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WHAT CAN WE DO?
Daniel C. Dennett

Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of
Philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the
author of a dozen books, including Consciousness Explained and, most recently, From
Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.

Many have reflected on the irony of reading a great book when you are too young to
appreciate it. Consigning a classic to the already read stack and thereby insulating
yourself against any further influence while gleaning only a few ill-understood ideas from
it is a recipe for neglect that is seldom benign. This struck me with particular force when
I reread The Human Use of Human Beings more than sixty years after my juvenile
encounter. We should all make it a regular practice to reread books from our youth,
where we are apt to discover clear previews of some of our own later “discoveries” and
“inventions,” along with a wealth of insights to which we were bound to be impervious
until our minds had been torn and tattered, exercised and enlarged by confrontations with
life’s problems.
Writing at a time when vacuum tubes were still the primary electronic building
blocks and there were only a few actual computers in operation, Norbert Wiener
imagined the future we now contend with in impressive detail and with few clear
mistakes. Alan Turing’s famous 1950 article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,”
in the philosophy journal Mind, foresaw the development of AI, and so did Wiener, but
Wiener saw farther and deeper, recognizing that AI would not just imitate—and
replace—human beings in many intelligent activities but change human beings in the
process.

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but
patterns that perpetuate themselves. (p. 96)

When that was written, it could be comfortably dismissed as yet another bit of
Heraclitean overstatement. Yeah, yeah, you can never step in the same river twice. But
it contains the seeds of the revolution in outlook. Today we know how to think about
complex adaptive systems, strange attractors, extended minds, and homeostasis, a change
in perspective that promises to erase the “explanatory gap”⁸ between mind and
mechanism, spirit and matter, a gap that is still ardently defended by latter-day Cartesians
who cannot bear the thought that we—we ourselves—are self-perpetuating patterns of
information-bearing matter, not “stuff that abides.” Those patterns are remarkably
resilient and self-restoring but at the same time protean, opportunistic, selfish exploiters
of whatever new is available to harness in their quest for perpetuation. And here is where
things get dicey, as Wiener recognized. When attractive opportunities abound, we are apt
to be willing to pay a little and accept some small, even trivial, cost-of-doing-business for
access to new powers. And pretty soon we become so dependent on our new tools that
we lose the ability to thrive without them. Options become obligatory.

⁸ Joseph Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64, pp.
354-61 (1983).

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