31 ms·

Daniel Dennett has died

952 points by mellosouls 3y ago

Bostonian 3y ago
RIP. His book Consciousness Explained (1992) was fascinating.
- canadiantim 3y ago
  I've always heard it described as Consciousness Explained Away (1992); still tho, RIP
  - markhahn 3y ago
    Yes, it was traditional "philosphers of mind" who found him dismissive, mainly because those are all basically Mysterians. For instance, he cut Chalmers no slack on the incoherency of Philosophical Zombies.
  - mannykannot 3y ago
    The title promised more than it delivered, but nevertheless, Dennett's efforts in attempting to achieve that goal were a refreshing break from the incessant and fruitless bickering over whether the mind is a physical phenomenon.
  - wzdd 3y ago
    That isn't the witty riposte that it is apparently thought to be. It really does "explain away" consciousness by reducing it to plausible physical processes. This reduction also applies to things like qualia, which is where nonmaterialists get upset as qualia (or equivalents) are also invoked by people like Nagel and Chalmers to argue against the physicality of consciousness. The core argument from Nagel / Chalmers is that that there is a subjective element to consciousness which has no physical explanation. The reasoning for this is always an appeal to intuition. If you accept that there is "something that it is like" to see red, be a bat, etc, and that the "something that it is like" is above and beyond the physical processes of the brain -- the firing of neurons -- then you by definition cannot accept a purely physical explanation of consciousness. Dennett's book argues that this is mystical nonsense (or, charitably, wishful thinking) and the "something that it is like" is simply what happens when particular types of physical processes occur in the brain. It's no surprise, therefore, that "explained away" is a criticism if you're a nonmaterialist. But if you're a materialist, then "explained away" is actually a good thing and the purpose of the book.
    - canadiantim 3y ago
      the "something that it is like" happening when "particular types of physical processes occur in the brain" points to these being separate and distinct processes, yet materialists claim they are the same and identical process. Qualia isn't the same process as the physical processes in the brain; they are very highly correlated, but ultimately distinctly separate processes.
- acqbu 3y ago
  Rest in Peace, Legend!
errantmind 3y ago
I had the opportunity to hear a guest lecture of his in Colorado a little over 15 years ago which inspired my further study of philosophy at the time. He had a keen mind and will be missed.
dosinga 3y ago
The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul with Douglas Adams is from quite some time ago, but as relevant as ever
- x3n0ph3n3 3y ago
  Douglas R. Hofstadter (of GEB), not Douglas Adams
  - apricot 3y ago
    In the beginning, self-reference was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
    - johngossman 3y ago
      I want to read this book
kkarimi 3y ago
Probably the most interesting modern thinker that I remember from my 6 years of studying Psychology and Neuroscience. RIP
mkmk 3y ago
Very nice profile of him from 2017: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett... RIP
vlowther 3y ago
One of the great thinkers of the modern era. He will be missed.
ricardo81 3y ago
Enjoyed his participations in the "four horseman of the apocalypse" Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4 - From Bacteria to Bach and Back Apt for today's world. Could listen to him all day.
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  Non-apocalypse. That's the joke.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett
DylanDmitri 3y ago
Really liked this essay on cognition - https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-organisms-as-agents-with-agendas https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-o...
ithkuil 3y ago
I must admit I always scoffed at philosophers, but then I started reading Dennett and not only I finally met a philosopher that I respected, but he helped me unlock what other philosophers are doing and I started to see philosophers as a whole in new light.
- klodolph 3y ago
  You’re not alone. I think a lot of people, especially in STEM, pooh-pooh philosophy at first. The problem is that in any field, if you start digging to understand the underlying concepts of that field and how they are defined, at some point you hit philosophy and start working with philosophical concepts. The other problem is that there’s some real quack philosophy around, too. Various traps that philosophers sometimes fall into.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Whom would you describe as a "quack" philosopher?
    - klodolph 3y ago
      I picked the wording of my comment carefully… “quack philosophy” is what I said, not “quack philosopher”. That was very, very intentional. I don’t think I have ever described somebody as a quack philosopher.
      - keiferski 3y ago
        Ok, then what works would you describe as quack philosophy? I don't think the distinction is really that relevant.
        klodolph 3y ago
        Ok. I think the distinction is important, and relevant, and even critical. It is a distinction I will continue to make. I put the concept of “philosophical zombies” as quackery. At best, the p-zombie thought experiment shows that we haven’t really come up with a definition of consciousness that explains what we want it to explain. Some people use p-zombies as part of a larger argument against physicalism. Chalmers published a modal logic argument against physicalism using p-zombies. One of the tricky things about modal logic is that it requires a deeper understanding of modal logic in order for you (you, someone reading a modal logic argument) to make good decisions about which propositions you are willing to accept in a modal logic argument. Since most people only have an intuitive understanding of modal logic, it is a good way to win an argument but a bad way to explain your position. I’d say that this work (p-zombies) is quackery in the sense that it’s consistently directed at something which I consider to be unproductive, which is the work of undermining or attacking physicalism / physical monism. At some point, in these discussions, you end up having some argument about the semantics of ontology and how you define “existence”. If your semantics for “existence” admits non-physical things to exist (like, if you’re a Platonist), and you’re having a conversation with someone who believes in physicalism, then I don’t think either person in the conversation is going to get much out of it, other than a better way to explain their own position. Edit: I hope that paints a complete enough picture and covers the important parts of my complaints about p-zombies. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of philosophy and I may be missing something important, maybe there’s some really important argument p-zombies are used for, and maybe I don’t understand Chalmers; that’s always a risk. My main complaint here is that it seems to be some tool to make an argument against physicalism, but this tool doesn’t help you understand physicalism, or help you understand its alternatives. It’s just an argument that you can have between somebody who believes in physicalism and somebody who doesn’t, where neither person will agree with the other one after hearing the argument.
dotsam 3y ago
Sad news. I aspire to be as intellectually acute in old age as Dennett was. His recent autobiography was engaging, although somewhat too indulgent at times. I admire how he created a life and a world-view that worked so well for him.
- IncreasePosts 3y ago
  What do you mean old age? He died at the same age that our (most likely) President will be next year.
  - replwoacause 3y ago
    Yes exactly. Old age.
dustfinger 3y ago
Consciousness Explained [1] absolutely filled me with wonder during my university days. [1]: https://www.amazon.ca/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/0316180661 https://www.amazon.ca/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Denne...
- deleted 3y ago
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Barrin92 3y ago
Incredibly sad news. I don't have much to add but to share some of my favorite work by him, one is an essay exploring Jaynes idea of the Bicameral Mind, and another is a talk he gave on Ontology and Philosophy of Science. Always admired his ability to bridge disciplines and look at ideas from a slightly unorthodox angle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx5OZ1AZ5Vk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx5OZ1AZ5Vk https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-archeology.pdf https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-arc...
- ggpsv 3y ago
  Oh, I did not know about this essay! Thank you for sharing. To others reading this, this short essay [0] by Julian Jaynes is a good introduction to his idea of the Bicameral Mind. He later developed the idea further in his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". If you've watched the series "Westworld", how the androids begin to develop something akin to consciousness is inspired by Jaynes' ideas. [0]: https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/articles/consciousness-and-the-voices-of-the-mind/ https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/articles/consciousnes...
- johngossman 3y ago
  Thank you! Great essay.
superb-owl 3y ago
Unlike most of you, I strongly disliked Dennett's philosophy. But he seemed like a wonderful human, and he always made me think.
- atentaten 3y ago
  What do you dislike about it?
  - foldr 3y ago
    Dennett and Fodor had a lot of amusing (though sometimes rather bitter) exchanges. Here's a review by Fodor that gives a critical perspective on some of Dennett's work: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n05/jerry-fodor/why-would-mother-nature-bother https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n05/jerry-fodor/why-woul...
    - pdonis 3y ago
      I found Dennett's responses to Fodor to be spot on. I think Fodor simply could not grasp what Dennett was actually talking about--and Fodor was not the only one.
      - foldr 3y ago
        Dennett's response concedes all of Fodor's main points and proceeds via innuendo and ad hominem. But there you have it. Dennett was important and influential, and is worth reading, but his appeal as a philosopher has always been a mystery to me.
        pdonis 3y ago
        > Dennett's response concedes all of Fodor's main points and proceeds via innuendo and ad hominem I strongly disagree, but I doubt we'll resolve that here. > his appeal as a philosopher has always been a mystery to me. Not to me, but again, we won't resolve that here. We agree that he was important and influential, and that's what matters for this discussion in his memory.
Simplicitas 3y ago
A philosopher who appreciated engineering. RIP Daniel Dennett.
deleted 3y ago
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dsubburam 3y ago
I liked the debate he had with Sapolsky, where he explained why free will is compatible with determinism (arguments that were new to me), and that Sapolsky's book ("Determined") did not grapple with those arguments. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYzFH8xqhns&t=2273s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYzFH8xqhns&t=2273s
- johngossman 3y ago
  I just watched this recently and thought "he looks old." But he was as sharp as ever. I hope my brain still works right up to the end
- fsckboy 3y ago
