text: ``People  say again and again that philosophy  doesn't really progress, that we  arestill occupied  with the same philosophical problems as were  theGreeks.But  the people who say this don't understand why ishas to be  so. It is becauseour language has remained the same and  keeps seducing us  into asking the same questions.  As longas there continues to be a verb  'to be' that  looks as if it functions in the same way as 'to eat' and  'to  drink', as long as we stillhavethe adjectives  'identical', 'true',  'false', 'possible',as  long as we continueto talk of a river of time, of  an expanseof  space, etc., etc., people will keepstumbling over the  samepuzzling  difficulties and find themselves staring atsomethingwhich  no explanation seems capable of clearing up.And what'smore,this  satisfies  a longing for the transcendent, because, insofar  as peoplethinkthey can  see `the limits of human  understanding', theybelieve of course thatthey  can see  beyond these.`` 
  
  ''Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of ourintelligence by means of language``
  
  ``Ambition is the death of  thought'''
  
  These three quotes are from Ludwig Wittgenstein who redefined philosophysome70 years ago (but most people have yet to find this out).Dennett, though he has  been a philosopher for some40 years, is one them. It is also curious that both he and his prime antagonist, John Searle, studied under famous Wittgensteinians (Searle with John Austin, Dennett with Gilbert Ryle) but Searle got the point and Dennett did not. Dennett is a hard determinist(though he trys to sneak  reality in the back door), and perhaps this is due to Ryle, whose famous book 'The Concept of Mind'(1949) continues to be reprinted.  That book did a great job of exorcising the ghost but it left the machine.  Dennett enjoys  making  the mistakes Wittgenstein, Ryle(andmany others since) have exposed in detail. 
  
  Byaccident,just before this book, I had  read ''The Minds I'', which Dennett coauthored withDouglas Hofstadter in 1981. They made some bad  mistakes(see my review), and saddest of all, they reprinted  twofamous articles that pointed the wayout of the mess---Nagel's `What is  like to be a bat?` and an early version of John  Searle's Chinese Room argument explaining why computers  don't think.
  
   Nagel pointed out that we do noteven know how to recognize whata concept of a bat's mind would be  like.  Searle similarly explained how we lack a way to conceptualize  thinking  and how itdiffersfrom what a computer does(eg,it can translate Chinese  without understanding it). Likewise, we lack a clear test for recognizing  what countsas good  vs bad--or just intelligible-- for many philosophical and scientific concepts. Our  use of the words consciousness, choice, freedom, intention,  particle, thinking, determines, wave,cause, happened,  event(and so on endlessly) are  rarely a source of confusion  but as soon as we leave normal life and enter philosophy(and anydiscussion detached from the environment  in  which language evolved) chaos reigns. Wittgenstein  was the first to understand why and to point out how to avoid  this. Unfortunately, he died inhis prime, his works are composed almost entirely of a series of examples of  how the mind(language)  worksand he never wroteany popular books,  so  understanding of his work is restricted to a very few. 
  
  Searle  is one of the world's leadingphilosophers and has written  manyextremely clear  and highly regarded articles and books,some of which have pointed out the  glaring defects in Dennett'swork.His review ``Consciousness Explained  Away'' of Dennetts 1991 book`'Consciousness Explained'' and his book''The Mystery of Consciousness'' are very well  known,and show, in a way that isamazingly clear for philosophical writing,why neither Dennett(nor any of the  hundreds of philosophersandscientists who have written on this topic)havecome closetoexplaining the hard problem--ie, how do you conceptualizeconsciousness.Many suspect we will never be able to conceptualizeany of the reallyimportant things, but it isclear that we are  nowhere near it now. Dennett has mostly  ignored his critics but has favored  Searle with vituperative personal attacks.Searle has been accused by Dennett and others of  being out to destroy cognitive psychology which is quite funny as modern philosophy is(mostly) a branch of cognitive psychology and Searle has made it very clear for 30 years that WE are a good example of a biological machine that is conscious, thinks, etc,.  He just points out that we don't have any idea how this happens.   Searle characterizes as ''intellectualpathology'',the views ofDennett andall those who denythe existence of thevery phenomena they setout to explain. Dennett repeats his  mistakes here andleaves his reply to his critics to the penultimate page of  the book, where we are told that they areall mistaken and it is a waste of spaceto show how! Unsurprisingly, there isnot one reference toWittgenstein or Searle in theentire book.There arehowever, many references to other old schoolphilosophers who are as confusedas he is. 
  
