​​​DANIEL DENNETT’S SCIENCE OF THE SOUL

丹内特的灵魂科学

A philosopher’s lifelong quest to understand the making of the mind.
一位哲学家对心智构成的毕生探索


​Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Slowly, that changed. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and combined. Some hit upon the trick of making copies of themselves that, in turn, made more copies. The replicating chains were caught in oily bubbles, which protected them and made replication easier; eventually, they began to venture out into the open sea. A new level of order had been achieved on Earth. Life had begun.

四十亿年前,地球是个死寂的地方。不存在挣扎、思考或渴望。慢慢地,变化发生了。海水从岩石上将化学物质剥离,在海底热泉的周围,这些化学物质冲撞、化合。有些化学物质碰巧学会了复制自己的把戏,于是创造了自己越来越多的“副本”,后者继而又为自己创造更多副本。这些不断自我复制的链状分子被油性的泡泡包裹,这让它们得到保护,并让复制变得更加容易;最后,它们终于开始向大洋深处冒险。地球上由此产生了新的秩序。生命诞生了。

The tree of life grew, its branches stretching toward complexity. Organisms developed systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems, layered in ever-deepening regression. They used these systems to anticipate their future and to change it. When they looked within, some found that they had selves — constellations of memories, ideas, and purposes that emerged from the systems inside. They experienced being alive and had thoughts about that experience. They developed language and used it to know themselves; they began to ask how they had been made.

生命之树向着更复杂的方向不断生长。有机体的演变过程不断深化,发展出系统、子系统、子子系统。它们利用这些系统来预测并改变未来。当它们审视自身,其中一些发现了自我的存在——由记忆、想法和从系统中涌现出来的目的组成的迷宫。它们体验活着的感觉,并对这体验有着思考。它们发展出语言并运用语言了解自身;它们开始追问自己是如何被创造出来的。

This, to a first approximation, is the secular story of our creation. It has no single author; it’s been written collaboratively by scientists over the past few centuries. If, however, it could be said to belong to any single person, that person might be Daniel Dennett, a seventy-four-year-old philosopher who teaches at Tufts. In the course of forty years, and more than a dozen books, Dennett has endeavored to explain how a soulless world could have given rise to a soulful one. His special focus is the creation of the human mind. Into his own he has crammed nearly every related discipline: evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence. His newest book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back,” tells us, “There is a winding path leading through a jungle of science and philosophy, from the initial bland assumption that we people are physical objects, obeying the laws of physics, to an understanding of our conscious minds.”

简单地讲,这便是创世的世俗版本。它的作者不是某一个人;而是由过去数世纪的科学家们共同书写。然而,如果说它属于某一个人的话,这个人大概就是丹尼尔·丹内特,一位在塔夫茲大学任教的74岁哲学家。丹内特在四十年中著作等身,致力于解释一个没有灵魂的世界是如何变得生灵遍地的。他的焦点集中于人类心智的诞生。他一个人研习了跟此相关的几乎所有学科:进化生物学、神经科学、心理学、语言学、人工智能。他的新书《From Bacteria to Bach and Back》告诉我们,“有一条穿越了科学与哲学丛林的蜿蜒小路,路的一头是平淡无奇的假设:我们人类是服从物理规律的自然物件;路的另一头则通向对我们有意识心灵的理解。”

Dennett has walked that path before. In “Consciousness Explained,” a 1991 best-seller, he described consciousness as something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain. Many readers felt that he had shown how the brain creates the soul. Others thought that he’d missed the point entirely. To them, the book was like a treatise on music that focussed exclusively on the physics of musical instruments. It left untouched the question of how a three-pound lump of neurons could come to possess a point of view, interiority, selfhood, consciousness—qualities that the rest of the material world lacks. These skeptics derided the book as “Consciousness Explained Away.” Nowadays, philosophers are divided into two camps. The physicalists believe, with Dennett, that science can explain consciousness in purely material terms. The dualists believe that science can uncover only half of the picture: it can’t explain what Nabokov called “the marvel of consciousness—that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being.”

丹内特曾走过那条小路。在1991年的畅销书《意识的解释》中,他将意识描绘成某种类似于多层次计算机程序组在大脑这个硬件上运行的产物。许多读者感到他已成功阐明了大脑创造灵魂的机理。另一些人则认为他完全没抓住要点。对他们来说,这本书就像是一本仅仅关注于乐器物理特性的音乐专著。书中没有回答这个核心疑问:一坨三磅重的神经细胞集合体怎么就拥有了观点、内心、自我和意识——这些都是物质世界的其他事物所不具备的。这些怀疑者管这本书叫做《意识被解释没了》。今天,哲学家们分为了两个阵营。与丹内特同一阵营的物理主义者们相信科学可以纯粹用物质的语言解释意识。二元论者则相信科学只能展现画卷的一半:科学无法解释纳博科夫所言的“意识的神奇——在虚无的夜里一扇窗突然被打开,窗外是阳光普照的大地。”

Late last year, Dennett found himself among such skeptics at the Edgewater Hotel, in Seattle, where the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research had convened a meeting about animal consciousness. The Edgewater was once a rock-and-roll hangout—in the late sixties and seventies, members of Led Zeppelin were notorious for their escapades there—but it’s now plush and sedate, with overstuffed armchairs and roaring fireplaces. In a fourth-floor meeting room with views of Mt. Rainier, dozens of researchers shared speculative work on honeybee brains, mouse minds, octopus intelligence, avian cognition, and the mental faculties of monkeys and human children.

去年末,在加拿大先进研究院召开的一场关于动物意识的会议上,丹内特发现自己周围都是这样的怀疑者。会议举办地滨水酒店在60/70年代曾是摇滚迷的老巢,当时齐柏林乐队曾在此上演他们臭名昭著的恶作剧,但今天的滨水酒店豪华而安静,有高级的老板椅和嗡嗡作响的壁炉。在一个能看见丹尼尔山的四楼房间里,一群研究者分享他们对蜜蜂大脑、老鼠心智、章鱼智力、鸟类认知能力,以及猴子与人类孩童精神机能的研究成果。

At sunset on the last day of the conference, the experts found themselves circling a familiar puzzle known as the “zombie problem.” Suppose that you’re a scientist studying octopuses. How would you know whether an octopus is conscious? It interacts with you, responds to its environment, and evidently pursues goals, but a nonconscious robot could also do those things. The problem is that there’s no way to observe consciousness directly. From the outside, it’s possible to imagine that the octopus is a “zombie”—physically alive but mentally empty—and, in theory, the same could be true of any apparently conscious being. The zombie problem is a conversational vortex among those who study animal minds: the researchers, anticipating the discussion’s inexorable transformation into a meditation on “Westworld,” clutched their heads and sighed.

在会议最后一天的傍晚,专家们发现他们正围着一个熟悉的谜团打转——“僵尸问题”。假设你是正在研究章鱼的科学家。你怎么知道章鱼是有意识的?它同你互动,对环境做出反应,并明显能够追求目标,但是一个没有意识的机器人也可以做这些事情。问题在于没办法直接观察到意识。从外部看来,想象章鱼是个“僵尸”是可能的——躯体是活的但精神是空的——而且,理论上,对任何明显有意识的生物来说,这都成立。僵尸问题是研究动物心智者的讨论热点:研究者预言讨论会不可避免地变成一场对《西部世界》的冥想,这让他们挠头叹息。

​Dennett sat at the seminar table like a king on his throne. Broad-shouldered and imposing, with a fluffy white beard and a round belly, he resembles a cross between Darwin and Santa Claus. He has meaty hands and a sonorous voice. Many young philosophers of mind look like artists (skinny jeans, T-shirts, asymmetrical hair), but Dennett carries a homemade wooden walking stick and dresses like a Maine fisherman, in beat-up boat shoes and a pocketed vest—a costume that gives him an air of unpretentious competence. He regards the zombie problem as a typically philosophical waste of time. The problem presupposes that consciousness is like a light switch: either an animal has a self or it doesn’t. But Dennett thinks these things are like evolution, essentially gradualist, without hard borders. The obvious answer to the question of whether animals have selves is that they sort of have them. He loves the phrase “sort of.” Picture the brain, he often says, as a collection of subsystems that “sort of” know, think, decide, and feel. These layers build up, incrementally, to the real thing. Animals have fewer mental layers than people—in particular, they lack language, which Dennett believes endows human mental life with its complexity and texture—but this doesn’t make them zombies. It just means that they “sort of” have consciousness, as measured by human standards.