  They are both largely incoherent in that debate because they both think "the right next move" is to test "free will" against their notions of morality. Morality has nothing to do with free will. If you consider morality important, then you might care about free will within your moral framework; but you can debate free will without any notion of morality, and neither of them can see that. (is - ought, which they both are aware of)
  - astine 3y ago
    On the contrary, morality has everything to do with free will. It's one of the central motivations of the concept and always has been. From the greeks right up through the enlightenment, the question was always "in what sense are we capable of making responsible choices," with that term 'responsible' just dripping with moral implications. Without the moral implications, free will would not have the place it does in our cultural ethos.
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      you might be making a case that you can't talk about morality without talking about free will. but you have not made a case that talking about free will requires talking about morality
      - 3y ago
spmurrayzzz 3y ago
Breaking the Spell is a book I still recommend to friends today. Sad to hear.
mamonster 3y ago
Whilst he is probably the most respectable member of the "Four Horsemen"(Hitchens is probably the most revered but his early death seems to have given him a halo, a lot of his arguments would not stand up today), New Atheism will end up IMO as something that is seen very negatively by posterity(very little of it stands up today as anything more than fedora tipping).
- tanepiper 3y ago
  Unfortunately a lot of "New Atheism" has aligned itself with some very problematic people and views so I tend to agree.
hobbescotch 3y ago
Very sad news. Had the pleasure of having him be the keynote speaker at an aesthetics conference some friends and I organized during uni. Brilliant mind. RIP
Jun8 3y ago
Whether you like his theories and positions or not, he was a great philosopher, an influential thinker, and an interesting character. NY Times interview with him: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/27/magazine/daniel-dennett-interview.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/27/magazine/dani... NYer profile: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett... Interesting thread on /r/askphilosophy on philosophers' pushback against him: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/2cs8kz/do_many_philosophers_disagree_and_dislike_daniel/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/2cs8kz/do_ma... Big loss indeed, RIP.
- Fripplebubby 3y ago
  For anyone who enjoyed the titles of those links but found that there was just, something in the way of really digging into them, try: NY Times interview with him: https://archive.ph/knd9C https://archive.ph/knd9C NYer Profile: https://archive.ph/Snm8g https://archive.ph/Snm8g
Mesopropithecus 3y ago
RIP. When I wasn't sure what to make of Goedel, Escher, Bach, his writings tipped the scale. Thanks!
AlbertCory 3y ago
So sad. I was on the team that brought him to Google, and my task was to get his signature on the video release form. Here's the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0 I told him that his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea was one of the few where, when I got to the end, I immediately wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again. He said, "I'm not sure that's a good thing."
- greentxt 3y ago
  He was nothing if not honest. Truly the best of the New Athiests and deserving of almost Rorty-esque fandom.
- dwh452 3y ago
  Very sad for me, he was one of my favorite thinkers and his books were the few that made me feel smarter after having read them. His thinking tools remain a great aid to my thinking. The reason for this post though, is to mention that Darwin also died on April 19th.
- eternauta3k 3y ago
  Could you explain his answer?
  - n4r9 3y ago
    My guess: Dennett took it to mean that his exposition wasn't clear enough to the layman first time round and was disappointed by this. C.f. the famous quote attributed to Einstein "If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.". (Does anyone know if he actually said anything like that?)
    - datascienced 3y ago
      Could also mean it ended up for this reader as being entertainment. Wanting to read again because it is joyful. In terms of learning I can’t read a book and remember it all. I would need to apply it.
pdonis 3y ago
I first came across Daniel Dennett through Douglas Hofstadter, when I read The Mind's I because I liked Godel, Escher, Bach. Once I had read Dennett's contributions to The Mind's I, I started looking up everything I could find of his writings; I think at this point I've read every one of his books and a fair number of his papers. He will be missed. RIP.
tum92 3y ago
Had the pleasure of taking a course of his in undergrad as a newly decided philosophy major. The material was excellent and right up my alley, but more than anything I was stunned by how fluidly and clearly he communicated. Huge loss
- tony_cannistra 3y ago
  I had the same experience, except I was definitely not a Phil major. He had a "class for every major" where we read chapters of the book he was writing (Toolkit for Thinking) and basically gave him feedback. It was an amazing strategy for him to get reviews on his book that way from totally non-Phil folks. And my name is in the book!
- Fripplebubby 3y ago
  Great teacher, great writer. I took one of his undergrad classes, and one day I went in to his office hours to chat - I still remember how relieved he was that I wasn't there to try to debate with him about God, that I wanted to talk about something else! I think that happened to him quite a lot due to his reputation.
nathan_compton 3y ago
Good to finally have the question of whether he is conscious or not definitely resolved.
motohagiography 3y ago
Can't say I met or knew him, but his essays in "The Mind's I" and "Brainstorms" are what got me to pursue tech as a teenager in the early 90s. Along with Hofstader, his ideas were foundational to hacker culture. What a time to go, where there has been a kind of cog.sci winter for the last 20 years, but the last year of LLMs has forced philosophy of mind back into the public consciousness. Though largely today under the guise of "AI Safety" and "alignment," Dennet's articulations form the tools we're going to be using to reason about ethics as they relate to these things we think of as minds - and regarding how we relate to these things that increasingly resemble other minds. Without too much lionizing (even though he has, however, just died), it would be hard to say that new ideas in philosophy as a whole have had more impact in a lifetime or more than that. A lot of very clever people disagreed strongly with him. However, since not one of them could deny they were shaped by the forces they opposed, those controversies became the shape of his own huge and formidable influence. I'm sure he would want to be remembered for something else, and I have the sense sentimentality was not his thing at all, but his popularization the term "deepity," was in the character of many of his ideas, where once you had been exposed to one, it yielded a perspective you could afterwards not unsee. I hope an afterlife may provide some of the surprise and delight he brought to so many in this one.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  I'm afraid an afterlife would not leave Dennett in good humor.
  - pmarreck 3y ago
    I think it would. Even if he was wrong about it, it's important to air the thinking around it regardless of belief. The proposition, for example, that consciousness is basically an illusion without empirical basis, one would have to take up as belief, I guess (paradoxically), since to most of us, that would seem like gaslighting (i.e., "if your conclusion is that Descartes was wrong and that we can't even know we are conscious, then I beg to differ")
    - mensetmanusman 3y ago
rthrfrd 3y ago
Very sad to hear. We’ll certainly miss having his perspective to ground us in this era of AI hyperbole, as thousands of engineers start confronting the ambiguities of consciousness with incongruent mental frameworks.
pixelmonkey 3y ago
Looks like dailynous.com server is having trouble responding (likely due to HN). But a cached copy of the page is here: http://archive.today/kHPfz http://archive.today/kHPfz Daniel Dennett was an important philosopher of mind, whose Wikipedia page is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett When I studied philosophy in college (2002-2006), his ideas were among the most discussed and debated at NYU's philosophy department. I always enjoyed his thoughts and writings, even if I often didn't agree with them. RIP.
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pbsladek 3y ago
Love his work. Sad to see him go.
abeppu 3y ago
In 2022, a GPT-3 model fine-tuned on Dennett's writing was good enough that "Dennett experts" could only pick a real Dennett quote from a list of 5 quotes about 50% of the time. I don't know that anyone's tried on newer models. He's gone, but I wonder if we could continue to get insights from him for a while longer. https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/07/results-computerized-philosopher-can.html https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/07/results-comput...
- _akhe 3y ago
  > I wonder if we could continue to get insights from him I think so. His views were somewhat rigid and materialist. As a de-fluffer, he's great, and I'm sure he will continue to be quoted especially as we make progress on AI and get into the nuts and bolts of consciousness. In particular which things are extraneous or peripheral to the problem itself.
  - tanepiper 3y ago
    I tend to agree here, I found intuition pumps didn't make sense and illusionism a cop-out for materialism.
goodgoblin 3y ago
I was unpacking and yesterday from a move and saw a copy of his "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" book and remembered he time he answered a fan email I sent to him with the simple reply "It's always nice to receive an email such as yours." - here's to hoping you are wrong about the soul Dan!
raoof 3y ago
consciousness is like a joke, if you think it needs an explanation you already miss it. I struggled with myself to convince Dennett that his conscious so much that I ended up losing it myself I hope you don't make the same mistake that I did
scoofy 3y ago
My background is in Analytic Philosophy, so I'm fairly familiar with Dennett. His rise to prominence during the early 2000's seemed appropriate given the huge shift in American religious belief. Though, I still certainly understand that folks can be exasperated by that movement, I just don't think that you can experience a 30% drop in religious affiliation, in a single generation, without annoying people.[1] I read his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which I found really interesting in that I'd never thought about religion as a concept being an evolutionary adaptive (or "hijacking") feature. I found it fascinating, though not profound. That said, I think some of the best philosophical work is just that. Really insightful ideas that make perfect sense once you think about them, you just probably wouldn't take the time to think about them. 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-religious-composition-has-changed-in-recent-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...
- wslh 3y ago
  Sorry, don't get your stats. In my family one generation passed from orthodox religious to the next: non religious without any issue. One example contradicts the whole point. The study focus on Christianity and not other religions though.