  Like most people, it does not cross his mindthatthe very inference engineshe thinks with are forcinghim to cometo  certainconclusions and that these will oftenbe quite  unconnectedwith or wrong about the way things are in the  world. They are a jumble of evolutionary curiositieswhich do various tasks in organizing behavior that were useful for survivalhundreds of thousands of years ago.Wittgenstein was a pioneerin doingthought experiments in cognitive psychologyand beganto elucidate the nature of these engines and the subtletiesof language in the 30's, and thus he made the sorts of commentsthat this review begins with. 
  Dennett says(p98)that  his view is compatibilism, ie, that  free will(whichI hopewe can equate with choice) is compatible with  determinism(ie, that''there is at any instant exactly one physically  possible  future''--p25). He wants to show that determinism is not the same as inevitablity. However, the whole book is smoke  and mirrors by means of  which choice, in the sense we normally  understand it, disappears and we are  left with ``choice``,  which is something we cannot choose. Naturally, this  echoes  the fate of consiousness in his earlier book ``Consciousness  Explained``. 
  
  It is remarkable that, at a time when we are  just beginning to  reach the point where we might be able to understand the basics of how a  single neuron works(or how an  atom works for that matter), that anyone should  think they can  make the leap to understanding the whole brain and to explain  its most complex phenomena. Please recall the last sentence of Wittgenstein  from the opening quote: ''And what'smore,this satisfies a longing for thetranscendent, because, insofar aspeoplethinkthey can see `the limits of  human understanding',theybelieve of course thatthey can see beyond  these.`` The  relation between language, thought and reality is  extraordinarily complex and everyone gets lost. If one is very, very  careful,some understanding is possible, but Dennett throws caution to  the  winds and we are dragged into the quicksand. 
  
  There are  at least 3 different  topics here(evolution of our brain, choice  and morality) and Dennett tries  vainly to weld them together into  a coherent account of how freedom evolves  from the deterministic  crashing of atoms. There is, however, no compelling  reason to  accept that bouncing atoms (or his favorite example, the game  of  life running on a computer) are isomorphic with reality.  He knows that  quantum indeterminacy(or the uncertainty principle)  is a major obstacle to  determinism however defined(and has  been taken by many as an escape to  freedom) but dismisses  it due to the fact that such events are too rare to  bother  with. By extension, its unlikely that any such  event will happen now or even in our  whole lifetime in our  brain, so we appear to be stuck with a determined  brain(whatever  that may be). However, the universe is a big place and its been  around a long time(perhaps forever) and if even one such quantum  effect occurs  it would seem to throw the whole universe into  an indeterminate state. The  notion ''there is at any  instant exactly one physically possible future''  cannot be true  if at any instant a quantum indeterminacy can occur--in this  case  there would seem to be infinitely many possible futures. This  recalls  one of the escapes from the contradictions of physics--each  instant our  universe is branching into infinitely many universes. 
  
  He correctly rejects the idea that quantum indeterminacy gives us the answer to how we can have choice.  This obvious idea has been suggested by many but the problem is that nobody has any idea how to specify an exact sequence of steps which starts with the equations of physics and ends up with the phenomena of consciousness(or any other emergent phenomenon).  If so, they will definitely win at least one Nobel Prize, for not only will they have explained consciousness, they will have explained the universal phenomenon of emergence(how higher order properties emerge from lower ones). So, they would have to solve the 'easy' problem(to determine the exact state of the brain corresponding to some mental state and preferably specify the exact position of all the atoms in the brain over time-ignoring uncertainty) and the 'hard' one(what exactly correlates with or produces consciousness or choice etc?). And while they are at it how about also doing the  impossible--an exact and full solution to the quantum field equations for a brain.  It is very well known that these equations are uncomputable, even for one atom or a vacuum, as it would require an infinite amount of computer time.  But infinite will do for one atom so maybe a brain will take no longer. 
  
  He starts off on the  first page appealing to the laws of  physics for protection against fantastic  notions such as immaterial souls, but physics is made of notions just as  fantastic(uncertainty,  entanglement, wave/particle duality, Schrodinger's  dead/alivecat etc) and as Feynmann said many times ``Nobody understandsphysics!'' Many think nobody ever will. 
  
