Daniel Dennett has died
dailynous.com
dailynous.com
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.
It's not all boring - it makes for some great movies. Terminator 2, The Matrix etc.
It's also moving to practical engineering questions like how can we have AI controlled drones kill invading Russians but ensure they won't turn on us later, more than philosophical waffle.
(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.")
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
> The term has been used in a pejorative sense to describe the attitude of "being overly concerned with making moral judgments or being illiberal in the judgments one makes".
There is also the 19th century Moralism movement/philosophy, which may have inspired the more general sense of the word, but I’m not sure.
I think we should all step back and question whether we all even mean the same thing by the word “imposition”. When I think about imposition, I can see how people could interpret that to mean a wide range of things, including social pressure, religious rules, as well as the force of law. This is why (above) I interpret moralism (the general term) as a kind of judgment, but not necessarily an imposition of rules or punishments.
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:
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")
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:
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.
"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.
I do think its true that some of his work has resonated with many people who also resonate with "hacker culture".
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.
Jargon file was published as The Hacker's Dictionary in 1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File
I consider this definitive evidence that the foundational period of hacker culture was before these books were published. I'm not sure what the point of trying to shift that period forward so as to include Dennett's works is. It's neither true nor necessary.
His first three books were published in 81, 84 and 86.
I agree with you that the foundational period slightly predates these, but I don't consider the foundational period to be the same as when "hacker culture was established".
I began to encounter it myself starting in about 1979 via CoEvolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review, but it was still very, very much evolving and continued to do so in very noticeable ways as I started programming in 1984.
I tend to consider the general use of IP as probably one of the main signifiers of hacker culture being established, and that was far from common in the 75-85 period (though growing rapidly).
This is wrong by definition, is the thing. That's what foundational means: to found something is to establish its foundation.
Dennett was simply not a significant part of that. The timeline isn't the reason for that, but it in fact suffices to make the case.
You can trace things flowing all over the place with say MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club being often sited as an early example. But it’s really just refinements of the same basic culture, and computers is one of the few places it survived unlike say pinball.
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.
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…
While the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming, that still remains to be seen. ;)
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-a...
Things still move during winter, just not as much.
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...
> as the early 1990s, about 90% of U.S. adults identified as Christians. But today, about two-thirds of adults are Christians.The study focus on Christianity and not other religions though.
> Some philosophical research projects ... are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed upon rules are presupposed — and seldom discussed — and the implications of those rules are worked out, articulated, debated, refined. So far, so good. Chess is a deep and important human artifact, about which much of value has been written. But some philosophical research projects are more like working out the truths of chmess. Chmess is just like chess except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one. I just invented it — though no doubt others have explored it in depth to see if it is worth playing. Probably it isn’t. It probably has other names. I didn’t bother investigating these questions because although they have true answers, they just aren’t worth my time and energy to discover. Or so I think. There are just as many a priori truths of chmess as there are of chess (an infinity), and they are just as hard to discover...
Ah, I believe this is the same "mess we're in" from Joe Armstrong's eponymous 2014 Strange Loop conference talk[0]:
> This is a device that we can imagine. I try to find a big sausage machine where you put sausage meat, you know, you turn the handle. So we put all programs into it, and we turn the handle, and a smaller number of programs come out. Then we can throw away all the other programs. And that breaks the second law of thermodynamics. The trouble with software, you see, its complexity increases with time. We start with one program, and it splits and becomes two programs and four programs.
> Files and systems, they mutate all the time. They grow in entropy. Disks are absolutely huge. And there's all these problems with naming. Naming's horrible. If you've got a file or something, what file name should it be? What does it have? What directory should I put it in? Can I find it later?
(68% match)
> When you have an idea, you have a little box and you type something into the box. I've done this, I've implemented it. You have a little box and then there's a little icon, Sherlock Holmes at the bottom. You type this stuff into the box and you press the Sherlock Holmes button. And the idea is that will find among all my files that I'm interested in, the most similar thing to what I've just put in this box. So I want it to find the most similar thing to this new thing. And then I want to know, is it different? So once it's found them, it makes a list of them in order.
(64% match)
Edit: Just had the revelation that I am posting these quotes straight out of a RAG on the transcript of his talk.
I guess Mr Dennett never came across the ideas of Mr Cantor.
[Yes, yes… I know they’re both countable.]
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.
