YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Dennett

lines on the record: 51
first: 2024-01-22
most recent: 2024-01-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Not one word in a hundred is uttered in interpersonal communication words not one word in a thousand is uttered in interpersonal communication. The very idea that words are for interpersonal communication is just wrong. Most words just occur in individual heads. He was thinking about thinking to yourself in words, I guess. And he said no biologist, no biologist would ever say that A feature that only happens once in a thousand times is the function. Any feature of the biological world? No, how about sperm? Not one sperm in a million achieves its function, but there's absolutely no question about what its function is.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we don't learn our languages, then learning about the origins of language is going to be that much more hard to study because we're going to have to go back and conjure up hard to test hypotheses about genetic changes that could have put the language acquisition device in our brains. And I think that idea is looking more and more quaint these days. And we're getting some good alternative explanations of how language evolves so. For all his brilliance. And I think Jerry Foder got his Andy Darwinism from his colleague Noam. They taught a course together. And numb would sometimes say things that were Very plausible from his point of view, and of course, he could make them sound even more plausible in his style. One of my favorites was he claimed at a meeting of evolution of language at Harvard that Words is it none.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's possible, which was Crick's point, but there's a good reason for biologists to hope it's not actual because if it is, then it just means that questions about the origins of life are much harder to study because we won't be able to figure out from what the initial conditions were like on Earth. We'll have to, it will just make it that much harder to study. And I said similarly Chomsky's view on linguistics in saying that you don't so much learn your language as grow your language. He said birds don't learn their feathers and we don't learn our languages.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very strange. And one of my earliest publications was a little bit called in Behavioral Brain Science. It was called Passing the Buck to Biology, where I pointed out that Francis Crick, among others, had talked about the possibility that life didn't start on this planet, but started somewhere else and was just ceded to this planet. I think endospermia, no. And I said”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think we're entering a new phase. Noam Chomsky created a whole new field, modern contemporary computational linguistics, formal linguistics. How many people invent a new science? He did. Great thinker. But I think he had... A fundamentally mistaken idea about the nature of language, he didn't realize that it evolved gradually and that Is so called language acquisition device is a fantasy. There isn't any such thing. Langu Evolved culturally, very fast, and grammatical. Regularities shift and evolve as well. Noam Tomsky Also, not a fan of evolution by natural selection.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Copy the latest products of AI. We are unleashing a pandemic of rogue cultural variants. We don't even need bad actors to make this happen. It can be people with hearts of gold trying to help the world and they simply make mistakes and then they replicate the mistakes and the mistakes replicate themselves and pretty soon we're in the soup.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have their own fitness same as viruses. Same as viruses, they have their own fitness, some of them may be very good for us, some of them may be neutral, and some of them may be positively dangerous. And That's the point That is actually I think acknowledged by the serious students of cultural evolution by People like Richardson and Henrik and Name, am I forgetting at the moment Boyden Richardson and Hendrik three good examples Boyd and Richardson talking about what they call rogue cultural variants. Well, rogue cultural variants are memes that have their own fitness. They are not adaptive to us, but they spread anyway. Reason I think that's so important Rogue cultural variance is just what we make possible. When we let the replicative power of digital computers”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like viruses in that regard. And that many people work on cultural evolution and just think of it as. Instincts passed on by culture, not genes, but always serving beneficent, they're serving to enhance the biological fitness of human beings. Same way that instincts do. Instincts are adaptations that enhance genetic fitness. Memes, on their view, or cultural evolved items are adaptations that also serve human fitness. And your point is, no, they don't have to serve human fitness.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We agree about that. Well, the reason we drag memes in is a point that to me one of your most maybe the most important thing I ever learned from you, and that is Memes have their own fitness”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Responsible not genetic evolution, very little difference between the genes of our human ancestors of ten thousand years ago and our genes today. What's changed is cultural evolution, language, science, civilization, agriculture, bridges and boats and cars and planes and radios and televisions and all the rest of human culture, and music and art and poetry, and religion. All of these things are products of cultural evolution. And that's what's what makes human beings different from the rest of the animal kingdom. I don't think this is even... I don't think this should be viewed as even controversial. I think it's just obvious.