  On pg  2 he says  our values have little to do with the goals of our cells and  on pg 2  to3 that our personality differences are due to how  our ''robotic teams are  put togther, over a lifetime of  growth and experience.`` This is a bald  dismissal of human  nature, of the abundant evidence that our differences are  to  a large extent programmed into our genes and fixed in early  childhood, and  is typical of his constant confused wandering  back and forth between  determinism and environmentalism.
  
  On page  9 he notes that free will is a problem and our  attitudes to  it make a difference, but for whom? Nobody but philosophers. We make choices. What's the problem?  One has to step  outside life to experience a problem and then  everything becomes a problem.  What are consciousness, pain,  yellow, intention, matter, quarks, gravity  etc.? I doubt that  anyone has ever experienced a fundamental change in their  interactions  with people or their decision making processes due to their  thinking about choice. This shows that there is something  strange about such questions. Wittgenstein would probably say that the language games are  different. There are games  for language connected with the cognitive  templates for decisions  or seeing colors etc, and thinking philosophically is operating them in decoupled mode. Decoupled modes permit  thinking about the past, planning for the future, guessing  the mental states  of others, etc, but if one takes the results  in the wrong way and starts to  think `'John will try to steal  my wallet'', rather than just imagining that  John might  do it, confusion enters and those who cannot turn off the decoupled  mode or distinguish it from coupled mode,  enter the realm of pathology. Some aspects of schizophrenia and other mental illness might be  seen this way--they lose control of which mode they are in, eg, notbeing able to see the  difference between the motives people  have and the motives they might have. 
  
  One can then see  much of the philosophizing people do as operating in  these  decoupled modes but failing to be able to keep in front of them  the  differences from the normal mode. Normal mode--eg, what  is that lion doing--  was undoubtedly the first one evolved  and decoupled modes--what did that lion  do last time or what  does he intend to do next--evolved later. This was  probably  never a problem for animals--any animal that spent too much  time  worrying about what might happen would not be very successful  contributing to  the gene pool. It is interesting to speculate that only when humans developed  culture and began degeneratinggenetically, could large numbers of people  survive with genes that  led them to spend alot of time in decoupled modes.  Hence, we  have philosophy and this book, which is mostly about running the  decision templates in decoupled mode where there are no real  consequencesexcept earning royalties for putting the results  in a book for other people to  use to run their engines in decoupled mode.' Let us alter Wittgenstein's quote to read:  ''As longas there continues to be a verb 'to decide'  that looks as if it functions in the same way as 'to  eat' and 'to  drink',as long as we continueto talk of  freedom of action, of saying I  wish I had done otherwise,  etc., etc., people will keepstumbling over the  samepuzzling  difficulties andfind themselves staring atsomethingwhich  no  explanation seems capable of clearing up.''
  
  As withmost philosophy books, nearly every page, often every paragraph,  changes from one type of language  game to another without  noticing that now one would have to be joking or  dreaming  or acting in a play or reciting a story , etc, and not actually  intending anything nor describing an actual situation in the  world. On page  10 he says we count on free will for the  whole way of thinking about our lives,  like we count on food  and water, but who ever, outside philosophy, standing in  front  of lunch counter full of food, ever thinks how fine it is that  they  have free will so they can pick coke instead of mineral  water? Even if I  want to be a serious compatibilist and  try thinking this in decoupled mode, I  have to exit and  enter nondecoupled mode to make the actual choice. Only then  can I go back to decoupled mode to wonder what might have  happened if I had  not had the ability to make a real choice.  Wittgenstein noted how pretend  games are parasitic on real ones(this is not a trivial observation!).  The ability to engage in very complex  decoupled scenarios  is already evident in 4 year old children. So I would say  that normally, nobody counts on having choice, but rather we just choose. 
  
  
  On the same page he shows again that he does not grasp cognitive  basics.  He says we learn to conduct our lives in the conceptual  atmosphere of choice,  and that `'It appears to be a stable  and ahistorical construct, as eternal  and unchanging as arithmetic,  but it is not.'' And on page 13--''It is an  evolved creation  of human activity and beliefs''. The whole thrust of  cognitive  psychology is that we do NOT learn the basics of planning, deciding,  promising, resenting, etc, but that these are built-in functions  of the  inference engines that work automatically and unconsciously  and start running  in very early childhood. There is no evidence  that they change as we grow,  or are in any way subject to  our beliefs,only  that they mature just as our body does. 
  