FWIW, I have also seen the dismissive STEM attitude toward the philosophical tradition. It helps to remember that the philosophical tradition predates the scientific tradition significantly, and that it does not take logical positivism or reductionism as givens. Having studied both disciplines, I feel like philosophy has seriously enhanced my understand of the world even if I don’t use it in my day-to-day scientific work.
And they probably know other people in the department who teach things that might be interesting to a STEM student even if that student hardly knows it yet.
Logicians are somewhat different in studying formal systems, and there are strong links to (foundations of) mathematics. But logics are typically developed and analyze to study some otherwise philosophically motivated questions.
Few generalisations hold of philosophy departments across traditions and regions, and this is untrue of departments in the analytic tradition of which Dennett was part. Philosophical logicians are often interested in more than logic for logic’s sake, and other philosophers share that interest; see e.g. Williamson’s /Modal logic as metaphysics/.
That's an interesting point.
I think there's also a cost to that-- philosophy lugs around a lot of pre-scientific baggage that is poorly specified but historically important. Free will comes to mind, especially within the Christian history of resolving the apparent contradiction of horrific natural/manmade evils existing in the face of an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent god.
There are of course other historical contexts to notions of free will. But when philosophers talk about any of these in places where laypeople here them, it seems like those historical contexts are gone and they end up strongly implying a general purpose free will that is neither well-specified or in some cases even coherent.
It would be like a bunch of programmers debating "functions," with one meaning functional programming, another meaning any programming language where functions are a first-class citizen, and yet another meaning the set of all keywords "function" or "FUNCTION" in any programming language in history. That's not going to be a fruitful discussion.
So I'd speculate people in STEM can smell the lack of systematic thinking in some of these discussions and unfortunately throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Edit: clarification
>implying a general purpose free will that is neither well-specified or in some cases even coherent.
To the contrary, I find that it is the layman who has an airy-fairy conception of free will that couldn't possibly exist, while the philosophers are generally more down-to-earth and use "free will" that normal people use the term in a non-philosophical context.
>So I'd speculate people in STEM can smell the lack of systematic thinking in some of these discussions and unfortunately throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I'm not sure if there's any baby in the bathwater if philosophy lacks systematic thinking, if by "lacking systematic thinking" you mean something like "not thinking definitions and arguments through". Luckily it doesn't seem that philosophy does this. But maybe I'm misunderstanding you - maybe you're talking about the philosophical discussions that laymen generally overhear, which tend not to be discussions held by philosophers but by other laymen. And I do think you would be right to say that these discussions generally aren't very coherent, and reflect poorly on philosophy as a discipline.
It be be tautological, but a lack of systemic thinking makes a discussion bad philosophy, or epistemic bunk as they say in the trade.
Or maybe his point, in a discussion like this on HN, a lot of people are jumping into the conversation in-the-middle, without catching up on the history.
Perhaps, but seeing poor thinking in others is a lot easier than seeing it in oneself. I don't recall encountering any STEM folks who haven't made a logical/epistemic/other error on the proposition of whether we have free will. It is one of those questions that seems to put the mind into some sort of a weird downgraded mode.
This entire comment section is...interesting.
It's like the first programming language you learned. It will shape your perception of what programming is all about for a long time afterward, and might even turn you away from programming altogether. But there are lots of programming languages, and they're just different ways to make the same silicon do something interesting!
The silicon argument might be right if we treat it on its own. Input, process and output. But one think of the system where the silicon or multiple of them plus some analogue or biological input and output. It is not the same. The process affect the speed and response … you can imagine one use lisp, basic or cnn to drive a car … can you.
The turning complete is not physical as above and real world ish. Hence it sound all true. But people forgot we do not have unlimited memory. Our tur8ng complete is in practice not.
To sum it all may be we kick human out of the loop all silicon and human language might have a chance the same using the same language (but still physical real world above …)
Perhaps finding it confusing is a recent development.
Philosophers shoud better stay away from physics. Not saying here, that the thought experiments can't provide valuable insights. It's just they can't be used to define the truth about the reality.
To a t, these people were dullards. They rarely had deep knowledge about anything, most of the time not even about the field they professed such dedication to. The entire point of an undergraduate education is to establish a foundation of baseline knowledge to allow you to contextualize new information, and if you don't engage with it, there's not a lot of opportunities to make up for it later.
