, program A always beats program B, then replacing the
pseudo-random number generator with a genuinely indeterministic
device will not help B at all. A will still win every time. A superior algorithm like A's will hardly stumble when faced with so inconsequential,
indeed practically invisible, a change. Though pseudo-random generators may not produce genuinely random output, they come so close
that for almost any purpose it makes no difference. There is one
context in which it does make a practical difference: cryptography.
The particular flavors of patternlessness of particular pseudo-random
number-generating algorithms can eventually be sniffed out by supercomputers, putting a premium on using genuinely random numbers in
these specialized contexts. 4 But aside from a context in which you have
to worry about an opponent having access to your particular brand of
pseudo-random number generator and using it to "read your mind,"
you have nothing to gain from going genuinely indeterministic. To put
it graphically, the universe could be deterministic on even days of the
month and indeterministic on odd days, and we'd never notice a difference in human opportunities or powers; there would be just as many
triumphs—and just as many lamentable lapses—on October 4 as on
October 3 or October 5. (If your horoscope advised you to postpone
any morally serious decision to an odd-numbered day, you would have
no more reason to follow this advice than if it told you to wait for a
waning moon.)

Events w i t h o u t Causes in a D e t e r m i n i s t i c U n i v e r s e
The vast causal independence of contemporary occasions is the preservative of the
elbow-room within the Universe.

—Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas
Determinism is a doctrine about sufficiency: If S0 is a (mind-bogglingly
complex) sentence that specifies in complete detail the state descrip4. If you need them, you can get sequences of truly random digits on the Web from several
sources, such as www.random.org and www.fourrnilab.ch/hotbits.

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Freedom Evolves

tion of the universe at t0, and S t similarly specifies the state description
of the universe at a later time t u then determinism dictates that S 0 is
sufficient for S t in all physically possible worlds. But determinism tells
us nothing about what earlier conditions are necessary to produce S t or
any other sentence for that matter. Hence, since causation generally
presupposes necessity, the truth of determinism would have little, if any,
bearing on the validity of our causal judgments.
For example: According to determinism, the precise condition
of the universe one second after the Big Bang (call the corresponding
sentence S0) causally sufficed to produce the assassination of John F.
Kennedy in 1963 (sentence C). Yet there is no reason at all to claim
that S 0 caused C. Though sufficient, we have no reason to believe that
S 0 is necessary. For all we know, Kennedy might well have been assassinated anyway, even if some different conditions had obtained back
during the universe's birth. H o w could we ever tell? We can imagine
the investigation, even if we can't conduct it: Imagine that we take a
snapshot of the universe at the moment of Kennedy's assassination,
then alter the picture in some trivial way (by moving Kennedy 1 mm
to the left, say). Sentence C, "John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963
(in Dealey Plaza, while riding in a motorcade . . .)," is still true, but
with a microscopic difference in the atomic conditions that make it
true. Then, starting from our subtly revised state description of 1963,
and following the (deterministic) laws of physics in reverse, we generate a movie running all the way back to the Big Bang, obtaining a
world in which S 0 subtly fails. There are highly similar possible worlds
in which Kennedy is killed but S 0 is not the case, so the state of the
universe described by S 0 is not the cause of Kennedy's assassination.
More plausible causes of that event would include: "A bullet followed
a course directed at Kennedy's body"; "Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the
trigger on his gun." Conspicuously absent from this list are microscopically detailed descriptions of the universe billions of years prior
to the incident. Philosophers w h o assert that under determinism S 0
"causes" or "explains" C miss the main point of causal inquiry, and
this is the second major error.
In fact, determinism is perfectly compatible with the notion that some
events have no cause at all. Consider the sentence " T h e devaluation of
the rupiah caused the D o w Jones average to fall." We rightly treat such
a declaration with suspicion; are we really so sure that among nearby

Events without Causes in a Deterministic Universe

85

universes the D o w Jones fell only in those where the rupiah fell first?
Do we even imagine that every universe where the rupiah fell experienced a stock market sell-off? Might there not have been a confluence
of dozens of factors that jointly sufficed to send the market tumbling
but none of which by itself was essential? On some days, perhaps, Wall
Street's behavior has a ready explanation; yet at least as often we suspect that no particular cause is at work.
A coin flip with a fair coin is a familiar example of an event
yielding a result (heads, say) that properly has no cause. It has no cause
because no matter how we choose the set X (ignoring Austin's mistaken advice that we consider circumstances as they precisely were), we
will find no feature C that is necessary for heads or necessary for tails.
Have you ever wondered about the apparent contradiction involved in
using a coin flip as a~generator of a random event? Surely the result of
a coin flip is the deterministic outcome of the total sum of forces acting
on the coin: the speed and direction of the release that imparts the spin,
the density and humidity of the air, the effect of gravity, the distance
to the ground, the temperature, the rotation of the earth, the distance
to Mars and Venus at that time, and so forth. Yes, but this total sum has
no predictive patterns in it. That is the point of a randomizing device
like a coin flip, to make the result uncontrollable by making it sensitive to so many variables that no feasible, finite list of conditions can
be singled out as the cause. That is why we require the coin to be
flipped high, with a vigorous spin, and not just dropped from the fingers an inch above the table: We set in motion a sequence that practically guarantees that nothing will be the cause of its landing heads or
tails. Notice how the strategy of flipping a coin exploits digitizing to
guarantee that its outcome is causeless (if done fairly). It accomplishes
just the opposite of digitizing in computers: Instead of absorbing all the
micro-variation in the universe, it amplifies it, guaranteeing that the
unimaginably large sum of forces acting at the moment will tip the digitizer into one of two states, heads or tails, but with no salient necessary conditions for either state.
The practice of "wiggling events" in controlled experiments
is one of the great innovations of modern science, and as Judea Pearl
points out, it depends on using something like coin flips to break the
causal links that otherwise might exist between the events we wish to
analyze:

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Freedom Evolves

Assume we wish to study the effect of some drug treatment on
recovery of patients suffering from a given disorder. . . . Under
uncontrolled conditions, the choice of treatment is up to the
patients and may depend on the patients' socioeconomic backgrounds. This creates a problem, because we can't tell if changes
in recovery rates are due to treatment or to those background factors. What we wish to do is compare patients of like backgrounds,
and that is precisely what [Sir Ronald] Fisher's randomized experiment accomplishes. How? It actually consists of two parts, randomization and intervention.
Intervention means that we change the natural behavior of
the individual: we separate subjects into two groups, called treatment and control, and we convince the subjects to obey the
experimental policy. We assign treatment to some patients who,
under normal circumstances, will not seek treatment, and we give
placebo to patients who otherwise would receive treatment. That,
in our new vocabulary, means surgery—we are severing one functional link and replacing it with another. Fisher's great insight was
that connecting the new link to a random coin flip guarantees that
the link we wish to break is actually broken. The reason is that a
random coin is assumed to be unaffected by anything we can
measure on a macroscopic level—including, of course, a patient's
socioeconomic background. (Pearl 2000, p. 348)
O u r practice in such cases belies a background assumption that
seems to be widely adopted (but seldom, if ever, examined): the assumption that the only way for an event not to have a cause is for it to be
strictly undetermined, to have no sufficient condition, no matter how diffuse and complex and uninteresting. This can lead to serious distortion
of one's scientific agenda: What was the cause of World War I? Surely if
we are going to be good scientific explainers, we need to find the cause!
Declaring that World War I had no cause would be tantamount, would
it not, to declaring it either a violation of the laws of nature—some
miracle!—or (quantum physics to the rescue) the result of indeterministic quantum processes? No, it would not. It could be that no matter how
historians "wiggle the events" looking for necessary antecedents for
World War I in nearby possible worlds, they find that those universes in
which World War I occurs do not share any common, necessary

Events without Causes in a Deterministic Universe

87

antecedent. Suppose, for instance, that in universe A, Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated and World War I subsequently breaks out. Is the former then the cause of the latter (as some of us "learned" in school)?
Maybe not; perhaps in universe B, Archduke Ferdinand survives, but
World War I happens anyway. And similarly, for any "cause" that historian X proposes, historian Y may be able to dream up a world in which
World War I occurs "without the candidate cause occurring first. The "war
could have been a fluke, and then persisting in arguments about "the
cause" would be not just futile, but almost guaranteed to generate artifactual myths about covert causation worth pursuing further. The search
for such necessary conditions is always rational, so long as we remind ourselves that there may be nothing to find in any particular case.5
O n e might wqrtider, then, why it is that causal necessity matters to us as much asit does. Let us return for a m o m e n t to chess programs A and B. Suppose our attention is drawn to a rare game in which
B wins, and we want to know "the cause" of this striking victory. T h e
trivial claim that B's win was "caused" by the initial state of the computer would be totally uninformative. Of course, the total state of the
toy universe at prior moments was sufficient for the occurrence of the
win; we want to know "which features "were necessary, and thereby
understand what such rare events have in common. We want to discover those features, the absence of which "would most directly be followed by B's loss, the default outcome. Perhaps we will find a
heretofore unsuspected flaw in A's control structure, a bug that has only
just now surfaced. Or we might find an idiosyncratic island of brilliance
in B's competence, which once diagnosed would enable us to say just
what circumstances in the future might permit another such victory
for B. Or perhaps the victory is a huge coincidence of conditions that
should provoke no repair, since the probability of their recurrence is
effectively zero. This last possibility, that in the relevant sense there simply was no cause of B's victory—it was a fluke—is easy enough to
understand in such a simplified context, but hard to countenance, it
seems, in real-world cases.

5. The bias in favor of not just looking for but finding a cause is not idle, as Matt Ridley notes
in his discussion of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, for which no cause has yet been found: "This
offends our natural determinism, in which diseases must have causes. Perhaps CJD just happens
spontaneously at the rate of about one case per million per year" (Matt Ridley 1999, p. 285).

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F r e e d o m Evolves

Rationality requires that we evaluate necessary conditions at
least as carefully as sufficient conditions. Consider a man falling down
an elevator shaft. Although he doesn't know exactly which possible
world he in fact occupies, he does know one thing: He is in a set of
worlds all of which have him landing shortly at the bottom of the shaft.
Gravity will see to that. Landing is, then, inevitable because it happens
in every world consistent with what he knows. But perhaps dying is not
inevitable. Perhaps in some of the worlds in which he lands, he survives. Those worlds do not include any in which he lands headfirst or
spread-eagled, say, but there may be worlds in which he lands in a toesfirst crouch and lives. There is some elbow room. He can rationally
plan action on the assumption that living is possible, and even if he cannot discover sufficient conditions to guarantee survival, he may at least
improve the odds by taking whatever actions are necessary, and thereby,
with some luck, find himself in one of the Vastly many possible worlds
in which he lives.
C O N R A D : Once again, what sense can this talk of
improving his odds make? We're presupposing determinism
here. He can't change worlds. He's in the world he is in, the
actual world, and in that world he either lives or dies, and
that's the end of it!
But that is true independently of determinism, and is irrelevant to the issue of the rationality of his action, pretend we temporarily suspend this man in his plummet and allow/him to peruse the Vast
corner of the Library of Babel that contains biographies of somebody
of his name, with his features and characteristics and history to date—the tale of a man w h o accidentally falls down an elevator shaft and finds
himself confronting an unimaginably huge collection of books, each
purporting to be his true life history. In some of these he lives and in
some of these he dies (and, this being the Library of Babel, in some of
these he turns into a golden teacup and is thrown at Cleopatra by a
giant snail). T h e trouble is that although he can rule out the fantastic
books on the basis of his general knowledge of how the world works,
he could have no way of telling which particular book among those
that have him living or dying after his fall is the truth. And assuming
that determinism is true, or false, will not help him find the needle in

Will the Future Be Like the Past?

89

this haystack. His best strategy, faced with his ineliminable uncertainty
about which book tells the truth, is to look for general patterns of predictive saliency—causes and effects—and be guided by the anticipations these commend to him. But how is he to do that? N o t a problem:
He is already designed to be caused to do that, by eons of evolution.
If he didn't have these talents, he wouldn't be here. He is the product
of a design process that has created species of anticipator-avoiders to
w h o m this trick is second nature. They are not perfect, but they do
much better than chance. Compare, for instance, the prospects of
beings w h o are confronted by the opportunity to win a million dollars by calling a coin toss or by rolling two dice and getting snake eyes.
Some of them reason fatalistically: "It makes no difference which
method I choose; the c/dds of my throwing snake eyes are either 0 or
1. I don't know which fate is already determined, and the same is true
for my calling the coin." Others act on the conviction that the l-in-2
chance of calling the coin is much better than the l-in-36 chance of
rolling snake eyes, and opt for the coin toss. N o t surprisingly, people
so designed have outperformed the fatalists, w h o can be seen from the
perspective of history to have a design flaw.

W i l l the Future Be Like the Past?
And now, at last, we are ready to confront the third major error in
thinking about determinism. Some thinkers have suggested that the
truth of determinism might imply one or more of the following disheartening claims: All trends are permanent, character is by and large
immutable, and it is unlikely that one will change one's ways, one's fortunes, or one's basic nature in the future. Ted Honderich, for example, has maintained that determinism would somehow squelch what
he calls our life-hopes:
If things have gone well for a person, there is more to hope for
in what follows on the assumption that the entire run of his or
her life is fixed. . . . If things have not gone well, or not so well
as was hoped, it is at least not unreasonable to have greater hopes
on the assumption that the whole of one's life is not fixed, but is
connected with the activity of the self. . . . Given the sanguine

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Freedom Evolves

premise of our reasonableness, there is reason to think that we do
not tend to the idea of a fixed personal future. (Honderich 1988,
pp. 388-89)
Clearly such anxieties originate in a vague sense that true possibilities
(for an improved lot, say) disappear under determinism. But this is a
mistake. T h e distinction between being a thing "with an open future
and being a thing "with a closed future is strictly independent of determinism. In general, there is no paradox in the observation that certain
phenomena are determined to be changeable, chaotic, and unpredictable,
an obvious and important fact that philosophers have curiously
ignored. Honderich finds disturbing the notion that we might have a
"fixed personal future," but the implications of this notion are entirely
distinct from the implications of having a "fixed personal nature." It
could very well be one's "fixed"—that is, determined—personals/tare
to be blessed with a protean nature, highly responsive to the "activity
of the self." T h e total set of personal futures, "fixed" or not, contains
all sorts of agreeable scenarios, including victories over adversity, subjugations of weakness, reformations of character, even changes of luck.
It could be just as determined a fact that you can teach an old dog new
tricks as that you can't. T h e question to ask is: Are old dogs the kinds
of things that can be taught new tricks? If they aren't, we don't want
to be like old dogs. We rightly care about being the sorts of entities
whose future trajectories are not certain to repeat the patterns found
in the past, and the general thesis of determinism has no implications
at all about such issues.
Consider the simple deterministic Life worlds. At one level
nothing ever changes; pixels do the same thing over and over forever,
following the simple rule of physics. At another level, we see different
kinds of worlds. Some worlds are just as changeless from a bird's-eye
view as they are at the atomic level, a field of still lifes and flashers, say,
flashing for eternity. No drama, no suspense. Other worlds "evolve"
continuously, never returning to the same state twice, in either a patterned way, growing predictably, creating a steady stream of identical,
equally spaced gliders, for instance, or in an apparently patternless way,
with myriad growing, shifting, colliding swarms of pixels. In these
worlds is the future like the past? Yes and no. The physics is eternally
changeless, so the micro-events are always the same. But at a higher

Will the Future Be Like the Past?

9i

level, the future may be variegated: It may contain some patterns that
are like the patterns of its past, and it may contain others that are
entirely novel. In some deterministic worlds, that is, there are things
whose natures change over time, so determinism does not imply a fixed
nature. A small, but heartening, fact. There are more to come.
Some Life worlds contain competitions, and even though
Laplace's demon knows exactly how each competition will end, there
may be genuine drama and suspense for lesser intelligences, w h o cannot know, from their limited perspective, how the contest will end.
Consider, for instance, those Life worlds in which there is a Universal
Turing Machine running our program in which A is playing B in
chess. Chess is a game of "perfect information"; in this regard it is
unlike card games, in which you keep your cards concealed from your
opponent (and in which no opponent knows what card will come up
next in the deck). So both A and B have common and total information about the state of the chess game in progress and the possibilities
that lie ahead. They nevertheless come to have differing inventories
of hard-won expectations about the probable future moves of their
opponents—and themselves. T h e contest is to use the shared information to generate proprietary information on which to base one's choice
of move, and the explanation of why A beats B (if it does, when it does)
must be in terms of its superior capacity to generate, and use, information about the uncertain, open future (from its perspective). Every
finite information-user has an epistemic horizon; it knows less than
everything about the world it inhabits, and this unavoidable ignorance
guarantees that it has a subjectively open future. Suspense is a necessary
condition of life for any such agent. 6
But set aside subjective suspense, and change of nature. W h a t
about improvement? Can there be not just improvement, but selfgenerated improvement in a deterministic world? Can an agent in a
deterministic world realistically hope to improve its lot? Once again,
the answer to this question has nothing to do with determinism and
6. Laplace's demon instantiates an interesting problem first pointed out by Turing, and
discussed by Ryle (1949), Popper (1951), and MacKay (1960). No information-processing
system can have a complete description of itself—it's Tristram Shandy's problem of how to
represent the representing of the representing of. . . the last little bits. So even Laplace's
demon has an epistemic horizon and, as a result, cannot predict its own actions the way it
can predict the next state of the universe (which it must be outside).

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Freedom Evolves

everything to do with design. Programmers have already demonstrated
how deterministic computer algorithms can adapt themselves to
changes in the environment and learn from their mistakes. We have
postponed invoking a talent for learning in chess programs A and B,
not wanting to distract attention from the other issues under discussion, but consider what happens when we incorporate a capacity to
learn from experience in one of the contestants. If initially mediocre
B possesses the capacity to learn and A does not, then we may ultimately find B emerging victorious. O n e of the products of B's history
of competitions against A, the fruits of its very own labors, you might
say, could be B's evolving a structure that gave it an improved competence, and hence an improved lot in life. B changes from a perennial
loser into a regular winner. Suppose B has this sort of learning structure in a deterministic world; its enviable capacity will not improve at
all with the introduction of a genuinely indeterministic randomnumber generator. N o r will adding indeterminism to the universe help
open up B's future if it lacks this ability to learn.
The conditions under which such self-improvement occurs
(non-miraculously) are precisely the conditions under which something—either a hacker God, or evolution, or B's instructor, or B
itself—discerns the causes responsible for victory and installs designs
that enhance the likelihood of the presence of those causes at the right
times in the future. There is, then, a familiar reason to design a program to learn from experience: In the future it may encounter a similar situation, and what happens then can be influenced by what it
learns now: This is because what happens then will depend on what it
decides then; whether or not to castle, for instance, will be up to it in
one important sense. Whether the rules of chess remain constant will
not be up to it, nor will its opponent's moves be up to it; its own moves,
however, will be up to it in the sense that matters: They will be the
outcome of its exploratory and deliberative processes.
Similarly contrast a fish confronting a baited hook with a fish
confronting a swiftly approaching net; -whether the first fish takes the
bait is up to the fish, but whether the second fish enters the net is probably not. Do fish have free will, then? N o t in a morally important sense,
but they do have control systems that make life-or-death "decisions,"
which is at least a necessary condition for free will. In Chapter 4 we
will consider whether there is another, more "weighty sense of "up t o "

Will the Future Be Like the Past?

93

that applies to us (if we are moral agents) but not to deterministic chessplaying computers—or fish.
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. The
m o o n is made of the same sort of stuff that we are, obeying the same
laws of physics, but its nature, unlike ours, is fixed. Moreover, unlike
us, its nature is nothing to it. It is not equipped to care for itself in the
slightest. T h e difference between us and the m o o n is not a difference
of physics; it is a higher-level difference of design. We are the product
of a massive, competitive design process; the m o o n is not. This design
process, natural selection, famously involves "random" mutation as
its ultimate Generator Of Diversity. We have seen that computer
programs—and controlled experiments more generally—make use
of such generators of diversity to much the same effect: to drive
exploratory processes into new patterns, and out of old patterns. But
we have also seen that this welcome source of diversity need not be
truly random in the sense of indeterministic.
To say that if determinism is true, your future is fixed, is to
say . . . nothing interesting. To say that if determinism is true, your
nature is fixed, is to say something false. O u r natures aren't fixed because
we have evolved to be entities designed to change their natures in
response to interactions with the rest of the world. It is confusion
between having a fixed nature and having a fixed future that mismotivates the anguish over determinism. The confusion arises when
one tries to maintain two perspectives on the universe at once: the
"God's eye" perspective that sees past and future all laid out before it,
and the engaged perspective of an agent within the universe. From the
timeless God's-eye perspective nothing ever changes—the whole history of the universe is laid out "at once"—and even an indeterministic universe is just a static branching tree of trajectories. From the
engaged agent's perspective, things change over time, and agents
change to meet those changes. But of course not all change is possible
for us. There are things we can change and things we can't change, and
some of the latter are deplorable. There are many things wrong with
our world, but determinism isn't one of them, even if our world is
determined.

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Freedom Evolves

So having set aside the fear of physical determinism, we can
direct our attention to the biological level at which we might actually
explain how it can be that we are free, when other entities in our
world, made of the same kind of stuff, are not free at all. And as usual,
when the topic is biology, we will find that there are all manner of
different kinds and grades of freedom. T h e freedom, such as it is, of
a chess-playing computer living on the Life plane is a toy, a mere cartoon sketch of the kind of freedom we're interested in. But we are
interested in this kind of freedom, and it helps to begin with the simplest imaginable model of it, and to confirm that it is compatible with
determinism.

C O N R A D : OK, you have shown that Austin was wrong.
But it turns out that he wasn't interested in real possibility
at all; he was interested in his putting game! And you are
right that the way to check up on that is by hitting a few
putts and seeing how many go in. As you show, there is a
sense of competence, of can do, that applies equally well to
human agents and such contraptions as chess-playing
computers (and can openers, for that matter). But all this
shows is that answering that kind of question is not even
addressing the question that interests me: Could Austin
have made that very putt? And the answer to that question
must be "no" in a deterministic world.

Very well, if you insist. Maybe there is a sense of "possible" in
which Austin could not possibly have made that very putt, if determinism is true. N o w why on earth should we care about your question? Aside from idle metaphysical curiosity, what interest should we
take in whether or not Austin could have made the putt in your sense?
T h e incompatibilists do have an answer to this question, and
before we can comfortably turn back to evolution, we should give
them a chance to present it. T h e next chapter is devoted to looking at
their best answer to date. Those w h o are already persuaded that determinism is just not the issue may pass over Chapter 4, but they will miss
some incidental discoveries about the nature of our freedom that are
quite independent of the quest for indeterminism that uncovered
them.

Notes on Sources and Further Reading

95

Chapter 3
Our everyday thinking about possibility, necessity, and causation seems to conflict with determinism, but this is an illusion. Determinism doesn't imply that
whatever we do, we could not have done otherwise, that every event has a cause,
or that our natures are fixed.

Chapter 4
A sympathetic look at an ambitious indeterministic model of decision-making
exposes the motivations as well as the problems that beset any theorist that follows that path. What libertarians plausibly claim to need can be provided without indeterminism, and (ndeterminism cannot make any difference that could
make a moral difference.

N o t e s o n Sources and Further R e a d i n g
Judea Pearl's Causality:Models, Reasoning, and Inference (2000), which I discovered while preparing the final draft of this book, raises questions about
the Taylor/Dennett way of putting things in terms of possible worlds,
while opening up tempting alternative accounts. It will be no small labor
to digest these and, if need be, reformulate our conclusions, which we
do not think are direcdy challenged. This is work for the future.
For more on possibility, see Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Dennett
1995), Chapter 5, " T h e Possible and the Actual" and, especially, "Possibility Naturalized" (pp. 118—23). See also the thought experiment
("Two Black Boxes," pp. 412—22), in which it can be seen that scientists could have total knowledge of the micro-causal processes occurring
(deterministically) in this phenomenon and yet be completely baffled
about the macro-causal regularity they observe and wish to explain.
For more on pseudo-random numbers and their uses in control
and free will, see Elbow Room (Dennett 1984), pp. 66-67 and elsewhere.
Published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1766, Laurence
Sterne's comic novel Tristram Shandy purports to be an autobiography,
but winds itself into recursive loops of reflection and reaction and
meta-reaction, a task unfinished and unfinishable.

y

91

Chapter 4

A HEARING FOR
LIBERTARIANISM

The traditional problejh of free will is introduced by the proposition
that if determinism islrue, then we don't have free will. This proposition
expresses incompatibilism, and it certainly seems plausible at the outset.
Many who have thought long and hard about it still think it's true, so
before returning to my project, which denies it outright, let's take it
for a test drive to see what its appeal is, and what its strengths are, as
well as its -weaknesses.

T h e A p p e a l o f Libertarianism
If we accept the proposition as it stands, two paths open up, depending on which half of the proposition we cling to:
Hard determinism: Determinism is true, so we don't have free will.
Hard-headed scientific types sometimes proclaim their acceptance
of this position, even declaring it a no-brainer. Many of them
would add: And if determinism is false, we still don't have free
will—we don't have free will in any case; it's an incoherent concept. But they typically excuse themselves from exploring the
question of how they then justify the often strongly held moral
convictions that continue to guide their lives. Where does this
leave us? What sense are we to make of human striving, praising,
blaming? In Chapter 1 we encountered the spiral into the abyss
that beckons at this juncture. Are there any stable alternatives to
this threatened moral nihilism? (The hard determinists among you
may find in subsequent chapters that your considered view is that

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Freedom Evolves

whereas free will—as you understand the term—truly doesn't
exist, something rather like free will does exist, and it's just what
the doctor ordered for shoring up your moral convictions, permitting you to make the distinctions you need to make. Such a
soft landing for a hard determinist is perhaps only terminologically different from compatibilism, the view that free will and
determinism are compatible after all, the view that I am defending in this book.)
Libertarianism: We do have free will, so determinism must be false;
/^determinism is true. Since, thanks to quantum physicists, the
received view among scientists today is that indeterminism is true
(at the subatomic level and, by implication, at higher levels under
various specifiable conditions), this can look like a happy resolution of the problem, but there is a snag: How can the indeterminism of quantum physics be harnessed to give us a clear, coherent
picture of a human agent exercising this wonderful free will?
This meaning of libertarianism, by the way, has nothing to do with the
political sense of the term. There are probably more left-leaning than
right-leaning philosophers w h o defend this kind of libertarianism, but
only because there are probably more left-leaning philosophers in general. It might be true that political right-wingers w h o have thought
about it tend to favor free will libertarianism, and religious conservatives are drawn to it, if only by being repelled by all the alternatives,
but free will libertarians are not committed to any particular view
about the powers of the state vis-a-vis the citizens. They agree that free
will depends on indeterminism but they divide rather sharply on the
snag just mentioned: How, exactly, could subatomic indeterminism
yield free will? O n e group simply declares that this is somebody else's
problem, a j o b for neuroscientists, perhaps, or physicists. All they are
concerned with are what we might call the top-down constraints of
moral responsibility: For a human agent to be properly held responsible for something done, it must be the case one way or another that
the agent's choice of this action was not determined by the total set of
physical conditions that obtained prior to the choice. "We philosophers
are in charge of setting the specs for a free agent; we leave the problem
of implementation of those specs to the neuro-engineers." Another,
smaller group has appreciated that this division of labor is not always a

The Appeal of Libertarianism

99

good idea; the very coherence of the libertarian specs is called into
question by the difficulties one encounters in trying to implement
them. Moreover, it turns out that the attempt to devise a positive
account of indeterministic human choice pays dividends that are independent of the assumption of indeterminism.
T h e best attempt so far is by R o b e r t Kane, in his 1996 book,
The Significance of Free Will.1 Only a libertarian account, Kane claims,
can provide the feature -we—some of us, at least—yearn for, -which he
calls Ultimate Responsibility. Libertarianism begins with a familiar
claim: If determinism is true, then every decision I make, like every
breath I take, is an effect, ultimately, of chains of causes leading back
into times before I was born. In the previous chapter I argued that
determination is not trie same as causation, that knowing that a system
is deterministic tells you nothing about the interesting causation—or
lack of causation—among the events that transpire within it; but that's
a controversial conclusion, flying in the face of a long tradition. Some
may view it as, at best, an eccentric recommendation about how to use
the word "cause," so let's set it aside temporarily and see what happens if instead we stick with tradition and treat determinism as the
thesis that each state of affairs causes the succeeding state. As many have
claimed, then, if my decisions are caused by chains of events leading
back before my birth, I can be causally responsible for the results of my
deeds in the same way a tree limb falling in a windstorm can be causally
responsible for the death of the person it falls on, but it is not the limb's
fault that it "was only as strong as it -was, or that the wind ble-w so
fiercely, or that the tree grew so close to the footpath. To be morally
responsible, I have to be the ultimate source of my decision, and that
can be true only if no earlier influences were sufficient to secure the outcome, which was "truly up to m e . " Harry Truman had a famous sign
on his desk in the Oval Office of the White House: " T h e Buck Stops
Here." A human mind has to be a place where the buck stops, Kane
says, and only libertarianism can provide this kind of free will, the kind
that can give us Ultimate Responsibility. A mind is an arena of "willings (choices, decisions, or efforts)" and:

1. Followed up with a response to his critics in "Responsibility, Luck, and Chance:
Reflections on Free Will and Indeterminism" (1999).

IOO

Freedom Evolves

If these willings were in turn caused by something else, so that
the explanatory chains could be traced back further to heredity
or environment, to God, or fate, then the ultimacy would not lie
with the agents but with something else. (Kane 1996, p. 4)
Libertarians have to find a way of breaking these ominous causal chains
in the agent at the time of decision, and as Kane acknowledges, the
inventory of libertarian models so far devised is a zoo of hopeless m o n sters. "Libertarians have invoked transempirical power centers, n o n material egos, noumenal selves, non-occurrent causes, and a litany of
other special agencies whose operations were not clearly explained" (p.
11). He sets out to correct that deficiency
Before turning to his attempt, however, we should note that
some libertarians don't see this as a deficiency. Unrepentant dualists and
others actually embrace the idea that it would take a miracle of sorts
for there to be free will. They are sure in their bones that free will, real
free will, is strictly impossible in a materialist, mechanist, "reductionist" world—and so much the worse for that materialist vision! C o n sider, for instance, the doctrine known as "agent causation." Roderick
Chisholm, the chief architect of the contemporary version of this
ancient idea, defines it thus:
If we are responsible . . . then we have a prerogative which some
would attribute only to God: each of us, when we act, is a prime
mover unmoved. In doing what we do, we cause certain events
to happen, and nothing—or no one—caused us to cause those
events to happen. (Chisholm 1964, p. 32)
H o w do " w e " cause these events to happen? H o w does an agent cause
an effect without there being an event (in the agent, presumably) that
is the cause of that effect (and is itself the effect of an earlier cause, and
so forth)? Agent causation is a frankly mysterious doctrine, positing
something unparalleled by anything we discover in the causal processes
of chemical reactions, nuclear fission and fusion, magnetic attraction,
hurricanes, volcanos, or such biological processes as metabolism,
growth, immune reactions, and photosynthesis. Is there such a thing?
W h e n libertarians insist that there must be, they play into the hands of
those at the other pole, the hard determinists, w h o are content to let
the libertarians' uncompromising definition of free will set the terms

The Appeal of Libertarianism

101

of the debate, so that they can declare, with science as their ally, so
much the worse for free will. I find that those w h o take it as just obvious that free will is an illusion tend to take their definition of free will
from radical agent-causation types.
This polarization is probably inevitable. W h e n the stakes are
high, one should be cautious, but excess caution leads to hardened
positions and paranoia about "erosion." If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, as they say. Beware the thin edge of
the wedge, the slippery slope. If you give them an inch, they'll take a
mile. Caution can also lead to a sort of unwitting self-caricature, however. In their zeal to protect something precious, people sometimes
decide to dig the moat too far out, thinking that it is safer to defend
too much than risk defending too little. T h e result is that they end up
trying to defend the"indefensible, clinging to an extreme position that
is actually vulnerable only because of its exaggeration. Absolutism is
an occupational hazard in philosophy in any case, since radical, hardedged positions are easier to define clearly, are more memorable, and
tend to attract more attention. N o b o d y ever became a famous philosopher by being a champion of ecumenical hybridism. On the topic of
free will this tendency is amplified and sustained by tradition itself: As
philosophers for two millennia have said, either we have free will or
we don't; it's all, or nothing at all. And so the various compromise proposals, the suggestions that determinism is compatible with at least some
kinds of free will, are resisted as bad bargains, dangerous subversions of
our moral foundations.
Libertarians have long insisted that the compatibilist sorts of free
will I am describing and defending are not the real thing at all, and not
even an acceptable substitute for the real thing, but rather a "wretched
subterfuge," in the oft-quoted phrase of Immanuel Kant. Two can play
this disparagement game. Watch. According to us compatibilists, libertarians seem to think that you can have free will only if you can engage
in what we might call moral levitation. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be
able to levitate—and then to dash off in any direction with the merest
flick of a whim? I'd love to be able to do that, but I can't. It's impossible. There are no such miraculous things as levitators, but there are
some pretty good near-levitators: Hummingbirds, helicopters, blimps,
and hang gliders come to mind. Near-levitation isn't good enough,
though, for libertarians, w h o say, in effect:

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Freedom Evolves

If your feet are on the ground, the decision isn't really yours—
it's really planet Earth's decision. The decision isn't made by you
but is rather a mere summation of causal trains intersecting in your
body, a mobile bump on the surface of the planet, buffeted by
influences, answerable to gravity. Real autonomy, real freedom,
requires that the chooser be somehow suspended, isolated from
the push and pull of all those causes, so that when decisions are
made nothing causes them except you!
Those are the caricatures. They have their uses, but now let's
get serious and consider Kane's intrepid attempt to fill in the gaps and
provide a libertarian model of responsible decision-making. Acknowledging that "freedom is a term with many meanings," Kane grants that
"even if we lived in a determined world, we could meaningfully distinguish
persons w h o are free from such things as physical restraint, addiction or
neurosis, coercion or political oppression, from persons not free from
these things, and we could allow that these freedoms would be worth
preferring to their opposites even in a determined world" (Kane 1996,
p. 15). So some freedoms "worth wanting are compatible with determinism, but "human longings transcend" those freedoms; "there is at
least one kind of freedom that is incompatible with determinism, and it
is a significant kind of freedom worth wanting.'" It is "the power to be the
ultimate creator and sustainer of one's own ends or purposes" (p. 15).
It is commonly supposed that in a deterministic world, there
are no real options, only apparent options. In the~previous two chapters, I have shown that this is an illusion, but if it is, it is also remarkably resilient and tempting. If determinism is true, then there is at any
instant exactly one physically possible future, so since every choice has
already been determined, all of life is just the playing out of a script
that was fixed at the dawn of time. With no real options, no branch
points in one's trajectory through history, it seems you can hardly be
the author of your acts; you are more like an actor in a play, speaking
your lines with apparent conviction, committing your "crimes" with
grace or clumsiness, whichever has been fixed in the stage directions.
Compelling, isn't it? But false. Probably the best way to drive home
the surprising conclusion that this is just wrong—a panic reaction that
is simply not justified by the premise of determinism—is to give the
other side their best shot at saying what would give us real options. The

Where Should We Put the Much-needed Gap?

103

challenge Kane faces is to describe a "way our apparent decision-making
could be real decision-making, and he wants to do this without postulating any supernatural entities or mysterious forms of agency. He is,
like me, a naturalist, w h o assumes that we are creatures of the natural
order whose mental activity is dependent on the operations of our
brains. This requirement of naturalism sets some questions "well "worth
asking. (In later chapters, we'll look more closely at what contemporary cognitive neuroscience and psychology have to say about decisionmaking, to see "what interesting things happen "when we get more
ambitious and try to put in more of the details.)

W h e r e S h o u l d W e / P u t the M u c h - n e e d e d Gap?
A legendary book review begins, "This book fills a much-needed gap,"
and whether or not the author of that review meant what he said, Kane
definitely needs a gap, a hiatus in determinism, and he wants to install
it in what he calls the faculty of practical reason in the brain. He describes
this faculty in terms of its input, its output, and "what sometimes happens during the process that takes it from input to output (see Figure
4.1). These three phenomena are distinguished by Kane in terms of
three senses oiwill:
(i) desiderative or appetitive will: what I want, desire, or prefer to do
(ii) rational will: what I choose, decide, or intend to do
(iii) striving will: what I try, endeavor, or make an effort to do. (Kane
1996, p. 26)
Roughly, will of type (i) provides the input to the faculty of practical
reason, which yields type (ii) will as output when all goes well. W h e n
there is a strain on the machinery we get (iii), which always implies a
resistance, generating striving or heightened effort. This all sounds
quite familiar and right. W h e n we are undecided, we stoke up our
minds "with "whatever relevant preferences or desires occur to us (i),
remind ourselves of relevant facts or beliefs, and then mull. O u r
mullings, easy or effortful (iii), eventually terminate in decisions (ii).
"If there is indeterminacy in free will, on my view, it must come somewhere between the input and the output" (Kane 1996, p. 27).

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Freedom Evolves

Kane sets up an example so we can see such a system in action:
Consider the case of a businesswoman " w h o is on the way to a meeting important to her career when she observes an assault in an alley
An inner struggle ensues between her moral conscience, to stop and
call for help, and her career ambitions, which tell her she cannot miss
this meeting" (Kane 1996, p. 126). He ventures the idea that this struggle might set up two "recurrent and connected neural networks"—one
for each side of the issue. These two interconnected networks feed back
on each other, interacting in multifarious ways, interfering with each
other, and generally churning along until one of them wins the tugof-war, at which time the system settles, outputting a decision.
Such networks circulate impulses and information in feedback
loops and generally play a role in complex cognitive processing in
the brain of the kind that one would expect to be involved in
human deliberation. Moreover, recurrent networks are nonlinear,
thus allowing (as some recent research suggests) for the possibility of chaotic activity [my italics—DCD], which would contribute

Where Should We Put the Much-needed Gap?

105

to the plasticity and flexibility human brains display in creative
problem solving (of which practical deliberation is an example).
The input of one of these recurrent networks consists of the
woman's moral motives, and its output the choice to go back; the
input of the other, her career ambitions, and its output, the choice
to go on to her meeting. The two networks are connected, so that
the indeterminism that made it uncertain [my italics—DCD] that she
would do the moral thing was coming from her desire to do the
opposite, and vice versa—the indeterminism thus arising, as we
said, from a conflict in the will. (Kane 1999, pp. 225-26)
Before we go any further, we need to separate two issues that
are run together in th}S passage. The "chaotic activity" Kane mentions
here is deterministic chaos, the practical unpredictability of certain sorts of
phenomena that are describable in plain old Newtonian physics. As
Kane recognizes, two networks interacting chaotically would not in
themselves create any indeterminism, so if there is any "indeterminism
that made it uncertain," it has to come from elsewhere. This is a key
point. Kane is not alone in seeing the importance of chaos in decisionmaking, but it is his idea to supplement chaos with a smidgen of quantum randomness, following, with many others, in the wake of Roger
Penrose (1989, 1994). T h e question we need to consider is whether any
important work is being done by Kane's extra ingredient, and for this
we need to get clearer about what a chaotic phenomenon is.
Consider the Hyatt N e w Departure Ball Bearing exhibit. For
many years, the Museum of Science and Technology in Chicago displayed a glass case in which an astonishing phenomenon unfolded,
hour after hour. This exhibit, donated by a branch of General Motors,
showed an endless parade of little steel balls rolling out of a little hole
in the back of the exhibit, falling several feet onto the highly polished
top of a beautifully machined cylindrical steel "anvil," bouncing high
in the air through a ring that rotated like a coin spun on a tabletop (so
that timing the leaps through the rotating ring had to be exquisitely
precise), and then bouncing off a second anvil up to a small hole in the
back of the case, through which they all made their precise exits:
Bounce, bounce, swish, bounce, bounce, swish, hundreds of times an
hour. The sign on it said: "This machine demonstrates the accuracy of
manufacture and uniformity of physical properties of the balls used in

io6

Freedom Evolves

ball bearings." Once the two anvils were properly adjusted, it would
run for days on end, with each ball following exactly the trajectory of
its predecessor, a perfectly predictable, reliable, deterministic unfolding, a powerful demonstration that physical properties can fix one's
destiny—at least if one is a little steel ball. Its predictability could have
been shattered, however, by simply doubling the number of anvils (so
that each ball had to take four bounces before exiting) and turning the
anvils on their sides, so that the balls had to bounce off the rounded
walls of the cylinders instead of their ultra-flat tops. The margins of
error for machining the balls and adjusting the anvils would shrink vanishingly close to zero. 2 T h e mere presence of onlookers on the other
side of the glass would create enough variable gravitational interference
to upset the most exacting of calculations and cause many of the balls
to miss their final destinations!
This kind of chaos is deterministic, but not for that reason
uninteresting; it could indeed, as Kane says, "contribute to the plasticity and flexibility human brains display." In recent years the p o w ers of such chaos, and "non-linearity" more generally, have been
explored and amply demonstrated in many models alluded to by Kane.
Some of this research has been heralded by critics as the death knell
of Artificial Intelligence or, more specifically, the symbol-crunching
variety known as GOFAI—Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (Haugeland 1985), and the impression has been created in many
quarters that non-linear neural networks have wondrous powers altogether off-limits to mere computers, with their clunky, brittle algorithmic programs. But what many fans of neural networks have
overlooked is the fact that the very models they advertise to prove their
point are computer models, not just strictly deterministic but even,
down in the engine room, algorithmic. They are non-algorithmic
only at the highest level. (Can a whole be "freer" than its parts? Here
is one way it can.) Even such an astute commentator as Paul Churchland can fall into this tempting trap. Correctly disparaging Roger Penrose's attempt to enlist quantum physics against the dread algorithms
of AI, Churchland writes:

2. The physicist Michael Berry (1978) has done the calculations for predicting the trajectory
of steel balls off the round posts in pinball machines. Three rebounds takes us beyond the
limits of feasible calculation.

Where Should We Put the Much-needed Gap?

107

One need not look so far afield as the quantum realm to find a rich domain
of nonalgorithmicprocesses. The processes taking place within a hardware [my italics—DCD] neural network are typically nonalgorithmic, and they constitute the bulk of the computational activity
going on inside our heads. They are nonalgorithmic in the blunt
sense that they do not consist in a series of discrete physical states
serially traversed under the instructions of a stored set of symbolmanipulating rules. (Paul Churchland 1995, pp. 247-48)
Notice the insertion of the word "hardware" here. Without it,
what Churchland says would be false. In fact, all the results he discusses
(NETTalk, Elman's grammar-learning networks, Cottrell and Metcalfe's EMPATH, and others) were produced not by "hardware n e u ral networks" but by Virtual neural networks simulated on standard
computers. And so, at a low level, every one of these demonstrations
did "consist in a series of discrete physical states serially traversed under
the instructions of a stored set of symbol-manipulating rules." This is
not the level at which to explain their power, of course, but it is an
algorithmic level. Nothing these programs do transcends the limits of
Turing computability. Just as we had to go to the chess-playing level to
explain the difference in powers between programs A and B in Chapter 3, we have to go to the neural-network-modeling level to explain
the remarkable powers of these simulated networks, but in both cases
what is going on at the micro-level is a deterministic, digital, algorithmic process. The very models Churchland discusses so favorably are
implemented as computer programs—algorithms, from the point of
view of the limits of computability. So, unless he wants to disavow his
own favorite examples, he must grant, after all, that algorithmic processes can exhibit the powers he thinks are crucial to the explanation
of mentality. But then his claim that hardware neural networks are
nonalgorithmic, even if true, would not play any role in explaining the
powers they exhibit—since algorithmic approximations thereof have
all the necessary powers. 3
The simple Life world agents considered in Chapter 2 and the
computer chess programs considered in Chapter 3 were both digital
and deterministic, and so, for all their extra powers, are computer sim-

3. This paragraph is drawn, with revisions, from Densmore and Dennett 1999.

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Freedom Evolves

ulations of non-linear neural networks. Churchland's extra ingredient—hardware in place of virtual machine software—adds nothing to
the powers of neural networks. Or if it does, nobody has given us any
reason to think so. 4 Does Kane's extra ingredient—quantum level
indeterminism—do any more work? To answer this question, we need
to consider the details. Where and how should Kane insert the indeterminism he wants?

Kane's M o d e l o f Indeterministic D e c i s i o n - m a k i n g
What should the faculty of practical reasoning do, and how should it
do it? What are the specs, as an engineer would say, of this decidingdevice? Kane tells us that it should somehow discern the weight of the
various reasons and preferences fed to it, and tip the scales in favor of
the reason the agent "wants to act on more than he or she wants to act
on any other reasons (for doing otherwise)." He adds the further proviso that felicitous or successful cases of the faculty in action should
not be the result of coercion or compulsion (Kane 1996, p. 30). Kane
deliberately leaves open at the outset the question of whether the faculty operates deterministic ally, since he wants to argue that, for libertarian free will to emerge from the faculty, this extra feature of
indeterminism must be installed. In considering the specs for a faculty
of practical reason, it helps to go beyond Kane's minimal conditions
and consider some of the sorts of incompetence you wouldn't want your
faculty to exhibit.
'
(1) It gives no output at all—it's just broken. You are unable
to think about what to do next.

4. There might be a reason, implicit in my discussion of the role of collision in creativity in
Chapter 2. It might be that no feasible computer simulation, no virtual world small enough
to simulate, can have the mixture of noisiness and quietness required for open-ended creative
power. That would not be germane to Churchland's claim about neural networks, but it
might be true. The work of Adrian Thompson (e.g., Thompson et al. 1999) on evolutionary
electronics suggests from a different quarter that software cannot always substitute for
hardware in the exploration of design space. Thompson has created hardware chips with
abilities that do not depend on their software-handling capabilities but rely instead on
undesigned interactions at the microphysical level that can be selected for by artificial
evolution.

Kane's Model of Indeterministic Decision-making

109

(2) It has too narrow a bandwidth (it can't handle simultaneously all your wants or desires or preferences, and
thrashes away, unable to digest its huge input).
(3) It gives output too slowly for the world you live in.
(4) It has Hamlet's problem (infinite loop) and delays its output indefinitely.
(5) It fails for particular sorts of input (advice from M o m , considerations of patriotism, sex, or tenure . . .).
(6) It gives the wrong output for the input (e.g., you definitely
prefer human rights to having an ice cream at time t, but
your faculty ha^ you decide to buy an ice cream instead of
putting the money in the Amnesty International box).
This last suggestion raises an interesting question about weakness of will, and the striving will—Kane's type (iii)—that arises when
there is resistance and something has to give. Where is the clutch on this
mechanism? Is it outside the faculty or inside?
The example given in (6) puts the clutch inside the faculty,
allowing unwanted slippage between the input and the output: You
arrive at an unwanted decision. But apparently there's another sort of
case: Your practical reasoning works just fine so that you do decide to
spend the money on human rights, but (darn it) the clutch slips after
you make the decision and you end up buying the ice cream instead
of doing what you decided to do. (See Figure 4.2.) Are these really two
different cases? If so, what is the difference, and why is it important?
W h e n is a decision really a decision? This is not the only problem about
the boundaries that we will encounter.
What if your faculty of practical reasoning were to give different outputs for the very same inputs? Would this be a flaw? Usually we
want systems to be reliable, and by this we mean that we count on them
always to give the same output—the best output, whatever it is—for
each possible input. Consider your hand calculator as an example.
Sometimes, however, when the best output is not definable or we
specifically want the system to introduce "random" variation into the
surrounding supersystem, we are content to have it give different outputs for the very same input. T h e standard way to achieve this is to

no

Freedom Evolves

Figure 4.2

Clutch Positions, Inside and Out

incorporate a pseudo-random number generator in the system, serving the function of a coin flip (by generating either a 0 or a 1 every
time it is asked) or the throw of an ordinary six-sided die (by generating a number between 1 and 6 every time it is asked) or the spin of a
wheel of fortune (by generating a number between 1 and n every time
it is asked). Kane wants something better than pseudo-randomness.
He wants genuine randomness, and he proposes to get it by supposing
there is some kind of quantum-fluctuation amplifier in the neurons.
As we saw in the previous chapter, this wouldn't make his model any
more flexible or open-ended, more capable of improving itself or
learning. It wouldn't give his system any opportunities it wouldn't get
by having a pseudo-random number generator do the work, but that
is not its point. Its point is metaphysical, not practical.
In any case, should you want your faculty of practical reasoning to give different outputs for the very same inputs? Here we face

Kane's Model of Indeterministic Decision-making

Figure 4.3

IU

Memory Positions, Inside and Out

another boundary problem. What do we count as an input? Does the
faculty contain the history of its previous activities, or is it just the
content-free mill, the processor, which has to get (parts of) the history
fed into it from external memory? (See Figure 4.3.)
You wouldn't want your practical reasoning to be so rigid that
it made the same decision every day—for instance, always deciding on
a ham sandwich for lunch. But if we include in the input available facts
from memory, so that one of the inputs today is the fact that you've had
a ham sandwich two days running, this makes today's case a different
case from yesterday's case, however it is decided. Since people have
capacious memories and perceptual sensitivity, they are never in exactly
the same state twice, so they can get plenty of variability in the output
of their faculties of practical reason by simply feeding in more varied
input about their current state and circumstances. Your system of practical reasoning could be as reliable as a hand calculator, determined always
to give output! in response to inputj for every value of i, and yet still

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Freedom Evolves

never make the same decision twice—simply because time marches on
and the system never faces exactly the same input on two occasions.
"That was then, this is n o w " as the saying goes. As we saw in Chapter
3, the computer chess programs playing against each other might never
play the same game twice without ever adjusting their faculties of practical reason, all the variations being the result of changes in their inputs
over time. You can be perfectly consistent and yet all over the map, if
you let the features of the map influence your decision-making.
N o w we are ready for Kane's central claim. Suppose your faculty of practical reasoning, unlike the deterministic arrangement just
described, was equipped with indeterminism "somewhere between the
input and the output." Is this a bug or a feature? H o w should we imagine this? Should we conceive of the faculty as containing one or more
deterministic reasoning modules as subsystems, while also having some
mdeterministic innards? If we put a random number generator outside
the faculty (Figure 4.4), then the random numbers it generates must
be considered to be inputs to the faculty, and the faculty ought to treat

Kane's Model of Indeterministic Decision-making

113

them like any other inputs; if it is reliable, it should yield an output
determined by that input. If, alternatively, we put a random number generator inside the faculty, to let it free up the way the faculty handles its
inputs, then the faculty's outputs will not be determined by its inputs—
but all we've done is drawn the boundary line in a different functional
place.
Kane says that the indeterminacy should be "between" the
input and the output, but we might well wonder why the indeterminacy couldn't come in as part of the input. What difference could it
make? I put this question to Kane (in discussing an earlier draft of this
chapter), and he had an interesting response:
There is a reason why it is between input and output and does
not come in merel/ as part of the input. The reason is that what
is assumed to go on between input and output is the agent's doing
or action (in the form of practical reasoning and efforts issuing in
choice). The input (in the form of dispositions, beliefs, desires and
the like) is not something the agent here and now controls,
though some of it may have been the product of reasoning, efforts
or choices made at earlier times. . . . Indeterminism merely at the
input stage does not give us robust responsibility. The indeterminism must be an ingredient not only of what "comes to mind"
but of what the agent is actually doing (reasoning, making efforts,
making choices) to fully capture libertarian responsibility. If inputs
are the result of our doings, OK, but if they just happen to us or
occur, that's not good enough even if it's by chance. (Kane, personal correspondence)
Kane wants the indeterminism to be "the result of our doings"
rather than randomness that "just happens" in the input. This is easily
provided: Have the faculty of practical reasoning send out for some randomness whenever, in the midst of its labors, it encounters something
it interprets as a blockade of one sort or another—an imponderable
choice or meta-choice about which way to turn or what to think about
next (Figure 4.5).
That way, since the randomness will have been "called for" as
a result of the specific activities of the faculty, it won't just arrive unbidden from out of the blue. Moreover, the use to which the requested
randomness gets put will be determined by constructive activities of

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Freedom Evolves

the faculty itself. (If I decide to flip a coin to settle where to dine
tonight, it is still my choice; I made it settle my choice.) But here again,
we are just redrawing the boundary line; anything an onboard source of
randomness can provide can also be provided in the input by an external source of randomness that is consulted wh^en needed. As we are
beginning to see, the metaphor of the container has to do a lot of work
for Kane.
But, for the sake of argument, let's assume that Kane can come
up with a good reason to distinguish internal from external sources of
randomness. We install the indeterminacy inside the faculty, in between
input and output, per his specifications, and then we install the faculty
inside the agent. H o w does it operate in daily life? Kane notes that
choices or decisions normally terminate processes of deliberation
or practical reasoning, but they need not always do so. We need
not rule out the possibility of impulsive, spur-of-the-moment, or
snap, decisions, which also settle conditions of indecision but

Kane's Model of Indeterministic Decision-making

115

arise with minimal or no prior reasoning. Yet, while impulsive or
snap decisions can occur, they are less important for free will than
decisions that terminate processes of deliberation in which alternatives are reflectively considered. For, in the latter cases, we are
more likely to feel we have control over the outcome and "could
have done otherwise." (Kane 1996, p. 23)
So we get a picture of occasional acts of deliberate choice being
the morally significant turning points—"they play a pivotal role"
(p. 24)—laying down habits and intentions that are later acted on quite
thoughtlessly but still with responsibility. Consider an example of a
snap decision. My wife asks me if I can stop by the post office on my
way to work and mail a package for her, and I reply almost instantaneously that I can't, because then I'd be late for an appointment with
a student. Did I deliberate? Did I engage in a process of practical reasoning? This is not heavy-duty moral decision-making, but this is the
stuff from which moral (and immoral) lives are largely composed: h u n dreds and thousands of minor choice points decided with a moment's
consideration, usually with the background of justification kept tacit
and unarticulated. H o w weird it would be if I had responded along
these lines: "Well, since you are my wife and we have solemnly promised to help each other, and since I can think of no defect or problem
in your request—you haven't asked me to do something physically
impossible, or illegal, or self-destructive, for instance—there is undeniably a strong case for my answering, 'Yes, dear.' On the other hand,
I have told a student that I would meet with him at nine-thirty, and
given the traffic, honoring your request would entail standing him up
for at least half an hour. I could try to call him and ask his permission
to reschedule, but I might not reach him, and besides, the harder question is whether my mailing the package in so timely a manner is a sufficiently important errand to warrant inconveniencing him. My
making the appointment amounted to a promise to him, though not
one that couldn't be forgivably broken for cause. . . ." It is perhaps surprising to note that all these considerations (and many more!) really did
contribute somehow to my snap answer. H o w so? Well, would I have
given an unconsidered snap judgment, positive or negative, if my wife
had asked me please to strangle the dentist on my way to work, or drive
my car over a cliff? If I had earlier told my student merely that I

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Freedom Evolves

intended to be in my office at 9:30 for coffee (no promise made or
implied), or left the time of the appointment more flexible, or had been
talking to him on the phone at the very moment my wife asked, this
would have made a difference, surely, in my snap judgment. Even a snap
judgment can be remarkably sensitive to myriad features of my world
that have conspired over time to create my current dispositional state.
Kane is willing to allow that such a complex dispositional state,
which has been building more or less continuously in me since I was
a child, may determine how I will respond in such a case and in other
cases when I do not deliberate. But once again, boundary questions
loom. Should we view a snap judgment as issuing from the faculty of
deliberation (but just so swiftly and effortlessly that the details stay
tacit) or should we view the snap decision as issuing more directly from
some "lower" faculty or subsystem, the faculty of deliberation being
kept in reserve for occasional heavy lifting? It is best, I think, to draw
the lines (which are, after all, just philosophers' lines of analysis, not
anatomical boundaries to be discovered) so that even snap judgments
get executed, effortlessly, in and by the faculty of practical reasoning.
For, as we shall see, Kane holds that whereas the gap of indeterminism
is to be located within that faculty (between input and output), the faculty does not always have to avail itself of indeterminism. It can operate deterministically on occasion, even when dealing with high-stakes
moral decisions. (Shall I strangle the dentist? Naw.)
Kane is comfortable with this occasional role for determinism
in the life of a moral agent, for several reasons. First, it permits him to
handle these snap judgment cases realistically. It is just not plausible to
maintain that the habits of a lifetime, yielding decisions so predictable
you can trust your life to them, are nevertheless indeterministic (except
in the limiting sense that there might be one chance in a bazillion that
they would be disrupted). Think of your willingness to drive on the
highway, facing oncoming cars in the opposite lane with an approach
velocity well over 100 miles per hour. Your life depends on the drivers of those cars not deciding, as they are free to decide, to swerve suddenly into your lane, just to see what happens. Your equanimity on the
highway shows how predictable you assume these total strangers to be.
They could kill you in a senseless, suicidal actegratuit, but you wouldn't
pay a dollar or even a dime for the opportunity to clear the road of all
oncoming cars before you ventured out. Second, Kane needs a help-

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117

ing of determinism in order to handle a more serious objection to libertarianism raised by me in Elbow Room: the case of Martin Luther.
"Here I stand," Luther said. "I can do no other." Luther claimed
that he could do no other, that his conscience made it impossible for
him to recant. He might, of course, have been wrong, or have been
deliberately overstating the truth. But even if he was—perhaps especially if he was—his declaration is testimony to the fact that we simply do not exempt someone from blame or praise for an act because
we think he could do no other. Whatever Luther was doing, he was
not trying to duck responsibility. (Dennett 1984, p. 133)
Kane accepts that Luther's decision was the furthest thing
from a snap judgment, that it was definitely a morally responsible
decision, and that wnat Luther said about it may well have been true:
He could not have done otherwise; he truly was determined by his faculty of practical reasoning at the time to stand firm. T h e case of Luther is
not a rare or unimportant sort of case. As we shall see in later chapters, the policy of preparing oneself for tough choices by arranging to
be determined to do the right thing when the time comes is one of
the hallmarks of mature responsibility, and Kane accepts this. In fact,
he builds his account of free will around the idea that for each of us
morally responsible agents, there must have been some relatively infrequent occasions in our lives when we have encountered conflicting
desires—generating his type (iii) striving will. On some of these occasions we have decided to perform "self-forming actions" (SFAs),
which may have a deterministic effect on our subsequent behavior,
and only these SFAs need be the result of processes in the faculty of
practical reason that are genuinely indeterministic:
An act like Luther's can be ultimately responsible . . . though
determined by his will, because the will from which it issued was
a will of his own making, and in that sense it was his "own" free
will. . . . Ultimately responsible acts, or acts done of one's own
free will, make up a wider class of actions than those self-forming
actions (SFAs) which must be undetermined and such that the
agent could have done otherwise. But if no actions were "selfforming" in this way, we would not be ultimately responsible for
anything we did. (Kane 1996, p. 78)

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Freedom Evolves

W h e n I launch a boulder from a catapult toward my enemy,
once the boulder is in flight, its trajectory is out of my hands, no longer
subject to my will, but its effects on landing are my responsibility, no
matter how long the delay. W h e n I launch myself into a trajectory of
one sort or another, having taken care to arrange that I will be unable
to alter various aspects of that trajectory hereafter, the same conclusion
manifestly holds. Reflections like this lead some libertarians to accept
that the freedom they seek to install may have to be concentrated in a
few windows of opportunity with special properties. (Peter van Inwagen, for instance, joins Kane on this point, but, unlike Kane, supposes
such windows may be quite rare.) But now just what special properties will these be? Kane says that an SFA must meet condition AP:
(AP) The agent has alternative possibilities (or can do otherwise)
with respect to A at t in the sense that, at t, the agent can (has the
power or ability to) do A and can (has the power or ability to) do otherwise. (Kane 1996, p. 33)
Notice the role of "at t" in this formula. Some philosophers can't bear
to say simple things, like "Suppose a dog bites a man." They feel
obliged instead to say, "Suppose a dog d bites a man m at time t"
thereby demonstrating their unshakable commitment to logical rigor,
even though they don't go on to manipulate any formulae involving
d, m, and t. Talk about time t is ubiquitous in philosophical definitions
but seldom given any serious work to do. Here, however, it plays a serious role. This definition speaks about what is the case at each moment
in time; it requires us to think about possibilities-at-an-instant. Kane
(p. 87) quotes a rhapsodic passage from William James:
The great point . . . is that the possibilities are really here. . . . At
those soul-trying moments when fate's scales seem to quiver, . . .
[we acknowledge] that the issue is decided nowhere else than here
and now. That is what gives the palpitating reality to our moral life
and makes it tingle . . . with so strange and elaborate an excitement. (James 1897, p. 183)
Let's look more closely at those quivering scales. Imagine that
your faculty of practical reason is equipped with a dial, with a needle
showing which way the scales are currently tipping as the mulling goes
on, hovering between Go and Stay (supposing those are the options

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119

you're currently considering) and wandering back and forth, perhaps
even quivering, oscillating swiftly between the two values (Figure 4.6).
And suppose that at any moment you can terminate the process of
deliberation by pressing the Now! button, sealing your choice with
whatever side, Go or Stay, happens at that instant to be favored by the
deliberation up to then. Suppose, for the moment, that all the processing by your faculty of practical reasoning is deterministic; it "sums
the weights" by some deterministic function of all the input it has so
far considered, and yields a moment-by-moment value that swings this
way and that, between Go and Stay, depending on the order in which
considerations are processed and reprocessed in the light of further
deliberation.