  - MetaMonk 3y ago
    Life and psychology are not neatly provable / disprovable structures all the way down though.
- listic 3y ago
  It may be an aside, but could you you clarify what you mean by a huge shift in American religious belief? For the benefit of those of us, who are on the internet, but not from or have been to the US?
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    It only takes about five seconds. Open the link that GP shared and read the first paragraph. > as the early 1990s, about 90% of U.S. adults identified as Christians. But today, about two-thirds of adults are Christians.
carlinm 3y ago
Sad to hear this. I had read his book “Elbow Room” back when I had been diving more deeply into free will and the various viewpoints associated. I don’t know that I found it convincing but it was an interesting peek into the compatibilist argument.
barfard 3y ago
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pknerd 3y ago
I am sorry that I did not know about him but mentioning of "Consciousness" in the linked article made me to google about his books. One of the book is "Consciousness Explained", I wonder whether it is for layman like me who do not know much about it?
- deleted 3y ago
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- johngossman 3y ago
  I would say it is. As usual, need to be aware that his conclusions are controversial. But the whole area is
- mkehrt 3y ago
  It's extremely oriented towards laymen, and if you think it sounds interesting, you will probably enjoy it a lot. (Even if you don't agree with its conclusions)
- codeulike 3y ago
  Its a great book, you might not agree that it 'explains' consciousness but it will give you a lot of new ways to think about it and it references a lot of interesting research.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
Sad news. I loved "Minds I". After that he was always quantum entangled with Douglas Hofstadter for me. RIP a cool and fun philosopher, Mr. Dennett.
mihaitodor 3y ago
Really terrible news... So glad I got to meet him in person in Dublin in 2018 when he gave a talk at https://www.tcd.ie/biosciences/whatislife https://www.tcd.ie/biosciences/whatislife and hung out for a chat in the lobby. He had this wonderful Gandalf-worthy cane that I'm not sure how he managed to manoeuvre when boarding airplanes.
tombert 3y ago
I was one of those irritating edgy atheist teenagers (and am still kind of an irritating edgy atheist adult), so I used to have plenty of Daniel Dennett quotes in my back pocket when arguing with people online. He will be missed by me.
alex201 3y ago
I've never quite seen eye to eye with Daniel Dennett. His tendency to reduce the inexplicable to what he's confident he understands has always made me wonder if a challenging childhood might have fostered his distrust of the mysterious. Whenever I admire Nobel Prize laureates like Roger Penrose, who argue that consciousness isn't just software running on the brain's hardware, I can't help but feel a twinge of pity for Dennett and his like-minded peers. I can almost hear him reflecting, 'Wow, that was a wild ride, but boy, was I cranky! I wish I could have another go at it.
- n4r9 3y ago
  > made me wonder if a challenging childhood might have fostered his distrust of the mysterious Why this, and not simply an urge to understand things?
  - alex201 3y ago
    Understand things? He has never successfully explained anything related to consciousness except by using the magical word: illusion. One might argue back, 'You're the illusion, Mr. Dennett,' and we end up as a bunch of ignorant folks pointing fingers.
    - n4r9 3y ago
      I get that you disagree with him. Just saying it's unfair to assume that his natural curiosity stems from some kind of trauma.
- tasty_freeze 3y ago
  There is an infinity of mysterious things one could posit, including an infinity of mutually incompatible mysteries. How do you decide which mysteries are worthy of consideration? Personally, I think starting with things are known to exist, which have a physical basis, is a great start, and untestable assumptions should be kept to a minimum. Just because it would be delightful to contemplate that ornately feathered technicolor quantum unicorns are actually underlying all of reality, it isn't productive to consider until there is a reason to. Penrose is no doubt a genius of high order in his domain, but consciousness is not one of his domains. Saying consciousness is the result of quantum effects in microtubules explains nothing -- it is just a very tiny rug which one could imagine is hiding the truth, as all the larger scale hiding places have been inspected and found lacking. You'd think that with the stunning (and mostly unexpected) success of LLMs would expose the fact that simple, soul-free, mechanistic computations can produce some really amazing capabilities. The human brain is orders of magnitude larger than GPT4, plus it has a wildly more complex architecture than today's neural networks. To me, it takes little imagination to see how everything could be explained in purely physical terms.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Something more descriptive in the title would be helpful like "Daniel Dennett, philosopher and cognitive scientist, has died"
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  "<Name> has died" is something of an HN convention: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22has+died%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22has+died%22>
bbor 3y ago
RIP to a legend. If you haven’t heard of him and are interested in the more philosophical side of AI I think he’s at his best in dialogue with others, so I highly recommend skimming this 1993 round table that made me fall in love with him. I can’t find the stamp, but I know at some point he excitedly describes machine learning research to some guffaws from his interlocutors — quite funny and vindicating in hindsight. https://youtu.be/RVrnn7QW6Jg?si=jenbni0Rg1dX5fd4 https://youtu.be/RVrnn7QW6Jg?si=jenbni0Rg1dX5fd4 At ~01:50:00, he talks very poignantly about death, the soul, and immortality. Obviously this video is 30 years old now, but I doubt he changed much and it seems his philosophy left him with good tools to handle the specter of death. Godspeed Dennett, the world is in your debt... Some other, perhaps more lighthearted timestamps: - @ 01:00:00; A Nagel discussion culminating in “I think we’re making tremendous progress on knowing what it’s like to be a bat!” Truly a Silicon Valley optimist before it was cool. - at 01:12:00; He tells a fun robotics story to back up his belief in the tractability of neurophilosophy. - @ 01:40:00; he discusses his general philosophy for the mind and why he thinks our brains can be broken down into a recursive hierarchy of agential machines. - 00:24:00 is the moment that made me love him. Love to hate him, perhaps! Like a more prestigious, less directly-aggressive Gary Marcus.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  I can also recommend this discussion. It makes me sad that Sheldrake is the last participant standing. Not because I want Sheldrake to die, but rather because it reminds me all those great thinkers are now thinking no more.
_akhe 3y ago
Dennett on Closer To Truth (just uploaded) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHvIXe4DOEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHvIXe4DOEc
n4r9 3y ago
Like others here, I found Consciousness Explained to generate a huge perspective shift in my worldview. My (now) wife and I went to see him speak in June 2012 in King's College Cambridge, on the event of Alan Turing's 100th birthday: https://philevents.org/event/show/2205 https://philevents.org/event/show/2205 I don't remember all the details, but I think he spoke about Turing's ideas about evolution and computers. It might be similar to this article from roughly the same time (though paywalled): https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/-a-perfect-and-beautiful-machine-what-darwins-theory-of-evolution-reveals-about-artificial-intelligence/258829/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/-a-pe... The only other talk I remember going to was Simon Singh (author of Fermat's Last Theorem) giving a great presentation on (and demonstration of!) the Enigma machine.
spacetimeuser5 3y ago
Ok. And how many professors of medicine and doctors die under 120. Monkeys got really cheap headset.
arduanika 3y ago
With no disrespect to the other three, Dennett always struck me as the most serious and intellectually modest of the Four Horsemen. He mostly stuck to his own lane of academic expertise, and used the proper caveats when venturing out of it. He didn't lean on rhetorical flourish, strawman his opponents, or overstate his case. The other three are a lot of fun, but maybe there's something to be said for boring. He spoke at my college once, and came off as nuanced and considerate. I think I disagree with him about consciousness, but I'm not informed enough to know for sure. What's clear is that he was a constructive part of the conversation in his field.
- JoeJonathan 3y ago
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  - naasking 3y ago
    I'm always confused by these Islamophobia charges. Christianity has similar backwards and violent rhetoric. Before the Reformation, non-Christians were right to fear Christians. Has Islam had a similar reformation of its violent precepts?
    - JoeJonathan 3y ago
      Was everything hunky dory after the reformation? Protestant missionaries cleared the ground for British and Dutch colonialism. There’s no one Islam, so it depends on which Muslims you’re talking to.
      - naasking 3y ago
        > There’s no one Islam, so it depends on which Muslims you’re talking to. There was no one Christianity either, but the question is, was it rational at the time to be cautious of any Christians if you didn't know their affiliations or religious zeal? It seems to me that charges of Islamaphobia are a convenience afforded only to those safe in developed countries far from the realities of life in Muslim theocracies. You are correct the Reformation was not an end to violence, it was the start of the process of eliminating systematic violence at the behest of religious ideology. It's an ongoing process in all such religions, but it's not Islamaphobic to note that Islam is far behind the curve on this. I think Harris would agree that we shouldn't judge individuals based solely on their religious affiliation (and hence, don't stoke fear of Muslims), but to ignore the realities of Muslim theocracies is naive.
IncreasePosts 3y ago
I find it interesting that there is no mention of this on the cnn/foxnews homepage. If a philosopher of his standing died in France, I'm sure it would be on the front of Le Monde and Figaro
- CreepGin 3y ago
  I also find it interesting that I graduated from Tufts (2011) and took a Philosophy class in 2010, and yet today is the first time I heard about Professor Dennett. I do wish I'd known him and his works earlier though. His notion of conciousness being a narrative created by the brain resonates well with me.
Flatcircle 3y ago
Probably won’t be going to heaven. (No offense)
- datascienced 3y ago
  Is that because of unrepented sin, or heaven not existing.
  - Flatcircle 3y ago
    The latter
JabavuAdams 3y ago
Wow, not that old.
darreninthenet 3y ago
What books would people recommend starting with by this guy?
- abecedarius 3y ago
  The Mind's I made the biggest impression on me. I don't know if that generalizes, you not being a 1980s teen now.
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codeulike 3y ago