A lot of philosophy ignores biology, sometimes even physics. In topics where biology would be immensely relevant, like with philosophy of mind. Dennett didn't try to ignore biology, he was deeply aware and well read in biology as well.
Most of the philosophy I'm familiar with is concerned with abstract notions and concepts like morality. I'm really having a hard time seeing how biology or physics would inform it one direction or another.
Like, what sort of biology would have made Kant's notions of morality different?
Relativity overturned those Newtonian assumptions on which Kant depended, although he might say we nevertheless have to experience time as constant and space in three dimensions, regardless of how those things turn out to "really" work, since that's the only way we can do it.
So it's no longer obvious that time and space are just given absolutely, and due to that, they no longer make for a comfortable starting point for philosophical assumptions. If nature itself is different, then we might not even be experiencing it that way in the first place.
More tentatively, I think our advancing understanding of how brains and machines embody concepts, our understanding of the differences of biological creatures combined with new physics, is suggestive at a bare minimum that reality could be experienced differently, and/or that we can understand how we experience these things empirically with better knowledge about brains, instead of asserting that everything is governed at the outset by this or that philosophical assumption.
I think you are more wrong than right here. My understanding (informed by Onora O'neill, Dan Bonevac, and various Stanford Encyclopedia entries :-)) is that Kant does not specifically depend on Newtonian assumptions but that human perceptions have to be mediated by time and space. Instead of overturning Kant, relativity and QM put even more distance between what we, as mortal, physical beings, can perceive versus whatever is really going on in the world.
Kant's project was to discover, given all of that, what anyone can say about things like ethics. He even goes so far to say that what he is trying to do is universal and he would like it to apply to other forms of intelligent beings.
I understand the point about mediation, and I tried to speak to it directly in the portion you quoted. You are exactly right about the way Kant uses that in his argument. It's flexible enough that it can be understood as resilient, I think.
I tried show how science can nevertheless speak to it in several ways. One is the convenient equivalence between Kant's necessary conditions and nature as we understood it at the time. That equivalence makes it easier to be comfortable positing time and space as we understand them as necessary conditions that are prior to nature. It would be harder (but not impossible!) to entertain if there was daylight between what we believed our faculties to be and what we believed the natural world to be, if what was "necessary" was something different than what we thought we experienced (such as, say, a singular loaf of unified spacetime). An implication of Kant's view, as I understood him, was that we should be ready to believe it's different anyway, but nevertheless, it's easier to swallow when it perfectly aligns with how we thing the world really is.
Second, for a different way of stating a similar point, if time and space are non-newtonian in some important way, we may have to understand that that is what we experience in the first instance, and we would have to wrestle with the fact that our intuitions may attest to a variety of possible underlying necessary conditions. (Wittgenstein has been mentioned in this thread, so for a paraphrase of something he supposedly said, in reply to a student noting that it looks like the sun goes around the earth: "What would it look like if the earth went around the sun?" So it may be with the nature of our faculties.)
Third, as we gain deeper understanding of brain functions of ourselves and other creatures, we may have inroads to how certain of our conscious experiences depend on conceptual abstractions or models. And if so, it transforms it into an open empirical question rather than one where we are simply stuck presuming necessary conditions. Kant might insist that that is all already through the lense of our faculties such as they are, but we, with more information, would be increasingly comfortable just not entertaining them as we get increasingly robust empirical understandings of conscious experience.
None of these is a "defeater" argument by itself and there's a lot that can be talked about here of course, but I think given 21st century science, if Kant were trying to present his vision for the first time we might find it more challenging to reconcile with what we know of the natural world.
Only in *very* specific situations which are extremely extremely extremely unrelated and WELL out of both practical and theoretical bound to the human perception of reality.
Relativity is kind of the trivia of physics, it really has not informed much technology apart from a few things in space - compare this to, say, quantum electrodynamics which tells us why weird stuff happens in things we've made quadrillions of (not to mention quantum computing, etc.)
The only time we would have ever brushed up against it naturally might have been when we put clocks into space so that we could better send nukes into other parts of the globe.
GPS is kind of a huge one, though it technically is just a few clocks in space.