丹内特坐在会议桌前,如同王座上的国王。宽阔的肩膀、堂堂的仪表,加上蓬松的白胡子和圆圆的肚子,他看起来就像是达尔文和圣诞老人的合体。他有着胖胖的手掌和洪亮的声音。许多研究心智的年轻哲学家看起来就像是艺术家(紧身长裤,T恤和凌乱的头发),但丹内特拿着自制的木头手杖,穿着打扮像个缅因州的渔夫,一双快艇鞋和满是口袋的背心让他看起来一副与世无争的样子。他把僵尸问题看作是典型浪费时间的哲学问题。这个问题预先假定意识就像灯的开关:动物要么有自我,要么就没有。但是丹内特认为这些意识内容就像是演化史,是渐进的过程,并没有硬性界限。对动物们是否有自我这个问题最简单的回答就是,它们拥有部分自我。他喜欢“部分”这个词。在描述大脑时,他常常说,大脑作为若干子系统的集合,这些子系统“部分地”知道、思考、决定和感受。这些层级联合起来逐渐构成了事情的真相。比起人类,动物们的精神层级更少——特别是它们缺少语言。丹内特认为正是语言赋予了人类精神生活的复杂性和质地——但这不代表动物们就是僵尸。这只是说动物们“部分地”拥有意识,如果以人类的标准来看的话。

Dennett waited until the group talked itself into a muddle, then broke in. He speaks slowly, melodiously, in the confident tones of a man with answers. When he uses philosophical lingo, his voice goes deeper, as if he were distancing himself from it. “The big mistake we’re making,” he said, “is taking our congenial, shared understanding of what it’s like to be us, which we learn from novels and plays and talking to each other, and then applying it back down the animal kingdom. Wittgenstein ”—he deepened his voice—“famously wrote, ‘If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand him.’ But no! If a lion could talk, we’d understand him just fine. He just wouldn’t help us understand anything about lions.”

丹内特一直等到这群人的讨论走进了死胡同才插话。他讲得很慢,声音悦耳,以一种胸有成竹的自信娓娓道来。当他用到哲学术语时,他的声音变得低沉,好像他故意与其保持距离似的。“我们所犯的大错”,他说,“在于将我们从小说、戏剧和谈话中建立起的对自身的意气用事和富有成见的认识投射到动物王国中。维特根斯坦”——他压低声音——“曾有过著名的论述:‘如果狮子可以讲话,我们会无法理解他。’但是错了!如果狮子可以讲话,我们会很好地理解他。只是那对我们理解狮子毫无帮助。”

“Because he wouldn’t be a lion,” another researcher said.

“因为这样一来他就不再是头狮子了,”另一位研究者说道。

“Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” He concluded, “The notorious zombie problem is just a philosopher’s fantasy. It’s not anything that we have to take seriously.”

“对,”丹内特回答道,“他与普通狮子的差异如此之大,以至于他无法告诉我们做一头狮子是什么样的体验。我认为我们应该习惯这样一个事实:我们在日常生活中熟悉的人类概念只能被部分地应用到动物身上。”他总结道,“臭名昭著的僵尸问题只是哲学家的迷思罢了,我们不必认真对待。”

“Dan, I honestly get stuck on this,” a primate psychologist said. “If you say, well, rocks don’t have consciousness, I want to agree with you”—but he found it difficult to get an imaginative grip on the idea of a monkey with a “sort of” mind.

“老丹,我真是迷糊了,”一位灵长类心理学家说道。“如果你说,石头没有意识,我倒是同意”——但他对一只猴子只拥有“部分”心智这这种想法难以理解。

If philosophy were a sport, its ball would be human intuition. Philosophers compete to shift our intuitions from one end of the field to the other. Some intuitions, however, resist being shifted. Among these is our conviction that there are only two states of being: awake or asleep, conscious or unconscious, alive or dead, soulful or material. Dennett believes that there is a spectrum, and that we can train ourselves to find the idea of that spectrum intuitive.

如果哲学是场球赛,那球就是人类的直觉。哲学家们努力把我们的直觉从场地的一头拉到另一头。但有些直觉拒绝被挪动。这类直觉中包括这样一个信念:生命只有两个状态,清醒或沉睡,有意识或无意识,活着或死去,有灵的或物质的。丹内特相信存在一个连续的光谱,也相信我们能训练自己从直觉上接受这一概念。

“If you think there’s a fixed meaning of the word ‘consciousness,’ and we’re searching for that, then you’re already making a mistake,” Dennett said.

“如果你认为‘意识’这个词有一个固定的含义,而我们正努力找寻它,那你已经犯了一个错误。”丹内特说道。

“I hear you as skeptical about whether consciousness is useful as a scientific concept,” another researcher ventured.

“在我看来你怀疑的是意识作为一个科学概念是否有用,”另一位研究者插话道。

“Yes, yes,” Dennett said.

“是的,是的。”丹内特答道。

“That’s the ur-question,” the researcher replied. “Because, if the answer’s no, then we should really go home!”

“那是你的问题,”这位研究者反驳。“因为如果答案是否定的,那我们都该回家才对。”

“No, no!” Dennett exclaimed, as the room erupted into laughter. He’d done it again: in attempting to explain consciousness, he’d explained it away.

“不,不!”丹内特大声说道,房间里爆发出一阵大笑。再一次的,当试着解释意识时,他又遭遇了滑铁卢。

In the nineteenth century, scientists and philosophers couldn’t figure out how nonliving things became living. They thought that living things possessed a mysterious life force. Only over time did they discover that life was the product of diverse physical systems that, together, created something that appeared magical. Dennett believes that the same story will be told about consciousness. He wants to tell it, but he sometimes wonders if others want to hear it.

在十九世纪,科学家和哲学家想不明白无生命的东西是怎么变成有生命的。他们认为有生命的东西拥有一种神秘的生命之力。过了很长时间他们才逐渐发现生命是多种物理系统的产物,它们共同创造了生命这一奇迹。丹内特相信,关于意识,情况也是相同的。丹内特想要讲述关于意识的故事,但有时他怀疑其他人是否愿意倾听。

“The person who tells people how an effect is achieved is often resented, considered a spoilsport, a party-pooper,” he wrote, around a decade ago, in a paper called “Explaining the ‘Magic’ of Consciousness.” “If you actually manage to explain consciousness, they say, you will diminish us all, turn us into mere protein robots, mere things.” Dennett does not believe that we are “mere things.” He thinks that we have souls, but he is certain that those souls can be explained by science. If evolution built them, they can be reverse-engineered. “There ain’t no magic there,” he told me. “Just stage magic.”

“告诉人们一种效应是怎么产生的人往往被记恨,被当做扫兴的人、晚会败兴者,”大概在十年前的一篇名为“解释意识的‘神奇之处’”的论文中,他写道。“如果你真的成功解释了意识,他们会说,你就贬低了我们大家,把我们变成了蛋白质机器人,平庸的物件。”丹内特不相信我们是“平庸的物件。”他认为我们拥有灵魂,但是他确信灵魂可以被科学所解释。如果进化造就了灵魂,那它们也能被反推回去。“没有神奇的魔法,”他对我说。“只是舞台戏法罢了。”

It’s possible to give an account of Dennett’s life in which philosophy hardly figures. He is from an old Maine family. By the turn of the eighteenth century, ancestors of his had settled near the border between Maine and New Hampshire, at a spot now marked by Dennett Road. Dennett and his wife, Susan, live in North Andover, Massachusetts, a few minutes’ drive from Tufts, where Dennett co-directs the Center for Cognitive Studies. But, in 1970, they bought a two-hundred-acre farm in Blue Hill, about five hours north of Boston. The Dennetts are unusually easygoing and sociable, and they quickly became friends with the couple next door, Basil and Bertha Turner. From Basil, Dennett learned to frame a house, shingle a roof, glaze a window, build a fence, plow a field, fell a tree, butcher a hen, dig for clams, raise pigs, fish for trout, and call a square dance. “One thing about Dan—you don’t have to tell him twice,” Turner once remarked to a local mechanic. Dennett still cherishes the compliment.

要说明丹内特的生活并不困难,哲学在他的生活中并不占据显著地位。他来自缅因州的一个家庭。在18世纪时,丹内特的祖先在缅因州和新罕布什尔州的边境安定下来,今天那里被叫做丹内特路。丹内特和她的妻子苏珊生活在马萨诸塞州的北安多弗,那里距离塔夫茲大学只有几分钟车程。丹内特就是在这所学校担任心智研究中心的联席主任。但1970年代,他们在距离波士顿向北5小时车程的蓝山买了一个200英亩大的农场。丹内特一家特别容易相处且善于社交,他们很快与邻居Basil Turner、Bertha Turner两口子成为了朋友。从Basil那儿,丹内特学会了架房子、盖屋顶、装窗户、围篱笆、犁地、砍树、杀鸡、挖蛤蚌、养猪、钓鲑鱼和跳舞。“老丹这一点让我印象深刻——同样一件事,你不用教他两次,”Turner曾对当地的一位技工说。丹内特很珍视这一评价。

​In the course of a few summers, he fixed up the Blue Hill farmhouse himself, installing plumbing and electricity. Then, for many years, he suspended his academic work during the summer in order to devote himself to farming. He tended the orchard, made cider, and used a Prohibition-era still to turn the cider into Calvados. He built a blueberry press, made blueberry wine, and turned it into aquavit. “He loves to hand down word-of-mouth knowledge,” Steve Barney, a former student who has become one of the Dennetts’ many “honorary children,” says.

