Daniel Dennett Explains Consciousness and Free Will | Big Think 

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Seems to me he explains nothing.

Does it strike anyone else as incredibly weird that this one particular species on this one particular planet sit around in suits and spectacles talking about whether they have free will, or whether a bigger a larger version of them created the universe, or so forth..? ... yes I'm stoned... how did you know that..?

Free will, that is, a consciousness that is immaterial, prevents infinite regressions. Determinism cannot work without an infinite regression.

The idea of consciousness being a "trick" is strange. Who is tricking what?

Free will is simply a poetic term for voluntary action, which is distinct from involuntary action. We have the ability to choose and make conscious decisions within the confines of any given situation. THAT is what most rational people mean by free will, not that we have some magical power to can do whatever we want.

I agree with his mechanistic theory of consciousness, but then in the end he failed to provide anything conclusive that how free will fits with it.

He seems to want to reject "magic" in the consciousness realm, but hold on to it in the free will realm.

Misleading title. He doesn't explain Consciousness or Free Will

I grew my beard that long once. My love for cereal forced me to shave. Free will had little to do with it. I gotta have my Pops.

For those who wonder if material alone, by being configured in a specific way is able to be conscious, consider this: The human brain has about 100 billion neurons. Each neurons fires (on average) about 200 times per SECOND. And each neuron connects to about 1,000 other neurons. So... every time each neuron fires a signal, 1,000 other neurons get that information. 100 billion neurons x 200 firings per second x 1,000 connections each = 20,000,000,000,000,000 bits of info transmitted per second. Its worth considering that consciousness, or continuous awareness, is simply the consequence of being the magnificently efficient processors that we are. Unlike computers we make, we can parallel process, which allows for a larger picture of what's happening, and is likely a great contributor to what makes for an experience.

If you want to study something, you first have to be able to look at it. Consciousness is beyond the mind. It can see the mind but the mind cannot see it. So you can never study it and so you can never "understand" what it is. The best you can do is meditate and only "experience" it existentially. End of the story.

Spoiler : No he actually doesn't.

If determinism is true, then I have no choice as to what I believe, so stop trying to convince me otherwise.

If “consciousness is a bunch of tricks,” who is being tricked? I (my consciousness) must be real in order to be tricked, but if my consciousness is real, then it cannot be “a bunch of tricks.”

Ive listened to many talks by Dennett but all I hear is hot air. Seriously, i think he is very biased without having too many arguments to back his opinion.

Word salad. Not clear what is his answer to people fearing of not having free will?

Daniel Dennett explains nothing

"some people...": Chalmers and Searle and their nonsense

The title of this video should be "Daniel Dennett justifies his views on Conciousness and Free Will". People are bound to be disappointed with the contents because of the misleading title.

We live in a society were people are denying their own existance

I don't think Dan explained consciousness here. He said a few things about it, explain it he did not.

You smart guys think you can go on and on about this , But I've already proven it A 100 times an still you deny it. Say it can't be proven , your in denial. Hahaha

You are wrong Santa.

Wow. First off for someone of his caliber he should be able to articulate scientific matters on the subject and then provide some layman explaination. His ideas are all over the place. Conciousness, in humans, is a higher abstract than that of other plants and animals based upon the interactions between neural connections. Although we have not mapped out precisely the ways in which our connections differ especially in the prefrontal cortex we can infer that conciousness is a result of the level of complications. That being said consciousness is applicable to animals in the form of sense and other levels that we cannot express because we are not able to "experience" it. So free-will is an amalgamation of connections formed from the omplexities of life and our genetic structure. Making decisions with "reasoning" means that the levels of abstraction in our explainations of reality to further manipulate are expressed on a larger complication. It still follows that there is no "ghost in the machine" that can bypass the natural structure of our existence, but that decisions are made based on more levels of abstractions amalgamated not only from personal experience, but from the collective knowledge of human communication. That is free-will. Conciousness is not seperate from our existence, it is our existence.