Would condition AP be met in such a case? What would we
look for to answer this question? Suppose we looked at the last minute of
deliberation, and noticed that during that time, the needle oscillated back
and forth a dozen times or more, and roughly half the time the needle
pointed to Go and half the time the needle pointed to Stay. On that
timescale it would certainly look as if both alternatives were open (compared, for instance, to a minute during which the needle rested firmly
on Stay the entire time). But for Kane (and for James) this is not good
enough. For there to be genuine free will, both possibilities have to open
at time t, the very instant the Now! button was pressed. If we then zoomed
in on that moment, and noticed that for the last 10 milliseconds before

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Freedom Evolves

time t, the needle was steady on Stay, which was also the decision registered by the pressing of the Now! button, it would seem that we had good
evidence that the Go option was not available at time t (see Figure 4.7).

Ah, but there is a loophole. I imagined that you got to press the
Now! button. Could we introduce indeterminacy by letting the exact
timing of the button pressing be "up to you"? Let's suppose, then, that
while the mulling process itself is all determined, what is indeterminate is the exact timing of the Now! button-press. Sometime in the next
20 milliseconds the button will be pressed, but exactly when is strictly
(quantum) indeterminate. T h e n if the quivering between Go and Stay
takes place at a high enough frequency to put Ipoth Go and Stay periods into that 20-millisecond window, the actual decision made by the
activation of the Now! button will be undetermined, utterly and officially unpredictable from a complete description of the universe at the
beginning of the window of opportunity (Figure 4.8).
Unfortunately, it will still not be the case that condition AP is
met, due to a flaw in the definition of AP: that pesky "at t" clause. It
will still be completely predictable that if the decision occurs at millisecond 5, say, it will be a decision to Go, and if it occurs at millisecond 17 it will be a decision to Stay. In fact, for any time t in the window
of opportunity, it is determined what decision would be made at that
instant; what isn't determined is when exactly the decision will be
made. T h e agent is not free at t to Go or Stay for any value of t. But
isn't this good enough, so long as the instant of choosing is undeter-

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121

mined? It is tempting to propose a mild revision of condition AP that
would then accept our simple model: Let time t be smeared over the
whole 20-millisecond time window instead of instantaneous, and we're
home free, since both Go and Stay coexist at time t thus stretched
out—and 20 milliseconds is hardly a long period of time.
The needle on the dial, and the button, make this model look
awfully "mechanistic," to be sure, but Kane demands this himself. He's
trying to be a naturalist libertarian, so he wants his model to be scientifically respectable, something the brain could implement, and the dial
and the button are just vivid devices for helping us visualize the underlying state of the relevant neural complexity. Some sort of physically
realizable neural state must implement the current weighting, and some
state-transition must implement a decision (yield an output); we can
just pretend that the dial transduces the former and the button triggers
the latter. So the model illustrates one way—one family of ways—in
which subatomic quantum indeterminacy could be amplified into
playing a crucial role in decision-making. Moreover, the model seems
to satisfy Kane's Ultimacy requirement for SFAs:
(U) for every X and Y (where X and Y represent occurrences of
events and/or states) if the agent is personally responsible for X,
and if Y is an arche5 (or sufficient ground or cause or explanation)
5. Arche is Aristotle's term for origin.

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for X, then the agent must also be personally responsible for Y.
(Kane 1996, p. 35)
Translation: You can only be personally responsible for one thing if you
are personally responsible for everything that is a sufficient condition
for it. According to Kane,
SFAs are the undetermined, regress-stopping voluntary actions
(or refrainings) in the life histories of agents that are required if U
is to be satisfied. (Kane 1996, p. 75)
Indeterministic timing of the Now! button could make the decision
itself indeterministic in cases where both options quiver in a slightly
elongated window of opportunity; there wouldn't be any sufficient
condition for either the Go or Stay decision at any earlier moment, so
you could be personally responsible for Go (or Stay) without having
to worry about being responsible for any earlier sufficient condition
for Go (or Stay). Of course, we still have to find some way of making
sense of an indeterministic button pressing being "up to you" and not
itself just an external, random input.

"If y o u m a k e y o u r s e l f really small,
y o u can e x t e r n a l i z e virtually everything" 6
Once again we have a boundary problem, and this-time it is major: H o w
can Kane get a quantum indeterminacy to be inside the relevant system?
To see the difficulty, suppose a bystander yells just as you're about to
push the Now! button, startling you and thereby hastening your press
by five milliseconds, causing your press. Is the decision now no longer
yours at all? After all, the crucial part of the cause, the part that determined whether to Go or Stay, was itself caused by the bystander's yell
(which was caused by the seagull flying by so close, which was caused
by the early return of the fishing fleet, which was caused by the resump-

6. This was probably the most important sentence in Elbow Room (Dennett 1984, p. 143),
and I made the stupid mistake of putting it in parentheses. I've been correcting that mistake
in my work ever since, drawing out the many implications of abandoning the idea of a
punctate self. Of course, what I meant to stress with my ironic formulation was the converse:
You'd be surprised how much you can internalize, if you make yourself large.

"If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything"

123

tion of El Nino, which . . . was caused by a butterfly flapping its wings
back in 1926). Even if that butterfly wing flap was truly undetermined,
the magnified effect of a quantum leap in its tiny brain, this moment of
indeterminism is in the wrong time and place. The butterfly's moment of
freedom back in 1926 isn't what gives you free will today, is it? Kane's
libertarianism requires him to break the chain of causation somewhere
in the agent and at the time of decision, the "here and now" requirement spoken of so eloquently by William James. If it really matters, as
libertarians think, then we'd better shield your processes of deliberation
from all such external interference. We'd better insulate the wall that surrounds . . . you so that external forces don't interfere with the decision
you're cooking up in your internal kitchen, using only the ingredients
that you have allowed through the door.
This retreat of the Self into a walled enclave within which all the
serious work of authorship has to be done parallels another retreat into
the center of the brain, the various misbegotten lines of argument and
reflection that lead to what I call the Cartesian Theater, the imaginary
place in the center of the brain "where it all comes together" for consciousness. There is no such place, and any theory that tacitly presupposes
that there is should be set aside at once as on the wrong track. All the
work done by the imaginary homunculus in the Cartesian Theater must
be distributed in time and space in the brain. The problem is compounded
for Kane, since he has to figure out some way to get the undetermined
quantum event to be not just in you but yours. He wants above all for the
decision to be "up to you," but if the decision is undetermined—the
defining requirement of libertarianism—it isn't determined by you,
whatever you are, because it isn't determined by anything. Whatever you
are, you can't influence the undetermined event—the whole point of
quantum indeterminacy is that such quantum events are not influenced
by anything—so you will somehow have to co-opt it or join forces with it,
putting it to use in some intimate way, an objet trouve that you meaningfully incorporate into your decision-making in some fashion. But in
order to do this, there has to be more to you than just some mathematical point; you have to be someone; you have to have parts—memories,
plans, beliefs, and desires—that you've acquired along the way. And then
all those causal influences from the past, from outside, come crowding
back in, contaminating the workshop, preempting your creativity, usurping control of your decision-making. A serious quandary.

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T h e problem, you will recall, was already clearly recognized
by William James when he asked, "If a 'free' act be a sheer novelty,
that comes not from me, the previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply
tacks itself on to me, how can I, the previous I, be responsible?" Kane
makes some useful headway on an answer to this rhetorical question
with his idea of "plural rationality" (Kane 1996, Chapter 7). We
don't want our free acts to be unmotivated, inexplicable, random
lightning bolts without rhyme or reason. We want there to be reasons for them, we want these to be our reasons, and (if we're libertarians) we want them to meet the AP condition, to be free in the
sense that "at time t" we "could have done otherwise." O n e way this
could be the case is if you yourself have taken the time and effort to
develop two (or more) sets of competing reasons. T h e n both sets of reasons are composed, devised, revised, sanded, and polished locally, by
you yourself. T h o u g h you may have borrowed some pieces and ideas
from outside, you've made them your own, so these are indeed doit-yourself reasons. Moreover, each set of reasons is at least tentatively
endorsed by you. (If one of them wasn't, there wouldn't have been
any fuss, would there? You'd have made a quick—perhaps even
snap—decision in favor of the other.) So w h e n deliberation finally
terminates, whichever side you come down on is a side you have
taken very seriously yourself, right up to the verge of endorsement.
Your act amounts to a final verdict, a declaration that makes you the
kind of person you are (a Stayer or a Goer)—and right then you could
have done otherwise.
/
The point of plural rationality—or "parallel processing," as he
more recently calls it (Kane 1999)—is that it builds on an intuition
we've always had: You can be rightly held responsible for the outcome
of a deed that includes a chance or undetermined element, if that is what
you were trying to accomplish. The would-be assassin whose lucky long
shot hits the prime minister is not absolved on the grounds that it was
mere chance—even genuinely indeterministic chance—that he hit his
target. By setting up an opponent process pitting two different attempts
against each other (e.g., the businesswoman's quandary about whether
to do the right thing or advance her career), Kane guarantees that when
one of the attempts fails, the other succeeds, and she is rightly held
responsible in either case because that is one of the things she was trying
to accomplish. T h e fact that she was trying to accomplish two incom-

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125

patible things at the same time doesn't show that when she manages to
accomplish one of them, she wasn't trying to accomplish it!
So Kane claims that this embedding of indeterminism in the
maelstrom of conflicting reasons, where the agent is actually trying—
type (iii), the striving will—to get it right, saves the outcome, whichever it is, from being a fluke, a mere accident. Every adult agent will
have faced such dilemmas, moral or prudential, and been shaped by
them.
By choosing one way or another in such cases, the agents would
be strengthening their moral or prudential characters or reinforcing selfish or imprudent instincts, as the case may be. They would
be "making" themselves or "forming" their wills one way or
another in a manner that was not determined by past character,
motives, and circumstances. . . . It is because their efforts are thus
a response to inner conflicts embedded in the agents' prior character and motives that their character and motives can explain the
conflicts and why the efforts are being made, without also explaining the outcomes of the conflicts and the efforts. Prior motives
and character provide reasons for going either way, but not decisive reasons explaining which way the agent will inevitably go.
(Kane 1996, p. 127)
T h e idea that someone w h o has been tested by serious dilemmas of practical reasoning, w h o has wrestled with temptations and
quandaries, is more likely to be "his own man" or "her own woman,"
a more responsible moral agent than someone who has just floated happily along down life's river taking things as they come, is an attractive
and familiar point, but one that has largely eluded philosophers' attention. In most accounts of free will, the occurrence of tough choices in
an agent's history plays no marked role and, in fact, is largely ignored,
probably because it draws attention to the embarrassing limiting case:
Buridan's Ass, w h o purportedly starves to death because he is equidistant from two piles of food and can't think of a reason for going left
rather than right (or vice versa). This "liberty of indifference" has been
noted since medieval times, and tie-breaking by flipping a coin has
always been a recognized solution to such impasses, a useful prosthesis
of the will, one might say, but it doesn't look like a good model for
free will. If we theorists find ourselves approaching a view in which

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our only free choices will be those where we might as well flip a coin,
then we must have blundered down the wrong path. Turn back quickly.
And so the topic gets ignored. But Kane shows quite convincingly that
the incremental character-building that may (but also may not) grow
out of a lifetime of hard choices taken seriously really does add a "variety of free will worth wanting." There's one big problem with it,
however: It doesn't need the indeterminism that inspired its creation.
Moreover, it can't harness indeterminism in any way that distinguishes
it from determinism, because the "here and n o w " requirement is not
only not well motivated; it is also probably incoherent, as we shall see.

Beware of Prime Mammals
The basic idea is that the ultimate responsibility lies where the ultimate cause is.
—Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will
You may think you're a mammal, and that dogs and cows and whales
are mammals, but really there aren't any mammals at all—there
couldn't be! Here's a philosophical argument to prove it (drawn, with
alterations, from Sanford 1975).
(1) Every mammal has a mammal for a mother.
(2) If there have been any mammals at all, there have been only
a finite number of mammals.
, "*"
(3) But if there has been even one mammal, then by (1), there
have been an infinity of mammals, which contradicts (2),
so there can't have been any mammals. It's a contradiction
in terms.
Since we know perfectly well that there are mammals, we take this
argument seriously only as a challenge to discover what fallacy is lurking within it. Something has to give. And we know, in a general way,
what has to give: If you go back far enough in the family tree of any
mammal, you will eventually get to the therapsids, those strange,
extinct bridge species between the reptiles and the mammals. A gradual transition occurred from clear reptiles to clear mammals, with a lot
of hard-to-classify intermediaries filling in the gaps. What should we

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127

do about drawing the lines across this spectrum of gradual change? Can
we identify a mammal, the Prime Mammal, that didn't have a m a m mal for a mother, thus negating premise (1)? On what grounds? W h a t ever the grounds are, they will be indistinguishable from the grounds
we could also use to support the verdict that that animal was not a
mammal—after all, its mother was a therapsid. What should we do?
We should quell our desire to draw lines. We don't need to draw lines.
We can live with the quite unshocking and unmysterious fact that, you
see, there were all these gradual changes that accumulated over many
millions of years and eventually produced undeniable mammals.
Philosophers tend to like the idea of stopping a threatened infinite regress by identifying something that is—must be—the regressstopper: the Prime Mammal, in this case. It often lands them in
doctrines that wallow in mystery, or at least puzzlement, and, of course,
it commits them to essentialism in most instances. (The Prime M a m mal must be whichever mammal in the set of mammals first had all the
essential mammalian features. If there is no definable essence of mammal, we're in trouble. And evolutionary biology shows us that there are
no such essences.)
Kane's theory of free will specifically calls for "regress-stopping"
special cases, the self-forming acts, or SFAs.
If an infinite regress is to be avoided, there must be actions somewhere in the agent's life history for which the agent's predominant motives and the will on which the agent acts were not already
set one way (Kane 1996, p. 114)
O n e might pause to ask how often these important moments tend to
occur. Once a day on average, or once a year or once a decade? Do
they tend to start at birth, at age five, at puberty? These SFAs look suspiciously like Prime Mammals. It is worrying that while they are key
events in the life of any moral agent—the natural rites of passage, one
might say, into responsible adulthood—they are practically impossible
to discover. There is no way to tell a genuine SFA from a pseudo-SFA,
an impostor bout of reasoning that never actually availed itself of quantum indeterminism but just cranked out a pseudo-random and hence
deterministic result. They would feel the same from the inside and look
the same from the outside, no matter how sophisticated our observational apparatus. As Paul Oppenheim has suggested to me, Kane's SFAs

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Freedom Evolves

can be usefully compared with speciation events in evolution, which can
only be retrospectively identified. Every birth in every lineage is a
potential speciation event, since offspring all have at least minute differences that make them unique, and any difference could be the
beginning of something that eventually blooms into speciation. Time
will tell. There is nothing special at the time about a birth that will turn
out to have been a speciation event. 7 Similarly, one should be suspicious of the demand that there be an event—an SFA—that has some
special, intrinsic, local feature that sets it apart from its nearest kin and
explains its capacity to found something important. Is it plausible that
an agent w h o hadn't yet experienced one or more of these very special events (but only near misses, pseudo-SFAs) would simply not be
responsible for any acts performed? "Yes, these furry, warm-blooded
things look a lot like mammals, and smell and sound like mammals, and
are cross-fertile with mammals, but they lack the secret essence; they
aren't mammals at all, not really."
Consider Luther in this regard. Kane says: "If he is ultimately
accountable for his present act, then at least some of these earlier
choices or actions must have been such that he could have done otherwise with respect to them. If this were not the case, nothing he could
have ever done would have made any difference to what he was" (Kane
1996, p. 40). And so it makes sense—one might think—to take a good
hard look at Luther's biography, to see what kind of upbringing he had,
what powerful influences held him in thrall, what catastrophes he
endured, and the like. But, in fact, nothing we could discover about
such macroscopic details would shed any light at all on the question of
whether or not Luther had had any genuine SFAs during this period.
We could certainly discover that episodes of conflict and soul-searching
occurred on various occasions, and we might even confirm that these

7. Some contemporary creationists have conceded that all living things are related by descent
in a tree of life that is billions of years old, and also grant that all the transformations of
successive generations within species are accomplished by mindless Darwinian natural
selection, but hold out hope that the branching events themselves, the speciations, are, if
not miraculous, in need of special help from some intelligent designer (or Intelligent
Designer—they claim to be neutral about the identity of the i.d.). This condensation of
all the specialness into a magic moment—or a place where it all comes together—is an
irresistible motif to some thinkers. The clearest example is Michael Behe (1996); for a
discussion of the fallacies involved, see Dennett (1997C).

Beware of Prime Mammals

129

occasions set up "chaotic" opponent processes in the neural networks
from which his decisions eventually emerged. What we could not discover, however, was whether these tugs-of-war had the benefit of genuinely random, as opposed to mere pseudo-random, sources of
variability. T h e price libertarians must pay for sequestering their pivotal moments in subatomic transactions in some privileged place in the
brain (at time t) is that they render these all-important pivots undetectable by both the everyday biographer and the fully equipped cognitive neuroscientist. O n e might think that the difference between
Lutheri, w h o was held in a cell during his adolescence for five years
and subjected to brainwashing, and Luther 2 , who had a roughly normal adolescence of triumphs and trials in the knockabout world, would
have a bearing on whemer there were SFAs in the ancestry of the decision made by Luther today . But these salient environmental differences,
which intuitively do have a bearing on our assessment of Luther's
capacity for moral choice, are in no way symptoms of the presence or
absence of SFAs. (They are just as irrelevant to the question of whether
or not an SFA occurred in Luther as Austin's ten demonstration putts
would be to the question of whether or not he was determined to miss
the putt at time t.) And when we get out our supermicroscopes and
look at subatomic activity in the neurons, whatever we see will be
equally uninformative about SFAs.
But isn't this inscrutability of ultimate responsibility a problem
for every theory? As Kane has said,
If a young murderer is on trial and we look into his past life of
child abuse and peer pressure, we have to make some judgment
about how much of his present vicious character from which this
act flowed is his own doing and how much is due to outside influences over which he lacked control. Such questions are relevant
to determining guilt or innocence and how much punishment
should be mitigated on any theory. They are formidably difficult
questions to answer no matter what view you take about free will.
(Kane, personal correspondence)
This is right, so far as it goes. Variations in life history are
indeed relevant to variations in current degree of responsibility, as Kane
says, and they are also difficult to investigate, on any theory. But Kane's
libertarian view requires an additional investigation that is hard to

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Freedom Evolves

motivate—impossible, in my opinion. Consider the situation statistically: We sort a hundred murderers by background, from most deprived
to most fortunate, to see which should have mitigation, or total exculpation (we'll address those policy issues later). Suppose we find the following: 60 percent show clear evidence of major deprivation of the
relevant sorts and are hence unproblematic candidates for substantial
mitigation; 10 percent are "borderline"—they show quite a lot of deprivation, but how much is too much?—and the remaining 30 percent
show normal-to-exemplary upbringings, no signs at all of brain damage, etc. (See Figure 4.9.) These fortunate individuals emerge, by a
process of elimination, as practically indistinguishable from each other
in all the macroscopic characters that we take to be the necessary conditions for responsibility—the features the 60 percent lack. They are
all apparently responsible adults. They are all among society's apparent
success stories—we raised them right, filled in their gaps, gave them
an equal opportunity, and so forth.
Nature doesn't insist on sharp boundaries, but sometimes we
must draw a line of political policy, simply because we have to have
some practical and ostensibly fair way of dealing with specific cases: You

Beware of Prime Mammals

131

can't drive until you are sixteen in most states, and you can't drink until
you are twenty-one, no matter how mature you are for your age. Faced
with the array of cases illustrated in Figure 4.9, we would have to find
some partly arbitrary way of drawing a line across the penumbral 10
percent, and opinions would no doubt differ on which factors to
weight heavily and which to ignore. (If the curve were much steeper,
we'd be grateful to discern an apparent joint at which to carve nature;
if it were more gradual, our political task would be all the harder.) But
Kane's view requires us to reserve judgment about not just the 10 with
marginal claims to mitigation but the 30 exemplary candidates as well.
Some unknown number—it could be all 30—could turn out to be
entirely nonresponsible, because all the apparent SFAs in their life histories were pseudo-SrjAs. After all, Kane holds that no robot with only
a pseudo-random number generator in its system could be responsible
at all, and yet such a robot might pass all macroscopic tests for humanity perfectly. (Such a robot, unlike a Stepford Wife, 8 would not betray
its robotitude by a slavish obsession with some one policy, thanks to
the pseudo-random jigglers in its faculty of practical reason that would
keep it eternally open-minded.) Indeed, according to Kane's view it is
entirely possible that some in the marginal group of 10 are rightly held
responsible since they have had some modest number of genuine SFAs
in their pasts, in spite of their deprivations, while some of the privileged group of 30 are not fit candidates for moral responsibility at all.
Try to imagine the first defendant (the son of a billionaire, since
he'll need an expensive team of lawyers and scientists!) w h o tries to
introduce evidence in court before sentencing, "demonstrating" that
his brain lacked the quantum indeterminacies required for responsibility, even though he'd had an exemplary upbringing, was of above average intelligence, etc. It's a tough sell. W h y should the metaphysical
feature of Ultimate Responsibility (supposing Kane has defined a
coherent possibility) count more than the macroscopic features that can
be defined independently of the issue of quantum indeterminism, and
that are well motivated in terms of the decision-making competences
that agents have or lack? Indeed, why should metaphysical Ultimate

8. The 1975 science fiction movie The Stepford Wives, by Bryan Forbes (based on Ira Levin's
novel), portrayed a town in which the real wives were gradually replaced by mindless robot
duplicates who devoted all their energy to housecleaning and taking care of their men.

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Freedom Evolves

Responsibility count for anything at all? If it can't be motivated as a
grounds for treating people differently, why should anyone think it is
a variety of free will worth wanting? As Kane himself puts it, "In short,
when described from a physical perspective alone, free will looks like
chance" (Kane 1996, p. 147). And chance looks exactly the same,
whether it is genuinely indeterministic or merely pseudo-random or
chaotic.
The libertarian, like the essentialist in biology, is captivated with
boundaries, in particular the boundaries that delimit the "here" and the
"now." But these boundaries, being partly interdefinable, are porous in
any case. Suppose the indeterministic neurons in your faculty of practical reasoning died, leaving you disabled for any future SFAs. But suppose, fortunately for you, that the damaged part of your brain could be
replaced by an indeterministic prosthetic device implanted in just the
right milieu in the healthy part of your brain. A good way to get genuine quantum indeterminism into a physical device is to use a little bit
of decaying radium and a Geiger counter, but it might not be healthy
to have such a radium randomizer implanted in your brain, so it could
be left in the lab, surrounded by a lead shield, and its results could be
fed into your brain on demand, by radio link (as in my "Where am I?"
story in Brainstorms, 1978). The location of the randomizer in the lab
obviously shouldn't make a difference, since it is functionally inside the
system; it would play exactly the same role as the damaged neurons ured
to play, no matter where it was geographically. But there might be a
cheaper, safer way of getting exactly the same effect: We could use genuinely random fluctuations in the light coming from deep space as our
trigger, beaming it direcdy to the transceiver implanted in your brain.
Since this signal arrives at the speed of light, there is no way for us to
predict what the next fluctuations will be, even though their random
source is a star light-years away. But if there is no problem getting your
indeterminacy from a distant star, why insist on making it now in the
first place? Record a series of random fluctuations by a radium randomizer over a century, and install that recording from the past as your
pseudo-random number generator somewhere in your brain, to be consulted when appropriate.
In Elbow Room, I noted the unimportance of the difference
between a lottery in which the winning ticket is chosen (randomly)
after all the tickets are sold, and a lottery in which the winning ticket

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133

stub is chosen before the tickets are sold. Both are fair lotteries; both give
all the purchasers a fair chance of winning.
If our world is determined, then we have pseudo-random number generators in us, not Geiger counter randomizers. That is to
say, if our world is determined, all our lottery tickets were drawn
at once, eons ago, put in an envelope for us, and doled out as we
needed them through life. (Dennett 1984, p. 121)
Kane has suggested to me (personal correspondence) that " T h e
indeterminacy-producing mechanism must be responsive to the dynamics within the agent's own will and not override them or it would be
making the decisions and not the agent." His concern is that a remote
source of randomness ^vould threaten your autonomy, and be likely to
take control of your thinking processes. Wouldn't it be much safer—
and hence more responsible—to keep the randomizer inside you, under
your watchful eye in some sense? No. Randomness is just randomness;
it isn't creeping randomness. Programmers routinely insert calls to the
random number generator in their programs, not worrying about it
somehow getting out of hand and providing chaos where it isn't wanted.
Suppose we visualize the brain's dynamics in our Go/Stay example as
creating a saddle in a decision landscape, a place where the decisionexplorer will eventually slide off the hill into either the Go valley to the
north or the Stay valley to the south. (See Figure 4.10.)

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134

The landscape is generously sprinkled with banana peels—
calls to the random number generator that are activated any time the
decision-explorer passes over them. This keeps the explorer moving,
randomly if necessary, preventing Buridan's Ass from occurring, so the
explorer never gets stuck on the flattish ridge of the saddle and dies
decisionless. These slippery banana peels are harmless, though, because
once a decision starts heading down into one valley or the other,
encountering an unnecessary peel can only briefly bump the decision
back uphill a bit, delaying for a micro-moment the plunge that has
already been settled on, or else hasten its downward slide, without
being able to overrule it. Or to use another vivid image popular among
modelers, the random number generator simply "shakes" or "jiggles"
the landscape ever so incessantly, so that nothing can just stop on the
saddle forever—but the shape of the landscape isn't altered at all, so
nothing ominous "takes over."

H o w C a n It B e " U p t o Me"?
A popular argument with many variations claims to demonstrate the
incompatibility of determinism and (morally important) free will as
follows:
(1) If determinism is true, whether I Go or Stay is completely
fixed by the laws of nature and events in-the distant past.
/
(2) It is not up to me what the laws of nature are, or what happened in the distant past.
(3) Therefore, whether I Go or Stay is completely fixed by circumstances that are not up to me.
(4) If an action of mine is not up to me, it is not free (in the
morally important sense).
(5) Therefore, my action of Going or Staying is not free.
Kane's libertarian response to this compelling argument is to attempt
to isolate the indeterminism of libertarian free will in a few crucial
episodes of possibility "at time t" and he hopes to locate those episodes
inside the agent, both spatially and temporally, so the agent's choices

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135

can be "up t o " the agent. But once he has allowed that the morally relevant effects of these episodes can be widely distributed in time (as in
the case of Luther), what work is there left for the boundary of the container to do? If some event in Luther's boyhood can play a crucial role
in Luther's responsibility in adulthood for his momentous decision not
to recant, why not an event in Luther's mother's life while Martin was
but an embryo? Because, presumably, those events occurred not in
Luther but outside Luther, in the external environment, however
strongly they imposed themselves on him, and hence they were not "up
to Luther." Yes, but if "the child is father to the man," isn't young
Luther just as external to adult Luther? W h y aren't Luther's youthful
dispositions, and even his later conscious episodic memories of his
youth, themselves rather remote influences "from the outside"? This is
a stretched version of the problem we encountered early in this chapter, when we wondered whether to put the memory inside the faculty
of practical reasoning or leave it outside and have portions of it
"inputted" when the occasion demanded it. T h e lines we draw don't
do any discernible work for us. And as we will see later, our own moral
agency often depends crucially on a little help from our friends without in any way being thereby diminished. T h e ideal of "do-ityourself," carried to absolutistic extremes, is superstition. It is true that
if you make yourself as small as possible, you can externalize virtually
everything. So much the worse for models that push all that matters
into a single moment, somewhere in the heart of an atom. If there is
a case to be made for libertarianism, it will have to come from some
still unexplored quarter, since the best attempt to date, Kane's, ends up
in a cul-de-sac. His Ultimate Responsibility requirement turns out, on
further examination, to burden the specs of a free agent with conditions
that are both unmotivated and undetectable. You can demand a car
with two steering wheels and a compass in the gas tank, but that doesn't
make it worth wanting.
H o w then should we respond to the incompatibilist argument? Where is the misstep that excuses us from accepting the conclusion? We can now recognize that it commits the same error as the
fallacious argument about the impossibility of mammals. Events in the
distant past were indeed not "up to me," but my choice now to Go
or Stay is up to me because its "parents"—some events in the recent
past, such as the choices I have recently made—were up to me

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Freedom Evolves

(because their "parents" were up to me), and so on, not to infinity, but
far enough back to give my self enough spread in space and time so
that there is a me for my decisions to be up to! T h e reality of a moral
me is no more put in doubt by the incompatibilist argument than is
the reality of mammals.
Before leaving the topic of libertarianism, we should ask, once
more, what the point of it might be. An indeterministic spark occurring at the moment we make our most important decisions couldn't
make us more flexible, give us more opportunities, make us more selfmade or autonomous in any way that could be discerned/rom inside or
outside, so why should it matter to us? H o w could it be a difference that
makes a difference? Well, it could be, could it not, that belief in such
a spark, like belief in God, changes the whole way you think about the
world and your life in it, even if you'll never know (in this lifetime)
whether it is true. Yes, the case for belief in indeterminism in action
must come down to something like that. But there is an important difference. Even if you can never know, never prove scientifically, that
there is a God, it is not hard to explain why a belief in a supreme and
merciful Being watching over you might comfort you, give you moral
strength and hope, and so forth. T h e belief in God is not like, say, the
belief in Gog (a large sphere of copper that orbits a star outside our
light-cone and has the letters G O G stamped prominently on its surface). Anybody is welcome to believe in Gog if it makes them feel
good, but why would it? My charge is that libertarians have inflated
perfectly reasonable desires for varieties of free will-worth wanting into
a craving for a variety of free will that would be'no more worth wanting than communion with Gog. But it is also true that however misguided such a craving is, it might be unwise to tamper with it. It might
be that until or unless a suitable substitute is found, we should tiptoe
away from further criticism of this irrational and unmotivated yearning. (Stop that crow!) But if that is so, it's too late to put the cat back in
the bag. We'd better see what can be done to help people get over their
delusion.

Chapter 4
An examination of the best positive case for lihertarianism shows that it cannot
find a defensible location for indeterminism within the decision-making processes

Notes on Sources and Further Reading

137

of a responsible agent. Since it cannot motivate its defining requirement, we can
leave indeterminism behind and consider more realistic requirements for freedom,
and how they could have evolved.

Chapter 5
Four billion years ago, there was no freedom on our planet, because there was
no life. What kinds of freedom have evolved since the origin of life, and how
did evolutionary reasons—Mother Nature's reasons—evolve into our reasons?

N o t e s o n Sources and Further R e a d i n g
/
I drew the importance of chaos to philosophers' attention in Elbow
Room (Dennett 1984). A more recent compatibilist appreciation of the
role of chaos is Matt Ridley 1999, pp. 3 1 1 - 1 3 . On where the buck
stops, see Elbow Room (p. 76), which also includes discussions of N e w tonian chaos (pp. 151—52) and the movable clutch that marks the difference between weakness of will and self-deception.
T h e discussion of snap judgments in the faculty of practical
reason is a descendant of the discussion of getting a joke that I offered
in Brainchildren (Dennett 1998A, p. 86): The complex dispositional
state of belief that determines whether or not one will laugh at a joke
depends on one's filling in many details left unsaid in the telling.
It would be odd to call the unconscious process that triggers an involuntary chuckle deliberation, but it is a sophisticated informationtransforming process in any case.
See DavidVelleman's "What Happens W h e n Someone Acts?"
(1992) on Chisholm's agent causation, and a possible reduction of it to
something more acceptable to a naturalist, a topic taken up in Chapter 8 of this book.
Theorists seldom explicitly endorse the Cartesian Theater, but
closet Cartesians can sometimes be teased into the open. For a collection of examples on display, with commentary, see my recent books
and articles on consciousness. A similar image of isolation for the sake
of authorship inspires, and distorts, some philosophers' thinking about
understanding. See my "Do-it-yourself Understanding," in Brainchildren
(Dennett 1998A), on Fred Dretske's attempt to save genuine h o m e -

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Freedom Evolves

made understanding from pre-fab simulacra that can be bought and
installed on the cheap. (According to this vision, robots may seem to
understand, but it isn't their understanding, since they didn't make it
themselves.)
On Kane's idea of parallel processing: In a piece entitled " O n
Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want" (in Dennett 1978) I
made much the same suggestion, using the example (pp. 294—95) of a
woman who had to choose between taking a j o b at the University of
Chicago, and taking a j o b at Swarthmore; either decision is rational,
and even if the choice is undetermined, when she makes whichever
choice she makes, there is a good reason for it, and it is her reason. But
I didn't take the idea very seriously, except as a crumb to throw to libertarians. Kane shows that I underestimated it.
On mammals: There is quite a literature that has grown up in
recent years on vagueness and how to deal with it. I recommend in
particular Diana Raffman (1996); she has convinced me, but if her discussion doesn't convince you, you can follow her bibliographical references to the rest.
Robert French's (1995) Tabletalk model is a deeply satisfying
architecture for the sort of stochastic decision-making process sketched
here—a toy world without moral significance, but full of insight. See
my Foreword to his book, reprinted in Brainchildren (Dennett 1998A).
Kane proposes a distinction between what he calls "Epicurean"
and "non-Epicurean" versions of indeterminism (Kane 1996, pp.
172—74). A world of Epicurean indeterminism consists of "forks in history" (modeled on the Epicureans' random swerves) interspersed among
things and events with "determinate" properties. In a non-Epicurean
world, there is "both indeterminateness of physical properties and the
possibility of forks in history." What difference does this make? "An Epicurean world in which undetermined events occurred given an entirely
determinate past—a world of chance without indeterminacy—would
be a world of mere chance, not free will. There would be no indeterminate 'gestation period' for free acts, so to speak; they would just pop
out of a determinate past one way or the other without any preparation
in the form of indeterminacy-producing tension, struggle, and conflict"
(p. 173). But what about the computer models of non-linear, chaotic,
recurrent feedback tugs-of-war? They have apparent "gestation periods"
as pregnant with (digital approximations of) indeterminacy as you like,

Notes on Sources and Further Reading

139

but they get their (pseudo-)indeterminism the Epicurean way—with
pseudo-random number generators interspersing their outputs among
the deterministic subroutines. You can't have it both ways: If, following
Paul Churchland, you want to applaud the discovery of the power of
non-linear, recurrent networks, in all their non-symbolic, non-rigid,
free-wheeling holistic openness, you have to concede that Epicurean
algorithmicity suffices to provide it, since that is what the working models are made of.

/

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141

Chapter 5

WHERE DOES ALL THE
DESIGN COME FROM?
"Excuse me, sir, can you tell me how to get to Symphony Hall?"
"Practice, practice, practice!"

f
The Boston Symphony Orchestra is notorious for giving guest conductors a hard time until they prove themselves. A young conductor,
facing his debut with the B S O and knowing their reputation, decided
to try a shortcut to respect. He was scheduled to conduct the
premiere of an unhearably discordant contemporary piece, and as he
reviewed the score a brilliant stratagem occurred to him. He found an
early crescendo in which the entire orchestra was screaming away on
more than a dozen different quarreling notes and noted that the second oboe, one of the softest voices in the orchestra, was scheduled to
play a B-natural. He picked up the part score for the second oboe, and
carefully inserted the sign for a flat—the oboe would now be instructed
to play B-flat. At the first rehearsal, he briskly led the orchestra up
through that doctored crescendo. " N o ! " he hollered, stopping the
orchestra abruptly. Then, with furrowed brow and deep concentration,
he said, "Somebody, let's see, yes, it must be . . . second oboe. You
were supposed to play B-natural and you played B-flat." "Hell, no,"
said the second oboe, "I played B-natural. Some idiot had written in
a B-flat!"

Early Days
Consider this phenomenon from the biological point of view. The
Boston Symphony Orchestra has been in existence for more than a

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Freedom Evolves

century, its personnel continuously being replaced, its finances waxing
and waning, its repertory growing and shifting as old chestnuts are
retired and new pieces explored. In many ways this fine old institution
is like a living organism, with a distinct personality, a particular history
of growth, of sickness and health, learning and forgetting, traveling
around the globe and returning to its home, replacing tired old "cells"
with new recruits, adjusting its behavior to the ecological niche in
which it flourishes. This biological perspective is compelling, and useful, but it leaves out the most amazing and important features of the
phenomenon. If biologists from another galaxy were to discover the
Boston Symphony Orchestra, what ought to impress them most are not
these remarkable similarities to animals and plants, but the dissimilarities. An organism is made of a huge team of cells, but no cell can be
anxious about the prospect of being humiliated. No cell can learn to
play the oboe, or be responsible for choosing this year's guest conductors from a list of young hopefuls. No cell can draw out the implications of the oboist's response and anticipate the catastrophic effect it
will have on the young conductor's campaign for respect.
What is remarkable about the Boston Symphony Orchestra
(and the myriad other human institutions and practices) is that, on the
one hand, they can be so beautifully designed and organized, so selfsustaining, while, on the other hand, they are composed of a motley
assortment of autonomous individuals, of different nationalities, ages,
genders, temperaments, aspirations. The orchestra members are free to
come and go as they choose, so the board of directors must work hard
to ensure that the working conditions and pay are sufficient to keep
the orchestra members well motivated. Look at the violin section.
Twenty talented individuals, but all different. Some are brilliant but lazy
while others are obsessive perfectionists; one is bored but conscientious,
another is enraptured by the music, yet another is daydreaming about
making love to that adorable cellist over there, but all of them are drawing their bows across their strings in perfect unison, a pattern robustly
superimposed on a kaleidoscope of different human consciousnesses.
What makes this concerted action possible is a massive complex of
cultural products, deeply shared by the musicians, the audience, the
composer, the conservatories, the banks, the municipal authorities, the
violin-makers, the ticket agencies, and so on. Nothing in the animal
world is a close counterpart to this complexity. H u m a n minds are

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143

furnished—and beset—by thousands of anticipations, evaluations,
projects, schemes, hopes, fears, and memories that are entirely inaccessible to the minds of even our closest relatives, the great apes. This
world of human ideals and artifacts gives individual human beings
capacities and proclivities that are strikingly different from those of any
other living beings on the planet.
The freedom of the bird to fly wherever it wants is definitely
a kind of freedom, a distinct improvement on the freedom of the jellyfish to float wherever it floats, but a poor cousin of our human freedom. Compare birdsong to human language. Both are magnificent
products of natural selection, and neither is miraculous, but human language revolutionizes life, opening up the biological world in dimensions utterly inaccessible to birds. H u m a n freedom, in part a product
of the revolution begat of language and culture, is about as different
from bird freedom as language is different from birdsong. But in order
to understand the richer phenomenon, one must first understand its
more modest components and predecessors. W h a t we must do to
understand human freedom is to follow Darwin's "strange inversion of
reasoning" and go back to a time at the beginning of life when there
was no freedom, no intelligence, no choice, but only proto-freedom,
proto-choice, proto-intelligence. We have already reviewed in outline
what happened: Simple cells eventually begat complex cells, which
eventually begat multicellular organisms, which then begat the complex macroscopic world we live and act in. N o w we must go back and
look at some of the telling details in this procession.
Suppose you just want to be alive on planet Earth. What do
you need? Starting at the molecular level, you need not just D N A , but
all the molecular tools—proteins—for accomplishing the many steps
in D N A replication. You need one protein for initiating the process,
another for unwinding the helix, another for binding the single-strand
D N A , . . . , relaxation of supercoils, chromosome segmentation/packing, and so on. N o n e of them is optional; all of them are necessary. If
you're missing any of these proteins you're out of luck. These building blocks themselves had to be designed over time. T h e complete kit,
which we share with all life on the planet today, got assembled and
refined over several billion years, and it replaces simpler kits for our still
simpler ancestors. We are dependent on our kit, and they were dependent on theirs, but we have more possibilities than they did, because the

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Freedom Evolves

improvements in our kit made possible higher forms of aggregation,
and these in turn made possible ever more devious ways of colliding
with the other things in the world, and exploiting the results of those
collisions. W h e n life began, there was just one way of being alive.
It was do A or die. N o w there are options: do A or B or C or D
or . . . die.
To live you need energy. Did the first energy exploited for life
come from the sun, or from thermal sources deep in the earth? This is
currently an open question, with a tantalizing array of hypotheses
about the origins of life competing for confirmation. However it got
started, life—most of it, in any case—eventually became dependent on
energy from the sun. To stay alive and reproduce you had to float on
or near the surface of the sea, basking in sunlight. A major innovation
occurred when some of the baskers mutated, "discovering" thereby
that instead of doing it all themselves, they could do better by engulfing and disassembling some of their neighbors, using them as a handy
store of fancy spare parts already constructed. Encroachment is what
makes life interesting. Encroachers and encroachees inaugurated an
arms race, leading to new varieties of both. Soon—in a billion years
or so—there were many "ways of making a living" (as Richard Dawkins has put it), but these many ways will always be but a Vanishing
thread of actuality in the Vast space of logical possibility. Almost every
combination of building blocks is a way of not being alive.
O n e of the most important innovations in this arms race of
competitive design was the accident known as the eukaryotic revolution, which happened some billion years ago. /The first living things,
the relatively simple cells known as prokaryotes, had the planet to
themselves for around three billion years, until one of them got invaded
by a neighbor, and the resulting team-of-two was more fit than their
uninfected cousins, so they prospered and multiplied, passing their
teamwork on to their offspring. It was an early instance of a sort of
cooperation: symbiosis, a case in which X and Y collide, but instead of
X destroying Y, or vice versa, or even worse, mutual self-destruction—
the usual result of collisions in this hard world—X and Y join forces,
creating Z, a new, bigger, more versatile thing, with better options.
This may have happened many times in the prokaryotic world, of
course, but once it happened the first time, the planet was changed for
all subsequent life. These super-cells, eukaryotes, lived alongside their

Early Days

145

prokaryotic cousins, but were enormously more complex, versatile,
and competent thanks to their hitchhikers. This was unwitting cooperation, of course. The eukaryotic teams were utterly oblivious of the
teamwork in which they engaged. They had—and needed—no appreciation of the free-floating rationale for their advantage over the competition. T h e early eukaryotes were not themselves multicellular, but
they opened up the design space of multicellular organisms since they
had enough spare parts to become different kinds of specialists. (We're
still a long way from violinists and oboists, and the teamwork of the
BSO, but we're on the road.)
The eukaryotic revolution draws our attention to the fact that
even in biological evolution, which Darwin aptly called "descent with
modification," there is plenty of room for horizontal transmission of
design. The prokaryote hosts w h o were first "infected" by their symbiotic visitors got a huge gift of competence designed elsewhere. That is,
they didn't get all their competence by vertical descent from their ancestors via their parents and grandparents and so forth. They didn't get all
their competence from their genes, in other words. They did, h o w ever, pass on this gift to all their offspring and grand-offspring through
their genes, since the genes of the invaders came to share the fate of
the nuclear genes of their hosts, traveling side by side into the next generation, which was infected at birth, one might say, with its own complement of symbionts. The clear trace of this dual path is still highly
salient today, in all multicellular creatures, including us. Mitochondria,
the tiny organelles that transform energy in each of our cells, are the
descendants of such symbiont invaders, and have their own genomes,
their own D N A . Your mitochondrial D N A , which you get only from
your mother, exists in each of your cells, alongside your nuclear
D N A — y o u r genome. (Sexual reproduction came along later; the
sperm from your father contributed none of his mitochondria in the
process of fertilization.)
Horizontal transmission of design, of information that can be
put to good uses, is the key feature of human culture, and undoubtedly the secret of our success as a species. Each of us is the beneficiary
of the design work done by countless others w h o are not our ancestors. We don't each have to "reinvent the wheel" or invent calculus or
clocks or the sonnet form. It is sometimes claimed, erroneously, that
this cultural transmission, being between genetically unrelated indi-

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Freedom Evolves

viduals, shows that human culture cannot be interpreted as an evolutionary phenomenon governed by the principles of neo-Darwinian
theory In fact, as we have just seen, horizontal transmission of good
design elements between unrelated individuals is recognized as an
important feature of evolution of early (single-celled) life, with a growing list of proven instances, a centerpiece, not an embarrassment, of
contemporary evolutionary biology.
The eukaryotic revolution was not accomplished overnight;
solutions to many problems had to be laboriously discovered by evolution before it was secure. In Chapter 2, we met the parasitic transposons, renegade genes whose deleterious effects had to be thwarted.
The process that resolved these intragenomic conflicts illustrates several important Darwinian themes: R & D is expensive, every design
must be "paid for," and evolution is forever reusing earlier designs
(paid for and copied) for new purposes. Simple prokaryotes can get
their genes expressed with relatively simple gene-reading equipment.
That is, it doesn't take very high tech to follow a prokaryote gene recipe
and build an offspring prokaryote. Fancier eukaryotic cells, however,
to say nothing of us multicellular types composed of these more complex building blocks, need a mind-bogglingly elaborate system of intermediate steps, checks and balances, so that genes can be turned on and
off at appropriate times by the indirect effects of other gene products,
and so forth. For some time biologists have had a classic chicken-andegg puzzle to contend with: H o w did this elaborate gene-regulation
machinery evolve? Multicellular life couldn't everrbegin to evolve until
most of this expensive machinery was in place, but it apparently isn't
required for simpler prokaryotic life. What paid for all that R&D? The
answer that is now emerging is that it was paid for by a civil war that
raged for roughly a billion years of early prokaryotic life. It was an arms
race within the genome, with good-citizen genes doing battle with
those transposons—freeloaders w h o copied themselves repeatedly in
the genome without providing any benefit to the whole organism. This
created lots of measures and countermeasures, such as silencing mechanisms and isolation-defeating mechanisms. (The details of these mechanisms, like the details of the mechanisms that permitted the symbiotic
unifications of genomes in the eukaryotic revolution, are beginning to
emerge, and are fascinating, but well beyond the scope of this book.)
Like modern-day arms races, the result was an expensive standoff, but

The Prisoner's Dilemma

147

the fruits of that R & D were then available for beating into plowshares:
the high-tech machinery necessary for making multicellular life forms
(McDonald 1998). So it appears that we ourselves are a "peace dividend" of sorts, like computers and Teflon and GPS, and the other hightech spin-offs of the arms race conducted by the military-industrial
complex thanks to our tax dollars.

T h e Prisoner's D i l e m m a 1
But how do these arms races actually work? What factors govern or
constrain the thrust and counterthrust of the different "sides" in these
competitions? Every circumstance in nature in which something like
cooperation arises requires explanation. (It may well begin with a happy
accident, but it can't be sustained as a happy accident. That would be
too good to be true.) This is where we need the perspective of game
theory, and its classic example, the Prisoner's Dilemma. This is a simple two-person "game" that casts shadows, both obvious and surprising, into many different circumstances in our world. Here is the basic
scenario. You and another person have been imprisoned pending trial
(on a trumped-up charge, let's say), and the prosecutor offers each of
you, separately, the same deal: If you both hang tough, neither confessing nor implicating the other, you will each get a short sentence
(the state's evidence is not that strong); if you confess and implicate the
other and he hangs tough, you go scot-free, and he gets life in prison;
if you both confess and implicate, you both get medium-length sentences. Of course, if you hang tough and the other person confesses,
he goes free and you get life. What should you do?
If you both could hang tough, defying the prosecutor, this
would be much better for the two of you than if you both confess, so
couldn't you just promise each other to hang tough? (In the standard
jargon of the Prisoner's Dilemma, the hang-tough option is called
cooperating—with the other prisoner, of course, not the prosecutor.)
You could promise, but you would each then feel the temptation—
whether or not you acted on it—to defect, since then you would go scot1. Parts of this section are drawn, with revisions, from Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Dennett
1995, pp. 253-54).

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Freedom Evolves

free, leaving the sucker, sad to say, in deep trouble. Since the game is symmetrical, the other person will be just as tempted, of course, to make a
sucker of you by defecting. Can you risk life in prison that the other
will keep his promise? Probably safer to defect, isn't it? That way, you
definitely avoid the worst outcome of all, and might even go free. Of
course, the other fellow will figure this out, too, if it's such a bright idea,
so he'll probably play it safe and defect, too, in which case you must
defect to avoid calamity—unless you are so saintly that you don't mind
spending your life in prison to save a promise-breaker—so it is likely
that you'll both wind up defecting and accepting medium-length sentences. If only you both could overcome this reasoning and cooperate!
The logical structure of the game is what matters, not this particular setting, which is a usefully vivid imagination-driver. We can
replace the prison sentences with positive outcomes (it's a chance to win
different amounts of cash or, say, descendants) just so long as the payoffs are symmetrical, and ordered so that lone defection pays more than
mutual cooperation, which pays each more than mutual defection does,
which in turn pays more than the sucker payoff one gets when the other
is a lone defector. (And in formal settings we set a further condition:
The average of the Sucker and Mutual Defection payoffs must not be
greater than the Mutual Cooperation payoff.) Whenever this structure is
instantiated in the world, there is a Prisoner's Dilemma.
Game-theoretic explorations have been undertaken in many
fields, from philosophy and psychology to economics and biology. In
evolutionary game theory, the payoffs are measured in descendants, and
the point of the models is to explore the conditions under which
PLAYER Y
COOPERATE

DEFECT

COOPERATE
PLAYER X
DEFECT

Figure 5.1

The Prisoner's Dilemma

The Prisoner's Dilemma

149

"cooperative" designs can hold their own and outproduce the otherwise always favored selfish defectors. W h y is defection the default winning strategy? Look at the payoff matrix in Figure 5.1. Whatever Player
Y does, if Player X defects, he will do better than if he cooperates.
Defection is said to dominate as a policy in the basic situation. The effect
of this on Player X's descendants as a proportion of the next generation of a population can be derived mathematically, and readily demonstrated in simulations, in which simple defector-agents of one sort or
another are matched pairwise with simple cooperator-agents of one
sort or another. They interact according to their type—defectors always
defect and cooperators always cooperate—and the outcomes (in terms
of numbers of descendants) are tallied and summed over many generations. In the absence, of special features to prevent it, the defectors
soon swamp the cooperators, sad to say. This ineluctable trend is the
prevailing wind against which all evolution of cooperation must be
pitched. T h e most influential of the many applications of gametheoretic thinking to evolutionary theory is John Maynard Smith's
concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy, or ESS, a strategy that may not
be the best imaginable but is un-subvertible by any alternative strategy
under the circumstances. The nasty world in which everybody defects
all the time is an ESS in most imaginable circumstances, since pioneer
cooperators thrown into such a population get suckered to death in
short order. There are conditions, however, in which there are other,
more heartening outcomes, and these escapes from the grim default
are the steps in the ladder leading up to us.
There can be no doubt that game-theoretic analyses work in
evolutionary theory Why, for instance, are the trees in the forest so tall?
For the very same reason that huge arrays of garish signs compete for our
attention along commercial strips in every region of the country! Each
tree is looking out for itself and trying to get as much sunlight as possible. If only those redwoods could get together and agree on some
sensible zoning restrictions and stop competing with each other for
sunlight, they could avoid the trouble of building those ridiculous and
expensive trunks, stay low and thrifty shrubs, and get just as much sunlight as before! But they can't get together. Under these circumstances,
defection from any cooperative agreement is bound to pay off w h e n ever it occurs, so if there weren't an essentially inexhaustible supply of
sunshine, trees would be stuck with the "tragedy of the commons"

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150

(Hardin 1968). The tragedy of the commons occurs when there is a
finite "public" or shared resource that individuals will be selfishly
tempted to take more of than their fair share—such as the edible fish
in the oceans. Unless very specific and enforceable agreements can be
reached, the result will tend to be the destruction of the resource. It
was the evolution of enforceable checks and balances that permitted
the cooperating genes to hold their own against the defecting transposons, one of the earliest "technological" innovations to overcome
the boringly simple world of universal selfishness, universal defection.

E Pluribus

Unutn?2

The advent of multicellularity was ushered in by another innovation
in cooperation: solving the problem of group solidarity at the cell level.
As I noted at the beginning of Chapter 1, we are each of us composed
of trillions of robotic cells, each with its own complete set of genes and
an impressive array of internal life-support machinery. W h y do these
individual cells submit so selflessly to the good of the whole team?
They have become hugely dependent on each other, of course, and cannot survive long on their own except in the particular environment
they usually inhabit, but how did they get that way? 3 O n e of the virtues
of the "gene's-eye perspective" on evolution is that it draws attention
to this issue as a serious problem. Cellular group solidarity is ubiquitous in nature; slavishly devoted cells can be found, after all, in every
living thing visible to the naked eye. Hence it is "natural," but it is

2. This section contains revised versions of a section with the same title in Chapter 16 of
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Dennett 1995).
3. Notice that I have fallen in with the standard biologists' way of speaking about biological
types (or lineages or species) as if I were talking about individuals. Our cells have "become
dependent" but none of my cells have become dependent; they were all born that way Giraffes
have grown longer necks over eons, and it took thousands of years for weaverbirds to "learn"
how to build their nests. The "growing" and "learning" here is invisible if you concentrate
on individuals. As we saw with the emergence of avoidance in Chapter 2, even when each
individual is determined to be just the way it is till the day it dies, the larger process can yield
change, improvement, growth. Some philosophers have been suspicious of this duality of
perspective—"bait and switch" is how I characterized their skepticism in Darwin's Dangerous
Idea (Dennett 1995)—but it is the key to understanding how all evolutionary R&D happens.

E Pluribus Unum?

151

nonetheless a design achievement of major proportions, not something
that biologists may take for granted. The lessons to be learned are
tricky, however, because the cells that compose us belong to two very
different categories.
The cells that compose multicellular me all share an ancestry;
they are a single lineage, the daughter cells and granddaughter cells of
the egg and sperm that united to form my zygote. They are host cells.
The other cells, the symbionts, are the same sort of things—they are
themselves eukaryotes and prokaryotes—but they count as outsiders
because they have descended from different lineages. (So this is secondgeneration symbiosis; symbiosis created your eukaryotic cells, which
have then played host in turn to a flood of newer guests!)
W h a t difference does the host/guest difference make? T h e
answer here, which will be echoed at the higher level of human social
life, is that although pedigree is often a good predictor of future competence, it is future competence that counts in the end, regardless of
pedigree. For instance, your immune system is composed of cells that
are now members in good standing of the host team, but they began
their career in your ancestors as an invading army, which was gradually co-opted and turned into a troop of mercenary guards, their own
genetic identity merged with that of the more ancient lineages they
joined forces with, another instance of horizontal transmission of
design. The key to understanding the patterns these transformations
follow is to treat all these robotic cells as tiny individual agents, as intentional systems, each with a smidgen of "rational" decision-power.
Adopting the intentional stance, leaping up from the physical stance of
component atoms, via the design stance of simple machines, to the
intentional stance of simple agenthood, is a tactic that pays off handsomely but must be used with caution. It is all too easy to miss the fact
that there are crucial moments in the careers of these various agents
and semi-agents and hemi-semi-demi-agents when opportunities to
"decide" arise, and then pass.
The cells that compose my bulk have a shared fate, but some
in a stronger sense than others. The D N A in my finger cells and blood
cells is in a genetic cul-de-sac; these cells are part of the somatic line (the
body), not the germ line (the sex cells). As Francois Jacob has m e m o rably said, the dream of every cell is to become two cells, but my
somatic line cells are doomed to die "childless"—aside from occasion-

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Freedom Evolves

ally yielding replacements for neighbors "who die in action, and barring dramatic progress in cloning techniques. Since this cul-de-sac was
determined some time ago, there is no longer any pressure, any normal opportunity, any "choice points" at which their intentional
trajectories—or the trajectories of their limited progeny—might be
adjusted. They are, you might say, ballistic intentional systems, whose
highest goals and purposes have been fixed once and for all, with no
chance of reconsideration or guidance. They are totally committed
slaves to the summum bonum of the body of which they form a part.
They may be exploited or tricked by visitors, but under normal circumstances they cannot rebel on their own. Like the Stepford Wives,
they have a single summum bonum designed right into them, and it is
not "Look out for Number O n e . " On the contrary, they are team players by their very nature.
H o w they further this summum bonum is also designed right
into them, and in this regard they differ fundamentally from the other
cells that are "in the same boat": my symbiont visitors. The benign
mutualists, the neutral commensals, and the deleterious parasites that
share the vehicle they all together compose—namely, me—each have
their own summum bonum designed into them, and it is to further their
own respective lineages, not mine. Fortunately, there are conditions
under which an entente cordiale can be maintained, for after all, they are
all in the same boat, and the conditions under which they can do better by not cooperating are limited. But they do have the "choice." It
is an issue for them in a way it is not, normally/ for the host cells.
Why? W h a t enables—or requires—the host cells to be so
committed, "while giving the visitor cells a free rein to rebel when the
opportunity arises? Neither sort of cell is a thinking, perceiving,
rational agent, of course. And neither sort is significantly more cognitive than the other. That is not where the fulcrum of evolutionary game
theory is located. R e d w o o d trees are not notably clever either, but they
are in conditions of competition that force them to defect, creating
what is, from their point of view (!) a wasteful tragedy. The mutual
cooperative agreement whereby they would all forgo growing tall
trunks in the vain attempt to gain more than their fair share of sunlight
is evolutionarily unenforceable.
The condition that creates a choice is the mindless "voting" of
differential reproduction. It is the opportunity for differential reproduc-

E Pluribus Unum?