丹内特用了几个夏天的时间,自己建起了蓝山农舍,装好了水管和电力设施。接下来的许多年中,他为了全身心的照料农场,在夏天时暂停自己的学术研究。他照顾果园、制作苹果酒,再用一部禁酒年代的蒸馏器把苹果酒酿成苹果白兰地。他做了一个蓝莓压榨器来制作蓝莓酒,然后再酿制成白兰地。“他喜欢将知识付诸行动而不只是停留于嘴上”,Steve Barney——丹内特以前的一位学生——说道,Steve现在是丹内特许多“荣誉养子”之一。

“He taught me how to use a chain saw, how to prune an apple tree, how to fish for mackerel, how to operate a tractor, how to whittle a wooden walking stick from a single piece of wood.” Dennett is an avid sailor; in 2003, he bought a boat, trained his students to sail, and raced with them in a regatta. Dennett’s son, Peter, has worked for a tree surgeon and a fish biologist, and has been a white-water-rafting guide; his daughter, Andrea, runs an industrial-plumbing company with her husband.

“他教我怎么用链锯,怎么修剪苹果树,怎么钓马鲛鱼,怎么开拖拉机,怎么把一根木头削成拐杖。”丹内特是个狂热的航海爱好者。2003年他买了艘船,教他的学生航海,并在帆船比赛中和他们一较高下。丹内特的儿子Peter——一位树木栽培家兼鱼类生物学家——已是一位漂流指导;他的女儿Andrea同她的丈夫一起经营一家工业水管公司。

A few years ago, the Dennetts sold the farm to buy a nearby waterfront home, on Little Deer Isle. On a sunny morning this past December, fresh snow surrounded the house; where the lawn met the water, a Hobie sailboat lay awaiting spring. Dennett entered the sunlit kitchen and, using a special, broad-tined fork, carefully split an English muffin. After eating it with jam, he entered his study, a circular room on the ground floor decorated with sailboat keels of different shapes. A close friend and Little Deer Isle visitor, the philosopher and psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, had e-mailed a draft of an article for Dennett to review. The two men are similar—Humphrey helped discover blindsight, studied apes with Dian Fossey, and was, for a year, the editor of Granta — but they differ on certain points in the philosophy of consciousness. “Until I met Dan,” Humphrey told me, “I never had a philosophical hero. Then I discovered that not only was he a better philosopher than me; he was a better singer, a better dancer, a better tennis player, a better pianist. There is nothing he does not do.”

几年前,丹内特卖掉了农场,换了小鹿岛上一处河边的房子。去年12月一个阳光明媚的早上,房子被新鲜的积雪覆盖,在草坪与河水相接之处,一艘双体帆船正等着春日扬帆。丹内特走进充满阳光的厨房,用一把别致的叉子小心地切开一个英式松饼。在和着果酱吃掉小松饼后,他走进书房——一个位于一楼的装饰着不同形状帆船龙骨的圆形房间。好友兼小鹿岛镇的访客——哲学与心理学家Nicholas Humphrey电邮了一篇文章草稿给丹内特审阅。两人很相似——Humphrey帮助发现了盲视(blindsight)【译注:指一部分视觉皮层受伤的患者能够在无视觉意识的情况下对进入眼睛的刺激做出反应】,同Dian Fossey一起研究猿类,在格兰塔出版社当了一年编辑——但在意识哲学方面,他们的看法不尽相同。“直到我遇到了老丹,”Humphrey告诉我,“我从来没遇到过一位让自己倾慕的哲学英雄。然后我发现他不仅是一位比我更出色的哲学家;还是位更出色的歌手、舞者、网球手和钢琴家。他无所不能。”

Dennett annotated the paper on his computer, and then called Humphrey on his cell phone to explain that the paper was so useful because it was so wrong. “I see how I can write a reaction that is not so much a rebuttal as a rebuilding on your foundations,” he said, mischievously. “Your exploration has helped me see some crucial joints in the skeleton. I hope that doesn’t upset you!” He laughed, and invited Humphrey and his family to come over later that day.

丹内特在他的计算机上对文章做了批注,然后用手机给Humphrey打电话说文章太有用啦,因为它错的太离谱。“不过我想到了一个办法,可以让我的回应看起来不那么像一个彻底驳斥而更像在你基础上的重构,”他淘气地说道。“你的探索帮助我看清了整幅图景中的一些关键节点。我希望这不会惹恼你!”他大笑道,并邀请Humphrey一家晚些时候过来做客。

He then turned to a problem with the house. Something was wrong with the landline; it had no dial tone. The key question was whether the problem lay with the wiring inside the house or with the telephone lines outside. Picking up his walking stick and a small plastic telephone, he went out to explore. Dennett has suffered a heart attack and an aortic dissection; he is robust, but walks slowly and is sometimes short of breath. Carefully, he made his way to a little gray service box, pried it open using a multitool, and plugged in the handset. There was no dial tone; the problem was in the outside phone lines. Harrumphing, he glanced upward to locate them: another new joint in the skeleton.

然后他就去忙房子的一个小问题了。电话线有点问题,没声音了。关键疑问在于,究竟是房子里还是房子外的电线出了问题。拾起拐杖和一个塑料电话,他开始探险了。丹内特曾心脏病发作,还做了动脉手术;他很强壮但走路很慢,有时还有些气短。他小心翼翼地走到一个灰色的电话箱前,用工具撬开它然后把听筒插进去。还是没声音,看来问题出在外面的电话线上。他清了清嗓子,抬头顺着电线发现了问题所在:整副图景中的又一关键节点。

During the course of his career, Dennett has developed a way of looking at the process by which raw matter becomes functional. Some objects are mere assemblages of atoms to us, and have only a physical dimension; when we think of them, he says, we adopt a “physicalist stance”—the stance we inhabit when, using equations, we predict the direction of a tropical storm. When it comes to more sophisticated objects, which have purposes and functions, we typically adopt a “design stance.” We say that a leaf’s “purpose” is to capture energy from sunlight, and that a nut and bolt are designed to fit together. Finally, there are objects that seem to have beliefs and desires, toward which we take the “intentional stance.” If you’re playing chess with a chess computer, you don’t scrutinize the conductive properties of its circuits or contemplate the inner workings of its operating system (the physicalist and design stances, respectively); you ask how the program is thinking, what it’s planning, what it “wants” to do. These different stances capture different levels of reality, and our language reveals which one we’ve adopted. We say that proteins fold (the physicalist stance), but that eyes see (the design stance). We say that the chess computer “anticipated” our move, that the driverless car “decided” to swerve when the deer leaped into the road.

在工作中,丹内特逐渐获得了一个本事:关注原材料是如何起作用的。一些事物对我们来说仅仅是一堆原子的集合,只有物理这个维度,当我们审视它们时,丹内特说,我们采用的是“物理立场”,比如当我们用公式去预测热带风暴的走向时所采用的立场。当涉及到更加复杂精细的事物——那些有目的和功能的事物——时,我们往往采用“设计立场”。我们说一片树叶的“目的”是从阳光中获取能量,一个螺母和一个螺栓被设计成相互匹配的一对。最后,还有一类事物似乎具有信念和欲望,审视它们时我们采取“意向立场”。如果你同计算机下象棋,你不会去检查电路的导电性或是去研究操作系统内部的运行状况(也就是物理和设计立场);你会思考程序是如何思考的,它的计划是什么,它“想”干啥。这些不同的立场反映了不同层次的现实,而我们的语言揭示出我们采用的是哪一种立场。我们说蛋白质折叠(物理立场),眼睛看(设计立场)。我们说象棋程序“预测”我们的下一步棋,无人驾驶汽车“决定”急转弯以避开闯进公路的小鹿。

​Later, at a rickety antique table in the living room, Dennett taught me a word game he’d perfected called Frigatebird. Real frigate birds swoop down to steal fish from other birds; in Frigatebird, you steal words made of Scrabble tiles from your opponents. To do so, you use new letters to transform their stems: you can’t steal “march” by making “marched,” but you can do it by making “charmed.” As we played, I tried to attend to the workings of my own mind. How did I know that I could use the letters “u,” “t,” and “o” to transform Dennett’s “drain” into “duration”? I couldn’t quite catch myself in the act of figuring it out. To Dennett, this blindness reflects the fact that we take the intentional stance toward ourselves. We experience ourselves at the level of thoughts, decisions, and intentions; the machinery that generates those higher-order properties is obscured. Consciousness is defined as much by what it hides as by what it reveals. Over two evenings, while drinking gin on the rocks with a twist—a “sort of” cocktail—we played perhaps a dozen games of Frigatebird, and I lost every time. Dennett was patient and encouraging (“You’re getting the hang of it!”), even as he transformed my “quest” into “equations.”