Daniel Dennett deserves a lifetime achievement award for five decades of his majestic failure to explain consciousness. Moreover, he uses the term without even basic understanding of what it means. What he refers to as "consciousness" is in fact metacognition. So not only he fails miserably to explain anything... He describes a leaf, and insists it is a "tree".

This old man has miserably failed to explain Consciousness and Freewill. His explanation is rather mediocre.

so his subjective experience of reality appearing in his consciousness has lead him to believe that consciousness isn't real, but the subjective experience appearing in it is? I mean does he not see how foolish that is?

ya, this guy seems to be speaking to a very narrow audience. He immediately goes after anyone who believes in the supernatural, then uses the word "designed" to explain why we have free will. Oh wait, we don't have free will; or ya, we do. I can't tell from his little diatribe here. He says that a purely mechanistic view of the world is right, but doesn't back it up. Then he tells me that as long as we desire the good free will and not the bad; that's good. Says that certain competences are "superior" to others, but I disagree. So we are rational beings who are able to justify our actions, but ya, that just kind of developed over billions of years, and yada yada, now we have free will....I'm beginning to see what he means by tricks. He yada yada'd over the best part!! Who the hell is this guy to tell me what I should desire and what I shouldn't desire? One final question then I'll go back in my bible-thumping, creationist, ignorant, unscientific, self-righteous hole in the ground: Did Dennett have a choice in having this point of view, or not?

He lost me at 5:50 when he said that we have the obligation to think ahead and anticipate the out come of our actions...Isn't this "anticipation" it self is rooted in realms that are (more or less) out of our control? Isn't this "anticipation" and "calculation" ALSO bounded by the same factors which render us "freewill-less" in the first place?? i.e laws of physics, DNA, upbringing..etc? Does Mr Dannett mean that this "anticipation" is independent from the factors that robbed us from free will in the first place??? Any one, please??

I've been watching a few videos of this guy. I had to ask, what kind of a philosopher presents his ideas as "absolute truth" and underestimates all other thoughts? Well, I guess the one with lots of beard and little wisdom..

So what Daniel Dennet believes in or what he is espousing is that nobody has free will, or free will is an illusion. So if he had no choice in the argument that he just laid out, why should anyone believe it as sound or true?

ok, fine, but a magician cant trick someone - an aggregate assemblage of atoms - into becoming self aware.

I didn't notice any 'explanation' in the video at all! A lot of assertion, some description and a touch of evolutionary biology as a reason why consciousness might be useful... But none of that is an explanation of consciousness, especially if Mr Dennett wishes to distinguish between a physical material and 'an other' mechanism.

Sure I see the point he's trying to get across. I'm not opposing it, I'm not saying it's right or wrong. But what I don't like is, he's basically saying that others who don't have the same philosophy as he does is dumb

I've never resonated with determinism, and the physicist point of view of our material world always bring described by it's antecedent. This works in physics, but we don't even know what consciousness is yet, how it works, or what generates it, etc. Sure, we could reduce everything down to its physicality, and with perfect information of the present it might be true that we could predict the future perfectly as well. But one interesting component of complex brains and minds is that they seem to be able to generate infinities of thought. As in, what is possible to think about is seemingly infinite, and the ways to approach thinking about anything are infinite. So, how is it that physicists and sympathizers to determinism believe they can reduce the complexity of a conscious mind, and all of it's thoughts and actions, into the direct casual chain of physics? Does awareness of the game, so to speak, change this (think of this in the context of the observer in quantum outcomes)? Is the future actually written in this view, even though the future doesn't exist? I feel like we have too much to learn to settle on one or the other answer. But I'd have to say that it's not clear to me that that type of determinism applies at the level of a conscious creature living in the present moment.

the idea that everyone believes in free will because they are not smart enough seems...too easy. it demonstrates a lack of curiosity in to the question of why these forms of understanding are pervasive to the point of universality and whether or not these forms of conception are separable from the human conceptual/experiential apparatus.