153

tion that lets the lineages of our visitors "change their minds" or
"reconsider" the choices they have made, by "exploring" alternative
policies. My host cells, however, have been designed once and for all
by a single vote at the time my zygote was formed. If, thanks to mutation, dominating or selfish strategies occur to them, they will not flourish (relative to their contemporaries), since there is scant opportunity
for differential reproduction. (Cancer can be seen as a selfish—and
vehicle-destructive—rebellion made possible by a revision in normal
circumstances that does permit differential reproduction.)
Brian Skyrms has pointed out (1994A, 1994B) a wonderful
parallel between this multicellular policy (another benign fruit of the
civil war that created all the gene-reading machinery) and John Rawls's
monumental A TheorypjJustice (1971). The precondition for normal
cooperation in the strongly shared fate of somatic-line cells is analogous to the situation in "the original position," Rawls's thought experiment about how rational agents would choose to design an ideally just
state, if they had to choose from behind what he called the veil of ignorance. Skyrms calls this, aptly, the "Darwinian Veil of Ignorance." Your
sex cells (sperm or ova) are formed by a process unlike that of normal
cell division, or mitosis. Your sex cells are formed by a different process
called meiosis, a process that randomly constructs a half a. genomecandidate (to join forces with a half from your mate) by choosing first
a bit from "column A" (the genes you got from your mother) and then
a bit from "column B" (the genes you got from your father) until a full
complement of genes—but just one copy of each—is constructed and
installed in a sex cell, ready to try its fate in the great mating lottery.
But which daughters of your original zygote are destined for meiosis
and which for mitosis? This too is a lottery.
Is it a random lottery or a pseudo-random lottery? So far as we
know it is just like a coin toss, determined by some inscrutable and
unpatterned coincidence of impingements from w h o knows where,
and hence predictable in principle by Laplace's infinite demon, but not
by the highly sensitive and broadly based selective forces that form the
blind but effective gropings of the Blind Watchmaker. Thanks to this
mechanism, paternal and maternal genes (in you) could not ordinarily
"know their fate" in advance. T h e question of whether they are going
to have germ-line progeny that might have a flood of descendants
flowing on into the future or be relegated to the sterile backwaters of

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Freedom Evolves

somatic-line slavery for the good of the body politic or corporation
(think of the etymology) is unknown and unknowable, so there is
nothing to be gained by selfish competition among their fellow genes.
That, at any rate, is the usual arrangement. There are special occasions,
however, on which the Darwinian Veil of Ignorance is briefly lifted:
the cases of "meiotic drive" or "genomic imprinting" (Haig and
Grafen 1991; Haig 1992, 2002; for discussion, see Darwin's Dangerous
Idea [Dennett 1995, Chapter 9]), in which circumstances do permit a
"selfish" competition between genes to arise—and arise it does, leading to escalating arms races. But under most circumstances, the "time
to be selfish," for genes, is strictly limited, and once the die—or the
ballot—is cast, those genes are just along for the ride until the next
election. The parallel was perhaps first noted by E. G. Leigh:
It is as if we had to do with a parliament of genes: each acts in its
own self-interest, but if its acts hurt the others, they will combine
together to suppress it. The transmission rules of meiosis evolve
as increasingly inviolable rules of fair play, a constitution designed
to protect the parliament against the harmful acts of one or a few.
However, at loci so closely linked to a distorter that the benefits
of "riding its coattails" outweigh the damage of its disease, selection tends to enhance the distortion effect. Thus a species must
have many chromosomes if, when a distorter arises, selection at
most loci is to favor its suppression. Just as too small a parliament
may be perverted by the cabals of a few, a species with only one,
tightly linked chromosome is an easy p r e y i o distorters. (Leigh
1971, p. 249)
Just try to describe these deep patterns in nature without using
the intentional stance! T h e slow-motion patterns that are predictive
at the gene level are remarkably reminiscent of—actually previews of—
the patterns that are predictive at the psychological and social level:
opportunities, discernment and ignorance, seeking out the best moves
against the competition, avoidance and retaliation, choice and risk. The
moves and countermoves in evolutionary R & D have rationales even if
nothing and no one explicidy considered them. These are what I call
free-floating rationales, and they preceded our articulated, considered
rationales by billions of years. Among them is the fundamental principle of avoidance of harm, the same in both domains: W h e n you don't

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155

have any information about what your fate is likely to be, you cannot
avail yourself of a free choice.
And this is another way of denying people an opportunity: keeping them in the dark about it. We might call such an unrecognized and unimagined opportunity a bare opportunity. If I walk by
a row of trash cans, and one of them happens to contain a purse
full of diamonds, then I pass up a bare opportunity to become
wealthy. . . . Bare opportunities are in great abundance, but they
are not enough; when we say we want opportunities, or chances
to improve our lots, we don't want just bare opportunities. We
want to detect our opportunities, or be informed about them, in
time to act. (Dennett 1984, pp. 116-17)
Skyrms shows that when the individual elements of a group—
whether of whole organisms or their parts—are closely related (clones
or near clones) or are otherwise able to engage in mutual recognition
and assortative "mating," the simple Prisoner's Dilemma, in which the
strategy of defection always dominates, does not correctly model the
circumstances. That is "why our somatic cells don't defect; they are
clones. This is one of the conditions under which groups—such as the
group of my "host" cells—can have the harmony and coordination
required to behave, quite stably, as an "organism" or "individual." But
before we give three cheers and take this to be our model for how to
make a just society, we should pause to notice that there is another way
of looking at these model citizens, the somatic-line cells and organs:
Their particular brand of selflessness is the unquestioning obedience of
zealots, exhibiting a fiercely xenophobic group loyalty that is hardly an
ideal for human emulation.
We, unlike the cells that compose us, are not on ballistic trajectories; we are guided missiles, capable of altering course at any point,
abandoning goals, switching allegiances, forming cabals and then
betraying them, and so forth. For us, it is always decision time. For this
reason, we are constantly faced "with social opportunities and dilemmas of the sort for which game theory provides the playing field and
the rules of engagement, but not yet the solutions. Life is more complicated for people in society than it is for the cells that compose them,
and we have a lot of R & D to accomplish—"Practice, practice,
practice!"—before we get to Symphony Hall.

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Freedom Evolves

Still, it is heartening to recognize that the problems facing us
have precedents that were eventually solved by trial and error. Otherwise we wouldn't be here. Trial and error—even mindless trial and
error, with preservation of partial progress—is a potent process. It has
created genuine novelties in the world; it has solved major problems,
overcome daunting obstacles. Trial and error works, so trial works: At
least one variety of trying has a proven track record. O u r varieties of
trying may not look quite so feckless in the face of determinism when
we see how successful their ancestors have been. T h e very cells that
compose us are the direct descendants of cells that once had to solve a
huge problem of cooperation, and succeeded.

D i g r e s s i o n : T h e Threat o f G e n e t i c D e t e r m i n i s m
With all this ominous talk about cells and genes in juxtaposition with
talk about violinists and oboists, it is time, perhaps, to set minds at ease
by raising the "specter" of "genetic determinism" and banishing it
once and for all. According to Stephen Jay Gould, genetic determinists believe the following:
If we are programmed to be what we are, then these traits are
ineluctable. We may, at best, channel them, but we cannot change
them either by will, education, or culture. (Gould 1978, p. 238)
If this is genetic determinism, then we can all breathe a sigh of relief:
There are no genetic determinists. I have never encountered anybody
w h o claims that will, education, and culture cannot change many, if not
all, of our genetically inherited traits. My genetic tendency to myopia
is canceled by the eyeglasses I wear (but I do have to want to wear them);
and many of those w h o would otherwise suffer from one genetic disease or another can have the symptoms postponed indefinitely by being
educated about the importance of a particular diet, or by the culture-borne
gift of one prescription medicine or another. If you have the gene for
the disease phenylketonuria, all you have to do to avoid its undesirable
effects is stop eating food containing phenylalanine. As we have seen,
what is inevitable doesn't depend on whether or not determinism
reigns, but on "whether or not there are steps we can take, based on
information we can get in time to take those steps, to avoid the fore-

Digression: The Threat of Genetic Determinism

i57

seen harm. There are two requirements for a meaningful choice: information and a path for the information to guide. Without one, the other
is useless or worse. In his excellent survey of contemporary genetics,
Matt Ridley (1999) drives the point home with the poignant example
of Huntington's disease, -which is "pure fatalism, undiluted by environmental variability. Good living, good medicine, healthy food, loving
families or great riches can do nothing about it" (p. 56). This is in sharp
contrast to all the equally undesirable genetic predispositions that we can
do something about. And it is for just this reason that many people w h o
are likely, given their family tree, to have the Huntington's mutation
choose not to take the simple test that would tell them with virtual certainty whether they have it. But note that if and -when a path opens up,
as it may in future, for treating those w h o have the Huntington's mutation, these same people will be first in line to take the test.
Gould and others have declared their firm opposition to
"genetic determinism," but I doubt if anybody thinks our genetic
endowments are infinitely revisable. It is all but impossible that I "will
ever give birth, thanks to my Y chromosome. I cannot change this by
either will, education, or culture—at least not in my lifetime (but w h o
knows what another century of science will make possible?). So at least
for the foreseeable future, some of my genes fix some parts of my
destiny without any real prospect of exemption. If that is genetic determinism, we are all genetic determinists, Gould included. Once the caricatures are set aside, what remains, at best, are honest differences of
opinion about just how much intervention it would take to counteract one genetic tendency or another and, more important, whether
such intervention would be justified. These are important moral and
political issues, but they often become next to impossible to discuss in
a calm and reasonable way. A first step toward restoring sanity is to recognize, as a useful rule of thumb, that whenever you encounter the
"charge" of "genetic determinist" the likelihood is high that this is just
a case of Stop that crow! and doesn't warrant any more discussion, at least
not in those terms. Besides, what would be so specially bad about genetic
determinism? Wouldn't environmental determinism be just as dreadful?
Consider a parallel definition of environmental determinism:
If we have been raised and educated in a particular cultural environment, then the traits imposed on us by that environment are

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ineluctable. We may, at best, channel them, but we cannot change
them either by will, further education, or by adopting a different
culture.
T h e Jesuits have often been quoted (I don't know how accurately) as
saying: "Give me a child until he is seven, and I -will show you the
man." An exaggeration for effect, surely, but there is little doubt that
early education and other major events of childhood can have a profound effect on later life. There are studies, for instance, that suggest
that such dire events as being rejected by your mother in the first year
of life increases your likelihood of committing a violent crime (e.g.,
Raine et al. 1994). Again, we mustn't make the mistake of equating
determinism with inevitability. What we need to examine empirically—and this can vary just as dramatically in environmental settings
as in genetic settings—is whether the undesirable effects, however profound, however large, can be avoided by steps we can take. Consider
the affliction known as not knowing a word of Chinese. I suffer from it,
thanks entirely to environmental influences early in my childhood (my
genes had nothing—nothing direcdy—to do with it). If I were to
move to China, however, I could soon enough be "cured," with some
effort on my part, though I would no doubt bear deep and unalterable
signs of my deprivation, readily detectable by any native Chinese
speaker, for the rest of my life. But I could certainly get good enough
in Chinese to be held responsible for actions I might take under the
influence of Chinese speakers I encountered. /
Isn't it true that whatever isn't determined by our genes must
be determined by our environment? W h a t 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. We've seen, in Chapters 3 and 4,
that 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 all the gaps of specification left unfixed by our genes,
and unfixed by salient causes in our environment. This is particularly
evident in the way the trillions of connections between cells in our
brains are formed. It has been recognized for years that the human
genome, large as it is, is much too small to specify (in its gene recipes)
all the connections that are formed between neurons. W h a t happens

Digression: The Threat of Genetic Determinism

159

is that the genes specify processes that set in motion huge population
growths of neurons—many times more neurons than our brains will
eventually use—and these neurons send out exploratory branches, at
random (at pseudo-random, of course), and many of these happen to
connect to other neurons in ways that are detectably useful (detectable
by the mindless processes of brain-pruning). These winning connections tend to survive, while the losing connections die, to be dismantled so that their parts can be recycled in the next generation of hopeful
neuron growths a few days later. This selective environment within the
brain (especially within the brain of the fetus, long before it encounters the outside environment) no more specifies the final connections
than the genes do; saliencies in both genes and developmental environment influence and" prune the growth, but there is plenty that is left
to chance.
"""
W h e n the human genome was recently published, and it was
announced that we have "only" about 30,000 genes (by today's
assumptions about how to identify and count genes), not the 100,000
genes that some experts had surmised, there was an amusing sigh of
relief in the press. Whew! " W e " are not just the products of our genes;
" w e " get to contribute all the specification that those 70,000 genes
would otherwise have "fixed" in us! And how, one might ask, are we
to do this? Aren't we under just as much of a threat from the dread
environment, nasty old Nurture with its insidious indoctrination techniques? W h e n Nature and Nurture have done their work, will there
be anything left over to be me? (If you make yourself really small, you
can externalize virtually everything.)
Does it matter what the trade-off is if, one way or another, our
genes and our environment (including chance) divide up the spoils and
"fix" our characters? Perhaps it seems that the environment is a more
benign source of determination since, after all, "we can change the
environment." That is true, but we can't change a person's past environment any more than we can change her parents, and environmental adjustments in the future can be just as vigorously addressed to
undoing prior genetic constraints as prior environmental constraints.
And we are now on the verge of being able to adjust the genetic future
almost as readily as the environmental future. Suppose you know that
any child of yours will have a problem that can be alleviated by either
an adjustment to its genes or an adjustment to its environment. There

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Freedom Evolves

can be many valid reasons for favoring one treatment policy over
another, but it is certainly not obvious that one of these options should
be ruled out on moral or metaphysical grounds. Suppose, to make up
an imaginary case that will probably soon be outrun by reality, you are
a committed Inuit w h o believes life above the Arctic Circle is the only
life worth living, and suppose you are told that your children will be
genetically ill-equipped for living in such an environment. You can
move to the tropics, where they will be fine—at the cost of giving up
their environmental heritage—or you can adjust their genomes, permitting them to continue living in the Arctic world, at the cost (if it is
one) of the loss of some aspect of their "natural" genetic heritage.
The issue is not about determinism, either genetic or environmental or both together; the issue is about what we can change
whether or not our world is deterministic. A fascinating perspective
on the misguided issue of genetic determinism is provided by Jared
Diamond in his magnificent book Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). The
question Diamond poses, and largely answers, is "why it is that "Western" people (Europeans or Eurasians) have conquered, colonized, and
otherwise dominated "Third World" people instead of vice versa. Why
didn't the human populations of the Americas or Africa, for instance,
create worldwide empires by invading, killing, and enslaving Europeans? Is the answer . . . genetic? Is science showing us that the ultimate
source of Western dominance is in our genes? On first encountering
this question, many people—even highly sophisticated scientists—
j u m p to the conclusion that Diamond, by merely addressing this question, must be entertaining some awful racist hypothesis about European
genetic superiority. So rattled are they by this suspicion that they have
a hard time taking in the fact (which he must labor mightily to drive
home) that he is saying just about the opposite: The secret explanation
lies not in our genes, not in human genes, but it does lie to a very large
extent in genes—the genes of the plants and animals that were the wild
ancestors of all the domesticated species of human agriculture.
Prison wardens have a rule of thumb: If it can happen, it "will
happen. What they mean is that any gap in security, any ineffective prohibition or surveillance or weakness in the barriers, will soon enough
be found and exploited to the full by the prisoners. Why? The intentional stance makes it clear: The prisoners are intentional systems "who
are smart, resourceful, and frustrated; as such they amount to a huge

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161

supply of informed desire -with lots of free time in which to explore
their worlds. Their search procedure "will be as good as exhaustive, and
they will be able to tell the best moves from the second-best. Count
on them to find whatever is there to be found. Diamond exploits the
same rule of thumb, assuming that people anywhere in the world have
always been just about as smart, as thrifty, as opportunistic, as disciplined, as foresighted, as people anywhere else, and then showing
that indeed people have always found what was there to be found. To
a good first approximation, all the domesticable wild species have been
domesticated. The reason the Eurasians got a head start on technology
is because they got a head start on agriculture, and they got that because
among the wild plants and animals in their vicinity ten thousand years
ago were ideal candidates for domestication. There were grasses that
were genetically close to superplants that could be arrived at more or
less by accident, just a few mutations away from big-head, nutritious
grains, and animals that because of their social nature were genetically
close to herdable animals that bred easily in captivity. (Maize in the
Western Hemisphere took longer to domesticate in part because it had
a greater genetic distance to travel away from its wild precursor.) And,
of course, the key portion of the selection events that covered this
ground, before modern agronomy, was what Darwin called "unconscious selection"—the largely unwitting and certainly uninformed bias
implicit in the behavior patterns of people w h o had only the narrowest vision of what they were doing and why. Accidents of biogeography and hence of environment, were the major causes, the constraints
that "fixed" the opportunities of people wherever they lived. Thanks
to living for millennia in close proximity to their many varieties of
domesticated animals, Eurasians developed immunity to the various
disease pathogens that j u m p e d from their animal hosts to human
hosts—here is a. profound role played by human genes, and one confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt—and "when thanks to their technology they were able to travel long distances and encounter other
peoples, their germs did many times the damage that their guns and
steel did.
What are we to say about Diamond and his thesis? Is he a dread
genetic determinist, or a dread environmental determinist? He is neither, of course, for both these species of bogeyman are as mythical as
werewolves. By increasing the information we have about the various

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Freedom Evolves

causes of the constraints that limit our current opportunities, he has
increased our powers to avoid "what we want to avoid, prevent what
we want to prevent. Knowledge of the roles of our genes, and the genes
of the other species around us, is not an enemy of human freedom, but
one of its best friends.

D e g r e e s of F r e e d o m and the Search for Truth
The "decisions" made by lineages (of parasitic cells or of redwood trees,
for instance) can be seen only by squinting just right. You have to adopt
the intentional stance toward these curious ensembles of stuff, put time
on fast forward, and hunt for the higher-level patterns to emerge from
the mountains of data, which they do, with gratifying predictability.
The more recognizable sort of decisions, made in real time by compact, salient individuals, had to await the birth of locomotion. Yes,
trees can "decide" that spring has come and it is time to push out the
blossoms, and clams can "decide" to clam up tight when they feel an
alarming bump on their shells, but these options are so rudimentary,
so close to being simple switches, that they are decisions by courtesy
only. But even a simple switch, turned on and off by some environmental change, marks a degree of freedom, as the engineers say, and hence
is something that needs to be controlled, one way or another. A system has a degree of freedom when there is an ensemble of possibilities
of one kind or another, and which of these possibilities is actual at any
time depends on "whatever function or switch controls this degree of
freedom. Switches (either on/off or multiple-choice) can be linked to
each other in series, in parallel, and in arrays that combine both sorts
of links. As arrays proliferate, forming larger switching networks, the
degrees of freedom multiply dizzyingly, and the issues of control grow
complex and non-linear. Any lineage equipped with such an array confronts a problem: W h a t information ought to modulate passage through
this array of forking paths in a multi-dimensional space of possibilities?
That is what a brain is for.
A brain, with its banks of sensory inputs and motor outputs, is
a localized device for mining the past environment for information that
can then be refined into the gold of good expectations about the future.
These hard-won expectations can then be used to modulate your

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163

choices—better than your conspecifics can modulate their choices.
Speed is of the essence, since the environment is always changing and
teeming with competitors, but so is accuracy (since among the competitors' options are such tactics as camouflage), and so is thrift (since
everything costs something and has to pay for itself in the long run).
These conditions on evolution generate a set of trade-offs, with a premium on swift, high-fidelity, high-relevance sensory attention. The
arms race in future-production guarantees that each species "will ignore
whatever it can afford to ignore in its environment, a risky policy that
may blindside it in the future, when a heretofore bland variable in its
environment suddenly takes on fatal relevance.
This higher-order prospect of an environment rich in unanticipatable but relevant novelties poses another trade-off: Will it pay this
lineage to invest in learning? There is a substantial overhead cost:
Machinery must be installed to permit the switching networks to be
re-designable in real time, during the individual organism's own lifetime, so that it can adjust its control functions in response to new
patterns it detects in the world. Recall Drescher's (1991) distinction
between situation-action machines and choice machines mentioned in
Chapter 2. Situation-action machines are a collection of relatively simple switches, each one embodying an environmental rule of sorts: If you
encounter condition C, do A. They are cost-effective for relatively simple
organisms whose behavior is innately specified. Choice machines
have a different set of mechanisms, which embody predictions: If you
encounter condition C, doing A would result in outcome Z (with probability
p). They generate several or many such predictions, and then evaluate
them (using whatever values they have, or have developed), and this
arrangement is cost-effective for organisms that are designed to learn
during their own lifetimes. An organism can have both sorts of
machines in its kit, relying on the former for quick-and-dirty lifesaving choices and relying on the latter for serious thinking about the
future—a rudimentary faculty of practical reasoning.
Such fancy learning machinery will pay for itself only if there
are enough occasions for learning (and the learning tends to be in the
direction of new good habits, not new bad habits, of course). H o w
much is enough? That depends on the circumstances, but there is no
question that often there is not enough. "Use it or lose it" is a motto
with many applications in the animal world. For instance, the brains of

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domesticated animals are significantly smaller than the brains of their
nearest wild kin, and this is not just a by-product of selection for large
muscle mass in animals raised for food. Domesticated animals can afford
to be stupid and still have lots of offspring, for they have in effect outsourced many of their cognitive subtasks to another species, us, on
"which they have become parasitic. Like the tapeworms that have
"decided" to trust us to handle all their locomotion and food-finding
tasks for them so that they can drastically simplify their nervous systems, which they no longer need, domesticated animals would be in
tough shape without their human hosts to live off. They are not
ewdoparasites, living inside us, but they are still parasites.
We have arrived in the vicinity of the freedom of the bird,
which can fly wherever it wants. W h y does it want to fly where it "wants
to fly? It has its reasons. Its reasons are embodied in the settings of all
the switches in its brain, and are endorsed, over the long run, by its
continuing survival. Mostly, the things it cares to gather information
about are the things that matter the most to its immediate well-being.
The more pressure its ancestors have recently been under from wily
competitors, the more likely it is to carry an investment in expensive
equipment for countering that family of threats. W h e n sailors first
arrived in their sailing ships at remote islands in the Pacific inhabited
by birds "whose ancestors had not seen a predator in many thousands
of years, they found birds so incurious, so unafraid of the large moving things approaching them, that the sailors could swagger right up
and grab them. These birds could fly perfectly well, but no stealth "was
needed to capture them. They could fly "wherever they "wanted, but
they didn't have very astute "wants; there "were reasons in the offing that
they didn't know enough to make their own. They had plenty of bare
opportunities to save themselves, but they lacked the information
needed to act on them. These species of birds are largely extinct now,
of course.
The arms race of predator and prey, as "well as the competition
among conspecifics for mates, and for the means for mates—food,
shelter, territory, local standing, etc.—has given our biosphere h u n dreds of millions of years of R & D across a broad spectrum of parallel
processing in millions of species at a time. At this very moment, trillions of organisms on this planet are engaged in a game of hide-andseek. But for them it's not just a game; it's a matter of life and death.

Degrees of Freedom and the Search for Truth

165

Getting it right, not making mistakes, matters to them—indeed nothing matters more—but they don't, as a rule, appreciate this. They are
the beneficiaries of equipment exquisitely designed to get what matters right, but when their equipment malfunctions and gets matters
wrong, they have no resources, as a rule, for noticing this, let alone
deploring it. They soldier on, unwittingly. T h e difference between
how things seem and how things really are is just as fatal a gap for them
as it can be for us, but they are largely oblivious to it. T h e recognition
of the difference between appearance and reality is a human discovery.
A few other species—some primates, some cetaceans, maybe even
some birds—show signs of appreciating the phenomenon of "false
belief "—getting it wrong. They exhibit sensitivity to the errors of others, and perhaps even some sensitivity to their own errors as errors, but
they lack the capacity for the reflection required to dwell on this possibility, and so they cannot use this sensitivity in the deliberate design
of repairs or improvements of their own seeking gear or hiding gear.
That sort of bridging of the gap between appearance and reality is a
wrinkle that we human beings alone have mastered.
We are the species that discovered doubt. Is there enough food
laid by for winter? Have I miscalculated? Is my mate cheating on me?
Should we have moved south? Is it safe to enter this cave? Other creatures are often visibly agitated by their own uncertainties about just
such questions, but because they cannot actually ask themselves these
questions, they cannot articulate their predicaments for themselves or
take steps to improve their grip on the truth. They are stuck in a world
of appearances, making the best they can of how things seem and seldom, if ever, worrying about whether how things seem is how they
truly are. We alone can be racked with doubt, and we alone have been
provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-seeking
methods. Wanting to keep better track of our food supplies, our territories, our families, our enemies, we discovered the benefits of talking it over -with others, asking questions, passing on lore. We invented
culture.
It is culture that provides the fulcrum from which we can
leverage ourselves into new territory. Culture provides the vantage
point from which we can see how to change the trajectories into the
future that have been laid down by the blind explorations of our genes.
As Richard Dawkins has said, " T h e important point is that there is no

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general reason for expecting genetic influences to be any more irreversible than environmental ones" (Dawkins 1982, p. 13). But in order
to reverse any such influence, you have to be able to recognize and
understand it. It is only we human beings w h o have the long-range
knowledge capable of identifying and then avoiding the pitfalls on the
paths projected by our foresighdess genes. Shared knowledge is the key
to our greater freedom from "genetic determinism."
We haven't got to Symphony Hall yet, but we're getting closer.

Chapter 5
The wisdom inherent in the design of multicellular life forms can best be understood by adopting the intentional stance toward the whole process of evolution.
From this perspective we can discern the free-floating rationales of the cooperative "choices" in non-zero-sum games that have guided the evolutionary R&D
process to ever more sophisticated rational agents, expanding the capacity of lifeforms to recognize and act on opportunities. Turning our backs on the misguided
bugbear of "genetic determinism," we can see how evolution by natural selection provides for greater and greater degrees of freedom, but this is still not the
freedom of human agency.

Chapter 6
Human culture is neither a miracle nor a straightforward addition to the tool kit
provided to us by our genes to enhance their own fitness. In order to understand
how a person can be both a creation of and a creator of culture, we need to explore
the multi-stage evolutionary process from which culture, and human sociality,
have emerged.

N o t e s o n Sources and Further R e a d i n g
There are more extended developments of the ideas in this chapter in
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Dennett 1995), from which some of the paragraphs in this chapter are taken. John Maynard Smith's Games, Sex and
Evolution (1988; especially Chapters 21 and 22) is an excellent introductory account of game theory in evolution, as is the revised edition of
Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976). Brian Skyrms's Evolution of

Notes on Sources and Further Reading

167

the Social Contract (1996) carries the exposition through more recent
research. For an arresting overview of the trend explored in this chapter, see Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (2000).
O u r understanding of the evolutionary processes described
here, especially the conflicts between genes that can be described from
the intentional stance, is growing at a rapid pace. Many of today's specific claims (such as the number of genes in the human genome) may
well be rescinded tomorrow, but the skeleton of theory and evidence
that holds evolutionary biology together is remarkably robust and
resilient. An excellent, if difficult, book surveying the steps in the transition from the simplest life-forms to human societies is Maynard Smith
and Eors Szathmary's The Major Transitions in Evolution (1995); an easier version is their 199^ book, The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life
to the Origins of Language. For an authoritative overview of the state of
knowledge circa the end of 2000, see Evolution: From Molecules to
Ecosystems edited by Andres Moya and Enrique Font (forthcoming),
for a series of surveys on such topics as the evolution of multicellularity, conflicts that can arise in spite of the largely shared fate of mitochondrial and nuclear genes, the cost-benefit trade-offs of symbiosis,
and many other fascinating topics.
Drescher's distinction between situation-action machines and
choice machines usefully clarifies (and partially cuts across) the distinction I have drawn between Skinnerian and Popperian creatures
(Dennett 1975, 1995, 1996A).

y

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Chapter 6

THE EVOLUTION
OF OPEN MINDS

H u m a n beings are not just clever brutes, resourceful agents looking
out for themselves 4n a dangerous world, and they are not just herd
animals either, unwittingly huddling together for mutual benefit that
they needn't understand. O u r sociality is a multi-layered p h e n o m e non, replete with reverberant phenomena involving mutual recognition (of recognition of recognition . . .) and hence opportunities
galore for such distinctively human activities as promise-making and
promise-breaking, veneration and slander, punishment and honor,
deception and self-deception. It is this environmental complexity
that drives our control systems, our minds, into their own many layers of complexity, so that we can cope with the world around us
effectively—if we are normal. There are unfortunate human beings
w h o for one reason or another cannot, and they must live among us
in a reduced status, rather like pets, at best, cared for and respected,
restrained if necessary, loved and loving in their own limited ways, but
not full participants in the human social world, and, of course, lacking morally significant free will. T h e problematic boundaries between
them and the rest of us, and the supremely difficult issues that arise
w h e n individuals are up for promotion or demotion, will be the topic
of a later chapter, but in order to lay the groundwork, we need to consider further how these unique complexities of human society and
psyche evolved.

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H o w Cultural S y m b i o n t s Turn Primates into Persons
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to
shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the
worst architect from the best of bees is this—that the architect raises his structure in
imagination before he erects it in reality.
—Karl Marx, Capital

Culture makes things easier—or possible at all. And some of its changes seem more
nearly inexorable ("evolutionary") than others.

—-John Maynard Smith, "Models of Cultural and Genetic Change"
In species that lay their eggs and leave, never to share an environment
with their offspring, genes are almost the only pathway of vertical
descent or inheritance. Almost, but not quite, as we can see in a simple example: Take a species of butterfly that normally lays eggs on the
leaves of a particular kind of plant, and consider what can develop
w h e n one female happens to lay her eggs on some other kind of leaf
by accident. It is likely that the gene that is (most) responsible for this
egg-laying habit works by getting offspring to "imprint" on whatever kind of leaf they first observe on hatching. This aberrant butterfly's offspring will repeat her "mistake" and instinctively lay their
eggs on leaves that resemble their birthplace leaf. If her mistake happens to have been a happy accident, her lineage may prosper while
others perish: T h e new leaf preference will be an adaptation with no
genetic change at all.

This example highlights the element of deixis, or "pointing,"
involved in the kind of reference employed in genetic recipes. T h e
gene in the butterfly's offspring says, in effect: Lay your eggs on something that looks like this (and a little finger points blindly out, falling
on whatever target is there when the organism "looks" where the finger is pointing). Once the principle is understood, one can see it
operating everywhere, especially in the multifarious developmental
processes that depend on "cell memory." T h e butterfly didn't just
deposit D N A on that leaf; she deposited eggs, and those egg cells contain all the reading machinery and initial raw materials for following
the D N A recipes. This reading machinery, too, contains crucial infor-

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mation needed to make the offspring phenotype, and it is not coded
in the genes; the genes just "point t o " the ingredients and tell the reading machinery, in effect: Use this and that to make and fold the next
protein. 1 If we arrange to alter these elements in the immediate environment of the gene-reading process, we can produce a change in output (like the offspring's altered leaf-choosing habit) and if it happens
to be—like that habit—one that guarantees that the same alteration will
tend to recur in the next generation's gene-reading environment, we
have produced a phenotypic mutation (a mutation in the product, the
vehicle that confronts natural selection) without any mutation in the
genotype (the recipe). Cooks know that subtle changes in the texture
of flour and sugar in different countries can have a profound effect on
how their favorite recipes come out. They follow the recipe to the letter, reaching for the stuff that is called flour here, and get an unfamiliar
cake. But if the new cake is a good cake, its recipe may be copied and
followed by many cooks, creating a lineage of cakes quite distinct from
their ancestors and from their contemporary kin in the home country
(I trust that aficionados "will note the parallels between this point and
the Twin Earth industry in philosophy Those w h o don't get this parenthesis may consider themselves fortunate to be in the dark.)
Mother Nature is not a "gene-centrist." That is, the process of
natural selection doesn't favor transmitting information via genes when
the same information (roughly) can be just as reliably, and more
cheaply, provided by some other regularity in the world. There are the
regularities supplied by the laws of physics (gravity, etc.) and by the
long-term stabilities of environment that can be safely "expected" to
persevere (salinity of the ocean, composition of the atmosphere, colors of things that can be used as triggers . . .). Since these conditions
are more or less constant, they can be tacitly presupposed by the genetic
recipes and not "mentioned." (Note that cake mixes sold in boxes often
prescribe a different baking temperature, or the addition of extra flour
or water, for high-altitude cooking, an instance of variance that obliges
the recipe to mention something it could otherwise thriftily be silent
about.)

1. The genes do code information to guide the construction of the next generation's reading
machinery, of course, and to stock that generation's kitchen with raw materials, but other
sources can also contribute to that specification, as we have just seen.

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Among the regularities that can be presupposed by the gene
recipes are those that are transmitted from generation to generation by
social learning. These are just more cases of expectable environmental
regularities, but they take on further importance because of the possibility that they themselves can be subject to selectional pruning (unlike
gravity, for instance). Once the informational path of transmission is
established, and becomes "relied upon" by the genes to do some of the
carrying, it becomes subject to design improvements of its own, just
like the myriad refinements that have beefed up the processes of D N A
coding, replication, editing, and transmission over the eons. Genetic
changes that tend to prolong parent-offspring contact and interaction,
for instance, can raise the reliability of these pathways of social learning by giving them more time to operate, and then attentional biases
(watch Mom!) can evolve to tune the transmission further. T h e path
becomes a road becomes a highway, an informational channel designed
by natural selection to enhance R & D in the lineages that rely on it.
In species in which parents and offspring live together for a
time, there is a broad avenue for such vertical but non-genetic transmission of useful information or "tradition," such as food and habitat
preferences (Avital and Jablonka 2000). As we have seen, horizontal
transmission of genetically transmitted design, the sharing of useful genes
with organisms other than your offspring or parents, has also been
around since the earliest days of evolution, and has played a critical role
in many of the most brilliant advances made by evolution, but these
appear to be happy accidents, not designed pathways for spreading
designs. Horizontal transmission of non-genetic information is a much
more recent innovation in multicellular life-forms equipped with perceptual systems (animals, in short). Nowhere are its powers more evident than in our species, but we are not alone in enjoying its benefits.
Monkeys being studied on a Japanese island have famously learned by
imitation or observation the trick of cleaning wheat thrown on the
beach by throwing sandy handfuls of it into the sea and then scooping
the floating grains from the surface, and there is reason to believe that
the dam-building technologies passed on by adult beavers to their
young may include a substantial measure of observation and learningby-imitating, if not formal instruction. There are, as usual in biology,
some nice intermediate examples to illuminate the contrasts. M o u n tain goats trample a network of best-route paths across their territory,

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bequeathing this usefully prepared environment, as tidy as any human
road system, not only to their offspring and grandoffspring, but to all
the creatures w h o move through the area. Is this cultural transmission?
Yes and no. The preservation of the uniformity relied upon depends
on repetition of actions by individual goats, w h o have to be able to see
what the other goats are doing. Is that imitation? What exactly is being
replicated? It is hard to say.
But there is one species, Homo sapiens, that has made cultural
transmission its information superhighway, generating great ramifying
families of families of families of cultural entities, and transforming its
members by the culturally transmitted habit of vigorously installing as
much culture as possible in the young, as soon as they can absorb it.
This innovation in horizontal transmission is so revolutionary that the
primates that are its-hosts deserve a new name. We could call them
euprimates—superprimates—if we wanted a technical term. Or we
could use the vernacular and call them persons. A person is a hominid
with an infected brain, host to millions of cultural symbionts, and the
chief enablers of these are the symbiont systems known as languages.
Which came first, language or culture? Like most chicken-andegg puzzles, this one seems paradoxical only when you look at it simplistically It is true that full-blown language can't flourish as an
institution among the members of a species until there is a community
of sorts, with norms, and traditions, and recognition of individuals, and
mutually understood roles. So there is a case to be made for the claim
that some sort of culture precedes—and must precede—language.
Chimpanzee communities have norms and traditions (of sorts), and
recognition of individuals, and mutually understood roles (of sorts)
without language, and they also show some modest cultural transmission: traditions or "technologies" for cracking nuts, fishing for termites,
sponging water out of hard-to-reach sources. They even have some
proto-symbols; in at least one chimp community, the slyly lascivious
stroking of a plucked blade of grass by a male apparently means, to an
onlooking female, something like "Va-va-voom!" or "Would you like
to come up and see my etchings?" There are differences in hand clasps
during grooming rituals that seem to be culturally, not genetically,
transmitted. Looking back in our own evolutionary history, there is
evidence (still hotly debated) of hominid control of fire going back a
million years, and this was surely a culturally transmitted practice (not

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genetically transmitted, like the nest-digging practices of digger wasps),
and yet language may well be a much more recent innovation, with
estimates ranging from hundreds of thousands to only tens of thousands
of years ago.
Culture and cultural transmission can exist without language,
and not just in us hominids, and in chimpanzees, our closest surviving
relatives. But it is language that opens the floodgates of cultural transmission that set us apart from all other species. Elaborate linguistic
culture has apparently evolved only once on this planet—so far. (Neanderthals probably had language, so at one time there may have been
two language-using species sharing the planet, but if so, they probably
both inherited it from their shared ancestor.) W h y haven't other species
discovered this magnificent suite of adaptations? T h e list of features
unique to Homo sapiens is familiar: control of fire, agriculture (but don't
forget the fungus-farming ants), complex tools, language, religion, war
(but remember the ants), art, music, weeping, and laughter. . . . In
which order did these specialties emerge, and why? The historical facts
are remote in time, but not quite inert; they do leave fossil traces that
can be studied today by anthropologists, archaeologists, evolutionary
geneticists, linguists, and others. What binds together all the interpretations of the data and governs the ongoing debates is Darwinian thinking—and it is not just about genes. Sometimes it is not about genes at
all. Language has evolved only once, but languages have been evolving
ever since the first language-using group split up into subgroups, and
although there have definitely been genetic responses to the advent of
language (brains have evolved anatomically to make them better wordprocessors), it is very unlikely that any of the evolved differences
between, say, Finnish and Chinese, or Navajo and Tagalog, are due to
any of the faint genetic differences that can be discerned (using sophisticated statistical analysis) between the human populations w h o speak
these languages as their native tongue. Any human infant can learn any
human language it is exposed to with equal ease, so far as we know. So
the evolution of languages is not directly about the evolution of genes,
but it has still been governed by the Darwinian constraints: All R & D
is costly, and every new design has to pay for itself one way or another.
If grammatical complexity of one sort or another persists, for instance,
it does so for a reason, since everything in the biosphere is up for
renewal, revision, or cancellation, all the time. Customs and habits will

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go extinct just as certainly as species, unless something keeps them
going. Elaborate innovations—of language or of other human practices—don't just happen; they happen for reasons.
The question is: whose reasons? The lawyers ask "Cui bono?"—
who benefits? To answer this question properly we need to make a bold
leap of the imagination—without any magic feather to help us. You
will notice, when you leap, a noisy crowd of hysterical bystanders
warning you not to do it, imploring you to turn your back on this
dangerous idea. T h e topic we are about to broach has an unparalleled
power to upset the guardians of tradition and turn up the volume, but
not the accuracy, of their criticisms. We are about to consider the
prospect of memes, cultural replicators parallel to genes, and many w h o
have considered the prospect just hate it. Let's try to understand it, first,
and see if it is realryso hateful. I will do my best to render vivid the
grounds for the hatred, so as not to be accused of sugarcoating a poisonous idea, starting right now.
We see an ant laboriously climbing up a stalk of grass. W h y is
it doing that? W h y is that adaptive? What good accrues to the ant by
doing that? That is the wrong question to ask. No good at all accrues
to the ant. Is it just a fluke, then? In fact, that's exacdy what it is: a fluke!
The ant's brain has been invaded by a lancet fluke (Dicrocoelium dendriticum), one of a gang of tiny parasitic worms that need to get themselves into the intestines of a sheep or cow in order to reproduce.
(Salmon swim upstream; these parasitic worms drive ants up grass stalks,
to improve their chances of being ingested by a passing ruminant.) The
benefit is not to the reproductive prospects of the ant but the reproductive prospects of the fluke.2
In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins pointed out that
we can think of some cultural items—which he dubbed memes—as
parasites, too. They use human brains (instead of sheep stomachs) as
their temporary homes, and j u m p from brain to brain to reproduce.
Like the lancet flukes, they have been getting better and better at

2. Strictly speaking, to the reproductive prospects of the fluke's genes (or the fluke's
"group'"s genes), for as Sober and Wilson (1998) point out (p. 18) in their use of
D. dendriticum as an example of altruistic behavior, the fluke that actually does the driving
in the brain is a sort of kamikaze pilot, who dies without any chance of passing on its own
genes, benefiting its (asexually reproduced) near-clones in other parts of the ant.

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negotiating this elaborate cycle (because of all the competition
between memes for limited places in brains) and, also like the lancet
flukes, they don't need to have a clue about how or why they do this.
They are ingeniously designed informational structures that unwittingly exploit thinkers, but they aren't themselves thinkers. They don't
have nervous systems; they don't even have bodies, in the ordinary
sense. They are actually more like a simple virus than a w o r m
(Dawkins 1993), because they travel light, instead of making a big
body to move around in. Basically, a virus is just a string of nucleic
acid (a gene) with attitude. (It also has a protein overcoat of sorts; a
viroid is an even more naked gene, lacking the overcoat.) Similarly, a
m e m e is an information-packet with attitude—a recipe or instruction
manual for doing something cultural.
Memes are thus analogous to genes. What is a meme made of?
It is made of information, which can be carried in any physical
medium. Genes, genetic recipes, are all written in the physical medium
of D N A , using a single canonical language, the alphabet of C, G, A,
and T, triplets of which code for amino acids. Memes, cultural recipes,
similarly depend on one physical mediuin or another for their continued existence (they aren't magic), but they can leap around from
medium to medium, being translated from language to language, just
like . . . recipes! Whether written in English in ink on paper, or spoken in Italian on videotape, or stored in a diagrammatic data structure
on a computer's hard disk, the very same recipe for chocolate cake can
be preserved, transmitted, copied. Since the propfof the pudding is in
the eating, the likelihood of a recipe getting any of its physical copies
replicated depends (mainly) on how successful the cake is. H o w successful the cake is at what? At getting a host to make another copy of
the recipe and pass it on. Cui bono? Typically the eaters of the cake benefit, and that is why they treasure the recipe, making copies of it, and
passing it on, but whether or not these "hosts" benefit, if one way or
another the cake can encourage them to pass on the recipe, the recipe
itself will benefit in the only way that matters for recipes: by being
copied and thus prolonging its lineage. (We can imagine, for instance,
that the recipe might be for making a cake that is, in fact, highly toxic
but contains a powerful hallucinogen that gives people w h o eat it an
overpowering, obsessive desire to make more copies of the recipe and
share them with their friends.)

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In the domain of memes, the ultimate beneficiary, the beneficiary in terms of which the final cost-benefit calculations must apply,
is: the meme itself, not its carriers. This is not to be heard as a bold
empirical claim, ruling out (for instance) the role of individual human
agents in devising, appreciating, and securing the spread and prolongation of cultural items. My claim is rather that we may adopt a perspective or point of view from which a wide variety of different
empirical claims can be compared, including the traditional claims, and
the evidence for them considered in a neutral setting, a setting that does
not prejudge these questions. At first glance, this vision of culture may
look more ominous than promising. If this is a kind of freedom, it is a
strange kind indeed, it seems, and not in any way preferable to the
bird's ignorant, if blissful, freedom to fly where it wants. In the analogy with the fluke, we are invited to consider a meme to be like a parasite that commandeers an organism for its own replicative benefit, but
we should remember that such hitchhikers or symbionts can be classified into three fundamental categories: parasites, whose presence lowers the fitness of their host; commensals, whose presence is neutral
(though, as the etymology reminds us, they "share the same table");
and mutualists, whose presence enhances the fitness of both host and
guest. Since these varieties are arrayed along a continuum, the boundaries between them need not be too finely drawn; just where benefit
drops to zero or turns to harm is not something to be directly measured by any practical test, though we can explore the consequences
of these turning points in models. We should expect memes to come
in all three varieties, too. Some memes surely enhance our fitness, making us more likely to have lots of descendants (e.g., methods of hygiene,
child-rearing, food preparation); others are neutral—but may be good
for us in other, more important regards (e.g., literacy, music, and art)—
and some memes are surely deleterious to our genetic fitness, but even
they may be good for us in other ways that matter more to us (the techniques of birth control are an obvious example). Trivially, the memes
that persist will be those whose own fitness as replicators is greater,
whatever their effects on our fitness, or indeed on our well-being in
any sense. Thus it is a mistake to assume that the natural selection of a
cultural trait is always "for cause"—always because of some perceived
(or even misperceived) benefit it provides to the host. We can always ask
if the hosts, the human agents that are the vectors, perceive some ben-

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efit and (for that reason, good or bad) assist in the preservation and
replication of the cultural item in question, but we must be prepared
to entertain the answer that they do not. In other words, we must consider as a real possibility the hypothesis that the human hosts are, individually or as a group, either oblivious to, or agnostic about, or even
positively dead set against some cultural item, which nevertheless is able
to exploit its hosts as vectors. As George Williams has said,
Within a society a meme may indeed enhance the happiness or
fitness of its bearer, or it may not. If it can be horizontally transmitted at a greater rate than its bearer can reproduce, that bearer's
fitness becomes largely irrelevant. The progress of cigarette smoking leaves a trail of corpses no less dead than those felled by a clone
of spirochetes. (Williams 1988, p. 438)
There are many unanswered questions about memes, and many
objections. Can the meme's-eye perspective be turned into a proper science of memetics, or is it "just" a vivid imagination-stretcher, a philosophical tool or toy, a metaphor that can't be made literal? It is too soon
to tell. Most of the arguments that have been deployed against a science
of memetics have been misguided and misinformed, and they betray a
distinct whiff of disingenuousness or desperation. This is particularly
evident when these arguments get repeated by people who manifestly
don't understand them, since they faithfully and uncomprehendingly
replicate minor errors that somehow got into the germ line! My favorite
bad objection is the claim that cultural evolution isr "Lamarckian," so it
can't be "Darwinian," a mantra with several ill-considered variants,
none of which hold water. 3 But it sounds good, doesn't it? It sounds
like a sophisticated objection that must really hit those pesky ultraDarwinians right where they live. (Stop that crow!) Pioneering research
efforts now under way may mature into a substantial new discipline of

3. Briefly, Lamarckianism is the heresy of genetic transmission of acquired characteristics, but
whose acquired characteristics—the memes' or their hosts'? Hosts pass on acquired parasites
to their offspring all the time—no Lamarckian heresy there—and since memes have no
germ-line/somatic-line distinction, there is no clear distinction between a mutation and an
acquired characteristic of a meme. If "cultural evolution is Lamarckian" means either of these
things, it is no objection to memetics; if it means something else, this has yet to emerge from
the smoke screen.

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memetics and prove these critics wrong. (Eat that crow!) Or they may
not. There are still serious obstacles and objections that need to be met.
(See the notes on further reading at the end of the chapter.) As I say, it
is too soon to tell, but it doesn't matter for our purposes, because the
main contribution from memes that we need on this occasion is, in fact,
"just" philosophical or conceptual—and no less valuable for that: The
meme's-eye perspective lets us appreciate a possibility that is otherwise
very hard to take seriously As we saw in Chapter 4 on libertarianism,
there is a powerful conviction among many thinkers that somehow we
have to be liberated from our brute biological heritage, if we are to have
free will that matters morally. Since we can't engage in magical moral
levitation, and we can't harness the quanta to carry us above our biology, we will have to loqk elsewhere for our liberation. Richard Dawkins
closes The Selfish Gene with a ringing declaration:
We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if
necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. . . . We are
built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we
have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth,
can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. (Dawkins
1976, p. 215)
But how can " w e " do that? Dawkins doesn't say, but I think
that the meme's-eye perspective, in fact, opens up just the prospects
we need to fulfill his claim. It will take more than a few steps. The first
is simply this: We can recognize that access to memes—good, bad, and
indifferent—does have the effect of opening up a world of imagination to human beings that would otherwise be closed off. T h e salmon
swimming upstream to spawn may be wily in a hundred ways, but she
cannot even contemplate the prospect of abandoning her reproductive
project and deciding instead to live out her days studying coastal geography or trying to learn Portuguese. The creation of a panoply of new
standpoints is, to my mind, the most striking product of the euprimatic
revolution. Whereas all other living things are designed by evolution
to evaluate all options relative to the summum bonum of reproductive
success, we can trade that quest for any of a thousand others as readily
as a chameleon can change color. Birds and fish and even other m a m mals are quite immune to fanaticism, an affliction of cultural infection
unique to our species, but, ironically, culture makes us susceptible to

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such pathologies by making us open-minded about ends and means in a
way no other animals are.
W h e n an agent or intentional system makes a decision about
which is the best course of action, all things considered, we need to
know from whose perspective this optimality is being judged. A more
or less default assumption, at least in the Western world, and especially
among economists, is to treat the agent as a sort of punctate, Cartesian
locus of well-being. What's in it for me? Rational self-interest. But
while there has to be something in the role of the self—something that
defines the answer to the Cui bono? question for the decision-maker
under examination, there is no necessity in this default treatment, comm o n as it is. A self-as-ultimate-beneficiary can in principle be indefinitely distributed. I can care for others or for a larger social structure,
for instance. There is nothing that restricts me to a me as contrasted to
an us. (If you make yourself really small you can externalize virtually
everything.)
O n e tradition would speak here of "selfless" caring, but this
creates more problems than it solves: T h e quest for "true" selflessness
is a mission that is guaranteed to fail. It must fail not because we're no
angels (we're no angels, but that's not the problem), but because the
defining criteria of true selflessness are systematically elusive, as we shall
see. It is better to think of the human capacity to rethink one's summum bonum as the possibility of extending the domain of the self. I can
still take my task to be looking out for N u m b e r O n e while including
under Number O n e not just my own living body, but my family, the
Chicago Bulls, Oxfam . . . you name it. Here is one good reason for
treating the self this way: Suppose I am an agent in a bargaining situation, or in a Prisoner's Dilemma, or faced with a coercive offer, or an
attempt at extortion. My problem is not resolved, or diminished, or
even significantly adjusted, if the "self" I am protecting is other than
my proper self, if I am not just trying to save my own skin, so to speak.
An extortionist or a benefactor w h o knows what I care about is in a
position to frame the situation to hit me where it matters to me, whatever matters to me.
We have arrived at the doors of Symphony Hall, but there is
much more to be explored. We have to see how cultural evolution,
sometimes in harness with biological evolution, can produce the social
conditions that compose the conceptual atmosphere, the air we

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breathe, when we conduct ourselves with the conviction that we are
often free, in a morally important sense, to do whatever we decide.

T h e Diversity o f D a r w i n i a n Explanations
Ethical ideas, political, religious, scientific ideas—all of these ideas and
the institutions that embody them have arisen in very recent biological time, and not by magic. Culture didn't just descend on a band of
hominids one day like a cloud of airborne germs. In order to understand how culture-borne ideas came to enlarge our selves, we have to
look at the structure of the environment in which these ancestral agents
must have acted. Whe/i we do this, we see a wide and largely unexplored variety of Darwinian hypotheses to test in our investigation of
the history that has created our cultural heritage, and the reasons for
the various parts of it.
W h e n the cultural environment changes, a culture-borne habit
can evaporate overnight, and this can send ripples back through the
selective environment, so that there is a potent feedback cycle that
speeds up evolution, often in directions we may come to regret. C o n sider a few examples. Walt Disney's cartoon feature Bambi was released
in 1942 and changed American attitudes toward deer-hunting in the
space of a few years (Cartmill 1993). Today the deer population in parts
of the United States has become a serious public health problem, creating a minor epidemic of Lyme disease, spread by deer ticks w h o bite
human beings w h o like to walk in wild country. In a single generation
aluminum pots displaced the traditional Sukuma baskets of the masonzo
culture along the shores of Lake Victoria in Africa:
These watertight baskets were woven by women and used at celebrations as vessels for consuming vast quantities of pombe, a millet beer. . . . Blades of grass dyed with manganese were woven
into the baskets in geometric patterns with a symbolic significance. It wasn't always possible to find out what the patterns
meant because the arrival of the mazabethi—the aluminum dishes
named after Queen Elizabeth that had been introduced on a large
scale under British rule—had signified the end of the masonzo culture. I spoke to an old woman in a little village who, after more

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than thirty years, was still incensed about the mazabethi. . . . "Sisi
wanawake, we women, we used to weave baskets while sitting
around and chatting with each other. I don't see anything wrong
with that. Each woman did her best to make the most beautiful
basket possible. The mazabethi put an end to all that." (Goldschmidt 1996, p. 39)
Even more sad is the effect reported of the introduction of steel axes
to the Panare Indians of Venezuela.
In the past, when stone axes were used, various individuals came
together and worked communally to fell trees for a new garden.
With the introduction of the steel ax, however, one man can clear
a garden by himself. . . collaboration is no longer mandatory nor
particularly frequent. (Milton 1992, pp. 37-42)
These people lost their traditional "web of cooperative interdependence," and now they are also losing a great deal of the knowledge they
have amassed over centuries, of the fauna and flora of their own world.
Often their very languages are extinguished, in a generation or two.
Could something like that happen to us? Are there gifts from technology or science that could wreak as much havoc to our cultural milieu as
these simple steel axes did to theirs? W h y not? O u r culture is made of
the same sort of stuff as theirs. {Stop that crow!—only now, perhaps, we
can all see that there actually might be good reasons to stop that crow.)
These examples show that culturally maintained features are
highly volatile and easy to extinguish under some conditions, which is
unsettling. But it is also hopeful. A cultural malignancy—such as a tradition of slavery or abuse of women—can sometimes be made to evaporate in as short a time, thanks to a few practical adjustments. N o t all
cultural features are so delicate. A culturally enforced habit may long outlive its usefulness, persisting thanks to sanctions imposed by the m e m bers of the culture, w h o may be oblivious to or only dimly appreciate
the original rationale of their habit-turned-tradition. A taboo against
eating pork, for instance, could have had an entirely sound rationale
(free-floating or not) when it was first established, a rationale that lapsed
long ago but is no longer required for the maintenance of the taboo.
And if a feature is genetically anchored, the time lag between the cessation of its raison d'etre and its extinction can be measured in hundreds

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Explanations

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of generations. O u r sweet tooth, to take a well-worn example, made
excellent sense back in our hunter-gatherer days, when energygathering was a matter of life or death. Now, with sugar ubiquitous in
our environment, it is a curse that we must overcome with a variety of
culture-borne countermeasures. (Hands up, all you genetic determinists w h o think this is impossible—hmm, I don't see any hands.)
There are numerous possibilities for complex interactions
between genetic and cultural (and other environmental) factors. The
differences in timescale alone ensure that. Consider, for instance, an
incomplete survey of the possibilities for a Darwinian account of religion. 4 Religion is ubiquitous in human culture, and it flourishes in spite
of its considerable costs. Any phenomenon that apparently exceeds the
functional cries out fo/r explanation. We don't marvel at a creature
doggedly grubbing irr the earth with its nose, for we figure it is seeking
its food; if, however, it regularly interrupts its rooting with somersaults,
we want to know why. What benefits are presumed (rightly or wrongly)
to accrue to this excess activity? From an evolutionary point of view,
religion appears to be a ubiquitous penchant for somersaults /of the most
elaborate sort, and as such it demands an explanation. There is no dearth
of hypotheses. Religion (or some feature of religion) might be like:
Money: It is a well-designed cultural addition whose ubiquity
can be readily explained and even justified: It's a Good Trick
that one would expect to be rediscovered again and again, a
case of convergent social evolution. T h e society benefits. (It is
somewhat like the pheromone trails laid down by social insects
to coordinate the activities of their fellows—its utility can be
understood only in the context of the group, raising all the
issues of group selection.)
A pyramid scheme: It is a cleverly designed con game passed on
(culturally) through the generations of an elite, w h o use it to
take advantage of their conspecifics. Only the elite benefit.
A pearl: It is the beautiful by-product of a rigid, genetically
controlled mechanism responding to an unavoidable irritation;
the organism thus protects itself from internal damage.