I find it interesting that you say: "although he might say we nevertheless have to experience time as constant and space in three dimensions". The physicist/philosopher/physiologist/mathematician Hermann von Helmholtz (who was, I think, very much inspired by Kant) wanted to prove that, given some basic measurement axioms (demanding constant curvature etc.), Euclidean geometry is necessarily the geometry of our internal perceptual manifolds (Kant's view is, I believe, essentially that these internal manifolds must have the same geometry as physical space-time). But it turned out that pseudo-spherical geometry also satisfies these axioms. So, although there is something, as far as your general description goes, to your 'defence' of Kant, and I think Helmholtz himself would've said that he's working within Kant's framework, it is still insufficient to vindicate everything that Kant said. I believe Helmholtz agreed, however, that our spatial imagination is three dimensional.
And Kant furthermore asserts that: 4. In addition to (1), there is no mind-independent space-time, space and time as such are mind-dependent. This means that our descriptions of the world are necessarily, e.g. Euclidean.
I don't think (1), (2), (3) are at all controversial, although only (2) and its consequences are a contribution of Kant himself, but (4) is, I'm pretty sure, quite universally rejected nowadays.
My understanding is that post-relativity, Neokantians have been trying to reconcile Kant's thought with the implications of relativity. Philosophy as a discipline is, as I understand it, happy to work with new scientific discoveries, and not going to stick with philosophical dogma in the face of contradicting science. Besides, beyond a certain level, doesn't science have to give way to philosophy? I don't see holding certain philosophical assumptions (not really assumptions, but intuitions or propositions argued from intuitions) as a necessarily bad thing or even an avoidable thing, as long as it's open to both philosophical and scientific criticism, where applicable.
The fact that the relation is one of an amendment or a reconciliation to new data is a point in favor of skepticism against his original assumptions, but not a defeater.
I would agree that we can credit intuitions as being more than mere assumptions, and I think you're right about The legitimacy of positing assumptions as long as they're posited in a spirit of openness and responsiveness to philosophical and scientific criticism. What do you know, a healthy and reasonable of reply on philosophy. To tie this to Daniel Dennett, I have found one of his most valuable contributions to be a notion of the principle of charity, which is to credit the person you correspond with with the most reasonable possible interpretation, and I think the best philosophical exchanges are carried out in that spirit, and so I think he would highlight yours as the response in this thread that best embodies that principle.
Ok... this is non sequitur. It really doesn't matter that time moves at different speeds for any of Kant's philosophical positions. 2 people could be traveling at 0.5c and 0.00000001c and that makes no difference in Kant morals on how they should behave.
And, practically speaking, unless there's a drastic development in propulsion the only bearing relativity has on day to day life is making sure the GPS works correctly. It is, otherwise, completely non-impactful to anyone beyond astrophysicists.
This wasn't about Kant's morals. This was about the idea that Newtonian conceptions of space and time familiar to Kant were necessary preconditions to experience.
In comparison, the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg is a bare introduction in Graph Theory and Hamilton carving quarternions into Broom Bridge is an amusing aside before you get to the meat of the subject. A lecturer might amuse you with Kekule's dream before telling you about a Benzene ring but the ring is the thing, not the dream.
Philosophy is a field with time-translation symmetry but is taught akin to fields without (e.g. Literature, History, Sociology). Fields without TTS need you to build up from the replay log. But fields with TTS can do something far better: they can distill "truths" into snapshots. Consequently, as a child I read about Galois Theory without reading Analyse d’un Mémoire sur la résolution algébrique des équations or a translation thereof.
Conjectures and Refutations shows how to accelerate through a replay log, indexing at key-frames so that we don't need to play every frame to get to the conclusions we're searching for. Good field. Bad practice.
Most students will not stay in academia, but making them think about questions like what is it to live a good life seems to me pretty important for the education of future citizens !
And in fact ancient philosophers being historically so remote is likely to be a good thing, to prevent emotional knee-jerk rejections that is at risk of happening with more recent philosophers too associated with current politics.
Its the artsy types that only read Sartre and Heidigger an Derrida, and never got their hands dirty by working in a lab, doing sufficiently higher level math, engineered and built modern tech are the annoying ones.
It is both funny and not.
Spending a bunch of time figuring out why something that seems obvious is obvious probably seems like a waste of time to a lot of people, but it can certainly help in the long run. We can't see our own blindspots, so even if something seems obvious, I think it's useful to understand it.
Žižek has made comments about so many different things, so publicly, that it’s hard to avoid finding something you disagree with. But it’s also hard to avoid finding something you agree with.
I like his books, but someone like Alan Watts is much more prone to quackery, IMO.