  On pg 14 he suggests  its probable that our having free will depends on our believing  we have  it!  Do we believe we see an apple, feel a pain, are  happy? The language  game of belief is very different from  that of knowing. We can believe we have  a dollar in our  pocket but if we take it out and look at it we can't  meaningfully  then say that we still believe it(except as a joke etc.). The  inference engine can run in decoupled(belief) mode so we can  imagine havingchoices or making them, but in life we just make them and it is only in very  odd situations we can say  that we believe we made a choice. But Dennett is  saying thisis the universal case. If making a choice had any dependence on belief than so would everything everything else--consciousness,  seeing,  thinking,etc. If we take this seriously(and he says 'the serious problems of  free will' ) then we are getting  into trouble and if we actually try to apply  it to life, then madness is minutes away. 
  . 
  On page 65 et seq., he  discusses causation, intention and the `informal predicates'  that we use to  describe atoms etc, but cognitive resarch has  shown that we describe all  objects with a limited number of  ontological categories which we analyse with  our intuitive physics  modules and that when agents (ie animals or people or  things  like them--ie, ghosts or gods) are involved we use our  concepts (engines)  for agency, intuitive psychology, social minds, etc to  decide  how to behave. There is almost certainly no causation module  but  rather it will involve all of these and other inference  engines, depending on  the precise situation. Discussing  possibility and necessity is much  easier if  one talks in terms of the output of our modules for intuitive  physics,  agency, ontological categories etc. Of course there is no mention  here of Wittgenstein's many incisive comments on causation,  intention,  deciding, nor of Searle's now classic works  on Intention and Social Reality. 
  
  He spends much time on  Ainslie's book 'Breakdown of Will', in which is  discussed  the hyperbolic discounting faculties (ie, inference engines) by which  we evaluate probable outcomes.
  Hemakes much of the excellent work of Robert Frank on altruism, emotion and economics, but the book he cites was 15 years old when this book was published. It was Bingham's idea, amplified by Frank and by Boyd and Richardson (1992) that  cooperation  was greatly stimulated by the evolution of means for punishing cheaters. He suggests these as examples of Darwinian approaches  that areobligatory and promising. Indeed they are, and  in fact they are standard  parts of economic, evolutionary  and cognitive theory, but unfortunately, he  makes little reference  to the other work in these fields. All that work tends to show that people do not choose but their brains choose for them. He does not establish any convincing connection between this work and the general problem of choice. 
  
  Onpg 216 he says that making oneself so  that one could not have  done otherwise is a key innovation in  the evolutionary ascent to free will,  and that we can only  be free if we learn how to render ourselves insensitive  to  opportunities. But where this ability resides is not revealed  for  several chapters! Dennett has a penchant for hiding  his ideas in a massive  amount of rather irrelevant text.  Again, he gets things backwards, as there is  a vast body of  very good evidence from biology and psychology that we are get  the feelings that we should behave in some way from our inference engines and  these are not provided by some part of our conscious  self, but by the automatic and unconscious operation of the  engines. As he notes, hundreds of experiments  with the Prisoner's Dilemma  and related protocols have shown how easy it is to  manipulate  people's choices and that their calculations are not conscious  and  deliberate at all. When the situation is manipulated to  make them conscious,they are much slower and  less reliable. So, there has been  constant pressure of natural  selection to make the engines fast and automatic  and inacessible  to deliberate thought.
  
  Dennett says `we make ourselves'  so  that we could not do otherwise and that this is the basis  of morality and  choice. The evidence would seem to be exactly  the opposite. Our inference engines give  us basic moral intuitions and  we generally act in accord with the results.  If we or others  do not we feel guilt, outrage, resentment etc, then cheater genes will invade the population and this is one of the main theories as to how a good part of morality evolved.Our genes make us so we can't(mostly) do otherwise, not our will or whatever Dennett thinks can do it.   We can often choose to do otherwise but our own  intuitions and the knowledge of social disapproval  usually serve to limit our choices. These intuitions evolved  in small groups between 50,000 and some  millions of years ago. In the modern world the intuitions are often not to  our  advantage and the social controls weak. This is a prime reasonfor the chaos in the world.
  
