Consider the lobster

0:00So imagine a lobster, right? Just sitting at the bottom of the ocean. Okay. It's crawling along the sand and it comes across a trap and it just walks in. Right. Now, you have to ask yourself, did that lobster actually make a choice? Like, does it have free will? And I guess more importantly for you listening right now, when you woke up this morning and decided to put on this deep dive, did you make a truly independent choice? Or were you just, you know, following some biological program? I mean, it really is the ultimate philosophical trap, isn't it? Yeah. Because we walk around feeling absolutely certain that we're the conscious authors of our lives. Like we're calling all the shots. Yet when you zoom in close enough, we're made of the exact same biological physical stuff as that lobster. Just carbon and water and yeah. Exactly. There is no magical soul stuff floating around in our heads. It's just chemistry and physics. And that tension that weird gap between cold hard physics and the deeply subjective feeling of being alive, that is our mission today. We are taking a deep dive into the life and honestly the mind bending ideas of Daniel

1:06C. Dennett. One of the absolute greatest philosophers and cognitive scientists of our time. For sure. And his entire life's work was basically dedicated to shattering our everyday illusions about how our brains actually work. Which is why for this deep dive, I've actually shifted my background today to sort of set the mood for this journey. Oh yeah, I see that. It's very distinct. Yeah. On one side, we have these ancient classical marble sculptures. And on the other side, this web of beautifully glowing modern neural networks. Which is a perfect visual, really, because it captures Dennett as incredibly unique career path. It really does. Because before we can plunge into his grand theories on consciousness or you know, whether you actually have free will, it helps to understand the lens through which he looked at the world. And that started when he was just a kid. He was like completely obsessed with solipsism. Oh yeah. And for anyone who hasn't encountered that term lately, solipsism is that classic, slightly

2:06maddening philosophical puzzle of, you know, is the physical world actually real or is it all just an illusion happening inside my own mind? Which is a heavy thing for a kid to be thinking about. Definitely. Dennett wouldn't just briefly wonder about this either. He would go on these long, intense intellectual monologues. And when he was just 12 years old, his summer camp counselor was listening to him spiraling on this topic and finally just stocked him. What did he say? He goes, Dan, I think you're a philosopher. That is amazing. Getting that kind of validation at 12 years old. I mean, that must have been massive for him. Oh, absolutely. But the funny thing is he didn't immediately run off to a university philosophy department. He actually tried to be an artist first. He did, yeah. He went a lot of time as a sculptor working with clay and stone. But even then, he wasn't just like thinking about the aesthetics of the art. He was obsessively trying to untangle the relationship between the mind of the artist, the physical art object itself, and then the mind of the observer who comes to look at

3:08it. Because fundamentally, he was trying to solve the problem of perception. He was asking how human vision and subjective interpretation relate to this purely physical block of stone. And he was actually quite a successful sculptor exhibiting in galleries, winning competitions, that sort of thing. But he ran into a wall. Now, with the art itself, though. No, not at all. With the environment. Yeah, he despised the art world. I mean, the artists were fine, but he just couldn't stomach the gallery owners, the critics, the buyers. He felt it was all way too pretentious. Exactly. So he just pivots hard and goes all in on philosophy. And this is where we see his intellectual DNA really take shape. Evily influenced by two major mentors who honestly couldn't have been more different. Right. So first, you have Willer Van Orman-Quine, who was this legendary, incredibly rigorous logician at Harvard. Dennett reads Quine's book from a logical point of view as a teenager. As a teenager? Yeah. Stays up all night reading it and concludes that Quine is brilliant, but entirely wrong.

4:11Which is such a bold take. So bold. But Dennett actually transfers to Harvard specifically to, as he put it, take him down in his lair. I mean, that is just the ultimate academic flex for a teenager, to switch colleges just to pick a fight with a legendary logician. It really is. And he actually spends three years writing his undergraduate thesis, criticizing Quine. But the twist comes when Dennett moves on to Oxford to study under his second mentor, Gilbert Ryle. Okay. And who is Ryle? He's a very strong, very, very strong, very, very, very good student in this movement that had a really deep respect for ordinary language. He warned against turning the mind into some magical, non-material sanctuary. And when Dennett compared Ryle's approach to what he learned from Quine, he had this massive epiphany. Oh. Yeah. He realized he actually agreed with Quaintree's demand for empirical scientific foundations. So Quine basically morphed from his target into his hero. Okay. Dennett takes Quine's hardcore scientific skepticism like the demand that we ground our theories and actual physics,

5:13and combines it with Ryle's insistence that we use practical ordinary language instead of academic mysticism. And that combination leads Dennett to do something in the 1960s that makes the traditional philosophers think he has totally lost his mind. Oh, yeah. They thought he was crazy. He decides to go study physiology, neurobiology, psychology, and early artificial intelligence. Which was unheard of because traditional philosophy at the time was very much an armchair discipline. You just sat in a quiet room and thought really hard about thinking. Right. But Dennett realized that if you truly want to understand consciousness, you can't just philosophize. Well, it makes complete sense if you think about it like a mechanic, right? Like you can write a brilliant sweeping manual on why a car drives smoothly if you refuse to ever open the hood and look at the engine. Right. You got to get your hands dirty. You have to see how the spark plugs fire and how the oil lubricates the pistons. And that's exactly what's fascinating here. Dennett was constantly looking for practical tools to navigate this really difficult conceptual terrain.

