Beautifully said, honestly brought me some solace. Echoing your endorsement of Brainstorms — I expect/hope this will be his enduring legacy! Death touches us a

Beautifully 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…