4 ms·
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 Hofsta
by 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 agoI'm afraid an afterlife would not leave Dennett in good humor.
- pmarreck 3y agoI 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 agoI think that I think, therefore I think I am.
- pmarreck 3y agono point in not making it recursive I think that I think that I think, therefore I think that I think I am It's kind of interesting that this is still on HN front page at the same time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092985
- arduanika 3y agoI'm guessing that was GP's joke. Similar to Vonnegut's joke at a memorial service for Asimov at the American Humanist Society: "Isaac is up in Heaven now". It's amusing that when I searched for the exact quote just now, I found this HN comment from 2011, on the "in memoriam" thread for Dennett's fellow horseman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3360710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3360710
- dredmorbius 3y agoWhether Dennett was right or wrong about a deity, he's meeting his maker ;-)
- erickhill 3y agoMan I miss Hitchens something fierce.
- freedomben 3y agoIndeed. Do yourself a favor and don't watch any of the videos of him on youtube. That razor sharp wit combined with spontaneous humor will make you really mad at cancer.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tzakrajs 3y agoAlso: Do yourself a favor and (dont? er do?) read/listen to his brother's books! Particularly The Phoney Victory. He writes polemics as good as Christopher. Truly a yin to the yang. I like the way they argue, although I don't necessarily agree with everything they argue.
- undershirt 3y agoGod forgive us. May his memory be eternal.
- swat535 3y agoHe may forgive but I am not sure his soul would have wanted to be with Him, based on what I have seen from him he would rather be in oblivion than an Eternal Church.. Obviously I don’t claim to know his true heart.
- robwwilliams 3y agoLoL. We will have to live for him and breathe his dust.
- samatman 3y ago> Along with Hofstadter, his ideas were foundational to hacker culture. Dennett was an influential thinker, probably more so than Hofstadter overall, but I can't agree with this assessment. For one thing, he became widely known after Consciousness Explained, in 1992, which is simply too late to be foundational to hacker culture, which was well and truly founded by then. I won't broaden my case here, lest anything I say be interpreted as speaking ill of the dead. I'm certain he was a major influence for many who post here, yourself included, and I don't intend to detract from that.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoMaybe you discovered Dennett after 1992, but he was a well-known and widely published philosopher long before. "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" was a landmark work and was published in 1984. "The Minds I" (w/Hofstadter) was, relatively speaking, a hugely popular work published in 1981. In 1993, the cover of "Dennett and his critics" began > Daniel Dennett is arguably one of the most influential yet radical philosophers in America today. Doesn't sound much like someone who "became widely known" after a book published in 1992.
- ska 3y agoYou both have a point. Hacker culture was well established by the 70s, so still a decade before Dennett's earlier works. I do think its true that some of his work has resonated with many people who also resonate with "hacker culture".
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoHacker culture was not well established by the 70s, simply because so few people worked with computers in that decade. You can certainly trace its roots back to at least 1970, but it really did not become established then. What most people identify as "hacker culture" today arose in tandem with (a) relatively affordable "personal" computers (b) modem-based communication. The rise of these two things is more or less entirely cotemporal with the most productive phase of Dennett's career.
- Optimal_Persona 3y agoWhat do you mean by "cog.sci winter of the last 20 years"? The research of Dr. Bruce Perry, Bessel van der Kolk and others into the effects of trauma on brain development, behavior and social functioning has had a profound impact on the understanding of cognition, the mind-body continuum, and the treatment of human suffering in this time frame. https://earlylearningnation.com/2023/02/author-bruce-perry-and-the-neuroscience-insights-we-need-today/ https://earlylearningnation.com/2023/02/author-bruce-perry-a...
- stevofolife 3y agoI think what he means is that many of the seminal work related to cognitive science were produced back then. For example, Chomsky, Minsky, John Searle, David Chalmers and many more. Things still move during winter, just not as much.
- bbor 3y agoBeautifully said, honestly brought me some solace. Echoing your endorsement of Brainstorms — I expect/hope this will be his enduring legacy! Death touches us all, but I totally agree, it especially hurts me to see these AI pioneers passing away right when so many groundbreaking cognitive science discoveries are being made. Especially in the cases of Dennett’s “opposition” like Lenat (and soon Chomsky…) where they die appearing “disproven” or “outmoded” by LLMs in the eyes of Silicon Valley celebrities like Hinton and Friedman. Oh well, I’m sure their time on their earth has prepared them for a little bit of criticism and uncertainty, a-la Schopenhauer’s “Only with time, however, will the period of my real influence begin, and I trust that it will be a long one.” Luckily, Dennett is under no such cloud, and he died more or less a hero in my eyes; certainly among the most influential Connectionist philosophers (+ Dreyfus & Clark?), who seemed very helpful in re-legitimizing ML. I, for one, don’t think it would be odd to see philosophers like Dennett and Hofstadter in a Turing Award announcement someday…
- generic92034 3y ago> Death touches us all [..] While the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming, that still remains to be seen. ;)
- seydor 3y agoAI safety is moralism of the boring kind, not even some new moral philosophy. AFAIK Dennett did not hold strong moral positions , let alone moralist, so i feel he was orthogonal to it
- xpe 3y agoWhat moralism is interesting to you?
- dudeinjapan 3y agoAnything to do with trains and levers.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoWhat is it like to be a trolley ? (I had misremembered the author of that original quote, but then : > Daniel Dennett, while sharply disagreeing on some points, acknowledged Nagel's paper ["What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"] as "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness.")
- seydor 3y agoNone
- xpe 3y agowhat do you mean by moralism? I doubt that you reject the rationality of caring about behavior. Fair? There are philosophers who talk about morality from the point of view of rationality without making wild* claims about truth. * you have to start with some assumptions, but some are less attractive than others
- seydor 3y agomoralism is not some specific set of morals, but the idea that they should be imposed via whatever means
- robwwilliams 3y agoGreat start at a eulogy or thank-you note! I also thank Dennett for the originality, humor, and clarity of all of his work on consciousness and cognition. He wanted to communicate more than impress readers. His book Consciousness Explained is a good overview of the conundrum of brain-mind. And in the end he admits clearly that he actually did NOT explain consciousness (read the last two pages). But he framed the problem better than most philosophers, and brings readers into the discussion. Daniel Dennett, Richard Rorty, and Humberto Maturana: The three modern philosophers I read and respect the most as a practicing neuroscientist. Maturana by far the strongest scientist of this trio and oddly, the most radical neurophilosopher of them all. I would have loved to overhear a conversation of these three. Ah, perhaps too subtle humor in your closing comment. “Dennett in dust”—-his comfortable afterlife, will have to be satisfied with all of us talking about ideas he nurtured and motivated.