4. The next few paragraphs are drawn, with revisions, from Dennett 1997A.

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A bowerbird's bower: It is the product of something analogous
to runaway sexual selection, the elaboration of biological
strategies caught on a positive feedback escalator.
Shivering: This apparently pointless agitation of the body actually has a benign role to play in maintaining the homeostatic
balance, by raising the body temperature. T h e shiverer benefits, in most but not all circumstances in which it occurs.
Sneezing: Invading parasites have commandeered the organism
and are driving it to destinations that benefit them, whatever its
effects on the organism, like the fluke in the ant's brain.
The truth about religion might well be an amalgam of several of
these hypotheses, or others. But even if this is so—especially if this is so—
we will not get a clear vision of why religion exists until we have clearly
distinguished these possibilities and put each of them to the test. They
do not all pull in the same direction, but they are all instances of Darwinian thinking. All of the hypotheses seek to explain religion by uncovering some benefit, some work done to pay the costs, but they differ
strikingly on the answer to Cui bono? Is it the group that benefits, or the
elite, or the individual organism, or is it a "red queen effect" in which
all parties have to run as fast as they can just to stay even, or is there yet
some other evolutionary beneficiary? And none of these hypotheses
invoke a "gene for religion"—though genes play a major role in setting
up some of these possible preconditions for some aspects of religion.
There may, of course, actually be such things as genes for religion. For instance, heightened "religiosity" is a defining symptom of
certain forms of epilepsy, and it is known that there are genetic predispositions for epilepsy. It could be that cultural environments—sets of
traditions and practices and expectations—become amplifiers and
shapers of certain rare phenotypes, tending to turn them into shamans
or priests or prophets whose message is whatever the local message is
(it's like learning your native tongue). In just such a way the "gift of
prophecy" could actually "run in the family"—there would be a gene
for it in exactly the same way there are genes for myopia or hypertension. (Yes, yes, I know; "strictly speaking" there are no such things as
genes for myopia or hypertension; those so-called genes are only predispositions for those conditions. Stop that crow!) If there are any genes

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for religion, this is, in fact, one of the least interesting and least informative of the Darwinian possibilities. M u c h more important is the evolution (and maintenance, in the face of extinction) of the conditions
that might do the amplifying, and this is almost certainly not governed
by genes at all. It is cultural evolution.
While I'm fending off caricatures of Darwinian thinking, I
might as well sound an alert about another of them, which I will call the
nudist fallacy. The American Sunbather magazine (a few issues of which
came into my sweaty hands when I was a youngster) made a big deal, as
I recall, about the essential naturalness of nudity. It was a return to our
unclothed animal heritage, a way we could all get in touch with "the
way Mother Nature intended us to be." Nonsense. N o t the part about
what Mother Nature intends—I am quite happy to defend the use of this
vivid phrase as shorthand for the free-floating rationales of the designs
evolution discovers and endorses. What is nonsense is the idea that what
Mother Nature intends is ipso facto good (for us now). By all means take
your clothes off whenever the spirit moves you, but don't make the mistake of supposing that by thus being "natural" you're improving your
condition in some way. (In fact, clothing is just as natural for our species
as a borrowed shell is for a hermit crab, w h o would be most unwise to
scurry around in the nude.) Myopia is natural, but thank goodness for
eyeglasses. Mother Nature intended us to eat all the sweet things we
could lay our hands on, but this is not a good reason for going with that
instinct. Many of the culturally evolved features of human life are quite
obviously cost-effective correctives for one superannuated "instinct" or
another (Campbell 1975)—and other features, as we shall see, are correctives to those correctives, and so forth. The Darwinian processes are
launched by the underlying competition among alleles in genomes, but
in our species the adaptations leave the launching pad far behind.

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Freedom Evolves

N i c e Tools, but You Still H a v e t o U s e T h e m
Our opinions, gently nudged by circumstance, revise themselves under cover of
inattention. We tell them, in a steady voice, No, I'm not interested in a change at
present. But there is no stopping opinions. They don't care about whether we want
to hold them or not; they do what they have to do.
—Nicholson Baker, The Size of Thoughts
In the past few decades, everyone has read or seen an endless number of books
devoted to the culture of narcissism, of disbelief of desire, or whatever. The argument
in these books is always the same: what you imagine are your well-founded beliefs or
preferences turn out to be nothing more than a set of reflexes implanted in you by the
hidden assumptions of your "culture." You're not a skeptic about religion because
you don't believe in the story of Noah and the Ark but because you are a member of
the culture of disbelief

—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker (May 24, 1999)
O n e further source of resistance to Darwinian thinking in this charged
context needs to be exposed and disarmed before we can proceed
comfortably. A deep and persistent misunderstanding of Darwinian
thinking is the idea that whenever we give an evolutionary explanation of a human phenomenon, in terms of either genes or memes, we
must be denying that people think! This is sometimes a by-product of
the caricature of genetic determinism, whose imaginary adherents say:
"People don't think, they just have lots of unthinking instincts." But
it can also be found in a caricature (sometimes, I must admit, a selfcaricature) of theorists of cultural evolution who say, in effect: " M y
memes made me do it!"—as if memes (say, the memes of calculus or
quantum physics) could do their work in their human hosts without
requiring those human beings to do any thinking. Memes depend on
human brains as their nesting places; human kidneys or lungs wouldn't
do as alternative sites, because memes depend on the thinking powers
of their hosts. Being involved in thinking is a meme's way of being put
through its paces and tested by natural selection, just as getting one's protein recipe followed and getting the result out in the world is a g e n e ' s w a y of

being tested. If memes are tools for thinking (and many of the best of
them are just that), they have to be wielded for their phenotypic effects
to show up. You still have to think.

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187

It is true that a good Darwinian model of thinking will not
look just like the traditional models. We do need to replace the bad old
Cartesian model of a central, non-mechanical res cogitans, literally a
thinking thing, that does the serious spiritual work. T h e Cartesian T h e ater, the imaginary place in the center of the brain "where it all comes
together" for consciousness (and thinking) must be dismanded, and all
the thinking work must be distributed to less fantastic agencies. In the
next chapter, we will look in more detail at what follows from the fact
that our thinking tasks get outsourced to semi-independent neural
subcontractors in competition with each other, but the thinking still
has to get done, and wherever thinking gets done, people do things for
reasons that are their reasons.
So it is not a c&se of memes versus reasons. It is not even a case
of memes versus good~reasons. Explanations that purport to account for
one thing or another by citing the reasoning done by thinking agents
are not ruled out by a sound Darwinian approach. Far from it. The only
position on reasons that memetics contradicts is the well-nigh incoherent position that supposes reasons somehow exist without support
from biology at all, hanging from some Cartesian skyhook. A parody
will expose the fallacy: " T h e people at Boeing are under the ludicrous
misapprehension that they have figured out the design of their planes on
sound scientific and engineering principles, and proven rigorously that
the designs are as they should be, when in fact memetics shows us that
all these design elements are simply the memes that have survived and
spread among the social groups to which those airplane manufacturers
belong." It is true, of course, that those memes have done well in
those circles, but that does not compete with the good old-fashioned
explanation in terms of well-planned, well-organized, well-conducted
rational research and development. It supplements such an explanation.
W h y would anyone think otherwise? Aside from occasional
confusions on this score on the part of some would-be Darwinians, and
aside from the caricatures, there is a more interesting reason. It has
sometimes seemed that would-be memeticists deny any role to thinking because they occasionally mimic the perspective typically adopted
by population geneticists, who deliberately ignore the actual operation
of the phenotypes whose differential reproductive success determines
the fate of the genes being studied. Population geneticists tend to shun
all discussion of the bodies, structures, and real-wo rid events that some-

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Freedom Evolves

how compose selection events and instead just talk about the effects on
the gene pool of one hypothesized change or another. It's as if lions
and antelopes didn't actually lead lives, but just either procreated or not,
depending on the fitness scores their bodies got. Imagine a tennis tournament in which the contestants just strip to the buff and get carefully
examined, pairwise, by sports doctors and coaches w h o vote on which
of each pair advances to the next round, until a winner is declared.
Population geneticists would appreciate the point of such a strange
practice, but would acknowledge that since the judges' criteria ought
to be grounded in the rough-and-tumble of actual play, it is better to
let the players go at it and let their actual contests decide the winners.
Still, they would insist, you don't have to watch. Here is an expression
of the standard rationale:
As long as the proximate mechanisms result in heritable variation,
adaptations will evolve by natural selection. There is a sense in
which the specific proximate mechanism doesn't matter. If we
select for long wings in fruit flies and get long wings, who cares
about the specific developmental pathway? If the brainworm has
evolved to sacrifice its life so that its group will end up in the liver
of a cow, who cares how (or if) it thinks or feels as it burrows into
the brain of the ant? (Sober and Wilson 1998, p. 193)
Similarly, the tussles among memes in brains can be ignored (after all,
it's so messy and complicated) and we can stand back and just tabulate
eventual winners and losers, but we mustn't forget that the contests do
go on. Thinking happens, and how thinking happens affects which
memes do well.
The Darwinian algorithms of evolution are substrate-neutral.
They are not about proteins, or D N A , or even carbon-based life; they
are about the effects of differential replication with mutation wherever
it occurs, in whatever medium. This is especially important when we
turn, as we are about to, to the evolution of morality. To appreciate this
neutrality, consider a fantasy about another uniquely human creation,
music. It is highly probable that we members of H. sapiens have some
genetic predispositions vis-a-vis music. But whether or not this is probable, let's suppose it for the sake of a thought experiment. Let's suppose that our love of music, our responses to music, our talents for

Nice Tools, but You Still Have to Use Them

189

music, etc., are partially products of some genetically transmitted design
features. And let's suppose that this distinguishes us from intelligent
"Martians" (some non-human but culturally adept and communicative species), who utterly lack those human quirks in favor of music in
their genetic birthright. A Martian research team visits our planet.
O n e of their kind gets interested, in an intellectual way, in Earthmusic, and endeavors to incorporate into its own perceptual capacities
and proclivities all the discriminations, preferences, habits, etc., of a
human music lover. While a normal human being has none of this
work to do and is, in effect, a born music lover, for our imaginary Martian music is very definitely an acquired taste. But suppose the Martian does acquire it, by dint of diligent study and self-training. N o w set
aside the (ultimately boring) question of whether the Martian can really
appreciate music "the way we human beings do." Consider, instead,
the more interesting question of what the patterns are that distinguish
great music from good music from so-so music from awful music.
What are the patterns the Martian is going to have to come to
appreciate if it is to become a solid music critic, for instance? These are
the patterns—deeply intertwined, surely, with the quirky genetic history of H. sapiens but independently describable—that a Darwinian
theorist about music should most aspire to uncover. Suppose our Martian pioneer takes Earth-music back to Mars, and other Martians then
take to this exotic new pastime and, following the lead of their pioneer, diligently imbue themselves with the requisite (but cultureborne) attitudes and dispositions. W h e n they perform, enjoy, criticize
the works of Mozart, the explanation of the source of their dispositions will be cultural, not genetic, but so what? It really doesn't
matter (from some important points of view) whether someone is a
"natural" (genetically designed) musician or an "artificial" (culturally
designed) musician. The questions about the relations, the structures,
the patterns that make this Mozart, or baroque music, or Earth-music
will be substrate-neutral. And if, as seems likely, the Martian Hit Parade
comes to include compositions that would never win an audience on
Earth, the explanation of the differences in responsivity between Martians and Earthlings that account for these differences in taste will be
neutral with regard to their genetic or cultural origins. N o w if the Martians simply can't acquire these tastes, then they will never exhibit the

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Freedom Evolves

patterns of preference and habit that could perpetuate the phenomenon; Martians just have tin ears, and music is not for them. But if they
can acquire the taste for music, it won't really matter how they acquire
it: The summation of the forces of nature and nurture in their development may arrive at the same sum by many different routes—all Darwinian. This thought experiment, science-fictional as it is, reminds us
of an important truth about differences between human musicians.
There are huge differences between those w h o have "natural" musical
talent and those who must inculcate it by internalizing large doses of
theory. It is, however, something approaching racism to declare that
only the former are true musicians, only the former really play music.
I suspect that eventually we will be able to identify genes "for" musical talent but music theory is, and should be, neutral with regard to
them.
So, too, should the theory that explains morality. It should be
neutral with regard to whether our moral attitudes, habits, preferences,
and proclivities are a product of genes or culture. It is an important
empirical question to what extent we are born "good natured," as de
Waal (1996) has said about chimpanzees, and to what extent we are
born "crooked" and have to be straightened out by culture, as Kant
has said about us: "Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht
ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden" (Out of timber so
crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can
be built). T h e explanation of how morality came to exist and why it
has the features it has will have to be Darwinian^ in either case. The
interplay between cultural and genetic transmission routes can be conducted only from a neutral perspective.
Even groups that are genetically identical can differ profoundly at
the phenotypic level because of cultural mechanisms, and these
differences can be heritable in the only sense that matters as far as
the process of natural selection is concerned. The fact that culture
by itself can provide the ingredients required by the process of natural selection gives culture the status that critics of biological determinism have emphasized. (Sober and Wilson 1998, p. 336)
Explaining why music exists and why it has the properties it
has is one project, hardly begun. Explaining why morality exists and

Nice Tools, but You Still Have to Use Them

191

why it has the properties it has is another project, on which somewhat
more progress has been made, and this work will be the topic of the
next chapter. Some of the guiding insights come from the work already
discussed in Chapter 5 on evolutionary game theory. In recent years a
growing multi-disciplinary band of researchers has been exploring
the evolution of "cooperation," or "altruism," or "groupishness," or
"virtue." Whether the results are called sociobiology or evolutionary
psychology or Darwinian economics or political science or ethics naturalized or just an interesting branch of evolutionary biology, this
approach describes a pattern that must be present in any such conflictual circumstance, whether it is embodied in genes or memes or some
other cultural regularities. Several excellent books have recently
appeared that survey and explain this research, and I will not attempt
yet another primer-when it has already been done so well by others
(see the Notes on Sources and Further Reading at the end of the next
chapter). Instead, I will step back and offer some interpretations to orient the work for our purposes, as well as some necessary correctives to
a flood of misinterpretations that have dogged this research.

Chapter 6
A Darwinian approach to human culture permits us to sketch an explanatory
path that can account for the major differences between us and our nearest animal relatives. Culture is a major innovation in evolutionary history. It provides
one species, H o m o sapiens, with new topics to think about, new tools to think
with, and—since the media of culture open up the possibility of cultural replicators whose own fitness is independent of our genetic fitness—new perspectives
to think from.

Chapter 7
The stability of the social conditions, individual practices, and attitudes that
anchor our moral agency demands analysis and is beginning to receive it, from
evolutionary theorists who recognize that culture itself must obey the constraints
of evolution by natural selection. Contrary to the dire warnings of some critics,
this approach does not subvert the ideals of morality; it provides much-needed
support.

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Freedom Evolves

N o t e s o n Sources and Further R e a d i n g
Animal Traditions (2000), by Eytan Avital and Eva Jablonka, is a fascinating investigation of the under-studied topic of animal tradition. See
also my review (Dennett forthcoming B), which will appear in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, and the review by Matteo Mameli, in Biology and Philosophy, 17:1 (2002).
Those who want to know more about Twin Earth can consult
Andrew Pessin and Sanford Goldberg's anthology, The Twin Earth
Chronicles (1996), or my essay "Beyond Belief" in The Intentional Stance
(Dennett 1987).
On memes, see Blackmore 1999; Aunger, 2000, 2002; D e n nett forthcoming C; and a special issue of The Monist on the epidemiology of ideas (Sperber 2001). In addition to Darwin's Dangerous Idea
(Dennett 1995) and my essays in Aunger 2000 and Sperber 2001, I
have written elsewhere on memes, in " T h e Evolution of Evaluators"
(Dennett 2001); a review of Walter Burkert's Creation of the SacrediTracks
of Biology in Early Religions (Dennett 1997A); and an overview essay,
" T h e N e w Replicators," in Encyclopedia of Evolution, M. Pagels, ed.
(Dennett 2002A).
An excellent examination of the question of why religions
exist is Pascal Boyer's Religion ExplainediThe Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (2001).
An excellent article on using cladistic methods for the analysis
of linguistic evolution is Gray and Jordan 200D, on Pacific language
spread. Mark Ridley (1995, p. 258) has an account of lancet flukes, and
a more detailed discussion occurs in Sober and Wilson 1998. Cloak
1975 converged with Dawkins 1976, on the Cui bono? question for cultural items: " T h e survival value of a cultural instruction is the same as
its function; it is its value for the survival/replication of itself or its
replica."
For a discussion of the error of pitting Darwinian explanation
against reasons, see my comment on "A Critique of Evolutionary
Archaeology," by James L. Boone and Eric Alden Smith, in Current
Anthropology (Dennett 1998B).

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Chapter 7

THE EVOLUTION OF
MORAL AGENCY
/ account for morality as an accidental capability produced, in its boundless stupidity,
by a biological process that is normally opposed to the expression of such a capability.
—George Williams, in Zjpgon
If communities of genes and cells can evolve a system of rules that allow them to
function as adaptive units, then why can't communities of individuals do the same?
If they do, then groups will be like individuals, which is the proposition that we
are seeking to establish.

—Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others

Is nature individualistic or communal? It is commonly thought—especially by those who fear any invocation of evolutionary considerations
in ethics—that since Darwinism sees "nature red in tooth and claw,"
it can only subvert or discredit our ethical aspirations, never support
them with new insights, new foundations. This is simply not true.

Benselfishness
We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

—Benjamin Franklin to John Hancock, at the signing of the Declaration of
Independence, July 4, 1776
This exhortation by Ben Franklin comes down to us through the ages,
rippling red-white-and-blue in the breeze, redolent with the aroma of
apple pie, a fine, noble, inspirational thing for our hero to have said,

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Freedom Evolves

right? But wait a minute. Wasn't sly old Ben actually appealing to the
craven, self-interested prudence of his listeners? Wise up, you cowards,
and let me draw your attention to your actual predicament: Join or die.
Which was it, a call for altruism and self-sacrifice or an appeal to those
who knew which side their bread was buttered on? I propose that we
concede that it was not, after all, a plea for genuine altruism (we'll consider later just what that might be, and whether it exists in significant
amounts), but rather the expression of something still quite wonderful: a plea for a particular variety offarsighted self-interest, a kind of prudence that tends to get overwhelmed in competition because evolution
is famously shortsighted, demanding immediate payoffs for all its innovations. I propose to call this particular variety of farsighted cooperative behavior benselfishness, in honor of Ben, but also suggestive of the
fact that while this is a kind of selfishness, it's a good kind of selfishness.
Were it not for the serendipity of Franklin's eloquence, I might have
called it euselfshness.
Genuine, or pure, altruism is an elusive concept, an ideal that
always seems to evaporate just when you get in position to reach out
to grab it. It isn't clear what would count as genuine altruism, and paradox hovers constantly nearby. Imagine a world in which there is only
one altruist and everybody else is selfish. The altruist and a selfish guy
are stuck on an island with a rowboat that has room for only one. What
should the altruist do? Should he volunteer to perish on the island, or
is it better—more altruistic—for him to commandeer the rowboat,
leaving the selfish guy to fend for himself, so thjit he can go help several selfish folks back on the mainland? An altruist shouldn't stupidly
sacrifice himself for no gain—that's just being stupid. H o w crafty can
an altruist be in exploiting others in order to achieve his altruistic ends?
Consider the statutory safety briefing to passengers on airplanes: If you
are traveling with a child, when the oxygen masks descend, first put
on your own mask, then tend to your child. It seems that a parent can
follow this advice with a clear conscience since it is probable (nothing
is certain in life) that by taking care of yourself first, you will be better
able to take care of your child, and your child's welfare is what matters most to you. That makes you an altruist. According to Elliott
Sober and David Sloan Wilson, in their book Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, " T h e thesis of altruism, as we
understand it, says that some people at least some of the time have the

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195

welfare of others as ends in themselves" (Sober and Wilson 1998,
p. 228). Of course, it all depends on what counts as an end in itself. If
you, selfish daydreamer that you are, prefer savoring in your imagination the future prospects of your child—if you prefer this activity to all
others, and will take whatever steps are necessary to preserve the credibility of these parental flights of fancy by protecting your child, then
you are no different from the miser who risks death to save his treasure chest from sinking to the bottom of the sea. If you have made the
mistake of trading in your altruistic concern for your child for a selfish concern for your own peace of mind as you reflect on how you are
sacrificing everything for your child, you are no true altruist. You're
just taking all these steps in order to feel good about yourself.
And so forth, £n all too familiar spiral of defeating conditions
that we dutifully explore in intro philosophy class every year. It starts
when we consider Socrates' notorious claim (in the Meno) that nobody
ever desires evil for himself, a doctrine that is obviously false until it is
shored up by adding that nobody ever knowingly desires something that
is, all things considered, evil for himself. Is even that adjusted version true?
Is it impossible or just highly unlikely? Is it just that anybody w h o did
knowingly desire courses of action that were, all things considered, evil
for himself would probably not last long enough to have offspring?
Mules are sterile because of their parents' genes, but not
because they inherited "the gene for sterility" from their parents, for
there is no such gene. 1 Sterility is a cul-de-sac, the end of a lineage,
not something that can be passed on. Is an altruist rather like a mule,
a more or less chance coming together of features that is perfectly possible but systematically unlikely to perpetuate itself? We should bear in

1. Mules have donkey fathers and horse mothers (usually—mules with donkey mothers are
called hinnies); donkeys have 62 chromosomes, horses have 64 chromosomes (32 pairs), and
mules have 63 unpairable chromosomes. There are very rare cases of fertile mules. And there
are conditions under which there could be a sort of sterility gene. For instance, there could be
a gene that in single dose (heterozygosity—a copy from either mother or father but not from
both) provided a large benefit, so large that it persisted in spite of the fact that those with
double doses of the gene (homozygotes) were sterile. This is a self-limiting possibility, since
as the proportion of those with a single copy of the gene grows, the likelihood of both
parents having a single copy, and both passing it on to their offspring, grows, and hence the
proportion of sterile offspring grows, but they are a sink for the gene. The best-known
instance of this quite familiar phenomenon, heterozygote superiority, is the resistance to
malaria provided by a single dose of a gene that in double dose causes sickle cell anemia.

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Freedom Evolves

mind that although mules have no offspring, mules do proliferate at
some times and places, thanks to indirect effects involving other species
(such as the members of Homo sapiens w h o are also members of the
British Mule Society, from which I got some of these details about
mules). In fact, there are many ways in which evolution can sustain
populations of organisms that seem, at first glance, to be systematically
ruled out. There are conditions under which being altruistic—at least
benselfish—is neither a genetic nor a cultural cul-de-sac, and these
conditions have been exposed and clarified in a growing family of theoretical models.
The array of evolutionary game theoretic models that has been
developed over the last few decades can be organized, with only a litde rough shoehorning, into something like a genealogical tree of m o d els, starting from an original seed, which has offspring, which have
offspring, which have offspring, and so forth, and this tree exhibits—
approximately—two interlocked trends: Parent models are simpler than
their offspring, the next generation of models, and this increasing complexity of the models doesn't just bring increasing realism (with the
models reflecting more and more of the actual complexities of the real
world) but also increasing optimism! In the simplest models, altruism
appears doomed. Aside from occasional short-lived freaks of nature,
altruists seem to be ruled out by the fundamental principles of evolutionary theory, as impossible as perpetual motion machines. It's a dogeat-dog world, and nice guys inevitably finish last. Then, as we add a few
realistic touches, something in the direction of altruism appears and
flourishes under certain conditions, and adding yet more layers of complexity seems to yield more varieties of quasi-altruism, pseudo-altruism,
or whatever you want to call it. (I want to call it benselfishness.) Perhaps,
it seems, as our models and theories get still closer to the complexity of
the actual world, we will eventually arrive at genuine altruism, as a real
possibility in the real world. Is this optimistic prospect an illusion? Is this
bottom-up project as hopeless as trying to build a tower to the moon?
You can't get there from here, say the anti-Darwinian skeptics. Don't
even try. Or are the skeptics the ones who are confused, holding out for
an inflated vision of altruism that is inaccessible by this bottom-up route
only because it is inflated—a skyhook held aloft by hot air?
In any case, all the models show when and how benselfishness
can flourish, and none of the models yet devised distinguishes between

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197

benselfishness and "genuine" altruism—if such a thing can be characterized. They all show conditions under which, bucking the constant
headwind of evolution's myopia, organisms can come to be designed by
evolution to cooperate, or more precisely designed to behave in such
a way as to prefer the long-term welfare of the group to their i m m e diate individual welfare.
T h e seed of this tree of models begins with the problem illustrated by the Prisoner's Dilemma. In these models, defection plays a
role rather like the role of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in
physics. Physicists are forever reminding us that things break down,
things get muddled, things don't tend to repair themselves unless
something special—such as a living thing, a local entropy-battler—
intervenes. Economises, similarly, are forever reminding us that there
is no such thing as a~free lunch. Evolutionists in the same spirit remind
us that freeloaders will always show up eventually, and when they do,
they will soon enough win the local breeding contests unless something is put in place to prevent it. Whatever the local game, and
whatever the costs and benefits to the group (the locally interacting
population that must share the space and resources and risks), if it is
possible to share the benefits of group action without paying one's
share of the costs (one's dues, one might say), then those w h o pursue this selfish path will do better than those w h o don't. It's as simple as subtraction: Net benefits (benefits minus dues) have to be less
than gross benefits, which is what the freeloader enjoys, by definition.
All this must be true unless there are preventing conditions of one
kind or another. Start with a uniform population of happy cooperators (they all have the cooperator gene, to keep it simple). They normally breed true, we may suppose, but what happens if a freeloader
mutant appears in one generation of offspring? The freeloader does
at least as well as the cooperators (since he doesn't pay his dues) and
hence has a greater than average number of freeloader offspring.
Pretty soon there is a growing tribe of freeloaders, and no matter how
well or ill the group as a whole does (it probably does worse, weighed
down as it is with all the freeloaders), within the group nobody does
better than the freeloaders, w h o gradually come to dominate the
group.
Of course, something may intervene to prevent this sad deterioration. You can imagine, if you like, that freeloaders tend to be ster-

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Freedom Evolves

ile, or infanticidal. What a lucky break for cooperators! You might as
well imagine that Zeus likes to throw lightning bolts at freeloaders,
keeping their numbers down (thank goodness) by his sport. Setting
wishful fantasy aside, you can ask what might evolve naturally that would
have the systematic effect of blocking the takeover by freeloaders,
which must be assumed to be the default trend. As we have seen, this
problem arose in the earliest days of life on this planet, in the intragenomic conflict between good genes and freeloading parasitic genes,
and was solved by the evolution of counteracting mechanisms that
could keep the freeloaders in check. Problems at that early and submicroscopic level were invisible to Darwin, of course, but he himself
recognized the problem in the case of the social insects, whose extreme
devotion to the group was a major challenge to the theory of natural
selection. William Hamilton showed in his famous papers on "kin
selection" how the social insects (and other highly social species) could
evolve such patterns of cooperative instinct, and Richard Dawkins
recast Hamilton's model into the perspective of the selfish gene. We
are obliged to descend to the level of the gene to find the answer to
the Cui bono? question in the extreme case of such self-sacrificial
behavior because, as Sterelny and Griffiths vividly put it, "Perhaps a
robin is being canny in choosing not to lay all the eggs she can, but a
bee that stings an intruder at the certain cost of her own life cannot be
saving anything for a rainy day" (Sterelny and Griffiths 1999, p. 157).
The pioneer models supposed, for simplicity, a single gene for
"cooperate" and an alternative gene for "defect,'/ and these genes were
deemed to operate deterministically at the biological level of behavior.
(Remember: This has nothing to do with the determinism or indeterminism of physics and everything to do with design. In these models,
the individual organisms are stipulated to be old dogs that can't learn
new tricks and are stuck as lifetime cooperators or defectors.) This is
not much of an oversimplification if you're dealing with insects, whose
behavioral routines are relatively rigid and tropistic (or sphexish, to use
the term Douglas Hofstadter coined, in honor of the Sphex wasp),
though even social insects can be strikingly facultative under some conditions, changing almost overnight from drone to worker when conditions in the colony demand redeployment, for instance.
These models show that defectors tend to do very well indeed,
though they can pollute their own nests: As the proportion of free-

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199

loaders increases, they tend to meet each other more often, in costly
bouts of mutual defection, and there aren't enough exploitable cooperators around to make up the difference. So the cooperators start
making a comeback, but only until there are enough of them around
to be worth preying on, at which point the freeloaders begin thriving
again. But the models also exhibited some strange effects, settling into
equilibria that don't match our expectations, and thus raising the
prospect that at least some of the behavior of the models was artifactual, an unintended by-product of the oversimplifications rather than
a reflection of something in the real world. (See Skyrms 1996 for a
lucid treatment.) This is rather like the mythic discovery that, according to your aerodynamic model, bumblebees can't fly. Something must
be wrong with your nlodel, since there goes an airborne bumblebee.
The model must be too simple, must be leaving out a complication that
is actually a key to the bumblebee's manifest success. O n e simplification of these evolutionary game theory models was their superabstractness. Individuals were just members of a set, drawn in random
pairs for interactions that then determined their fate in the next phase,
with no concern for their relative spatial locations in some world. It is
as if the individual organisms lived on the Internet, as likely to interact with somebody halfway around the world as next door. (Actually,
of course, interaccessibility on the Internet is highly ordered; some
people are much "farther away"—harder to get to—than others, so
these models would seriously oversimplify even the "global village" of
the World Wide Web.) A second wave of models imposed a simplified
spatiality, by adjusting the likelihood of encounters by a "viscosity" factor (the higher the viscosity of the imaginary space, the more likely you
are to interact with somebody whose address is close to yours), and this
simple change ushered in new opportunities for the evolution of cooperation, while also wiping out the embarrassing equilibria. It turns out
that neighborhood makes a big difference. (Encroachment is what makes
life interesting.) Neighborhood makes it more probable that you will
interact with your own kind, so you get a better average payoff from
any cooperative behaviors you engage in, since they are more likely to
be reciprocated.
Then if we make the individual agents a little bit more sophisticated, allowing them some choice in w h o they interact with (just
allowing them to refuse to play under some conditions, for starters),

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the simple space they all inhabit (not unlike the plane of the Life world)
begins to pick up some structure: Clusters of like-acting agents begin
to self-assemble, forming groups with different characters. Cooperators tend to find other cooperators, and defectors tend to get stuck having to associate with other defectors. This is all very suggestive, of
course, but we are still a long way from altruism. For instance, wouldn't
genuine altruists shun the selfish policy of finding like-minded altruists with w h o m to hang out? Wouldn't a genuine altruist go out of his
way to be the lone altruist in a selfish group? That's where he's needed
the most, it seems, not living it up among his fellow altruists. H o w
merely benselfish of him! Besides, the agents in these models are still
deemed to be pretty simpleminded old dogs, situation-action machines
with a few preset switches that determine their "choices" in any
encounter by the application of a simple rule. A vivid reminder of
how simple the agents in these models are is that the tactics of selfsegregation and ostracism that emerge from these models were already
exploited at the macromolecular level of intragenomic conflict during
the prokaryotic era. A model that needn't distinguish between a
macromolecule and an adult human citizen is breathtakingly abstract.
W h e n we make the agents still more facultative, more plastic,
giving them the possibility of learning from their experience, adjusting the rules they were born with as a function of the encounters they
have already had, things get more interesting still. The inevitability—
note the term—of a group being swamped by freeloaders always
depended on the assumption that everybody would be oblivious; there
would be no capacity of the various individuals to notice what was
happening, to raise the alarm, to deplore, to propose sanctions, to form
vigilante groups, to brand or punish the freeloaders among them. Once
we add simple versions of this reactivity, it ushers in a wave of new
complexities. Dire conditions that had seemed inevitable now turn out
to be preventable after all, thanks to the timely and well-aimed use of
information by group members. The benselfish types now have a reason to punish too-pure "altruists"—the chumps or wimps w h o always
let the freeloaders exploit them—since these pushovers help freeloaders flourish. So any mutations that permit the benselfish to distinguish
themselves from pushovers will be favored, but then any freeloaders or
pushovers who can disguise themselves as benselfish will tend to thrive,
until the next phase of the arms race. A group's evolution of the capac-

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201

ity for policing its members, by adopting the disposition among its
members to punish violators (of whatever its other policies are), opens
the floodgates to the social or cultural evolution of all manner of local
norms. In a classic paper on cultural evolution, R o b Boyd and Peter
Richerson show that if the cost of punishing is relatively low—
something that can be virtually guaranteed whenever there emerges a
practice of punishing those w h o don't punish—this creates an engine
of group conformism of apparently unlimited scope and power. The
title of the paper says it all: "Punishment Allows the Evolution of
Cooperation (or Anything Else) in Sizable Groups" (Boyd and R i c h erson 1992).
So far, then, our evolutionary story has suggested the sorts of
conditions that could l*ave brought us, without skyhooks or other miracles, to a prudent disposition for cooperation, reinforced by the disposition we share with our fellow citizens to "punish" those who don't
cooperate, but it is still a cold, robotic sort of mutually enforced n o n aggression. As Allan Gibbard says,
Human natural propensities were shaped by something it would
be foolish to value in itself, namely multiplying one's own genes
among later generations. Still, the kinds of coordination that
helped our ancestors pass down their genes to form us are worth
wanting—for better reasons. Darwinian forces shaped the concerns and feelings we know, and some of these are broadly moral.
(Gibbard 1990, p. 327)
Broadly moral, but not purely moral. There is no sign yet of treating
the welfare of others as an end in itself, for instance. This is probably
as it should be, since we have yet to include anything distinctively
human in the models, and one of our fairly comfortable initial intuitions about morality is that although non-human animals may be
"good natured," as Frans de Waal says, they are not yet "the moral animal," as Robert Wright says. Still, since this sort of self-maintaining
societal structure can now be seen to be a necessary precondition for
the long-term flourishing of genuinely altruistic agents, it is reassuring
to see how little must be presupposed to get it to evolve and to sustain
itself: The very simplicity and relative rigidity of the abilities to discriminate the freeloaders from the good citizens, and the dispositions
to "punish," show that as far as this feature of culture is concerned, it

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could predate language and convention and ceremony. We're not talking about trial by jury and public denunciation here; we're talking
about an unreflective, "brute" inclination to channel some risky
aggression against those of one's group one has discriminated as n o r m violators. It would be reasonable to look for evidence of this sort of
long-term maintenance of local "customs" among packs of wolves or
troops of monkeys or apes, for instance. Whether or not we find that
this station on the way to fully developed human culture is clearly
occupied by some other species, it provides a certain sort of relief from
skepticism: a possible Just So Story to get us gradually from animals that
are merely social in the manner of bees and ants to animals that have a
taste for cultural transmission and inculcation, disposed to attend to the
nuances of approval and disapproval, disposed to be enlisted in transitory enforcement posses, disposed to prefer the comfort of acceptance
to the threat of group censure. And with this transition, groups become
effective repositories of recently discovered "knowledge," not having
to wait for the genetic evolution of each new Good Trick to spread to
fixation through the population, since it can be much more swiftly
spread by group conformism. A price well worth paying for access to
this brighter tempo of discovery is a certain vulnerability to something
like myth, local misdiscoveries that nevertheless sell like hotcakes in the
structured conformism of the group.

B e i n g G o o d i n Order t o S e e m G o o d

/

Jesus is coming. Look busy!
—bumper sticker
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be
looking.
—H. L. Mencken, Prejudices
The specter of defection hangs over us all, evolutionary original sin,
with its perennially tempting reflection: H o w can it not be rational to
defect here? If the other guy defects (or if "everybody does it"), then
you're a patsy if you don't defect as well, and if the other guy doesn't

Being Good in Order to Seem Good

203

defect, you make out like a bandit by defecting. And if everybody
knows this, how can anybody ever cooperate? W h e n payoffs are in the
short term, how can evolution ignore them, and when we consider that
life is short, how can we ourselves ignore these payoffs? Fear of p u n ishment and a desire for acceptance will take us past the easy cases, by
changing the expected payoff. As thinkers have recognized for centuries, it is not hard to see why it is rational to cooperate when Big
Brother is watching. Any society that was lucky enough to harbor a
belief in a vigilant, omnipresent God—who could be expected to mete
out punishment in the afterlife more than compensating for any local
gains—would be a society populated by citizens w h o could be counted
on to do what that God commanded, even when out of sight of their
fellow citizens. N o t e tr^at for this myth to arise and flourish, there need
not have been an intelligent author w h o understood this rationale, any
more than there must have been an intelligent promulgator of the policies that evolved to secure compliance between potentially rival genes
in meiosis. Human beings could be the unwitting beneficiaries of this
group adaptation without anybody having figured out its free-floating
rationale. But as critics since Nietzsche have insisted, a "morality" thus
based on fear of God is neither as noble, nor as stable, as we would like.
What would happen to a society in which this useful scaffolding began
to break down, or never existed in the first place? Would there be no
way for its members to evolve robust habits of cooperation?
What about the hard cases, in which one can be pretty sure one
will not be detected cheating? In these cases the voice of temptation
speaks with alarming rationality: Nobody will ever know, and think of what
you can gain! W h e n we enter the world in which decision-making has
to deal with serious temptation, and with the unbounded terraces of
reflection that can accompany our struggles with such temptation, we
have left the free will of the birds behind and begun to explore the
problematic territory of human free will, the only variety that carries
moral weight. Tradition places the burden of all that moral weight on
an imaginary functionary, the immortal, immaterial, miracle-working
soul, but once we look more closely at the evolutionary antecedents
of our human control systems, we can reverse-engineer that soul and
see why some of its parts work the way they do.
According to Sallust, Cato was a noble man indeed: "Esse quam
videri bonus malebat"—he preferred to be good rather than to seem so. If

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Robert Frank is right, then Cato was one of those advanced souls who
have managed to invert the policy that made us moral in the first place:
Malo esse bonus ut videar—I prefer to be good in order to seem good. In Passions within Reason:The Strategic Role of the Emotions, Frank argues that the
next plateau in the evolution of freedom is achieved when our ancestors
first confronted and learned to solve what he calls commitment problems.
A commitment problem "arises when it is in a person's interest to make
a binding commitment to behave in a way that will later seem contrary
to self-interest" (Frank 1988, p. 47). We have already encountered the
basic structure of a commitment problem in the Prisoner's Dilemma:
The evolutionary fate of cooperators and defectors is powerfully affected
by the presence or absence of fake cooperators, or bluffers. This creates
a selection pressure for bluff-detection and sets off an arms race of exposure and concealment of strategy. W h e n the free-floating rationales of
this competitive arena are captured within the flexible control systems of
human agents, the tempo picks up, and the issue is transformed from the
impersonal (which agents will do better under these conditions right
now, cooperators or defectors?) to the personal (what should I do under
these conditions, cooperate or defect?). W h e n evolution gets around to
creating agents that can learn, and reflect, and consider rationally what
they ought to do next, it confronts these agents with a new version of
the commitment problem: how to commit to something and convince others you have done so. Wearing a cap that says "I'm a cooperator" is not
going to take you far in a world of other rational agents on the lookout
for ploys. According to Frank, over evolutionary time we "learned" how
to harness our emotions to the task of keeping us fern being too rational,
and—-just as important—earning us a reputation for not being too
rational. It is our unwanted excess of myopic or local rationality, Frank
claims, that makes us so vulnerable to temptations and threats, vulnerable to "offers we can't refuse," as the Godfather says. Part of becoming
a truly responsible agent, a good citizen, is making oneself into a being
that can be relied upon to be relatively impervious to such offers.
First, why should you want to have such a reputation? Well, if
you have the reputation, the Mafia will leave you alone, since they will
calculate that their coercive offers probably won't work on you, so why
waste a good horse's head? Even more important, your reputation will
appeal to the choosiness of your fellow group members, who know all
about the risks of being taken in by a defector, and who will scout around

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205

for somebody they think they can rely on to resist temptation. We noted
in the previous section that cooperators tend to hang out with cooperators, and defectors with defectors. "Commitment problems abound and,
if cooperators can find one another, material advantages are there for the
taking," Frank observes (1988, p. 249), and the advantages of being a
cooperator in a group of cooperators has been demonstrated in a host of
evolutionary models. If you are fortunate enough to find yourself in a
group of cooperators, is this just luck? N o t if the group has an entrance
exam. But are you then just lucky to have the talent for cooperation that
lets you pass the exam? Perhaps, but being lucky to be talented is better
than just being lucky. (I will have more to say about luck later.)
It is benselfish to want to have an impeccable reputation, but
how on earth can you Establish this? Since talk is cheap, anybody w h o
is asked will swear on a stack of Bibles that they will never defect. Unless
there is some other way to discern the cooperators among the defectors, there is scant chance of building stable groups of rational cooperators. (Remember: The somatic-line cooperators that compose most of
your body are ballistic intentional systems, quite reliably robotic and impervious to temptation, but now we're talking about building not a body
but a corporation of highly rational individuals, like the Boston Symphony Orchestra.) And for there to be a trustworthy signal of reliability, it must be, as Amotz Zahavi (1987) has shown us, a costly
signal—something that cannot be cheaply faked. Swearing on a Bible
is an empty ceremony that cannot convey usable information, since if
it were to get started as a signal of reliability, it would immediately
be copied and used by all the unreliable types, and hence lose its credibility and fall into disuse. You might try to save it by inflating the
ceremony—I'll swear on two Bibles, I'll swear on a stack of Bibles—but
the fruitlessness of this inflation is nicely alluded to in the idiom, our
mythical paradigm of a failed attempt to demonstrate trustworthiness. 2
So here is the main problem: not just how can you make yourself into
an agent that can be trusted in commitment problem cases, but how can
you credibly advertise the fact that you are to be so trusted?

2. So why does the practice of taking an oath on the Bible persist? Because, quite
independently today of the participant's belief in divine retribution, it signals one's deliberate
entrance into the jeopardy of perjury, taking on the variable but still substantial risk of
mundane retribution.

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Sometimes one problem can be solved by another problem.
This is especially true w h e n the problem is confronted by Mother
Nature, that master opportunist. We have a problem of self-control
that is truly hard—costly—for us to solve. According to Frank, the fact
that it is costly to solve is a blessing, not a curse. It is the problem
exemplified by Ulysses and the Sirens, where the trick is to devise
some way of tying yourself to the mast and blocking your sailors' ears
with wax so that you can't act on your strongest inclination of the
moment. (The trick is to arrange it so that "at time t" your will is ineffective.) Ulysses knows perfectly well the long-term benefits of adopting the policy of avoiding the Sirens when they sing their seductive
song, but he also knows he is disposed in many circumstances to overvalue immediate payoffs, so he needs to protect himself from a somewhat misshapen preference structure that he expects will impose itself
on him when time t rolls around. He knows himself, and he knows
what evolution has provided for him: a slightly second-rate faculty of
reason that will cause him to take the immediate payoff ("I couldn't
do otherwise," he'll say, as he jumps into the Sirens' arms)—unless he
takes steps now to distribute his decision-making over more favorable
times and attitudes. His seduction by the Sirens is not inevitable, provided he has enough lead time to prepare his avoiding move. As Frank
observes,
It is important to stress that the experimental literature does not
say that immediate payoffs get too much weight in every situation.
It says only that they always get very heavy weight. On balance,
that was likely a good thing in the environments in which we
evolved. When selection pressures are intense, current payoffs are
often the only ones that matter. The present, after all, is the gateway to the future. (Frank 1988, p. 89)
Ulysses' problem is not a moral problem; it is a prudential problem, of the sort that can afflict the most selfish, least altruistic of agents.
To the selfish agent, it is the problem of how to avoid falling for shortterm selfish gains at the expense of longer-term selfish gains, a problem of mastering himself for a life of greater prudential success. Before
turning to Frank's account of how, by solving this prudential problem
we carry ourselves all the way to morality, we need to look in a bit
more detail at the problem of temptation.

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207

Learning t o D e a l w i t h Yourself
Intertemporal bargaining seems to be a rather artificial process unlikely to have
arisen in lower animals. It was the human race that vastly expanded an individual's
scope ofchoice and discovered that free choice often serves us worse than bald
necessity.
—George Ainslie, Breakdown of Will
As the old-time Maine farmer began to hitch up his overalls after using
the outhouse, a quarter rolled out of his pocket and fell down the hole.
"Dang!" he said, and pulled a five-dollar bill out of his wallet and threw
it down the hole after the quarter. " W h y on earth did you do that?"
he was asked. "You do^t't think I'm going down there for a quarter, do
you?" he replied. Raising the stakes for ourselves changes the task of
self-control we confront. We all tend to have problems with temptation that are nicely revealed in a few simple questions:
1. Which would you prefer: a dollar right now or a dollar tomorrow}
If you are like most normal people you prefer the dollar now, for obvious reasons. The sooner you get it the sooner you can put it to use,
and w h o knows what the future will hold? If, weirdly, you were
entirely indifferent between the choice of a dollar now or tomorrow
or next week or next year, we would say that you do not discount the
future. It is obviously rational to discount the future, but how much?
2. Which would you prefer: a dollar right now or a dollar-fifty tomorrow} If you prefer the dollar-fifty tomorrow, how about a dollar and a
quarter? H o w about a dollar and a dime? At some point we'll find a
choice about which you are indifferent, and that will fix two points on
a curve, your discount curve for the future. We might gather lots of
data of this sort in order to plot lots of points on your particular curve,
using money as a handy measuring system (standing in for a much
wider set of your preferences: Which would you prefer, to be pain-free
today or pain-free a week from today? Which would you prefer, fame
tomorrow or fame next year?). Suppose you are indifferent regarding
question 2. A dollar today or a dollar-fifty tomorrow strike you as
equally desirable. Then consider the next question:
3. Which would you prefer: a dollar next Tuesday or a dollar-fifty next
Wednesday} This is the same question as the previous one, but just seen
from farther away in time. But you may well find that your answers

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208

don't match. If you are like most people, a dollar right now is quite
hard to turn down in favor of a dollar-fifty tomorrow, while it's relatively easy to do the prudent thing and sign up for the dollar-fifty next
Wednesday instead of signing up for the dollar next Tuesday If you
tend to prefer a dollar now to a dollar-fifty tomorrow but also prefer a
dollar-fifty on Wednesday to a dollar on Tuesday you have a conflict;
you will discover a shift in your preferences at some point in time
between now and next Tuesday a shift brought about by nothing but
the passage of time.
O u r susceptibility to these intertemporal conflicts is a glitch, a
foible, an anomaly in our basic competence as decision-makers or
choosers, and it lies at the heart of a remarkable theory of human will
developed by the psychiatrist George Ainslie and recently given an
accessible presentation in his book Breakdown of Will (2001). People
may discount the future at different rates, and there is no right answer
to how steeply one should discount the future, but whatever your rate,
if you were rational about how you apply it, you would apply it so that
no intertemporal conflicts arise: The cool-headed choice you make
now for next year is the same choice you would make w h e n next year
rolls around. Succumbing to temptation is being deflected from your
rational policy (whatever it is) in a way you would rationally like to
avoid, if only you could. W h a t shape should your discount curve take?
Figure 7.1 shows two basic types of curve superimposed: the gradual
exponential curve and the deeply bowed, steeply rising hyperbolic curve.

/

/1i

Time —•

Figure 7.1 An exponential discount curve and a hyperbolic (more bowed)
curve from the same reward. As time passes (rightward along the horizontal
axis), the motivational impact—the value—of a subject's goals gets closer to its
undiscounted size, which is depicted by the vertical line (Ainslie 2001, p. 31).

Learning to Deal with Yourself

209

It can be shown (see, visually, in Figure 7.2) that an exponential discount rate can't produce these anomalies, but a hyperbolic discount
rate (see Figure 7.3), by having a steep tail, can.

Figure 7.2 Conventional (exponential) discount curves from two rewards
of different sizes, available at different times. At every point at which the
subject might evaluate earlier and later rewards, their values stay
proportional to their objective sizes (Ainslie 2001, p. 32).

Figure 7.3 Hyperbolic discount curves from two rewards of different sizes
available at different times. The smaller reward is temporarily preferred for
a period before it is available, as shown by the portion of its curve that
projects above that from the later, larger reward (Ainslie 2001, p. 32).

Where that snaggle-tooth hyperbolic hook of the smaller reward
briefly crosses the curve of the greater reward is where your window
of temptation is open: a brief period of time when the smaller reward
seems more valuable than the greater reward. Voluminous testing under
many conditions has shown that we, like other animals, are innately
equipped with hyperbolic discount rates. " T h e human race evolved

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with a very regular but deeply bowed discount curve for evaluating the
future" (Ainslie 2001, p. 46). This, Ainslie notes, is an illusion rather
like the Miiller-Lyer illusion.

We may know—thanks to measurement—that the two lines are the
same length, but that doesn't stop the illusion from exerting a powerful force on us. We can learn to compensate for that naturally illusory
outcome, overruling it with a deliberate, conscious correction. Similarly, utility theory (and measurement) can convince us that an exponential discount rate is right, and we can then learn to compensate for
the hyperbolic discount rates we were born with. It's an unnatural act,
but one well worth learning to perform. Some of us do it better than
others.
The desirability of rationalizing our behavior along exponential lines is at least dimly appreciated by us, but how on earth do we do
it? Where does the oomph come from to overrule our own instincts?
Tradition would say it comes from some psychic force called willpower,
but this just names the phenomenon and postpones explanation. H o w
is "willpower" implemented in our brains? According to Ainslie, we
get it from a competitive situation in which "interests" engage in what
he calls "intertemporal bargaining." These "interests" are temporary
agents of sorts, homunculi representing various reward possibilities:
An agent who discounts reward hyperbolically is not the straightforward value estimator that an exponential discounter is supposed to be. Rather, it is a succession of estimators whose
conclusions differ: as time elapses, these estimators shift their relationship with one another between cooperation on a common
goal and competition for mutually exclusive goals. Ulysses plan-

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211

ning for the Sirens must treat Ulysses hearing them as a separate
person, to be influenced if possible and forestalled if not. (Ainslie
2001, p. 40)
T h e "power bargaining" engaged in by these "groups of rewardseeking processes" is a self-equilibrating process that needs "no ego or
judge or other philosopher-king, no organ of unity or continuity,
although it will predict how such an organ may appear to operate"
(p. 62). As Ainslie describes this phenomenon, it is a competition for
selection in which the competitors can co-opt and exploit each other,
and it is none other (I suspect) than the opponent process of "striving
will" sketchily imagined by Kane. It does, indeed, contribute importantly to the unpredictability of human choice, not by harnessing quantum randomness as Kane hoped, but by having built into it a recursive
feature that systematically thwarts prediction: W h e n we choose, we
reflectively use our choice as a predictor of what our choices in the future will be;
our very self-consciousness about our choices creates a recursive loop
that renders our choices indefinitely sensitive to further considerations.
The orderly internal marketplace pictured by conventional utility theory becomes a complicated free-for-all, where to prevail an
option not only has to promise more than its competitors, but also
act strategically to keep the competitors from turning the tables
later on. (Ainslie 2001, p. 40)
Ainslie analyzes how the microstrategies of these homunculi
bundle rewards together, thereby creating an approximation of an
exponential discount rate, generating "rules" and resolutions that in
turn generate justifications for minor exemptions (it will be easier for
me to keep to my diet if I'm not too strict on myself, so—since it's my
birthday—I'll reward myself with a little bit of cake . . .), which in turn
generate further moves and countermoves, a snowballing chaos of
internal challenges. For instance: "Once I expect myself to find an
exception whenever the urge is strong, I no longer have a credible
prospect of the whole series of later rewards—the cumulative benefits
of my diet—available to choose. In this way hyperbolic discount curves
make self-control a matter of self-prediction" (p. 87).
A recovering alcoholic may expect to resist taking a drink, but this
expectation surprisingly disappoints her, and when she notices

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this she loses confidence in her expectation; if her expectation falls
below being enough to stake against her thirst, her disappointment is apt to become a self-confirming prophecy. But if this
prospect is itself daunting enough in the period before it becomes
preferred, she'll look for other incentives to oppose her thirst
before it becomes too strong, and thus raise her expectation of not
drinking, and so on—all before she's actually taken a drink. Her
choice is doubtless determined in advance, in the same sense that
all events have strict causes that have causes in turn; but what
immediately determines her choice is the interplay of elements
that, even if well known in themselves, make the outcome unpredictable when they interact recursively.
Hyperbolic discounting makes decision making a crowd phenomenon, with the crowd made up of the successive dispositions
to choose that the individual has over time. At each moment she
makes the choice that looks best to her; but a big part of this picture is her expectation of how she'll choose at later times, an
expectation that is mostly founded on how she has chosen at previous times. (Ainslie 2001, p. 131)
Ainslie's theory of the will generates explanations of more than
a few phenomena that have baffled other theorists (or just been conveniently ignored by them), on such topics as addiction and compulsion, "premature satiation," self-deception and despair, "legalistic"
thinking and spontaneity. The price one must pay for this theoretical
fecundity is some initially counterintuitive premises: in particular,
rewards and pleasures must be distinguished. Rewards are, by definition, "any experience that tends to cause repetition of the behavior it
follows" and some such experiences are positively painful, however
much they may enhance the replicative disposition (the intracerebral
fitness, you might say) of that behavior. It is a difficult theory, bristling
with novelties that require one to set aside dear old habits of thought,
and I have only skimmed the most interesting conclusions off the top
in this presentation. It has not yet received the attention it deserves, so
just which of its many tempting conclusions deserve endorsement is
an open question, but there is no question that it is a fine addition to
the wealth of recent work that applies an evolutionary perspective to
the traditional philosophical questions of will and mind. It even has

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213

some unsettling observations to make on the topic of the elusiveness
of morality, and the ways in which our best-formulated rules can come
to haunt us with unintended consequences, but those are topics for
another occasion. We still haven't arrived at the moral arena, but
Robert Frank proposes a path.

Our Costly Merit Badges
Suppose you place a candy in front of a small child and tell her that she
may take it, but if she can wait fifteen minutes, she can have two. H o w
good are children at this feat of delaying gratification? N o t very Children exhibit significant variation in this capacity for self-control, and
whether these differences are due in the main to genetic differences or
early childhood environmental differences or sheer chance, they are not
inevitable; they can be diminished (or enhanced) by simple strategies of
self-distraction, or the right kinds of concentration. (For instance, children can learn to hold out for the second piece of candy by concentrating on the delightful properties of something else that isn't
available—nice crunchy salty pretzels, for instance, or a favorite toy.)
Some good strategies invoke cool reason and others invoke competing
hot passion. These self-manipulation proposals, by the way, oppose an
influential theme in moral philosophy, the theme attributed to
Immanuel Kant that stresses the second-rate, ignoble nature of such
laying-on of merely emotional crutches. T h e Kantian ideal is a fantasy in
which you somehow strengthen your pure-reasoning muscle to such a
fine pitch that you can make pure, emotionless judgments untainted
by tawdry guilt feelings or base longings for love and acceptance. Kant
held that such judgments are not only the best sort of moral judgments,
they are the only sort of judgments that count as moral at all. Enlivening reflection with base appeals to emotion may be fine for training
children, but the presence of those training wheels actually disqualifies
their judgments for moral consideration. Is this perhaps a case in which
holding out for perfection—a job-related disability in philosophers—
conceals the best path?
According to Frank, the evolutionary beauty of this co-opting
of emotion to play such a role in self-control is that it provides at the
same time a basis for costly signaling of precisely this triumph: Others

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get to see that you are one of those emotional folks w h o can be
counted on to care passionately about your commitments; it is not that
you are crazy or irrational but that you put an irrationally high price
(from the myopic perspective of the critic) on your integrity. You get
to wear your heart on your sleeve, and a costly heart it is. The trick to
gaining the reputation for being good, a valuable prize indeed, is actually being good. No shortcut methods will work (yet—evolution is still
going on).
In order to understand why actually being good is the most costeffective solution to this problem, we have to understand it as the price
we pay for self-control. I can control myself only with a broad brush.
"Moral sentiments may be viewed as a crude attempt to fine-tune
the reward mechanism, to make it more sensitive to distant rewards and
penalties in selected instances" (Frank 1988, p. 90). As we will see in
the next chapter, I cannot micromanage my own real-time deliberations, so I have to resort to shotgun approaches, equipping myself with
powerful emotional dispositions that spill over their targets, leave me
trembling with rage w h e n rage is appropriate, unable to contain my
joy when joy is appropriate, swept away by sorrow or pity. But in order
to get these emotions to help me make long-term prudential decisions
when I face temptation from short-term Sirens, I have to let them rule
me as well w h e n my choice is between my short-term gain and what
is best for others. I can't just be committed to myself. Or, to put it in
terms of my motto, the social environment in which I find myself
encourages me, in order to further my narrow self-interests, to make
myself larger than I otherwise would be; when I "look out for N u m b e r
O n e " I cast my net wide enough to include my fellow cooperators.
As always, it will not do just to postulate such a happy state of
affairs as if it were a gift from God. It might occasionally arise by
accident, but if it persists long enough to make a pattern in the world, it
needs an explanation. The task of the evolutionary models is to demonstrate that environments can evolve in which this self-enlargement
is itself a forced move, rationally dictated. This design "decision"—
paying the price of commitment to a variety of impure altruism (or is it
only advanced benselfishness?) as the cost of gaining self-control—has a
rationale that need not have been appreciated by anybody It is a freefloating rationale, but none the worse for that. In fact, it is better as a freefloating rationale. That is what gives emotional expression its evidentiary

Our Costly Merit Badges

215

status in the arms race of detection and dissembling. If we as individuals could readily figure out and act on this rationale, anchoring it in our
own minds, we would be suspected of putting on a show. We are highly
alert judges of character, and a survey of the cues that matter to us
(whether or not we consciously appreciate their contribution) should
reveal that we pay scant attention to those displays that are easy to fake,
but concentrate instead on the signs that are the irrepressible, unevocable manifestations of disposition. And that is just what we see, Frank
claims:
We can thus imagine a population in which people with consciences fare better than those without. The people who lack
them would cheat less often if they could, but they simply have
greater difficulty ^solving the self-control problem. People who
have them, by contrast, are able to acquire good reputations and
cooperate successfully with others of like disposition. (Frank
1988, pp. 82-83)
And where does this leave the contrast between benselfishness and
genuine altruism? Frank claims that the innovation he describes does
cross the finish line and get us all the way to genuine altruism:
People with genuine moral sentiments are better able than others
to act in their own interest. . . . People with good reputations can
thus solve even nonrepeated prisoner's dilemmas. For example,
they can cooperate successfully with one another in ventures
where cheating is impossible to detect. Genuine altruism can
emerge, in other words, merely on the basis of having established
a reputation for behaving in a prudent way (p. 91)
He shows that in fact altruists—if these good folk really are altruists—
do quite well, in spite of the costs they incur. Psychologists and economists have conducted many experiments in which human beings
(typically, college students) are put in multiple Prisoner's Dilemmas
where the payoffs are small, but not negligible, sums of money. In
experiments that Frank conducted, students were given varying
opportunities to get to know each other during brief encounters (ten
minutes to half an hour) prior to being paired up repeatedly in Prisoner's Dilemma interactions. By varying the conditions, Frank
showed that people are surprisingly good—though far from perfect:

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Freedom Evolves

between 60 and 75 percent accurate—at predicting w h o will defect
and w h o will cooperate.
The prisoner's dilemma experiment lends support to our intuition that we can identify unopportunistic persons. That we can,
in fact, do this is the central premise upon which the commitment model is based. From this premise, it logically follows that
unopportunistic behavior will emerge and survive even in a ruthlessly competitive material world. We may thus concede that
material forces ultimately govern behavior, yet at the same time
reject the notion that people are always and everywhere motivated
by material self-interest. (Frank 1988, p. 145)
As the rationalists emphasize, we live in a material world and, in
the long run, behaviors most conducive to material success should
dominate. Again and again, however, we have seen that the most
adaptive behaviors will not spring directly from the quest for material advantage. Because of important commitment and implementation problems, that quest will often prove self-defeating. In
order to do well, we must sometimes stop caring about doing the
best we can. (p. 211)
Several features of Frank's account support striking correctives
to the prevailing philosophical wind encountered in earlier chapters.
First, recall the discussion in Chapter 4 of "could have done otherwise," and the example of Martin Luther. Far from such phenomena
being exceptions to the rule, or special cases requiring special excuses,
we can now see that the practice of making oneself so that one could
not have done otherwise is a key innovation in the evolutionary ascent
through Design Space—the Vast multidimensional space of all possible
designs—to human free will. This tactic of fixing one's will, once recognized, can be seen to have left a fossil trace in one of the words of
moral praise that seldom gets brandished by philosophers but is often
admired in a moral agent: She shows such determination, we say, admiringly. Second, we have seen that the philosophers' fear that if we are
determined, we may not be able to avail ourselves of real opportunities—if we are determined there may not be any real opportunities—
gets it almost backward; we can only be free in a morally relevant sense
if, in fact, we learn how to render ourselves insensitive to many of the

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217

opportunities that come our way. Again, we don't do this by making
ourselves crazy or blind, but by raising our stakes so that the "decisions"
are forced moves, or no-brainers, beneath serious consideration. Third,
we have seen that that mythical being, the economists' purely selfish
rational agent w h o can never resist a bargain, is a rational fool, to
w h o m we can put the famous rhetorical question: "If we're so stupid
how come we're rich?" As Frank puts it,
Altruists . . . do appear to do better economically: the experimental studies consistently find that altruistic behavior is positively
correlated with socioeconomic status. Of course, this does not
mean that altruistic behavior necessarily causes economic success.
But it does suggest that an altruistic posture cannot be too seriously burdensome m material terms. (Frank 1988, p. 235)
To another mythical being, the Kantian rational saint, we can say in
the same spirit: "If we're so immoral, how come we have so many
trusting friends?" In other words, if you want to get to genuine altruism, you should consider trying the evolutionary approach, sneaking
up on it by gradual increments, with no Prime Mammals, and no skyhooks, passing from blind selfishness through pseudo-altruism to quasialtruism (benselfishness) to something that may be quite good enough
for all of us.
Let me reflect briefly on the methods I have commended on
this path, and the conclusions I am not drawing. Frank's arguments and
conclusions have not yet won anything like general acceptance among
his fellow economists or evolutionary theorists (or philosophers), and
there remain serious problems—and alternatives—that need to be carefully addressed. W h a t is mainly important to me here is that Frank's
project, like Ainslie's, is an instance of a type of approach to these issues,
a Darwinian approach, that, I claim, is both obligatory and promising.
It is obligatory because any theory of ethics that just helps itself to a
handy set of human virtues without trying to explain how they might
have arisen is in danger of positing a skyhook, a miracle that "explains"
nothing because it can "explain" anything. It is promising because,
contrary to what the enemies of Darwinian approaches declare, novel
insights tumble out of the exercises of these theorists with quite gratifying frequency Speculative exercises in agent-design have been a staple of philosophers since Plato's Republic. W h a t the evolutionary

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perspective adds is a fairly systematic way to keep the exercises naturalistic (so we don't end up designing an angel or a perpetual motion
machine), but just as important, it permits us to explore the interactions over time between agents that philosophers typically just handwave about. For instance, philosophers often ask "What if everybody
did it?" as a rhetorical question, and don't stop to consider the answer,
which they typically think is obvious. They never even address the
more interesting question: What if some people did it? (What percentage, over what time period, under what conditions?) Computer simulations of evolutionary scenarios add further discipline: a way of
discovering hidden assumptions of one's models, and a way of exploring the dynamic effects, by "turning the knobs" to see the effect of different settings of the variables. It is important to recognize that these
computer simulations are actually philosophical thought experiments,
intuition pumps, not empirical experiments. They systematically
explore the implications of sets of assumptions. Philosophers used to
have to conduct their thought experiments by hand, one at a time.
N o w they can conduct thousands of variations in an hour, a good way
of checking to make sure that the intuitions they pump are not artifacts of some arbitrary feature of the scenario.
We have arrived at a sketch—a sketch only—of a path from the
origin of life to the existence of persons, agents whose freedom is both
their greatest strength and their greatest problem. We need to look
more closely now at what must be going on inside such a human agent
when a free decision is made, before turning to/ an exploration of the
implications for the continuing evolution of human freedom.