I read Consciousness Explained 30 years ago and at first I was miffed that it didn't touch on the possibilties of Quantum mechanics and consciousness, a buzzword idea that I was keen on at the time. But then every chapter was so fascinating - blindsight, p-zombies, Libet, the cartesian theatre. If I can sum up in a very simple way, as a philosopher he was pointing to a simple but hard to grasp idea: Consciousness probably isn't what we think it is. Most of our preconceptions about it are likely wrong. Because we're right in it all the time, it seems like we 'know' things about it. But we don't. Quick example: our visual consciousness seems continuous. But we know from saccades that it can't be.
- meowface 3y ago
  For the record, 30 years later most consciousness researchers still believe it's unlikely that quantum mechanics plays a special role in consciousness. It of course remains plausible, since we still don't have the true answers yet, but hypotheses like Penrose's have not yet been found to be credible. I really like your summary of some of his ideas, though.
  - dudinax 3y ago
    I bet we'll find there's more computation going on in neurons (and possibly other brain cells) than we currently know about which will necessarily be happening at much smaller scales than synapse firing.
    - meowface 3y ago
      I think this is likely, yes. I think there are already some leads pointing in that direction. I think it likely won't depend on quantum mechanics, though. (But of course, this is all idle speculation from a complete amateur.) Each neuron is itself a complex organism. They're unicellular, but each is still a robust lifeform.
- vga805 3y ago
  We don't know from saccades that consciousness can't be continuous. We just know that the physical impressions on our retina do not map 1 to 1 to our visual conscious experience. The brain does all sorts of things to the raw information it receives before that information rises to the level of phenomenal consciousness.
jacksonhacker 3y ago
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glennonymous 3y ago
I sent an unsolicited 25 page paper about memes that I wrote, as just some (fairly pretentious!) guy without a college degree, to Professor Dennett, in the early oughts. And he just went ahead and read the thing and gave me very kind feedback on it. I'm sure he was a busy person, and didn't have any obligation to respond to me, at all. It touched me deeply. What a generous and gracious soul he was. I mean these words in a non-supernatural way, of course. :-D A toast to Mr. Dennett's wonderful memory.
dredmorbius 3y ago
NY Times obit: <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead...> Paywall: <https://archive.is/EIsGd https://archive.is/EIsGd>
tempaway3845751 3y ago
So I'm going to speak about a problem that I have and that's that I'm a philosopher. When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say, "I'm a professor," their eyes glaze over. When I go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around, they ask me what field I'm in and I say, "philosophy" -- their eyes glaze over. When I go to a philosopher's party and they ask me what I work on and I say, "consciousness," their eyes don't glaze over -- their lips curl into a snarl. And I get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they think, "That's impossible! You can't explain consciousness." The very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain consciousness is just out of the question. ... It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness. ... with regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of us seems to think, "I am an expert. Simply by being conscious, I know all about this." And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the way consciousness is! No, you've got it all wrong." And they say this with an amazing confidence. And so what I'm going to try to do today is to shake your confidence. Because I know the feeling -- I can feel it myself. I want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost minds -- that you are, yourselves, authoritative about your own consciousness. That's the order of the day here. From Daniel Dennett's TED talk, 2003 https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_the_illusion_of_consciousness https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_the_illusion_of_consci...
caturopath 3y ago
He's in a better place now.
Ologn 3y ago
I have seen him on television and Youtube, reading these comments it seems his books are interesting as well. I very much enjoyed him in the documentary series "A Glorious Accident", the show featuring him was - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_bv7rDB5e8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_bv7rDB5e8 and the show in the series featuring a round table of him, Stephen Jay Gould, Freeman Dyson, Oliver Sacks and him is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVrnn7QW6Jg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVrnn7QW6Jg
mwcz 3y ago
We were lucky to be privy to his wisdom for the past 18 years, since a heart-related close call in 2006, but even that doesn't feel like enough.
quus 3y ago
a post which will spawn many bad takes on philosophy in the comments section by tech workers who barely know the subject but believe they are experts
nighthawk454 3y ago
Oh! I had just come across him via this recent YouTube video. I'm glad to be introduced to a new influential thinker. I guess I have some reading to do, thanks Mr. Dennett! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGrRf1wD320 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGrRf1wD320
nukeyoular 3y ago
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earthboundkid 3y ago
Fortunately, we have a chatbot that can simulate him perfectly: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/GPT-3-Dennett-230201a.pdf http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/GPT-3-Den...
mjh2539 3y ago
The favorite "philosopher" of non-philosophers.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I remember seeing him as one of the megaminds in Vim Kayzer’s A Glorious Accident[0]. That was a show that would put many people to sleep, but I profoundly enjoyed it. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Glorious_Accident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Glorious_Accident
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
There’s a really good eulogy on Ars Technica[0], as he was personal friend of one of the reporters. [0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/philosopher-daniel-dennett-dead-at-82/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/philosopher-daniel-d...
stevebmark 3y ago
Unfortunately, listening to Dennett debate Sam Harris on free will made me lose faith in Dennett’s credibility. He was not able to understand the very clear argument of why we don’t have free will. Hearing him literally being unable to understand was surprising.
- awwaiid 3y ago
  I should go watch that debate. From "Elbow Room", the rough idea I've gotten out of it is that traditional Free Will is meaningless and so he invented a new definition which we might now call Agency. I don't recall how far he took it, but for me determinism is very helpful (if not required) for predictability, and predictability required for meaningful Free Will. So I'll have to go watch the debate, but my bet is that Dennett was willfully (pun intended) refusing to accept the other-definition of Free Will in favor of his own. I'll report back after I listen to the debate :)
taco-hands 3y ago
There are a lot of weeds to get into on the subject of philosophy here and demonstrated by the comments. However, Dennett contributed a lot in terms of thinking and arguments... We don't 'think' enough as individuals/beings and for that I doth my cap in respect of the work that he did and however it's regarded by 'the mob'!
qwerty456127 3y ago
Philosophers never die. Our bodies are computers and our personalities are self-improving (or self-worsening in some cases) programs. To the moment a body of a philosopher dies, the case usually is it has became irrelevant already because the program already runs in the decentralized cloud of the society.
api_or_ipa 3y ago
So sad. I just listened to an interview he gave to Babbage podcast from the Economist. Highly recommend listening to his thoughts, he was an incredible luminary. https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qNJBiPgkgf29cqpAcPfvf https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qNJBiPgkgf29cqpAcPfvf
az09mugen 3y ago
I discovered him with the excellent Royal Institution talk "If Brains are Computers, Who Designs the Software?" [0]. And the quote which marked my mind is "How could a slow, mindless process build a thing that could build a thing that a slow mindless process couldn't build on it's own ?". [0] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTFoJQSd48c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTFoJQSd48c
alexnewman 3y ago
Dennett clearly is an important mind. I do not disagree with anything he has opinions on. His belief that "self control is the arena of consciousness and emotional valence is what does all the pushing and pulling", I think expresses the limits of his theory and has some pretty obvious blindspots. I think both of these gentlemen would benefit by a study of islamic philosophy. I only wish the islamic religion was as tangible to me as its philosophy and sociology but I find it completely inscrutable. I might enjoy its theogony and stories if i spoke arabic.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
Rest In Peace, do not return as a philosophical zombie. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/67 https://existentialcomics.com/comic/67
SnoJohn 3y ago
His last interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWpm2NOF2Zw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWpm2NOF2Zw
nurettin 3y ago
I loved his "brights" vs "murkies" analogy.
alsetmusic 3y ago
I just confirmed that I have a copy of Breaking the Spell on a bookshelf. I still haven’t got to it. I buy books aspirationaly and read about a third of how many I buy. I have too many inputs to get to all of them. This was disappointing: > When the American Humanist Association revoked a lifetime achievement award it once gave to Richard Dawkins on account of his anti-trans tweets, Dennett was firmly on Dawkins’ side. He also passively promoted an embarrassing article written by the head of the Center For Inquiry, claiming identity politics and cancel culture had “torn apart” the Humanist movement… mostly because people were criticizing Dawkins for perpetuating anti-trans talking points. https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/what-ill-remember-about-daniel-dennett https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/what-ill-remember-about-da...
- cuile 3y ago
  I think it's actually very reassuring that he didn't accept the type of uncritical groupthink that is exemplified by the "trans rights" movement. It's odd how so many so-called atheists ended up latching onto that cultish nonsense. Dawkins stands amongst the few who have cast a suitably critical eye over this "gender identity" belief system.
the-mitr 3y ago
Some of Denett's works have been very influential in shaping my ideas about the world. Being a physicist by training, I did not (could not because of lack of exposure?) appreciate the concept of natural selection till I read his Darwin's Dangerous Idea. That book completely transformed my way of looking at principle of natural selection. The Mind's I anthology was another one which blew me away as a youngster. Finally his ideas on religion/atheism as presented in Breaking the Spell contributed to making sense of unorganised thoughts I had.

