I've Been Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett

Author:Daniel C. Dennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

20.

THE LOCKE LECTURES AND THE VERVET MONKEYS IN AMBOSELI

THE DENNETT FAMILY RETURNED TO OXFORD IN 1983 for the Trinity term so I could give the Locke Lectures in philosophy. A Locke Lecturer is almost always from abroad—most are from the US—and gives a lecture a week for seven weeks. My topic was free will, and I discovered to my delight that Ryle’s masterpiece, The Concept of Mind, had originally been planned as a book on free will. I like to think that Ryle, who died in 1976, would have approved of my lectures, which certainly bore the stamp of his enduring influence on my thinking. Where Ryle had exposed “the ghost in the machine” I exposed the “bugbears” that philosophers have resorted to in their forlorn efforts to motivate some of their pet themes, a phenomenon I have recently called “free will inflation.”

I brought with me my trusty Kaypro “portable” computer and a tiny dot-matrix printer. Since my year with John McCarthy at CASBS, I was a convert to both word processing and email, and I look back with mixed emotions on the joys and terrors of those early days of personal computing. The early text-editing systems were actually faster, in general, than today’s word processors, because they didn’t have all the overhead of frequent automatic copying and saving, and they weren’t “WYSIWYG” (What You See Is What You Get). You had to type in formatting codes: to get a phrase like “a priori” in italics, you had to type something like “{CTRL\ital: a priori}”; it was not unusual to print out a file and find that you’d forgotten to close off a curly bracket somewhere, with the result that page after page of text appeared in italics. Mildly annoying, but few calamities can match the discovery that the file you’ve labored over for weeks has disappeared into the ether due to a computer malfunction, with no copies anywhere. The elaborate safeguards of today’s operating systems are all welcome improvements for which a few tedious milliseconds of delay are a price worth paying. One day I broke a spring on the little doorlatch of my Kaypro that held the floppy disk for my operating system. If I couldn’t close the door securely, I couldn’t use the operating system at all, so I had to make a repair. I took my ever-at-hand jackknife and whittled a specially shaped wedge out of a clothespin, which did the trick. Few philosophers in Oxford had ever seen a personal computer then, and some of them came around to our flat to see the marvel; when they saw that I had actually repaired it—with a jackknife, no less—they were unduly impressed with my computer expertise, an opinion I didn’t go out of my way to adjust.

I have written of the reception of my Locke Lectures, which were well attended, elsewhere. One of the Oxford philosophers in attendance, Michael Dummett, was heard to say that he’d be damned if he’d learn anything from somebody who could

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