Hello,
Yesterday we lost a good one. Daniel C. Dennett, born in Boston in 1942, who lived to see his 82nd birthday, has passed away. Dennett was a philosopher of the mind and consciousness, a cognitive scientist, and a man with an inveterate curious mind. For me, he was an icon of humanism, secularism, earnestness, seriousness, and yes, my favorite: curiosity.
One of the so-called “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism, he had a witty, cerebral, yet compassionate takedown of just how corrupting, out-moded, and awful religion can be. He never subtitled a book “how religion poisons everything” like Hitchens did; but he was every bit of a good fighter as Hitch was. He knew how important clear-thinking was for the maintenance of civilization and the continued spread of prosperity. Yet he knew religion was a natural phenomena easily explained through evolution. He wasn’t as wrapped up about making a positive case for atheism as the likes of Sam Harris or Hitchens. Because, in his words, which I agree with, “it seemed too obvious to bother with” (2023, 295).
In Breaking the Spell (2006), he made the case that we need to understand the social function of religion—as a highly evolved meme—that has good (community, ritual, inculcating moral frameworks that can be used for prosocial purposes) and bad features (dogma, ease in which it is used by “cults of personality,” intolerance, stifling inquiry, supernaturalism, inculcating moral frameworks that can be used for anti-social purposes). The “spell” that needs to break is simply the “taboo against looking too closely at how religions work and why” (2023, 295). I love his work on religion. But his ideas about the brain and the mind; and his thoughts on consciousness are even more important to me.
I disagree with Dennett about free will. I think I disagree with Dennett about consciousness. Though when I review his words on it; I’m not so sure. He (in)famously wrote a book called Consciousness Explained (1991) that religious folks and some scholars of consciousness, be they philosophers, biologists, cognitive scientists, physicists, or mathematicians, disagreed with, claiming the book was more apt to be called “Consciousness Explained Away,” which is a play off of Dennett’s own chapter called “Consciousness Explained…or Explained Away?”
I believe consciousness is a “hard problem.”; Dennett believed it was not. This means that I believe that the “why?” question—why or how it is like to be anything at all; why do we have subjective experiences to begin with - is possibly “insoluble.” Dennett believes that consciousness is nothing but the operations of a “virtual machine.” Earlier in the above mentioned book, Dennett basically argues that consciousness or the “various phenomena that we call consciousness” can be easily, or at least in pricinple, explained by “all the physical effects of the brain’s activities, and how these give rise to the illusions about their own properties.”
Damn. Even when I think I disagree with him, he’s a literal causal force that makes my current beliefs weaker, for he is, sentence for sentence, pound-for-pound, probably the sharpest mind I’ve ever come across. For that, he actually makes my ideas sharper.
Dennett realized more than most that “tools make you smarter” (2023, 172), be they algorithms, perspectives, ladders, maps, telescopes, scalpels, intuition pumps, scissors, or, my personal favorite, language. Until reviewing some of Dennett’s work today, I didn’t realize how much my belief that “words build our minds” was Denettian. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), he wrote “words and other mind-tools give [Homo sapiens] an inner environment that permits it to construct ever more subtle move-generators and move-testers.” And the ability to develop “stage-setting” moves requires rich conceptual and linguistic fluidity that his point that “the self-exhortations and reminders made possible by language are actually essential to maintaining the sorts of long-term projects only we human beings engage in” so true and exciting and rich with possibilities (379-380). And he stresses: we can’t do science without language and therefore language is fundamental to the pursuit of understanding.
He was brilliant at helping people develop tools that help you think better, or to formulate plausible theories of the mind, the world, and the universe. I particularly am drawn to his understanding of Darwinism, calling it a “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways” (1995, 63). One can’t truly understand human beings if their framework excludes evolution through natural and sexual selection. Although this should be “duh” in 2024; I’m afraid it’s not.
~
In the 1968, Dennett’s first published paper was on articifial intelligence (AI). And his last tweet ever—not because of his passing; but because he quit Twitter in 2023, seemingly because of Elon Musk— was also about AI, at least, in part:
Amen. Musk is total hack who shouldn’t be trusted.
I recently came across Dennett’s 2023 piece in The Atlantic called, “The Problem With Counterfeit People,” and was excited that he was writing in public and going to continue to think about and try to influence the conversation on AI. He knows better than all of these AI techbro capitalists, that’s for sure, about the brain; about language; and about how tools can both be used for good and bad. In my opinion, runaway selection bodes bad news for AI outcomes. I hope we get to read more of his recent thinking on AI. And I’m excited to go back and read more of his earlier work on it.
Dennett has help me consider and reconsider so much. I was lucky to be alive at the same time as he was. He’s the world’s expert on mind-tools, in my opinion. He gives you tools, literally, in every sentence, to help you become a better thinker. There is so much more of his work for me to dig into.
I will leave with an excerpt from his 2006 Edge.com essay called “THANK GOODNESS!” written after he almost died due to aortic dissection, but was saved due to luck, human expertise and ingenuity:
“As I now enter a gentle period of recuperation, I have much to reflect on, about the harrowing experience itself and even more about the flood of supporting messages I've received since word got out about my latest adventure. Friends were anxious to learn if I had had a near-death experience, and if so, what effect it had had on my longstanding public atheism. Had I had an epiphany?, or was my atheism still intact and unchanged?
Yes, I did have an epiphany. I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now.
To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and x-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to x-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India—and the United States, of course—and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other's work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the CT-scanner. Allan—you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who's counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws.”
Stay curious,
Patrick M. Foran
Thanks for sharing!
I always think about Daniel Dennett because many of my online or video game handles are "Breakingthespell." I enjoyed his work for many of the same reasons you outlined. He's been on my mind in particular lately because I haven't heard much from him. I had to check - the last thing I wrote on twitter was 10/28/23 (though I reposted a few things up until 1/27/24). I also think of him when I say "Thank Goodness," because he helped create that awareness, for me, that we can change our language when words don't mean what they used to or we thought they were supposed to. R.I.P. Daniel Dennett.
Take Care,
todd