952 points by mellosouls 3y ago

Bostonian 3y ago

RIP. His book Consciousness Explained (1992) was fascinating.

canadiantim 3y ago
I've always heard it described as Consciousness Explained Away (1992); still tho, RIP
- markhahn 3y ago
  Yes, it was traditional "philosphers of mind" who found him dismissive, mainly because those are all basically Mysterians. For instance, he cut Chalmers no slack on the incoherency of Philosophical Zombies.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  The title promised more than it delivered, but nevertheless, Dennett's efforts in attempting to achieve that goal were a refreshing break from the incessant and fruitless bickering over whether the mind is a physical phenomenon.
- wzdd 3y ago
  That isn't the witty riposte that it is apparently thought to be. It really does "explain away" consciousness by reducing it to plausible physical processes. This reduction also applies to things like qualia, which is where nonmaterialists get upset as qualia (or equivalents) are also invoked by people like Nagel and Chalmers to argue against the physicality of consciousness. The core argument from Nagel / Chalmers is that that there is a subjective element to consciousness which has no physical explanation. The reasoning for this is always an appeal to intuition. If you accept that there is "something that it is like" to see red, be a bat, etc, and that the "something that it is like" is above and beyond the physical processes of the brain -- the firing of neurons -- then you by definition cannot accept a purely physical explanation of consciousness. Dennett's book argues that this is mystical nonsense (or, charitably, wishful thinking) and the "something that it is like" is simply what happens when particular types of physical processes occur in the brain. It's no surprise, therefore, that "explained away" is a criticism if you're a nonmaterialist. But if you're a materialist, then "explained away" is actually a good thing and the purpose of the book.
  - canadiantim 3y ago
    the "something that it is like" happening when "particular types of physical processes occur in the brain" points to these being separate and distinct processes, yet materialists claim they are the same and identical process. Qualia isn't the same process as the physical processes in the brain; they are very highly correlated, but ultimately distinctly separate processes.
acqbu 3y ago
Rest in Peace, Legend!

errantmind 3y ago

I had the opportunity to hear a guest lecture of his in Colorado a little over 15 years ago which inspired my further study of philosophy at the time. He had a keen mind and will be missed.

dosinga 3y ago

The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul with Douglas Adams is from quite some time ago, but as relevant as ever

x3n0ph3n3 3y ago
Douglas R. Hofstadter (of GEB), not Douglas Adams
- apricot 3y ago
  In the beginning, self-reference was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
  - johngossman 3y ago
    I want to read this book

kkarimi 3y ago

Probably the most interesting modern thinker that I remember from my 6 years of studying Psychology and Neuroscience. RIP

mkmk 3y ago

Very nice profile of him from 2017: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett... RIP

vlowther 3y ago

One of the great thinkers of the modern era. He will be missed.

ricardo81 3y ago

Enjoyed his participations in the "four horseman of the apocalypse" Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4 - From Bacteria to Bach and Back Apt for today's world. Could listen to him all day.

arrowsmith 3y ago
Non-apocalypse. That's the joke.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett

DylanDmitri 3y ago

Really liked this essay on cognition - https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-organisms-as-agents-with-agendas https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-o...

ithkuil 3y ago

I must admit I always scoffed at philosophers, but then I started reading Dennett and not only I finally met a philosopher that I respected, but he helped me unlock what other philosophers are doing and I started to see philosophers as a whole in new light.

klodolph 3y ago
You’re not alone. I think a lot of people, especially in STEM, pooh-pooh philosophy at first. The problem is that in any field, if you start digging to understand the underlying concepts of that field and how they are defined, at some point you hit philosophy and start working with philosophical concepts. The other problem is that there’s some real quack philosophy around, too. Various traps that philosophers sometimes fall into.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Whom would you describe as a "quack" philosopher?
  - klodolph 3y ago
    I picked the wording of my comment carefully… “quack philosophy” is what I said, not “quack philosopher”. That was very, very intentional. I don’t think I have ever described somebody as a quack philosopher.
    - keiferski 3y ago
      Ok, then what works would you describe as quack philosophy? I don't think the distinction is really that relevant.
      - klodolph 3y ago
        Ok. I think the distinction is important, and relevant, and even critical. It is a distinction I will continue to make. I put the concept of “philosophical zombies” as quackery. At best, the p-zombie thought experiment shows that we haven’t really come up with a definition of consciousness that explains what we want it to explain. Some people use p-zombies as part of a larger argument against physicalism. Chalmers published a modal logic argument against physicalism using p-zombies. One of the tricky things about modal logic is that it requires a deeper understanding of modal logic in order for you (you, someone reading a modal logic argument) to make good decisions about which propositions you are willing to accept in a modal logic argument. Since most people only have an intuitive understanding of modal logic, it is a good way to win an argument but a bad way to explain your position. I’d say that this work (p-zombies) is quackery in the sense that it’s consistently directed at something which I consider to be unproductive, which is the work of undermining or attacking physicalism / physical monism. At some point, in these discussions, you end up having some argument about the semantics of ontology and how you define “existence”. If your semantics for “existence” admits non-physical things to exist (like, if you’re a Platonist), and you’re having a conversation with someone who believes in physicalism, then I don’t think either person in the conversation is going to get much out of it, other than a better way to explain their own position. Edit: I hope that paints a complete enough picture and covers the important parts of my complaints about p-zombies. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of philosophy and I may be missing something important, maybe there’s some really important argument p-zombies are used for, and maybe I don’t understand Chalmers; that’s always a risk. My main complaint here is that it seems to be some tool to make an argument against physicalism, but this tool doesn’t help you understand physicalism, or help you understand its alternatives. It’s just an argument that you can have between somebody who believes in physicalism and somebody who doesn’t, where neither person will agree with the other one after hearing the argument.

dotsam 3y ago

Sad news. I aspire to be as intellectually acute in old age as Dennett was. His recent autobiography was engaging, although somewhat too indulgent at times. I admire how he created a life and a world-view that worked so well for him.

IncreasePosts 3y ago
What do you mean old age? He died at the same age that our (most likely) President will be next year.
- replwoacause 3y ago
  Yes exactly. Old age.

dustfinger 3y ago

Consciousness Explained [1] absolutely filled me with wonder during my university days. [1]: https://www.amazon.ca/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/0316180661 https://www.amazon.ca/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Denne...

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Barrin92 3y ago

Incredibly sad news. I don't have much to add but to share some of my favorite work by him, one is an essay exploring Jaynes idea of the Bicameral Mind, and another is a talk he gave on Ontology and Philosophy of Science. Always admired his ability to bridge disciplines and look at ideas from a slightly unorthodox angle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx5OZ1AZ5Vk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx5OZ1AZ5Vk https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-archeology.pdf https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-arc...

ggpsv 3y ago
Oh, I did not know about this essay! Thank you for sharing. To others reading this, this short essay [0] by Julian Jaynes is a good introduction to his idea of the Bicameral Mind. He later developed the idea further in his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". If you've watched the series "Westworld", how the androids begin to develop something akin to consciousness is inspired by Jaynes' ideas. [0]: https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/articles/consciousness-and-the-voices-of-the-mind/ https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/articles/consciousnes...
johngossman 3y ago
Thank you! Great essay.

superb-owl 3y ago

Unlike most of you, I strongly disliked Dennett's philosophy. But he seemed like a wonderful human, and he always made me think.

atentaten 3y ago
What do you dislike about it?
- foldr 3y ago
  Dennett and Fodor had a lot of amusing (though sometimes rather bitter) exchanges. Here's a review by Fodor that gives a critical perspective on some of Dennett's work: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n05/jerry-fodor/why-would-mother-nature-bother https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n05/jerry-fodor/why-woul...
  - pdonis 3y ago
    I found Dennett's responses to Fodor to be spot on. I think Fodor simply could not grasp what Dennett was actually talking about--and Fodor was not the only one.
    - foldr 3y ago
      Dennett's response concedes all of Fodor's main points and proceeds via innuendo and ad hominem. But there you have it. Dennett was important and influential, and is worth reading, but his appeal as a philosopher has always been a mystery to me.
      - pdonis 3y ago
        > Dennett's response concedes all of Fodor's main points and proceeds via innuendo and ad hominem I strongly disagree, but I doubt we'll resolve that here. > his appeal as a philosopher has always been a mystery to me. Not to me, but again, we won't resolve that here. We agree that he was important and influential, and that's what matters for this discussion in his memory.

Simplicitas 3y ago

A philosopher who appreciated engineering. RIP Daniel Dennett.

