Elbow Room

The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting

By: Daniel C Dennett

Narrated by: Don Hagen

Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

In this landmark 1984 work on free will, Daniel Dennett makes a case for compatibilism. His aim, as he writes in the preface to this new edition, was a cleanup job, "saving everything that mattered about the everyday concept of free will while jettisoning the impediments". In Elbow Room, Dennett argues that the varieties of free will worth wanting - those that underwrite moral and artistic responsibility - are not threatened by advances in science but distinguished, explained, and justified in detail.

Dennett tackles the question of free will in a highly original and witty manner, drawing on the theories and concepts of fields that range from physics and evolutionary biology to engineering, automata theory, and artificial intelligence. He shows how the classical formulations of the problem in philosophy depend on misuses of imagination, and he disentangles the philosophical problems of real interest from the "family of anxieties" in which they are often enmeshed - imaginary agents and bogeymen, including the Peremptory Puppeteer, the Nefarious Neurosurgeon, and the Cosmic Child Whose Dolls We Are.

Putting sociobiology in its rightful place, he concludes that we can have free will and science, too. He explores reason, control and self-control, the meaning of "can" and "could have done otherwise", responsibility and punishment, and why we would want free will in the first place. A fresh listening of Dennett's book shows how much it can still contribute to current discussions of free will.

This edition includes as its afterword Dennett's 2012 Erasmus Prize essay.

©1984, 2015 Daniel C. Dennett (P)2015 Gildan Media LLC

Critic reviews

"True classics are dazzling when they are written and should be dazzling forever. Daniel Dennett's Elbow Room makes the cut as he captures what a thorough analysis of the problem of free will looks like. Bravo!" (Michael S. Gazzaniga, professor of psychology and director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, University of California, Santa Barbara)

You will be disappointed

The description made me so excited, because it sounds like a really interesting and deep book.
Boy was I let down. The author try’s way to hard to fill his pages with really big words. It takes him a whole chapter to ramble on about what could easily be expressed in a few sentences.
I’ve been listening to it for 3.5 hours now and I can’t tel you a single point that has been made.
The narrator almost whistles with ever s sound.
It is free after all. So I’m not so disappointed.
But I was for sure let down.

Good points but rambling

This book successfully convinced me to accept compatibilism at least to some degree. However it overall felt rambling and not focused. The author could have built a more direct case. Felt like this could have been slimmed down to a focused long essay.

Good effort, but a fail

Summary:

Dennet's project in this book is to give an account for compatibilism - that human beings are both constrained by deterministic forces but also free. His main approach is to try to show us that we don't have to give up our commitment to scientific principles - that is, determinism - in order to be free "in the ways that matter to us", and that our fears that determinism makes us puppets are unfounded. In his words, these fears are "bugbears", or scary illusions.

The Good:

Dennet, like his fellows Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, should be praised for his "plain English" philosophy and accessible style. No one is going to be frustrated by obscure references or terminology here. Any high schooler could understand his argument and clip through the book at an easy pace.

The Bad:

The other side of this stylistic coin is what some (including me) will find grating. His tone is avuncular and at times condescending, with too many unhelpful digressions. Some may find this Oxonian style charming, others won't.

The Ugly:

Causality is a key, indispensable concept in discussions of free will. Dennet fails to address this in a satisfying way. He doesn't simply fail to unpack the nuance and complexity of causality (anything like Hume's crucial analysis is absent here), he fails to address it at anything beyond an elementary level.

What is truly perplexing is that he fails to distinguish between ultimate and proximate causes - a sophomoric error. For him, the fact that we have interests, deliberate between options, make choices is enough to demonstrate that we have free will. For example, Dennet uses the case of wanting to cross the Atlantic Ocean. He can't simply translocate at will (his choices are constrained), but he can make choices and act in ways to get around this (call a travel agent and buy plane tickets). Another example he appeals to is that of the Mars Rover. Because of the extreme distance, direct control of the Rover is impossible for NASA engineers, so they have programmed it with a certain amount of autonomy, constrained by over-arching goals. Why Dennet doesn't see that this is demonstrating the exact opposite of what he wants it to is baffling.

He invokes the concepts of interests, agency, and intentionality as a way to render the existence of free will plausible, like a sooth-sayer invokes spirits to make his predictions about the future plausible. But he leaves these concepts unexplored and therefore unexplained. Why are our choices free? Because we have agency that allows us to pursue our interests, says Dennet. Why does he say we have agency? Because we make choices. (The question of why we have the interests we do is safely left unasked.) This scholastic, circular reasoning is deeply disappointing coming from someone of Dennet's credentials. He might as well be a spiritualist who invokes a soul to explain free will, something I assume, to his credit, Dennet would balk at. But it amounts to the same thing. He simply ignores any discussion about the ultimate causes - social, psychological, biological, or physical - that constrain and determine our interests and therefore our making those choices, that is, our agency. Why does he want to cross the ocean, or speak at that conference, or make that pay check, or eat, or survive, or procreate, rather than not do any of these things? For a professional philosopher of his reknown, this omission is nothing sort of shocking. One is compelled to ask, is Dennet hoodwinking us, or has it simply never occurred to him to investigate these deeper causes? There is no indication of an answer in this book.

Ultimately, and unfortunately, Dennet fails in his goals. He doesn't give a full or fair account of what deterministic accounts of our behavior are actually proposing. Is he not aware of them? Does he not understand them? Or does he think they are so irrelevant that they are beneath his regard? Based on this book, we simply don't know. Additionally, he fails to give any convincing account as to what free will actually means, beyond the banal and superficial definition that it entails making choices. Well of course, Mr. Dennet, but what does it mean to make a choice? What's going on in our minds that accounts for making a decision? What are the causes and constraints of those factors in our minds (and, antecedently, our brains) that account for decision-making? Dennet explains all these away - which are in reality the crux and meat of the matter - with a wave of the hand.