| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016845)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
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| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| 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 Al, and so did Wiener, but |
| Wiener saw farther and deeper, recognizing that Al 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"® 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). |
| 42 |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016845 |
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