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dsubburam 3y ago

I liked the debate he had with Sapolsky, where he explained why free will is compatible with determinism (arguments that were new to me), and that Sapolsky's book ("Determined") did not grapple with those arguments. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYzFH8xqhns&t=2273s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYzFH8xqhns&t=2273s

johngossman 3y ago
I just watched this recently and thought "he looks old." But he was as sharp as ever. I hope my brain still works right up to the end
fsckboy 3y ago
They are both largely incoherent in that debate because they both think "the right next move" is to test "free will" against their notions of morality. Morality has nothing to do with free will. If you consider morality important, then you might care about free will within your moral framework; but you can debate free will without any notion of morality, and neither of them can see that. (is - ought, which they both are aware of)
- astine 3y ago
  On the contrary, morality has everything to do with free will. It's one of the central motivations of the concept and always has been. From the greeks right up through the enlightenment, the question was always "in what sense are we capable of making responsible choices," with that term 'responsible' just dripping with moral implications. Without the moral implications, free will would not have the place it does in our cultural ethos.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    you might be making a case that you can't talk about morality without talking about free will. but you have not made a case that talking about free will requires talking about morality
    - 3y ago

spmurrayzzz 3y ago

Breaking the Spell is a book I still recommend to friends today. Sad to hear.

mamonster 3y ago

Whilst he is probably the most respectable member of the "Four Horsemen"(Hitchens is probably the most revered but his early death seems to have given him a halo, a lot of his arguments would not stand up today), New Atheism will end up IMO as something that is seen very negatively by posterity(very little of it stands up today as anything more than fedora tipping).

tanepiper 3y ago
Unfortunately a lot of "New Atheism" has aligned itself with some very problematic people and views so I tend to agree.

hobbescotch 3y ago

Very sad news. Had the pleasure of having him be the keynote speaker at an aesthetics conference some friends and I organized during uni. Brilliant mind. RIP

Jun8 3y ago

Whether you like his theories and positions or not, he was a great philosopher, an influential thinker, and an interesting character. NY Times interview with him: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/27/magazine/daniel-dennett-interview.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/27/magazine/dani... NYer profile: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett... Interesting thread on /r/askphilosophy on philosophers' pushback against him: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/2cs8kz/do_many_philosophers_disagree_and_dislike_daniel/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/2cs8kz/do_ma... Big loss indeed, RIP.

Fripplebubby 3y ago
For anyone who enjoyed the titles of those links but found that there was just, something in the way of really digging into them, try: NY Times interview with him: https://archive.ph/knd9C https://archive.ph/knd9C NYer Profile: https://archive.ph/Snm8g https://archive.ph/Snm8g

Mesopropithecus 3y ago

RIP. When I wasn't sure what to make of Goedel, Escher, Bach, his writings tipped the scale. Thanks!

AlbertCory 3y ago

So sad. I was on the team that brought him to Google, and my task was to get his signature on the video release form. Here's the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0 I told him that his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea was one of the few where, when I got to the end, I immediately wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again. He said, "I'm not sure that's a good thing."

greentxt 3y ago
He was nothing if not honest. Truly the best of the New Athiests and deserving of almost Rorty-esque fandom.
dwh452 3y ago
Very sad for me, he was one of my favorite thinkers and his books were the few that made me feel smarter after having read them. His thinking tools remain a great aid to my thinking. The reason for this post though, is to mention that Darwin also died on April 19th.
eternauta3k 3y ago
Could you explain his answer?
- n4r9 3y ago
  My guess: Dennett took it to mean that his exposition wasn't clear enough to the layman first time round and was disappointed by this. C.f. the famous quote attributed to Einstein "If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.". (Does anyone know if he actually said anything like that?)
  - datascienced 3y ago
    Could also mean it ended up for this reader as being entertainment. Wanting to read again because it is joyful. In terms of learning I can’t read a book and remember it all. I would need to apply it.

pdonis 3y ago

I first came across Daniel Dennett through Douglas Hofstadter, when I read The Mind's I because I liked Godel, Escher, Bach. Once I had read Dennett's contributions to The Mind's I, I started looking up everything I could find of his writings; I think at this point I've read every one of his books and a fair number of his papers. He will be missed. RIP.

tum92 3y ago

Had the pleasure of taking a course of his in undergrad as a newly decided philosophy major. The material was excellent and right up my alley, but more than anything I was stunned by how fluidly and clearly he communicated. Huge loss

tony_cannistra 3y ago
I had the same experience, except I was definitely not a Phil major. He had a "class for every major" where we read chapters of the book he was writing (Toolkit for Thinking) and basically gave him feedback. It was an amazing strategy for him to get reviews on his book that way from totally non-Phil folks. And my name is in the book!
Fripplebubby 3y ago
Great teacher, great writer. I took one of his undergrad classes, and one day I went in to his office hours to chat - I still remember how relieved he was that I wasn't there to try to debate with him about God, that I wanted to talk about something else! I think that happened to him quite a lot due to his reputation.

nathan_compton 3y ago

Good to finally have the question of whether he is conscious or not definitely resolved.

motohagiography 3y ago

Can't say I met or knew him, but his essays in "The Mind's I" and "Brainstorms" are what got me to pursue tech as a teenager in the early 90s. Along with Hofstader, his ideas were foundational to hacker culture. What a time to go, where there has been a kind of cog.sci winter for the last 20 years, but the last year of LLMs has forced philosophy of mind back into the public consciousness. Though largely today under the guise of "AI Safety" and "alignment," Dennet's articulations form the tools we're going to be using to reason about ethics as they relate to these things we think of as minds - and regarding how we relate to these things that increasingly resemble other minds. Without too much lionizing (even though he has, however, just died), it would be hard to say that new ideas in philosophy as a whole have had more impact in a lifetime or more than that. A lot of very clever people disagreed strongly with him. However, since not one of them could deny they were shaped by the forces they opposed, those controversies became the shape of his own huge and formidable influence. I'm sure he would want to be remembered for something else, and I have the sense sentimentality was not his thing at all, but his popularization the term "deepity," was in the character of many of his ideas, where once you had been exposed to one, it yielded a perspective you could afterwards not unsee. I hope an afterlife may provide some of the surprise and delight he brought to so many in this one.

fsckboy 3y ago
I'm afraid an afterlife would not leave Dennett in good humor.
- pmarreck 3y ago
  I think it would. Even if he was wrong about it, it's important to air the thinking around it regardless of belief. The proposition, for example, that consciousness is basically an illusion without empirical basis, one would have to take up as belief, I guess (paradoxically), since to most of us, that would seem like gaslighting (i.e., "if your conclusion is that Descartes was wrong and that we can't even know we are conscious, then I beg to differ")
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago

rthrfrd 3y ago

Very sad to hear. We’ll certainly miss having his perspective to ground us in this era of AI hyperbole, as thousands of engineers start confronting the ambiguities of consciousness with incongruent mental frameworks.

pixelmonkey 3y ago

Looks like dailynous.com server is having trouble responding (likely due to HN). But a cached copy of the page is here: http://archive.today/kHPfz http://archive.today/kHPfz Daniel Dennett was an important philosopher of mind, whose Wikipedia page is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett When I studied philosophy in college (2002-2006), his ideas were among the most discussed and debated at NYU's philosophy department. I always enjoyed his thoughts and writings, even if I often didn't agree with them. RIP.

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pbsladek 3y ago

Love his work. Sad to see him go.

abeppu 3y ago

In 2022, a GPT-3 model fine-tuned on Dennett's writing was good enough that "Dennett experts" could only pick a real Dennett quote from a list of 5 quotes about 50% of the time. I don't know that anyone's tried on newer models. He's gone, but I wonder if we could continue to get insights from him for a while longer. https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/07/results-computerized-philosopher-can.html https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/07/results-comput...

_akhe 3y ago
> I wonder if we could continue to get insights from him I think so. His views were somewhat rigid and materialist. As a de-fluffer, he's great, and I'm sure he will continue to be quoted especially as we make progress on AI and get into the nuts and bolts of consciousness. In particular which things are extraneous or peripheral to the problem itself.
- tanepiper 3y ago
  I tend to agree here, I found intuition pumps didn't make sense and illusionism a cop-out for materialism.

goodgoblin 3y ago

I was unpacking and yesterday from a move and saw a copy of his "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" book and remembered he time he answered a fan email I sent to him with the simple reply "It's always nice to receive an email such as yours." - here's to hoping you are wrong about the soul Dan!

raoof 3y ago

consciousness is like a joke, if you think it needs an explanation you already miss it. I struggled with myself to convince Dennett that his conscious so much that I ended up losing it myself I hope you don't make the same mistake that I did

scoofy 3y ago

My background is in Analytic Philosophy, so I'm fairly familiar with Dennett. His rise to prominence during the early 2000's seemed appropriate given the huge shift in American religious belief. Though, I still certainly understand that folks can be exasperated by that movement, I just don't think that you can experience a 30% drop in religious affiliation, in a single generation, without annoying people.[1] I read his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which I found really interesting in that I'd never thought about religion as a concept being an evolutionary adaptive (or "hijacking") feature. I found it fascinating, though not profound. That said, I think some of the best philosophical work is just that. Really insightful ideas that make perfect sense once you think about them, you just probably wouldn't take the time to think about them. 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-religious-composition-has-changed-in-recent-decades/ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...

wslh 3y ago
Sorry, don't get your stats. In my family one generation passed from orthodox religious to the next: non religious without any issue. One example contradicts the whole point. The study focus on Christianity and not other religions though.
- MetaMonk 3y ago
  Life and psychology are not neatly provable / disprovable structures all the way down though.
listic 3y ago
It may be an aside, but could you you clarify what you mean by a huge shift in American religious belief? For the benefit of those of us, who are on the internet, but not from or have been to the US?
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  It only takes about five seconds. Open the link that GP shared and read the first paragraph. > as the early 1990s, about 90% of U.S. adults identified as Christians. But today, about two-thirds of adults are Christians.