  On pg  225 he finally sneaks in a definition of free will  as ''a complicated snarl of mechanistic causes that look likedecision making(from certain angles)''. He claims that thisplays all the valuable  roles of free will but lacks some  (unspecified) properties possessed by  traditional free will.  The smoke is thick but I  am pretty  sure one of those unspecified properties is what we understand aschoice. He insists(top pg 226) that his naturalistic  account of decision  making leaves plenty of room for moral  responsibility, but making ourselves so  we couldn't do otherwise  does not seem to describe the way we actually  function, nor  does it seem to leave any room for morality, as that would seem  to consist precisely in being able to do otherwise. 
  
  He  does not propose  any test for deciding if a choice is voluntary  or forced and I doubt he could  do so. Normally if someone  asks us to move our hand, we know what counts as  having a  choice, but, typical of philosophers, I expect that regardless  of  whether it moves or not he will count both as evidence for his position. 
  
  At this point he also starts his discussion of Libet's well known work on conscious attention which is the only part of the book that I felt was worth my time. 
  
  On page 253 et seq., he sneaks in his definition of conscious will--the  ''brains user illusion  of itself''' which has as one of its main roles  providing  ''me with the means of interfacing with myself at other times``.  And ``Illusory or not, conscious will is the persons guide  to his or her own  moral responsibility for action.`` He says  the trick we need is to see that  ``I`' control what is happening  inside the ''simplification barrier''...  ''where decision  making happens''. ``Mental events'' become conscious by  ''entering  into memory''. ''The process of self description... is  what we  are''. The crucial thing is that choice is possible  because the self is  distributed over space(the brain) and time(memories).  He realizes this is  going to leave many incredulous(everyone who can follow this and really understands!). ''I know that many  people find it hard to graspthis idea or take it seriously. It seems to them  to be a trickwith mirrors, some kind of verbal slight of hand that whisksconsciousness, and the real Self , out of the picture just when it was about to  be introduced.'' Many will say he took the words out of their mouth, but I would  say it's incoherent and  thateverythingwe know about consciousness and the whole  universe(making the obvious extensions of such claims)  was gone long beforewegot this far. 
  
  
  On pg 259 he says that culture has made us rational animals!  This is a stunning denial of human nature(ie, genetics and evolution) coming from the person who wrote 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea''!  Presumably he is talking about his idea that it is memories spread over space(the brain and other people) and time that give us choices and morals and consciousness(line 6 from bottom).  He says consciousness is a user-interface but it is never made clear who or where the user is and how it interfaces with the brain(you will have to suffer through 'Consciousness Explained to find that there is no answer there either).  Though he makes many references to evolutionary and cognitive psychology, he seldom uses any of the terminology that has been current for decades(social mind, intuitive psychology, coalitional intuitions etc) and clearly is not familiar with most of the concepts. If he means that we got the fine details of morality from culture, thats ok, but this is the icing on the cake and the cake was baked by the genes.  
  
  We are also told here that R&D(by which he means evolution here, but other things elsewhere) has given us the self  and that language creates new kind of consciousness and morality.  I am sure that he will get little agreement on this.  It seems quite clear that consciousness and the basics of morality evolved in primates(and earlier) long before spoken language(though it is a very deep topic as to how language evolved from extant capacities in the brain).  He continues ``morality memes arose by accident some tens of thousands of years ago`` which would be OK if he meant the icing on the cake but he clearly means the cake!  And then he says the point of morality is not the survival of our genes, which is an amazing (and totally incorrect)thing to say, even if he was only referring to memes.  
  On pg 260 he claims  that  because we do not comprehend our ''bland dispositions  to cooperate'', they  mean nothing to us, but it is the operation  of our templates that is  everything to us. There is ample  evidence that if one of them is damaged a  person cannot function  properly as a social being(eg, autism).  I would say it is the operation of the templates for intuitive psychology etc which lead Dennett to the counterintuitive views that we do not have consciousness and choice in the way we think.  
  