6:18He actually carried a physical walking stick for years that perfectly mirrors this philosophy. A walking stick. Yeah. And it wasn't some ornate polished cane either. He literally found a piece of spruce branch in a forest on Outer Long Island in 2006. Oh, okay. Just chopped off the ends and used it as is. And he took that simple stick to the icy tundra of Kallalut, Nunein in Greenland and walked through the ancient ruins of Sicily with it. That's incredible. And the only modification he ever made was carving the dates and locations into the wood with his pocket knife. He even carved Sicilya in a talix. In a talix with a pocket knife. Yep. He was a deeply pragmatic man who relied on tangible tools, whether he was walking across a glacier or turning to map the human mind. Okay. So if he is this philosophical mechanic popping the hood of the human mind, what does he actually find in the engine that changes his worldview so drastically? Well, the real turning point happened when a medical student at Oxford sat down and explained the biological structure of neurons to him.

7:22Just the basic biology. Yeah. The student explained how a single neuron works. Yeah. That it receives multiple inputs from surrounding cells, but it only has a single branching output and that simple structural fact triggered a massive realization for Denon. I really want to break down why that specific structural detail, many inputs, one output. Why is that so revolutionary? Because it acts like a biological logic gate. Oh, I see. Yeah. The neuron takes in a variety of complex signals, maybe chemical, maybe electrical, and it boils them down to a simple, binary decision. It either fires or it doesn't fire. Right. The action potential. Exactly. And when it fires, that single signal branches out to stimulate other neurons, which perform their own logic gates. When you network billions of these simple, blind biological switches together, the structure can configure itself. It can learn, adapt, and hold memories without any central boss telling it what to do. Meaning you absolutely do not need an intelligent engineer. You don't need a ghost hovering in the brain pulling the levers.

8:25The network generates all this complexity automatically from the bottom up, which perfectly aligns with Denon's view on Charles Darwin. Denon famously argued that Darwin's concept of natural selection is the single greatest idea in human history. Right. Eating out Newton and Einstein. Eating out Newton and Einstein, because before Darwin, if you saw a complex, purposeful design, like an eye or a brain, you assumed they just had to be an intelligent designer. Right. But Darwin provided the mechanism to explain how you get from lifeless chemistry and blind physics to a thinking, conscious philosopher, purely through iteration and survival. And that really sets up the biggest illusion, then it spent his life trying to dismantle, doesn't it? It does. Because if everything is just blind chemistry and neurons firing, then what is actually happening when I look at a sunset? Because I got to say, if I close my eyes right now, it genuinely physically feels like I'm sitting inside a little movie theater inside my skull. Yes. I feel like there is a distinct me looking out through the windows of my eyes, watching a screen.

9:28And then it called that the Cartesian theater, named after the 17th century philosopher, Renee Descartes. Descartes gave us this deeply ingrained idea that there is a private stage in our minds. When we see a sunset, we sort of imagine the optic nerves sending a signal into the brain, where a tiny version of ourselves, a homunculus, sits in a little control room, watching the sunset on a screen, and experiencing the feeling of awe. But I have to push back here on behalf of everyone listening, because that intuition is incredibly stubborn. It's very hard to shake. When I feel an itch on my arm, I feel like I am the one noticing it. How does Dynet explain a way that centralized feeling of me? He explains it by asking what happens next. What happens next? Right. Scientists can trace the physical pathways of the brain. They can watch the visual cortex process light, and they can watch the member centers light up. But the mistake people make is pointing to that neural activity and saying, ta-da, that's where consciousness happens.