"I answer that, Man has free-will: otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards, and punishments would be in vain. In order to make this evident, we must observe that some things act without judgment; as a stone moves downwards; and in like manner all things which lack knowledge. And some act from judgment, but not a free judgment; as brute animals. For the sheep, seeing the wolf, judges it a thing to be shunned, from a natural and not a free judgment, because it judges, not from reason, but from natural instinct. And the same thing is to be said of any judgment of brute animals. But man acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power he judges that something should be avoided or sought. But because this judgment, in the case of some particular act, is not from a natural instinct, but from some act of comparison in the reason, therefore he acts from free judgment and retains the power of being inclined to various things. For reason in contingent matters may follow opposite courses, as we see in dialectic syllogisms and rhetorical arguments. Now particular operations are contingent, and therefore in such matters the judgment of reason may follow opposite courses, and is not determinate to one. And forasmuch as man is rational is it necessary that man have a free-will." Aquinas

I'm open to the idea of a bag of tricks. Just show me the trick?

The problem with materialism is that we don't know if matter exists. If you cut open a human brain, a materialist would say that he can't see a soul, whereas I'd say that I can't see matter.

Anyone who takes Dennett seriously has been duped by a word magician.

"Consciousness... is not MAGIC. It's a bunch of TRICKS." Thanks for clearing that up.

I have listened, he told me nothing. He has not explained why! I am willing to listen, but he needs to tell me why.

Exellent example of a OPINION not exlanation.

So you think it's a bunch of tricks. LIST THE TRICKS!

It seems to me that many philosophers today didn't really understand their classes on wittgenstein 's ideas... Dennett is playing language games at the highest level

Not one person alive can explain what consciousness is lol! No one can find it never mind explain it ha

Complete bs...he explains nothing.

Determinism is BS, any evidence of free will, regardless of how seemingly insignificant, validates all free will! While I very much respect Einstein as a very intelligent person and his contributions to our knowledge of light, speed, eluded to mass, energy and relativity, he was a determinism believer. As an intellect and thinker however, I don't think he was qualified to hold Newton's cod piece (jock strap of old)! Newton, who lived hundreds of years earlier, was and IS right about the universal clock and nothing exists other than the present instant in the ticking of the cosmic clock. Every action that is taking place in this instant is happening regardless of it's position in the universe, but requires an observer to make it a part of our perceived reality. Countless supernova explosions are happening in this instant throughout the known universe, and even though they are not visible to us, they are happening at this moment. The past is behind this moment, and the future is yet to be written and is certainly not determined. Yes, the movement of a conscious observer changes their perception of reality, but not what happened in that tick of the cosmic clock, but space, time and speed will alter different observers perceptions of it. It would matter not if you could travel at warp speeds, 10, 100 or 1000 times the speed of light, you can never go backwards in time with respect to Newton's cosmic clock. The question of determinism can not be separated from the debate over consciousness, which I will address here later. But, that being said you should also know that I have subscribed to the multiple-worlds theory for many years now, and it is based on the relationship of perceived reality to consciousness. Some amount of determinism does exit on the macro-level,and plays out under Newton's cosmic clock. Think about it like the impending merging of the Milky Way with Andromeda and other Newtonian physics down to and including our solar system's existence and our sun's interactions with other stars in our galaxy. However, determinism on the micro-level as it relates to our lives is much less a factor. Consciousness plays a much bigger role there. Peoples lives and events that occur in them are determined more by our conscious decisions that are made in basically three different ways. Many are made emotionally, while some are made logically, and some are a combination of both. The timelines of our lives generally follow the path that we lay out for our lives from the time we become sentient until the time that we appear to die to others around us. If you want to see the difference that your conscious decisions make on your reality timeline try this experiment. Make a conscious choice to let any significant decisions you make for a set amount of time be determined by a coin toss, which you can equate to a cat in Schrodinger's box, a purely random act of chance, the result of which is only revealed upon observation. I assure you that the events of your life's expected time line will change drastically, but it will fit nicely with the many worlds theory. Now, lets talk a little bit about consciousness and it's effect in our lives First, without consciousness there is nothing, and I do mean NOTHING. Our perception of reality actually creates reality. Without our ability to perceive it, it would not exist. Without consciousness everything that existed would be totally predetermined, but there would be nothing to acknowledge it and give it substance - No reality could exist. Consciousness is in fact a very complex electromagnetic waveform generated by all sentient life forms and just like in electronics theory, the product of merging of all those complex waveforms results in more waveforms that are the sum, the difference and the two originals. The number and types of those interactions are innumerable, or if you prefer "infinite" , although I dislike using that word because infinity does not exist any more than "zero" exists in our reality and math. You are the Captain of your own ship of destiny and you pick the ports. Your own reality IS what your mind and senses perceive it to be and it is just as real and valid as anyone else's perceptions of it. If you only consider the nearly eight billion people on this earth with which we have a somewhat shared perception of reality, less with some and much more with friends, family and colleagues, you should quickly realize that it can be considered to be a giant venn diagram with intersections indicating the areas where our perceptions converge into a shared reality. If you are reading this, our venn diagrams are converging and there is a sharing of our perceived reality going on right now. I have said enough about this for now, but i will leave you with one last thought. Consider that it is all about consciousness and many worlds and - REALITY=INFINITY/ZERO