Chapter 7
The complexities of social life in a species with language and culture generate a
series of evolutionary arms races from which agents emerge who exhibit key components of human morality: an interest in discovering conditions in which cooperation will flourish, sensitivity to punishment and threats, concern for
reputation, high-level dispositions of self-manipulation that are designed to
improve self-control in the face of temptation, and an ability to make commitments that are appreciable by others. Innovations such as these can thrive under
specifiable conditions that co-evolve with them, supplanting the myopic "selfishness" of simpler organisms inhabiting simpler niches.

Notes on Sources and Further Reading

219

Chapter 8
The emerging picture of a human agent as a swarm of competing interests
shaped by evolutionary forces is hard to reconcile with our traditional sense of
ourselves as conscious egos or souls or selves, willing our intentional actions by
free decisions that must issue from our private sanctuaries in the mind. This
tension is nicely exposed in a controversial—and often misinterpreted—
experiment by Benjamin Libet, and can be resolved by looking more closely at
how a self emerges from the processes that occur in our brains. Correcting these
common misapprehensions about the self and the brain also banishes some dark
conclusions about the prospects for free will that have gained credence in some
quarters.

N o t e s o n Sources and Further R e a d i n g
Among the excellent books on evolutionary approaches to cooperation are Brian Skyrms's Evolution of the Social Contract (1996); R o b e r t
Wright's The Moral Animal (1994) and Nonzero (2000); Matt Ridley's
The Origins of Virtue (1996); Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths's Sex
and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (1999); and, of course,
Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson's Unto Others (1998). For valuable commentary on Sober and Wilson's book (and a reply), see Katz
2000. I have expressed my views of their book in an essay forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Dennett forthcoming
A), which will also contain several other commentaries and a reply by
the authors.
On the simple variety of punishment required to enforce cultural norms, see John Haugeland's Having Thought (1999), and my
review (Dennett 1999A). Paul Bingham (1999) has developed a bold
and controversial theory of human evolution based on the premise that
the innovation of simple weapons—sticks and stones—so altered the
cost-benefit trade-off or riskiness of individual participation in group
punishment of defectors that it ushered in the unique varieties of
human social cooperativity on which human culture depends, a culturally evolved revolution that was swiftly responded to genetically,
with skeletal adaptations for better throwing and weapon-wielding.

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220

The Zahavi Handicap Principle is discussed at length in Frank
1988. See also Helena Cronin's The Ant and the Peacock (1991). R a n dolph Nesse has edited an outstanding anthology of new work on the
topic of commitment, Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment (2001).
For an overview of the experimental literature on selfmanipulation and self-control in children, see J. Metcalfe and W
Mischel's "A H o t / C o o l System Analysis of Delay of Gratification:
Dynamics of Willpower" (1999). For an overview of the gametheoretic context of Frank's proposal, along with subtle criticism and a
friendly amendment to his invocation of emotions for this signaling role,
see D o n Ross and Paul Dumouchel's "Emotions as Strategic Signals."

/

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Chapter 8

ARE YOU OUT
OF THE LOOP?
"You imagine a fictional mental construct called 'free will,' which is kind of like
believing in leprechauns or UFOs to a cognitive neuroscientist."

—Rachel Palmquist, a character in Brain Storm, by Richard Dooling

Several years ago I had a strange experience. I was reading a funny and
thought-provoking novel by Richard Dooling, entitled Brain Storm
(1998), recommended to me by a friend w h o insisted I would enjoy it
in spite of its title—in 1978 I had published a book entitled Brainstorms.

D r a w i n g the W r o n g M o r a l
The hero of this novel is a young lawyer w h o visits a neuroscience laboratory in his quest to establish that his client, on trial for murder, has
brain damage. T h e neuroscientist he finds to help him, Dr. Rachel
Palmquist, is—wouldn't you know—as uninhibited as she is beautiful,
and eventually things get steamy. Their clothing is cast aside, but then,
entwined on the laboratory floor, they encounter a problem: O u r hero,
it seems, has a conscience, and thoughts about his wife and kids
threaten to bring the carnal proceedings to an abrupt end. What to do?
Dr. Palmquist does what I guess any brilliant, naked neuroscientist
would do under just such circumstances: she says,
"In Consciousness Explained, Dan Dennett uses the analogy of a
cartoon featuring Casper the Friendly Ghost. You want to say that
you have a soul." (Dooling 1998, p. 228)
Free will is the issue, and according to her, I have explained that it cannot exist.

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"We don't even have free will?"
"Folk psychology again," she said. "It's a nice fiction. Perhaps a necessary fiction—that a certain part of your consciousness
can stand aside from itself, assess and control its own performance.
But a brain is a symphony orchestra without a conductor. Right
now we're hearing an oboe or maybe a piccolo make an inquisitive flourish of self-examination while the rest of the instruments
are off soaring in a different crescendo. What's left of you is an
extremely complex balance of competing wet biological parallel
processors in that electrochemical batch of elbow macaroni fermenting between your ears, which is ultimately in charge of your
body, but by definition cannot be in charge of itself." (Dooling
1998, p. 229)
Quite a wake-up call! This neuroscientist must indeed be brilliant,
since she goes on to give an impromptu precis of my theory of consciousness that is insightful and accurate—hard enough to do with
clothes on and a podium to stand behind—but what galvanized me was
Dooling's master twist: She gets the part about free will dead wrong,
just the way some real neuroscientists have done. Is free will a fiction, then,
according to my view? Is this the implication of my theory of consciousness? N o t at all, but more than a few neuroscientists and psychologists have thought that their science has demonstrated this, and
my allusion to Casper the Friendly Ghost may have contributed to this
misapprehension.
~
It is easier to see what the issue is if we switch fantasies for a
moment. Recall the myth of Cupid, w h o flutters about on his cherubic wings making people fall in love by shooting them with his litde
bow and arrow. This is such a lame cartoonists' convention that it's hard
to believe that anybody ever took any version of it seriously. But we
can pretend: Suppose that once upon a time there were people w h o
believed that an invisible arrow from a flying god was a sort of inoculation that caused people to fall in love. And suppose some killjoy scientist then came along and showed them that this was simply not true:
No such flying gods exist. "He's shown that nobody ever falls in love,
not really. The idea of falling in love is just a nice—maybe even a
necessary—fiction. It never happens." That is what some might say.
Others, one hopes, would want to deny it: " N o . Love is quite real, and

Drawing the Wrong Moral

223

so is falling in love. It just isn't what people used to think it is. It's just
as good—maybe even better. True love doesn't involve any flying
gods." The issue of free will is like this. If you are one of those w h o
think that free will is only really free will if it springs from an immaterial soul that hovers happily in your brain, shooting arrows of decision
into your motor cortex, then, given what you mean by free will, my
view is that there is no free will at all. If, on the other hand, you think
free will might be morally important without being supernatural, then
my view is that free will is indeed real, but just not quite what you
probably thought it was.
Since readers fall into both camps, you can't hope to reach
everybody unless you draw everybody's attention to this problem,
which I've often triecyto do. In my book Brainstorms, one of the questions discussed was whether such things as beliefs and pains were "real,"
so I made up a little fable about people w h o speak a language in which
they talk about being beset by "fatigues" where you and I would talk
about being tired, exhausted. W h e n we arrive on the scene with our
sophisticated science, they ask us which of the little things in the bloodstream are the fatigues. We resist the question, which leads them to ask,
in disbelief: "Are you denying that fatigues are real?" Given their tradition, this is an awkward question for us to answer, calling for diplomacy (not metaphysics). In Consciousness Explained (1991 A), I tried to
fend off the same confusion with a story about a madman w h o said
there were no animals in the zoo—he knew perfectly well that there
are giraffes and elephants and the like, but insisted that they were not
what people thought they were. These exercises in imaginationshifting seemed to me to do the trick, but I must say that the message
just doesn't seem to take. I've finally come to realize that many p e o ple like the confusion. They don't want to adjust their imaginations.
They like to say that I deny the existence of consciousness, that I deny
the existence of free will. Even such a clever thinker as R o b e r t Wright
finds the denial of the distinction I insist upon irresistible:
Of course the problem here is with the claim that consciousness
is "identical" to physical brain states. The more Dennett et al. try
to explain to me what they mean by this, the more convinced I
become that what they really mean is that consciousness doesn't
exist. (Wright 2000, p. 398)

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And that wily cultural observer Tom Wolfe notes that E. O. Wilson,
Richard Dawkins, and I
present elegant arguments as to why neuroscience should in no way
diminish the richness of life, the magic of art, or the righteousness
of political causes. . . . Despite their best efforts, however, neuroscience is not rippling out into the public on waves of scholarly
reassurance. But rippling out it is, rapidly. The conclusion people
out beyond the laboratory walls are drawing is: The fix is in! We're
all hardwired! That, and: Don't blame me! I'm wired wrong! (Wolfe
2000, p. 100)
Exactly the conclusion Rachel Palmquist wanted to draw on
the laboratory floor. Later in this chapter, we will confront the problem head-on, in the title of an excellent n e w b o o k by the psychologist Daniel Wegner: The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002). I think
Wegner's account of conscious will is the best I have seen. I agree
with it in almost every regard. And I've discussed with him the
awkwardness—from my point of view—of his title. I see him as the
killjoy scientist w h o shows that Cupid doesn't shoot arrows and
then insists on entitling his b o o k The Illusion of Romantic Love. But
I appreciate that there are people w h o will insist that Wegner's title
is just right: He is showing that conscious will is an illusion. Wegner eventually softens the blow by arguing that conscious will may
be an illusion, but responsible, moral action is quite real. And that
is the b o t t o m line for both of us. We agree that Rachel Palmquist is
wrong w h e n she uses a neuroscientific theory of the will to ground
her conclusion that our hero's conscience shouldn't trouble him
(since he doesn't have free will, not really). Wegner and I agree on
the bottom line; what we disagree on is tactics. Wegner thinks it is
less misleading, more effective, to say that conscious will is an illusion, but a benign illusion, even, in some regards, a veridical illusion. (Isn't this a contradiction in terms? N o t necessarily; like a
splittable atom, a veridical illusion can find a place in our conceptual scheme, in spite of its etymology.) I myself think that the t e m p tation to misread this conclusion the way Rachel Palmquist does is
so strong that I prefer to make the same points by saying that no, free
will is not an illusion; all the varieties of free will worth wanting are,

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225

or can be, ours—but you have to give up a bit of false and outdated
ideology to understand how this can be so. Romantic love minus
Cupid's arrow is still worth yearning for. It is still, indeed, romantic love, real romantic love.
C O N R A D : No, it isn't! Romantic love without genuine
spirituality—what you're lampooning as Cupid's arrow—
isn't real romantic love at all! It's a cheesy substitute! And
the same holds for free will. What you call free will, a
phenomenon that in the end is just a complicated snarl of
mechanistic causes that look like decision-making (from
certain angles), isn't real free will at all!
Fair enough, Conrad, if that's the way you insist on using the
terms. But then you must accept the burden of demonstrating why you
are wise to hold out for these "genuine" varieties of romantic love and
free will, when my substitutes fulfill all the requirements you've listed
so far. What makes the "genuine" varieties worth caring about at all? I
agree that margarine isn't real butter, no matter how good it tastes, but
if you insist on real butter at any price, you really ought to have a good
reason.
C O N R A D : Aha! You admit it, then. You're just playing with
words, and trying to pass off margarine for real butter. I exhort
all people to demand real free will; accept no substitutes!
And do you also advise diabetics to insist on "real" insulin,
instead of the "artificial" stuff? If your real heart gives out some day,
will you spurn an artificial substitute that can perform all the functions
of your real heart? At what point does love of tradition turn into a foolish superstition? I claim that the varieties of free will I am defending
are worth wanting precisely because they play all the valuable roles free
will has been traditionally invoked to play. But I cannot deny that the
tradition also assigns properties to free will that my varieties lack. So
much the worse for tradition, say I.
Perhaps time will tell which expository tactic, Wegner's or
mine, is best for the topic of free will, or perhaps not. But shame on
anybody w h o ignores the claim—explicitly defended by both of us—

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that a naturalistic account of decision-making still leaves plenty of
room for moral responsibility 1
What in particular about the neuroscience of decision-making
convinces so many people that free will is an illusion? It isn't just the
bare fact of materialism-—the fact that there are no Cupids shooting
arrows into our motor cortex—but rather a particular aspect of that
neuroscience, and Rachel Palmquist does a fine j o b of conveying the
popular impression:
Preconscious cognition is brain activity that occurs before you are
aware of it. The scary part is that it initiates actual movement in
the physical world. Your consciousness, if you want to call it
that, simply observes activity which originates somewhere else
in your brain. . . . Think of your brain as a complex arrangement of networks and parallel processors. From time to time,
some are conscious of themselves, but most aren't. Imagine a
three-hundred-millisecond moral void which opens just after
the brain triggers behavior and before the brain becomes consciously aware of it. (Dooling 1998, p. 120)
That 300-millisecond "moral void" is the problem. It looks as if your
brain makes up its mind before you do!
"Stimuli, sensations," she said, pasting an electrode on each
shoulder. "They get processed preconsciously, important mental
decisions and representations are made before the brain is selfconsciously aware of them." (p. 122)
The 300-millisecond "gap" is real enough, but there is something fishy
about this way of interpreting it—as a "moral void"—and this is the
mistake I want to examine. Again. I discussed it in a chapter of Consciousness Explained, but that discussion was obscure and difficult, and
needs refreshing. This time, perhaps, the moral of the story will come
through clearly—instead of coming through backward, the way it was
taken by that brilliant, naked neuroscientist, Rachel Palmquist.
1. Disagreeing with us is Derk Pereboom, whose new book, Living without Free Will (2001),
arrived as I was putting the finishing touches on this book. He defends the view that "given
our best scientific theories, factors beyond our control ultimately produce all of our actions,
and that we are therefore not morally responsible for them." He did not at all persuade me,
but others who find my book unconvincing may find a valuable ally here.

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227

W h e n e v e r the Spirit M o v e s You
Are decisions voluntary? Or are they things that happen to us? From some fleeting
vantage points they seem to be the preeminently voluntary moves in our lives, the
instants at which we exercise our agency to the fullest. But those same decisions can
also be seen to be strangely out of our control. We have to wait to see how we are going
to decide something, and when we do decide, our decision bubbles up to consciousness
from we know not where. We do not witness it being made; we witness its arrival.
This can then lead to the strange idea that Central Headquarters is not where we, as
conscious introspectors, are; it is somewhere deeper within us, and inaccessible to us.

—Dennett, Elbow Room
It takes time for a braM to do anything, so whenever you do something
(whenever your body does something) your brain, which controls your
body, has to do something else first. Normally, when you are awake and
busy, you are doing several things at once—walking and talking, stirring
the pot on the stove while trying to recollect which ingredient goes in
next, reading the next measure of the piano part while listening to what
the cello is playing and moving your own hands into position for the next
cascade of chords, or just reaching for your beer while channel surfing.
So much is normally going on, overlapped in time, that it would be difficult to sort out all the dependencies, but it is possible to quiet everything
down and isolate a "single" act, just in order to study it. Sit very still for
a while, trying not to think of anything at all, and then, for no reason at
all except that you want to, flick your right wrist once. A single flick,
please, whenever, as we say, the spirit moves you. Call that voluntary,
intentional act of yours Flick! If we monitor your brain with an array of
surface electrodes (on the scalp will do fine—we needn't insert them in
your brain), we will find that the brain activity leading up to Flick! has a
definite and repeatable time course, and a shape. It lasts the better part of
a second—between 500 and 1,000 milliseconds—ending when your wrist
actually moves (which we can detect by having your wrist break a beam
of light aimed at a simple photoelectric cell). The motion of the wrist is
preceded by less than 50 milliseconds by activity in the motor nerves
descending from the motor cortex of your brain to the muscles in your
forearm, but it is preceded by as much as 800 milliseconds—almost a second—by a clearly detectable wave of activity in your brain known as the
readiness potential, o r R P (Kornhuber and Deecke 1965). (See Figure 8.1.)

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Freedom Evolves

Somewhere among those thousand milliseconds is the notorious "time t" the time when you consciously decide to flick your wrist.
Benjamin Libet set out to determine just when it is. Since this moment
is defined by its subjective properties, he had t o ^ e t you to say when it
occurs so that he could then superimpose it on the objective series of
events occurring in your brain. He figured out a clever way to put the
two series, subjective and objective, into registration. He had subjects
look at a "clock" with a swiftly moving dot, like the second hand, but
moving considerably faster, one revolution every 2.65 seconds, so that
he could get readings of fractions of seconds to calibrate against his
timed recordings of brain activity (Figure 8.2).
Libet asked his subjects to take note of the position of the dot
on the clock face at the instant they decided to flick or were first aware
of the urge or wish to flick. This information they were to report (later,
well after the flick, without rushing their report). He found a time gap
or latency between the RP he measured in subjects' brains and their
reported time of decision of between 300 and 500 milliseconds. That is the

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229

"moral void" of which Rachel Palmquist speaks, and it is whopping, by
neuroscientiflc standards—compared, for instance, to the idiosyncrasies
and inaccuracies that can be observed in other judgments of simultaneity. There is no controversy about whether, in this artificial circumstance,
the RP is the triggering cause of your nick. The RP is a highly reliable
predictor of flicking. So now what is the problem? It seems to be this:
W h e n you think you're deciding, you're actually just passively watching
a sort of delayed internal videotape (the ominous 300-millisecond delay)
of the real deciding that happened unconsciously in your brain quite a while
before "it occurred to you" to flick. As I put it in Consciousness Explained,
We are not quite "out of the loop" (as they say in the White
House), but since our access to information is thus delayed, the
most we can do is intervene with last-moment "vetoes" or "triggers." Downstream from (unconscious) Command Headquarters,
I take no real initiative, am never in on the birth of a project, but
do exercise a modicum of executive modulation of the formulated
policies streaming through my office. (Dennett 1991 A, p. 164)

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Freedom Evolves

But I was expressing this view in order to demonstrate its falsehood. I
went on to say: "This picture is compelling but incoherent." Others,
however, don't see this incoherence. As the sophisticated (and welldressed) neuroscientist, Michael Gazzaniga has put it: "Libet determined that brain potentials are firing three hundred and fifty
milliseconds before you have the conscious intention to act. So before
you are aware that you're thinking about moving your arm, your brain
is at work preparing to make that movement!" (Gazzaniga 1998, p. 73).
William Calvin, another fine (and reliably clothed) neuroscientist puts
it more cautiously:
My fellow neurophysiologist Ben Libet has, to everyone's
consternation, shown that the brain activity associated with
the preparation for movement (something called the "readiness
potential") . . . starts a quarter of a second before you report having decided to move. You just weren't yet conscious of your decision to move, but it was indeed under way. (Calvin 1989, pp.
80-81)
And Libet himself has recently summarized his own interpretation of
the phenomenon thus:
The initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the
brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he
wants to act! Is there, then, any role for conscious will in the performance of a voluntary act? (see Libet 1985) To answer this it
must be recognized that conscious will (W)Aloes appear about
150 msec, before the muscle is activated, even though it follows
the onset of the RP. An interval of 150 msec, would allow enough
time in which the conscious function might affect the final outcome of the volitional process. (Actually, only 100 msec, is available for any such effect. The final 50 msec, before the muscle is
activated is the time for the primary motor cortex to activate the
spinal motor nerve cells. During this time the act goes to completion with no possibility of stopping it by the rest of the cerebral cortex.) (Libet 1999, p. 49)
Only a tenth of a second—100 milliseconds—in which to
issue presidential vetoes. As the astute (and impeccably attired) neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran once quipped, "This suggests that

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our conscious minds may not have free will, but rather 'free won't'!"
(Holmes 1998, p. 35). I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I
certainly want more free will than that. Can we find any flaws in the
reasoning that has led this distinguished group of neuroscientists to this
dire conclusion?
Libet's experimental task is an unusual one, worth imagining
carefully. You are sitting there calmly, watching a clock dot go round
and round, and waiting till, for no reason at all except perhaps that
you're getting bored, you decide to flick: "Let the urge to act appear
on its own any time without any preplanning or concentration on
when to act" (Libet et al. 1983, p. 625). It's important that you not follow a policy such as deciding that you'll flick your wrist the next time
the clock hand gets t6 the "three o'clock" position, since then you
would have made your decision ("of your own free will") earlier, and
just be implementing it more or less mindlessly, triggered by the visual
appearance of the clock face. (Recall Martin Luther, w h o made up his
mind long ago, and now can do no other.) H o w can you be sure you're
not letting something about the clock face trigger your "free" choice?
That is anybody's guess, but for the moment let's presume that you succeed in following instructions at least to this extent: So far as you can
tell, you are not "gearing" your choice to the position of the clock dot,
but rather just "noticing" what position the clock dot is in when "it
occurs to you" to flick. After the flick you tell Libet what that position was ("The clock dot was just after 10 when I decided" or " T h e
dot was straight down, position 3 0 " or whatever), and his earlier datarecording permits him to say to the millisecond just when the clock
dot was in that position. Libet can then put your stream of consciousness (as later reported by you) into temporal registration with your
brain activity, and that will fix the time of your consciousness of your
decision, right? That's the assumption that underlies Libet's experiment, but it's not as innocent as it first appears.
Suppose Libet knows that your readiness potential peaked at
millisecond 6,810 of the experimental trial and the clock dot was
straight down (which is what you reported you saw) at millisecond
7,005. H o w many milliseconds should he expect to have to add to this
number to get the time when you were conscious of it? The light gets
from the clock face to your eyeball almost instantaneously, but the path
of the signals from retina through lateral geniculate nucleus to striate

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232

cortex takes 5 to 10 milliseconds—a paltry fraction of the 300 millisecond offset, but how much longer does it take for them to get to you?
(Or are you located in the striate cortex?) The visual signals have to be
processed before they arrive at wherever they need to arrive at for you
to make a conscious decision of simultaneity. Libet's method presupposes, in short, that we can locate the intersection of two trajectories
•

the rising-to-consciousness of signals representing the
decision to flick

•

the rising-to-consciousness of signals representing successive clock-face orientations

so that these two events occur side by side, as it were, in a place where
their simultaneity can be noted. Since Libet wants to hear from you,
not your striate cortex, we have to know where you are in the brain
before we can even begin to interpret the data. Let us suppose, for the
sake of argument, that this makes sense. To be fair and constructive,
cast aside all the extravagant versions of the supposition: Libet is not
supposing that you are an actual homunculus, with arms and legs, eyes
and ears, like the little green man in the control room of the man-size
puppet in the morgue in Men in Black, and he's not supposing that you
are an immaterial portion of glowing ectoplasm that oozes around in
your brain like a ghost amoeba, or that you are an angel whose wings
are folded till you are called to fly to heaven. We must consider a minimalist version of the hypothesis, stripped of all-such embarrassing
details: You are just whatever-it-takes-to-be-able-to-experiencedecision-and-clock face-orientation-simultaneity. (If we need to have
an image, we can dimly imagine that this whatever-it-is is some nexus
or cluster of brain activity, and it might shift around under various conditions, a brainstorm with rather special cognitive powers. See Figure
8.3.) There are then at least three possibilities to explore:
(A) You are busy making your free decision in the faculty of practical reasoning (where all free decisions are made), and you
have to wait there for visual contents to be sent over from
the vision center. H o w long does this take? If time pressure
is not critical, perhaps the visual content is sent very slowly
and is seriously out of date by the time it arrives, like yesterday's newspaper.

Whenever the Spirit Moves You

(B) You are busy watching the clock in the vision center, and
have to wait for the faculty of practical reasoning to send you
the results of its latest decision-making. H o w long does
this take? This might be another dawdling transmission,
mightn't it?
(C) You are sitting where you always sit: in command headquarters (otherwise known as the Cartesian Theater), and
have to wait for both the vision center and the faculty of
practical reasoning to send their respective outputs to this
place, where everything comes together and consciousness
happens. If one of these outposts is farther away, or transmits at a slower rate, you will be subject to illusions of
simultaneityj-^-if you judge simultaneity by actual arrival
time at command headquarters, instead of relying on
something like postmarks or time stamps.

233

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Freedom Evolves

Putting the matter this baldly helps—I hope—to clarify the
problems with Libet's picture. What is the presumed implication of
these different hypotheses? What would it mean for you to be in one
of these places rather than the other? The governing idea is presumably that you can only act where you are, so if you are not in the faculty of practical reasoning when a decision is made there, you didn't
make it. At best you delegated it. ("I want to be in the faculty of practical reasoning. After all, if I'm not there when decisions are made, the
decisions won't be mine. They will be its!") But when you are there,
you may get so engrossed in making your decision that "your eyes glaze
over" and the vision center's good work goes unattended, never getting to you at all. So, perhaps, you should move back and forth between
the faculty of practical reasoning and the vision center. But if that is
what you do, then it is quite possible that you were, in fact, conscious
of the decision to flick at the very moment you made it, but it then took
you more than 300 milliseconds to move to the vision center and pick
up an image—you got there just as the dot-straight-down picture
arrived—so you misjudged the simultaneity because you lost track of
how long it took you to get from place to place. Whew! This is one
hypothesis, call it Strolling You, that could save free will, by showing that
the gap was an illusion, after all. According to this hypothesis, you consciously decided to flick when that part of your brain decided to flick
(hey, you were there, at the time, riding the readiness potential as it was
created) but you later misjudged the objective clock time of that decision because of the time it took you to get to the vision center and
pick up the latest clock-face position.
If you don't like that hypothesis, here is another one that could
do the trick, based on alternative (C), in which both the vision center
and the faculty of practical reasoning are moved out of command headquarters. Call it Out-of-touch You. You have outsourced all these tasks,
as today's business world would put it, delegating them to subcontractors, but you do keep limited control of their activities from your seat
in command headquarters by sending them orders and getting results
from them, in a continuous cycle of commands and responses. If asked
to think of a reason not to dine out tonight, you send out to your faculty of practical reasoning for a reason, and pretty quick it sends two
back: I'm too tired and there's food in the fridge that will spoil if we don't eat
it tonight. H o w did the faculty come up with these? W h y in this order?

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235

W h a t operations did it execute to generate them? You haven't a clue—
you just know what you sent out for, and recognize that what arrived
back is a satisfactory fulfillment of your request. If asked what time it
is, you send the appropriate command to the vision center, and it sends
back the latest view of the watch on your wrist, with a little help from
the wrist-motion-control center, but you have no insight into how that collaborative effort was achieved either. Given the problem of variable
time delays, you institute a time-stamp system, which works well for
most purposes, but you misuse it in Libet's rather unnatural setting.
W h e n asked, from your underprivileged position in command headquarters to judge just when, exactly, your faculty of practical reasoning issued its flick order (a judgment you are to render in terms of the
time stamps you discern on the streams of reports coming in from both
the faculty of practical reasoning and the vision center), you match up
the wrong reports. Since you're relying on second-hand information
(reports from the two outlying subcontractors) you can easily just be
wrong about which event happened first, or whether any two were
simultaneous.
O n e thing going for this hypothesis is that such judgments of
simultaneity are unnatural acts in the first place, unless they are framed
for a particular purpose, such as your trying to get your staccato attack
in sync with the conductor's downbeat, or trying to connect with a
low fastball so as to send it straight back over the pitcher's head. In
such natural contexts, virtuoso feats of timing are possible, but isolated
judgments of "cross-modal" simultaneity (answering such questions as
"Which came first, the flash or the beep, or were they simultaneous?")
are notoriously prone to interference and error. Depending on how
you frame a judgment, depending on what use you plan to make of
the judgment, what counts, subjectively, as simultaneity can be made
to move around. So if you make your judgments of simultaneity from
such an underprivileged position, with no natural context that provides a reason for the judgment, you could well have ordered the faculty of practical reason to issue a decision, and simply misfiled its
report of completion, so that you misjudge it to have been done simultaneously with the perception in the vision center of the clock face
position at 30. But perhaps this hypothesis doesn't appeal, since you
aren't actually present in the faculty of practical reasoning w h e n it
makes the decision.

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So here is yet another hypothesis, which puts you back where
the action is (or was): Slow-drying Ink. W h e n you make a decision, consciously, in the faculty of practical reasoning (and you are right there,
in the thick of it), you "write it u p " in ink that is slow-drying:
Although you can start acting on it immediately, you can't compare it
with what's going on in vision until the ink dries (in about 300 milliseconds). (This hypothesis is inspired by other work of Libet's discussed in Consciousness Explained [Dennett 1991 A], on "backwards
referral" of consciousness.) On this hypothesis, you actually decide to
execute Flick! exactly when the RP in your brain shows up, without
any delay, but you don't get to compare that conscious decision with
a result from the vision center for a good 300-plus milliseconds, the
time it takes for your decision to cure before entering the comparison
chamber.
And if you don't like that hypothesis, there are others that
could be considered, including, of course, all manner of hypotheses
that don't "save free will" because they tend to confirm Libet's view of
the matter: that in the normal course of moral decision-making, you
in fact have at most 100 milliseconds in which to veto or otherwise
adjust decisions made earlier (and elsewhere) unconsciously. Can't we
just dismiss the whole sorry lot of them, on the grounds that these
hypotheses are wildly unrealistic oversimplifications of what is known
about how decision-making works in the brain? Yes indeed, we could,
and we should. But when we do that, we don't just dismiss all these
fanciful hypotheses that could "save free will" iff the face of Libet's
data; we must also dismiss Libet's own hypothesis and all the others that
purport to show we only have "free won't." His hypothesis, just as
much as those I've just sketched, depends on taking seriously the idea
that you are restricted to the materials you can get access to from a particular subregion of the brain. H o w so? Consider his idea of a strictly
limited window of opportunity to veto. Libet tacitly presupposes that
you can't start thinking seriously about whether to veto something until
you're conscious of what it is that you might want to veto, and you
have to wait 300 milliseconds or more for this, which gives you only
100 milliseconds in which to "act": "This provides a period during
which the conscious function could potentially determine whether the
volitional process will go on to completion" (Libet 1993, p. 134). The
"conscious function" waits, in the Cartesian Theater, until the infor-

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mation arrives, and only then for the first time has access to it and can
start thinking about what to do about it, whether to veto it, etc. But
why couldn't you have been thinking ("unconsciously") about whether
to veto Flick! ever since you decided ("unconsciously") to flick, half a
second ago? Libet must be assuming that the brain is talented enough
to work out the details of implementation on how to flick over that
period of time, but only a "conscious function" is talented enough to
work on the pros and cons of a veto decision.
In fact, at one point Libet sees this problem and addresses it
candidly: " T h e possibility is not excluded that factors, on which the
decision to veto (control) is based, do develop by unconscious processes
that precede the veto" (Libet 1999, p. 51). But if that possibility is not
excluded, then the conclusion Libet and others should draw is that the
300-millisecond "gap" has not been demonstrated at all. After all, we
know that in normal circumstances the brain begins its discriminative
and evaluative work as soon as stimuli are received, and works on many
concurrent projects at once, enabling us to respond intelligently just in
time for many deadlines, without having to stack them up in a queue
waiting to get through the turnstile of consciousness before evaluation
begins. Patricia Churchland (1981) demonstrated this in a simple
experiment in which subjects were required to respond consciously
(how else?) to a light flash. Their total response time was about 350 milliseconds. Libet's reaction to Churchland's finding was to insist that
such a response is begun unconsciously: "The ability to detect a stimulus and react to it purposefully, or to be psychologically influenced by
it, without any reportable conscious awareness of the stimulus, is
widely accepted" (Libet 1981, p. 188). But this concedes just what is
at issue: You can begin reacting purposefully to—you can be psychologically influenced by—a decision to flick long before it "rises to consciousness." For all Libet's experiments have shown, it could be that
you have optimal access at all times to the decision-making you are
engaged in. That is, it could be that every part of you that is competent to play any role in the decision-making it falls to you to engage in
gets whatever it needs to do its j o b at the earliest possible time. (What
else could you be worried about when you wonder if you are getting
informed too late to make the difference you want to make?)
Libet's data do rule out one hypothesis, which might have been
our favorite: Self-contained You, according to which all the brain's chores

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Freedom Evolves

are gathered into one compact location, where everything could happen
at once in one place—vision, hearing, decision-making, simultaneityjudging. . . . With everything so handy, the timing problem couldn't
arise: A person, a soul, could sit there and make free, responsible decisions and be simultaneously conscious of making them, and of everything else going on in consciousness at the time. But there is no such
place in the brain. As I never tire of pointing out, all the work done
by the imagined homunculus in the Cartesian Theater has to be broken up and distributed in space and time in the brain. It is once again
time to repeat my ironic motto: If you make yourself really small, you
can externalize virtually anything.
The brain processes stimuli over time, and the amount of time
depends on which information is being extracted for which purposes.
A top tennis player can set up to design a return of service within 100
milliseconds or so. The 78 feet from base line to base line can be traversed by a serve from Venus Williams (averaging 125 mph) in less than
450 milliseconds, only about 50 milliseconds more than it took the
fastest serve yet recorded (from Greg Rusedski, at 147 mph initial
speed). And since the precise timing and shape of that return depends
critically on visual information (if you doubt this, try returning service
blindfolded), it is possible for the brain to extract visual information
and put it to highly appropriate use in that short a time. As Churchland showed, just pressing a button when asked to signal when you see
a flash of light takes a normal subject about 350 milliseconds. N o w
these are conscious, voluntary, intentional responses to events (aren't
they?), and they happen without any 300 to 500 millisecond delay. Of
course, the tennis player, and the subject in the experiment, have to
decide (freely, consciously) beforehand that they are going to gear their
responses to particular conditions. These are, in effect, mini-Luther
cases. The tennis player pre-commits to a simple plan and then lets
"reflexes" execute her intentional act. (It can be somewhat conditional,
along the lines of IF high to my backhand THEN defensive lob ELSE topspin down alley. In effect, she turns herself temporarily into a situationaction machine.) And you, having decided to cooperate with the
experimenter by pressing the button as soon as the light flash appears,
do likewise: You just sit back on autopilot and let your decision be
implemented. "I couldn't do otherwise," you might say. "Since there
wasn't time to reflect and consider, I did all my reflection off-line, in

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the luxury of spare time, so that w h e n the crunch came I could act
without thinking."
We do this all the time. O u r lives are full of decisions to act
when the time is ripe, revisable commitments to policies and attitudes
that will shape responses that must be delivered too swiftly to be reflectively considered in the heat of action. We are the authors and executors of these policies, even though they are compiled from parts we can
only indirectly monitor and control. T h e fact that we can play ensemble music, for instance, shows that our brains are capable of multitasking on a highly convoluted timescale, and it is all deliberate, controlled,
and intended. The responses we make in conversation, indeed the very
words we say silently to ourselves as we reflect on what to do next, are
themselves acts that haye had long preparation times reaching back into
the past. W h a t Liber discovered was not that consciousness lags ominously behind unconscious decision, but that conscious decisionmaking takes time. If you have to make a series of conscious decisions,
you'd better budget half a second, roughly, for each one, and if you
need to control things faster than that, you'll have to compile your
decision-making into a device that can leave out much of the processing that goes into a stand-alone conscious decision. Libet reports a simple experiment by Jensen (1979) that demonstrates this effect. Jensen
asked subjects to press a button as soon as they were conscious of a light
flash, just as Patricia Churchland had done, and got results consonant
with hers—actually, his subjects' reaction times were quite a bit faster—
250 milliseconds on average. Then he asked his subjects to delay their
button presses just a little, as little as possible. They had to add a w h o p ping 300 milliseconds to their response time. The brain has tricks for
avoiding these delays under some conditions, such as searching a scene
for particular items under time pressure. For instance, when hunting
for a target item, the brain sometimes knows enough to let itself go;
it does a random visual search of a systematic display, even though it
could do a "more efficient" methodical search. Attention can swing
faster from item to item when it is just let loose, since "attention is fast,
but volition is slow" (Wolfe, Alvarez, and Horowitz, 2000).
These timing tricks usually fit together seamlessly and are
incorporated into the brain's own monitoring of what it is up to, but
in artificial circumstances (as devised by clever experimenters) the tricks
can be exposed. For instance, w h e n the brain executes a decision to

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act (at the time of the RP rise) it sets up anticipations—it produces a
little future—about what should happen next. If what happens next is
artificially disrupted—by being sped up or delayed, for instance—this
creates violations of those anticipations and signals that something is
wrong. But the brain may not be up to coming up with the right interpretation of just what has happened in such an unprecedented setting.
In Consciousness Explained (Dennett 1991 A, pp. 167—68), I described
an early experiment that illustrates this, which I called Grey Walter's
pre-cognitive carousel. Back in the early 1960s, the eminent neurosurgeon and early roboticist Grey Walter took advantage of the fact that
he had a series of epilepsy patients in whose motor areas he had
implanted electrodes. He wired the leads from the electrodes to a slide
carousel, so that whenever the patients decided (ad lib, whenever the
spirit moved them) to advance to the next slide, the detected brain
activity in the motor area directly triggered the advance of the carousel.
The button the patients pushed was a dummy, attached to nothing. The
effect, he said, was dramatic: It seemed to the patients that just as they
were "about t o " push the button, but before they had decided, the slide
projector would read their minds and literally take matters out of their
hands. 2 Since their anticipation of a perceived slide change was
"scooped" by slightly earlier perception of such a change, they were
left with a powerful conviction that something spooky was happening;
the slide projector was reading their minds. In one sense that is just

J
2. Grey Walter described this experiment in a talk I attended in Oxford in 1963 or 1964.
The account was never subsequently published, to the best of my knowledge. I and a number
of readers have tried to track it down, without success, and several—Wegner included—have
expressed the hunch that Grey Walter was pulling our legs that day in Oxford. Maybe, but
my own surmise is that he may have decided not to publish it because even by the standards
of the day, the ethics of the experiments were borderline: His patients had chronically
implanted phone jacks protruding from their skulls for months on end, a regimen they would
not likely have acquiesced in, had they not thought it was part of a treatment that might
improve their epilepsy, but as best I recall, their repeat visits to Grey Walter's Burden Institute
were as research subjects in experiments that had no plausible therapeutic benefit to them. (In
any event, the effect should be possible to replicate non-invasively on normal subjects today,
with the aid of the latest high-speed analysis of scalp electrode signals or MEG scanning. The
main technical hurdle is not getting the data, but processing it fast enough in real time to
provide the anticipation effect. Although I know of no published replications—or failures to
replicate—I predict that anybody who takes the trouble to test this and the variations I
propose on p. 168 of Consciousness Explained will find the effect.)

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what was happening, but it wasn't learning of their decisions before
they were conscious of them—it was just "reading" and executing their
conscious decisions faster than their own arm muscles could "read" and
execute the very same decisions. Imagine popping a photograph into
an envelope and mailing it (snail mail) to a friend, and suppose the letter is swiftly intercepted by a mail thief who, as a prank, scans your p h o tograph and e-mails the picture to your friend minutes after you drop
the envelope in the mailbox. Half an hour after you mail the photograph, your friend calls you and marvels at the details of the picture.
You were anticipating just such a call, but not for two or three days! It
would be upsetting, to say the least, and you might be tempted to j u m p
to the false conclusion that your letter must have been sent by you long
before you were conscious of sending it—have you been sleepwalking
in recent days?
A similar confusion, I submit, is what is happening in the case
of Libet's subjects' 300-millisecond misjudgment. W h e n we perform
an intentional action, we normally monitor it visually (and by hearing
and touch, of course) to make sure it is coming off as intended.
Hand—eye coordination is accomplished by a tightly interwoven system of sensory and motor systems. Suppose I am intentionally typing
the words "flick the wrist" and wish to monitor my output for typographical errors. Since the motor commands take some time to execute, my brain should not compare the current motor command with
the current visual feedback, since by the time I see the word "flick" on
the screen, my brain is already sending the command type "wrist" to
my muscles. My brain should keep the earlier command (type "flick")
around long enough (slow-drying ink?) to use it efficiently for visual
monitoring purposes. If that habit is sufficiently ingrained (and why
wouldn't it be?), it should interfere with the attempt to perform the
unnatural act of timing the decision itself rather than the executed
action. The only way to get Libet's data to imply an ominous 300millisecond gap is to assume that the simultaneity judgment he calls for
is undistorted by any such habit, but we have good reasons for believing otherwise, so the gap is an artifact of mis-imagined theory, not a
discovery
W h e n we remove the Cartesian bottleneck, and with it the
commitment to the ideal of the mythic time t, the instant when the
conscious decision happens, Libet's discovery of a 100-millisecond veto

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window evaporates. Then we can see that our free will, like all our other
mental powers, has to be smeared out over time, not measured at
instants. Once you distribute the work done by the homunculus (in this
case, decision-making, clock-watching, and decision-simultaneityjudging) in both space and time in the brain, you have to distribute the
moral agency around as well. You are not out of the loop; you are the
loop. You are that large. You are not an extensionless point. What you
do and what you are incorporates all these things that happen and is not
something separate from them. Once you can see yourself from that
perspective, you can dismiss the heretofore compelling concept of a
mental activity that is unconsciously begun and then only later "enters
consciousness" (where you are eagerly waiting to get access to it). This
is an illusion since many of the reactions you have to that mental activity are initiated at the earlier time—your "hands" reach that far, in time
and space.3

A Mind-writer's V i e w
Illusory or not, conscious will is the person's guide to his or her own moral
responsibility for action.
—Daniel Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will

If Libet's Cartesian Theater sketch model of conscious decisionmaking is too simple, what does a better model \<pok like? Daniel Wegner's model has the curious virtue of being halfway in the right
direction. By being still too Cartesian, still too dependent on the seductive metaphor of "the place in the brain where I am," it illustrates the
powerful attractions of that idea. It is very difficult, in fact, to describe
the immediate phenomenology of decision-making in any other terms,

3. One commentator on Libet who gets close is Sean Gallagher: "I think that this problem
can be solved as long as we do not think of free will as a momentary act. Once we
understand that deliberation and decision are processes that are spread out over time, even,
in some cases, very short amounts of time, then there is plenty of room for conscious
components that are more than accessories after the fact" (Gallagher 1998). (But then he
goes on to say that if the feedback is all unconscious, it will be "deterministic" but if it is
conscious, it won't be. Cartesian thinking dies hard.)

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243

so by taking our bearings at Wegner's halfway house, we can see better how to complete the departure from the Cartesian Theater.
Everybody knows what a mind-reader is supposed to be able
to do; Wegner is an accomplished mind-writer. He has figured out h o w
to compose intentional actions and impose them on people so that they
think they are deciding on their own to do them. There is a cottage
industry in the philosophical world of free will research devoted to the
analysis of thought experiments involving various imaginary mindwriters, such as nefarious neurosurgeons w h o implant remote-control
devices in their victims' brains, but the truth about actual mind-writing
has some wrinkles in it that are, in my view, of greater philosophical
interest.
H o w can anybody write intentions in somebody else's mind?
D o n ' t we each have "privileged access" to our own decisions and
choices? N o , not really. O n e of the major themes in Wegner's work is
the demonstration, by a number of routes, that our knowledge of the
relation between our thoughts and our actions (and between thoughts
and other thoughts) has only the "privilege" of ordinary familiarity. 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. But if you surreptitiously insert
grounds for false belief into my stream of consciousness, you can make
me think I am making "free" decisions when it is you w h o controls
my actions. The basic technique has been understood by magicians for
centuries: Magicians now call it psychological forcing, and it is remarkably
effective in able hands. You give the victim a variety of reasons to think
that he and he alone is responsible for deciding something that you
want him to decide, and he falls for it. Or you can fool him in the other
direction, getting him to think he is not responsible for something that
he is, in fact, producing—for instance, a message spelled out by "spirits" on a Ouija board.
Wegner has adapted the principle of the Ouija board and the
techniques of the magicians to a laboratory setting, and produced some
remarkable results. Subjects in his experiments are systematically driven
to misattribute decisions to themselves that are in fact being made by
somebody else. The reason they can be fooled is that, as David H u m e
pointed out so vigorously several centuries ago, you can't perceive causation. You can't see it w h e n it happens outside, and you can't introspect it w h e n it happens inside. What people perceive is one thing

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happening and then another, and they fall for Wegner's magic for
much the same reasons we all fall for stage magic: We are overeager to
interpret, to "notice" things causing other things when, in fact, both
"cause" and "effect" are effects of complex machinery that is hidden
from us—backstage, in effect. He shows that we don't have anything
like direct access to the causes and effects of our decisions and intentions, but rather must draw inferences—swiftly and without logical fanfare. We're actually very good at this; the inferences we make are almost
always inferences to the best explanation of the sequence we've experienced, except when a sly manipulator has put some misleading premises into the arena.
Notice how the introduction of the issue of privileged access
automatically puts us on the slippery slope to the Cartesian Theater:
There are things going on in me that I don't know about, and then
there are things I know about "directly"—they are somehow delivered
to me wherever I am. Instead of fighting this, Wegner permits himself
the full Cartesian image when it suits his purposes: "We can't possibly
know (let alone keep track of) the tremendous number of mechanical
influences on our behavior because we inhabit an extraordinarily complicated machine" (Wegner 2002, p. 27). These machines we inhabit
simplify things for our benefit: " T h e experience of will, then, is the
way our minds portray their operations to us, then, not their actual
operation" (p. 96). In other words, we get a useful but distorted glimpse
of what is going on in our brains:
The unique human convenience of conscious^thoughts that preview our actions gives us the privilege of feeling we willfully cause
what we do. In fact, unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms
create both conscious thought about action and the action, and
also produce the sense of will we experience by perceiving the
thought as cause of the action. So, while our thoughts may have
deep, important, and unconscious causal connections to our
actions, the experience of conscious will arises from a process that
interprets these connections, not from the connections themselves. (Wegner 2002, p. 98)
W h o or what is this " w e " that inhabits the brain? It is a commentator
and interpreter with limited access to the actual machinery, more along

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the lines of a press secretary than a president or boss. And this imagery
leads straight to Libet's vision of "conscious will" as being out of the
loop.
Consciousness and action seem to play a cat-and-mouse game
over time. Although we may be conscious of whole vistas of
action before the doings get underway, it is as though the conscious mind then slips out of touch. A microanalysis of the time
interval before and after action indicates that consciousness pops
in and out of the picture and doesn't really do anything [my italics—
DCD]. The Libet research, for one, suggests that when it comes
down to the actual instant of a spontaneous action, the experience of consciously willing the action occurs only after the RP
signals that brain, events have already begun creating the action
(and probably the intention and the experience of conscious will
as well). (Wegner 2002, p. 59)

A Self of One's O w n
Odd, though, all these dealings of mine with myself First I've agreed a principle
with myself, now I'm making out a case to myself, and debating my own feelings
and intentions with myself Who is this self, this phantom internal partner, with
whom I'm entering into all these arrangements? (I ask myself.)
—Michael Frayn, Headlong
Philosophers and psychologists are used to speaking about an organ of unification
called the "self" that can variously "be" autonomous, divided, individuated, fragile,
well-bounded, and so on, but this organ doesn't have to exist as such.
—George Ainslie, Breakdown of Will
A voluntary action is something a person can do when asked.
—Daniel Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will

So "consciousness . . . doesn't really do anything" according to Wegner, and that is why conscious will is, as his title proclaims, an illusion.
There is an escape from this vision, thanks to a slight shift in perspec-

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tive that is actually implicit in Wegner's work. Consciousness has lots
of work to do, but its accomplishments seem to disappear w h e n we ask
ourselves what work it is doing right now (at time t). Since at each
moment it "doesn't really do anything," it can seem that it is an utterly
epiphenomenal accompaniment, along for a free ride. An evolutionary perspective shows us why this is mistaken.
O n e of the phenomena that Wegner exposes for a better view
is "ideomotor automaticity." This is the name for the familiar—but
always unsettling—phenomenon in which thinking about something
can bring about a bodily action related to that thing without the action
being an intentional action. For instance, you might betray a secret sexual thought with a telltale hand motion that you didn't intend and, in
fact, would be embarrassed to discover. In such a case, you are not conscious of the causal relation between the thought and the act, but there
it is, as good as the causal relation between the aroma of good food and
salivation. The main feature of ideomotor actions is people's obliviousness to them—their underprivileged access, you might say. It is as if
our usually transparent minds had curtains or barriers installed, behind
which these causal chains could get tugged without our introspecting
them, producing effects without our compliance. "This ghost army of
unconscious actions provides a serious challenge to the notion of an
ideal human agent. T h e greatest contradictions to our ideal of conscious agency occur when we find ourselves behaving with no conscious thought of what we are doing" (Wegner 2002, p. 157).
For Descartes, the mind was perfectly transparent to itself, with
nothing happening out of view, and it has taken more than a century
of psychological theorizing and experimentation to erode this ideal of
perfect introspectability, which we can now see gets the situation
almost backward. Consciousness of the springs of action is the exception, not the rule, and it requires some rather remarkable circumstances
to have evolved at all. Ideomotor actions are the fossils, in effect, of an
earlier age, w h e n our ancestors were not as clued in as we are about
what they were doing. As Wegner says, "Rather than needing a special theory to explain ideomotor action, we may only need to explain
why ideomotor actions and automatism have eluded the mechanism
that produces the experience of will" (p. 150).
In most of the species that have ever lived, "mental" causation
has no need for, and hence does not evolve, any elaborate capacity for

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self-monitoring. In general, causes work just fine in the dark, without
needing to be observed by anybody, and that is as true of causes in animals' brains as anywhere else. So however "cognitive" an animal's faculties of discrimination might be, the capacity of their outputs to cause
the selection of appropriate behavior does not need to be experienced
by anything or anybody A bundle of situation-action links of indefinite
sophistication can reside in the nervous system of a simple creature and
serve its many needs without any further supervision. Its individual
actions may need to be guided by a certain amount of internal selfmonitoring (specific to the action), in order to make sure, for example,
that each predatory swipe snags its target, or to get the berries into the
mouth, or to guide the delicate docking with the sexual parts of a conspecific of the opposite sex, but these feedback loops can be as isolated,
as local, as the controls that spur the immune system into action w h e n
infection looms, or adjust the heart rate and breathing during exercise.
(This is the truth behind the deeply misleading intuition that invertebrates, if not "higher, warm-blooded" animals, might be "robots" or
"zombies," altogether lacking minds.)
As creatures acquire more and more such behavioral options,
however, their worlds become cluttered, and the virtue of tidiness can
come to be "appreciated" by natural selection. Many creatures have
evolved simple instinctual behaviors for what might be called home
improvement, preparing paths, lookouts, hideouts, and other features
of their neighborhoods, generally making the local environment easier to get around in, easier to understand. Similarly, when the need
arises, creatures evolve instincts for sprucing up their most intimate
environments: their own brains, creating paths and landmarks for later
use. T h e goal unconsciously followed in these preparations is for the
creature to come to know its way around itself, and how much of this
internal h o m e improvement is accomplished by individual selfmanipulation and how much is incorporated genetically is an open
empirical question. Along one of these paths, or many of them, lie the
innovations that lead to creatures capable of considering different
courses of action in advance of committing to any one of them, and
weighing them on the basis of some projection of the probable
outcome of each. In Chapter 5, we considered the advent of choice
machines that were capable of evaluating the probable outcomes of
candidate options prior to decision. In the quest by brains to produce

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useful future, this is a major improvement over the risky business of
blind trial and error, since, as Karl Popper once put it, it permits some
of your hypotheses to die in your stead. Such Popperian creatures, as
I have called them, get to test some of their hunches in informed simulations, rather than risking them in the real world, but they needn't
understand the rationale of this improvement in order to reap the benefits. The appreciation of the likely effects of particular actions is built
into any such assessment, but the appreciation of the effects of the contemplation itself is a still higher, even more optional, level of selfmonitoring. You don't have to know you're a Popperian creature to
be one. After all, any chess-playing computer considers and discards
thousands or millions of possible moves on the basis of their probable
outcomes, and it is manifestly not a conscious or self-conscious agent.
(Not yet—the future may hold conscious and even self-conscious
robots, which are certainly not impossible.)
What was it that arose in the world to encourage the evolution of a less unwitting implementation of Popperian behavioral control? What new environmental complexity favored the innovations in
control structure that made this possible? In a word, communication.
It is only once a creature begins to develop the activity of communication, and in particular the communication of its actions and plans,
that it has to have some capacity for monitoring not just the results of
its actions, but of its prior evaluations and formation of intentions as
well (McFarland 1989). At that point, it needs a level of selfmonitoring that keeps track of which situation-jaction schemes are in
the queue for execution, or in current competition for execution—and
which candidates are under consideration in the faculty of practical reasoning, if that is not too grand a term for the arena in which the c o m petition ensues. H o w could this new talent arise? We can tell a Just So
Story that highlights the key features.
Compare the situation confronting our ancestors (and Mother
Nature) to the situation confronting the software engineers w h o wanted
to make computers more user-friendly. Computers are fiendishly c o m plex machines, most of the details of which are nauseatingly convoluted
and, for most purposes, beneath notice. Computer-users don't need
information on the states of all the flip-flops, the actual location of their
data on the disk, and so forth, so software designers created a series of
simplifications—even benign distortions in many cases—of the messy

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truth, cunningly crafted to mesh with, and enhance, the users' preexisting powers of perception and action. Click and drag, sound effects,
and icons on desktops are the most obvious and famous of these, but
anybody w h o cares to dig deeper will find a bounty of further
metaphors that help make sense of what is going on inside, but always
paying the cost of simplification. As people interacted more and more
with computers, they devised a host of new tricks, projects, goals, ways
of using and abusing the competences designed for them by the engineers, who thereupon went back to the drawing board to devise further refinements and improvements, which were then used and abused
in turn, a coevolutionary process that continues apace today. The user
interface we interact with today was unimagined w h e n computers first
appeared, and it is the/tip of an iceberg in several senses: N o t only are
the details of what goes on inside your computer hidden, but so are the
details of the history of R & D , the false starts, the bad ideas that fizzled
before ever reaching the public (as well as the notorious ones that did
and failed to catch on). A similar process of R & D created the user interface between talking people and other talking people, and it uncovered
similar design principles and (free-floating) rationales. It too was coevolutionary with people's behaviors, attitudes, and purposes evolving in
response to the new powers they discovered. N o w people could do
things with words that they could never do before, and the beauty of the
whole development was that it tended to make those features of their
complicated neighbors that they were most interested in adjusting readily accessible to adjustment from outside—even by somebody w h o
knew nothing about the internal control system, the brain. These ancestors of ours discovered whole generative classes of behaviors for adjusting the behavior of others, and for monitoring and modulating (and, if
need be, resisting) the reciprocal adjustment of their own behavioral
controls by those others.
T h e centerpiece metaphor of this coevolved human userillusion is the Self, which appears to reside in a place in the brain, the
Cartesian Theater, providing a limited, metaphorical outlook on what's
going on in our brains. It provides this outlook to others, and to ourselves. In fact, we wouldn't exist—as Selves "inhabiting complicated
machinery," as Wegner vividly puts it—if it weren't for the evolution
of social interactions requiring each human animal to create within
itself a subsystem designed for interacting with others. Once created,

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it could also interact with itself at different times. Until we human
beings came along, no agent on the planet enjoyed the curious nonobliviousness we have to the causal links that emerged as salient once
we human beings began to talk about what we were up to. 4 As Wegner puts it, "People become what they think they are, or what they
find that others think they are, in a process of negotiation that snowballs constantly" (Wegner 2002, p. 314).
W h e n psychologists and neuroscientists devise a new experimental setup or paradigm in which to test non-human subjects such as
rats or cats or monkeys or dolphins, they often have to devote dozens
or even hundreds of hours to training each subject on the new tasks.
A monkey, for instance, can be trained to look to the left if it sees a
grating moving up and look to the right if it sees a grating moving
down. A dolphin can be trained to retrieve an object that looks like
(or sounds, to its echolocating system, like) an object displayed to it by
a trainer. All this training takes time and patience, on the part of both
trainer and subject. Human subjects in such experiments, however, can
usually just be told what is desired of them. After a brief question-andanswer session and a few minutes of practice, we human subjects will
typically be as competent in the new environment as any agent ever
could be. Of course, we do have to understand the representations presented to us in these briefings, and what is asked of us has to be composed of action-parts that fall within the range of things we can do.
That is what Wegner means w h e n he identifies voluntary actions as
things we can do w h e n asked. If asked to lower your blood pressure or
adjust your heartbeat or wiggle your ears, you will not be so ready to
comply, though with training not unlike that given to laboratory animals, you may eventually be able to add such feats to your repertoire
of voluntary actions.
As Ray Jackendoffhas pointed out to me, when language came
into existence, it brought into existence the kind of mind that can
transform itself on a moment's notice into a somewhat different virtual machine, taking on new projects, following new rules, adopting
new policies. We are transformers. That's what a mind is, as contrasted

4. Philosophers may want to compare my Just So Story to Wilfrid Sellars's (1963) myth of
"our Rylean ancestors," and "Jones, the inventor of thoughts." My debt to Sellars should be
clear to them.