之后,在客厅一张摇摇晃晃的古董桌边,丹内特教我玩一种文字游戏,他管游戏叫做军舰鸟。真正的军舰鸟会向下俯冲,从别的鸟嘴里偷食;在游戏里,你从对手的字母中偷来单词。你用新的字母把别人的单词变成新的单词:你不能把“march”偷过来变作“marched”,但你可以把它变成“charmed”。我们玩游戏时,我试着专注于自己的思维过程。我是怎样知道我可以用“u”、“t”和“o”来把丹内特的“drain”变成“duration”的?我发现想看清楚推理的过程几乎是不可能。对丹内特来说,这种对思维细节的无知反应了这样一个事实:我们对自己采用意向立场。我们在思考、决策、意图这个层面体验着自身,而产生这些高阶属性的机制则是面目模糊的。意识不仅被它展露的部分所定义,也同样被它隐匿的部分所定义。连着两个晚上,我们一起喝加了冰块和橘片的金酒——算是一种鸡尾酒——我们大概玩了12次军舰鸟游戏,每次我都输了。丹内特很耐心,不断鼓励我“你已经上道了”,就算在他把我的“quest”变成了“equations”时。

A running joke among people who study consciousness is that Dennett himself might be a zombie. (“Only a zombie like Dennett could write a book called ‘Consciousness Explained’ that doesn’t address consciousness at all,” the computer scientist Jaron Lanier has written.) The implicit criticism is that Dennett’s account of consciousness treats the self like a computer and reflects a disengagement from things like feeling and beauty. Dennett seems wounded by this idea. “There are those wags who insist that I was born with an impoverished mental life,” he told me. “That ain’t me! I seem to be drinking in life’s joys pretty well.”

在研究意识的学者圈子里流传着一个玩笑:可能丹内特自己就是具僵尸。(“只有丹内特那样的僵尸才会写一本名叫《意识的解释》的书,而书里根本没讲到意识”,计算机计算机科学家Jaron Lanier这样写道。)暗中嘲讽丹内特对意识的解释是把自我当成了一台计算机,忽视了例如感觉和美这样的东西。丹内特似乎被这个说法伤到了。“总有些人以为我生来就注定精神生活贫瘠,”他对我说。“当然不是啦!我非常懂得享受生活的美好。”

Dennett’s full name is Daniel Clement Dennett III. He was born in Boston in 1942. His father, Daniel C. Dennett, Jr., was a professor of Islamic history, who, during the Second World War, was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services and became a secret agent. Dennett spent his early childhood in Beirut, where his father posed as a cultural attaché at the American Embassy. In Beirut, he had a pet gazelle named Babar and learned to speak some Arabic. When he was five, his father was killed in an unexplained plane crash while on a mission in Ethiopia. In Dennett’s clearest memory of him, they’re driving through the desert in a Jeep, looking for a group of Bedouins; when they find the camp, some Bedouin women take the young Dennett aside and pierce his ears. (The scars are still visible.)

丹内特的全名是丹尼尔·克莱蒙顿·丹内特三世。他1942年出生在波士顿。他的父亲,小丹尼尔·C·丹内特是位伊斯兰史学教授,二战时被战略情报局录用,成为一名秘密特工。丹内特的童年是在贝鲁特度过的,他父亲在当地美国大使馆当文化专员。在贝鲁特,丹内特养了一只宠物羚羊,名叫Babar,并学了点阿拉伯语。他五岁时,当时正在埃塞俄比亚执行任务的父亲死于一次不明原因的空难。丹内特对父亲最清晰的记忆就是他们开吉普车穿越沙漠,寻找一群贝都因人;当时他们发现了贝都因人的营地,一些贝都因妇女将年少的丹内特带到一边给他的双耳穿洞。(伤疤如今依然可见。)

After his father’s death, Dennett returned to the Boston suburbs with his mother and his two sisters. His mother became a book editor; with some guidance from his father’s friends, Dennett became the man of the house. He had his own workshop and, aged six, used scraps of lumber to build a small table and chair for his Winnie-the-Pooh. As he fell asleep, he would listen to his mother play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Prelude No. 6 in E-Flat Major. Today, the piece moves him to tears—“I’ve tried to master it,” he says, “but I could never play it as well as she could.” For a while, Dennett made money playing jazz piano in bars. He also plays the guitar, the acoustic bass, the recorder, and the accordion, and can still sing the a-cappella tunes he learned, in his twenties, as a member of the Boston Saengerfest Men’s Chorus.

在父亲死后,丹内特同母亲和两个姐姐返回了波士顿郊区。他母亲成了图书编辑;而在父亲朋友的指导下,丹内特成了家中的男子汉。他有了自己的工作间,并在六岁时用剩余木料做了一套小桌椅给他的维尼熊。合夜入睡,他会听妈妈弹奏降E大调的拉赫玛尼诺夫前奏曲。如今,这段乐曲仍会让丹内特感动落泪。“我试着掌握这首曲子,”他说,“但始终无法弹得跟她一样好。”有一段时间,丹内特在酒吧弹奏爵士钢琴挣钱。他还会玩吉他、大贝斯、八孔直笛和手风琴,至今他仍能演唱二十多岁时在波士顿男声合唱团学会的无伴奏清唱。

As a Harvard undergraduate, Dennett wanted to be an artist. He pursued painting, then switched to sculpture; when he met Susan, he told her that she had nice shoulders and asked if she would model for him. (She declined, but they were married two years later.) A photograph taken in 1963, when Dennett was a graduate student, shows him trim and shirtless in a courtyard in Athens, smoking a pipe as he works a block of marble. Although he succeeded in exhibiting some sculptures in galleries, he decided that he wasn’t brilliant enough to make a career in art. Still, he continued to sculpt, throw pots, build furniture, and whittle. His whittlings are finely detailed; most are meant to be handled. A life-size wooden apple comes apart, in cross-sections, to reveal a detailed stem and core; a fist-size nut and bolt turn smoothly on minute, perfectly made threads. (Billed as “haptic sculptures,” the whittles are currently on display at Underdonk, a gallery in Brooklyn.)

作为哈佛大学的本科生,丹内特曾想成为一名艺术家。他学过画画,然后转向雕塑;当时他遇见了苏珊,他对她说她的肩膀很漂亮并问她是否愿意当他的模特。(她拒绝了,但两年后他们结为夫妻。)一张1963年的照片上,还是研究生的丹内特身材瘦削,光着膀子站在雅典的一处庭院中,抽着烟斗雕刻大理石。尽管他成功地让自己的一些雕塑作品在艺术馆中展出,他还是认为自己天赋不够吃这碗饭。不过他并没有中断雕塑、制陶、做家具和做木工。他的木工活很细致,大部分本来是打算做来卖钱的。一个真实大小的木苹果沿纵切面分开,展现出叶柄和苹果核的细节;一组拳头大小的螺母和螺栓严丝合缝,螺纹雕得精细完美。(这些木雕作品现在正在布鲁克林的Underdonk艺术馆展出,标签是“触感雕塑”。)

Dennett studied philosophy as an undergraduate with W. V. O. Quine, the Harvard logician. His scientific awakening came later, when he was a graduate student at Oxford. With a few classmates, he found himself debating what happens when your arm falls asleep. The others were discussing the problem in abstract, philosophical terms—“sensation,” “perception,” and the like—which struck Dennett as odd. Two decades earlier, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, Dennett’s dissertation adviser, had coined the phrase “the ghost in the machine” to mock the theory, associated with René Descartes, that our physical bodies are controlled by immaterial souls. The other students were talking about the ghost; Dennett wanted to study the machine. He began teaching himself neuroscience the next day. Later, with the help of various academic friends and neighbors, Dennett learned about psychology, computer programming, linguistics, and artificial intelligence—the disciplines that came to form cognitive science.

本科时,丹内特跟随哈佛逻辑学家奎因学习哲学。他对科学的觉醒来得迟些,在他就读牛津研究生时。当时他正同几位同学争论“当你的手臂睡着时发生了什么”。其他人都抽象地谈论这个问题,使用“感官”、“知觉”之类的哲学术语——这让丹内特显得格格不入。再早二十多年,丹内特的毕业论文指导老师,哲学家Gilbet Ryle曾发明了“机器中的鬼魂”这个短语来嘲笑笛卡尔式的二元论,即我们的物理身躯是由非物质的灵魂操控的。其他同学都在讨论鬼魂,而丹内特想要研究机器。第二天他便开始自学神经科学。之后又在多位学术伙伴和同仁的帮助下学习了心理学、计算机编程、语言学和人工智能——这些正是认知科学的支柱。

​One of Dennett’s early collaborators was Douglas Hofstadter, the polymath genius whose book about the mind, “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,” became an unlikely best-seller in 1979. “When he was young, he played the philosophy game very strictly,” Hofstadter said of Dennett. “He studied the analytic philosophers and the Continental philosophers and wrote pieces that responded to them in the traditional way. But then he started deviating from the standard pathway. He became much more informed by science than many of his colleagues, and he grew very frustrated with the constant, prevalent belief among them in such things as zombies. These things started to annoy him, and he started writing piece after piece to try to destroy the myths that he considered these to be—the religious residues of dualism.”