carlinm 3y ago

Sad to hear this. I had read his book “Elbow Room” back when I had been diving more deeply into free will and the various viewpoints associated. I don’t know that I found it convincing but it was an interesting peek into the compatibilist argument.

barfard 3y ago

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pknerd 3y ago

I am sorry that I did not know about him but mentioning of "Consciousness" in the linked article made me to google about his books. One of the book is "Consciousness Explained", I wonder whether it is for layman like me who do not know much about it?

deleted 3y ago
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johngossman 3y ago
I would say it is. As usual, need to be aware that his conclusions are controversial. But the whole area is
mkehrt 3y ago
It's extremely oriented towards laymen, and if you think it sounds interesting, you will probably enjoy it a lot. (Even if you don't agree with its conclusions)
codeulike 3y ago
Its a great book, you might not agree that it 'explains' consciousness but it will give you a lot of new ways to think about it and it references a lot of interesting research.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

Sad news. I loved "Minds I". After that he was always quantum entangled with Douglas Hofstadter for me. RIP a cool and fun philosopher, Mr. Dennett.

mihaitodor 3y ago

Really terrible news... So glad I got to meet him in person in Dublin in 2018 when he gave a talk at https://www.tcd.ie/biosciences/whatislife https://www.tcd.ie/biosciences/whatislife and hung out for a chat in the lobby. He had this wonderful Gandalf-worthy cane that I'm not sure how he managed to manoeuvre when boarding airplanes.

tombert 3y ago

I was one of those irritating edgy atheist teenagers (and am still kind of an irritating edgy atheist adult), so I used to have plenty of Daniel Dennett quotes in my back pocket when arguing with people online. He will be missed by me.

alex201 3y ago

I've never quite seen eye to eye with Daniel Dennett. His tendency to reduce the inexplicable to what he's confident he understands has always made me wonder if a challenging childhood might have fostered his distrust of the mysterious. Whenever I admire Nobel Prize laureates like Roger Penrose, who argue that consciousness isn't just software running on the brain's hardware, I can't help but feel a twinge of pity for Dennett and his like-minded peers. I can almost hear him reflecting, 'Wow, that was a wild ride, but boy, was I cranky! I wish I could have another go at it.

n4r9 3y ago
> made me wonder if a challenging childhood might have fostered his distrust of the mysterious Why this, and not simply an urge to understand things?
- alex201 3y ago
  Understand things? He has never successfully explained anything related to consciousness except by using the magical word: illusion. One might argue back, 'You're the illusion, Mr. Dennett,' and we end up as a bunch of ignorant folks pointing fingers.
  - n4r9 3y ago
    I get that you disagree with him. Just saying it's unfair to assume that his natural curiosity stems from some kind of trauma.
tasty_freeze 3y ago
There is an infinity of mysterious things one could posit, including an infinity of mutually incompatible mysteries. How do you decide which mysteries are worthy of consideration? Personally, I think starting with things are known to exist, which have a physical basis, is a great start, and untestable assumptions should be kept to a minimum. Just because it would be delightful to contemplate that ornately feathered technicolor quantum unicorns are actually underlying all of reality, it isn't productive to consider until there is a reason to. Penrose is no doubt a genius of high order in his domain, but consciousness is not one of his domains. Saying consciousness is the result of quantum effects in microtubules explains nothing -- it is just a very tiny rug which one could imagine is hiding the truth, as all the larger scale hiding places have been inspected and found lacking. You'd think that with the stunning (and mostly unexpected) success of LLMs would expose the fact that simple, soul-free, mechanistic computations can produce some really amazing capabilities. The human brain is orders of magnitude larger than GPT4, plus it has a wildly more complex architecture than today's neural networks. To me, it takes little imagination to see how everything could be explained in purely physical terms.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Something more descriptive in the title would be helpful like "Daniel Dennett, philosopher and cognitive scientist, has died"

dredmorbius 3y ago
"<Name> has died" is something of an HN convention: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22has+died%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22has+died%22>

bbor 3y ago

RIP to a legend. If you haven’t heard of him and are interested in the more philosophical side of AI I think he’s at his best in dialogue with others, so I highly recommend skimming this 1993 round table that made me fall in love with him. I can’t find the stamp, but I know at some point he excitedly describes machine learning research to some guffaws from his interlocutors — quite funny and vindicating in hindsight. https://youtu.be/RVrnn7QW6Jg?si=jenbni0Rg1dX5fd4 https://youtu.be/RVrnn7QW6Jg?si=jenbni0Rg1dX5fd4 At ~01:50:00, he talks very poignantly about death, the soul, and immortality. Obviously this video is 30 years old now, but I doubt he changed much and it seems his philosophy left him with good tools to handle the specter of death. Godspeed Dennett, the world is in your debt... Some other, perhaps more lighthearted timestamps: - @ 01:00:00; A Nagel discussion culminating in “I think we’re making tremendous progress on knowing what it’s like to be a bat!” Truly a Silicon Valley optimist before it was cool. - at 01:12:00; He tells a fun robotics story to back up his belief in the tractability of neurophilosophy. - @ 01:40:00; he discusses his general philosophy for the mind and why he thinks our brains can be broken down into a recursive hierarchy of agential machines. - 00:24:00 is the moment that made me love him. Love to hate him, perhaps! Like a more prestigious, less directly-aggressive Gary Marcus.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
I can also recommend this discussion. It makes me sad that Sheldrake is the last participant standing. Not because I want Sheldrake to die, but rather because it reminds me all those great thinkers are now thinking no more.

_akhe 3y ago

Dennett on Closer To Truth (just uploaded) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHvIXe4DOEc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHvIXe4DOEc

n4r9 3y ago

Like others here, I found Consciousness Explained to generate a huge perspective shift in my worldview. My (now) wife and I went to see him speak in June 2012 in King's College Cambridge, on the event of Alan Turing's 100th birthday: https://philevents.org/event/show/2205 https://philevents.org/event/show/2205 I don't remember all the details, but I think he spoke about Turing's ideas about evolution and computers. It might be similar to this article from roughly the same time (though paywalled): https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/-a-perfect-and-beautiful-machine-what-darwins-theory-of-evolution-reveals-about-artificial-intelligence/258829/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/-a-pe... The only other talk I remember going to was Simon Singh (author of Fermat's Last Theorem) giving a great presentation on (and demonstration of!) the Enigma machine.

spacetimeuser5 3y ago

Ok. And how many professors of medicine and doctors die under 120. Monkeys got really cheap headset.

arduanika 3y ago

With no disrespect to the other three, Dennett always struck me as the most serious and intellectually modest of the Four Horsemen. He mostly stuck to his own lane of academic expertise, and used the proper caveats when venturing out of it. He didn't lean on rhetorical flourish, strawman his opponents, or overstate his case. The other three are a lot of fun, but maybe there's something to be said for boring. He spoke at my college once, and came off as nuanced and considerate. I think I disagree with him about consciousness, but I'm not informed enough to know for sure. What's clear is that he was a constructive part of the conversation in his field.

JoeJonathan 3y ago
[flagged]
- naasking 3y ago
  I'm always confused by these Islamophobia charges. Christianity has similar backwards and violent rhetoric. Before the Reformation, non-Christians were right to fear Christians. Has Islam had a similar reformation of its violent precepts?
  - JoeJonathan 3y ago
    Was everything hunky dory after the reformation? Protestant missionaries cleared the ground for British and Dutch colonialism. There’s no one Islam, so it depends on which Muslims you’re talking to.
    - naasking 3y ago
      > There’s no one Islam, so it depends on which Muslims you’re talking to. There was no one Christianity either, but the question is, was it rational at the time to be cautious of any Christians if you didn't know their affiliations or religious zeal? It seems to me that charges of Islamaphobia are a convenience afforded only to those safe in developed countries far from the realities of life in Muslim theocracies. You are correct the Reformation was not an end to violence, it was the start of the process of eliminating systematic violence at the behest of religious ideology. It's an ongoing process in all such religions, but it's not Islamaphobic to note that Islam is far behind the curve on this. I think Harris would agree that we shouldn't judge individuals based solely on their religious affiliation (and hence, don't stoke fear of Muslims), but to ignore the realities of Muslim theocracies is naive.

IncreasePosts 3y ago

I find it interesting that there is no mention of this on the cnn/foxnews homepage. If a philosopher of his standing died in France, I'm sure it would be on the front of Le Monde and Figaro

CreepGin 3y ago
I also find it interesting that I graduated from Tufts (2011) and took a Philosophy class in 2010, and yet today is the first time I heard about Professor Dennett. I do wish I'd known him and his works earlier though. His notion of conciousness being a narrative created by the brain resonates well with me.