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with a mere brain: the control system of a chameleonic transformer, a
virtual machine for making more virtual machines. N o n - h u m a n animals can engage in voluntary action of sorts. T h e bird that flies wherever it wants is voluntarily wheeling this way and that, voluntarily
moving its wings, and it does this without benefit of language. The distinction embodied in anatomy between what it can do voluntarily (by
moving its striated muscles) and what happens autonomically, moved
by smooth muscle and controlled by the autonomic nervous system, is
not at issue. We have added a layer on top of the bird's (and the ape's
and the dolphin's) capacity to decide what to do next. It is not an
anatomical layer in the brain, but a functional layer, a virtual layer
composed somehow in the micro-details of the brain's anatomy: We
can ask each other to qto things, and we can ask ourselves to do things.
And at least sometimes we readily comply with these requests. Yes,
your dog can be "asked" to do a variety of voluntary things, but it can't
ask why you make these requests. A male baboon can "ask" a nearby
female for some grooming, but neither of them can discuss the likely
outcome of compliance with this request, which might have serious
consequences for both of them, especially if the male is not the alpha
male of the troop. We human beings not only can do things when
requested to do them; we can answer inquiries about what we are doing
and why. We can engage in the practice of asking, and giving, reasons.
It is this kind of asking, which we can also direct to ourselves,
that creates the special category of voluntary actions that sets us apart.
Other, simpler intentional systems act in ways that are crisply predictable on the basis of beliefs and desires we attribute to them on the
basis of our surveys of their needs and their history, their perceptual and
behavioral talents, but some of our actions are, as Robert Kane insisted,
self-forming in a morally relevant way: They result from decisions we
make in the course of trying to make sense of ourselves and our own
lives (Coleman 2001). Once we begin talking about what we're doing,
we need to keep track of what we're doing so we can have ready
answers to these inquiries. Language requires us to keep track, but also
helps us keep track, by helping us categorize and (oversimplify our
agendas. We cannot help but become amateur auto-psychologists.
Nicholas Humphrey and others have spoken of apes and other highly
social species as natural psychologists, because of the manifest skill and
attention they devote to interpreting each other's behavior, but since,

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unlike academic psychologists—and other human beings—apes never
get to compare notes, to argue about attributions of motives and beliefs,
their competence as psychologists never obliges them to use explicit
representations. With us, it is different. We need to have something to
say when asked what the heck we think we're doing. And when we
answer, our authority is problematic. T h e evolutionary biologist
William Hamilton, reflecting on his own uneasiness with his recognition of this fact, put the issue particularly well:
In life, what was it I really wanted? My own conscious and seemingly indivisible self was turning out far from what I had imagined
and I need not be so ashamed of my self-pity! I was an ambassador ordered abroad by some fragile coalition, a bearer of conflicting orders, from the uneasy masters of a divided empire. . . .
As I write these words, even so as to be able to write them, I am
pretended to a unity that, deep inside myself, I now know does
not exist. (Hamilton 1996, p. 134)
Wegner is right, then, to identify the Self that emerges in his
and Libet's experiments as a sort of public-relations agent, a spokesperson instead of a boss, but these are extreme cases set up to isolate factors that are normally integrated, and we need not identify ourselves so
closely with such a temporarily isolated self. (If you make yourself
really small, . . .) Wegner draws our attention to the times—not infrequent among those of us w h o are "absent-minded"—when we find
ourselves with a perfectly conscious thought thaj just baffles us; it is, as
he wonderfully puts it, conscious but not accessible (Wegner 2002, p. 163).
(Now why am I standing in the kitchen in front of the cupboard? I
know I'm in the place I meant to be, but what did I come in here to
get?) At such a moment, / have lost track of the context, and hence
the raison d'etre, of this very thought, this conscious experience, and so
its meaning (and that's what is most important) is temporarily no more
accessible to me—the larger me that does the policy-making—than it
would be to any third party, any "outside" observer w h o came upon
it. In fact, some onlooker might well be able to remind me of what it
was I was up to. My capacity to be reminded (re-minded) is crucial,
since it is only this that could convince me that this onlooker was right,
that this was something / w a s doing. If the thought or project is anyone's, it is mine—it belongs to the me w h o set it in motion and pro-

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vided the context in which this thought makes sense; it is just that the
part of me that is baffled is temporarily unable to gain access to the
other part of me that is the author of this thought.
I might say, in apology, that I was not myself when I made that
mistake, or forgot what I was about, but this is not the severe disruption
of self-control that is observed in schizophrenia, in which the patient's
own thoughts are interpreted as alien voices. This is just the fleeting loss
of contact that can disrupt a perfecdy good plan. A lot of what you are,
a lot of what you are doing and know about, springs from structures
down there in the engine room, causing the action to happen. If a
thought of yours is only conscious, but not also accessible to that machinery (to some of it, to the machinery that needs it), then you can't do anything with it and are yleft just silendy mouthing the damn phrase to
yourself, your isolated self, over and over. Isolated consciousness can
indeed do nothing much on its own. N o r can it be responsible.
As Wegner notes, "If people will often forget tasks for the simple reason that the tasks have been completed, this signals a loss of contact [my italics—DCD] with their initial intentions once actions are
over—and thus a susceptibility to revised intentions" (Wegner 2002,
p. 167). A loss of contact between what and what? Between a Cartesian Self that "does nothing" and a brain that makes all the decisions?
No. A loss of contact between the you that was in charge then and the
you that is in charge now. A person has to be able to keep in contact
with past and anticipated intentions, and one of the main roles of the
brain's user-illusion of itself, which I call the self as a center of narrative gravity, is to provide me with a means of interfacing with myself at
other times. As Wegner puts it, "Conscious will is particularly useful,
then, as a guide to ourselves" (p. 328). The perspectival trick we need
in order to escape the clutches of the Cartesian Theater is coming to
see that I, the larger, temporally and spatially extended self, can control, to some degree, what goes on inside of the simplification barrier,
where the decision-making happens, and that is why, as Wegner says,
"Illusory or not, conscious will is the person's guide to his or her own
moral responsibility for action" (p. 341).
I know that many people find it hard to grasp this idea or take
it seriously. It seems to them to be a trick with mirrors, some kind of
verbal sleight of hand that whisks consciousness, and the real Self, out
of the picture just when it was about to be introduced. Echoing Robert

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Wright, this view seems to many to deny the existence of consciousness instead of explaining how it came to exist. Where does consciousness come into the picture? It is already there, unnoticed in the
activity just described. Mental contents become conscious not by
entering some special chamber in the brain, not by being transduced
into some privileged and mysterious medium, but by winning the
competitions against other mental contents for domination in the control of behavior, and hence for achieving long-lasting effects—or as we
misleadingly say, "entering into memory." And since we are talkers,
and since talking to ourselves is one of our most influential activities,
one of the most effective ways—not the only way—for a mental content to become influential is for it to get into position to drive the
language-using parts of the controls. All this has to happen in the arena
of the brain, in "central processing," but not under the direction of
anything. As Ainslie noted, " T h e orderly internal marketplace pictured
by conventional utility theory becomes a complicated free-for-all"
(Ainslie 2001, p. 40), the Cartesian self fragmented into shifting coalitions, with no king or presiding judge.
C O N R A D : Suppose all these strange competitive
processes are going on in my brain, and suppose that, as
you say, the conscious processes are simply those that win
the competitions. How does that make them conscious?
What happens next to them that makes it true that I know
about them? For after all, it is my consciousness, what I
know from the first-person point of view, jiiat needs
explaining!
Such a question betrays a deep confusion, for it presupposes
that what you are is something else, some Cartesian res cogitans in addition to all this brain-and-body activity. What you are, Conrad, just is
this organization of all the competitive activity between a host of competences that your body has developed. You "automatically" know
about these things going on in your body, because if you didn't, it
wouldn't be your body!
The acts and events you can tell us about, and the reasons for
them, are yours because you made them—and because they made you.
W h a t you are is that agent whose life you can tell about. You can tell

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us, and you can tell yourself. The process of self-description begins in
earliest childhood, and includes a good deal of fantasy from the outset. (Think of Snoopy in the Peanuts cartoon, sitting on his doghouse
and thinking, "Here's the World War I ace, flying into battle.") It continues through life. (Think of the cafe waiter in Jean Paul Sartre's discussion of "bad faith" in Being and Nothingness [1943], w h o is all
wrapped up in learning how to live up to his self-description as a
waiter.) It is what we do. It is what we are.5
T h e demands of communication don't just create the need for
the sorts of self-monitoring arrangements that create the illusion of the
Cartesian Theater. They also open up human psychology to a rich variety of further elaborations. T h e fact that the primary complexities in
our environments art? not just other agents—potential predators or
prey or rivals or mates—but other communicating agents—potential
friends or enemies, potential fellow citizens—has still further implications for the evolution of human freedom, to be drawn out in the
remaining chapters.

Chapter 8
Exactly when and where do we make decisions? When we look closely at a person's conscious decisions, we discover that this quest for spatio-temporal precision breaks down, creating the illusion of an isolated, powerless self We restore
power, and hence the potential for moral responsibility, to the self by recognizing that its duties are distributed in both space and time in the brain.

Chapter 9
What are the prerequisites for autonomy and how could they ever be met? To
be moral agents we must be capable of acting for reasons that are our reasons,
but we are imperfect reasoners at best. Can we really be rational enough to sustain our sense of ourselves as genuine moral agents, and if so, how do we get
that way?

5. Portions of the preceding three paragraphs are drawn, with revisions, from Dennett 1997B.

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N o t e s o n Sources and Further R e a d i n g
Libet's most recent essay on the topic appears in a volume inspired by
his experiments, The Volitional Brain (Libet et al. 1999), that includes
essays psychological, neurological, theological, philosophical, and just
plain strange. This book is an unsurpassed paragon of openmindedness, the proof of which is that it includes as its closing essay a
trenchant review of itself, "A Review of The Volitional Brain," by
Thomas Clark (1999), that incisively but fairly exposes all the major
errors and many of the confusions in the essays that precede it. Philosophers have written quite a lot about the pragmatic contradiction
involved in asserting such sentences as "p and nobody should believe
that p." N o w they have a real-world example of that pragmatic contradiction on a large scale. (Actually, Stephen Stich beat them to it;
the first chapter of his Deconstructing the Mind [1996] explicitly purports to refute the chapters that follow it: reprinted essays, some of
them coauthored with graduate students of his. It is an example of
changing one's mind in public that I wish more philosophers would
emulate, though I do wonder about whether his various coauthors
were quite as ready as he to abandon ship—they don't say.) My own
discussions of Libet include Chapter 6, "Time and Experience," in
Consciousness Explained (1991 A); the somewhat more technical escay
written with Marcel Kinsbourne, "Time and the Observer: T h e Where
and W h e n of Consciousness in the Brain," Behavioral and Brain Sciences,
1991 (see also Libet's commentary in that volume); and my contributions, including debate with Libet, in the 1993 CIBA Foundation symposium volume, Experimental and Theoretical Studies of Consciousness,
especially pp. 134—35. See also Libet's account in Libet 1996.
T h e philosophical literature on nefarious neurosurgeons
implanting remote control devices in people's brains mosdy grows out
of the classic 1969 essay by Harry Frankfurt, "Alternative Possibilities
and Moral Responsibility." See Kane 2001, and, best among recent
books, John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza's Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (1998).
T h e permeable boundary between individual learning and
"instinct" supported by genetic inheritance is opened up in particularly interesting ways by the Baldwin Effect, or what C. H. Wadding-

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257

ton called genetic assimilation, a topic I discussed in both Consciousness
Explained (Dennett 1991 A) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Dennett
1995). A wave of second thoughts about the Baldwin Effect have
recently been gathered in a forthcoming volume edited by Bruce
Weber and David Depew, which includes an extended defense of the
Baldwin Effect by me, " T h e Baldwin Effect: A Crane, not a Skyhook"
(Dennett 2002B). I further developed other ideas in this chapter in
Kinds of Minds (Dennett 1996A), "Learning and Labeling" (Dennett
1993), and "Making Tools for Thinking" (Dennett 2000A).

/

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259

Chapter 9

BOOTSTRAPPING
OURSELVES FREE

It is culture that has allowed us to become what Aristotle famously
called us: rational animals. How? By permitting, once more, the division of labor and distribution of responsibility that has again and again
achieved new levels of design sophistication in evolutionary history.

H o w W e Captured R e a s o n s and M a d e T h e m O u r O w n
We are creatures, who ask why, with norms as in other domains. We want to take
morality not blindly as a set of taboos but as something with a point—or perhaps
more than one point, but then we want to think about what those points might have
to do with each other and how to reconcile them.
—Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings

Human consciousness was made for sharing ideas. That is to say, the
human user-interface was created by evolution, both biological and
cultural, and it arose in response to a behavioral innovation: the activity of communicating beliefs and plans, and comparing notes. This
turned many brains into many minds, and the distribution of authorship made possible by this interconnectedness is the source of not only
our huge technological edge over the rest of nature but our morality.
The last step required to complete my naturalistic account of free will
and moral responsibility is to explain the R & D that has given us each
a perspective on ourselves, a place from which to take responsibility.
The name for this Archimedean perch is the self. This is something
about us humans that sets us apart as potential moral agents, and it is

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Freedom Evolves

no surprise that language is involved. What is harder to see is how language, when it is installed in a human brain, brings with it the construction of a new cognitive architecture that creates a new kind of
consciousness—and morality.
This is both a historical question and a question of justification. If it were merely a historical question then the answer might be:
Once upon a time, many years ago, space aliens came to Earth and
made us all swallow morality pills; thereafter we taught morality to our
children. Or only slightly more realistically: A retrovirus swept over our
hominid ancestors, and in its wake the few w h o survived just happened
to have a gene for appreciating justice. Or still more realistically: Morality
memes arose by accident some tens of thousands of years ago and
swept over the human population in a worldwide epidemic. Even if
one of these fanciful tales were true, it would leave us without half the
answer we require: What about justification?
Fortunately, Darwinian reasoning is all about explaining things
"with a point." Any account in terms of natural selection presupposes
an answer—one answer or another—to the question Cui bono? We will
have to find further offspring of the Darwinian Cui bono questions,
however, since the point of morality is manifestly not restricted to "the
good of the species" or "the survival of our genes" or anything like
that. It will have to be something that arises in the course of making
ourselves the sort of selves that we are.
O n e of the disconcerting features of the evolutionary processes
described in earlier chapters is the absence of anything like comprehension in the agents whose proclivities are shaped by the processes.
These agents (or better, their genes) may be the beneficiaries of some
amiable instincts, some bland dispositions to cooperate, but this is nothing
to them. They can be oblivious to the reasons for the features that govern their lives, the free-floating rationales that they need not appreciate, and hence need not represent. T h e evolution of our capacity to
recognize these reasons, and reflect on them, and thereby to change
them into entirely different reasons, was another major transition in
evolutionary history, and like all the others, it had to build on what had
already evolved to serve other purposes.
The basic idea has been appreciated for centuries. According
to David Hume, we begin with what he calls the natural motives: sexual appetite, affection for children, limited benevolence, interest, and

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261

resentment—a list that any twenty-first-century evolutionary psychologist would look on with favor. These dispositions have rationales that
are not our rationales, though they have set the stage for our practice
of demanding and giving reasons. As H u m e put it in his Treatise of
Human Nature, "If nature did not aid us in this particular 'twou'd be
in vain for politicians to talk of honourable and dishonourable, praiseworthy and blameable. These words w o u ' d be perfectly unintelligible"
(Hume 1739, p. 500). From the outset we find ourselves approving of
some attitudes and practices—as "intrinsically" good, somehow—and
these attitudes and practices were shaped over millennia without foresighted design but with their own raisons d'etre. T h e benefits of some
of these entrenched habits and practices may have been at least dimly
perceived by our ancestors, but even this is not an exceptionless
requirement, since there are (at least) three ways in which differential
replication could pay for the designs bequeathed to us: (1) if our natural motives are adaptations directly advantageous to the individuals
w h o have them (individual-level selection, the more or less standard
case); (2) if there has been a group structure in human populations sufficiently salient to create conditions under which groups of unwitting
practice-followers could thrive at the expense of less favorably constituted groups (group selection); or (3) if memes for motives have been
in competition for the limited number of havens of human brains and
these motives have, like many of our other symbionts, gone to fixation
as stable features of human cultural ecology for one reason or another.
These are all "natural" ways, in Hume's sense, for us to be endowed
with the motives that provide the foundation for the next wave of
R & D , deliberate social engineering, which is only a few millennia old.
The natural motives, H u m e maintained, have "offspring," which he
dubbed the "artificial" virtues of morality—such as justice. H u m e saw
ethics as a kind of human technology, and he saw reflection as the tool
we get from nature that permits us to revise our natural instincts,
enhancing them with prosthetic elaborations whose rationales (freefloating until H u m e and others pinned them down and represented
them) are, in fact, aimed at still more freedom, consistent with security from harm. Eyeglasses for the soul, you might say. But before we
turn to this new sort of R & D , we should consider in outline the sort
of evolutionary process made possible by the transition from oblivious
agents to minded, reflective agents.

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We start with Brian Skyrms's elegant "evolutionary fable" of
the cake-splitting game in his book Evolution of the Social Contract (1996,
pp. 3ff). Suppose you and I come upon a chocolate cake we want to
divide between us. Instead of fighting over it (a dangerous option for
both of us) we agree to settle the matter by a simple game: "Each of us
writes a final claim to a percentage of the cake on a piece of paper,
folds it, and hands it to a referee. If the claims total more than 100%,
the referee eats the cake. Otherwise we get what we claim. (We may
suppose that if we claim less than 100% the referee gets the difference.)"
(p. 4). As Skyrms notes, almost everyone would choose 50%, the fair
amount. (The referee is not really part of the model, but just a bit of
stage-dressing.) And sure enough, evolutionary game theory shows that
the 50—50 split is an evolutionarily stable strategy, or ESS. "Fair division
will be stable in any dynamics with a tendency to increase the proportion (or probability) of strategies with greater payoffs because any unilateral deviation from fair division results in a strictly worse payoff"
(p. 11). But it is not the only ESS, Skyrms notes; there are many others. This is the problem of polymorphic traps:
For example, suppose that half the population claims % of the cake
and half the population claims %. Let us call the first strategy
Greedy and the second Modest. A greedy individual stands an equal
chance of meeting another greedy or a modest individual
[because we have not yet introduced any correlation—DCD]. If
she meets another greedy individual she gets nothing because
their claims exceed the whole cake, but if she meets a modest
individual, she gets %. Her average payoff is M. A modest individual, on the other hand, gets a payoff of M no matter who she
meets.
Let us check to see if this polymorphism is a stable
equilibrium. First note that if the proportion of greedys should
rise, then greedys would meet each other more often and the
average payoff to greedy would fall below the M guaranteed to
modest. And if the proportion of greedys should fall, the greedys
would meet modests more often, and the average payoff to
greedys would rise above ] A. Negative feedback will keep the
population proportions of greedy and modest at equality. But
what of the invasion of other mutant strategies? Suppose that a

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263

Supergreedy mutant who demands more than % arises in the
population. This mutant gets payoff of 0 and goes extinct.
Suppose that a Supermodest mutant who demands less than X arises
in the population. This mutant will get what she asks for, which
is less than greedy and modest get, so she will also go extinct—
although more slowly than supergreedy will. The remaining
possibility is that a middle-of-the-road mutant arises who asks for
more than modest but less than greedy. A case of special interest
is that of the Fair-minded mutant who asks for exactly X. All of
these mutants would get nothing when they meet greedy and get
less than greedy does when they meet modest. Thus they will all
have an average payoff less than X and all—including our fairminded mutant—will be driven to extinction. The polymorphism has strong stability properties.
This is unhappy news, for the population as well as for the
evolution of justice, because our polymorphism is inefficient.
Here everyone gets, on average, X of the cake—while X of the
cake is squandered in greedy encounters. (Skyrms 1996, pp.
12-13)
Skyrms goes on to note that once we add some positive correlation to the picture, so that each type of strategy tends to interact
with its own kind more than random pairing would ensure, these
unfortunate polymorphisms become less attractive—they become
more evitable. It doesn't matter what feature of the world makes this
correlation increase, but agents with minds and culture are particularly
well-suited to achieve this, as D o n Ross demonstrates in an imaginative Just So Story that builds on Skyrms.
Imagine a population that's settled into one of the polymorphic
ESSs. Continued success for the Greedy agents in this game will
depend on encouraging Modest agents to avoid interaction with
any Fairman mutants who come along. So we'd expect this population to evolve norms of justice that are a bit like Aristotle's.
These norms will associate "justice" with the idea that the Modest should respect their natural station and defer to the Greedy.
These will be norms very familiar from many human societies, past
and present. If these agents can't do moderately sophisticated computations, or pass around their thoughts on the implications of

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these, there the population will stay. It is, after all, in ESS equilibrium. But if these agents can do just a little economics and also
grasp basic Darwinian logic—nothing very fancy is needed—they
can notice that the all-Fairman ESS is (a) more efficient (the economic point), and (b) achievable along an equilibrium path (the
Darwinian point). We can readily imagine what might happen.
Initially, most of the population will find the idea of the allFairman ESS a shocking violation of natural morality. But a few of
the Modests will get from recognition of (a) to the concept of their
own exploitation. Why not? Any creature with much conceptual
flexibility will try that reasoning step, even if only to talk himself
out of the conclusion in deference to public opinion. Some Modests who embrace the idea will be persecuted; but this will itself
help spread the meme by dramatizing its importance. The enlightened Modests, if only they can identify each other, can easily rebel
in a quietly effective way: they just need to play the Fairman strategy with each other, thereby realizing the greater gains from trade.
After all, when we talk of "Fairman mutants" arising here we
needn't literally mean genetic freaks; every time the Fairman
meme lodges in a Modest's mind, we have a mutant. So far, let us
suppose, these mutants are just motivated by acquisitiveness: they
haven't yet morally challenged the prevailing norms. Some Modests, and even some Greedies, though, will find the mathematical
beauty of the more efficient outcomes attractive enough to strive
for in their own right. This will complement self-interest in speeding up the dynamic, though it isn't strictly necessary.
Evolutionary game theory shows that this population will
evolve relentlessly toward the all-Fairman ESS. Well before that
point, the concept of justice-as-fairness will naturally arise, because
the Fairmen best promote their own success by encouraging
ostracism of the Greedy. Inculcating moral revulsion against
Greedy strategies will be a natural move—a very obvious Good
Trick—if they're biologically equipped to experience simple
revulsion against anything. Eventually, the population will look
back on its own former consensus (if they're sophisticated) as a
kind of amoral childishness. If they're not sophisticated, they'll
decide that their ancestors were bad, and some silly and insecure
ones will discourage the reading of their surviving books.

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265

Now, look what's happened here. These agents underwent
moral evolution, measurable as such by an objective standard.
They got there by, at step one, catching a glimpse of an elementary Darwinian logical point. No farsighted moral superhero, neither Christ nor Nietzsche, had to exhort them along at any point.
A bit of science and logic did the whole trick. At the end of the
process, do these agents know something their ancestors didn't?
Sure they do: they know that fairness is just; they really are morally
superior to their ancestors. Hume's Guillotine [the principle that
you can't derive "ought" from "is"—DCD] notwithstanding,
they found this out thanks to being conscious meme-spreaders
who could think about hypothetical, and thanks to using those
capacities to learn $fome evolutionary theory. (Ross, personal correspondence)
Of course, you don't have to use the language of professional
economics to appreciate the economic point, and you don't have to
be an explicit Darwinian to see how you might get from here (inefficient polymorphic trap) to there (fair distribution) by a self-sustaining
path. A semi-understood, dimly imagined version will do just fine, as
always, as we pick our way gradually from obliviousness to comprehension. Darwin himself drew our attention to the importance of what
he called unconscious selection as an intermediate step between natural
selection and what he called methodical selection: the deliberate, foresighted, intended "improvement of the breed" by animal and plant
breeders. Darwin pointed out that the line between unconscious and
methodical selection was itself a fuzzy, gradual boundary:
The man who first selected a pigeon with a slightly larger tail,
never dreamed what the descendants of that pigeon would
become through long-continued, partly unconscious and partly
methodical selection. (Darwin 1859, p. 39)
And both unconscious and methodical selection are just special cases
of the more inclusive process, natural selection, in which the role of
human intelligence and choice can stand at zero. From the perspective
of natural selection, changes in lineages due to unconscious or methodical selection are merely changes in which one of the most prominent
selection pressures in the environment is human activity. This nesting

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of different processes of natural selection of genes has more recently
spawned a new member: genetic engineering. H o w does it differ from
the methodical selection of Darwin's day? It is less dependent on the
preexisting variation in the gene pool, and proceeds more directly to
new candidate genomes, with less overt and time-consuming trial and
error. There is ever more accurate foresight, but even here, if we look
closely at the practices in the laboratory, we will find a large measure
of exploratory trial and error in their search of the best combinations
of genes.
We can use Darwin's three levels of genetic selection, plus our
more recent fourth level, genetic engineering, as a model for four parallel levels of memetic selection in human culture. The first memes were
naturally selected, paving the way for unconsciously selected memes—
memes that were "domesticated" by inadvertence, we might say—
followed by methodically selected memes, in which human foresight
and planning played a clear role, but in which the underlying mechanisms were only dimly understood and most experimentation consisted of seeking simple variations on the existing themes, to the
present day when memetic engineering is a major human enterprise:
the attempt to design and spread whole systems of human culture, ethical theories, political ideologies, systems of justice and government,
a cornucopia of competing designs for living in social groups.
Memetic engineering is a very recent sophistication in the history of
evolution on this planet, but it is still several millennia older than
genetic engineering; among its first well-known products are Plato's
Republic and Aristotle's Politics.
We are not just Popperian creatures, capable of thinking ahead
and imagining alternative futures and their likely outcomes, but Gregorian creatures, using the thinking tools that our cultures install in us
during childhood and beyond (Dennett 1995, pp. 377 ff.). We come
to share a grab bag of memorized precepts on the tips of our tongues
as we face life's dilemmas. Even fairy tales and Aesop's fables have a
valuable role to play in directing a child's attention. O n e of the reasons
we so seldom paint ourselves into a corner or saw off the limb we are
sitting on is that we have all heard one funny, memorable tale or
another about a chap who did just that. And if we follow the Golden
Rule, or the Ten Commandments, we are enhancing our underlying
natural instincts with prosthetic devices that tend to encourage fram-

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267

ing the situations we confront in one way or another. But much of this
lore has itself evolved without deliberate authorship, and has been
passed on without explicit appreciation of its utility, until quite recently.

Psychic E n g i n e e r i n g and t h e A r m s R a c e o f R a t i o n a l i t y
In effect I took the standpoint of a psychic engineer charged with designing our norms
for an advantage we recognize together.
—Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings

Once we have captured the free-floating rationales of the natural
motives and represented them, alongside the representations of all the
artifices we dream up in the course of our reflections, we are no longer
bound by the inefficient, wasteful, mindless trial and error of natural
selection. We can hope to replace an equilibrium of sheer replicative
power with a reflective equilibrium of rational agents w h o have engaged
in the communal activity of mutual persuasion. This shift from u n directed trial and error to intelligent (re-) design is, I have suggested,
a major transition in evolutionary history, opening up literally
undreamed-of dimensions of opportunity, for good or ill. Until the
birth of ethics, Darwinian R & D had proceeded for billions of years
without any foresight, gradually climbing the slopes of Mount Improbable (Dawkins 1996). Wherever lineages found themselves on local
peaks of the adaptive landscape, their members had no way of so much
as wondering whether or not there might be higher, better summits
on the far side of this valley or that. In their physical landscapes, the
more farsighted of them could do something tantamount to framing
the goal of getting to the other side of the river, or to the visible patch
of edible grass on that hilltop over there, but more remote questions
about what the point of living might be and how it might best be
achieved were inexpressible until we came along. We are the only
species whose members can imagine the adaptive landscape of possibilities beyond the physical landscape, w h o can "see" across the valleys to
other conceivable peaks. The mere fact that we're doing what we're
doing—trying to figure out whether our ethical aspirations have any
sound anchoring in the world science is uncovering for us—shows how
different we are from all other species.

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We can conceive (we think) of better worlds and yearn to get
there. Are we right that these other worlds might be better? In what
sense? By whose standards? By ours. O u r evolved capacity to reflect
gives us—and only us—both the opportunity and the competence to
evaluate the ends, not just the means. We have to use our current values as the starting point for any contemplated revaluation of values, but
from our perspective on our current hilltop, we can formulate, criticize, revise, and—if we are lucky—mutually endorse a set of design
principles for living in society. We can envisage some tempting Utopian
peaks quite different from our current circumstances. Can we get to
any of them? Are we sure we want to try? If we can't get there, that
may be tragic, but not an offense against reason. H o w to factor in politics, the art of the possible, is itself one of the most difficult design
questions we face. We may be stuck, alas, in the best of all possible
worlds, given our historical predicament, but then again, we may be
able to discover some adjustments in our current design that have some
hope of carrying us to higher summits. And unlike all other species,
these are problem-S^or us. We actually work on them, devoting time and
energy to them. We gather information relevant to them, explore variations on them, and debate their merits knowing that our reflections
will actually help determine which trajectory our future holds.
This provides, at last, a naturalistic framework within which
the traditional questions of morality can make sense. O u r evolutionary journey has brought us to the traditional arena of philosophical and
political investigation and debate, in which many ideas compete for our
endorsement. Ethics is a large and complex field, and this is a contest
I will make no attempt to adjudicate or even contribute to in this book,
beyond a few suggestions about some fossil traces of that journey that
can still deflect our ethical thinking in misleading ways. O n e of our
most pressing tasks, as psychic engineers, is to see if we can secure the
fundamental concept of a responsible moral agent, an agent who,
unlike the cooperative prairie dog or loyal wolf or friendly dolphin,
chooses freely for considered reasons and may be held morally accountable for the acts chosen. We have sketched the evolutionary development of the patterns that constitute the conceptual environment in
which such a concept can reside—the air we breathe—but we also
need to examine more closely how an individual might be able to grow
into such an exalted role. Can anybody actually make the grade? Aren't

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we learning from psychologists that we are actually a far cry from the
rational agents we pretend to be?
Allen Funt was one of the great psychologists of the twentieth
century. His informal experiments and demonstrations on Candid
Camera showed us as much about human psychology and its surprising limitations as the work of any academic psychologist. Here is one
of the best (as I recall it many years later): He placed an umbrella stand
in a prominent place in a department store and filled it with shiny new
golf-cart handles. These were pieces of strong, gleaming stainless steel
tubing, about two feet long, with a gentle bend in the middle, threaded
at one end (to screw into a threaded socket on your golf cart) and with
a sturdy spherical plastic knob on the other end. In other words, about
as useless a piece of stainless steel tubing as you could imagine, unless
you happened to own a golf cart missing its handle. He put up a sign.
It didn't identify the contents but simply said: "50% off. Today only!
$5.95." Some people purchased them, and when asked why, they were
quite ready to volunteer one confabulated answer or another. They had
no idea what the thing was, but it was a handsome thing, and such a
bargain! These people were not brain-damaged or drunk; they were
normal adults, our neighbors, ourselves.
We laugh nervously as we peer into the abyss that such a
demonstration opens up. We may be smart, but none of us is perfect,
and whereas you and I might not fall for the old golf-cart-handle trick,
we know for certain that there are variations on this trick that we have
fallen for and no doubt will fall for in the future. W h e n we discover
our imperfect rationality, our susceptibility to being moved in the space
of reasons by something other than consciously appreciated reasons, we
fear that we aren't free after all. Perhaps we're kidding ourselves. Perhaps our approximation of a perfect Kantian faculty of practical reason
falls so far short that our proud self-identification as moral agents is a
delusion of grandeur.
O u r failures in such cases are indeed failures of freedom, failures to respond as we would want to respond to the opportunities and
crises life throws at us. For that reason they are ominous, for this is
indeed one of the varieties of free will worth wanting. Notice that
Funt's demonstration would not impress us if his subjects were not
people but animals—dogs or wolves or dolphins or apes. That a mere
beast can be tricked into opting for something shiny and alluring but

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not what the beast truly wants—should truly want—is hardly news to
us. We expect "lesser" animals to live in the world of appearances, beneficiaries of "instincts" and perceptual capacities that are magnificendy
effective in context, but easily exposed in unlikely circumstances. We
aspire to a higher ideal.
As we learn more and more about human weaknesses and the
way the technologies of persuasion can exploit them, it can seem as if
our vaunted autonomy is an unsupportable myth. "Pick a card, any
card," says the magician, and deftly gets you to pick the card he has chosen for you. Salespeople know a hundred ways to get you off the fence
so that you buy that car, that dress. Lowering one's voice, it turns out,
works very well: "7 see you in the green number." (You might want to
remember that the next time a salesperson whispers at you.) Notice that
there is an arms race here, with ploy and counterploy balancing each
other out. I've just somewhat diminished the effectiveness of the whispering trick against those of you w h o remember my exposure of it. It
is easy enough to discern the ideal of rationality that serves as the background for this battle: Caveat emptor, we declare, let the buyer beware.
This is a policy that presupposes that the buyer is rational enough to see
through the blandishments of the seller, but since we know better than
to believe this myth taken neat, we go on to endorse a policy of informed
consent, prescribing the explicit representation in clear language of all
the relevant conditions for one agreement or another. Then we also recognize that such policies are subject to extensive evasion—the fine-print
ploy, the impressive-sounding gobbledygook—so/we may go on to prescribe still further exercises in spoon-feeding the information to the
hapless consumer. At what point have we abandoned the myth of "consenting adults" in our "infantalizing" of the citizenry? W h e n we learn
of proposals to tailor a message to particular groups or particular individuals, each group targeted with specific images, stories, aids, and
warnings, we may be tempted to condemn these proposals as paternalistic, and as subversive to the ideal of free will in which we are Kantian
rational agents, responsible for our own destiny. But at the same time
we should acknowledge that the environment we live in has been being
updated ever since the dawn of civilization, elaborately prepared, made
easy for us, with multiple signposts and alerts along the way, to ease the
burdens on us imperfect decision-makers. We happily lean on the prostheses that we find valuable—that's the beauty of civilized life—but

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tend to begrudge those that others need. Once we understand that this
is an arms race, we can fend off the absolutism that sees only two possibilities: Either we are perfectly rational or we are not rational at all.
That absolutism fosters the paranoid fear that science might be on the
verge of showing us that our rationality is an illusion, however benign
from some perspectives. That fear, in turn, lends spurious attractiveness
to any doctrine that promises to keep science at bay, our minds sacrosanct and mysterious. We are actually wonderfully rational. We are
rational enough, for instance, to be really good at designing ploys for
playing mind games on each other, seeking out ever more subtle chinks
in our rational defenses, a game of hide-and-seek with no time out or
time limit.
But how do we get good enough at this to make the team? A
good answer to this~question must fend off paradox on all sides (Suber
1992). If you are free, are you responsible for being free, or just lucky?
Can you be blamed for failing to make yourself free? As we saw in
Chapter 7, cooperators capable of solving commitment problems and
establishing their reputation as moral agents get to enjoy the many benefits of being a trusted member of the community, but if you have not
yet achieved that status, what hope, if any, is there for you? Should we
regard the frequent defectors among us with contempt or compassion?
Boundaries created by evolutionary processes tend to be porous and
gradual, with intermediate cases bridging the chasms between the
Haves and the Have-nots, but we cannot go along with Mother
Nature's refusal to categorize all the way down. O u r moral and political systems apparently oblige us to sort people into two categories:
those w h o are morally responsible and those w h o are excused because
they don't make the grade. Only the former are fit candidates for p u n ishment, for being held accountable for their misdeeds. H o w shall we
decide where to draw the line? The occasionally stupid actions we take
and the habits and character traits we discover in ourselves may make
us wonder whether any such categorization can be anything but a convenient myth, rather like Plato's odious myth of the metals, the pioneering public relations ploy by which he proposed to keep the peace
in his Republic. Some people are born to be Gold, and others should
be content to be Silver or Bronze. It may seem, for instance, that political theory endorses the policy of maintaining a certain degree of p u n ishment in a society, in order to render credible the prohibitions that

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actually deter the rational from transgressing (to some degree), but this
policy is doomed to hypocrisy. Those w h o m we end up punishing are
really paying a double price, for they are scapegoats, deliberately
harmed by society in order to set a vivid example for the more ably
self-controlled, but not really responsible for the deeds we piously
declare them to have committed of their own free will. What, in fact,
are the qualifications for being a genuinely culpable miscreant, and
could anybody actually meet them?

W i t h a Little H e l p from My Friends
The things of which romance assures him are very far from being true: yet it is solely
by believing himself a creature but little lower than the cherubim that man has by
interminable small degrees become, upon the whole, distinctly superior to the
chimpanzee.

—-James Branch Cabell, Beyond Life
Fake it until you make it.
—a slogan of Alcoholics Anonymous
In Chapter 4, we considered and rejected Robert Kane's attempt to
halt a threatened infinite regress with some rather magic moments—
Self-Forming-Actions, or SFAs—buck-stopping, instants in which the
universe holds its breath while a quantum indeterminacy permits you
to "do-it-yourself," creating yourself as a responsible moral agent (and
you could have done otherwise). Kane's solution won't work because
you can't stop a regress by invoking a Prime Mammal, by inventing a
special difference that is "essential" but invisible. A genuine quantumchoice person and her pseudo-random-choice twin, like the Prime
Mammal and the Prime Mammal's mother, differ in no discernible
regard that could make such a special difference. You could never tell
you'd succeeded in having a genuine SFA, so even if they do occur,
their moral significance evaporates on examination and the regress still
threatens. How, then, if not by a miraculous leap of self-creation, did
you get here (moral agency) from there (the amoral unfreedom of an
infant)? N o t surprisingly, my answer will invoke the Darwinian themes

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of luck, environmental scaffolding, and gradualism. With a little bit of
luck, and a little help from your friends, you put your considerable
native talent to work, and bootstrapped your way to moral agency, inch
by inch.
The basic process was outlined in Chapter 8: A proper human
self is the largely unwitting creation of an interpersonal design process
in which we encourage small children to become communicators and,
in particular, to join our practice of asking for and giving reasons, and
then reasoning about what to do and why. For this to work, you have
to start with the right raw materials. You won't succeed if you try it
with your dog, for instance, or even a chimpanzee, as we know from
a series of protracted and enthusiastic attempts over the years. Some
human infants are also^unable to rise to the occasion. The first threshold on the path to personhood, then, is simply whether or not one's
caregivers succeed in kindling a communicator. Those whose fires of
reason just won't light for one reason or another are consigned to a
lower status, uncontroversially It's not their fault, it's just their bad
luck. But while we're on the topic of luck, let's first try to calibrate
our scales. 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 billions of generations, and those winners
were, in every generation, the luckiest of the lucky, one out of a h u n dred or 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.
Above the first threshold, people exhibit a wide diversity of
further talents, for thinking and talking, and for self-control. Some of
this difference is "genetic"—due mainly to differences in the particular set of genes that compose their genomes—and some of it is congenital but not directly genetic (due to their mother's malnutrition or
drug addiction, or to fetal alcohol syndrome, for instance), and some
of it has no cause at all, in the sense we discovered in Chapter 3: It is
the result of chance. N o n e of these differences in your legacy are factors within your control, of course, since they were in place before you
were born. And it is true that the foreseeable effects of some of them

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are inevitable, but not all—and less and less each year. It is also not in
any way your own doing that you were born into a specific milieu, rich
or poor, pampered or abused, given a head start or held back at the
starting line. And these differences, which are striking, are also diverse
in their effects—some inevitable and some evitable, some leaving lifelong scars and others evanescent in effect. Many of the differences that
survive are, in any event, of negligible importance to what concerns
us here: a second threshold, the threshold of moral responsibility—as
contrasted, say, with artistic genius. N o t everybody can be a Shakespeare or a Bach, but almost everybody can learn to read and write well
enough to become an informed citizen.
W h e n W T. Greenough and F. R. Volkmar (1972) first demonstrated that rats given a rich environment of toys and exercise gear and
opportunities for vigorous exploration had measurably more neural
connections, and larger brains, than rats raised in a bare, restrictive environment, some parents and educators went overboard in their eagerness to herald this important discovery, and then began to worry
themselves sick over whether junior was getting enough of the right
kinds of crib toys. In fact, we've known forever that a child raised alone
in a bare room with no toys at all will be seriously stunted, and nobody
has yet shown that the difference between having two toys and having
twenty toys or two hundred toys makes any noticeable long-term difference in how the infant's brain develops. It would be extremely hard
to show because so many confounding intervening influences, some
planned and some fortuitous, would do and undo "the effect that concerns us a hundred times a year as each child matured. We should do
the difficult research as best we can, since it is possible that one condition or another is playing a larger role than suspected—and hence is a
more appropriate target at which to aim our efforts of avoidance. But
we can already be quite sure that most, if not all, of these differences
in starting conditions vanish into the statistical fog as time passes. Like
coin tosses, there may be no salient causation to be discerned in the
outcomes. O n c e we have disentangled these factors to the extent that
this is possible with careful scientific study, we will be able to say with
some deserved confidence which interventions are apt to be needed in
order to counteract which shortcomings, and only then will we be in
a good position to make the value judgments that everybody is aching
to make.

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Tom Wolfe, for instance, deplores the use of Ritalin (methylphenidate) and other methamphetamines to counteract attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children. He does this without pausing to
consider the mass of evidence that indicates that some children have a
readily correctable—evitable—dopamine imbalance in their brains that
gives them a handicap in the self-control department just as surely as
myopia does in the vision department.
An entire generation of American boys, from the best private
schools of the Northeast to the worst sludge-trap public schools
of Los Angeles and San Diego, was now strung out on methylphenidate, diligently doled out to them every day by their connection, the school nurse. America is a wonderful country! I mean
it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human
comedy never runs out of material! It never lets you down!
Meantime, the notion of a self—a self who exercises selfdiscipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops
short of aggression and criminal behavior—a self who can
become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by
its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and
refusal to give up in the face of great odds—this old-fashioned
notion (what's a bootstrap, for God's sake?) of success through
enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slipping away . . .
slipping away. (Wolfe 2000, p. 104)
This characteristically purple passage has some uncharacteristically unintended irony in it. I wonder if Wolfe would commend a
bracing regimen of eye exercises and courses in Learning to Live with
Short-Sightedness in lieu of eyeglasses for the myopic. He ends up
declaiming the twenty-first-century version of that old chestnut: If
God had meant us to fly, he would have given us wings. So rattled is
he by the imaginary bogey of genetic determinism that he cannot see
that the bootstrapping he yearns to protect, the very fount of our freedoms, is enhanced, not threatened, by demythologizing the self. Scientific knowledge is the royal road—the only road—to evitability.
Perhaps here we see the outlines of a secret fear that lies behind some
of the calls to Stop that crow! N o t that science will take away our freedom, but that science will give us too much freedom. If your child
doesn't have as much "true grit" as your neighbor's child, perhaps you

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can buy him some artificial grit. W h y not? It's a free country and selfimprovement is one of our highest ideals. W h y should it be important
that you do all your self-improvement the old-fashioned way? These
are very important questions, and their answers are not obvious. They
should be addressed directly, not distorted by an ill-advised attempt to
smother them.
In Elbow Room, I compared differences in initial endowment,
genetic and environmental, to the staggered start of a marathon, in
which some runners start many meters behind others but all head for
the same finish line. This is fair, I argued, since in such a long race,
"such a relatively small initial advantage would count for nothing, since
one can reliably expect other fortuitous breaks to have even greater
effects" (Dennett 1984, p. 95). This is true, but it underplays the
role of non-fortuitous breaks in the race to responsible agenthood. The
quest for personhood is something of a team effort, with coaches and
supporters playing important roles on the sidelines, enriching the environment with a kind of scaffolding designed (unconsciously) to bring
out the best in us. More important than the supply of developmentally
appropriate toys, and even proper nutrition, is the set of ambient attitudes and policies a child observes and eventually participates in. There
is a body of evidence supporting the hypothesis that children exposed
to others w h o are violent, lying, and uncaring—playmates as much or
even more than parents—tend to perpetuate those character traits. T h e
silver lining of this cloud is just as important: Those of us w h o have the
good fortune to grow up in free societies, in the company of people
w h o are reasonable, truthful, and loving, tend to aspire to those ideals.
Upbringing does make a big difference.
It is a mistake to reduce the effects of upbringing to "moral
education," as if the key to ensuring that one's wards grow up into
responsible adults was a dutiful attention to one catechism or another.
Having a vade mecum of pithy precepts in one's kit is helpful, but a more
potent set of influences is installed even earlier, and it channels the way
we think every fleeting thought. W h e n we talk to our pre-linguistic
children, we half-consciously know that most of what we are saying to
them goes over their heads, but not all. Some of it sticks. What do you
want? Are you afraid of that? Where does it hurt? Do you know where
the bunny is? Are you trying to fool me? " D o n ' t worry, she'll grow into
it," Mother says, when imposing somewhat outsize hand-me-down

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clothes on her child, and much the same could be said about the somewhat outsize hand-me-down psychological dispositions adults impose
on us when we are children. Sure enough, we do grow into them,
making them ours, making us them, making us into agents like the
grown-ups. The more seriously we take our children as participants in
the practice of asking and giving reasons, the more seriously they will
come to take themselves.
This penchant for presuming, for erring on the side of presupposing more design competence in our young interlocutors than the
cold facts might warrant, is an extraordinarily powerful addition to the
Darwinian arsenal of R & D tricks. Because we human beings are not
blind watchmakers, but sighted selfmakers, w h o moreover can reflect
on what we see and draw inferences about what we wish to see in the
future, we are much more readily redesigned, first by others, and then
by ourselves, than any other organism yet evolved on the planet. C o n sider, for instance, the phenomenon of "being on one's best behavior."
Independently of all instruction, formal or informal, we almost always
adjust our behavior to harmonize with (what we take to be) the social
demands of the current circumstance. Aside from a few bizarrely free
spirits w h o seem genuinely unmoved by social pressure, people find
that it is only with the most strenuous and disciplined of efforts that
they can deliberately thwart the expectations of those around them.
This pressure of expectation works in all directions. What parent hasn't
discovered new strengths of character, new triumphs over sloth or fear
or squeamishness, in the recognition that one's child is watching? Since
we "rise to the occasion," it is a good thing to have a life full of occasions, opportunities to display our better selves, to others and to ourselves, and thereby to make it more likely that these better selves will
make an easier appearance in the future. (Ainslie 2001 has a particularly insightful discussion of this dynamic.) The "presentation of self in
everyday life" (Goffman 1959) is an elaborately (but mostly unconsciously) choreographed interactive dance, in which we not only
attempt to appear better than we are, but in the process bring out the
best in others. O n e wouldn't want to tamper carelessly with that set of
practices, the fruits of thousands of years of genetic and cultural evolution. It could undo a lot of valuable R & D . (Stop that crow!) On the
other hand, if done with discernment and understanding, some tampering could strengthen and enhance those designs, making up for

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missed opportunities or blurred perceptions. Moreover, some deliberate intervention might help extinguish any unfortunate variants of our
practices that can be seen to be self-defeating. This is where our
evolved capacity for reflection comes into its own. Consider the
subtle but devastating effect discerned by the African-American writer
Debra Dickerson, writing about her father:
Later, I came to understand thac he both expected and needed
blacks to fail, otherwise there was no proof of white perfidy and
soullessness. He never understood that his fatalism was a selffulfilling, self-defeating prophecy. He never considered that he
had to believe, at some level, that whites were superior since he
believed blacks had no chance whatsoever in life—but probably,
he would have attributed that to the transcendent power of the
white's innate evil. Among ourselves, we say "the white man's ice
is colder" to describe the many of us who won't believe or value
anything unless it comes from white people. The worse off some
blacks are, the more magical whites seem, albeit an evil magic.
So my father, like many other blacks, did the oppressor's job
for him; he taught me to do the same. This was the moment that
I began to close doors on myself. Perhaps whites would have been
happy to take that task on themselves, but they rarely had to.
Whites didn't have to place barriers in my path, I did it myself by
"accepting" my preordained place at the end of every line.
Racism and systematic inequality are very real forces in all our
lives, but so is fatalism and a perverse kind of exultation of oppression. (Dickerson 2000, p. 40)
W h a t are the larger-scale social patterns that will enhance freed o m and distribute it more equitably across the planet? W h a t combination of explicit promulgations and subtle tricks is most likely to
flavor the environment in ways conducive to the growth of human
selves? In Chapter 7, we considered R o b e r t Frank's suggestion that
problems of self-control and commitment help solve each other by
favoring the evolution of such emotions as anger and love. Allan Gibbard expands the point by addressing the issue of how a "psychic engineer" might want to fine-tune people's dispositions to feel anger, guilt,
and other emotions. Anger, Gibbard notes, "is powerful and inevitable,
and it often helps regulate action in desirable ways" (Gibbard 1990,

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p. 298). Although "we are stuck with anger, whatever our norms"
(p. 299), some cultures seem not to have any role for guilt. This raises
the question of whether we might all be better off without it. Some
hard determinists have argued that we not only should not bewail the
passing of "genuine" free will; we should say good riddance, since
without the presumption of free will, we may abandon the presumptions of moral responsibility, blame, and retribution, and all live more
happily ever after. I have done what I can to sever the connection they
imagine between determinism and responsibility, but still we can consider, with Gibbard, whether or not morality itself is a feature we
should try to preserve in our societies. "In part the question is pragmatic: might we do best without these particular feelings, or without
norms to govern thern?" (p. 295). Guilt and anger mesh together well:
Guilt placates angerrand the threat of guilt averts acts that would evoke
anger. H o w would people tend to behave toward each other in a society in which guilt and anger were both damped down as far as possible, or—with heroic re-engineering of society—obtunded altogether?
Might it even be wise, for one reason or another, to tune guilt and
anger out of balance, with one of them overshooting a bit? T h e hard
determinists say that our world would be a better place if we could
somehow talk ourselves out of feeling guilty when we cause harm and
angry when harm is done to us. But it isn't clear that any feasible "cure"
along these lines wouldn't be worse than the "disease." Anger and guilt
have their rationales, and they are deeply embedded in our psychology.
Better, Gibbard argues, is a policy that favors conditions that
will moderate the intensity of the norms for these emotions. He contrasts "imperious" with "diffident" designs of moral norms. Imperious norms demand a lot, and hence foster private reservations,
hypocrisy, and suspicion of others. They put a severe strain on human
nature and tend to involve "somewhat inefficient hectoring." This, he
claims, is a straightforward design flaw, like setting the steering ratio
on a car too high, leading drivers to oversteer, overcorrect, overcorrect their corrections, and so on. It is unsafe, and puts undue strain on
the mechanism, without achieving its intended effects (p. 306). Diffident norms, on the other hand, are relatively easygoing, a compromise with prudence and self-interest that is easier to swallow, and
hence easier for individuals actually to endorse. So Gibbard suggests
that the rational designer will tune the norms for anger and guilt

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rather diffidently, a culturally inculcated setting that harnesses nature
instead of fighting it.
Consider an individual Gibbard calls the "private ruminator,"
w h o is faced with a competition between egoistic goals and the tug of
general benevolence, or morality. He is driven in public discussion to
voice agreement with various publicly endorsed norms but may have
private reservations, may ask himself if he really should go along with
them when he can get away with not doing so. He may be familiar
with Robert Frank's claim that it pays, prudentially, to be good in order
to seem good, but he may toy with the idea that he's the exception. He
has accepted help from his friends but is capable of wondering just how
good a bargain this is, if it requires him to reciprocate in helping them.
Has he been cajoled into good citizenship by the situational demands
of conversation? H o w this conflict is resolved may depend heavily on
the societal atmosphere:
If allegiance to morality is the best way to promote his more egoistic goals, then his ambivalence is resolved. With an imperious
morality this is unlikely; with diffident morality, it seems more
plausible. . . . What makes a morality diffident is that it allies itself
with enough other motives to prevail, for the most part—to prevail with actual people, with all their jointness and separateness,
with their normative motivations and their appetites, feelings,
impulses, and yearnings. (Gibbard 1990, p. 309)
Engineers, like politicians, are concerned with tjfie art of the possible,
and this requires us, above all, to think realistically about what people
actually are, and how they got that way. Exercises in ethical theorizing
that refuse to bow to the empirical facts about the human predicament
are bound to generate fantasies that may have some aesthetic interest
but ought not to be taken seriously as practical recommendations. Like
everything else evolution has created, we're a somewhat opportunistically contrived bag of tricks, and our morality should be based on that
realization. Philosophers have often attempted to establish a hyperpure, ultra-rational morality, untainted by "sympathy" (Kant) or
"instinct," by animal dispositions or passions or emotions at all. Gibbard looks pragmatically at what we have to work with and proposes
to do, as an engineer, what Mother Nature has always done: work with
what you have.

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A u t o n o m y , Brainwashing, and E d u c a t i o n
To take oneself as a rational agent is to assume that one's reason has a practical
application or, equivalently, that one has a will. Moreover, one cannot assume this
without already presupposing the idea of freedom, which is why one can act, or take
oneself to act, only under this idea. It constitutes, as it were, the form of the thought
of oneself as a rational agent.