侯世达(Douglas Hofstadter)是丹内特合作伙伴中的一位,这位博学天才的著作《哥德尔、艾舍尔、巴赫书:集异璧之大成》在1979年成为了畅销书中的黑马。“他年轻时研习哲学的方式非常严格,”侯世达这样评价丹内特。“他研究分析哲学家和欧陆哲学家,并用传统的方式写文章回应他们。但之后他逐渐离开了这条标准路线。比起他的同事,他从科学中汲取更多信息,他对同事中流行的对诸如僵尸理论这种东西的顽固执迷感到失望。这些东西开始让他感到烦恼,他开始一篇接一篇的写文章试图瓦解这些他心目中的二元论宗教残余。”

Arguments, Dennett found, rarely shift intuitions; it’s through stories that we revise our sense of what’s natural. (He calls such stories “intuition pumps.”) In 1978, he published a short story called “Where Am I?,” in which a philosopher, also named Daniel Dennett, is asked to volunteer for a dangerous mission to disarm an experimental nuclear warhead. The warhead, which is buried beneath Tulsa, Oklahoma, emits a kind of radiation that’s safe for the body but lethal to the brain. Government scientists decide on a radical plan: they separate Dennett’s brain from his body, using radio transmitters implanted in his skull to allow the brain, which is stored in a vat in Houston, to control the body as it approaches the warhead. “Think of it as a mere stretching of the nerves,” the scientists say. “If your brain were just moved over an inch in your skull, that would not alter or impair your mind. We’re simply going to make the nerves indefinitely elastic by splicing radio links into them.”

丹内特发现争论很少能改变直觉;直觉的改变是通过用故事来修订我们对“什么是自然”的感觉来完成的。(他把这些故事叫做“直觉泵”。)1978年时,他发表了一个名叫“我在哪里?”的小故事,故事中一位同样叫丹内特的哲学家被要求自愿执行一项危险的任务:拆卸一枚试验核弹头。弹头埋在俄克拉荷马的Tulsa镇,放射出的射线对身体无害却对大脑致命。政府的科学家们决定采用一个激进的办法:他们把丹内特的脑子和身体分开,在颅骨中植入无线电发射器以便让大脑控制身体接近弹头,而大脑则安置在休斯顿的一个缸子子里。“这就好比只是把神经给拉长了,”科学家们说。“如果你的大脑只是在头盖骨中移动了一英寸,这并不会改变或损害到你的意识。我们只是通过安装无线电接头让你的神经变得具有无限延展性罢了。”

After the surgery, Dennett is led into the brain-support lab:

在手术过后,丹内特被带到大脑维持实验室:

I peered through the glass. There, floating in what looked like ginger ale, was undeniably a human brain, though it was almost covered with printed circuit chips, plastic tubules, electrodes, and other paraphernalia… . I thought to myself: “Well, here I am sitting on a folding chair, staring through a piece of plate glass at my own brain… . But wait,” I said to myself, “shouldn’t I have thought, ‘Here I am, suspended in a bubbling fluid, being stared at by my own eyes’?” … . I tried and tried to think myself into the vat, but to no avail.

我透过玻璃看到,在类似于姜汁啤酒的液体中漂浮着的无疑是一颗人类的大脑,虽然上面铺满了印刷电路芯片、塑料管、电极和其他装置……我想:“好吧,我坐在一张折叠椅上,透过一块玻璃凝视我自己的大脑……等等,”我对自己说,“我应该拥有思维吗,‘我在这,悬浮在这冒泡的液体中,被自己的眼睛凝视着’?……我极力尝试想象自己正处于缸中,但失败了。”

Toward the end of the story, the radio equipment malfunctions, and Dennett’s point of view is instantly relocated. It is “an impressive demonstration of the immateriality of the soul, based on physicalist principles and premises,” he writes, “for as the last radio signal between Tulsa and Houston died away, had I not changed location from Tulsa to Houston at the speed of light?” The story contains only neurons and machines, and is entirely materialist; even so, it shows that you aren’t situated “in” your brain the same way you’re situated “in” a room. It also suggests that the intuitions upon which philosophers so confidently rely are actually illusions created by an elaborate system of machinery.

在故事快结束时,无线电装置出问题了,丹内特的视角被瞬间转换。这是“一个对灵魂非物质性的精彩展示,作为根基的原则和前提则是物理的,”他写道,“当Tulsa和休斯顿之间最后的无线电信号中断时,我难道不是以光速从Tulsa到达了休斯顿吗?”这个故事只包含了神经元和机器,是彻头彻尾的物质主义;尽管如此,它展示了你并不是坐落于你的大脑“里面”,至少不是像坐落在一个房间“里面”那样。它同样暗示出哲学家们如此深信的直觉实际是被复杂精巧的机械系统所创造的幻觉。

Only rarely do cracks in the illusion of consciousness appear through which one might see the machinery at work. Proust inspected the state between sleep and wakefulness. Coleridge experimented with mind-altering drugs. Neuroscientists examine minds compromised by brain injury. Dennett’s approach has been to look back into evolutionary history. In the minds of other animals, even insects, Dennett believes, we can see the functional components upon which our selfhood depends. We can also see the qualities we value most in human selfhood in “sort of” form. Even free will, he thinks, evolves over evolutionary time. Your amygdala, the part of the brain that registers fear, may not be free in any meaningful sense—it’s effectively a robot—but it endows the mind to which it belongs with the ability to avoid danger. In this way, the winding path leads from determinism to freedom, too: “A whole can be freer than its parts.”

只有在很少的时候意识中的幻觉才漏出破绽,通过这些破绽,我们可以发现运行着的机械。普鲁斯特考察了介于睡眠和清醒之间的状态。柯勒律治尝试过改变心智的药物。神经科学家考察过大脑受损后的心智。丹内特的方法则是追溯进化的历史。丹内特相信,在其他动物——哪怕是昆虫——的心智中,我们可以发现那些构成我们自我意识的功能部件。我们也会发现那些我们最为珍视的人类自我特质也“部分的”成型。甚至自由意志,他认为,也是在漫长的进化中逐渐发展而来的。你脑中掌管恐惧的杏仁核,在任何意义上都无法被视作是自由的——它是个有效率的机器——但它赋予了它所属的心智以逃避危险的能力。也是通过这种方式,从决定论出发的蜿蜒小径才最终引向了自由:“整体可以比局部更自由。”

Along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens, Dennett is often cited as one of the “four horsemen of the New Atheism.” In a 2006 book called “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” he argued that religion ought to be studied rather than practiced. Recently, with the researcher Linda LaScola, he published “Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind,” a book of interviews with clergypeople who have lost their faith. He can be haughty in his dismissal of religion. A few years ago, while he was recovering from his aortic dissection, he wrote an essay called “Thank Goodness,” in which he chastised well-wishers for saying “Thank God.” (He urged them, instead, to thank “goodness,” as embodied by the doctors, nurses, and scientists who were “genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive.”)

与理查德·道金斯、山姆·哈里斯和已过世的克里斯托弗·希钦斯一起,丹内特常常被誉为“新无神论四骑士”之一。在2006年出版的《破除魔咒:作为一种自然现象的宗教》中,他提出宗教应该被研究而不是被实践。最近,他同研究员Linda LaScola一同发布了新书《布道场边的对话:不再信仰》,书中收录了对那些失去信仰的神职人员的采访。在选择不信教这点上,他可能相当自大。几年前,他正从动脉手术中逐渐恢复,当时他写了篇名为《Thank Goodness》的文章,他在其中指责善男信女们把“Thank God”挂在嘴边。(他劝他们改谢“goodness”,因为医生、护士和科学家们“才是让我活下来的真正原因。”)

​Yet Dennett is also comfortable with religion—even, in some ways, nostalgic for it. Like his wife, he was brought up as a Congregationalist, and although he never believed in God, he enjoyed going to church. For much of his life, Dennett has sung sacred music in choirs (he gets misty-eyed when he recalls singing Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion”). He and Susan tried sending their children to Sunday school, so that they could enjoy the music, sermons, and Bible stories, but it didn’t take. Dennett’s sister Cynthia is a minister: “A saintly person,” Dennett says, admiringly, “who’s a little annoyed by her little brother.”

当然丹内特与宗教也相处愉快——甚至对宗教有着某种感怀。同他的妻子一样,他从小被当作公理会教徒养育,虽然从来不信上帝,但他喜欢去教堂。他人生中的许多时间都在唱诗班歌唱圣歌(当他回想起演唱巴赫“马太受难曲”的经历时,双眼湿润了)。他和苏珊曾想过把孩子送去主日学校,这样他们就能欣赏到音乐、布道和圣经故事,但最终没有成行。丹内特的姐姐Cynthia是一位牧师,“一位圣人,”丹内特钦佩地讲,“对我这个弟弟有些不快。”

The materialist world view is often associated with despair. In “Anna Karenina,” Konstantin Levin, the novel’s hero, stares into the night sky, reflects upon his brief, bubblelike existence in an infinite and indifferent universe, and contemplates suicide. For Dennett, however, materialism is spiritually satisfying. In a 1995 book called “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” he asks, “How long did it take Johann Sebastian Bach to create the ‘St. Matthew Passion’?” Bach, he notes, had to live for forty-two years before he could begin writing it, and he drew on two thousand years of Christianity—indeed, on all of human culture. The subsystems of his mind had been evolving for even longer; creating Homo sapiens, Dennett writes, required “billions of years of irreplaceable design work”—performed not by God, of course, but by natural selection.