Anyone else get the feeling that this entire video was made for the sole purpose of making us feel "obligated" to share it. Also, I see a lot of injunctions to comment towards the end. Maybe Dennette has decided to design his own meme virus as an experiment to see how it evolves on RU-vid. After all, spreading his ideas is his prerogative and evolutionary purpose.

This guy is talking about waking everyday mundane consciousness which is a very narrow view of what consciousness is. We dream and experience altered states of consciousness which he neglects to even mention since it does not fit well with a mechanical and materialistic view of consciousness. He is simply attempting to explain the biological and neurological aspects of consciousness.He also fails to mention Qualia and the Hard problem of consciousness. So he is not saying very much at all...Free will only takes place when a person is fully aware of choices based on having enough information from which to make an informed decision. However since time only moves forward once a decision is made that is it. It's done. Everything up to that point is dynamic. I.E You have free will.... Otherwise your are what the Doctor suggests a robot...

Can someone please explain to me why Dennett is perceived as important, I have yet to hear him say ANYTHING profound or memorable.

There is a very simple way of dealing with the fact that free will as an absolute, cannot exist. You can sum it all up with the word "conditioned". We are conditioned. All our decisions are based on our conditioning, long term and short term. If our decisions were not a product of conditioning they would have no relevency to what we are making a decision about. You would have to be totally free from conditioning in order to make a free will choice. You could not have any knowledge, preferences or judgments, or your decision is a conditioned decision. There is no such state of mind as an unconditioned state of mind. What passes for the idea of free will is our reflection of what our mind decides. When we receive a decision from our mind, this then reflects back to our mind triggering another reaction. This new conditioned state might support or nullify our previous decision. This cyclic looping is what causes our sense that we are in control, when all that is happening is our conscious awareness is causing continual changes in what conditions are triggered in our mind. To take this one more step, how do you know you have decided. If you pay attentionn to the process you can witness that you feel or sense an acceptable feeling or you might just feel your time with this is done. Either way this is your mind signing the deal.

This makes us more complex, sentient and intelligent than a bird. Not more free.

So, in the end we have free will?

Most people cannot define consciousness properly, they can only experience it because they are conscious themselves and scientist can only roughly observe how sensory motor functions are enterpreted for our consciousness to act upon. Yet they cannot explain how neurons syncronize perfectly, how memory and experience are stored and how most if not all of our mental processes are guided, they can only observe how these processes corelate with atomic functions on an atomic level, with only the equations of physical law as their conceptual framework. So if someone claims he has a full explination of an abstract concept such as consciousnesss, then he cannot be expected to be taken seriously especially if he claims that what he cannot explain is simply "a trick". This man is the definition of an oxymoron.

Daniel Dennett needs to re-read Nietzsche. And then perhaps his naively optimistic naturalistic worldview might seem somewhat less optimistic.