I don’t think I have ever described somebody as a quack philosopher.
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.
Quack: 1) A practitioner who suggests the use of substances or devices for the prevention or treatment of disease that are known to be ineffective.
2) A person who pretends to be able to diagnose or heal people, but is unqualified and incompetent.
The inside baseball term more relevant to what you're talking about, I think, is "talking past each other." https://www.jstor.org/stable/25655279
A quack philosopher would seem to me to be someone that claims to be doing philosophy or interpreting the ideas of a philosopher, but doing so in an egregiously wrong or misleading manner.
You also might want to check out this article for more on p-zombies, by the way: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
Oh, here’s the thing—it’s not actually important to argue about what the word “quackery” means. I’ve explained what I meant by “philosophical quackery”, and if you want to talk about the content of what I wrote, then by all means, respond to the content.
If, instead, you want to start a fight about what the word “quackery” means, and whether I was wrong to use it, then I’m out. That sounds like a waste of time.
I'm not sure what else there is to say here. If you call people something, perhaps it's important to actually know what that thing means? This seems to happen often in conversations critical of philosophy: terms are used unclearly, and the attempt to actually clarify those terms is hand-waved away as "I don't want to argue about definitions."
So I think your criticism here is not that there are quack philosophical works, but that there are unproductive ones that do nothing but restate established positions. Which is definitely a true thing.
But if (when?) it was possible to empirically discriminate between these beliefs, it would stop being philosophy and would become science ! (Assuming you see them as exclusive rather than nested.)
I guess that, unlike in the sub-field of philosophy that are mathematics, where starting with different axioms isn't as much of a deal (outside of turf wars of mathematics departments ?), the issue is that you have plenty of questions that most people deeply care about, so disagreements can turn quite violent indeed ?
There are ton of scientific theories that seem legit but its def out there.
But many many years later, there's been a lot of churn in whose work I value and whose I don't. I wouldn't be surprised if I see his work in a very different light now. This news may be what gets me yo pick it up again and find out.
He consistently argues that studying consciousness and perception is difficult but not impossible, and we will slowly make progress in this scientific endeavor just like all others we have attempted thus far. In philosophy circles he is sometimes derided as having too scientific a mindset, but that is what draws me to him. He’s very endearing to listen to as well—very idiosyncratic.
Now to address your misguided belief on the mind being reduced to the brain.
Under atheistic materialism what is happening is matter in motion. This means even the matter in your brain. What does that mean? Your brain is determined by the laws of physics, chemistry, etc and even your comment was determined. You destroy the possibility of justified knowledge claims under that worldview when taking it to its logical conclusion. Also as Sean Caroll noted, quantum physics and stochastic probabilities don't mean anything, taking the worldview to the logical conclusion means determinism of the movement of matter.
You also can't account for universals and particulars on that view and solve the problem of the and the many.
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.
NY Times interview with him: https://archive.ph/knd9C
NYer Profile: https://archive.ph/Snm8g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx5OZ1AZ5Vk
https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-arc...
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/consciousnes...
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."
Authors @ Google? Was this his visit to the Kirkland office?
If so, I was one of the perhaps 5 (?) people who had lunch with him. I was astonished that more Googlers didn't seem the least bit interested in hanging out with Dan Dennett given the opportunity.
He seemed interested in my journey breaking free of religious indoctrination and what part his writings had in that. He said he had never heard of Joseph Campbell being the first step out. We had a brief discussion on how recognizing the universality of religious motifs can lead one to start asking the initial question, "What if my specific religion isn't so special after all?"
I asked him the admittedly-ambiguous question along the lines of, "If Google were to build something that seems to express intentional agency, would we have an ethical obligation relating to it?" I suspect his curt answer of "Yes" was him just being polite with a clueless armchair philosopher asking silly questions.
Then there was the Dawkins visit to Google Kirkland some time later. The failure to set up an audio system that didn't have an echo made me sad. Not sure why we couldn't have just kept the audio engineer present for the actual discussion. Later on Dawkins proceeded to walk through the line at the cafeteria backwards, but everyone seemed cordial enough regardless. That one dude pushing himself in Dawkins' face monopolizing all his time was obnoxious.
That whole program really jumped the shark when they later invited Fonzie to come talk about his children's book.
didn't lunch with him, unfortunately
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?)
In terms of learning I can’t read a book and remember it all. I would need to apply it.