—Henry A. Allison, "We Can Act Only under the Idea of Freedom"
The account I have sketched of the art of self-making shows it to
include an unsettling amount of unconscious or subliminal manipulation along with the exercise of "pure reason." Doesn't this process itself
undermine the concept of a responsible self? This question has been
explored at length by Alfred Mele in Autonomous Agents (1995). He
argues that beyond mere self-control there is autonomy, which he contrasts with heteronomy, in which a self-controlled agent is nevertheless
also under the (partial) control of others. He proposes a Default
Responsibility Principle: If no one else is responsible for your being in
state A, you are. This nicely cuts off the infinite regress feared by Kane;
it permits us to pass the buck to brainwashers (if such there be in your
past) but not to "society" in general or to the agentless environment.
Only if foresighted, purposeful agents have been manipulating you for
their own ends are you absolved from personal responsibility for the
actions undertaken by your body; those are not your deeds but your
brainwashers' deeds in such a case. Fair enough, but educators certainly
design their interactions with us in order to further their own ends, in
particular the end of turning us into reliable moral agents. H o w are we
to distinguish between good education, dubious propaganda, and bad
brainwashing? W h e n are you benefiting from a little help from your
friends, and when are you being taken for a ride?
Mele's term for brainwashing is "value engineering," and he
speaks disparagingly of engineering that "bypasses" people's capacities
for control over their mental lives (Mele 1995, p. 166-67). As we have
seen in earlier chapters, self-control of our mental lives is limited and
problematic in any case, so it is no surprise that we will have a problem distinguishing engineering that bypasses our capacities from engineering that exploits them in tolerable or desirable ways. To dramatize
the difference between autonomy and heteronomy, Mele devises some

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thought experiments about minimally different agents, Ann and Beth.
Suppose, to begin with, that Ann is genuinely autonomous—whatever
that might involve. Lucky Ann. Then further suppose that Beth is just
like Ann, her psychological identical twin, you might say, but has been
somehow brainwashed without her knowledge into this perhaps only
apparently enviable psychological state. Beth has all the same dispositions as Ann; she is exactly as open-minded, as non-obsessive, as flexible but also as resolute as Ann, but her apparent autonomy, Mele
suggests, is bogus. She is like a perfect counterfeit dollar, readily
exchangeable for a Coke and some change, but nevertheless importantly, morally, inauthentic.
Thought experiments that stipulate such extreme—and extremely unrealistic—conditions are notoriously likely to beguile the
philosopher's imagination, and it's important to turn all the knobs, to
vary all the stipulations this way and that, to see what's actually p u m p ing the intuitions. Normally, in the real world, the reason that differences in historical background matter (in this case, Ann's education
versus Beth's brainwashing) is that they carry implications about differences in disposition or character that will make for differences of
behavior in the future. This is just what has been disallowed in the
imagined case, but can we take this stipulation at face value? Thought
experiments about brainwashing are endemic in philosophers' discussions of free will, and a routine—but seldom commented on—feature
of these thought experiments is the victim's stipulated obliviousness to
the intervention. Let's see what happens when we turn this knob.
Suppose, with Mele (1995, p. 169), that Beth is later informed of her
secret history and given a chance to request that her brainwashing be
undone. If she retrospectively endorses it, does this act count? Is she
henceforth an autonomous agent? Your intuitions may balk at this, since
her state when she "endorses" it is so much a product of her earHer
brainwashing (by hypothesis). You may wish to object that she's been
designed to endorse her own design, surely an empty gesture on her part.
N o t so. Consider the difference time might make. Suppose we wait a
few years before we inform her of her secret history, giving her lots of
experience in the rough-and-tumble world of moral decision-making.
Since Beth is exactly as open-minded, as cognitively flexible, as Ann
(by hypothesis), this experience will be as potent, as valuable to her as
it would be to Ann, and hence it ought to be just as capable of ground-

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ing an endorsement in her case as in Ann's. We can pursue this line of
thought further by supposing we now turn the same knob on Ann's
case: We (lying) tell her that she is the victim of brainwashing. She
reflects on this datum and decides she approves of the way she is—she
ought to, after all; she's actually autonomous (whatever that comes to).
Does her act count for any more than Beth's? I can see no grounds for
it. Perhaps more to the point, you may feel a slight tug in the direction of supposing that by lying to Ann we have actually made her
somewhat worse off, in the autonomy department, than she otherwise
would be—supposing she believes our lie, of course! Why? Because
now she is deeply misinformed about her past, whether or not she ever
uses this misinformation in her decision-making. (And it is easy
enough to imagine thaft this misinformation might hugely flavor all her
subsequent thinking on moral topics.)
But recall that Beth was also drastically misinformed before we
told her of her brainwashing. Wasn't she? Mele doesn't go into this,
but presumably Beth's brainwashing was concealed from her; presumably part of her psychological similarity with Ann before her secret is
revealed to her is an astonishingly rich set of false pseudo-memories of
a fine, autonomy-guaranteeing moral education that never happened.
H o w else could the stipulation that she is Ann's psychological twin
otherwise be maintained?
Might it be simply falsehood, then, and concealment that are
the defining marks of brainwashing? As long as you tell people the truth
(what passes for the truth at the time you tell it) and eschew efforts to
mislead them, as long as you leave them in a state from which they can
make at least as good an independent assessment of their predicament
as before you intervened, you are educating them, not brainwashing
them. The idea that one's history might make a morally important difference without making a difference to one's future competence is not
supported by Mele's thought experiments after all. His parallel to the
perfect counterfeit dollar is instructive in this regard. Counterfeiting
matters because of its effects on the ambient beliefs and desires of the
populace about the integrity of their money, but these are general
effects, not the effects of specific bills. T h e identification and removal
of perfect counterfeit bills from the currency pool would be a pointless
project, since the difference between a genuine dollar and a perfect
counterfeit is (ex hypothesi) an inert historical fact. The belief that there

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are lots of perfect counterfeits among the legal tender might disturb the
economy by weakening confidence in the government's control of
monetary policy, but there would be no point in rounding the counterfeits up and destroying them (as opposed to rounding up and
destroying a lot of dollars in circulation).
Consider Ann and Beth again. If Beth learns the truth about
her brainwashing, this will no doubt send unsettling reverberations
through her psyche, with w h o knows what effects on her moral competence. But exactly the same reverberations will be sent through Ann
if she is convincingly taught the same "truth" about herself. If one is
impaired, so is the other. And if Ann's autonomy depends on the truth
of her own beliefs about her own past, then Beth's problem is just that
she has been lied to, not that she has been put into her enviable dispositional state by "value engineering." Note, by the way, what this
portends for any doctrine that sets out to defend Stop that crow! on the
grounds that people are better off not knowing the truth: "We had to
destroy human autonomy in order to save it." N o t an appealing policy statement.
T h e genuinely autonomous agent is rational, self-controlled,
and not wildly misinformed. T h e intuitive repugnance we feel in
"morality pills" and "brainwashing," in contrast to good old-fashioned
moral education, is perhaps due, then, to a dim appreciation of the utter
impossibility of there being any such shortcut treatments that could
actually preserve the informedness, flexibility, and open-mindedness
that, in our experience, depends on a sound education. I cannot see
that knowingly taking a pill to improve one's self-control is any more
subversive to one's autonomy than knowingly fostering a modest
amount of self-deception about one's powers. If you can knowingly
manipulate yourself in these ways, as a consenting adult, and endorse
the effects both prospectively and retrospectively, this is a fairly good
test of whether you can justifiably manipulate your children in the same
fashion. In Garrison Keillor's mythical town of Lake Wobegon, "all the
children are above average," and this happy myth makes them better
off than they otherwise would be—so long as they don't become seriously delusional about it. It is certainly an improvement on believing
that the white man's ice is colder.
Another perspective on autonomy has been explored at great
length by philosophers in the wake of Harry Frankfurt's influential

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essay "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" (1971).
Frankfurt articulated the idea that a person—an adult responsible
agent—differs from an animal or a young child in having a more complex psychology, in particular: higher-order desires. A person can want
one thing but want to want something else—and act on that secondorder desire. Such a capacity to reflect on, and endorse or reject, the
desires one discovers in oneself is not just a symptom of maturity,
Frankfurt claims; it is a criterion of personhood. This intuitively appealing idea has proven remarkably resistant to formulation in a way that
avoids regress or contradiction, and one relatively recent attempt, by
David Velleman, usefully highlights the role of reasoning and the
requirement that we not make ourselves too small: " T h e agent's role,
according to Frankfurf, is to reflect on the motives competing for governance of his behavior, and to determine the outcome of the competition, by taking sides with some of his motives rather than others"
(Velleman 1992, p. 476). H o w can a person take sides with, or against,
some of his or her own motives?
Consider the difference between two R o m a n Catholic monks:
O n e is ardent, endorsing his vow of celibacy, and triumphing in the
strength of his will over his genetic makeup; the other is equally celibate, but views his Catholicism as an addiction. He considers himself
brainwashed, a victim of alien memes, but he just can't convince himself to take the leap and abandon the principles he was taught. Certainly there are real people that fall into these two categories, on many
fronts, but what does the difference primarily consist in? Both monks
are strongly motivated by the tenets of R o m a n Catholicism, but one
wholeheartedly identifies with his religion and the other doesn't. Identification cannot be a matter of a pearly Cartesian ego or immaterial
soul accepting some memes and rejecting others; the entity that does
the endorsement has to be itself some kind of complex meme—brain
structure. But how can we identify some such structure as an agent
within, capable of "taking sides," without lapsing back into Cartesian
mysteries about an independent res cogitans that plays the role of Boss,
or at least traffic cop and judge, in the swirling competition within the
brain? Velleman gives us an example reminiscent of some of Daniel
Wegner's experiments, in which a submerged, only partly or even
entirely unconscious conspiracy of motives, reasons, recognitions, and
the like shapes the action:

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Suppose that I have a long-anticipated meeting with an old friend
for the purpose of resolving some minor difference: but that as we
talk, his offhand comments provoke me to raise my voice in progressively sharper replies, until we part in anger. Later reflection
leads me to realize that accumulated grievances had crystallized
in my mind, during the weeks before the meeting, into a resolution to sever our friendship over the matter at hand, and that this
resolution is what gave the hurtful edge to my remarks. . . . But
do I necessarily think that I made the decision or that I executed
it? . . . When my desires and beliefs engendered an intention to
sever the friendship, and when that intention triggered my nasty
tone, they were exercising the same causal powers that they exercise in ordinary cases, and yet they were doing so without any
contribution from me. (Velleman 1992, pp. 464-65)
What would be different if there were such a contribution? As Velleman notes, there has to be more to an agent than just a mathematical
point, since
when he takes sides with some of those motives, he bolsters them
with a force additional to, and hence other than, their own. . . .
What mental event or state might play this role of always directing but never undergoing such scrutiny? It can only be a motive
that drives practical thought itself, (pp. 476-77)
It can only be, as Kant said long ago, a respect for reason itself: "What
animates practical thought is a concern for acting in accordance with
reasons" (p. 478). And where does this come from? From the upbringing that engages the child in the practice of demanding and giving reasons. T h e role of consciousness here is precisely to move the issue into
the arena of deliberation and consideration, where over time the reasons
for and against can be considered and negotiated. But now what about
those Jesuits w h o (are said to) say that the first seven years are enough
for them to bring up a child so that he will identify with the faith? Is
that indoctrination or education? I think it is a strength, not a weakness, of the position I am sketching here that it allows that both of
the Catholic monks may well be right; the first may not be deluding
himself in his belief that he has the necessary autonomy to endorse his
decision and mean it, and the second may be right to resent his indoc-

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287

trination as well, and the differences between their upbringing may be
minuscule. People are amazingly complicated beings, and what works
well for one may be quite harmful to another. (The same is true of
Ritalin, of course; many for w h o m it is prescribed should definitely not
be taking it.) What, then, is the important role of such a self? The self
is a system that is given responsibility, over time, so that it can reliably
be there to take responsibility, so that there is somebody home to
answer when questions of accountability arise. Kane and the others are
right to look for a place where the buck stops. They have just been
looking for the wrong sort of thing.

Chapter 9
Human culture supported the evolution of minds powerful enough to capture
the reasons for things and make them our reasons. We are not perfectly rational
agents, but the social arena we live in sustains processes of dynamic interaction
that both require and permit the renewal and endorsement of our reasons, making us into agents that can take responsibility for our acts. Our autonomy does
not depend on anything like the miraculous suspension of causation but rather
on the integrity of the processes of education and mutual sharing of knowledge.

Chapter 10
The real threats to freedom are not metaphysical but political and social. As we
learn more about the conditions of human decision-making, we will have to
devise, and agree upon, systems of government and law that are not hostage to
false myths about human nature, that are robust in the face of further scientific
discovery and technological advances. Are we freer than we want to be? We now
have more power than ever to create the conditions under which we and our
descendants will lead our lives.

N o t e s o n Sources and Further R e a d i n g
D o n Ross has pointed out to me that Skyrms's analysis is not entirely
general, but that Ken Binmore's recent (and forbiddingly mathematical) analysis in Game Theory and the Social Contract, Vol. 2: Just Playing
(1998) provides an entirely general analysis.

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Elbow Room (Dennett 1984) has an earlier version of my gradualistic bootstrapping account, in Chapter 4, "Self-made Selves." T h e
present account supplements, and does not rescind in any way, that
account.
Peter Suber's 1992 essay, " T h e Paradox of Liberation" (unpublished, but available on the Web at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/
writing/liber.htm). provided me with many insights, as well as the
wonderful quotations from James Branch Cabell and Alcoholics
Anonymous used as epigraphs.
See Judith Harris's The Nurture Assumption (1998), on the evidence that children are more strongly influenced by their peers than
their parents, across a wide spectrum of psychological variables.
For somewhat orthogonal comments on Goffman's "presentation of self in everyday life," see Robert Wright's The Moral Animal
' (1994), in the chapter on deception and self-deception.
See my "Producing Future by Telling Stories" (1996C) on the
role of fairy tales in building reliable agents. Victoria McGeer's work
has been a main source for my comments on scaffolding. Relevant also
is the huge literature on the "child's theory of mind," which is well
surveyed in Astington, Harris, and Olson 1988; Baron-Cohen 1995;
and Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg, and C o h e n 2000.
Those wanting to investigate the attractions and pitfalls of hard
determinism and its kin should consult Michael Slote's "Ethics without Free Will" (1990); Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (1999);
and Derk Pereboom's book Living without Free Will (2001).
For more on extreme philosophical thought experiments that
demand that we take seriously such fantasies as morality pills and brainwashing-that-leaves-no-scars, see my "Cow-sharks, Magnets, and
Swampman" (Dennett 1996B).
On Hume, see David Wiggins's "Natural and Artificial Virtues:
A Vindication of Hume's Scheme" (1996).

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Chapter 10

THE FUTURE OF
HUMAN FREEDOM

Where will it all end?/There is no more potent source of anxiety about
free will than the image of the physical sciences engulfing our every
deed, good or bad, in the acid broth of causal explanation, nibbling away
at the soul until there is nothing left to praise or blame, to honor,
respect, or love. Or so it seems to many people. And so they try to erect
one barrier or another, some absolutist doctrine designed to keep these
corrosive ideas at bay This is a doomed strategy, a relic from the last millennium. Thanks to our growing understanding of nature, we have
learned that such bastions only postpone catastrophe, and often make it
worse. If you want to live on the beach, you had better be prepared to
move when the beach shifts, as beaches do, slowly but surely. Breakwaters can "save" the shoreline only by destroying some of the features that
made the shoreline such a fine place to live in the first place. T h e wiser
move is to study the situation and then agree on some guidelines about
how close to the edge is too close to build a house. But times change,
and policies that made sense for decades or centuries can become obsolete and need revision. It is often said that we have to work with nature,
not against it, but of course this is just the rhetoric of moderation; every
human artifice thwarts or redirects some trend of nature; the trick is to
figure out enough about how nature's patterns are put together so that
our interference in them will achieve the results we want.

H o l d i n g the Line against C r e e p i n g E x c u l p a t i o n
As we learn more and more about how people make up their minds,
the assumptions underlying our institutions of praise and blame, p u n -

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ishment and treatment, education and medication will have to adjust
to honor the facts as we know them, for one thing is clear: Institutions
and practices based on obvious falsehoods are too brittle to trust. Few
people will be willing to wager their futures on a fragile myth that they
themselves can see the cracks in. In fact, our attitudes on these matters
have been shifting gradually over the centuries. We now uncontroversially exculpate or mitigate in many cases that our ancestors would have
dealt with much more harshly Is this progress or are we all going soft
on sin? To the fearful, this revision looks like erosion, and to the hopeful it looks like growing enlightenment, but there is also a neutral perspective from which to view the process. It looks to an evolutionist like
a rolling equilibrium, never quiet for long, the relatively stable outcome
of a series of innovations and counter-innovations, adjustments and
meta-adjustments, an arms race that generates at least one sort of
progress: growing self-knowledge, growing sophistication about w h o
we are and what we are, and what we can and cannot do. And from
this self-understanding, we fashion and re-fashion our conclusions
about what we ought to do.
Here is an unanswered question left over from Chapter 9: What,
in fact, are the qualifications for being a genuinely culpable miscreant,
and could anybody actually meet them? Nobody's perfect, and besides,
a perfect miscreant is a concept in danger of self-contradiction, a point
that has been appreciated since Socrates. Doesn't there have to be something amiss in anybody w h o sets out knowingly to do evil? H o w shall
we draw the line between exculpatory pathologyyof various sorts—he
didn't know, he couldn't control himself—and people who do evil "of
their own free will," knowing what they are doing? If we set the threshold too high, everybody gets off the hook; if we set it too low, we end
up punishing scapegoats. The various libertarian proposals aimed at this
problem land wide of the target: Frankly mysterious agent causation,
quantum indeterminacy in the faculty of practical reason, moral levitation performed by immaterial souls or other spectral puppeteers—at
best these doctrines cajole us into diverting our attention from a difficult puzzle and fixating on a conveniently insoluble mystery. So let's
return to the problem: H o w do we draw the line, and what keeps it from
retreating in the face of all the pressure from science?
Imagine trying to devise an aptitude test that would measure
the flexibility of mind, general knowledge, social comprehension, and

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291

impulse-control that are arguably the minimal requirements of moral
agency. Such a test could operationalize the ideal implied by our tacit
understanding of responsibility: Normal adults have it, and you either
have it or you don't. We could design it to have a "ceiling effect": You
can't get more than 100 out of 100 points, and most people get 100.
(We have no legitimate interest in differences in competence above the
threshold. Unimaginative Smith may not have known what he was
doing quite as clearly as his accomplice, brilliant Jones, but Smith knew
quite well enough to be held accountable.) T h e rationale for such a
policy is clear and familiar, and it seems to work well in such simple
applications as automobile driver's licenses. You have to be sixteen (or
fifteen, or seventeen . . .) and you have to pass a test of aptitude and
knowledge of the rul6s. Thereafter, you are given the freedom of the
road and treated as equal to any other driver. Such a policy can then
be adjusted as we learn more about its effects on highway safety; nighttime restrictions, apprenticeship periods, exceptions for identifiable
disabilities or other special circumstances can be considered in a costbenefit trade-off between maximizing safety and maximizing freedom.
Just such a balancing process can also be discerned to be operating in the debates over grounds for exculpation or mitigation of
responsibility in general. As we learn more about patterns of relative
disability and their effects, we discover grounds for relocating individuals relative to the threshold, usually but not always in the direction of
exculpating some class of people heretofore seen as clearly culpable.
This creates the appearance of an ever-retreating threshold, but we
need to examine that appearance more dispassionately. It is quite possible for us to make major revisions in our policies about w h o m we
incarcerate and w h o m we treat, for instance, without any revision in
our philosophical background assumptions. After all, we don't change
our concepts of guilt and innocence when we discover that some individual in prison was falsely convicted. We remove that unfortunate person from the set of those deemed guilty, but we don't change the
criterion for set membership. It is precisely because we adhere to our
standard understanding of the concept of guilt that we recognize that
this person is not guilty after all. Similarly, on the strength of new evidence a category of individuals could be removed from the set of those
deemed responsible without any change—in particular, without any
"erosion"—of our concept of moral responsibility We would just learn

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that there were fewer morally responsible people in our society than
we had heretofore supposed.
The anxious mantra returns: "But where will it all end?" Aren't
we headed toward a 100 percent "medicalized" society in which
nobody is responsible, and everybody is a victim of one unfortunate
feature of their background or another (nature or nurture)? No, we are
not, because there are forces—not mysterious metaphysical forces, but
readily explainable social and political forces—that oppose this trend,
and they are of the same sort, really, as the forces that prevent the driving age from rising to, say, thirty! People want to be held accountable.
T h e benefits that accrue to one w h o is a citizen in good standing in a
free society are so widely and deeply appreciated that there is always a
potent presumption in favor of inclusion. Blame is the price we pay
for credit, and we pay it gladly under most circumstances. We pay
dearly, accepting punishment and public humiliation for a chance to
get back in the game after we have been caught out in some transgression. And so the best strategy for holding the line against creeping
exculpation is clear: Protect and enhance the value of the games one
gets to play if one is a citizen in good standing. It is erosion of these
benefits, not the onward march of the human and biological sciences,
that would threaten the social equilibrium. (Recall the cynical slogan
that accompanied the decay and ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union:
They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.)
Since there will always be strong temptations to make yourself
really small, to externalize the causes of your actions and deny responsibility, the way to counteract these is to make people an offer they can't
refuse: If you want to be free, you must take responsibility. But what
about the poor slobs w h o just can't hold their lives together, whose
ability to resist temptation is so impaired that they are well-nigh certain to live a life of transgression and punishment? Isn't this unfair to
them, a coercive offer that only masquerades as a free choice? They
can't really hold up their end of the bargain, and then they get p u n ished. They make useful scapegoats, perhaps, since the example we set
with them keeps vivid the anticipation of punishment that actually
deters those with slightly more self-control, but isn't this obviously
unjustifiable? After all, "they couldn't do otherwise." There is a sense
of this well-worn phrase that belongs in this context, but it is not the
sense that incompatibilists worry about, as we shall see.

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293

T h e dynamics of the process of negotiated thresholds is perhaps most visible in the extreme cases that occasionally come before
the public. What should we do, for instance, about convicted pedophiles? The recidivism rate is appalling—you really can't teach these
old dogs new tricks, apparently—and the harm they can do if allowed
their freedom is even more appalling (Quinsey et al. 1998). There is,
however, a treatment that studies have shown to be effective in endowing pedophiles with the self-control that would render them safe
enough to return to society (under some further supervision): castration. A dire remedy for a dire condition. Can it be justified? Is it "cruel
and unusual punishment"? It is important that many convicted
pedophiles volunteer for castration, as a vastly preferable alternative to
indefinite incarceration. (One hears less complaint about the cruel and
unusual punishment of releasing a sex offender into a community of
quite appropriately terrified and outraged citizens bent on forming vigilante groups to hound the dangerous individual out of town.) The
issue is far from resolved and is complicated by many factors. Castration achieves its main effect by stopping the flow of testosterone into
the body, and this can be done chemically or surgically. Chemical castration requires repeated injections and is in general reversible, but the
drugs have some bad side effects; surgical castration is not readily
reversible in one regard, but its main effect on behavior can be sidestepped by self-administering testosterone—if one really wants to. But
why would one want to do this? (See, e.g., Prentky 1997 and Rosier
and Witztum 1998.)
The symbolic effect of castration is obviously part of what
makes the issue so highly charged. If the surgical removal of, say, the
appendix, had as dramatic a positive effect on the self-control of those
w h o underwent the treatment, it is hard to believe there would be as
much vehemence in the opposition to this option. I know from experience that discussing this issue in this context is going to make some
readers' heads swim. " H e ends up advocating castration!" No, I have
raised the policy as a serious alternative but expressed no opinion on
its ultimate wisdom. After all, there may well be some better, and less
dire, treatment just around the corner. Moreover, suppose for the sake
of argument that the recidivism rate for pedophiles is 50 percent (not
far off the mark), and suppose that many pedophiles voluntarily
undergo castration as the price they are willing to pay for freedom.

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Roughly half of those will be "unnecessary" castrations: They wouldn't
have re-offended in any case. The problem is that we can't identify
them (now) in advance. But presumably with growing knowledge this
will improve. What should we do in the meantime? There are compelling reasons for shunning castration, and compelling reasons for
advocating it. I am using castration as an example, and inviting readers
to reflect on how strong they find the urge to respond to such an
"unspeakable" proposal by turning off their minds and turning up the
volume on their "hearts." This is part of the problem. So sure are some
people that they are being invited onto a buttered slide to perdition that
they just can't let themselves think about such issues. Philosophers are
supposed to be above such pressures, dispassionate contemplators of
every conceivable option, insulated in their ivory towers, but that is a
myth. In fact, philosophers rather relish the role of early warning
scouts, heading off a dimly imagined catastrophe before it gets a chance
to come into focus.
Castration is a useful example, since it exposes inconsistencies
in the thinking of advocates on both sides. There are those w h o eagerly
seek prescription drugs for themselves to help them keep to their diets
or control blood pressure that they cannot make themselves control
through proper exercise, while denying all such high-tech crutches to
boost or supplement the willpower of those with other temptations. If
it is rational, and responsible, for them to recognize their own weaknesses and take whatever steps are currently available to heighten their
own self-control, how can they disparage the same policies in others?
The new gastric bypass surgery that seems to be a major breakthrough
for some cases of chronic obesity caused by obsessive eating is a drastic measure, but the ambient opinion today in many quarters is that seriously overweight people w h o resist having the operation are being
irresponsible (Gawand 2001). This may well change as we learn more
about the long-term effects, both on the obsessive eaters and on the
surrounding society and its attitudes. Such attitudes play a powerful role
in setting the conditions in which free choices are made. For instance,
eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia nervosa are much less
common among women in Muslim countries, in which the physical
attractiveness of women plays a muted role relative to Westernized
countries (Abed 1998). Even minor revisions of societal norms, as
Gibbard notes, can have a profound effect on how individuals think

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about the choices they make, and this is a key feature distinguishing
human choice from animal choice.
Suppose you have a big purple spot on your back. This is a b i o logical feature, but probably not a very important psychological feature. Suppose instead that you have a big purple spot on your nose. This
is a much greater misfortune, since although both discolorations may
be physiologically harmless, the blotch on your nose will no doubt
interfere profoundly with your self-image, because it affects how others see you and treat you, and how you react to that treatment, and
how they react to those reactions, and so forth. A purple nose is a huge
psychological handicap. Its being such a handicap is, however, something that is itself readily recognizable by many, which can lead to the
endorsement of social policies, practices, and attitudes that tend to
minimize, or at any rate channel, the effects. What starts out as a superficial biological feature of an organism is turned into a psychological
feature and, in turn, becomes a political feature in the wider world.
This sort of thing doesn't happen to any great extent in the animal
world. Field ethologists routinely capture and tag the animals they
study, to help with re-identification of individuals over time. Many
thousands of birds have lived their lives with a colored band on one
leg, and perhaps as many mammals have conducted their affairs with
numbered metal tags quite visible on their ears, and so far as anyone
can tell, these markers do not interfere seriously with their lives, neither diminishing nor enhancing their opportunities. A human being
w h o had to appear in public with a metal tag affixed to one ear would
have to make major adjustments in life hopes and plans, and thus there
is a political dimension to any decision, self-imposed or otherwise, to
display such a feature.
This sensitivity to social and political reverberations that distinguishes human agency from animal agency also provides the grounds
for founding human responsibility on something more promising than
quantum indeterminacy. The political negotiations out of which our
current practices and presumptions about responsibility emerge have
nothing to do with determinism or mechanism in general, but do concern the assessment of the inevitability—or evitability—of particular
features of particular agents and types of agents. Can you teach these
old dogs new tricks, or not? As we noted in Chapter 3, there is an
unproblematic sense in which there can be growth in ability over time

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in a deterministic world, as well as a widening of opportunities and
what is made of them by particular deterministic agents. Such increase
in ability over time is utterly invisible to the mind-set that adopts the
narrow vision of possibility enshrined in the definition of determinism: "There is at any instant exactly one physically possible future."
According to that vision, in a deterministic world, at any time t, n o t h ing can do anything other than the one thing it is determined at t to do,
and in an indeterministic world, at any time t, a thing can do as many
different things—at least two—as that brand of indeterminism allows
for, presumably a deep and immutable fact of physics that could not be
perturbed by changes in practices or knowledge or technology. T h e
obvious fact that people today can do more than people used to be able
to do disappears from sight if we understand possibility this way, and
yet this fact is as important as it is obvious.
Indeed, failure to deal with the implications of this kind of
"can" now confronts ethical theorists of every persuasion. O n e of the
few uncontroversial propositions in ethics, deserving its own simple
slogan, is "ought implies can"—you are only obligated to do something
you are able to do. If you are frankly unable to do X, then it is not true
that you ought to do X. It is sometimes supposed that right here we
see the fundamental—and obvious—connection between free will and
responsibility: Since we are responsible only for what is in our power, and
since if determinism is true, we can do only whatever we are determined to do, it is never the case that we ought to do something else,
nothing else ever being in our power. But at the/same time, it is even
more obvious that the explosive growth of can-do in recent human history is rendering obsolete many of our traditional moral notions about
human obligation, quite independently of any considerations about
determinism or indeterminism. T h e sense of "can" that has the moral
import is not the sense of "can" (if there is one) that depends on indeterminism.
Suppose a competent but diseased adult asked you for assistance in putting his living body into cryogenic suspension of life pending some low-probability discovery of a cure for the disease
somewhere down the road. Wouldn't that be assisted suicide? Today,
arguably, it is; tomorrow it may be as obviously justifiable as assisting
in the administration of anesthesia to somebody about to undergo
potentially life-saving surgery. We never used to have to worry about

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297

the ethics of cloning, or omnipresent electronic surveillance, or mindaltering drugs used by athletes, or genetic enhancement of embryos,
and we have never had to worry much about the prospect of effective
prosthetic enhancements of the ability of human agents to control
themselves, but as such innovations arise, we need to have in place an
understanding of responsibility that is robust enough to accommodate
them gracefully

"Thanks, I Needed That!"
T h e key shift in perspective that will enable this is an inversion
described by Stepher/White in The Unity of the Self (1991, Chapter 8,
"Moral Responsibility"). D o n ' t try to use metaphysics to ground
ethics, he argues; put it the other way around: Use ethics to fix what
we should mean by our "metaphysical" criterion. First, show how
there can be an internal justification for some agent acquiescing in his
own punishment—saying, in effect, "Thanks, I needed that!"—and
then use that understanding to anchor and support a reading of our pivotal phrase, could have done otherwise: "An agent could have done other
than he or she did just in case the ascription of responsibility and blame
to that agent for the action in question is justified" (p. 236). In other
words, the fact that free will is worth wanting can be used to anchor
our conception of free will in a way metaphysical myths fail to do. T h e
basic argument is meant to cover all moral praise and blame, but we
can simplify the reasoning if we focus on cases of punishment by
authority ("the state") as a stand-in for the broader class of cases in
which although no crime has been committed one individual blames
another for a misdeed. In many cases in the broader class, there may
be no anticipated punishment other than being scolded—or just
resented, thought ill of. We can monitor the generality of the argument by shifting every now and then between a legal setting (the state
vs. Jones) and a moral setting (a parent admonishing a child, for
instance).
T h e ideal for an institution of punishment, White argues,
would be that every punishment should be justified in the eyes of the person punished. This presupposes that agents eligible for punishment are
intelligent, rational, knowledgeable enough to be competent judges of

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the purported justification of that punishment. Their (imagined)
acquiescence in their own punishment serves as a reference or pivot
point for setting the threshold. Those w h o are incompetent to make
such a judgment are surely not competent to enjoy the freedoms of citizenship without supervision, so we don't blame them (not yet, if they
are young children). Those w h o are competent enough to appreciate
the justification, and accept it, are unproblematic instances of culpable
miscreants—they say so themselves, and we have no plausible grounds
for not taking them at their word. That leaves those w h o are apparently competent but w h o resist acquiescence. These are the problem
cases, but they are squeezed from both sides: On the one hand, they
presumably desire the status of competent citizen, with its many benefits, and on the other hand, they dread the punishment, which they
can escape only by declaring themselves—or revealing themselves—to
'* be too small. (If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything.) White notes, slyly, that even the rational psychopath
will have an internal justification for supporting laws that punish psychopaths, since they protect him from other psychopaths and allow him
the freedom to pursue his interests as best he can.
Whether or not such a ceremony of justification is actually performed, we can imagine the scenario. Suppose you are the culprit. T h e
state says to you, in effect: "You erred. Tough luck, but for the good
of the state you are hereby asked to undergo punishment." You hear
the charges, the evidence, the verdict. Let's suppose that you are guilty
as charged. (The checks and balances of the system will keep pressure
on the state to make its cases well, and you are encouraged to exploit
that presumption in your defense.) But now the question is whether
you are responsible for the act committed. We may frame this as the
question "Could you have done otherwise?" but we wouldn't then
seek testimony from metaphysicians or quantum physicists. We would
seek specific evidence of your competence, or extenuating circumstances. Consider, in particular, a defense that cites factors that were
beyond your control, factors that were put in place many years before
you were born, for instance. These are relevant only insofar as you
could not have known about them. If you knew that the ground on
which you were building the house had been contaminated by factory
refuse a hundred years ago, or if you should have known, you cannot cite
this as a factor beyond your control. But could you have known?

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("Ought" implies "can.") As we come to have greater and greater
powers for acquiring knowledge about the factors that play a causal role
in our actions, we become increasingly liable for not knowing about
factors both external (e.g., the contaminated soil) and internal (e.g.,
your well-understood obsession with making a quick buck—you
should have done something about that!). A defense of "I could not
have done otherwise" that would have passed muster in olden days is
no longer acceptable. You are obliged by the prevailing attitudes of
society to keep up with the latest know-how on all matters over which
you wish to exercise some responsibility.
T h e state invites you to acquiesce in your punishment and, of
course, you may not acquiesce, but if the state has done its j o b right,
you ought to. That is,ythe state can offer you a reason that it can defend
without blushing. If you don't get it, that's your problem. If there are
lots of folks that don't get it, that's the state's problem; they have set
the threshold too low, or in some other way done a bad j o b framing
the laws. H o w do we handle the penumbra of cases in the real, nonideal world of people w h o can't get it, or whose acquiescence is a result
of brainwashing or coercion? T h e existence of a non-empty set of p u n ished culprits w h o do not competently acquiesce in their own p u n ishment is inevitable, but it is not inevitably large. In fact, the system of
negotiated thresholds has the nice property of being adjustable over time
to minimize the set of those misclassified. As we learn of miscarriages
of justice, we consider them as grounds for revision of our policies, and
when we learn of categories of individuals who fall below the currently
defended threshold for self-control, we face a political question of the
same sort as the question we face about whether to adjust the rules for
driver's licenses. And if new technologies (surgery or drugs or treatments or prosthetic devices or educational systems or warning lights
or . . .) can be effective in adjusting the abilities of those w h o fall short,
we will confront the cost-benefit trade-off of whether the good effects
outweigh the harm.
Can pedophiles do otherwise? Some can and some can't, and
we should consider steps that might be taken to move more of the latter group into the former. Those w h o can do otherwise are those who,
if they lapse, would insist on their right to be punished. And when they
make this claim, we should not prejudge their presumption of competence to make it—although that will be an issue in the trial. But

3°o

Freedom Evolves

wouldn't the occurrence of a lapse, any lapse, show that after all, they
could not have done otherwise—at least not on the specific occasion?
N o . That is an illicit return to the narrow notion of the term "can."
We anchor the broader notion to our practices and hold such individuals responsible. In the relevant sense, they could have done otherwise.
(Recall the more trivial version of this phenomenon from Chapter 3:
the chess program that failed to castle but could have castled all the
same—even though it operates in a deterministic world and hence
would always fail to castle in exactly that circumstance.)
But, knowing there will almost certainly be some recidivists
who do lapse, isn't this just too risky a policy to adopt? Perhaps it is, but
this is a political question about how much risk we are prepared to live
with, not a philosophical question about whether pedophiles have some
sort of metaphysical free will after all, or even a scientific question about
just what makes pedophiles do what they do. As we learn more and
more about the conditions—neurochemical, social, genetic—that predispose for pedophilia (and the shifting limits of evitability of these conditions), we will surely shrink the uncertainty, and hence the risk, of
releasing such people from confinement, but there will always be risk.
T h e political question is about how much risk we are prepared to tolerate in order to maintain our freedom as a society.
For centuries we've lived by the rule that no one can be p u n ished, or detained, for being likely to commit a crime, but for all that time
we've been quite aware of the fact that this admirable principle has its
risks. What do we do about the heretofore law-abiding citizen w h o
approaches his intended victim with a dangerous weapon? Just when
may we intervene? At what point does our fellow citizen forfeit his
freedom from interference? Does he have the right to a first blow before
we can take action against him? As we learn more and more about the
probabilities, and the conditions that underlie them, there will be more
and more pressure to adjust our admirable principle in the interests of
public safety. Notice that we have a host of clever innovations in the
law that already serve this purpose—they preserve the admirable principle by creating new crimes for people to commit on their way to their
main crime. We make a law that prohibits people from carrying certain dangerous weapons in public, for instance, or that institutes the
new crime of conspiracy to commit another crime. It is already a
crime for people with certain medical conditions to conceal that fact

Thanks, I Needed That!

301

w h e n they apply for certain high-risk positions. We have ways of putting the burden of knowledge on individuals so that they can make
decisions parallel to the dire choice of the pedophile. And—this is the
important point—if we maintain the requirement that these innovations must pass the "Thanks, I needed that!" test, we can preserve our
institution of responsibility; we can keep the specter of creeping exculpation at bay. Ask yourself: Suppose you knew (because of lots of good
science) that you suffered from a condition that made you highly likely
to injure people in some way unless you submitted to treatment Z,
which would make such a calamity much more evitable; and suppose
undergoing this treatment preserved your competence in (virtually)
every way. Would you be willing to undergo the treatment? Would you
be in favor of a law t^iat made undergoing the treatment a condition
of preserving your freedom? In other words, are you sure that under
those conditions you would have a right to strike the first blow? You
could say, at your trial, "I have a condition, Your Honor; it was outside my control! I couldn't do otherwise," but this would be disingenuous if you knew about the opportunity. W h a t if such a treatment
had to be undergone in childhood, before the age of informed consent? Are we prepared to consider the ethical wisdom of such preemptive interventions? W h a t standard of evidence should we require
before endorsing such a "public health" measure across the board? (We
already have laws mandating inoculation, even though we know to a
moral certainty that some children will have bad reactions to them and
die or be disabled.) T h e more we know, the more we can do; the more
we can do, the more obligations we face. We may yearn for the good
old days when ignorance was a better excuse than it is today, but we
cannot turn back the clock.
It is time to recall the plight of the hapless father from Chapter 1, who bears responsibility—doesn't he?—for the death of his child.
Presumably everybody has a breaking point; those w h o happen to
encounter their personal breaking point break! H o w can it be fair to
hold them responsible and punish them, just because some other person wouldn't have broken if faced with exactly their predicament? Isn't
he just the victim of bad luck? And isn't it just your good luck not to
have succumbed to temptation or had your weaknesses exploited by
some conspiracy of events? Yes, luck figures heavily in our lives, all the
time, but since we know this, we take the precautions we deem appro-

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Freedom Evolves

priate to minimize the untoward effects of luck, and then take responsibility for whatever happens. We can note that if he makes himself
really small, he can externalize this whole episode in his life, almost
turning it into a bad dream, a thing that happened to him, not something he did. Or he can make himself large, and then face the much
more demanding task of constructing a future self that has this terrible
act of omission in its biography. It is up to him, but we may hope he
gets a little help from his friends. This is indeed an opportunity for a
Self-Forming Action of the sort Kane draws to our attention, and we
human beings are the only species that is capable of making them, but
there is no need for them to be undetermined.

Are W e Freer T h a n W e W a n t t o Be?
Perhaps if we saw where seemingly ideal inquiry leads, we would change our minds
about what makes inquiry ideal. In any case, if such a method works it must work
slowly, with painstaking effort along many lines.
—Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings

Nicholas Maxwell (1984) defines freedom as "the capacity to achieve
what is of value in a range of circumstances." I think this is about as
good a short definition of freedom as could be. In particular, it appropriately leaves wide open the question of just what is of value. O u r
unique ability to reconsider our deepest convictions about what makes
life worth living obliges us to take seriously the discovery that there is
no palpable constraint on what we can consider. It is all up for grabs.
To some people, this is a fearful prospect, opening the gates to nihilism
and relativism, letting go of God's commandments and risking a plunge
into anarchy Stop that crow!
I think they should have more faith in their fellow human
beings, and appreciate how amazingly subde and adroit they are, how
well equipped by nature and culture to formulate and participate in
well-designed societal arrangements that maximize freedom for all. Far
from being anarchic, such arrangements are—and must be—exquisitely
tuned to strike a stable balance between shelter and elbow room. If we
cannot achieve universality {Homo sapiens' chauvinistic word for specieswide acceptance), we may at least be able to aspire to what Allan Gib-

Are We Freer Than We Want to Be?

303

bard calls "parochiality over the widest parish" (Gibbard 1990, p. 315).
But we may be able to achieve true universality. We've done it in other
domains. T h e philosophers' problem is to negotiate the transition from
"is" to "ought"—or, more precisely, to show how we might go beyond
the "merely historical" fact that certain customs and policies have had,
as a matter of fact, widespread societal endorsement, and get all the way
to norms that command assent in all rational agents. Successful instances
of this move are known. Bootstrapping has worked in the past, and it
can work here as well. We don't need a skyhook.
Consider the curious problem of drawing a straight line. A
really straight line. H o w do we do it? We use a straightedge, of course.
And where did we get it? Over the centuries we refined our techniques
for making straighter and straighter so-called straightedges, pitting them
against each other in-supervised trials and mutual adjustments that have
kept raising the threshold of accuracy. We now have large machines that
are accurate to within a millionth of an inch over their entire length,
and we have no difficulty in using our current vantage point to appreciate the practically unattainable but readily conceivable norm of a really
straight edge. We discovered that norm, the eternal Platonic Form of
the Straight, if you like, through our creative activity. We also discovered arithmetic, and many other timeless and absolute systems of truth.
As Gibbard says, we may not find a similar limiting point to our quest
for a system of ethics, but there is no a priori reason that I can see to rule
out the prospect, once we have the ideal in place of a free society in
which free inquiry can take place. The normativity implicit in these
human discoveries—or are they inventions?—is itself one of the fruits
of the evolutionary processes, both genetic and cultural, that have
designed us to be what we are, exploiting billions of serendipitous collisions and amplifying them, the "frozen accidents" of history, as Francis Crick has called them, into our current state. O u r communal process
of memetic engineering over thousands of years continues today, and
this book is just part of that process. It has no Archimedean perch from
which it can move the world, but it can contribute, perhaps, to the
refinement of our understanding of ourselves and our circumstances.
The freedom of thought and action that is necessary for discovering truth is a precursor, as we have seen, to the more expansive ideal
of political or civil freedom, a meme that spreads easily, apparendy It is
much more infectious than fanaticism, thank goodness. The cat is out

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Freedom Evolves

of the bag. There is no way that enforced ignorance can win in the long
run. You can't readily uneducate people. As communications technology makes it harder and harder for leaders to shield their people from
outside information, and as the economic realities of the twenty-first
century make it clearer and clearer that education is the most important investment any parent can make in a child, the floodgates will open
all over the world, with tumultuous effects. All the flotsam and jetsam
of popular culture, all the trash and scum that accumulates in the corners of a free society, will inundate these relatively pristine regions along
with the treasures of modern education, equal rights for women, better health care, workers' rights, democratic ideals, and openness to the
cultures of others. As the experience in the former Soviet Union shows
only too clearly, the worst features of capitalism and high-tech are
among the most robust replicators in this population explosion of
memes, and there will be plenty of grounds for xenophobia, Luddism,
and the tempting "hygiene" of backward-looking fundamentalism.
As Jared Diamond shows in Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), it
was European germs that brought Western Hemisphere populations to
the brink of extinction, since those people had had no history in which
to develop tolerance for them. In the next century it will be our
memes, both tonic and toxic, that will wreak havoc on the unprepared
world. Our capacity to tolerate the toxic excesses of freedom cannot
be assumed in others, or simply exported as one more commodity. The
practically unlimited educability of any human being gives us hope of
success, but designing and implementing the cultufal inoculation necessary to fend off disaster, while respecting the rights of those in need
of inoculation, will be an urgent task of great complexity, requiring
not just better social science but also sensitivity, imagination, and
courage. The field of public health expanded to include cultural health
will be the greatest challenge of this century. 1

H u m a n F r e e d o m Is Fragile
Whales roam the oceans, birds soar bHthely overhead, and, according
to an old joke, a 500-pound gorilla sits wherever it wants, but none
1. The preceding two paragraphs are drawn from Dennett 1999B.

Human Freedom Is Fragile

305

of these creatures is free in the way human beings can be free. H u m a n
freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from
all other biological conditions and found in only one species, us. The
differences between autonomous human agents and the other assemblages of nature are visible not just from an anthropocentric perspective but also from the most objective standpoints (the plural is
important) achievable. H u m a n freedom is real—as real as language,
music, and money—so it can be studied objectively from a n o nonsense, scientific point of view. But like language, music, money,
and other products of society, its persistence is affected by what we
believe about it. So it is not surprising that our attempts to study it
dispassionately are distorted by anxiety that we will clumsily kill the
specimen under the microscope.
H u m a n freedom is younger than the species. Its most important features are only several thousand years old—an eyeblink in evolutionary history—but in that short time it has transformed the planet
in ways that are as salient as such great biological transitions as the creation of an oxygen-rich atmosphere and the creation of multicellular
life. Freedom had to evolve like every other feature of the biosphere,
and it continues to evolve today. Freedom is real now, in some happy
parts of the world, and those w h o love it love wisely, but it is far from
inevitable, far from universal. If we understand better how freedom
arose, we can do a better j o b of preserving it for the future, and protecting it from its many natural enemies.
O u r brains have been designed by natural selection, and all the
products of our brains have likewise been designed, on a much swifter
timescale, by physical processes in which no exemption from causality
can be discerned. How, then, can our inventions, our decisions, our
sins and triumphs, be any different from the beautiful but amoral webs
of the spiders? H o w can an apple pie, lovingly created as a gift of
reconciliation, be any different, morally, from an apple, "cleverly"
designed by evolution to attract a frugivore to the bargain of spreading its seeds in return for some fructose? If these are treated as rhetorical questions only, implying that only a miracle could distinguish our
creations from the blind, purposeless creations of material mechanisms,
we will continue to spiral around the traditional problems of free will
and determinism, in a vortex of uncomprehending mystery H u m a n
acts—acts of love and genius, as well as crimes and sins—are just too

3o6

Freedom Evolves

far away from the happenings in atoms, swerving randomly or not, for
us to be able to see at a glance how to put them into a single coherent
framework. Philosophers for thousands of years have tried to bridge
the gap with a bold stroke or two, either putting science in its place or
putting human pride in its place—or declaring (correctly, but unconvincingly) that the incompatibility is only apparent without going into
the details. By trying to answer the questions, by sketching out the
non-miraculous paths that can take us all the way from senseless atoms
to freely chosen actions, we open up handholds for the imagination.
T h e compatibility of free will and science (deterministic or indeterministic—it makes no difference) is not as inconceivable as it once
seemed.
The topics investigated in this book are not just academic puzzles, delightful conceptual riddles to be solved or curious phenomena
not yet captured by good theories. Many people see them to be matters of life and death, and that makes them matters of life and death,
since people's fears tend to amplify the purported implications of the
different analyses and distort the arguments, making them into blunt
instruments of propaganda for good or ill. The emotional resonance of
the word "freedom," like that of the word "God," guarantees a partisan audience, eager to pounce on any false move, any threat, any concession. The effect is that tradition usually has a free ride, or close to
it. Doctrines that are endorsed by tradition should be left unexamined
if at all possible, people are inclined to think, as a matter of tactical wisdom, since it will only stir up a hornet's nest if we, question them. And
so traditional thinking lives on, largely unchallenged, and accretes a
pearly coating of spurious invulnerability over the years.
I have tried to show, with the help of many other thinkers, that
we can and should replace these sacrosanct but brittle traditions with
a more naturalistic foundation. It is scary letting go of such honored
precepts as the imagined conflict between determinism and freedom,
and the false security of a miracle-working Self or Soul to be the place
where the buck stops. Philosophical analysis, by itself, is not enough
to motivate such a drastic shift in our thinking, even w h e n it is fundamentally correct, and perhaps the most radical feature of this book by
a philosopher is the preeminence given in it to the work of n o n philosophers. My point has been that philosophers, as philosophers, cannot claim to be doing their professional duty to their very own topics

Human Freedom Is Fragile

307

unless they pay careful attention to the thinking of psychologists such
as Daniel Wegner and George Ainslie, economists such as R o b e r t
Frank, biologists such as Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Edward O.
Wilson, and David Sloan Wilson, and the others whose ideas have
played prominent roles in this book. I am not the only philosopher
w h o holds this view, of course. Such excellent philosophers as Jon
Elster, Allan Gibbard, Philip Kitcher, Alexander Rosenberg, D o n
Ross, Brian Skyrms, Kim Sterelny and Elliott Sober have pushed further than I have into these rich sources of philosophical ore, in the
process clarifying both the science and the philosophy
I have not just lavished attention on the ideas of n o n philosophers; in the process I have ignored the ideas of more than a few
highly regarded philosophers, sidestepping several vigorously debated
controversies in my'own discipline without so much as a mention. To
the participants in those debates I owe an explanation. Where, some
may well ask, are my refutations, my proofs, my philosophical arguments demonstrating the unsoundness of their carefully crafted analyses? I have provided a few: Austin's putt, Kane's faculty of practical
reasoning, and Mele's autonomy, for instance, have come in for the sort
of detailed attention philosophers expect. With regard to others, I have
decided to put the burden of proof on them. It takes a certain amount
of shared background assumptions to make a philosophical controversy,
and I have convinced myself—not proved—that my informal tales and
observations challenge some of their enabling assumptions, rendering
their contests optional, however diverting to those embroiled in them.
I could have said exactly how and why, but it would have taken a h u n dred pages or more of dense textual exegesis and argument, ending up
with verdicts of false alarm, an anticlimax to be shunned. That is a risky
decision on my part, since it is open to them to demonstrate that I have
woefully underestimated the inevitability of their shared presuppositions, but it is a risk I am prepared to take.
My aim in this book has been to demonstrate that if we accept
Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning" we can build all the way up
to the best and deepest human thought on questions of morality and
meaning, ethics and freedom. Far from being an enemy of these traditional explorations, the evolutionary perspective is an indispensable ally.
I have not sought to replace the voluminous work in ethics with some
Darwinian alternative, but rather to place that work on the foundation

3o8

Freedom Evolves

it deserves: a realistic, naturalistic, potentially unified vision of our place
in nature. Recognizing our uniqueness as reflective, communicating
animals does not require any human "exceptionalism" that must shake
a defiant fist at Darwin and shun the insights to be harvested from that
beautifully articulated and empirically anchored system of thought. We
can understand how our freedom is greater than that of other creatures,
and see how this heightened capacity carries moral implications: noblesse
oblige. We are in the best position to decide what to do next, because
we have the broadest knowledge and hence the best perspective on the
future. What that future holds in store for our planet is up to all of us,
reasoning together.

N o t e s o n Sources and Further R e a d i n g
Robert Kane's anthology, The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (2001), collects newly commissioned essays by the major contributors to the
philosophical literature in recent years, and readers will get useful triangulation there on the topics covered in this book.
T h e complex issues of punishment and recidivism are well surveyed in Quinsey et al., Violent Offenders: Appraising and Managing Risk
(1998), a statistically sophisticated broad overview of prediction and
treatment, with particular attention to psychopaths. A m o n g its most
striking findings is that psychopaths w h o are given training in social
sensitivity and interpersonal relations while they/are incarcerated are
more likely to commit violent crimes on release: "We speculate, then,
that patients learned a great deal from the intensive program but that
the psychopathic offenders put their new skills to quite unintended
uses" (p. 89). Philosophers need to rethink the enabling assumptions—
the oversimplifications—that they typically invoke w h e n discussing
psychopaths and other problematic culprits. As usual, a philosopher's
bare imagination, untrammeled by the facts, is too blunt an instrument
to be of much use on such a delicate and important set of problems.
Stephen White's The Unity of the Self(1991), especially C h a p ters 8 and 9, contains an acute and detailed analysis of some of the
issues I paint here in broad brush strokes, and develops arguments that
should satisfy the skeptics, especially on the need for, and soundness
of, the inversion he proposes. In particular, I commend his analysis of

Notes on Sources and Further Reading

309

the shortcomings of earlier philosophical attempts to deal with these
issues.
A fascinating book on the history of the bootstrapping process
that has yielded today's (well, the 1970s') standards of straightness and
precision is Wayne Moore's Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy (1970).
Some readers of this book have felt the lack of an account of
human creativity and authorship. This was the topic of my Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical
Association in December 2000 (Dennett 2000B).
The relationship between free will and political freedom is
incisively investigated by Philip Pettit in A Theory of Freedom: From the
Psychology to the Politics of Agency (2001), and by R o b e r t Nozick, in the
final chapter, "The Qfenealogy of Ethics," of his last book, Invariances
(2001). The role ofculture, especially political and economic organization, in maintaining and enhancing freedom is demonstrated in
Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom (1999).
As I was putting the finishing touches on this book, I received
in the mail a copy of Merlin Donald's new book, A Mind So Rare: The
Evolution of Human Consciousness (2001). Donald makes it clear on
page one that he conceives of it as an antidote of sorts to my books,
Consciousness Explained (1991A) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995).
However, the last chapter of Donald's book, " T h e Triumph of C o n sciousness," could serve quite well as the last chapter of this book. H o w
can this be? Because Donald, like many others, has hugely underestimated the bounty to be found in Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning." He says in his Prologue: "This book proposes that the human
mind is unlike any other on this planet, not because of its biology, which
is not qualitatively unique, but because of its ability to generate and
assimilate culture" (p. xiii). Exactly

J

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y

INDEX

Abed, Riadh, 294, 311
absentmindedness, 6
Absolute Ignorance, 47
absolutism, xii, 101, 135, 271, 289
accident, or fluke, 125
acte gratuit, 116
action:
birth of, 43
as cause, 72
action guidance, 46
adaptation, 185, 216, 219, 261
without genetic change, 170
language as, 174
addiction, 102, 212, 285
Aesop's fable, 266
Africa, 181-2
agency, moral, 56, 81, 103, 135, 295
evolution of, 193-219
minimal requirements for, 291
agenda, 251
agent(s), 34, 56, 72, 93, 125, 169, 180,
199, 200, 204, 254, 260, 265, 281,
285-6, 295
atom seen as, 54, 55
causation by, 100, 101, 137, 290
clusters of, 200
design of, 217
free, 218
human, 177, 219, 305
that "knows," 45

with mind and culture, 263
moral, 255, 268, 271-2
from oblivious to reflective, 261
perspective of, 26
rational, 45-6, 152-3, 217, 267, 270,
281
responsible, 117
simple, 151
as vector, 177—8
agent causation, 100, 101, 137, 290
agent-like designs, 42
agentocentrism, 61
agriculture, 161, 174
AIDS research, 17-18
Ainslie, George, 23, 207-11, 212, 217,
245,254,277,307,311
Akins, Kathleen, 59, 311
Alcoholics Anonymous, 272, 288
alcoholism, 211—12
algorithm(s), 107, 139
for chess, 83, 92
as clunky and brittle, 106—7
Darwinian, 188
of evolution, 3, 15
"all things considered," 180, 195
Allison, Henry A., 281,311
altruism, 175n, 191, 196, 200, 206
defined, 194-5
genuine, 194, 215, 217
impure, 214

326

Alvarez, G. A., 239, 324
American Sunbather, 185
amino acid, 176
Amnesty International, 109
anesthesia, 296
angels, 180, 218, 232
anger, 214, 278-9
animism, 55
annihilation of matter, 32
anorexia nervosa, 294
ant climbing a stalk of grass, 175
anthropocentrism, 61
anthropomorphism, 42
anticipation, 43
anxiety about free will, 15, 90, 289, 305
AP (alternate possibilities) condition,
118, 119, 124
apes, 143, 202
as natural psychologists, 251—2
appearance-reality distinction, 165
;
appetitive will, 103
apple, compared to apple pie, 305
Appleyard, Brian, 16
arche, 121
archeology, evolutionary, 192
Archimedean perch, 259, 303
architecture, cognitive, 260
Arinello, James, xiii
Aristotle, 259, 263, 266
arithmetic, 10, 303
arms race, evolutionary, 21, 54, 144,
146-7, 164, 200-1, 218, 270-1, 290
art, 174, 177
Artificial Intelligence, 106
asexual reproduction, 175n
Astington,J., 288, 311
atmosphere, 10, 305
conceptual, 180-1
atom, 26, 32, 34, 49, 6 4 - 5 , 306
Bohr model of, 26—7
unsplittable, 29
atomism, Greek, 7-8, 29
attention, 239
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
275
attitude, virus as string of nucleic acid
with, 176
Aunger, Robert, 192, 311
Austin, J. L ., 75-7, 81, 85, 94, 311
Austin's putt, 75-6, 94, 129, 307
author, 123, 137
of acts, 102
intelligent, no need for, 203

Index

autonomy, 102,136, 142, 255, 281-4,
286, 305, 307
of Dumbo, 21
Avital, E., 172, 192,311
avoidance, 43, 47, 51, 54, 56, 58-9, 62,
154, 156, 162, 206, 274
axe, introduction of, 182

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 274
background facts, 9—10
bacteria, 2, 45, 48
bag of tricks, 280
bait and switch, 150n
Baker, Nicholson, 186, 312
Baldwin Effect, 256-7
ball bearing, Hyatt N e w Departure
exhibit, 105-6
ballistic intentional systems, 205
ballistic trajectory, 155
Bambi, 181
bandwidth, 109
Baptista, David, xiii
bargaining, intertemporal, 207—8
Barmazel, Julie, xii
Baron-Cohen, S., 288, 312
"Be all that you can be," 7
beavers, culture in, 172
Bedoukian, Matt, xiii
behavior, on one's best, 277
Behe, Michael, 128n, 312
belief, 45, 81, 251, 259, 286
false, recognition of, 165
as real, 223
_
Benedictus, David, xii
beneficiary(ies):
ultimate, 177, 180, 184
unwitting, 44, 103
benevolence, 280
benselfishness, 193-7, 200, 205, 215,
217
Berry, Michael, 106n, 312
Beyerstein, Lindsay, xiii
Bible, swearing on, 205
Bidwell, Cinnamon, xiii
Big Bang, 30, 68, 84
Big Brother, 203
Bingham, Paul, 219, 312
Binmore, Ken, 287, 312
biological level, 94
biology, 307
in relation to physics, 26
bioprophets, grandiose, 16

Index

bird, 165, 295
freedom of, 143, 164, 177, 203, 251,
304
birdsong, 143
birth control, 177
bison, knowledge of, 4
Blackmore, Susan, xii, 192, 288, 312
blame, 279, 289-90, 297
as the price we pay for credit, 292
blind watchmaker, 48, 53, 153
or sighted selfmaker, 277
blindsiding, 44, 163
blink reflex, 58-9
bluff-detection, 204
Boeing, 187
bogeyman, 161
Boone, James L., 192, 312
bootstrapping, 273, 275, 288, 303, 309
Borges, Jorge Luis, 31,~33, 312
Boston Symphony Orchestra, 141—2,
145, 205
b o u n d a r i e s ) , 122-3, 132, 135, 177,
265, 271,
of the faculty of practical reason, 109
in nature, 65, 130, 131. See also carving at the joints
bowerbird, 184
Boyd, Robert, 201,312
Boyer, Pascal, 192, 312
brain, 2, 15, 104-6, 132, 188, 226-7,
231-2, 238-40, 247-9, 251, 254,
2 6 0 - 1 , 274-5, 305
growth of, 158-9
as meme-nest, 186
multitasking by, 239
and self, 219
size, 163-4
turned into mind, 259
what it is for, 162-3
brainchildren, 15
Brainchildren (Dennett), 137
Brainstorms (Dennett), 221, 223
brainwashing, 129, 281-5. 288
Brazil, 2, 4
Briscoe, Robert, xiii
British Mule Society, 196
Brook, Andrew, xii
buck, where it stops, 99, 137, 272, 287,
306
bulimia, 294
bumblebee flight, 199
Buridan's Ass, 125, 134
Burkert, Walter, 192, 312

327

businesswoman, example of, 104, 124-5
butter, real, versus margarine, 225
butterfly, egg-laying of, 170-1