This guy is clearly confused about the free will debate. Of course we have the ability to make choices and this is generally termed as 'free will', but the real point is that 'free will' is predetermined by the time line of history which that individual brain has gone through, combined with it's 'present' surrounding environment. These two factors are 'ultimately' what cause that brain to make a decision. The concept of cause and effect is obviously very real. You can't just change the rules and deny it exists when a sentient being comes into the equation. That sentient being is made up of non-sentient atoms. Why do people not get this? I challenge anybody to provide an example of a decision an individual has made (human or animal) which was not been predetermined by either of the two factors I mentioned.

We have no choice in what we do, nor do we have a choice in how we explain why we did it.

Concsiousness, in the way most people usually refer to it, is simply the brain receiving and processing information. However, there is Concsiousness beyond body/mind, and that's the real, true level of self. The body/mind is just a vehicle for that Concsiousness to experience this reality.

Sorry, anti-theist bigots full of bias, but free will DOES exist!

The no-free-will argument is plain silly, if for no other reason than being a big contradiction, both in believing it, and in arguing for it. If consciousness is an illusion, and free-will is an illusion, then so is believing that they're illusions. Does anyone have a choice to believe in free-will or not? If not, why would you make the argument--or DID you? Who pulls the strings? Maybe there are no strings.. Am I even typing right now? What? Who am I? I'm so damn confused. I think I'm going to go sit in a corner until some predetermined physical impulses make me do something and trick me into thinking I want to do it. Later, guys...

Conciousness is a muti faceted wiggle

I'll just say that the vast weight of the entire universe bearing down on all of us makes it highly unlikely that we can resist such environmental pressures with something called 'free will'

His beard looks like an optical illusion

"Concern about free will"? No, Sir, Mr Professor. Free will has nothing to do with it. People want consciousness to be special and not a materialist epiphenomenon because that means there would be life after death. Even a professor ought to be able to see that. This life just isn't worth it to a lot of people. An afterlife however brings the promise of something else, something better, somewhere our dreams and desires can be realized.

No arguments. No proof. No explanations. This is simply pointless babble.

Even if consciousness is NOTHING but a set of tricks my brain has developed to do with myself (through evolution), WHAT A POWERFUL SET OF TRICKS IS THIS... It is SO powerful I simply cannot even figure out what I would be like for myself without any recurrence of an "I" or even an "I am in relation to X that I'm thinking right now". It's even impossible to grasp such ontological condition. C'mon, "I am I", and "I am not X" are fundamental ontological assumptions we simply MUST do to be able to think and make any proposition about anything around us... It's not the case consciousness is something 'magical' or 'non-material', or 'spiritual'. It's simply a ontological necessity of our own form of reasoning and (self)representation.

We're not talking about souls, specialness, God, or religion Dennett. We are talking about a substance that is obviously ontologically distinct from matter. It is not extended in space like matter. So, unless you want to change the definition of matter to encompass mind then we still have a problem Dennett, can't simply explain it away my friend. Can't deny the facts.

Gosh he is so wrong.

Why is it that when someone argues for or against free-will, it usually involves them totally polarizing the issue(e.g. Sam Harris)? Yes, where is the evidence that free-will isn't an ever-growing framework, a platform, and why can't it be a spectrum, even a moving one? Lastly, why is the idea of free-will so closely tied with religion?? Does nobody remember the phrase "God has a plan for you"? Sounds quite like hard-determinism to me. Not only that, but the fact that god apparently knows everything, even future events. It is pre-determined. Who was the idiot that first associated religion with free will? What a jackass.

This is nonsense

Great work Daniel. Everything so much clearer now :-) .Consciousness is a bunch of tricks in the brain.Nice work. How about plants, and bacteria who does not have a brain but still have a conscious response to environment? Where their tricks take place ?

This man don't know what free will is.

Don't waste your money on his book: "Consciousness Explained". It's a thick book, but you come away knowing no more about consciousness than when you started reading. Daniel Dennett knows nothing on the subject.

