Vol. 25 No. 5 · 6 March 2003
pages 17-18 | 3168 words
Why would Mother Nature bother?
Jerry Fodor
- Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennett
Allen Lane, 347 pp, £20.00, February 2003, ISBN 0 7139 9339 1
Been feeling bad about being a thing? Been feeling that the laws of nature are pushing you around? Here’s a book-length dose of Daniel Dennett’s Cold Comfort Cure. According to Dennett, ‘naturalism is no enemy of free will; it provides a positive account of free will.’ Sound too good to be true? Well, so it is. Proposals for ‘compatibilist’ resolutions of the problem of determinism aren’t new to philosophy, of course. But they always turn out to be a sort of Chinese lunch: there’s the lurking sense that what you got isn’t quite what you ordered, and half an hour later you’re hungry again.
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Letters
Vol. 25 No. 7 · 3 April 2003
From Daniel Dennett
My old friend Jerry Fodor's review of my Freedom Evolves (LRB, 6 March) put me in mind of a passage in Lee Siegel's book on Indian street magic, Net of Magic:
'I'm writing a book on magic,' I explain, and I'm asked: 'Real magic?' By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts and supernatural powers. 'No,' I answer: 'Conjuring tricks, not real magic.' Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.
I doubt it was his purpose, but I want to thank Fodor for providing a fine illustration of a term I introduced a few years back and have been hard pressed to define: hysterical realism. He has no truck with half-measures, scare quotes, proto-choices or quasi-minds. His ontology accepts only real choices, real freedom ('metaphysical' freedom) and real minds: as florid a case of hysterical realism as I have encountered. 'One wants to be what tradition has it that Eve was when she bit the apple. Perfectly free to do otherwise. So perfectly free, in fact, that even God couldn't tell which way she'd jump.' In other words, 'one wants' a miracle. Speak for yourself, Jerry. The rest of us will settle for nature's stage magic, if it can provide the powers we crave, and it can.
I also want to thank him for providing more evidence in favour of my claim that the fundamental aim of his work is not so much to make progress in cognitive science as to protect the mysteries of mind from encroaching science. Some people have thought that my diagnosis was, while tempting, too harsh, and under-supported by textual evidence. Now he tells us that artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience 'barely exist'. Hysterical irrealism. In your dreams, Jerry. He loves to tell the world that 'everything is up for grabs and is likely to remain so for a very long time.' The longer the better, apparently, but meanwhile, evolutionary biology and the sciences of the mind are making steady inroads, and his contrary assurances are getting, well, a little shrill. Readers of my book can learn about this progress, and see how an evolutionary perspective can account for most of the things they hold dear in 'tradition' at the cost of letting go of some dubious jetsam. That's not real enough for Fodor, but then he's holding out for real magic or nothing at all.
Daniel Dennett
Tufts University, Massachusetts