10:28That's where the little man in the brain watches the screen. They stop one step too early. Because if there is a little man in the brain watching a screen, then who is inside the little man's brain watching his screen? Exactly. It's an endless loop that doesn't actually explain anything. So what's the alternative? Dynet argues that there is no central theater, where everything comes together for a viewer. The brain is just a continuing cascade of action potentials. Remember those electrical spikes traveling along the nerve fibers? Right. Think of it like a massive stadium wave, where the fans are throwing their arms up. There is no one central fan coordinating the wave. Right. It just ripples. The wave just propagates through the network. And the biological reactions are the experience. We desperately want there to be this magical, subjective finish line where chemistry turns into a soul. But Dynet says the cascade of firing neurons, the engaging emotional centers, the triggering memories, that entire distributed network is all consciousness is. There's no audience. Wow. Okay, so if human consciousness is just a beautifully complex stadium wave of biology

11:33with no magical inner audience, where does that leave the rest of the animal kingdom? That's the logical next question. Because I want to loop back to the lobster we talked about at the very beginning. If my brain is just biology and the lobster's nervous system is just biology, are we experiencing the world in the same way? So a great way to explore this is through the evolution of lobster traps. Okay. How so? The modern traps used by fishermen and Maine are now designed with biodegradable escape hatches. Meaning if a trap gets lost at sea, the hatch eventually dissolves so the lobster can get out rather than just starving to death in there. Well, that design implies that we recognize the lobster's suffering. Right. And we care enough to prevent it. But does a lobster actually have a self that experiences suffering? Well, Dynet would say a lobster absolutely has a lobster self. Oh, the lobster self. Yeah, it has a biological sense of self preservation. Like if a lobster is starving, it will not eat its own claw. It recognizes its claw as self. Oh, wow. However, it will happily break off its brother's claw and eat that.

12:36Very. And it has pain sensors and neural networks designed to protect its bodily integrity. But its suffering is fundamentally mechanically different from a mammal's suffering. Because the complexity of the neural network dictates the complexity of the suffering. Yes, exactly. A lobster lacks the neurological architecture to project thoughts forward and backward in time. I get it. A lobster sitting in a trap is not thinking I'm never going to see my family again. Or I was so foolish to walk into this thing. Right. It's not having an existential crisis. Exactly. Its pain is entirely contained within the present micromoment. Whereas our human suffering is agonizing largely because it is stretched out temporarily. You know, we mourn the past and we dread the future. The lobster only feels the immediate biological alarm. That makes me wonder though, are we constantly projecting our own Cartesian theater onto the animal kingdom? Like, do we assume animals process pain the way we do just because we don't know how else to relate to them? Oh, absolutely. If we connect this to the bigger picture,

13:38then it argue that this anthropomorphism is a massive trap. We project our rich temporal consciousness onto creatures that frankly don't possess the hardware for it. Take the debate over dogs versus wolves. Okay. When we try to imagine animal suffering, we naturally think of dogs. Right. Because anyone who has ever looked at their dogs face when they pick up their car keys knows that dogs can clearly suffer. They look heartbroken. They do. But dogs are an evolutionary anomaly. How so? Over thousands of years, humans unconsciously, selectively bred dogs, specifically to mirror our emotions, to communicate with us and to integrate into our social structures. Oh, so they're almost like mirrors for us? Exactly. A dog's capacity for emotional distress is entirely unique. So when we take a highly domesticated dog's mind and project it onto a wild wolf or a cow or a lobster, we end up with a wildly exaggerated view of what is actually happening in their neural networks. It really sounds like consciousness is not a light switch. Like, you don't simply possess a soul or lack a soul.

14:40Not at all. It is an evolutionary spectrum. Consciousness is a threshold of Darwinian complexity. Meaning what? Exactly. Meaning once an organism becomes self-regulating and self-protecting, which by the way, even a single-celled bacterium does on a microscopic level, you are looking at the foundational building blocks of consciousness. Okay. Well, this brings us to a highly uncomfortable crossroads. Uh-oh. Because I'm going to channel the skepticism of everyone listening right now. Go for it. If I am on the exact same biological continuum as a bacterium, a lobster, and a wolf, and if my thoughts are just cascades of action potentials dictated by the laws of physics, then I am just an incredibly complicated biological robot. Sure. So if I don't have a magical soul calling the shots, how can you possibly hold me morally responsible for my actions? Like, where is there any room for free will? Yeah, and this is where a denot philosophy gets very demanding. He openly acknowledges that people hate this realization. I can see why. For millennia, we believe that if our brains are just physical mechanisms

15:42governed by cause and effect, then we can't be blamed for our actions. We want a loophole. Denot calls it the desire for moral levitation. This fantasy that a tiny part of our brain is magically exempt from the laws of physics, allowing us to make completely uncaused choices. Right. We want that little homunculus in the control room to be totally immune to biology. But Denot argues that trying to shrink your identity down to a tiny untouchable dot in your brain is actually the wrong move. To have free will, you have to do the exact opposite. Which is? You have to make your concept of self enormous. Okay, break that down for me. Your true self isn't a tiny pilot in your head. Your big self is the entirety of your biological body, your memories, your moral education, your plans, and your social interactions, everything. I see. So instead of separating me from my biology, Denot is saying my biology is me. Exactly. But wait, how does that solve the responsibility problem? If the big self is still just a biological machine,