Flatcircle 3y ago

Probably won’t be going to heaven. (No offense)

datascienced 3y ago
Is that because of unrepented sin, or heaven not existing.
- Flatcircle 3y ago
  The latter

JabavuAdams 3y ago

Wow, not that old.

darreninthenet 3y ago

What books would people recommend starting with by this guy?

abecedarius 3y ago
The Mind's I made the biggest impression on me. I don't know if that generalizes, you not being a 1980s teen now.
- deleted 3y ago
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codeulike 3y ago

I read Consciousness Explained 30 years ago and at first I was miffed that it didn't touch on the possibilties of Quantum mechanics and consciousness, a buzzword idea that I was keen on at the time. But then every chapter was so fascinating - blindsight, p-zombies, Libet, the cartesian theatre. If I can sum up in a very simple way, as a philosopher he was pointing to a simple but hard to grasp idea: Consciousness probably isn't what we think it is. Most of our preconceptions about it are likely wrong. Because we're right in it all the time, it seems like we 'know' things about it. But we don't. Quick example: our visual consciousness seems continuous. But we know from saccades that it can't be.

meowface 3y ago
For the record, 30 years later most consciousness researchers still believe it's unlikely that quantum mechanics plays a special role in consciousness. It of course remains plausible, since we still don't have the true answers yet, but hypotheses like Penrose's have not yet been found to be credible. I really like your summary of some of his ideas, though.
- dudinax 3y ago
  I bet we'll find there's more computation going on in neurons (and possibly other brain cells) than we currently know about which will necessarily be happening at much smaller scales than synapse firing.
  - meowface 3y ago
    I think this is likely, yes. I think there are already some leads pointing in that direction. I think it likely won't depend on quantum mechanics, though. (But of course, this is all idle speculation from a complete amateur.) Each neuron is itself a complex organism. They're unicellular, but each is still a robust lifeform.
vga805 3y ago
We don't know from saccades that consciousness can't be continuous. We just know that the physical impressions on our retina do not map 1 to 1 to our visual conscious experience. The brain does all sorts of things to the raw information it receives before that information rises to the level of phenomenal consciousness.

jacksonhacker 3y ago

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glennonymous 3y ago

I sent an unsolicited 25 page paper about memes that I wrote, as just some (fairly pretentious!) guy without a college degree, to Professor Dennett, in the early oughts. And he just went ahead and read the thing and gave me very kind feedback on it. I'm sure he was a busy person, and didn't have any obligation to respond to me, at all. It touched me deeply. What a generous and gracious soul he was. I mean these words in a non-supernatural way, of course. :-D A toast to Mr. Dennett's wonderful memory.

dredmorbius 3y ago

NY Times obit: <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead...> Paywall: <https://archive.is/EIsGd https://archive.is/EIsGd>

tempaway3845751 3y ago

So I'm going to speak about a problem that I have and that's that I'm a philosopher. When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say, "I'm a professor," their eyes glaze over. When I go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around, they ask me what field I'm in and I say, "philosophy" -- their eyes glaze over. When I go to a philosopher's party and they ask me what I work on and I say, "consciousness," their eyes don't glaze over -- their lips curl into a snarl. And I get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they think, "That's impossible! You can't explain consciousness." The very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain consciousness is just out of the question. ... It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness. ... with regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of us seems to think, "I am an expert. Simply by being conscious, I know all about this." And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the way consciousness is! No, you've got it all wrong." And they say this with an amazing confidence. And so what I'm going to try to do today is to shake your confidence. Because I know the feeling -- I can feel it myself. I want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost minds -- that you are, yourselves, authoritative about your own consciousness. That's the order of the day here. From Daniel Dennett's TED talk, 2003 https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_the_illusion_of_consciousness https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_the_illusion_of_consci...

caturopath 3y ago

He's in a better place now.

Ologn 3y ago

I have seen him on television and Youtube, reading these comments it seems his books are interesting as well. I very much enjoyed him in the documentary series "A Glorious Accident", the show featuring him was - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_bv7rDB5e8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_bv7rDB5e8 and the show in the series featuring a round table of him, Stephen Jay Gould, Freeman Dyson, Oliver Sacks and him is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVrnn7QW6Jg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVrnn7QW6Jg

mwcz 3y ago

We were lucky to be privy to his wisdom for the past 18 years, since a heart-related close call in 2006, but even that doesn't feel like enough.

quus 3y ago

a post which will spawn many bad takes on philosophy in the comments section by tech workers who barely know the subject but believe they are experts

nighthawk454 3y ago

Oh! I had just come across him via this recent YouTube video. I'm glad to be introduced to a new influential thinker. I guess I have some reading to do, thanks Mr. Dennett! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGrRf1wD320 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGrRf1wD320

nukeyoular 3y ago

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earthboundkid 3y ago

Fortunately, we have a chatbot that can simulate him perfectly: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/GPT-3-Dennett-230201a.pdf http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/GPT-3-Den...

mjh2539 3y ago

The favorite "philosopher" of non-philosophers.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I remember seeing him as one of the megaminds in Vim Kayzer’s A Glorious Accident[0]. That was a show that would put many people to sleep, but I profoundly enjoyed it. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Glorious_Accident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Glorious_Accident

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

There’s a really good eulogy on Ars Technica[0], as he was personal friend of one of the reporters. [0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/philosopher-daniel-dennett-dead-at-82/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/philosopher-daniel-d...

stevebmark 3y ago

Unfortunately, listening to Dennett debate Sam Harris on free will made me lose faith in Dennett’s credibility. He was not able to understand the very clear argument of why we don’t have free will. Hearing him literally being unable to understand was surprising.

awwaiid 3y ago
I should go watch that debate. From "Elbow Room", the rough idea I've gotten out of it is that traditional Free Will is meaningless and so he invented a new definition which we might now call Agency. I don't recall how far he took it, but for me determinism is very helpful (if not required) for predictability, and predictability required for meaningful Free Will. So I'll have to go watch the debate, but my bet is that Dennett was willfully (pun intended) refusing to accept the other-definition of Free Will in favor of his own. I'll report back after I listen to the debate :)

taco-hands 3y ago

There are a lot of weeds to get into on the subject of philosophy here and demonstrated by the comments. However, Dennett contributed a lot in terms of thinking and arguments... We don't 'think' enough as individuals/beings and for that I doth my cap in respect of the work that he did and however it's regarded by 'the mob'!

qwerty456127 3y ago

Philosophers never die. Our bodies are computers and our personalities are self-improving (or self-worsening in some cases) programs. To the moment a body of a philosopher dies, the case usually is it has became irrelevant already because the program already runs in the decentralized cloud of the society.

api_or_ipa 3y ago

So sad. I just listened to an interview he gave to Babbage podcast from the Economist. Highly recommend listening to his thoughts, he was an incredible luminary. https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qNJBiPgkgf29cqpAcPfvf https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qNJBiPgkgf29cqpAcPfvf

az09mugen 3y ago

I discovered him with the excellent Royal Institution talk "If Brains are Computers, Who Designs the Software?" [0]. And the quote which marked my mind is "How could a slow, mindless process build a thing that could build a thing that a slow mindless process couldn't build on it's own ?". [0] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTFoJQSd48c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTFoJQSd48c

alexnewman 3y ago

Dennett clearly is an important mind. I do not disagree with anything he has opinions on. His belief that "self control is the arena of consciousness and emotional valence is what does all the pushing and pulling", I think expresses the limits of his theory and has some pretty obvious blindspots. I think both of these gentlemen would benefit by a study of islamic philosophy. I only wish the islamic religion was as tangible to me as its philosophy and sociology but I find it completely inscrutable. I might enjoy its theogony and stories if i spoke arabic.

BlueTemplar 3y ago

Rest In Peace, do not return as a philosophical zombie. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/67 https://existentialcomics.com/comic/67

SnoJohn 3y ago

His last interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWpm2NOF2Zw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWpm2NOF2Zw

nurettin 3y ago

I loved his "brights" vs "murkies" analogy.

alsetmusic 3y ago

I just confirmed that I have a copy of Breaking the Spell on a bookshelf. I still haven’t got to it. I buy books aspirationaly and read about a third of how many I buy. I have too many inputs to get to all of them. This was disappointing: > When the American Humanist Association revoked a lifetime achievement award it once gave to Richard Dawkins on account of his anti-trans tweets, Dennett was firmly on Dawkins’ side. He also passively promoted an embarrassing article written by the head of the Center For Inquiry, claiming identity politics and cancel culture had “torn apart” the Humanist movement… mostly because people were criticizing Dawkins for perpetuating anti-trans talking points. https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/what-ill-remember-about-daniel-dennett https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/what-ill-remember-about-da...

cuile 3y ago
I think it's actually very reassuring that he didn't accept the type of uncritical groupthink that is exemplified by the "trans rights" movement. It's odd how so many so-called atheists ended up latching onto that cultish nonsense. Dawkins stands amongst the few who have cast a suitably critical eye over this "gender identity" belief system.

the-mitr 3y ago

Some of Denett's works have been very influential in shaping my ideas about the world. Being a physicist by training, I did not (could not because of lack of exposure?) appreciate the concept of natural selection till I read his Darwin's Dangerous Idea. That book completely transformed my way of looking at principle of natural selection. The Mind's I anthology was another one which blew me away as a youngster. Finally his ideas on religion/atheism as presented in Breaking the Spell contributed to making sense of unorganised thoughts I had.