Dan Dennett. Sad to see him go.

Fellow resident of my hometown, I remember he signed every book of his that the library had, with a little note saying “To the readers of Andover…”. I always liked that.

Went to a lecture of his when I was a freshman, met him briefly in the hallway. Seemed like a kindly old man.

I liked his take on religion — felt it was a better attitude than the others of the late 2000s, like Dawkins and Hitchens.

This interview (below) with Bill Moyers always stood out to me as fairly reasonable. The rest of his thinking I never found terribly interesting.

In any case— may he rest in peace. A real loss to the philosophy community— if there is one.

I am surprised no one has started a thread on this — Manuel

He just died. Surprised there was no mention here.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead.html

RIP — fishfry

According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.

“We couldn’t live the way we do without it (i.e. the notion of free will),” he wrote in his 2017 book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.” “If — because free will is an illusion — no one is ever responsible for what they do, should we abolish yellow and red cards in soccer, the penalty box in ice hockey and all the other penalty systems in sports?”

I’m a robot, and you’re a robot, but that doesn’t make us any less dignified or wonderful or lovable or responsible for our actions. Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?

When it came to New Atheism, he was by far the best one. Not that the others were too good, but, he was much more kind which counts. — Manuel

I think it's the sheer hostility that some of these media atheists have gotten — ssu

If we are robots, are robots conscious according to him? — Johnnie

The key phrase is 'unconscious competence'. He argues that what we consider to be conscious thought actually arises from cellular and molecular processes of which we have no conscious awareness. Dennett asserts that the usual understanding of consciousness is a fallacious 'fok psychology' that interprets these processes after the fact. We believe we are autonomous agents, but our mental processes - which we mistakenly believe to have real existence - are really the outcome of the evolutionary requirements to solve specific kinds of problems that enhance our chances of survival and reproduction. That dovetails with Richard Dawkins' idea of the selfish gene. So he posits that what we experience as conscious decision-making is more about rationalizing or making sense of the outcomes of the unconscious competence of our unconscious evolutionary drives. — Wayfarer

I’m pleased to learn there is more to him, as this would explain why people I respect hold him in respect. — Wayfarer

Dennett is a materialist about the mind, but unlike many materialists he doesn’t identify mental events with physical events in the brain. Instead, he maintains that while we are nothing but complex physical systems controlled by what happens in our brains, we can’t in ordinary life understand ourselves in those terms. We operate instead with a useful fiction, namely that we are controlled by a mind full of sensations, intentions, beliefs, emotions, desires, and so on. This rough explanatory scheme enables us to understand and predict the actions of others, and to communicate with them. We treat ourselves and others as if we had these inner conscious lives. Like the rest of our natural, unscientific take on the world – colours, sounds, ordinary objects – these ideas about the mind are tools given to us by evolution, according to Dennett. Even though they don’t depict reality with scientific accuracy, they help us to function and survive, so they have been entrenched by natural selection.

In my view this is one of those philosophical positions that represent the triumph of theoretical commitment over common sense.

Fair comment, do you think? — Wayfarer

I think it's a really strange thing that some peoples first inclination on hearing about the death of someone is to try to discredit them or list all the things you disagree with them about. — flannel jesus

If, for Henry, culture has always to be understood as “a culture of life”, i.e., as the cultivation of subjective powers, then it includes art without being limited to it. Cultural praxis comports what Henry designates as its “elaborate forms” (e.g., art, religion, discursive knowledge) as well as everyday forms related to the satisfaction of basic needs. Both types of forms, however, fall under the ethical category of subjective self-growth and illustrate the bond between the living and absolute life. The inversion of culture in “barbarism” means that within a particular socio-historical context the need for subjective self-growth is no longer adequately met, and the tendency toward an occultation (i.e. obscuration) of the bond between the living and absolute life is reinforced. According to Henry, who echoes Husserl’s analysis in Crisis, such an inversion takes place in contemporary culture, the dominating feature of which is the triumph of Galilean science and its technological developments.

Insofar as it relies on objectification, the “Galilean principle” is directly opposed to Henry’s philosophy of immanent affectivity. For Henry, science, including modern Galilean science, nonetheless remains a highly elaborated form of culture. Although “the joy of knowing is not always as innocent as it seems”, the line separating culture from “barbarism” is crossed when science is transformed into scientist ideology, i.e., when the Galilean principle is made into an ontological claim according to which ultimate reality is given only through the objectively measurable and quantifiable.

eliminative materialism. — Wayfarer

One perspective (Dennett, 1987) is that propositional attitudes are actually dispositional states that we use to adopt a certain heuristic stance toward rational agents. According to this view, our talk about mental states should be interpreted as talk about abstracta that, although real, are not candidates for straightforward reduction or elimination as the result of cognitive science research. Moreover, since beliefs and other mental states are used for so many things besides the explanation of human behavior, it is far from clear that our explanatory theories about inner workings of the mind/brain have much relevance for their actual status.

I recall reading passages by Dennett and thinking, yes that sounds right based on my own reflections. In my experience, I've often found my own consciousness to be rather underwhelming, comprised of fleeting impressions and fragmented moments that I stitch together with narrative to seemingly make sense of it all. — Tom Storm