Cabell, James Branch, 272, 288, 312
cake-splitting game, 262—3
calculator, hand, 109
calories, 5
Calvin, William, 230, 312
camouflage, 163
campaigning for free will, 13
Campbell, Donald, 185, 312
"can," 7
"can (general)," 77
"can do," 296
See also possibility
cancer, 153
Candid Camera, 269
Canseco, Hector, xiii
capitalism, 304
Capone, Russell, xiii
Cappucci, Michael, xiii
carbon atom, as agent, 55
carbon-based life, 188
caricature, 157
carousel, pre-cognitive, 240-41
Cartesian bottleneck, 241
Cartesian ego, 285
Cartesian self, as locus of well-being,
180
Cartesian Theater, 123, 137-8, 187,
233, 235, 238, 241-4, 249, 253
Cartmill, Matt, 181,313
"carving nature at the joints," 65, 131.
See also boundary
Casper the Friendly Ghost, 221-2
castration, 293—4
categorization, obligatory, 271
Cato, 203-4
causal chains, 99, 634
causal explanation, 289
causal question, 80
causal regularities, 81
causality, no exemption from, 305
causation, 26, 62, 7 0 - 1 , 84. 95
agent, 100, 101, 137, 290
cannot be perceived, 243-4
"mental," 246
cause, 59, 65, 84, 244, 246-7
and effect, 56, 61, 89
events with none, 273-4
"real," 73, 74

328

caveat emptor, 270
ceiling effect, 291
celibacy, vow of, 285
cell(s), 142, 150-1, 156, 158-9, 162
communities of, 193
as robot, 2 - 3 , 22, 150-1, 205
cell memory, 170
Central Headquarters, 227
cetaceans, 165. See also dolphins
chance, 57, 132, 138, 158, 213, 273
compatible with determinism, 58
indeterministic, 124
See also luck, random numbers, random pairing, random swerve, random variation, randomness
change, 93
accumulation of, 40
chaos, 104, 105, 106, 129, 132-3,
137-8,211
',
computer models of, 138—9
no avoidance in, 44
character-building, 126
Charon, Rita, xii
cheating, 203
cherubim, 272
chess, 80, 92
compared to card games, 91
chess-playing computer, 79, 94, 107,
112,300
competence of, 87, 91
not conscious, 248
Chicago Museum of Science and Technology, 105
chicken, playing, 21
chicken-and-egg puzzle, 146, 173
child's theory of mind, 288
Childers, Mary, xii
chimpanzee, 173-4, 190, 272-3. See also
ape
Chinese, knowing, 158
Chisholm, Roderick, 100, 137, 313
choice, 48, 114, 136, 154, 163, 199,
212, 243
"choice," 152, 166, 200
free, 155
human, 207, 295
information required for, 157
informed, 81
"real," 80
role in evolution, 265
choice machine, 46, 163, 167,
247-8

Index

choice points, for cells, 152
Chouza, Regina, xiii
Christ, 265
chromosome, 154
of mules, 195n
chumps, 200
Churchland, Patricia, 237-9, 313
Churchland, Paul, 106-8, 139, 313
cigarette smoking, 178
citizen, 280
good, 204
informed, 274
"civil war in the genome," 146
cladistic methods, 192
Clark, Thomas, xiii, 256, 313
Cloak, F. T, 192, 313
clock, Libet's, 228, 231
clone, 155
near-, 155, 175n
cloning, ethics of, 297
clutch, on the faculty of practical reason,
109-10
coercion, 102, 108
cognitive faculties, 247
cognitive neuroscience, 129, 221
Cohen, D., 288, 312
coin flip, 89, 110, 114, 125-6, 153, 158,
274
to break causal links, 85, 86
as random, 85
Coleman, Mary, xiii, 251, 313
Collegium Budapest, xiii
collision, 43-4, 144, 303
in creativity, lOSh
in evolution, 49
comet, 4
Command Headquarters, 233—5
commensalism, 152, 177
commitment, 220
commitment problem, 204—5, 216, 218,
271
communication, 4, 248, 259, 273, 304,
308
community, 173
of genes, 193
compatibilism, 98, 101, 306
competition, 9 1 , 154, 164, 210-11
between neural subcontractors,
187
of consciousness, 254
of motives, 285
complexity, 36, 42—3

Index

computability, Turing, 107
computer:
chess-playing, 77, 79, 94, 107, 112,
300; competence of, 87, 91; not
conscious, 248
as deterministic, 77, 78
user-friendly, 248-9
computer graphics, 29
computer simulation, 49, 218
of chaos, 139
of neural networks, 106—7
of non-linear neural networks,
107-8
concreteness, in creativity, 50
conformism, 201—2
Conrad (your ombudsman), 57, 5 9 - 6 1 ,
78, 88, 94, 225, 254
conscience, 202
/
"conscious but not accessible," 252
conscious will, 224, 245
as illusory, 253
consciousness, xi, 2—3, 22—3, 137, 187,
210-11,227,231-6,238-9,
242-6, 252, 254, 259-60, 265,
269, 286
denying the existence of, 20
as real, 223
Consciousness Explained (Dennett), xi, 15,
57n, 221, 223, 226, 229, 236, 240,
256-7, 309
consenting adults, 270
"contribution, from me," 286
control, 162, 169. See also self-control
controlled experiments, 86, 93
Conway, John Horton, 36, 42, 46, 48,
5 0 - 1 , 65
cooperation, 147-51, 156, 166, 191,
194, 197-9, 203, 210, 218-9, 260,
268, 271,
cooperator, 197-8, 200, 204, 214
corporation, 205
"corporation," eymology of, 154
Cosmic Accident, 45
cosmology, 68
cost:
of information, 44, 163
of punishing, 201
cost-benefit analysis, 177, 184, 203, 219,
291, 299
cost-effectiveness, 163-4, 214
costly signal, 205, 213-15
Cottrell, G., 107

329

"could have done otherwise," 8 1 , 115,
118, 124, 206, 216, 238-9, 292,
298-301. See also AP condition
counterfactual sentences, 69, 70
counterfeit, perfect, 282-4
cranes, 53
creationism, 128n
creative process, 49
creativity, 49, 123, 309
modeling of, 50
creeping exculpation, 21, 289-92, 301
creeping randomness, 133
Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, 87n
Crick, Francis, 16, 20, 303
Crick-Watson model of DNA, 27
crime, 300, 305
Cronin, Helena, xii, 220, 313
crooked timber, humans as, 190
cryogenics, 296
cryptography, 83
Cui bono?, 175-6, 180, 184, 192, 198,
260
cul-de-sac, genetic or cultural, 196
culpability, 290
culpable miscreant, 290, 298
cultural environment, as amplifier of
genetic tendencies, 184
culture, 143, 156, 166, 170, 176-86,
189-92, 201, 218-19, 279, 287,
303, 309
evolution of, 170-180, 186, 201, 259,
277
invention of, 165
popular, 304
transmission of, 173—4, 202; horizontal, 145-6
Cupid, 222-6
Curry, Oliver, xii

Dahlbom, Bo, xiii
Darwin, 47, 143, 161, 198, 265-6,
307-9, 313
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Dennett), xi,
15, 31, 53, 62, 95, 147n, 150n,
154, 166, 257, 309
Darwinian forces, 201
Darwinian fundamentalism, 19, 20
Darwinian thinking, 174, 181, 183-92,
197, 212, 217-18, 260, 264-7,
272-3, 277, 290, 307
caricatures of, 185—7

330

Darwinism, 15, 47, 48, 178, 193
neo-Darwinism, 15, 146
Dawkins, Richard, xii, 15-16, 20, 144,
165-6, 175-6, 179, 192, 198, 224,
267, 307, 313
decision(s), 11, 99, 102, 109, 111-12,
117, 121, 180, 229, 231-2, 235-7,
239, 243, 251, 255
conscious, 241
"decide" and "decision" 92, 151,
162, 164, 214, 217
free, 8, 34, 218
snap, 114, 115, 116, 124
time, 155, 235
unconscious, 237, 239
voluntary, 227
whose?, 234
decision landscape, 133—4
decision-making, 105, 203, 225, 253,
287,
flaw in, 208
model of, 102
moral, 1 1 5 , 2 8 2 - 3
phenomenology of, 242
Deecke, L., 227, 318
deer tick, 181
Default Responsibility Principle, 281
defection, 147-52, 155, 198-9, 202-4,
271
prediction of, 216
defectors, 200, 219
degree of freedom, 162-66
deixis, 170-1
de Marchena, Ashley, xiii
Democritean Universe, 2 9 - 3 1 , 34—5,
38,64
Democritus, 29, 55, 77
demon, Laplace's, 28—9, 34, 69,
91
infinite, 153
Dennett, Daniel (referred to) 16, 20
Dennett, Susan, xiii
Densmore, S., 107n, 315
Depew, David, 257, 315
Descartes, Rene (see also Cartesian),
246
desert, 11
design(s), 25, 4 2 - 3 , 92, 145-6, 172,
179, 187, 198, 214, 259, 261, 266,
268, 277, 279
achievement, 151
of agents, 217
enhancement, 277

Index

by evolution, 52, 197
flaw, 279
increments of, 49
of informational channels, 172
level, 39-42, 46
opportunities, 40
principles, 249
space, 108n, 216
stance, 41, 46, 151
unconscious, 276
design process, 89
interpersonal, 273
desire, 45, 251, 286
higher-order, 285
determinism, 8, 12, 16, 22, 25-26, 28,
36, 38, 56-65, 77, 81, 84, 89-90,
95, 107, 111, 117, 134, 153, 156,
198, 212, 216, 242n, 279, 295-6,
300, 305-6
defined, 25
environmental, 157-60
forward but not backward, 68
genetic, 156-62
hard, 98, 100, 279; defined, 97
hatred of, 41
and inevitability, 51
reduces our possibilities, 75
stereotype of, 38
deus ex machina, 54
de Waal, Frans, 190, 201, 316
De Witt, Janelle, xiii
diabetes, 225
Diamond, Jared, 160-1, 304, 307,
316
dice, 110
y
Dickerson, Debra, 278, 316
Dicrocelium dendriticum (lancet fluke),
175-7, 184, 188, 192
"difference that makes a difference,"
136, 283
differential reproduction, 187-8,
261
diffident versus imperious systems of
norms, 279-80
digitizing, 85
of space and time, 29-30
"diplomacy, not metaphysics,"
223
disbelief, culture of, 186
discounting the future, 207-8
disease, immunity to, 161
disguise, 200
Disney, Walt, 13, 181

Index

Disterhoft, Jason, xiii
distribution
of cognitive labor, 46
of decision-making in time, 206
division of labor, 259
D N A , 51, 143, 145, 151, 170, 172, 176,
188
double-helix model of, 27
selfish, 52
"do it yourself," 135, 138, 272
doing things with words, 249
doing versus happening, 26, 41-2, 45,
52, 58, 306
dolphins, 250, 268
domesticated animals, brains of, 164
domestication, 161
of memes, 266
domination, in game theory, 149, 155,
197
Donald, Merlin, 309, 316
Dooling, Richard, 221-2, 316
dopamine, 275
doubt, discovery of, 165
Dowding, K. M., xii
Drescher, Gary, xiii, 46, 163, 167,
316
Dretske, Fred, 137
driving age, 131
Drosophila (fruitfly), 52
dualism, 23, 100
dues, paying, 197
Dumbo, 13-14, 21
Dumouchel, Paul, 220, 322
Durette, Jennifer, xiii

Epluribus unum, 150
Earth, formed, 3
"Eat that crow!," 179
eater (in Life world), 39, 41-22
not free, 61
economics, 148, 180, 197, 217, 265,
284, 307, 309,
Darwinian, 191
ecumenical hybridism, 101
education, 281, 290, 299, 304
moral, 21, 22
versus indoctrination, 286
effect, 244. See also cause
ego, 211
Cartesian, 285
conscious, 219
egoism, 280

33i

Elbow Room (Dennett), xi, 16, 88, 95,
117, 122n, 132-3, 137, 227, 276,
288, 302
electrons, 31
elevator shaft, man falling down, 88
E l m a n J . , 107
Elster, Jon, 307
emergence, 50
emotion, 213-4, 280
EMPATH, 107
encroachment, 3 9 - 4 1 , 44, 50, 68, 144,
199
end in itself, 195, 201
endoparasite, 164
energy, 144
engineering, 17, 162, 280
genetic, 266
memetic, 303
psychic, 267-8, 278-80
social, 261
software, 248-9
value, 281, 284
environment, 158, 163, 166, 181,
213
conceptual, 10
environmental determinism, 157-60
environmental impact, of ideas, 16
environmental regularities, 172
enzymes, as agents, 55
Epicurean and non-Epicurean indeterminism, 138—9
epilepsy, 184, 240
epistemic horizon, 91
equal rights, 304
equilibrium:
in game theory, 199
of replicative power versus reflective,
267
rolling, 290
social, 292
ESS. See evolutionarily stable strategy
essence, 127
"essential but invisible," 272
essentialism, 66n, 127, 132
Essunger, Paulina, xiii, 17—18, 20
ethical wisdom, 301
ethics, 181, 193, 217, 266-8, 280, 296,
303, 307
of cloning, 297
naturalized, 191
as technology, 261
ethology, 46, 295
eukaryote, 3, 151

332

eukaryotic revolution, 144—6
"everybody does it," 202
evil, 290
desiring for oneself, 195
evitability, 56, 62, 263, 274-5, 300-1
birth of, 56
evolution, xi, 2, 3, 10, 19, 47, 4 9 - 5 1 ,
57, 59, 89-94, 128, 145-6, 163,
166-7, 172-5, 179, 185, 196,
201-4, 213, 217, 248-9, 259-61,
265-8, 271, 287, 303, 305
algorithmic, 3, 15
artificial, 108n
not dependent on indeterminism,
58
simulation of, 49
as trial-and-error, 52
See also natural selection, Darwinian
thinking
evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), 149,
262-4
evolutionarily unenforceable, 152
evolutionary biology, 127, 167
evolutionary electronics, 108n
evolutionary game theory, 148-50, 152,
191, 196-202, 264
evolutionary perspective, 246
evolutionary psychology, 191
evolutionary theory, 217
exceptionalism, 308
exculpation, 130
creeping, 21, 289-92, 301
expectation, 162-3, 171, 212, 277
experiments:
controlled, 86, 93
thought, 63-70, 153
explanation, 91, 217
of competence, 79, 80
of regularity, 81
exponential discount curve, 208-9
extinction, 164, 182, 185
of habits, 175

facultative insects, 198
faculty of practical reason, 103—4, 115,
125, 137, 232-5, 248, 269, 290
Kane's model, 108-22
rudimentary, 163
false friends, 48
fanaticism, 179, 303
FAP (Fixed Action Pattern), 46
fascism of cells, 2

Index

fatalism, 12, 89, 157, 278
fate, 57
father who kills his infant daughter, 6-7,
301
fatigues, 223
fear of science, 5-6, 21
feather, Dumbo's magic, 13—14
feedback, 138, 242n
between cultural and genetic evolution, 181
loops, 104, 247
negative, 262
positive, 184
feelings, moral, 201
fetal alcohol syndrome, 273
fiction, free will as, 222
fire, control of, 173—4
fire brigade, 19
first-person point of view, 254
Fischer, John Martin, 256, 316
fish, free will of, 9 2 - 3
Fisher, Ronald, 86
fitness, 177-8, 188, 191
intracerebral, 212
fixed future versus fixed nature, 90, 93
flasher (in Life world), 37-8, 90
Flick!, 227, 236-7
folk psychology, 222
Font, Enrique, 167, 321
Forbes, Bryan, 131n
forced move, 214, 217
forces, political, not metaphysical,
292
foresight, 55, 265*-6
created by evolution, 53
lacking in evolution, 53
Frank, Robert, 204-6, 213, 215, 217,
220, 278, 280, 307, 316
Frankfurt, Harry, 256, 284-5, 316
Franklin, Benjamin, 193—4
Frayn, Michael, 245, 316
free, responsibility for being, 271
free, the truth as setting one, 22
free lunch, no, 197
free society, 276, 292, 300, 303-4
free spirits, 277
free will, 1, 21, 61, 75, 92, 93, 98, 103,
115, 117, 123, 125, 129, 134, 138,
179, 223, 242, 259, 272, 282,
296
anxiety about, 15, 90, 289, 305
belief in, 12, 13, 14
cannot exist, 221

Index

classic problem of, 9
genuine, 119, 279
as illusion, 11—12, 101
libertarian, 108
like the air we breathe, 10
like democracy, 13
literature on, 23
looks like chance, 132
as mass hallucination, 11
metaphysical, 300
morally significant, 81, 169
as a political problem, 9
problem of, "cure" for, 19
prospects for, 219
freedom, 261, 275, 306-7
of birds, 164, 177, 203
defined, 302
degree of, 162-66
*
evolution of, 25; continuing, 218
excesses of, 304
failures of, 269
human, compared to animal, 143,
305
idea of, 281
from interference, 300
kinds of, 3, 94, 134, 177
maximizing, 291
political, 13, 309
too much, 275-6, 287, 302-4
free-floating rationale, 145, 154, 166,
182, 185, 203-4, 214-5, 249,
260-1, 267, 279
free-for-all, in the brain, 254
freeloader, 146, 197-201
free-thinking, 5
French, Robert, 138, 316
friends, help from, 273, 281
frozen accident, 303
fruit fly, 52-5
functional, not anatomical, layer, 251
fundamentalism, 304
Funt, Allen, 269
future:
brains producing, 240, 247-8
open, 91
will it be like the past, 33, 35, 89,
90

Gallagher, Sean, 242n, 316
game theory, 147-50, 155, 166
evolutionary, 148-50, 152, 191,
196-202, 264

333

gap:
of indeterminism, 116
Libet's 300-msec, 228, 232, 234, 237,
241
much-needed, 103
Garcia, Craig, xiii
gastric bypass surgery, 294
Gawand, Atul, 294, 316
Gazzaniga, Michael, 230, 316
Geiger counter, 132—3
gene(s), 145-6, 153-62, 165, 167,
170-5, 185-6, 191, 260, 264, 266,
273
for appreciating justice, 260
"forx," 184
jumping, 52. See also transposon
parasitic, 146
parliament of genes, 154
pool, 188, 266
regulation, 146
for religion, 184
selfish, 179, 198
gene-centrism, 171
gene's-eye perspective, 150-1
General Motors, 105
Generator Of Diversity, 93
genetic(s), 157, 247
assimilation, 257
and cultural evolution, 219
determinism, 19, 156-62, 166, 183,
186, 275
enhancement of embryos, 297
genetic code, 50
genetic differences, 273
in children, 213
genius, 305
genocentrism, 16
genome, 185
human, 158-9
genomic imprinting, 154
genotype, 171
germ line, 151—3, 178
germs, 161, 304
gestation periods, 138
"getting it right," 165
Gibbard, Allan, 201, 259, 267, 278-80,
294, 302-3, 307, 316
Giorelli, Giulio, 1, 316
glider (in Life world), 39, 41, 46, 50, 90
not free, 61
as photon, 44
speed of, 43
global warming, 4

334

goals, 46, 152
goat paths, 172—3
God, 2, 203, 302, 306
belief in, 136
gift from, 214
hacker, 44-9, 92
playing, 41
Godfather, 204
"God's eye" perspective, 93
GodstufF, 1
GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned AI), 106
Goffinan, Erving, 277, 288, 317
Gog, belief in, 136
"going to happen," 59, 80
Gois, Isabel, xii
gold, 68-9
Goldberg, Sanford, 192, 321
Golden Rule, 266
Goldschmidt, T., 181, 317
, golf cart handle trick, 269
good-natured, chimps as, 201
Good Trick, 183, 202, 264
Gopnik, Adam, 186, 317
gorilla, 304
Gould, Stephen Jay, 156-7, 317
government, systems of, 266
gradualism, 273, 288
Grafen, A., 154, 317
grammatical complexity, evolution of,
174
gratification, delayed, 213
gravity, 9, 13, 6 0 - 1 , 106, 171-2
Gray, Russell, 192, 317
Greenough, W. X, 274, 317
Gregorian creature, 266
Grey Walter, W, 240-1
Griffiths, Paul, 198, 219, 323
grit:
artificial, 276
true, 275-6
Gross, Bernard, xii
groups, 202
like individuals, 193
welfare of, 197
group benefit, 184
group selection, 261
groupishness, 191
growing up, 21
growing into your attributions, 276—7
guided missiles, humans as, 155
guilt 279, 291,
feelings of, 213

Index

habits, 261
good versus bad, 163
hackers, in Life world, 40-1
as Gods, 44-9, 92
Haig, David, 154, 317
hallucination, mass, 11
Hamilton, William, 198, 252, 317
Hamlet's problem, 109
hand calculator, 111
Handicap Principle, 220
happening, versus doing, 26, 41—2, 45,
52, 58, 306
Hardin, G., 150, 317
hardware, 107
hardwired, humans as, 224
Harris, Judith, 288, 317
Harris, P., 288, 311
Hart, H.L.A., 74n, 317
Haugeland, John, 106, 219, 317
Hauser, Marc, xiii
Heat Death of the universe, 30
help from one's friends, 273, 281
hermit crab, 185
heteronomy, 281
heterozygote superiority, 195n
hidden agenda, in free will issue, xi, xii,
15
hide-and-seek, 164-5
Hippocratic Oath, 17
historicity, 40
HIV, 17-18
Hofstadter, Douglas, 49, 198, 317
Holmes, Bob, 231, 317
home improvement, 247
homeostasis, 5(/, 184
hominid, 173-4
Homo sapiens, 173, 188, 191, 196, 302
homunculus, 123, 211, 232, 238, 242
Honderich, Ted, 89-90, 318
honor, 169
Honore, A. M., 74n, 77, 317-8
Hooper, L. V, 2 , 3 1 8
horizontal and vertical transmission,
145, 146, 172, 178
Horowitz, T. S., 239, 324
host, 178n
benefit to, 177
human, 178
human being, as trillion-robot team,
2-3,5
"humanities," 66
Hume, David, 33, 35, 243, 2 6 0 - 1 , 288,
318

Index

Hume's Guillotine, 265
Humphrey, Nicholas, xii, 251
hunter-gatherer, 183
Huntington's disease, 157
hyperbolic discount rate, 208—12
hypertension, 184

I, the previous, 8
ice, 'white man's, 278, 284
ideals, democratic, 304
identification predicates, 66
identity across possible worlds, 35n
ideology, 266
false, 225
ideomotor automaticity, 246—7
"If you make yourself really small . . . ,"
122, 135, 159, 180, 238, 242, 252,
292, 298, 302
illusion, 210, 242, 245
benign, 224
freedom not an, 305
veridical, 224
will as, 224
imagination, 179, 267
imitation, 173
immune system, 247
cells of, as mercenaries, 151
imperious versus diffident systems of
norms, 279-80
imprinting, 170-1
of brain, 15
impulse-control, 291
inanimate physics, 26
incompatibilism, 94, 102, 292
argument for, 134—6
defined, 97
incompetence, 108
independence, 43
of cause and effect, 72
indeterminacy, 103, 113-4. See also
indeterminism
indeterminism, 8-9, 25-8, 3 4 - 5 , 58-60,
65, 83, 86, 9 2 - 5 , 98, 105, 108,
112, 123-6, 132, 134, 136, 198,
296, 306
indifference, 207
individualism, 193
individual-level selection, 261
individuals, 155, 162, 193
indoctrination versus education, 286
inert historical facts, 68, 69,174, 283
role in digitization, 77

335

inevitability, 22, 43, 51, 54, 56-62, 7 1 ,
88, 156, 158, 206, 274, 299, 305
of anger, 278
in game theoretical models, 200
as meaning unavoidable, 56
not implied by determinism, 25
infantalizing, 270
inference to the best explanation, 244
infinite regress, 272, 281
informal predicate, 65-7
information, 42, 46, 54, 62, 93, 145,
156, 161-4, 176, 200-1
costs of, 44, 58
extraction of, takes time, 238
memes as made of, 176
perfect, game of, 91
required for a free choice, 155
role in avoidance, 44
spoon-feeding, 270
transmitted by genes, 171—2
visual, 238
information-gathering, 44
information-handling, 46—7
information superhighway, cultural
transmission as, 173
informavore, 93
informed consent, 270
inoculation:
cultural, 304
mandated, 301
instinct, 185, 186, 247, 261, 266, 270,
280
overruling, 210
insulin, 225
insurance, malpractice, for academics,
16-17
intelligence, role in selection, 265
Intelligent Design, 128n
intentional action, 219, 241, 246
intentional stance, 45-6, 81, 151, 154,
160-2, 166-7,
defined, 45
Intentional Stance, The (Dennett), 192
intentional system, 45, 160-1, 180,
251
all the way down, 55
ballistic, 152
defined, 45
intentionality, 65
interests, 210
competing, 219
Internet, 199
intertemporal bargaining, 207—10

Index

336

intervention, 86
intragenomic conflict, 146, 200
"intrinsic" goodness, 261
introspection, 246
intuition pumps, 218
Inuit, 160
invertebrates, as robots or zombies, 247
involuntary reaction, blinks as, 58
I Q , 19
I R M (Innate Releasing Mechanism),
46
irrationality, 214

i

Jablonka, E., 172, 192,311
Jackendoff, Ray, 250
Jackson, Gabriella, xiii
Jacob, Francois, 151
James, William, 8-9, 118-9, 23-4, 318
jellyfish, 143
' Jensen, A., 239, 318
Jesuits, 158, 286
Jesus, 202, 265
Johnson, Anne J., xiii
joke, getting a, 137
"Jones, the inventor of thoughts," 250
Jordan, F. M., 192, 317
Julius Caesar, 68
jumping gene, 52
Jurgensen, Sarah, xiii
Just So Story, 202, 248, 250n, 263
justice, 261, 263, 266
evolution of, 263
miscarriages of, 299
justification, 260

Kamin, Leon, 19, 319
Kane, xii, 99-139, 211, 251, 256, 272,
281, 287, 302, 307-8, 318
Kant, Immanuel, 101, 190, 213, 217,
269-70, 280, 286, 318
Kass, Leon, 16, 318
Katz, Leonard, 219, 318
Keillor, Garrison, 284
Keller, Evelyn Fox, xii
Kelly, Erin, xiii
Kennedy, John E, 63
assassination of, 84
kin selection, 198
Kinsbourne, Marcel, 256
Kitcher, Philip, 307
knobs, turn all the, 282

knowers:
humans as, 2-5
long-distance, 3
knowledge, 22, 296, 308
burden of, 301
groups as repositories of, 202
human, 166
loss of, 182
role of in planning, 88
of self, 5
Kornhuber, H. H., 227, 318
Koslicki, Kathrin, xiii
Kozyra, Tomas, xiii
Kripke, Saul, 66n, 319

Lake Wobegon, 284
Lamarckian fallacy, 178
lancet fluke (Dkrocelium dendriticum),
175-7, 184, 188, 192
landmarks, in the brain, 247
landscape:
adaptive, 267
decision, 133-4
language, 143, 173, 176, 202, 218,
2 5 0 - 1 , 254, 260, 305
evolution of, 174-5, 192
Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 28, 77. 319
Laplacean snapshot, 28-9
Laplace's demon, 2 8 - 9 , 34, 69, 91, 153
laptop, 48n
Latta, Marcy, xiii
laughter, 174
law of gravity, 9, 1-3
law of nature, §6, 134
law of physics, 9, 29, 32, 34, 42, 65, 68,
84, 171
law school riddle, 74
learning, 110, 200
algorithms, 92
in evolutionary time, 204
and instinct, 256
investing in, 163—4
"learning" by lineages over
evolutionary time, 150n
social, 172
Leigh, E. G., 154, 319
level of analysis, 79
Levin, Ira, 13In
levitation, moral, 101-2, 179, 290
Levy, Frank, xii
Lewis, David, 69, 72, 82, 319
Lewontin, Richard, 19, 319

Index

libel, laws of, 16
liberation, paradox of, 288
libertarianism, 97-9, 100, 118, 123-4,
129, 132, 134-8, 179, 290
political, 98
liberty of indifference, 125
Libet, Benjamin, 219, 228-42, 245,
252, 256, 319
Library of Babel, 3 1 , 3 3 , 88
Library of Conway, 42
Library of Democritus, 3 1 - 3 , 42, 64,
67
Library of Mendel, 31
life:
origin of, 3, 144, 218
worth living, 10—11
Life (Conway's Game of), 36-52, 56,
58, 65-8, 9 0 - 1 , 94, 1/57, 200
hackers, 40
~"
website, 40
life-hopes, 89
light, speed of, 10, 32, 43-4, 5 2 - 3 ,
132
lightning bolts, avoiding, 60
literacy, 177
living, ways of making a, 144
locomotion, 162, 164
logic, 67, 265
modal, 64
logical possibility, 67
London School of Economics, xii
Long, Ryan, xiii
long-distance perception, 53
loop, out of the, 229, 242
lottery, 132-3, 153
Lotus 1-2-3, 46
love, 213, 278, 305
falling in, 223
romantic, 222—5
Love, Gabriel, xiii
luck, 7, 88, 90, 158, 205, 268, 271, 273,
301-2
lucky lineages, 52
Luddism, 304
Luther, Martin, 117, 128-9, 135, 216,
231, 238
Lyme disease, 181

MacKay, D. M., 9In, 319
MacKenzie, Robert, 47, 319
macroscopic patterns, 80
Mafia, 204-5

337

magic, 176, 181
moments, 272
stage, 243-4, 270
maize, 161
malaria, 195n
malignancy, cultural, 182
malpractice insurance for academics,
16-17
Mameli, Matteo, xii, 192, 320
mammal(s), 126-8, 136, 138, 295
Prime, 126-128, 136, 217, 272
Mantykoski, Janne, xii
marathon, 276
margarine, not real butter, 225
Marshall, Durwood, xiii
Martian music critic, 189-90
Marx, Karl, 170, 320
materialism, 15, 23, 226, 305
mathematical compressibility, 78
mating, assortative, 155
Maxwell, Nicholas, xii, 302, 320
Maynard Smith, John, xii, 149, 166-7,
170, 320
mazabethi, 181-2
McDonald, J. E, 147,320
McFarland, David, 248, 320
McGeer, Victoria, 288, 320
McLaughlin, J. A., 74n, 320
medicalization of society, 292
medium, 188
meme's independence of, 176
MEG scanning, 240n
meiosis, 153
meiotic drive, 154
Mele, Alfred, 281, 283, 307, 320
meme(s), 175-8, 186-8, 191-2, 261-6,
303
analogous to gene, 176
machine, 179
made me do it, 186
meme's-eye perspective, 179
tonic and toxic, 304
versus reasons, 187
memetic selection, four levels of,
266
memetics, proper science of, 178—9,
187
memory, 254
Men in Black, 232
Mencken, H. L., 202
Meno, 195
"mental" causation, 246
merit badges, 213

338

metabolism, 100
metaphysical curiosity, 94
metaphysical facts, 10
metaphysical truth, 13
metaphysics, 110, 131, 160, 292, 297
versus diplomacy, 223
Metcalfe, J., 220, 320
methodical selection, 265
military-industrial complex, 147
Milton, Katherine, 182
mind, 1, 9, 169, 219
as brain, xi, xii,
games, 271
human, 142-3
as a transformer, 250—51
as transparent, 246
where the buck stops, 99
mind-reader versus mind-writer, 243
miracle(s), 101, 166, 201, 217, 272,
305-6
free will as, 100
miraculous intervention by hacker
God, 44
phony, 54
Mischel, W, 220, 320
miscreant, culpable, 290, 298
misinformation, 283-4
mistake (s), 170
misunderstanding, effects of, 17
mitochondria, 145, 167
mitosis, 153
moat, dug too far out, result of, 101
modal logic, 64
model(s):
abstractness of, 200
game theory, 197-9
money, 183, 305
monkey(s), 202
culture in, 172
training, 250
Moore, G. E., 76, 77, 320
Moore, Wayne, 309, 320
moral action, 224
moral agency, 191
moral animal, 201
moral education, 21, 22, 276, 284,
286
moral feelings, 201
moral levitation, 101-2, 179, 290
moral philosophy, 213
moral reasons, 160
moral responsibility, 226
moral sentiments, 214

Index

moral void, 300 millisecond, 226,
229
morality, 204, 218, 259-60, 264, 268,
279-80, 307
elusiveness of, 213
evolution of, 188-91, 265
neutrality of theory of evolution of,
190
pill, 260, 284, 288
ultra-rational, 280
Morewedge, Carey, xiii
Mother Nature, 53, 58, 137, 171, 206,
248, 255, 260, 271, 280
what she intends, 185
motion-in-depth, 58-9
motivation, 285
motives, natural, 260, 267
Mount Improbable, 267
Moya, Andres, 167, 321
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 189
Mulder, Brett, xiii
mule, 195—6
Muller, Cathy, xiii
Miiller-Lyer illusion, 210
multicellularity, 143-7, 150-51, 153,
166-7, 172, 305
evolution of, 3
multitasking, by the brain, 239
murderers, of varying backgrounds,
130
music, 174, 177, 189-90, 305
genetic predisposition for, 188-9
Muslim, 294
mutation, 49-50,-52, 144, 153, 171,
177, 188,^00
mutualism, 152, 177
myopia, 156, 184, 275
of evolution, 197
as natural, 185
mysterian doctrines of consciousness,
21
mystery, 290
of mind, 271
myth, 203, 284
fragile, 290
of the metals (Plato), 271
metaphysical, 297
vulnerability to, 202

Nannini, Sandro, xii
narrow method of choosing a set of possible worlds, 75—6, 82

Index

natural motives, 261
natural selection, 47-53, 128n, 143,
166, 171-2, 177, 188, 190-1, 198,
247, 2 6 0 - 1 , 265, 305. See also evolution
naturalism, 15, 20-2, 103, 121, 137,
218, 226, 259, 268, 306, 308
as enemy of free will, 16
naturalness, 185
nature:
fixed versus fixed future, 90
fixed versus open, 9 1 , 93
or nurture, 158-9, 292
work with, 289
See also Mother Nature
"nature red in tooth and claw," 193
necessity, 26, 64—7, 95
causal, 7 1 - 3 , 84, 87-8 /
defined, 66
—
Need to Know Principle, 4n
nefarious neurosurgeons, 243, 256
neighborhood, 199
neo-Darwinism, 15, 146. See also Darwinian thinking, Darwinism
nervous system, of the planet, 4-5
Nesse, Randolph, 220, 21
NETTalk, 107
networks:
neural, 104-7, 139, 226
of switches, 162-3
neurons, 132
connections between, 158-9
neuroscience, 15, 103, 224, 226, 229,
250
neurosis, 102
Newtonian physics, 137
Nicod,Jean, Lectures, 23
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 203, 265
nihilism, 97
nihilistic universes, 35
noblesse oblige, 308
noise, 50, 158
role in creativity, 108n
role in evolution, 49—50
non-linearity, 104, 106, 138
non-material ego, 100
non-obliviousness, 250
non-occurrent cause, 100
non-zero-sum games, 166
norm(s), 173, 219, 259, 263-6, 263-4,
266, 279-80, 294, 303
nose, purple, 295
noumenal self, 100

339

Now! button, 119-22
Nozick, Robert, 309, 321
nudist fallacy, 185
Number One, looking out for, 152,
180, 214

objet trouve, quantum event as an, 123
obliviousness, 282—3. See also unwitting
agency
offer, coercive, 180, 204
offspring of natural motives, 261
old dog(s), new tricks and, 90, 200, 293,
295
Olson, D.R.E., 288, 311
ontology, 40, 70, 73
open future, 90, 93
open-mindedness, 180, 282, 284
opinions, 186
Oppenheim, Paul, xiii, 127
opponent process, 211
in the brain, 124, 129
opportunism, 216
of Mother Nature, 206
opportunity, 8, 12, 57, 61, 81, 36,
151-3, 155, 162, 166, 215, 268-9,
277, 295-6, 302
bare, 155, 164
design, 40, 41
real, 216-7
window of, 118, 236
oppression, political, 102
optimality, 180
options, 144
in a deterministic world, 25
original position, Rawls's, 153
original sin, evolutionary, 202
ostriches, 66
Oswald, Lee Harvey, 63, 84
Otto, Conrad's cousin, 57n
"ought":
deriving from "is," 303
implies "can," 296, 299
Ouija board, 243
Out-of-touch You, 234
outhouse, farmer in the, 207
overdetermination, 72—3

P element, 52
Pagels, Mark, 192, 315
pain, as real, 223
Palmquist, Rachel, 221, 224, 226, 229

340

Panare Indians, 182
Pandora's box, 21
parallel processing, 53, 164, 222, 226
or plural rationality, 124, 125
parasite(s), 146, 152, 162, 175, 177,
178n, 184
domesticated animals as, 164
parasitic genes, 51
parochiality over the widest parish,
303
passion, 213, 280
paternalism, 270
pattern(s), 41, 79, 85, 9 0 - 1 , 93, 142,
154, 163, 189, 198, 268, 289,
291
higher-level, 162
of predictive saliency, 89
social, 278
in universes, 32
patternlessness:
apparent, 78
as randomness, 83
Peace Corps, 1—2
peace dividend, 147
Peanuts, 255
pearl, 183
Pearl, Judea, 85-6, 95, 321
pedophile, 293-4, 299, 301
Penrose, Roger, 105—6, 321
Pereboom, Derk, 226n, 288, 321
perjury, 205n
perpetual motion machine, 196, 218
person, 166, 173, 253
concept of, 285
evolution of, 218
with feathers, 66
personal level, 204
personhood:
criterion of, 285
first threshold to, 273
quest for, 276
perspective, 180
neutral, of memetics, 177
Pessin, Andrew, 192, 321
Pettit, Philip, 309, 321
phenomenology of decisionmaking, 242
phenotype, 171, 184, 187
phenotypic effects, 186
phenylketonuria, 156
Phillips, Emo, 12
philosopher-king, 211

Index

philosophers:
attitudes and methods of, 15, 45,
63-4, 7 0 - 1 , 82, 84, 98, 101, 118,
125-7, 171, 213, 216-7, 243, 256,
282, 294, 306-8
changing their minds, 40
example, Star Wars as, 54
puzzles of, 11
philosophical argumentation, 26
philosophy, 148
intro class, 195
moral, 213
photon, 44, 59
photosynthesis, 100
physical level, 3 9 - 4 1 , 65
physical stance, 151
physically possible worlds, 67, 84
physics, 197-8, 296
of Life worlds, unchanging, 90
Newtonian, 105
Pinker, Steven, 2 0 - 1 , 321
pixel, 29, 35, 39-40, 45-6, 49, 68, 90
Plato, 65, 217, 266, 271
Platonic Form, 303
plural rationality, 124, 138
point, 267
does life have any, 7—8
things with a, 260
political policy, 130
political theory, 271
politicians, 280
politics, 181, 295, 299-300
polymorphic traps, 262-3, 265
Popper, Karl, 91n,-248, 321
Popperian creatures, 167, 248, 266
population genetics, 187—8
Porter, Valeria, xii
possibility, 26, 61-2, 81, 95, 143, 267
in the chess-playing-program world,
80
defined, 67
in deterministic worlds, 82, 83
everyday concepts of, 64, 77, 94
logical, 64, 144
multi-dimensional space of, 162
narrow, 296, 300
physical, 65
"real," 82
possibility-at-an-instant, 118—121
possible, art of the, 280
possible Life worlds, 45
possible lineages, 53

Index

possible worlds, 35n, 63—7, 70, 75-6,
86, 268
Postema, Gerald, xii
postmodernism, 5
Poundstone, William, 39, 48-9, 321
power bargaining, 211
"power of positive thinking," 13—14
practical reason, faculty of, 103-5, 115,
125, 137, 232-5, 248, 269, 290
Kane's model, 108-22
rudimentary, 163
pragmatic contradiction, 256
prairie dog, 268
praise and blame, 8, 12
precognition, as impossible, 53
predicates, identification, 66
predictability, 106
f
prediction, 33-4, 163
limits on our ability of, 34
Prentky, R. A., 293, 321
presuming, 277
presupposition by genes, 171-2
prevention, 54, 6 0 - 1 , 71
primates, 165
Prime Mammal, 126-8, 136, 217,
272
prime mover, 100
Prisoner's Dilemma, 147-8, 155, 180,
197, 204, 215-6
private ruminator, 280
privileged access, 243—4
probability, 4 3 - 5 , 91, 300
problem-solving, evolution as, 52—3
producing future, 240, 247-8
prokaryote, 3, 144-6, 151, 200
promise(s):
making and breaking, 169
in The Prisoner's Dilemma, 147—8
propaganda, 281
prophecy, gift of, 184
prostheses, 299
of reason, 270-1
rules as, 266
of the will, 125
proteins, 143, 176, 188
doing their thing, 55
proto-freedom, 143
Provine, Will, xiii
proximate mechanism, 188
prudence, 194, 201, 206, 208, 279
pseudo-altruism, 196, 217
pseudo-avoider, 58

34i

pseudo-random numbers, 78, 95
generator of, 83, 110, 131-2, 139
pseudo-randomness, 159, 272
psychological forcing, 243
psychologists:
academic, 252
natural, 251
psychology, 250, 269, 279, 295, 307
evolutionary, 261
psychopath, 308
rational, 298
punishment, 169, 200-2, 218-9, 271,
292, 298, 301, 308
acquiescence in, 297-9
in afterlife, 203
cruel and unusual, 293
or treatment, 290
purposes, 152
putt, Austin's, 75-6, 94, 129, 307
Pynchon, Thomas, 26, 321
pyramid scheme, 183
Pythagorean theorem, 10

quantum events, 72
quantum indeterminacy (or indeterminism), 121-2, 127, 131-2, 158, 272,
290, 295
quantum leap, 123
quantum physics, 8, 26, 86, 98, 105,
179, 298
quantum randomness, 110
quasi-altruism, 196, 217
questions, asking, 165
quietness of virtual worlds, 49, 50
Quine, WV.O., 29, 31, 35, 6 4 - 5 , 321
Quinsey, Vernon L., 293, 308, 321

R & D (research and development), 42,
47, 146-7, 150n, 154-5, 164, 172,
174, 187, 249, 259, 261, 267, 277
race, 19
racism, 160, 190, 278
Raffman, Diana, 138, 322
Raine, A., 158, 322
raison d'etre, 182, 261
Ramachandran, Vilayanur, 230, 322
random numbers:
generator of, 78-80, 82, 112-3, 133
sources of, 83n
random pairing, 263

342

i

\

random search, as faster, 239
random swerve, 138, 306
random variation, 109
randomized experiment, 86
randomizer, 132
randomness, 32, 78, 113—4
as Nature rolling dice, 34
not creeping, 133
sources of, 133
versus pseudo-randomness, 153
See also pseudo-randomness
rational animals, 259
rational and deterrable, moral agents as,
271-2
rational fool, 217
rational planning, 88
rational psychopath, 298
rational saint, 217
rational self-interest, 180
rational will, 103
rationale(s), free-floating, 145, 154, 166,
182, 185, 203-4, 214-5, 249,
260-1, 267, 279
rationalism, 216
rationality, 45, 151, 203, 205, 207, 210,
255, 271, 284, 287, 297
of defection, 202-3
ideal of, 270
imperfect, 269
myopic, 204
plural, 124
rats, environmentally deprived, 274
Ravizza, Mark, 256, 316
R a w l s j o h n , 153,322
readiness potential (RP), 227-8, 231, 240
reading machinery, 170-1
Reagan, Ronald, 54
real avoidance, 58
real beliefs and pains, 223
real butter, not margarine, 225
real choice, 80
real decision-making, 103
real free will, 225
real options, 102
realism, increasing, 196
reason, 268, 273, 281
cold water of, 19
cool, 213
pure, 281
respect for, 286
reasoning, 264, 285
strange inversion of, 47-8, 143, 307,
309

Index

reasons, 181, 201, 254, 294
asking and giving, 251, 261, 273,
277, 286
competing, 124
do-it-yourself, 124
giving the victim, 243
of hacker Gods, 45
ours and Mother Nature's, 137, 255,
260
space of, 269
versus memes, 187
recidivism, 293, 300, 308
recipe, 176
of genes, 170—1
reciprocated behavior, 199
recognition:
by evolution, 52
mutual, 155, 169, 173
recurrent neural networks, 139
recursive loop, 211—12
red queen effect, 184
reductio ad absurdum argument, 8
reductionism, 16, 19, 100
Reeve, Sebastian S., xiii
reflection, 203, 261, 267, 277-8, 285-6,
308
capacity for, 165
role in unpredictability, 211—12
reflex, 238
"hard-wired," 59
refutation by caricature, 19
regress, infinite, 127, 281
regret, 11—12
Reid, Peter, xiiT
reinventing die wheel, 145
religion, 5, 21, 98, 174, 181, 183-5,
192
gene for, 184
religiosity, 184
Rembrandt, 69
reminding, 252
Rendell, Paul, 62
replication, 173
of D N A , 143
replicator, 177, 304
cultural, 175
reproduction, self-, 48—9
reproduction, sexual, 145
reptiles, 126
reputation, importance of, 204-5, 214,
218, 271
res cogitans, 187, 254, 285
resentment, 261

Index

responsibility, 11-12, 34, 131, 158, 224,
226, 238, 243, 268, 270, 272, 279,
281, 291-2, 295-9, 301-2
apparent, 130
degree of, 129, 130
distribution of, 259
for effects of what we say, 17—8
mine, for trajectories I initiate,
118
moral, 99, 242, 253, 255, 271, 297;
constraints of, 98
robust, 113
taking, 259, 287, 292
threshold of, 274
Ultimate, 99, 117, 121-2, 126, 129,
131, 135
retribution, 279
retrovirus, 260
/
revaluation of values, 268~
reverse-engineering the soul, 203
reward, Ainslie's definition of, 212
"rewind the tape," 38
rhetorical question, 8, 124, 218
Richerson, Peter, 201, 312
Ridley, Mark, 192, 322
Ridley, Matt, 52, 87n, 137, 157,
322
right, religious, 19
right(s), 304
to strike the first blow, 300-301
rigid designation, 66n
rising to the occasion, 277
risk, 154, 205n, 248, 3 0 0 - 1 , 307
risky aggression, 202
Ritalin (methylphenidate), 275, 287
robot(s), 131, 138, 247
conscious, 248
robotic cells, 2 - 3 , 22, 205
robotic non-aggression, 201
Roman Catholic, 285-6
Rose, Steven, 19, 319
Rosenberg, Alexander, 307
Rosenberg, Daniel, xiii
Rosier, A., 293, 322
Ross, Amber, xiii
Ross, Don, xiii, 220, 263-5, 287, 307,
322
rules:
symbol-manipulating, 107
of transition in universes, 32—5
Rusedski, Greg, 238
Ryle, Gilbert, 9In, 322
Rylean ancestors, 250n

343

Saaristo, Antti, xii
saddle, in decision landscape, 133-4
saint, rational, 217
Sallust, 203
salmon, imagination of, 179
Salvato, Teresa, xiii
Samuel, George A., xiii
sanctions, 200—1
Sanford, D., 126, 322
Sanger, Derek, xiii
Sartre, Jean Paul, 255, 322
Sawyer, Tom, and the white-washed
fence, xiii
scaffolding, 276, 288
environmental, 273
religion as, 203
scapegoat, 272, 290, 292
scare-quotes, 48
schizophrenia, 253
Schwayder, Mark, xiii
science, 1, 5-6, 15, 21
commitment to reason of, 6
misreading of, 11
scientific ideas, 181
search procedure, exhaustive, 161
Second Law of Thermodynamics, 197
Sehon, Scott, xiii
selection pressure, 206, 265
selectional pruning, 172
self, 219, 245, 249, 253, 255, 259-60,
273, 275, 278, 281, 287, 302, 306
better, 277
Cartesian, 253, 254
demythologized, 275
as a fragile coalition, 252
must have parts, 123
presentation of, 277
as press secretary, 244—5
as public relations person, 252
punctate, 122n
retreat of, 123
size of, 180
spread in space and time, 136
self-consciousness, 2, 211
self-contained you, 237—8
self-control, 206-7, 211-4, 218, 220,
253, 273, 281, 284, 292-3, 297,
299
self-creation, 272
self-deception, 169, 212
self-description, 255
self-forming action (SFA), 117, 118,
121, 125, 127-32, 251, 272, 302

344

self-improvement, 92, 276
self-interest, 194, 204, 216, 264, 279
selfish DNA, 52
selfish genes, 179, 198
selfish policy, 200
selfish replicators, 179
selfishness, 150, 153-4, 206
myopic, 218
See also benselfishness
self-knowledge, 5, 206, 290
selflessness, 180
self-made man, 6
self-making, 281, 288
self-manipulation, 218, 220, 247, 284
self-monitoring, 247—8
self-prediction, 211—12
self-reproduction, 50—1
by Turing machine, 48
self-sacrifice, 194, 198
Sellars, Wilfrid, 250n, 322
Sen, Amartya, 309, 322
sentiments, moral, 214
serendipity, 50, 194, 303
in creation, 49
sexual selection, runaway, 184
SFA (self-forming action), 117, 118,
121, 125, 127-32, 251, 272, 302
Shakespeare, William, 274
shaman, 184
Shandy, Tristram, 9 I n
sharpshooter, 72
Shaverdashvili, Shorena, xiii
shivering, 184
sickle cell anemia, 195n
Siegel, Sheldon, xii
Sifferd, Katrina, xii
sighted selfmaker, 277
signal, costly, 205, 215
signals, emotions as strategic, 220
Silver, Andrew, xiii
Silver, Mitch, xiii
similarity, of possible worlds, 70
simplification, 43
simultaneity judgment, 232—5, 238,
241-2
situation-action machine, 46, 163, 167,
200, 238, 247-8
Skinnerian creature, 167
skyhook, 53, 196, 201, 217, 303
Cartesian, 187
Skyrms, Brian, 153, 155, 166, 199, 219,
262-3, 287, 307, 322

Index

slander, laws of, 16
Sleeper, Naomi, xiii
Slote, Michael, 288, 323
slow-drying ink, 236, 241
Smith, Eric Alden, 192, 312
Smollett, Sara, xiii
snap decisions, 137
sneezing, 184
Snoopy, 255
Sober, Elliott, xiii, 175n, 188, 190,
192-5, 219, 307, 323
social conditions, 191, 201
for free will, 180-1
social environment, 214
social insect(s), 183, 198, 202
social pressure, 277
sociality, 169
sociobiology, 191
Socrates, 66-7, 195, 290
software, 108n
somatic line cells, 151-5, 178n, 205
somersaults, 183
soul(s), 1-2, 203, 219, 221, 223, 238,
285, 289-90, 305-6
eyeglasses for the, 261
just died, 15
Soviet Union, 292, 304
spatiality, introduction of in game theory, 199
speciation event, 128
specs, 108, 135
setting the, 98-9
speed, 163
of generation,JS2
of light, 10y32, 43-4, 5 2 - 3 , 132
speed limit, 53
of evolution, 53
spell, breaking the, 14
Sperber, Dan, 192, 323
sphexishness, 198
spider, 170
spirituality, 225
spontaneity, 212
spontaneous intrusions, 49
spores, 43
Star Wars, 54
state description, 29-30, 64, 69, 83-4
Stepford Wife, 131, 152
Sterelny, Kim, 198, 219, 307, 323
sterility, gene for, 195
Sterne, Laurence, 95
Stich, Stephen, 256, 323

Index

still life (in Life), 38, 90
stochastic decision-making process,
138
Stop that crow!, 14, 19, 21, 136, 157,
178, 182, 184, 275, 277, 284
straightedge, 303, 309
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 54
strategies of self-distraction, 213
Strawson, P. E, 16
striving will, 103, 117,211
Strolling You, 234
Stuart, Matthew, xiii
stupidity, of evolution, 193
subatomic physics, 55
Suber, Peter, xiii, 271, 288, 323
subjective and objective series, registration of, 228
subjectively open future, 91
subjectivity, 65-6
sub-normal people, 169
substrate neutrality, 188—9
sucker, in game theory, 148
sufficiency causal, 71—3, 83, 87—8
sugar, 183
suicide, assisted, 296
Sukuma basket, 181-2
summum bonum, 152, 179-80
Superman, 67
supernatural, 223
surgery, in Pearl's sense, 86
swampman, 288
sweet tooth, 183
switch, 162
symbiont, cultural, 173
symbiosis, 2, 144-5, 147, 151-2, 167,
261
sympathy, 280
Symphony Hall, 141, 155, 166, 180
symphony orchestra, the brain as,
222
Szathmary, Eors, 167, 320

Tabletalk, 138
taboo, 182
Tager-Flusberg, H., 288, 312
taking sides, 285—6
talent, 205
tape, rewinding, 38
tapeworm, 164
Taylor, Christopher, xii, 64, 95, 323
Taylor, Jackie, xiii

345

technology, 296, 299
chimpanzee, 173
of persuasion, 270
Teflon, 147
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 20
templates of imagination, 42
temporal priority of causes, 72, 73
temptation, 203-7, 214, 218, 292, 301
Ten Commandments, 266
tennis:
serve speed, 238
tournament, 188
Tetris, 46
"thanks, I needed that," 297, 301
therapsids, 126-7
thinkers, memes not, 176
thinking with memes, 186—8
Third World, 160
Thompson, Adrian, 108n, 323
thought experiment(s), 153, 190, 218,
282, 288
thoughts, 244
time, 206, 210, 227, 238, 242, 245, 282,
286
distance in, 207—8
the fourth dimension, 30
scale, differences in evolution, 183
time-stamp system, 233, 235
time t, 118-21, 134, 206, 228, 241, 246,
296
Tinkertoy 27
tool(s), 174, 191
meme as, 186
for thinking, 25, 266
or toy, philosophical, 178
toy(s):
kind of freedom, 94
model, 26, 62; of determinism, 22
versus tools, 26
world, 81, 138
tradition, 172
animal, 192
gets a free ride, 306
tragedy of the commons, 149—50
transempirical power center, 100
transition rules, 65
translation, 176
transposon, 51, 146
trees:
decisions of, 162
defection by, 152
trial and error, 52, 156, 266—7

Index

346

trial by jury, 202
Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 95
tropism, 198
Truman, Harry, 99
truth:
discovery of, 303
methods of seeking, 165
as potentially hurtful, 17
responsibility for likely misunderstandings of, 17
as setting one free, 22
Tufts University, xii
Turing, Alan, 51, 9In, 323
Turing computability, 107
Turing Machine:
simple, in Life world, 62
Universal, in Life world, 46, 48,
5 0 - 1 , 59, 62, 91
turning the knobs of intuition pumps,
218
twin, psychological, 282—3
Twin Earth, 171, 192
Two Black Boxes, 95
typing, 241

U F O (unidentified flying object), 221
ultimate beneficiary, 180, 184
Ultimate Responsibility, 99, 117, 121-2,
126, 129, 131, 135
Ulysses and the Sirens, 206, 210-11
uncertainty, 4 2 - 3
unconscious actions, ghost army of,
246
unconscious decision(s), 239
unconscious manipulation, 281
unconscious mechanisms, 244
unconscious motives, 285
unconscious presentation of self, 277
unconscious selection, 161, 265
understanding, 137-8, 250
Universal Turing Machine, 48, 5 0 - 1 ,
59, 62, 91
in Life world, 46
universality, 302-3
unpredictability, of human choice, 211
unwitting agency:
in animals, 165, 248
in humans, 203, 260-1
in Life world creations, 44
in memes, 176
unwitting beneficiaries, 44, 203
"up to me," 92-3, 120-3, 134-6

USA, 2
U S . Army, 7
"use it or lose it," 163—4
user interface, 249, 259
user-illusion, 249
USSR, 2
utility theory, 210

vagueness, 65, 66, 138
value, 163, 201, 302
yours versus your cells', 2 - 3
value judgments, 274
Van Inwagen, Peter, 25, 118, 323
Vanegas, Rodrigo, xiii
Vanishing sets, 31-2, 34, 42, 144
Vast sets, 31-4, 42, 50, 62, 64, 69, 88
144, 216
vector, human agent as, 177-8
Veil of Ignorance, Darwinian, 153-4
Velleman, David, 137, 285-6, 323
Venezuela, 182
vertical and horizontal transmission,
145-6, 170
veto, 229-30, 236-7, 241
Vietnam War, 1
Villa Serbelloni, xii,
virtual machine, 108, 251
virtual worlds, quietness of, 49-50
virtue, 191, 217
artifical, 261, 288
virus, 176
viscosity, 199
vision center, 232^5
Volkmar, F. R . / 2 7 4 , 317
voluntary action, 245, 250-1
von Neuman, John, 48
voting, 154
"voting" by differential reproduction,
152-3
voxel, 29, 31-2, 35n, 70

Waddington, C. H., 256-7
Wagensberg, Jorge, 36, 42, 5 1 , 323
wager, 35
Wakeman, Nick, xiii
Walker, Jason, xiii
wall, as a design element, 43
Wall Street, causal explanation of, 85
war, 174
warden, prison, rule of thumb of, 160—1
wasp, digger, 174, 198

Index

watchmaker, blind, 48, 53
Watson, James, 16, 20
weakness of will, 109
weapons, evolution of, and punishment,
219
Weber, Bruce, 257, 323
weeping, 174
Wegner, Daniel, xii, 23, 224-5, 240n,
242-6, 249-50, 252-3, 285, 307,
323
werewolf, 161
what it is like to be something, 4
wheel of fortune, 110
"Where am I?" 132
White, Steve, xiii, 297, 308-9, 323
Whitehead, Alfred North, 83, 324
whole, as more free than its parts, 48,
61, 106
/
why, creatures who ask,~259
Wiggins, David, 288, 324
wiggling events, 82, 85
will, 281
conscious, 224
experience of, 244
human, 207
weakness of, 109
Williams, George, 178, 193, 238, 324
willing, 219
willpower, 210, 294
Wilson, David Sloan, 175n, 188, 190-5,
219, 307, 324
Wilson, Edward O., 15, 16, 20, 224,
307, 324

347

wimps, 200
window of opportunity, 242
Witztum, E., 293, 322
wolf, 202, 268
Wolfe, Jeremy, 239, 324
Wolfe, Tom, 15-6, 22, 224, 275, 324
women, presumed biological inferiority
of, 19
Woo, Robert, xiii
World War I, cause of, 86-7
World Wide Web, 199
worlds, possible, 35n 63-7, 70, 75-6,
86, 268
Worrall, John, xii
worth wanting, free will as, 102, 132,
135-6, 224-5, 269, 297
wretched subterfuge, 101
Wright, Robert, 20, 2 2 - 3 , 167, 201,
219, 223, 254, 288, 324

xenophobia, 155, 304

Y chromosome, 157
you, where you are in your brain, 232

Zahavi, Amotz, 205, 220, 324
Zahavi Handicap Principle, 220
Zeus, 198
zombie, 20, 247
zoo, 223