物质主义世界观常常被认为伴随着绝望。小说《安娜·卡列尼娜》中的英雄列文凝视夜空,审视自己的信念,在无限而冷漠的宇宙中如同泡影般的存在,头脑中浮现出自杀的念头。然而对丹内特而言,物质主义却让人精神满足。在他1995年的著作《达尔文的危险观念》中,他发问“巴赫创作马太受难曲花了多长时间?”巴赫,他写道,活了42年才开始曲子的创作,而他是从两千年的基督教历史——实际上,是从整个人类文化中汲取的营养。他心智中的各个子系统则经历了更长时间的进化;智人的出现,丹内特写道,更是需要“数十亿年无可替代的设计成果”——当然,设计者不是上帝,而是自然选择。

“Darwin’s dangerous idea,” Dennett writes, is that Bach’s music, Christianity, human culture, the human mind, and Homo sapiens “all exist as fruits of a single tree, the Tree of Life,” which “created itself, not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly.” He asks, “Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not.” But, he says, it is “greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail… . I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.”

“达尔文的危险观念,”丹内特写道,指的是巴赫的音乐、基督教、人类文化、人类的心智和智人都是“生命之树上的果实,是漫长自我演化的结果,而不是来自神奇的一瞬。”他诘问道,“这棵生命之树是人们能够去崇拜的上帝吗,能听见人们的祷告吗,需要去害怕吗?恐怕都不是。”但他说,它“比我们任何人能够富有细节地想象的任何东西都更伟大【编注:丹内特这里的意思大约是:许多听起来非常伟大神圣的东西其实只是些空洞的概念,你无法为它们填补细节,而一旦你这么尝试了,它们就立即显得平庸而不那么伟大了,相反,生命之树却不是,它充满着精彩的细节,而且你越是深入细节,越能体会到其伟大。】……我不能向它祈祷,但我能够赞美它的宏伟。这个世界是神圣的。”

Almost every December for the past forty years, the Dennetts have held a black-tie Christmas-carolling party at their home. This year, snow was falling as the guests arrived; the airy modern shingle-style house was decorated like a Yuletide bed-and-breakfast, with toy soldiers on parade. In the kitchen, a small robotic dog-on-wheels named Tati huddled nonfunctionally; the living-room bookshelf displayed a set of Dennett-made Russian dolls—Descartes on the outside, a ghost in the middle, and a robot inside the ghost.

过去四十年,几乎每个十二月丹内特都会在家举办正装圣诞欢乐派对。今年,客人们随着飘落的雪花纷至沓来;装潢现代轻快的房子被装饰得像一家连锁旅店,室内摆满了玩具士兵。厨房里,一只叫Tati的小机器狗坏了躺在地上;客厅里的书架上陈列着丹内特自制的俄罗斯套娃——最外面是笛卡尔,中间是幽灵,最里面是个机器人。

Dennett, dapper in his tuxedo, mingled with the guests. With a bearded, ponytailed postdoc, he considered some mysteries of monkey consciousness; with his silver-haired neighbors, many of whom had attended the party annually since 1976, he discussed the Patriots and the finer points of apple brandy. After a potluck dinner, he called everyone over to the piano, where Mark DeVoto, a retired music professor, was noodling on “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” From piles on a Dennett-built coffee table, Dennett and his wife distributed homemade books of Christmas carols.

丹内特穿着他的无尾礼服与客人们招呼交谈。跟一位留着胡须、扎着马尾辫的博士后,他探讨了猴子意识的神秘;跟他的那些从1976年便每年都会如约而至的满头银发的邻居们,他讨论了爱国主义和苹果白兰地。在享用了百乐晚餐后,他把大家叫到一架钢琴边,退休音乐教授Mark DeVoto即兴表演了《来吧,赞美信仰》。丹内特和妻子从他自制的咖啡桌上拿起一叠圣诞颂歌集分发给大家,歌集是丹内特家手工制作的。

“Hello!” Dennett said. “Are we ready?” Surrounded by friends, he was grinning from ear to ear. “Let’s go. We’ll start with ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful.’ First verse in English, second in Latin!”

“注意了!”丹内特说道,“大家准备好了吗?”被朋友们包围的丹内特笑开了花。“来吧,让我们高唱《来吧,赞美信仰》,第一节用英语,第二节用拉丁语。”

Earlier, I’d asked Susan Dennett how their atheism would shape their carol-singing. “When we get to the parts about the Virgin, we sometimes sing with our eyebrows raised,” she said. In the event, their performance was unironic. Dennett, a brave soloist, sang beautifully, then apologized for his voice. The most arresting carol was a tune called “O Hearken Ye.” Dennett sang the words “Gloria, gloria / In excelsis Deo” with great seriousness, his hands at his sides, his eyes faraway. When the carol faded into an appreciative silence, he sighed and said, “Now, that’s a beautiful hymn.”

早些时候,我问过苏珊,无神论信仰会影响你们唱颂歌吗?“当我们唱到圣母玛利亚时,有时会扬起眉毛。”她这样回答。这次聚会上,他们的表现并不讽刺。丹内特这个勇敢的独唱者,唱得非常好,却为他的声音道歉。颂歌中最吸引人的部分是一段名为“你们听啊”的段落,丹内特唱“荣耀属于主”时非常认真,他把手放在两边,目视远方。当颂歌结束,房间里安静下来,他叹息着说“真是美丽的旋律。”

Dennett has a philosophical arch-nemesis: an Australian named David Chalmers. Chalmers, who teaches at N.Y.U. and at the Australian National University, believes that Dennett only “sort of” understands consciousness. In his view, Dennett’s theories don’t adequately explain subjective experience or why there is an inner life in the first place.

丹内特有个哲学死敌:一位名叫大卫·查默斯的澳大利亚人。查默斯在纽约大学和澳大利亚国立大学任教,他相信丹内特只能算“以某种方式”理解了意识。在他看来,丹内特的理论没有充分解释主观经验,或者说,为什么我们会有内心体验。

Chalmers and Dennett are as different as two philosophers of mind can be. Chalmers wears a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt. He believes in the zombie problem and is the lead singer of a consciousness-themed rock band that performs a song called “The Zombie Blues.” (“I act like you act, I do what you do… . / What consciousness is, I ain’t got a clue / I got the Zombie Blues.”) In his most important book, “The Conscious Mind,” published in 1996, Chalmers accused Dennett and the physicalists of focussing on the “easy problems” of consciousness—questions about the workings of neurons or other cognitive systems—while ignoring the “hard problem.” In a formulation he likes: “How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?” Since then, the “hard problem” has been a rallying cry for those philosophers who think that Dennett’s view of the mind is incomplete.

同为关注心智的哲学家,查默斯和丹内特却大为不同。查默斯穿着黑色T恤,外面套一件黑色皮衣。他相信僵尸问题,还是一支以意识为主题的摇滚乐队主唱。乐队有首歌就叫《僵尸的忧伤》。(“我像你一样行,像你一样做……/ 意识是什么,我不懂/ 我有僵尸的忧伤。”)在他1996年出版的最重要著作《有意识的心智》中,查默斯指责丹内特和物理主义者只关注有关意识的简单问题——神经元和其他认知系统的运作——却忽视那些“困难问题”。他喜欢这个表达:“用大脑的水怎么酿出意识的酒?”之后,“困难问题”就变成战斗号角,用于号召那些认为丹内特对心智的看法并不完整的哲学家。

​Consider your laptop. It’s processing information but isn’t having experiences. Now, suppose that every year your laptop gets smarter. A few years from now, it may, like I.B.M.’s Watson, win “Jeopardy!” Soon afterward, it may have meaningful conversations with you, like the smartphone voiced by Scarlett Johansson in “Her.” Johansson’s character is conscious: you can fall in love with her, and she with you. There’s a soul in that phone. But how did it get there? How was the inner space of consciousness opened up within the circuits and code? This is the hard problem. Dennett regards it, too, as a philosopher’s fantasy. Chalmers thinks that, at present, it is insurmountable. If it’s easy for you to imagine a conscious robot, then you probably side with Dennett. If it’s easier to imagine a robot that only seems conscious, you’re probably with Chalmers.

想想你的笔记本计算机。它处理信息但没有经验。现在,假设每一年你的笔记本都在变聪明。几年之后它可能会像IBM的人工智能“沃森”一样,赢得问答比赛;然后它会像斯嘉丽在电影《她》中所配音的智能手机一样,同你进行有意义的聊天。斯嘉丽的角色是有意识的,你可能爱上她,她也可能爱上你。那部手机中存在灵魂。但那是怎样发展出来的呢?意识空间是如何在电路和程序编码中展开的呢?这便是那个困难问题。丹内特认为这个问题也不过是哲学家的幻想。查默斯认为当前这个问题是无法逾越的。如果想象一个有意识的机器人对你来说很容易,那你有可能站在丹内特这边。如果你更容易想象一个只是看起来有意识的机器人,那你大概站在查默斯这边。

A few years ago, a Russian venture capitalist named Dmitry Volkov organized a showdown between Dennett and Chalmers near Disko Island, off the west coast of Greenland. Before making a fortune investing in Shazam and in the Russian version of PayPal, Volkov was a graduate student in philosophy at Moscow State University, where he wrote a dissertation on Dennett’s work. Now he chartered a hundred-and-sixty-eight-foot schooner, the S/V Rembrandt van Rijn, and invited Dennett, Chalmers, and eighteen other philosophers on a weeklong cruise, along with ten graduate students. Most of the professional philosophers were materialists, like Dennett, but the graduate students were uncommitted. Dennett and Chalmers would compete for their allegiance.