What he meant: well, he's dead now, isn't he?
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.
I really like your summary of some of his ideas, though.
Each neuron is itself a complex organism. They're unicellular, but each is still a robust lifeform.
The point is that our intuition (for centuries!) about what visual conscious experience is driven by is wrong. You've summarized what we know now succinctly and usefully, but that in no way invalidates the point the comment was making.
I looked up what he said about p-zombies on the p-zombies wiki and am happy to see he has a position I agree with.
>Dennett argues that "when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition".
This is nonsense. Consciousness is exactly what it is. The only real that ever existed is the fact there's there there. Everything else can be an illusion, as you said. There's no reason why red appears they way it is.
But the fact that i can seem to experience red cannot be denied. The seeming cannot be a mistake.
The experience of consciousness, or that it’s like something to be you, doesn’t necessarily mean anything about how or why that’s possible or occurring in the first place.
What you cannot deny is the fact there's something at all. You cannot doubt that there's something. If you doubt that, there's a contradiction. Not what is that something, but simply the fact that _there is_ something.
So the fact there's something is something that has to be true. The question "I doubt there's something in this universe" doesn't make sense.
Yours sounds more like, “something seeming therefore something seeming”.
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.
Please excuse my probably oversimplified understanding of the debate as someone who hasn’t read most of the arguments yet.
but you have not made a case that talking about free will requires talking about morality
[1]: https://www.amazon.ca/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Denne...
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.
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.
His only weakness was occasionally indulging in speculation himself (like his Multiple Drafts) - he was better at eliminating speculation rather than offering it, regarding consciousness at least.
I highly recommend his talks on Closer To Truth (on YouTube) and all those videos actually.
He is often described that way, and even used the term himself sometimes, but he was not (and was careful to say that he was not) an eliminativist about everything. For example, he was not an eliminitavist about consciousness or free will. He believed those things are real--they just aren't like what many people think they are like; they don't have the properties that many people think they have.
With regard to consciousness and free will, Dennett was a physicalist: he believed consciousness and free will are physical processes that obey physical laws. That does place limitations on what consciousness and free will can do, and I think an unwillingness to accept those limitations, to accept that those limited concepts of consciousness and free will are the only ones we can actually have, drove a lot of the opposition to Dennett, though his opponents did not explicitly admit it.
Feel like he is though, second only to maybe Michael Shermer, or AI investors (zing!) The definition:
> Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist.
There's no way I'll find the video, but he said at one point in some interview almost exactly this: That most of the mental states we think we have don't really exist. I think it's also in his book Consciousness Explained (1991), but I didn't read it so can't be sure.
I always thought this is what upset people so much about Dennett - the apparent total denial of experience.
Yet this is an incredibly slippery slope! Anyone familiar with Chalmers' Hard Problem should intuit that there are "primitives" of experience that when put together make up the total experience. I agree that the Hard Problem is an accurate assessment of the issue, but given this "primitives" concept I agree with eliminativism in that "most" of the mental states we believe we have never existed, we were somehow "filled in".
I'll namedrop 3 more philosophers: John Searle (Berkeley), Donald Hoffman (Irvine), Colin McGinn (London, Oxford) - all of whom have excellent content on YouTube that will blow your mind, and these are maybe the best I've heard from on the subject.
I can't speak about whatever interview you saw, but in the book Consciousness Explained he does not say what you are describing. He says the same thing he says in one of his papers, I think it's "Real Patterns", which appeared in one of his later collections: Real consciousness does exist, but it is not like what many people think it is like. It does not have all of the properties that many people think it has. He does say that things with those properties don't exist--because nothing with those properties can exist. But he does not say that consciousness does not exist--just that it doesn't have those properties.
> the apparent total denial of experience
He doesn't say this either, although many of his opponents misdescribe him as saying that--because they cannot understand what he is actually saying. The only concept of consciousness they can grasp is the magical concept they have in their heads--I call it "magical" because it cannot exist if consciousness is a physical process working according to physical laws. And the latter kind of consciousness, the physicalist kind, is the kind Dennett describes and the kind he believed existed. So for opponents of his who can't even grasp that there is such a concept of consciousness, the only way they could interpret what Dennett was saying was that he was denying that consciousness existed.