16:43how can it be held accountable for a crime, for instance? So Denot draws a hard line between being free as a bird and having true free will. Okay. A bird is free to fly into a window. A lobster is free to walk into a trap. But neither has moral responsibility. Think about a wild bear. Okay, a bear. If a bear wanders into a campsite and kills a hiker, we might put the bear down for public safety, but we don't put the bear on trial for murder. Right. You don't read a bear. It's rights. Exactly. Because the bear lacks the neurological hardware to comprehend ethics or project the consequences of its actions into the future. The bear doesn't have a big self capable of moral reasoning. Right. True free will is the criterion by which we hold entities morally responsible. Denot uses the old phrase, no bless oblige privilege entails responsibility. I like that. Because you, as a normal competent human, possess the incredibly rare biological privilege to foresee the consequences of your actions, to understand pain,

17:43and to comprehend the rules of society. Ah. You are inherently obligated to act responsibly. So it was almost like building a robot. Like if I program an autonomous drone and release it into the city and it crashes into a crowd, I don't get to just shrug and say, well, the robot skiers just turn based on the laws of physics. It's not my fault. Exactly. You go to jail. I am responsible because I am the creator. So Denot is saying that as an adult human, I have, through my education and my choices, basically programmed my own biological robot. Therefore, I own what the robot does. And that is the burden of competence. You didn't create your brain from scratch, obviously. But you are the only entity capable is during it. Man, that burden of competence feels heavier today than ever before, doesn't it? It really does. It kind of feels like humanity just received a massive technological software update full of powerful new features. But nobody bothered to give us the updated moral user manual on how to actually use them. That is a really profound way to view our current era, actually.

18:44Philosophers have long relied on the ethical principle that ought implies can. Aught implies can, meaning. This means you are only morally obligated to do something if it is actually possible for you to achieve it. Like a peasant in the middle ages wasn't morally obligated to stop a famine on the other side of the planet because they literally couldn't. But today, thanks to our technological big self, we can do almost anything. We are living through an explosion of competence. Yeah. I mean, with a few clicks on a smartphone, you can transfer funds to Oxfam or Doctors Without Borders and save a life in a war zone. Yeah. We have the technology to genetically engineer embryos, create designer babies, we can deploy autonomous weapons. Sure. Then it pointed out that our philosophy is severely lagging behind this avalanche of new abilities. Because every new ability creates a new moral obligation. Right. If Aught implies can and we can do everything, then we ought to do everything. No wonder society feels completely besieged

19:44by anxiety right now. If our reach is now global, the weight of our biological free will is almost crushing. It is. And we are desperately waiting for an absolute answer. You know, some magical mathematical rule book to tell us exactly what to do, which doesn't exist, which doesn't exist. Then it warns that demanding absolutes is a trap. We have to accept partial, messy, practical responsibility. Waiting for a philosophical miracle is just an excuse to avoid doing the exhausting everyday work of making ethical choices. Wow. We have covered some intense ground today. We started with a 12 year old kid wondering if the world was just an illusion. Yeah. We watched him strip away the magical Cartesian theater in our minds and we ended up with this profound sense of moral responsibility rooted entirely in our biological wiring. And, you know, through all that heavy lifting, then it never lost his joy for the physical world. Really? Oh yeah. Even in his later years, he was known for driving this cranky rattling 1972 VW bug. That's 72.

20:44Yeah, his first was a 57. But this 72, the gas pedal would stick and he'd have to literally kick it to get it to work. But he loved the tactile reality of it. That's so fake. Here's a sailor too. He just lived a very robust, grounded life. So he didn't find the realization that we were just biological machines depressing it all? Quite the opposite. For Dennett, recognizing that there is no magical safety net, no soul separate from the body is exactly what makes this physical life so breathtakingly precious. His ultimate piece of advice was incredibly simple. What was it? Don't botch it. You only get one chance. Don't botch it. I love the weight of that. But before we sign off, I want to leave you the listener with one final lingering thought based on Dennett's notes regarding evolution. Oh, this is a good one. Because we tend to think that human evolution has stopped, right? Because we aren't growing wings or thicker fur or whatever. But Dennett points out that evolution is actually accelerating. It has just moved into the realm of language and culture. Right. The biosphere is shifting faster than ever

21:44through the evolution of ideas transmitting from brain to brain. Exactly. The software is evolving much faster than the hardware. Yeah, much faster. So Dennett says your big self, my self that grants you free will, is constructed out of your education, your cultural inputs, and the language you consume. He says you are the author of your own mind. But if cultural evolution is operating at lightning speed, quietly installing massive linguistic and ideological updates into your brain every single time you open an app or read a headline, how much of your big self did you actually build? That is the question. Are you the responsible engineer of your biological robot or are you just another piece of code being compiled by the environment around you? It's definitely something to chew on the next time you feel absolutely certain you are making a purely independent choice. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive. Keep questioning the world. Keep looking under the hood. And we'll catch you next time.