WOW! give this man a novel prize! omg, he just explained consciousness; consciousness is only an illusion! BRILLIANT!

Materialism is dying. Here are the premises of material monism in a nutshell: 1. Your conscious perceptions exist. 2. The conscious perceptions of other living entities, different from your own, also exist. 3. There are things that exist independently of, and outside, conscious perception. 4. Things that exist independently of, and outside, conscious perception generate conscious perception. Materialism is actually the philosophy that makes bigger leaps of faith than, say, ideal monism. Both Dualism and Materialism define themselves outside of the realm of investigation because of premise 3. But materialism actually requires more faith than dualism because of premise 4. The only way materialism can survive is for one to deny premise 1 and prance around, as Daniel Dennett does, denying his own existence.

I think the whole thing about consciousness is not about free will but about keeping alive the idea of a soul, so they have hope of an afterlife. Its all about the fear of death, every single person i have spoke to that believes the brain can't produce the mind(because the mind is too magical),they always propose a soul to explain consciousness.

If I knew I could be a famous philosopher by just repeating the same stupid argument like 200 years ago I would have done it long ago

His beard is mesmerizing, but still more of a Sam Harris fan.

It seems that really smart people can still have dumb ideas.

This gentleman's arrogance and lack of humility in his worship of biological reductionism is cringeworthy.

I've seen a few Dennett videos where he talks about consciousness and I'm fairly sure that he doesn't understand the basic idea of why explaining consciousness in the context of the brain is impossible.

He explains consciousness... You guys saying that he "doesn't," are just not satisfied at the answer (kind of like he explains). Many people just want a simple answer, which you're not going get unless you look up a dictionary to the word "Conscious." If its not enough, than the problem is your ability to critically think. Open some philosophy books, or any books about it, and/or maybe watch a few videos of neuroscientists explaining their 30+ years of research on the matter. Mind you, you won't interpret it as clearly, in the few words they speak of the extensive, as they have.

Daniel Dennett: triggering my anxiety, depression and existential crisis since 2006. Thanks for the Debbie Downer. I'm just a meat machine boop boop beep.

BILLIONS OF YEARS IS AS FAR OFF THE CHARTS AS SAID. Man can dig and search the stars but billions of years is rediculous when we can't fathom 1000s years we keep mistking for by all other opinions of proof and belief whether we believe or not WE ALL BELIEVE WE ARE ALIVE BE FOR WE DIE.

He didn't really explain anything

Daniel Dennett died yesterday. Information is real. The information in our dna has been alive for, in fact, billions of years. What we think is influenced by what we have heard from others, like him. Maybe he lives on in some real and meaningful way like that.

Dennet needs to consider that research that "might tend to confirm" (his words) something isn't conclusive. That type of thought can lead to error. Actually, the research does not explain qualia, and while theorizing that it does is fair, stating that it does is a basic logic error.

Ha Ha Ha (In honor of the Holy Trinity) Small Think does it again......Read Power of your subconscious mind by Joseph Murphy and then Dennett and atheists look like foolish children....

6:15: on the contrary, Orcas and several other species have the ability to share their wisdom. They are also able to extract responses from new situations. The network is wider than we believe it to be.

In short: I don't know how it went, but I think it was a purely evolutionary and random process. We changed a purely intelligible and guided process. BANG. Two pseudoscientific theses.

He’s so full of do-do.

Well, I guess the questions is then, who or what is the brain trying to trick into thinking it has free will?

Just a bit shallow ):

Where is the video of Daniel Dennett Quine, Consciousness and the Middle East?

poor dennet, so lost xD

Daniel Dennett does not 'explain consciousness' in this video (or anywhere else). He goes on about why people reject the notion of consciousness having naturalistic explanation; also something about awareness of our own reasons for doing things; and a few other tangents.

Anyone can watch their mind and observe the mysteriousness of choice making.

Funny how so much people talk like they know what is the right answer and how they talk shit about people who thinks otherwise, it baffles me how someone can think of themself as so smart to know the answer to the most hard philosophical questions but fail to realise that those questions have been around for thousands of years...