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Paul McCready once calculated that 10,000 years ago at the Dawn of Agriculture, human beings Bus there livestock and pets, their domesticated animals accounted for less than one percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass. Minor addition to the animals of the world. And the number now he calculates is more like ninety seven percent. In 10,000 years. That's one of the most dramatic biological changes in the history of life on the planet.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We see glimmers Evolution, you always see penumbral cases. We see glimmers of cultural evolution and we see chimpanzees spreading techniques for termite fishing or making mating signals or so forth. These are not genetically transmitted. Perceptually transmitted, they're culturally transmitted and they can evolve. And my way of saying what a meme is, is do you think that instincts are real? People say, Oh, yeah, sure, sure. I say, well, instincts are transmitted genetically by the genes. And sometimes we don't know how yet, but we know it's true. But If it's not transmitted genetically, but it's transmitted somehow, boom it's a meme. It's transmitted perceptually, in one way or another, and there's different ways it can happen, but much of what makes us so. Much Capable than other species. Creating the McCready explosion.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm happy to carry on into quarters where you've been perhaps dissuaded from Spending any more time defending them. I think it's a great idea, and I'm happy to Charge ahead with it.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, one of the most telling moments for me on this score when I was In a And some medical students. We're marveling at what had recently been discovered. About the intricacies of ribosomes and the way that DNA replicates and, I mean, ribosomes are just awesome, just breathtaking things. And after they had marveled at this, one of them said, well, that's your takes the wind out of Darwin's sails, or boy, that just shows evolution camp, you write, oh my gosh. And these were medical students.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Well, you know, let's put the brightest view on this. Thank goodness for people like Freddie Ayer and Jerry Foder. They have the gall, the guts, the nerve, the hutsbah to get out there and say, what's the problem?”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Jerry was at that conference, and after I'd trotted out my ideas about how you use the intentional stance, treat organisms as having purposes and designs and beliefs and so forth, he said, but Dan, Dan, that's just adaptationism. And Gould and Lewenthen have shown that that's completely bankrupt, that there's no truth to that at all. And I hadn't read the Gould Gluentin piece at that point. I went promptly read it and realized that it was a rhetorical masterpiece and a scientific fraud and devoted a lot of time over the next half a dozen years or so trying to expose the”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Repugnance with natural selection was one of the really driving forces to get me to write Darwin's dangerous idea. Oh, yes. Talking with him at a conference in Berlin where I introduced the intentional stance to some ethologists, cognitive ethologists, people working on vervet monkeys and piping plovers and bees and all sorts of other organisms.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. You are recreating some of our own discussions that we had on his sailboat. Yes, he was just He just thought it couldn't something was repugnant to him about the very idea of in fact, I think Jerry's profession.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He didn't know any evolutionary, not much evolutionary biology. What he did know, he misinterpreted. He thought that the Gould Lewent and Spandrels paper refuted, basically refuted natural selection. I mean”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jerry was a dear friend. We shared his sailboat for several years. I taught him basically how to sail his big boat. And we sailed together quite a lot and had a lot of other adventures together, scuba dived together and other things. And it only gradually became clear to me that he really didn't like evolution. I mean, he had an allergic reaction to Darwinian thinking, which And when I began pointing that out to some of his colleagues and associates, they said, Dan, Dan, you're being unfair. You're not sympathetic. Well, I was proved right to He and another friend of mine, Massimo Piatelli Palmarini, published a book together called What Darwin Got Wrong, which was just an embarrassment.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those are some of my favorites. But I also like the one a dear friend, a Columbia professor for many years was Arthur Danto. And he wrote a wonderful book on Nietzsche called Nietzsche's Philosopher, which was a hard-headed sort of naturalistic no fruit nonsense book about Nietzsche. And somebody, not I, came up with a wonderful definition of an Arthur dantist. And an Arthur Dantist is one who straightens the teeth of philosophical dogmas. And the quote was from Frau Nietzsche saying, little Friedrich used to say the most amazing things till we took him to the Arthur Dantist.