Is there a ghost in the machine?

Hugh Lawson-Tancred

FREEDOM EVOLVES by Daniel C. Dennett Allen Lane, £20, pp. 368 ISBN 0719559391 1 f, in a state of background quiescence, you momentarily decide to perform some small manual gesture — flicking, say, at a fly or assuaging an itch — this will, of course, have its neural cost. Circuits will be activated, synapses bridged, potential realised. Such events can now be recorded in the delicate filigree of an EEG print-out. We can calibrate in milliseconds the gradation of nervous activity before, during and after the muscular contraction realising the gesture. But how do such patterns of the actual work of the brain correlate with the subjective history of the event — your feeling of having decided, no matter how fleetingly, to break the circumambient stasis? The story can be written from the mind's eye no less than from that of the brain. Thanks to the ingenious system devised by the American experimental neurologist Benjamin Libet, the 'moment of decision' can be pinpointed in a way which suffices, given statistical abundance, to establish that the decisive intentional input comes not at the start of the neurological undulation but almost halfway into its course. Faust was doubly wrong. In the beginning was not the deed, nor even the intention, but the activated circuit.

There is, then, powerful neurological evidence to suggest that the brain decides before the conscious mind. So if the self is to be identified with the perspective of consciousness, the 'Cartesian theatre', it seems that the self must be the slave of the neurons. There is, no doubt, considerable wiggle room in this conclusion. We are talking here of a minimal gesture, almost a reflex — the situation may be very different with the complex deliberate and considered action in whose freedom we are really interested. And we might also question the assumption of the priority of consciousness in the constitution of the self. Why should I feel less one with the workings of my cerebral cortex than with the episodes of my stream of reflection?

What, however, is clear is that the enshrinement of the I, however broadly defined, as an independent and systemic source of causation, the traditional philosophical and theological doctrine of the freedom of the will, can now no longer be debated in isolation from the deluge of information about the machinery of mind yielded by the current revolution in neurology. The philosopher can no longer expatiate in that blackboard universe in which such abstractions as 'self' and 'soul', 'mind' and 'matter' fight out their paper battles. Hard empirical findings are encroaching with relentless erosion on the boundaries of the philosophic estate.

Philosophers have responded to this threat in a smoothly predictable variety of ways. Some have dug in their heels for a last-ditch defence of something like the Enlightenment autonomous moral subject, spiced, ad libitum, with a Greek revival, some have, in one idiom or another, formed a more or less shaky coalition with the putatively more closely adjoining sciences of Chomskyan linguistics and cultural anthropology, but a hardy few have bitten the bullet and signed up for the apostlehood of the new evolutionary psychology, whose juggernaut, as Steve Pinker has aptly remarked, is ineluctably and not now so gradually clearing all obstacles before it.

No major professional philosopher has gone further down this road than Daniel Dennett, who, in a treasure trove of specialist articles and two widely discussed popular presentations, Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea, has staked out with exemplary diligence the landscape as seen from a position of thoroughgoing philosophical naturalism. Dennett has always, rightly, conceded that the naturalistic reductions of cherished intuitions about the self, consciousness and the embodiment of rational agency have encountered such intensity of opposition precisely because they impinge, ultimately, on our conception of that metaphysical freedom without which the moral order can seem meaningless. Freedom is, of course, the central issue and in Freedom Evolves, which forms with the two earlier books a kind of culmination to the trilogy, Dennett seeks to cajole, coax, bludgeon or admonish us into accepting that being the products of aeons of blind watchmaking need not deny us, indeed in a sense guarantees us, the enjoyment of such freedom as is worth worrying about.

This is therefore a state-of-the-art presentation of the traditional (since Hume) thesis of compatibilism. Yes, the world is determined to whatever degree of finegrainedness you wish (and quantum physics is an irrelevance, merely replacing ineluctable law with random anarchy), but no, this does not mean that we are not free to earn legitimate praise or censure, when such concepts are pruned of the excrescences generated by centuries of ecclesiastically sponsored libertarianism. The game is to mould the pertinent concepts: and of course this immediately raises a raft of conundrums which issue only too naturally in metaphors of babies and bathwater, of butter and margarine.

Dennett, unlike Hume, has had the chance to read his Darwin — and indeed the successors of Gregor Mendel — and his worldview is informed by the priority that that experience dictates to a reasonable mind of showing how the view we take of any aspect of human nature or society could at least plausibly have evolved. In the jargon, this boils down to demonstrating that feature x (where x ranges over perceptual regularities, sexual proclivities, political accommodations, economic habits, familial structures, social dispositions, consumption propensities etc etc) constitutes an evolutionarily stable strategy.

