Thinker Daniel Dennett useless at 82

World famend thinker Daniel Dennett, who championed controversial takes on consciousness and free will amongst different mind-bending topics, died right now on the age of 82.

(Full disclosure: This loss is private. Dennett was a pal and colleague of my partner, Sean Carroll. Sean and I’ve many fond recollections of shared meals and stimulating conversations on an infinite vary of matters with Dan over time. He was a real unique and will likely be vastly missed.)

Surprised reactions to Dennett’s sudden passing started proliferating on social media shortly after the information broke. “Wrenching information. He is been an awesome pal and unbelievable inspiration for me all through my profession,” the Santa Fe Institute’s Melanie Mitchell, creator of Synthetic Intelligence: A Information for Pondering People, wrote on X. “I’ll miss him enormously.”

“He was a towering determine in philosophy and particularly within the philosophy of AI,” roboticist Rodney Brooks (MIT, emeritus) wrote on X, bemoaning that he’d by no means replied to Dennett’s final electronic mail from 30 days in the past. “Now we’ve solely recollections of him.

A 2017 New Yorker profile described Dennett as “a cross between Darwin and Santa Claus,” with “a fluffy white beard and a spherical stomach.” That jolly look was accompanied by an mental ferocity—generously embellished together with his glowing wit—as he battled such luminaries as Stephen J. Gould, John Searle, Noam Chomsky, David Chalmers, Roger Penrose, and Richard Lewontin, amongst others, over consciousness and evolution, free will, AI, faith, and plenty of different matters.

Dennett’s many books, whereas dense, nonetheless offered very properly and have been vastly influential, and he was a distinguished speaker in nice demand. His 2003 TED speak, “The Phantasm of Consciousness,” garnered greater than 4 million views. Whereas he gained explicit prominence as a frontrunner of the “New Atheist” motion of the early 2000s—colorfully dubbed one of many “4 Horsemen of New Atheism” alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—that was by no means his main focus, merely a pure extension of his extra central philosopical considerations.

David Wallace, historian and thinker of science on the College of Pittsburgh, provided Ars Technica this succinct summation of Dennett’s extraordinary affect:

To me, Dan Dennett exemplified what it means to do philosophy in an age of science. He as soon as mentioned that there was no such factor as philosophy-free science, solely science that didn’t interrogate its philosophical assumptions; equally, he noticed extra deeply than virtually anybody that the deepest conventional questions of philosophy, from free will to consciousness to metaphysics, have been irreversibly reworked by fashionable science, most particularly by pure choice.

His strategy, as a lot as his personal towering contributions, has impressed generations of philosophers, far past cognitive science and the philosophy of thoughts (his concepts have been influential within the interpretation of quantum concept, for example). He was one of many nice philosophers of the final century, and one of many only a few whose work has been transformative outdoors tutorial philosophy.

“Dan Dennett was the embodiment of a pure thinker—somebody who was good on the cautious conceptual evaluation that characterizes the very best philosophy, whereas caring deeply about what science has to show us concerning the pure world,” Johns Hopkins College physicist and thinker Sean Carroll informed Ars. “On the identical time, he was the mannequin of a publicly-engaged tutorial, somebody who wrote substantive books that anybody might learn and who had an actual affect on the broader world. Individuals like which can be extremely uncommon and treasured, and his passing is an actual loss.”

Born in Boston in 1942, Dennett’s father was a professor of Islamic historical past who turned a undercover agent for the OSS throughout World Struggle II, posing as a cultural attaché on the American Embassy in Beirut. Dennett spent his early childhood there till his father was killed in a airplane crash whereas on a mission to Ethiopia. Dennett, his mom, and two sisters returned to Boston after that, and his household assumed he would attend Harvard similar to his late father. However after graduating from the Phillips Exeter Academy, Dennett opted to attend Wesleyan College as an alternative—at the least till be got here throughout Harvard logician and thinker W.V.O. Quine‘s 1963 treatise, From a Logical Level of View.

Dennett ended up transferring to Harvard to review beneath Quine and change into a thinker, initially intent on proving Quine mistaken. By the point he was a graduate scholar at Oxford College, he was identified amongst his fellow college students as “the village Quinean.” In his 2023 memoir, I’ve Been Pondering, Dennett traced his curiosity in making use of his subject to questions of science started throughout this era. He recalled experiencing the common sensation of 1’s hand falling asleep and feeling like an alien factor, fairly than a part of one’s personal physique. He puzzled what was happening within the physique and the mind.

“The opposite philosophers thought, that’s not philosophy. I mentioned, properly, it must be,” he informed Tufts Now final yr. “So I began studying. I didn’t even know what a neuron was again then within the early ’60s, however I quickly realized. I used to be fortunate to get in on the bottom ground of cognitive neuroscience. Among the early pioneers in that subject have been my heroes and mentors and associates.”

