Douglas: When beginning to think about the issues of free will and determinism, one is faced with two compelling and contradictory intuitions: the first is our everyday experience that we are free to deliberate and do as we please, and the second is that as we are physical things, and the physical world is causally determined, then we must be causally determined. Are we asking the wrong questions? What do you see as the compelling questions or problems to be tackled regarding the issue of free will?

Dennett: Well, I think that is how the question gets started. One has to adjust one's intuitions to see how we have freedom, but we do.

Douglas: So is the way to understand the issue to work out what we actually mean when we say 'he or she could have done otherwise'?

Dennett: 'Could have done otherwise' is a very standard move in what is written about freedom. I believe it is a mistake. I believe that the reliance on this idea has actually created a lot of mystery, and it is not as important as people think. So for me the task is to show why people are tempted to think 'could have done otherwise' means what it means and has the importance they think it does. In other words I think that (a) I could not have done otherwise and (b) I'm responsible anyway.

Douglas: Most people are quick to realise that there is only one past, but seem to see the future as branching in some way. But the future is what will actually happen, so there is only one future. There are things I will do, and things that I won't do and that is the end of it. Since that is true, what does it mean when I say I can do something? I can only do what I actually do, or what I have actually done.

Dennett: I think that that is a good way of getting at the fact that we have a notion of change and how our opportunity comes, that extends beyond the actual. Now this, by the way, has nothing directly to do with human beings and possibilities. Take an oxygen atom, we say it can combine with two hydrogen atoms. What if it doesn't? What if in the entire history of the universe it never does? In what sense of 'can' could it have? The very notion of valance is a notion that already presupposes a stronger notion of 'can' than is provided by actual history. I think that this is actually an under-appreciated point about abilities. We're not just talking about human abilities - we're talking about the ability of boats to float, plants to grow and all the rest of it.

You might say: 'given the way cause has unfolded, it is false to say this boat can float because of the fact that it was never put in the water.' It was destined never to be put in the water, but still, it could have floated. If it had have gone in the water, it would have floated. And to say that 'I could have done otherwise', if things had been different - well, that could be important, even though things weren't otherwise.

Douglas: Is that how you get at the idea of a 'chance meeting' or a 'near miss' or an opportunity missed?

Dennett: For instance, yes. Our whole conceptual scheme is saturated in counterfactual life. We have words like 'avoid'. Well what does it mean to avoid something? It means something that was about to happen didn't happen. Well if it didn't happen we were wrong to think that it was going to happen. The picture of the future is branching with opportunities, threats, possibilities, avoidance, deterrents and so forth. This whole way of thinking is in one sense hard to reconcile with determinism. Yet you can see that reconciling it with determinism is something we do before we even get around to talking about human psychology.

Douglas: Maybe we could talk for a moment about human psychology. You have argued the way to understand talk about psychological states like beliefs and desires is via the Intentional Stance, where mental states are theoretical entities in a description of behaviour. By this account the content of our beliefs and desires are not directly related to physical structures, and instead there is a more indirect relationship between the content of mental states and causation. Is this an important part of the free will problem?

Dennett: I suppose it is in a way. I think that there are models of free will which suppose that human agents are sort of clearing houses for sentences, propositions of intentions, propositions of desires and these just turn a crank and produce an act. Those simple minded models of how human decision making goes are vulnerable to a variety of sceptical arguments about free will, but what's wrong with it largely is that they are a mistakenly concrete, and mistakenly idealised vision of how decision making actually occurs.

Douglas: So what is the relationship between being compelled by our beliefs and desires at one level of explanation, and being compelled by physical causes in a very real sense at another level of explanation?

Dennett: Let's suppose we are compelled by our beliefs and desires. Isn't that the way we want it to be? Suppose that we are very good at getting to the truth about things as a result of these beliefs and desires. It would certainly help if the combination of our beliefs and desires governed our actions. You can't imagine anything better to govern our actions. You'd hope that our beliefs and desires would compel our actions, otherwise we'd be like a loose cannon on the deck.

Douglas: What have you specifically added to the compatibilist position, or have you just made it more plausible, and more palatable?

Dennett: It's a version of compatibilism, and I hope I've made it more palatable by showing that unlike simpler versions of compatibilism, the more nuanced versions of compatibilism have these positive virtues that help explain features of our lives that are relatively inexplicable to other traditions.

Douglas: We've been talking about the notion of agent causation. What role does the concept of 'control' play? If determinism is true, does that mean that we are controlled by something? And if so, do you see the crucial point for freedom as being whether it is a something, or a someone?