几年前,一位俄罗斯风投资本家Dmitry Volkov曾在离格陵兰西海岸不远的迪斯科岛组织过一次丹内特和查默斯的对决。在投资手机应用Shazam和俄罗斯版的PayPal并大赚一笔前,Volkov是莫斯科国立大学哲学系的一名研究生,当时他曾写过一篇关于丹内特作品的论文。现在他是一百六十八英尺长的三桅帆船伦勃朗号的主人,邀请了丹内特、查莫斯和其他18位哲学家共赴一周的海上旅行,同行的还有10位研究生。大部分哲学家同丹内特一样都是物质主义者,研究生们的学术立场则尚未确定。丹内特和查默斯将为赢得他们的支持而相互竞争。

In June, when the Arctic sun never sets, the lowlands of Disko are covered with flowering angelica. The philosophers piled into inflatable boats to explore the fjords and the tundra. The year before, in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Dennett had published a paper called “The Mystery of David Chalmers,” in which he proposed seven reasons for Chalmers’s resistance to his views, among them a fear of death and a pointless desire to “pursue exhaustively nuanced analyses of our intuitions.” This had annoyed Chalmers, but on the cruise the two philosophers were still able to marvel, companionably, at the landscape’s alien beauty. Later, everyone gathered in the Rembrandt’s spacious galley, where Volkov, a slim, voluble man in sailor’s stripes, presided over an intellectual round-robin. Each philosopher gave a talk summarizing another’s work; afterward, the philosopher who had been summarized responded and took questions.

六月,北极圈的太阳终日位于地平线以上,迪斯科岛的低陆地区开满了白芷花。哲学家们坐上气垫船,游览峡湾和苔原。一年以前,在《意识研究》杂志上,丹内特曾发表了一篇题为《大卫·查默斯之谜》的文章,提出了查默斯之所以抗拒他的观点的七个原因,其中包括对死亡的恐惧和穷其一生追求对我们直觉的解析这样一种无聊欲望。这激怒了查莫斯,不过在海上航行中,两位哲学家还是能够愉快相处,对眼前的异域风景同声赞叹。之后大家聚集到伦勃朗号那宽敞的画廊里,瘦削但健谈的Volkov主持了接下来的智力循环赛。每位哲学家对另一位哲学家的作品进行总结,然后后者做出回应并接受提问。

Andy Clark, a lean Scottish philosopher with a punk shock of pink hair, summarized Dennett’s views. He wore a T-shirt depicting a peacock with a tail made of screwdrivers, wrenches, and other tools. “It obviously looks like something quite colorful and full of complexity and ‘peacockness,’ ” he said. “But, if you look more closely, that complexity is actually built out of a number of little devices.”

安迪·克拉克,一位顶着粉色朋克头发,身材清瘦的苏格兰哲学家总结了丹内特的观点。他穿的T恤上印着一只孔雀,孔雀的尾巴由螺丝刀、扳手和其他工具拼成。“就像色彩斑斓又充满复杂性的孔雀尾巴,”他说道,“但当你近距离观察,这种复杂性其实是由无数小工具拼凑而成的。”

“A Swiss Army peacock!” Dennett rumbled, approvingly. He was in his element: he loves parties, materialism, and the sea.

“瑞士军刀孔雀!”丹内特赞许地叫道。他置身于他的所爱之中:聚会、物质主义和大海。

After the introduction and summarizing part was over, Chalmers, carrying a can of Palm Belgian ale, walked to the front of the room and began his remarks. Neurobiological explanations of consciousness focus on brain functions, he said. But, “when it comes to explaining consciousness, one needs to explain more than the functions. There are introspective data—data about what it’s like to be a conscious subject, what it’s like experiencing now and hearing now, what it’s like to have an emotion or to hear music.” He continued, “There are some people, like Dan Dennett, who think that all we need to explain is the functions… . Many people find that this is not taking consciousness seriously.” Lately, he said, he had been gravitating toward “pan-proto-psychism”—the idea that consciousness might be “a fundamental property of the universe” upon which the brain somehow draws. It was a strange idea, but, then, consciousness was strange.

在介绍和总结部分结束后,查默斯手持一罐比利时啤酒走到房间前面开始了他的评述。对意识的神经生物学解释专注于大脑的功能,他说道。但“当你解释意识时,光说功能是不够的。这里面还涉及内省的数据——关于成为一个有意识的主体是何种感觉的数据,体验当下听我讲话是何种感觉,拥有情绪和聆听音乐是何种感觉。”他继续讲道,“有些人,比如丹内特,认为我们只需要解释功能……许多人发现这是没有认真对待意识。”之后,他说,他被“万物有灵论(pan-proto-psychism)”所吸引,该理论认为意识也许是“宇宙的基本属性”,而大脑利用了这一属性。这是个奇特的理论,不过,话说回来,意识就是奇特的。

Andy Clark was the first to respond. “You didn’t actually give us any positives for pan-psychism,” he said. “It was kind of the counsel of despair.”

安迪·克拉克首先回应。“你并没有给出任何实际证据来支持万物有灵论,”他说道,“感觉像是绝望后的无奈之说。”

Jesse Prinz, a blue-haired philosopher from cuny, seemed almost enraged. “Positing dualism leads to no further insights and discoveries!” he said.

来自纽约市立大学,有着一头蓝色头发的哲学家杰西·普林茨几乎被激怒了。“诉诸二元论无法带来进一步的洞见和发现!”他说。

Calmly, nursing his beer, Chalmers responded to his critics. He said that he could make a positive case for pan-proto-psychism, pointed out that his position wasn’t necessarily antimaterialist (a pan-psychic force could be perfectly material, like electromagnetism), and declared that he was all in favor of more neuroscientific research.

查默斯喝着啤酒,平静地回应对他的质疑。他说他可以就万物有灵给出正面支持,指出他的观点并不一定同物质主义相悖(心灵之力完全可以是物质的,就像电磁场),并声明他欢迎更多的神经科学研究。

Dennett had lurked off to the side, stolid and silent, but he now launched into an argument about perspective. He told Chalmers that there didn’t have to be a hard boundary between third-person explanations and first-person experience—between, as it were, the description of the sugar molecule and the taste of sweetness. Why couldn’t one see oneself as taking two different stances toward a single phenomenon? It was possible, he said, to be “neutral about the metaphysical status of the data.” From the outside, it looks like neurons; from the inside, it feels like consciousness. Problem solved.

丹内特本来在一旁沉默不语,但此刻他加入到关于视角的辩论中。他告诉查默斯,第三人称解释和第一人称经验之间并不一定有严格的界限,就像对糖分子的描述和对甜味的感知(并无实质分别)一样。为何我们不可以把它看成是采取两种不同立场来审视同一个现象呢?这是可能的啊,他说,“对数据的形而上状态保持中立”。从外部看来,是神经活动;从内部看来,是意识体验。问题解决!

Chalmers was unconvinced. Pacing up and down the galley, he insisted that “merely cataloguing the third-person data” could not explain the existence of a first-person point of view.

查默斯未被说服。在画廊里来回踱步,他仍坚持“仅仅对第三人称数据归类”不能解释第一人称视角的存在。

Dennett sighed and, leaning against the wall, weighed his words. “I don’t see why it isn’t an embarrassment to your view,” he said, “that you can’t name a kind of experiment that would get at ‘first-personal data,’ or ‘experiences.’ That’s all I ask—give me a single example of a scientifically respectable experiment!”

丹内特靠在墙上叹了口气,斟酌自己的语言。“我不知道怎样才能不对你的观点感到尴尬,”他说,“你举不出能得到‘第一人称数据’或‘体验’的实验。我只需要你给我这样一个在科学上站得住脚的实验!”

​“There are any number of experiments!” Chalmers said, heatedly. When the argument devolved into a debate about different kinds of experimental setups, Dennett said, “I think maybe this session is over, don’t you? It’s time to go to the bar!” He looked to Chalmers, who smiled.

“这样的实验有很多啊!”查默斯激烈地回应。然后讨论就演变成对不同实验设定的争论,丹内特说,“我觉得咱们先告一段落吧,你说呢?是时候去酒吧喝一杯了!”他看向查默斯,后者报以微笑。

Among the professional philosophers, Dennett seemed to have won a narrow victory. But a survey conducted at the end of the cruise found that most of the grad students had joined Team Chalmers. Volkov conjectured that for many people, especially those who are new to philosophy, “it’s the question of the soul that’s driving their opinions. It’s the value of human life. It’s the question of the special position of humans in the world, in the universe.”