But that is a gross misrepresentation of his views: he was not saying that people don't have experiences or thoughts. He was just saying that those real things, when you actually do the hard work of figuring out how they work in accordance with physical laws, turn out not to have some of the properties that people thought they had before that hard work was done. This is no different from any other concept once we try to build an actual scientific understanding of it.
> John Searle
Whose Chinese Room thought experiment was debunked in The Mind's I (though that's hardly the only rebuttal that has been published), and I suspect that chapter in the book was written largely by Dennett, since he published other similar rebuttals later on.
Starting to think you don't know Dennett, this is what he was all about haha.
> John Searle debunked
You're starting to reveal your lack of experience here. It's not something that can be debunked, it's just an observation and one that is widely considered foundational :)
Not only that, but that's like from his youth, he's done a lot more interesting stuff since Chinese Room - this seems like you just quickly googled.
I wish this was a better conversation, brush up!
- "There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory)." - from Consciousness Explained, page 132.
On page 113 he says:
- "Unlike mental states taxonomized folk psychologically, "content-fixations" are each precisely locatable in both space and time".
^ he is saying mental states are not locatable in space and time.
Page 138:
- "There are no fixed facts about the stream of consciousness independent of particular probes"
An interview:
- "The reason [consciousness] is so puzzling is that people think they ought to be able to study it from the inside, using pure phenomenology, those give you hints but they are illusory. That's not what's really going on."
Source for this interview (New Scientist): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm8M_xQrgCk
From David Rosenthal's Content, Interpretation, and Consciouness:
- "There is good reason, in any case, to construe Dennett's pandemonium model as positing only subpersonal events of content fixation, rather than full-fledged intentional states. Thus he writes:
"We replace the division into discrete contentful states-beliefs, meta-beliefs, and so forthwith a process that serves, over time, to ensure a good fit between an entity's internal information-bearing events and the entity's capacity to express (some of) the information in those events in speech. [10]
10: Dennett speaks throughout Consciousness Explained of such nonconscious, subpersonal events
Wikipedia on Multiple Drafts:
- "Dennett argues that [consciousness theories] share a common error in supposing that there is a special time and place where unconscious processing becomes consciously experienced, entering into what Dennett calls the "Cartesian theatre".
A couple more Dennett quotes:
- "There does not exist ... a process such as 'recruitment of consciousness' (into what?), nor any place where the 'vehicle's arrival' is recognized (by whom?)"
- "the Multiple Drafts model goes on to claim that the brain does not bother 'constructing' any representations..."
I could go on forever because this was his main jam. I find it hilarious this pdonis person has such a high karma/score/whatever on this site after such awful takes.
I won't even get into Searle who pdonis just Googled for the first time, bringing up Chinese Room (1980) as if it's a scientific theory. What a joke, I wish he could be downvoted.
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.
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/07/results-comput...
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.
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
For instance, he cut Chalmers no slack on the incoherency of Philosophical Zombies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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'!
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/philosopher-daniel-d...
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.
He will be missed by me.
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.
Your point about starting with physical things is questionable, as highlighted by prominent figures like Penrose and Donald Hoffman. The fundamentalism of materialism is an axiom that lacks proof.
Perhaps to you 'saying consciousness is the result of quantum effects in microtubules explains nothing', but so does Dennett's saying 'consciousness is an illusion', which equals 'I'm not sure what it is, but I will dismiss it because I would rather ridicule the unknown than accept my ignorance.'
At least Penrose denies what is deniable to open the door for a broader perspective, something that Dennett failed at.
I bet you think an LLM can experience what the color red feels like, or it can feel the scent of a rose, if it's fed enough 1/0's about it.
It also doesn't conflict with physicalism. I think he's trying to argue that consciousness would need more than you can do with a classical computer, but it doesn't seem to imply that. Classical computers are made of hardware components that rely on quantum effects to work, but that doesn't make them "quantum computers".
All the same, I don't think there is special quantum magic above and beyond the "ordinary" quantum phenomena needed to explain our brains.
But it doesn't seem like human brains are doing Shor's algorithm.
Why this, and not simply an urge to understand things?
Coming up with theories to explain the inexplicable is literally science.
Also, suggesting that Dennet's philosophy stems from a "challenging childhood" is argument ad hominem, because it focuses on the person, rather than on the content of the philosophy.
To continue the discussion in the same tone that you began it, perhaps you don't see eye to eye with him because he challenges your beliefs.
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.
Paywall: <https://archive.is/EIsGd>
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 :)
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...
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.