  He also says here that it was one of the major  evolutionary transitions when we were able to change our views and reflect on reasons for them. This again reflects his lack of understanding of evolutionary psychology.  I know of no evidence that the basic moral intuitions, like all the templates, are accessible to consciousness.  We may decide our cheating was justifiable, or forgive someone else's cheating, but we still know it was cheating(ie, we cannot change the engine). I suspect my ancestors a million years ago had the same feelings in the same situation but what has happened is that there are lots of other things that may be taken as relevant and that sometimes these will lead me to act contrary to my feelings.  Another issue is that as culture developed, one had to make many important or 'moral type` decisions for which the engines were not evolved to give a clear answer.  
  
  On pg 267 he says that we now replace our `free floating rationales'(probably corresponding to what cognitive psychologists call our templates or inference engines) with reflection and mutual persuasion. And on pg 286 he says that it is a child's upbringing --demanding and giving reasons-- that affects moral reasoning. Again, he just has no grasp of what has happened in the last 30 years of research--the templates do not change with reflection or upbringing. We are then told again that consciousness makes moral issues available over time to the self, which takes responsibility.  It is not any more coherent or credible with repetition.  
  
  On pg 289 he has a chapter summary which repeats the mistaken notions that it is culture that makes it possible to reflect and that choice depends on education(memory) and sharing.  It's clear that it is not culture but the inherited cognitive structures that make it possible to reflect and to choose and that culture determines the acceptable actions and their rewards or punishments. On pg 303 he discusses the classic philosophical barrier between 'ought'and 'is' , unaware that our templates solved that problem long ago--ie, they tell us how to feel about situations regarding other people.  He also seems to be unaware that there are hundreds of cultural universals implanted in our genes(eg see 'The Blank Slate'). 
  
  He often starts into what looks like its going to be a good discussion of some issue in evolutionary psychology, but invariably wanders off into philosophical arcana and winds up with more confusion.  This happens on pg 261 where he states that concepts like 'praiseworthy' were shaped over millennia by culture, while most would say the basis for such concepts is in the genes and each culture only detetermines the details of acceptable reactions to the intuitions its members get from their innate mechanisms.   On pg 262 he tries to explain how an ESS(Evolutionarily Stable Strategy) can produce morality. His idea here is that genetic `R&D` produces dim understandings of morals and then culture(memetics) produces variations and clarifications.  I would say that we all know, and much research has made clear, that we commonly get very clear results from our inference engines and only dimly understand in special cases.  Culture merely decides what we can do about our feelings.  
  
  The last part of the book is mostly  concerned  with moral culpability. He refers to the legal classic by Hart  and  Honore, which I started reading 30 years ago since it's  authors were deeply influenced by Wittgenstein.  Dennett tells us that we have  control over our own morality and  that thinking about morality will improve us.  But, there seems  no justification whatever for this view in this book. There is nothing at  all  here to help anyone escape from the dictates of the monkey mind. It is a defensible point of view that those who manage this do so by traveling a spiritual path that  has no connection with philosophy- and there is not a hint of  spirituality in this entire book--another telling point considering that many mystics have fascinating things to say about the functioning of the mind. I find  more wisdom about how  to be free and moral in any of Osho's 200 books than anywhere in philosophy. One rarely finds spiritually and morally  advanced people teaching at universities. There is no sign here, nor in  anything he has done, that Dennett is morally superior. After 40 years of thinking about morality he launches personal attacks on his critics or arrogantly dismisses them.  It seems clear that, like all of us, he is trapped in the limits of his inference engines. 
  
  So, how much opportunity is there to  improve our morality? It seems  clear(eg, see Pinker's `The Blank Slate`) that  most of our behaviour  is genetic and the rest due to unknown factors in our  environment, in spite of the vigorous efforts of parents and religions and political parties. On  average, maybe 5% of the variation in moral behavior(variations are the only thing we can  study) is due to our own efforts. The moral choices that matter  most today are  those affecting the fate of the world. But our moral templates were not evolved to deal with overpopulation and the greenhouse effect. 
  
  How remarkable it would be if just one of the hundreds of millions of educated people in the world managed to figure out what consiousness or choice or any mental phenomenon really is.  And if one did, we would expect them to be a scientist at the cutting edge of research using some exotic fMRI  equipment and the latest parallel processing neural networked fuzzy logic computer etc.  But a philosopher or physicist just sitting there thinking, coming up with the solution to the greatest puzzle there is!  And then writing a whole book about it without checking with the sceptics first.  To return to the quote at the beginning--'Ambition is the death of thought'.  Indeed--though clearly Wittgenstein was thinking of interesting thoughts
  