Daniel Dennett has died
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-reli...
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.
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/dani...
NYer profile: 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_ma...
Big loss indeed, RIP.
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.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-arc...
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Consciousness Explained [1] absolutely filled me with wonder during my university days.
[1]: https://www.amazon.ca/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Denne...
Enjoyed his participations in the "four horseman of the apocalypse"
Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4 - From Bacteria to Bach and Back
Apt for today's world.
Could listen to him all day.
Looks like dailynous.com server is having trouble responding (likely due to HN). But a cached copy of the page is here:
Daniel Dennett was an important philosopher of mind, whose Wikipedia page is here:
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.
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.
The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul with Douglas Adams is from quite some time ago, but as relevant as ever
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
Very nice profile of him from 2017: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett... RIP
Unlike most of you, I strongly disliked Dennett's philosophy. But he seemed like a wonderful human, and he always made me think.
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-comput...
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?
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 ?".
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 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.
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!
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.
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
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
RIP. His book Consciousness Explained (1992) was fascinating.
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.
One of the great thinkers of the modern era. He will be missed.
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
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.
Probably the most interesting modern thinker that I remember from my 6 years of studying Psychology and Neuroscience. RIP
RIP. When I wasn't sure what to make of Goedel, Escher, Bach, his writings tipped the scale. Thanks!
Good to finally have the question of whether he is conscious or not definitely resolved.
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.
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.
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
Dennett on Closer To Truth (just uploaded) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHvIXe4DOEc
A philosopher who appreciated engineering. RIP Daniel Dennett.
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.
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_consci...
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'!
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.
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.
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-d...
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!
Really liked this essay on cognition - https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-o...
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.
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.
Rest In Peace, do not return as a philosophical zombie. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/67
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.
Breaking the Spell is a book I still recommend to friends today. Sad to hear.
His last interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWpm2NOF2Zw
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.
What books would people recommend starting with by this guy?
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
Something more descriptive in the title would be helpful like "Daniel Dennett, philosopher and cognitive scientist, has died"
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
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.
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
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-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.
NY Times obit: <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead...>
Paywall: <https://archive.is/EIsGd>
I loved his "brights" vs "murkies" analogy.
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
Wow, not that old.
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.
Love his work. Sad to see him go.
He's in a better place now.
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).
The favorite "philosopher" of non-philosophers.
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.
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-da...
Probably won’t be going to heaven. (No offense)
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Ok. And how many professors of medicine and doctors die under 120. Monkeys got really cheap headset.
Fortunately, we have a chatbot that can simulate him perfectly: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/GPT-3-Den...
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.