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of his reputation. And actually she gotten some serious trouble for that because she tried to prevent the world from knowing that Wittgenstein was gay. He was And it shouldn't. Shouldn't have been something that was by her lights, you know, something shameful that had to be hidden.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We talked about that. The biologists in question, my friend of mine, Grover Stevens, we talked about what could ever have inspired somebody to think that rabbits were birds. And we came up with one somewhat plausible explanation. And it is that at some state fairs, agricultural fairs, the rabbits are judged in the same section with the poultry.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To see what really makes the intuition pump work. So if you encounter an intuition pump that you tend to be convinced by, just take a deep breath and look at all, change every detail, go through systematically changing the apparently minor little details and see if the story still works. And very often the whole thing falls apart. And you realize that The reason that intuition was pumped in you was not for the reason that the author said it was for some other reason. And once you expose that, you think, oh, I see, this was a... This was a sort of mirage that I fell for, and I'll have to think about that more carefully in the future.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we've already talked about where am I, which is probably my most elaborate and most, I think, my sort of deepest intuition pumps. In my book, by that title, I talk about both good and bad ones. And an intuition pump is either a formal argument or just a story, an imaginative tale, a conjuring up of a scene, which is supposed to provoke a fist-pounding intuition from the audience. Oh yeah, it's got to be that way. Boy, I got it. Sometimes... Just being fooled, you're being bamboozled. And Doug Hofstadter had some great advice when I introduced the term intuition pumpsy. He said, yeah, and you want to turn all the knobs.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is it there terribly afraid that they will be held as they should be, responsible for terrible things happening, and they want protection, they want to protect their billions and billions of dollars from suits. When Fox News had to pay billion dollars to settle a libel suit, that'll be chump change compared to the suits that will be wrung up against open AI and Google and Microsoft and the rest of them if some of their counterfeit people get loose and do serious damage.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With some caution, we'll be able to trust the things that we see on those media because when they're counterfeit, they'll be detected. And there will be some landmark cases where the counterfeit people are detected and people will go to jail for that. And actually, I'm heartened by the fact that the big companies now are begging to be regulated by Congress. Congress is sitting there pretty stupidly and not doing much about it yet, but maybe they'll recover their senses and a plum in time to do something about it. Well, the reason I think the companies are so eager to be regulated, which is”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The law that will do the trick, I think, is quite simple. Every manufacturer of hardware, every telephone manufacturer, every cell phone manufacturer, every laptop maker, every tablet maker, everybody who makes digital gear that can be used, say, on the internet, has got to put the detection software in. And if they don't, that's a big crime. And if everybody does it, then”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have some ideas for remedies, and they're not just mine, they're ideas that are being pursued. First of all As with counterfeit money, Want to make it illegal. And we want to have the penalties for making or distributing countership people as they're very serious crime. And then we want to develop the technology to detect counterfeit people and brand it as such. Now, that's what we do with counterfeit money. Most people don't worry about whether the $20 bill or the $20 note that they've got in their pocket is real because we rely on the technology to make it difficult, not worth the trouble to make counterfeit money. Well, we want to make it not worth the trouble for people to make counterfeit people by making the laws against it quite severe and then helping build the watermark software that will detect it. And then...”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Withhold the intentional stance from these fake agents. Is a very great weakness in our native equipment. Evolution hasn't prepared us for dealing with virtual worlds We can Exploited, fleeced, hoaxed. Bamboozled, sheated, lied to in ways that We can't even get our heads around. That's what's dangerous.