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.
AI 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
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.
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")
> 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.
Great 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.
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…
What 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.
I 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.
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.
It may be an aside, but could you you clarify what you mean by a huge shift in American religious belief? For the benefit of those of us, who are on the internet, but not from or have been to the US?
Sorry, don't get your stats. In my family one generation passed from orthodox religious to the next: non religious without any issue. One example contradicts the whole point.
The study focus on Christianity and not other religions though.
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.
Dennett himself (like his teacher Quine) is very deflationary about the kind of philosophy practiced by most of his colleagues. See e.g. his "Higher-order truths about chmess" (https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/s11245-006-0005-2):
> 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...
A more charitable view is that a lot of research projects which seem like chmess to an outside observer become a lot more rational when properly contextualized. Often, the authors have justifications, ontological commitments or motivational factors for pursuing esoteric research that get lost in the writing process and only become apparent when familiar with the ambient conceptual framework.
> 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.
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.
You’re not alone. I think a lot of people, especially in STEM, pooh-pooh philosophy at first.
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.
This is sad. I teach an upper-level undergraduate course on programming language theory, and one major component of the course is reduction proofs. Many students find proof by contradiction (reductio ad absurdum) to be a confusing concept. I have always directed those students toward Dennett’s helpful video (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sVUMAqMmy7o) and most of them respond positively to Dennett’s lucid style. RIP.
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.
That mindset frustrated me a lot in university. My school required a pretty broad survey of academia, with a class each in lower and upper division math, science, history, philosophy, and theology to graduate, and there were a lot of students (especially, for whatever reason, engineers) who hated it.
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.
> I think a lot of people, especially in STEM, pooh-pooh philosophy at first.
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.
That's because the majority of Philosophy courses are History of Philosophy courses whereas other logic-oriented fields occupy less time on "History of". While top departments like Princeton still focus on the quality of the arguments, they do devote entire course lengths to readings of ancient philosophers which are less elucidative about logic and reasoning than they are about the History of Philosophy.
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.
Having done a deep dive in philosophy at one point, the vast majority of it is ego stroking half-nonsense designed to be maximally unintelligible, because academics tolerate ridiculous amounts of jargon and equate hard to understand with meaningful or important. People like Robert Nozick, Thomas Nagel, John Searle and David Chalmers are by far the exception rather than the rule.
The amusing thing is that these quick dismissals of philosophy are all instances of philosophical thought. Usually neither good, nor consistent, nor original thought, but nevertheless.
One of the most delicious ironies in life is to ask these people why they think philosophy is poo-poo, and then revel in the fact that their answer is exactly philosophical in nature.
This honestly makes sense to me. Philosophy basically teaches you how to think about things really well. When talking about STEM folks, however, you're already dealing with extremely analytical people, but to them, analytical thinking is just intuitive.
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.
A useful rule of thumb for evaluating a field you're not familiar with is 'Sturgeon's law'. Sturgeon's law is a refutation of claims of the form "don't bother looking at that because 90% of it is crap". The law states that 90% of everything is crap, and hence such claims prove too much.
I was on the opposite side of that when I was young and first read his work. I eagerly read piles and piles of philosophy and quickly shelved any interest in him and his work as building on completely unconvincing premises.
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.
I enjoyed him mostly for his crusade against philosophy purporting that the mind has something other than a physical basis. Modern day philosophers that want to resurrect the “mind body problem” and panpsychism and the “hard problem of consciousness”.
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.
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.
Oh, I did not know about this essay! Thank you for sharing.
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.
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.
Very sad for me, he was one of my favorite thinkers and his books were the few that made me feel smarter after having read them. His thinking tools remain a great aid to my thinking. The reason for this post though, is to mention that Darwin also died on April 19th.
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.
My guess: Dennett took it to mean that his exposition wasn't clear enough to the layman first time round and was disappointed by this.
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?)
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.
For the record, 30 years later most consciousness researchers still believe it's unlikely that quantum mechanics plays a special role in consciousness. It of course remains plausible, since we still don't have the true answers yet, but hypotheses like Penrose's have not yet been found to be credible.
I really like your summary of some of his ideas, though.
I bet we'll find there's more computation going on in neurons (and possibly other brain cells) than we currently know about which will necessarily be happening at much smaller scales than synapse firing.
We don't know from saccades that consciousness can't be continuous. We just know that the physical impressions on our retina do not map 1 to 1 to our visual conscious experience. The brain does all sorts of things to the raw information it receives before that information rises to the level of phenomenal consciousness.
this is just silly pedantry. The comment you're replying to was clearly, if implicitly stating "visual conscious experience cannot simply be the experience of the patterns of light falling on our retina, even though we experience it as such, because of saccadic motion, which is occuring constantly but which we rarely perceive".
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".
> Consciousness probably isn't what we think it is
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.
What if it isn’t exactly what it appears to be to us? If the answer was that simple, thousands of years of deep thinking would have been for nothing. I believe it’s actually a difficult, perhaps even impossible question to answer.
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.
You misunderstand me. Consciousness definitely exists, but its workings are likely different to our preconceptions of how it should work. I offer saccadic masking as an example of how aspects of how it works are 'hidden' from us. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking
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.
Readit News
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.
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
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")
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.
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...
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.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are ton of scientific theories that seem legit but its def out there.
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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.
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?)
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.
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.
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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.
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