在哲学教授那里,丹内特似乎以微小优势得胜了。但航行结束后的调查显示大部分研究生加入了查默斯阵营。Volkov猜想对许多人,尤其是那些刚刚接触哲学的人来说,“正是对灵魂的好奇,人生的价值,人类在世界、宇宙中的独特位置这样的问题驱动着他们的观点。”

Despite his affability, Dennett sometimes expresses a weary frustration with the immovable intuitions of the people he is trying to convince. “You shouldn’t trust your intuitions,” he told the philosophers on the Rembrandt. “Conceivability or inconceivability is a life’s work—it’s not something where you just screw up your head for a second!” He feels that Darwin’s central lesson—that everything in biology is gradual; that it arrives “not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly”—is too easily swept aside by our categorical habits of mind. It could be that he is struggling with the nature of language, which imposes a hierarchical clarity upon the world that’s powerful but sometimes false. It could also be that he is wrong. For him, the struggle—a Darwinian struggle, at the level of ideas—continues. “I have devoted half a century, my entire academic life, to the project, in a dozen books and hundreds of articles tackling various pieces of the puzzle, without managing to move all that many readers from wary agnosticism to calm conviction,” he writes, in “From Bacteria to Bach and Back.” “Undaunted, I am trying once again.”

尽管丹内特平易近人,但有时他会流露出对自己说服对象的顽固直觉的倦怠与失望。“你不应该相信你的直觉,”他对伦勃朗号上的哲学家们说。“可以想象或无法想象,那是一辈子的功课,不是你扳动脑中某个开关就能一下子搞定的。”他感觉达尔文的核心教诲——生物学上的事都是渐进的;“不是奇迹般的一瞬间,而是慢慢、慢慢地”——太容易就会被我们头脑的分类习惯扫到一边。也许他正在同语言的自然倾向做斗争,这种倾向给世界赋予一个清晰分明的层次结构,这十分高效但有时会犯错。也有可能他自己是错的。对他来说,这斗争——一场观念之间的达尔文式斗争——还在继续。“我把我半个世纪的学术生命全都献给了这件事,写下了十几本书和数百篇文章来从不同方面向这个难题进发,但并未成功地把多少读者从谨慎的不可知论者转化成冷静的确信者,”他在新书《From Bacteria to Bach and Back》中这样写道。“我将再勇敢地尝试一次。”

For many years, I took Chalmers’s side in this dispute. I read Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained,” but I felt that something crucial was missing. I couldn’t understand how neurons—even billions of neurons—could generate the experience of being me. Terrence Deacon, an anthropologist who writes about consciousness and neuroscience, refers to “the Cartesian wound that separated mind from body at the birth of modern science.” For a long time, not even the profoundly informed arguments that Dennett advanced proved capable of healing that wound.

多年来,我站在查默斯这边。我读了丹内特的《意识的解释》,但是感觉一些关键点被遗漏了。我无法理解神经元——哪怕是好几十亿的神经元——怎么能生成我的体验。特伦斯•迪肯,一位探讨意识和神经科学的人类学家将这种疑惑形容为“笛卡尔的身心二元论在现代科学诞生伊始便为它留下了创伤。”相当长的一段时间里,即便是丹内特提出的深刻而丰富的论述也无力治愈这个伤口。

Then, late last year, my mother had a catastrophic stroke. It devastated the left side of her brain, wrecking her parietal and temporal lobes and Broca’s area—parts of the brain that are involved in the emotions, the senses, memory, and speech. My mother now appears to be living in an eternal present. She can say only two words, “water” and “time.” She is present in the room—she looks me in the eye—but is capable of only fleeting recognition; she knows only that I am someone she should recognize. She grasps the world, but lightly.

就在去年,我妈妈有一次严重的中风,破坏了她的左脑,损伤了她的顶叶和颞叶以及布洛卡区——大脑中负责情绪、感觉、记忆和话语的部分。我的妈妈现在好像生活在永恒的当下。她只能说“水”和“时间”这两个词。她在房间里——用眼睛看着我——但认知转瞬即逝;她仅仅知道我是某个她应当认识的人。她仍能感知世界,但程度已十分微弱。

As I spent time with my mother, I found that my intuitions were shifting to Dennett’s side of the field. It seems natural to say that she “sort of” thinks, knows, cares, remembers, and understands, and that she is “sort of” conscious. It seems obvious that there is no “light switch” for consciousness: she is present and absent in different ways, depending on which of her subsystems are functioning. I still can’t quite picture how neurons create consciousness. But, perhaps because I can take a stance toward my mother that I can’t take toward myself, my belief in the “hard problem” has dissolved. On an almost visceral level, I find it easier to accept the reality of the material mind. I have moved from agnosticism to calm conviction.

随着我与母亲共度时光,我发现自己的直觉正滑向丹内特这一边。说她“部分地”思考、关注、记忆和理解,“部分地”拥有意识,似乎变得自然起来。似乎明显并不存在一个“意识开关”:在不同意义上,她既存在又缺席,取决于她的哪些子系统正在运作。我仍然无法很好地想象神经元是如何创造意识的。但也许是因为我能够对母亲采取一种我没办法对自己采取的立场,我对“困难问题”的坚信消解了。几乎可以发自肺腑地说,接受心智是物质的这一现实对我来说更加容易。我从一个不可知论者转变成了冷静的确信者。

On a morning this past winter, Dennett sat in an armchair in his Maine living room. The sky and the water were blue and bright. He’d acquired two copies of the Ellsworth American, the local newspaper; later, he and Susan would sit by the fireplace and compete to see who could finish the crossword first. In the meantime, he was thinking about the nature of understanding. He recalled a time, many years ago, when he found himself lecturing a group of physicists. He showed them a slide that read “\(E = mc^2\)” and asked if anyone in the audience understood it. Almost all of the physicists raised their hands, but one man sitting in the front protested. “Most of the people in this room are experimentalists,” he said. “They think they understand this equation, but, really, they don’t. The only people who really understand it are the theoreticians.”

去年冬天的一个早上,丹内特坐在他缅因州客厅里的单人沙发上。天空和河水都显出明亮的蓝色。他买好了两份当地报纸Ellsworth American;之后他会同苏珊坐在壁炉边比试谁能先完成拼字游戏。同时,他思考着理解的本质是什么。他想起许多年前给一组物理学家做演讲时的情景。当时给他们展示的幻灯片上写着“\(E = mc^2\)”,他问听众是否有人理解这个公式。几乎所有物理学家都举手了,但是一位坐在前排的男子提出异议。“房间里绝大部分人都是实验物理学家,”他说,“他们认为他们理解这个公式,实则不然。只有理论物理学家才真正理解它。”

​“Understanding, too, comes in degrees,” Dennett concluded, back in his Maine living room. “So how do you take that last step? What if the answer is: ‘Well, you can only sort of take it’?” Physics, Dennett said, tells us that there are more than three dimensions, and we can use math to prove they’re there; at the same time, we struggle to picture them in our heads. That doesn’t mean they’re not real. Perhaps, he thought, the wholly material soul is similarly hard to imagine. “I’m not ready to say it’s unimaginable, because there are times when I think I can imagine it,” he said, “and then it doesn’t seem to be such a big leap at all. But—it is.”

“理解同样有程度之分,”丹内特总结道,情景切换回他在缅因州的客厅。“那么你如何走出这最后一步?如果答案是:‘你只能部分的做到’?”物理学,丹内特说,告诉我们存在着不止三个维度,我们可以用数学加以证明;同时,我们难以在脑中构想它们。这不等于说它们不存在。也许,他想,完全物质的灵魂同样难以想象。“我不打算说这无法想象,因为有时我觉得我可以想象得出,”他说,“然后这似乎并不是什么了不起的飞跃。但,这真的是。”

Before the morning slipped away, Dennett decided to go out for a walk, down to where the lawn ended and a rocky beach began. He’d long delighted in a particular rock formation, where a few stones were piled just so, creating a peephole. He was disappointed to find that the tides had rearranged the stones, and that the hole had disappeared. The dock was pulled ashore for the winter, its parts stacked next to his sailboat. He walked down the steps anyway, occasionally leaning on his walking stick. For a few minutes, he stood at the bottom, savoring the frigid air, the lapping water, the dazzling sun

在早晨悄悄溜走之前,丹内特决定出去走走,走到草坪与布满岩石的海滩相交的地方。他一直很喜欢一处岩石堆,一些石头重重叠叠形成一个空洞。当他发现潮水已经改变了石头的排布时颇为失望,洞消失了。冬季潮水后退,船坞在岸边露出身形,就在他的帆船旁边。他还是走下台阶,不时倚靠他的拐杖。有好几分钟,他站在船坞底部,尽情享受冰冷的空气、不断拍岸的海水和耀眼的阳光。


翻译:Drunkplane(@Drunkplane-zny)
校对:斑马(@鹿兔马朦),小聂(@PuppetMaster)
编辑:辉格@whigzhou

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