Dennett’s first tutorial place was on the College of California, Irvine, and a revised model of his doctoral thesis turned his first guide: 1969’s Content material and Consciousness. He moved to Tufts College in 1971, the place he remained for the remainder of his profession. Considered one of Dennett’s earliest collaborators was Douglas Hofstadter, creator of the bestselling Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Everlasting Golden Braid, who referred to as Dennett “a lodestar in my life” in an electronic mail [quoted with permission] to colleagues after listening to of the latter’s loss of life:

Dan was a deep thinker about what it’s to be human. Fairly early on, he arrived at what many would see as surprising conclusions about consciousness (primarily that it’s simply an emergent impact of bodily interactions of tiny inanimate elements), and from then on, he was a dead-set opponent of dualism (the concept there may be an ethereal nonphysical elixir referred to as “consciousness”, over and above the bodily occasions going down within the enormously advanced substrate of a human or animal mind, and maybe that of a silicon community as properly).  Dan thus completely rejected the notion of “qualia” (pure sensations of things like colours, tastes, and so forth), and his arguments in opposition to the mystique of qualia have been refined however very cogent.

Dennett was a a confirmed compatibilist on the fiercely debated topic of free will, that means that he noticed no battle between philosophical determinism and free will. “Our solely notable divergence was on the query of free will, which Dan maintained exists, in some sense of ‘free,’ whereas I simply agreed that ‘will’ exists, however maintained that there is no such thing as a freedom in it,” Hoftstadter recalled.

Johns Hopkins thinker Jenann Ismael recalled corresponding with Dennett after her personal guide on free will, How Physics Makes Us Free, was printed in 2016.  She had not but met Dennett, however his work was naturally a big affect, although her guide was largely crucial of his stance on the topic. Ismael opened her guide by discussing Dennett’s fictional brief story, “The place Am I?“, calling it “the very best of piece of philosophical fiction ever written.” (Try this brief movie based mostly on the story, starring Dennett himself uttering such immortal strains as, “They made a glowing new vat for my mind.”)

Dennett learn her guide and emailed Ismael with just a few notes—not about how he felt she’d misrepresented his views (which he deemed of “regardless of”) however correcting her errors concerning the plot of his brief story. “It seems I received the story mistaken,” Ismael informed Ars.  “I would learn it so way back, I simply embellished it in my head and embarrassingly by no means realized. The place I criticized him in my guide, he wasn’t as eager to appropriate me as he was excited to speak concerning the concepts.”

She discovered him to be crammed with infectious heat. “It was true that he might suck the air out of a room when he entered and even sitting at a spherical dinner desk, he in some way turned the middle of it, he took possession of the dialogue,” mentioned Ismael. “However he additionally paid shut consideration to individuals, learn voraciously, listened to and heard what others have been saying, taking what he might and disseminating what he realized. He had immense curiosity and he needed to share every part that he realized or favored.”

In his later years, Dennett wasn’t shy about sounding the alarm concerning AI, even writing an article for The Atlantic final yr on the subject concerning the risks forward, significantly with the appearance of massive language fashions like ChatGPT.  “Probably the most urgent downside shouldn’t be that they’re going to take our jobs, not that they’re going to vary warfare, however that they’re going to destroy human belief,” he informed Tufts Now. “They’re going to maneuver us right into a world the place you’ll be able to’t inform reality from falsehood. You don’t know who to belief. Belief seems to be some of the necessary options of civilization, and we are actually at nice danger of destroying the hyperlinks of belief which have made civilization attainable.”

Dennett was not one to site visitors in false modesty over his many accomplishments and at all times evinced a robust diploma of self-confidence, fondly recounting in his memoir of the time fellow thinker Don Ross wryly noticed, “Dan believes modesty is a advantage to be reserved for particular events.”

His myriad pursuits weren’t restricted to the tutorial. Dennett cherished artwork, music, crusing, pottery, trout fishing, windsurfing, ran his personal cider press, and made his personal Calvados on a Prohibition-era nonetheless. He might name a sq. dance, whittle a picket strolling stick, and was keen on pondering knotty philosophical questions whereas driving his tractor on his 200-acre farm in Blue Hill, north of Boston, which he purchased within the Seventies. (He offered the farm round 2014.)

“Dan was a bon vivant, a really zesty fellow, who cherished journey and hobnobbing with brilliance wherever he might discover it,” Hoftstadter wrote in his tribute.  “In his later years, as he grew slightly teetery, he proudly carried a picket cane with him all world wide, and into it he chiseled phrases and pictures that represented the numerous locations he visited and gave lectures at. Dan Dennett was a mensch, and his concepts on so many topics will go away an enduring affect on the world, and his human presence has had a profound affect on these of us who have been fortunate sufficient to know him properly and to rely him as a pal.”

Ismael recalled him sending her YouTube movies of “swing dancing and foolish outfits” in the course of the pandemic, his emails affected by colourful emojis. He was “a wierd man, who did not take himself as critically as you may assume,” she mentioned. “I actually cherished him, cherished his spirit, his generosity, the expansiveness of his pondering, his enjoyment of concepts, and his nice good cheer. Philosophically, I feel he had true greatness. It appears not possible he’s gone.”