In this spirit, Dennett devotes the second half of the book to showing that freedom is indeed such an ESS. Except that, as I read him, there is a subtle shift of emphasis away from the eponymous claim that freedom evolves to the claim that it is ('genuine'?) altruism that undergoes that process. This is a closely related, independently fascinating and currently highly top

ical claim, but it is a different claim and, I suppose, ultimately a less momentous one.

Be that as it may, Dennett broaches his topic with his usual Olympian gusto. The Dennettian cogitative engine peremptorily integrates, absorbs, digests and selectively ejects a wide gamut of fascinating contemporary scholarship from such figures as George Ainslie, Brian Skyrms, Robert Frank, Ben Libet and Daniel Wegner, Much of this work is extremely recent and it positively buzzes with vitality. Whether discussing Ainslie's attribution of the weakness of the will to our constitutional inability rationally to manage the discounted utility of future pleasure, Slcyrms's account of the harnessing of the appetites to project the correlation between actual and apparent reliability on which the way out of the prisoner's dilemma depends or, most intriguing of all, Wegner's examination of the ease with which the subject, any of us, can be fooled into accepting as his own desires and beliefs that are in fact inserted from outside, Dennett constantly relates the academic research to the phenomenological reality of being the proprietor and inhabitant of a fantastically complicated machine based on four billion years of aleatorical R&D.

This is proof positive that the evolutionary paradigm is no longer a brash young upstart in the discussion of the mind but a mature research programme with a generous crop of rich findings, deep hypotheses and tantalising prospects. Above all, games theory raises its head again and again. How do strategies interact, mutually adjust, reciprocally absorb and precariously wobble at all the levels from fully fledged intentional action and progressively less intricate design down to fundamental mechanics into which Dennett has long insisted that we must orchestrate any coherent account of the world? This is material whose vigour and freshness alone make it a joy to read. The take-home message is a variation on the Nietzschean injunction to become what we are or, to use the splendid AA slogan appropriated by Dennett, to fake it until you make it. Freedom is no less in our genes than aggression, cruelty and greed. We can, in a real sense, choose which to suppress.

Dennett also finds space for a defence and articulation of the lightning-conductor theory of memes of which he, after Dawkins, is the most prominent and committed public proponent. Memes are informational structures like genes and, also like genes, they seek to propagate and reproduce their stock. But unlike genes they are embodied not in the surreal necklaces of DNA but in the cultural artefacts of ideologies, traditions, religions and scientific or pseudoscientific theories. Even many of those who sign up for the predominance of genetic factors in life-outcomes' and the salience of evolution for the possibility of design balk at the need for an independent level of the struggle for sur

vival among the immaterial precipitates of social interaction. The future of the meme debate looks set to be one of the most entertaining shows of the next few years.

While the book ends with its ebullient review of the science, it begins with the conceptual argumentation. Business before pleasure. Only, for me at least, Dennett does not quite do the business. To be sure, he plays cricket enough to mount his attack on incompatibilist libertarianism not in the form of some straw man but in its most armour-plated contemporary embodiment in the work of Robert Kane. In the ruthless dissection that ensues, we see the cutting edge of mind science — the pineal gland to which Descartes resorted is now constantly under the microscope and the space for the mysterious soul-body transaction is being remorselessly squeezed out of existence.

That, though, is the easy bit, Harder, of course, is to show that though everything is determined we still have choice. Dennett wheels out the modern armamentarium of possible worlds and John Conway's cottage industry of the Life game, but his central claims that, as I take it, because an event is determined it does not make sense to say that it is inevitable, since either there is determined avoidance or there is no coherent avoider to do the avoiding, and that the diversity of causal antecedents of even closely related worlds precludes that

coincidence of necessary and sufficient causation that would really rule out an authentic option, do not quite stack up, for all their lucidity and ingenuity. There is also something unsettling, not to say vexing, in the use of a puppet interlocutor, as in Consciousness Explained, though now with an unperspicuously motivated change of name from Oscar to Conrad, to voice the objections of the reluctant convert. One should surely distrust a salesman who volunteers to act as his own devil's advocate.

Of course, this only means that Dennett has not solved the deepest problem in moral philosophy. Surprise, surprise. What he has done is make a major contribution to relocating the popular discussion of selfhood. responsibility and control to its proper home in best-practice scientific psychology. What he has done is throw down a gauntlet to those, on both sides of the argument, who say that consistent Darwinism negates the reality of choice and the poetry of existence. What he has done is produce a book of sparkling brio and seemingly effortless panache. For an authentic sense of mastery of the current debate and an almost subliminal sensitivity to the looming issues of the nearer or remoter future, you simply cannot beat Dennett. Here he is on cracking form, and Dennett at his best is as good as it gets.