Dennett: What we want to be is controlled by ourselves. That means to have our bodies behave just as we want them to. After all, for me to control you is to get you to act and so forth just exactly the way I want you to. Well, for me to control me is the same thing - to get myself to act just I the way I want me to. So self control is a perfectly legitimate and real phenomenon. We want the absence of others' control, that's an important factor in this. And it's important to realise that distinct from the absence of causation, we don't want agents that are trying to control us. This is a practical and empirical matter. No matter how free your will is, if there are villainous controllers trying to control your every move, you don't have much free will. For that very reason we have relative freedom from intelligent purposeful agents that are trying to control us.

Douglas: From your work in the philosophy of mind, I gather that you would analyse 'agent' in terms of interaction with the environment, rather than as some 'central meaner'. Is an ability to 'self-monitor' therefore important?

Dennett: Yes, that true. The capacity to self-monitor is a very important factor in the redoubtable sorts of self controllers that we are. Its not perfect, but its what gives us our edge.

Douglas: Having an ability in language allows the user to create a representation of a potentially infinite variety of situations. Would you argue that this constructive aspect of language is the source of our ability to act in a way that breaks with our past?

Dennett: Well, almost that's true, I think. What you're calling the constructive aspect of natural language I think is part of the naturalisation of our generative powers, where we conceive of a future and take steps to enact it. But it's important not to then inflate language into a mythical position. I don't think I can imagine in detail an alternative way of creating that competence of the mind, but I don't think I can prove that there aren't other ways it can be done.

Douglas: In a way I am looking into the idea that we might need something that creates an infinite range of possibilities in order to give us the kind of free will that we would like, and that language might be such a tool. Is this an avenue you would go down?

Dennett: I think that this is an avenue that I would go down, though I haven't put it quite in those terms. I think that it is important to realise just how different our minds would be without language and it goes way beyond our brain structure. It's what we put in our minds, it's what we structure our brains with, and that really does involve language and culture. And it gives us the capacity, for instance, to represent to ourselves futures, even beyond our own deaths. Our capacity to entertain projects that have meanings goes so far in space and time, orders of magnitude ahead of other creatures, and it's this meaning that matters, this meaning that interests us, and that's why our freedom is much more interesting than the birds that fly in the sky, or the whales that roam the sea without running into a fence. That's a sort of freedom - it can go where it wants to. But if you can't frame very interesting desires then your freedom's really negligible.

You know the stoics used to say, (and I always found this remarkably unattractive) the way to seek freedom and happiness is to desire less. If you can get your desires down to zero, then all your desires will be satisfied. You'll be as happy as a clam, but you'll be a clam. And the interesting thing about us, is that we aren't like clams, and we have an extraordinary, nuanced, complex, layered hierarchical structure of values and desires that matters to us and we move in that space.

Douglas: And so the notion of free will is closely related to that of creativity in art?

Dennett: It is.

Douglas: Are there new issues you want to address in you forthcoming book on free will that you did not explore in Elbow Room?

Dennett: There are avenues, important aspects of a treatment of free will that I didn't cover in Elbow Room, the importance of which now have been brought to my attention. The view that I'll be taking is pretty much the same view as in Elbow Room, but there will be more powerful arguments, and much more attention to evolution.

Douglas: Do you see that there is an important relationship between 'predictability in principle' and free will? I'm thinking about whether there is a role for randomisers.

Dennett: I talked about that in Elbow Room. There are a number of roles for randomisers. Consider that randomisers are irrelevant unless your opponent needs to break your code. Then you've got to have one. But the only reason to have a genuine randomiser is for security.

Douglas: Security in the sense of survival fitness?

Dennett: Well, consider the simple game of rock, paper, scissors. What's the best strategy? Well, you can either try to read the other person's mind, and pick up some pattern and latch onto that pattern or, if you can't do that, you want to make sure that they can't do that to you. And one way of making sure that they can't do that is to use some sort of random pattern. But you've got to really be random. If you are really random you can't lose. But you might settle for just using the random number generator in your computer. The trouble is that if your opponent knows that you are using that random number generator, then they have a perfectly good predictor of your behaviour - they just use the same random number generator. So the only way to fool them is to use a real random number generator, instead of a pseudo random number generator, and then you are untrackable. Being untrackable is a desirable property to have in some circumstances, and that's a role for randomisers.

Douglas: Since natural selection just uses what is available, it doesn't necessarily follow that there are real randomisers in nature.

Dennett: That's right. Evolution itself doesn't have real randomisers. There is talk about random mutation, but it doesn't have to be random mutation, pseudo-random mutation is just as good.

guy douglas, the philosophers' magazine
www.philosophers.co.uk/archive/dennett_interviewed.htm