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, some of them will. I mean, deep fakes, deep fake videos are already possible, and some of them are downright scary. I'm happy to say that several of the big companies, I think, YouTube and Google have already said that they're not going to allow any political ads to run that use videos. Opponents or candidates in their ads without marking this as such. But we need a lot more of that. The point is that when we see things that seem to be people, whether we just hear them or read their words in an interview or whether we see them in video, We can't help but treat them as Reasonable agents as intentional systems, as I say. And we want to argue with them. We want to talk with them. We don't have any other way of dealing with them other than just sitting there gobsmacked and wondering. And I think that... Inability of ours to”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the products of GPT four and The ones that evolved the fastest would be the ones that are better at manipulating human beings and their attention to copy them and to trade them and to devote their time to them. We're at grave risk of having our attention captured. By counterfeit people that are the product of Artificial intelligence. And this would be hugely dangerous. Human trust, which is one of the enabling conditions of civilization. And is now being threatened as it's never been threatened before.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To think of them as Nautilus, they can replicate, they can evolve, and they can be vectors of disease. And they can kill us all. And the same misdirection occurs with AI where you have people worrying about whether AGI, artificial general intelligence is right around the corner or 50 years or 100 years. And will they enslave us and take over? I say, look, long before that happens, we got a much more serious problem. It's right on our doorstep right now. Who cares? Large language models, ChatGPT, GPT four and so forth. Who cares whether they're conscious? They're not in any interesting way yet. The main thing is that. They can fool us into thinking they're conscious. And they can manipulate us, they can hold our attention, and they can evolve. And we're on the verge of a population explosion of Software viruses.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, thank you, Richard. I would like to talk about that. And I thought of a way which actually builds on some work of yours that seems to me is underappreciated. Suppose somebody said, Oh my gosh, viruses. They alive or not. And what if they become alive in the near future? What if they become giant viruses as big as elephants and they trample us to death? And wouldn't that be terrible? And isn't that a possibility? To which the answer is, don't worry about that. Viruses are dangerous long before we get to such issues like that. They're dangerous because alive or not, I think.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a good case. That's a very good case. Yes, in fact, Richard and I discussed that very example at some length. There's been a lot of foolishness written about it. Actually, some of it by scientists as well. And the funny thing is that the solution is once you see it sort of comically obvious.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes The only thing about Richard wasn't afraid to misread philosophers. And sometimes I thought his misreadings were more fruitful than the official readings of the clan of academic philosophers. He got a lot more out of some of those philosophers than other philosophers did. But yes, a brave antique spirit who was never afraid of leaping in and trying out a new idea.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you trust driving the car? Would you be angry if the car didn't work? The people who built that car believed in truth. They had to. You can't build a car without believing in truth and taking it deadly seriously. And the very idea, you're all for truth if you're a postmodernist when it's the question of how much money is in my bank account. Exactly. Will my car's wheels fall off? Or is this bridge safe to cross?”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think they thought it wasn't philosophy because it was about computer programs. It was engineering. That's not philosophy. I think that's a great mistake too. By my lights Breakthroughs in science in the last few hundred years have been in engineering. And whether it's Turing and von Neumann and the digital computer, and we could go back and talk about the other forerunners of computers or whether it's the steam engine or the radio. Engineering Often. Some of the deepest and most important and most revolutionary grounds for scientific breakthroughs that there are. To me The fact that many people outside of science and engineering, people in the humanities, and their relativistic about truth and they're talking about postmodernism and truth. And I want to say to them, Do you own a car?”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. That was a lovely moment for me. I was talking about the frame problem of artificial intelligence sort of vanished into the background now. That was one of the main issues of good old-fashioned AI, symbolic AI, the frame problem. worked very hard on that, got myself thoroughly puzzled and finally got some enlightenment about it. And I thought they'd be interested. And actually they were. But first they had to worry about whether what I was doing was really philosophy. And David Wiggins cut them short. And I'm glad he did. Good for David.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it is, but. It's all phone true. A lot of scientists. And not in any demeaning way. Many scientists make a huge commitment to learning particular techniques, becoming masters of particular laboratory setups and a gear and so forth. They're going to ride that horse as hard as they can for as long as they can. And it does, in fact, mean that they can barely bring themselves to think about whether maybe they bet on the wrong horse, whether they're wasting their experimental life on experiments that in the end will prove not to... Open up any great new avenues of thought, but it's what they got to do and thank goodness they do it. And some of them really strike golden, a lot of them don't”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you're too busy in the lab. I once asked a very fine young neuroscientist who was doing experiments with monkeys with chronically implanted electrodes. Very interesting work. And over a beer afterwards, I asked him what he thought it all meant, what he thought he was getting it. And he said, oh, Dan, I don't have time to think.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You'd be none the wiser. You don't even know where your thinking is happening, where the causal interactions are happening that give you the mind that you have. So I think that this is a fact about consciousness to this day, although I've been talking about this for 40 years or more. A lot of people still think that the first person point of view is the sort of royal road to discovery about consciousness. And in fact, it's not. It's a very unreliable source of evidence about your own consciousness. You can be wrong. And this is one of the liberating discoveries of the last 50 years.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People think they have special privileged access to their own minds. They have underprivileged access to their own minds. You don't even know where your mind is. You think it's behind your eyes and between your ears. But if your brain were somehow surgically moved down into your chest and your brain, your skull packed with other organs.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's one of my favorites too. In this experiment, I imagine that I volunteer for an operation that's going to remove my brain and put it in the proverbial brain in the vat, but hooked up to my body with radio transceivers so that my body can go off and have adventures leaving my brain behind. Part of the story has me brought into the lab so I see my brain in the vat. And I'm looking at my brain in the vat and I think here I am staring at my own brain in the vat. I think, wait a minute, wait a minute. Why am I not thinking here I am in the vat being stared at by my own eyes? Why am I so sure that I'm outside the vat, not inside? Well, it's because of where my eyes are, of course. And one of the points I wanted to make was”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I began carefully talking to and questioning and reading the works of scientists, I began to discover what I thought were scientific mistakes they were making and I tried in a modest and constructive way to point them out. And sure enough it worked. And I think philosophers are better at questions than answers. And that's okay. I don't think that's demeaning at all. We get to take the bird's eye view. We get up out of the trenches. We don't have to worry about running a big lab or doing all of the scut work that goes with real science. But we can have the luxury of Watching closely and seeing if we see anything that might need some further reflection on the part of the scientist. And sometimes the answer is yes. And those have been delightful moments for me when I can help scientists figure out better questions to ask.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I think a mistake that a lot of philosophers, a lot of academic paid professional philosophers make is they think that only lay people Make philosophical mistakes. Sciences make philosophical mistakes too. But you can't help scientists with their philosophical mistakes unless you know the science that they're dealing with. And so one of my ideas was”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I did want to point out that really, if they thought praying for me helped. Then they haven't been listening to what I've been saying, that's for sure. Because I think the idea that praying does any good at all, except maybe calms you down a little bit. We now have good scientific evidence at intersessionary prayer doesn't work. And so find some better way of paying it forward. Plant a tree, give some money to Oxfam, do something else that helps others. If you need to pray to calm your own self down, go ahead and do it. But don't think you're doing any good. Exactly.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have some religious friends who were brave enough to tell me that they had prayed for me And since they're good people and brave enough to tell me that, I actually resisted the jibe, did you also sacrifice that I do? I did want to point out.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mistakes and screw ups and so forth. And I prefer the sterner regime of responsibility. Don't make mistakes. You don't make mistakes when you're dealing with people's lives if you can possibly help it and you hold yourself responsible for that. And that's something which seems to have lost some ground in some quarters these days.”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eliminate the middleman and thank the ones that have brought the goodness on. And there's many people who have done that. And so I mentioned all the wonderful people in the hospital who Made my survival possible? And one of the points I made there, which I think it was comfortable for many people to hear is In the hospital Good intentions are not enough. You've got to get it right. And there are a lot of people checking you and just having good intentions Hardly suffices. But in another context, for instance, in religions, you know, if your heart's in the right place, you tend to get forgiven for all of your...”
2024-01-22 · Intelligence Squared · Adventures in Philosophy with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT