RIP Daniel Dennett
I am surprised no one has started a thread on this, but I just discovered it too to be fair. Daniel Dennett, an extremely influential and polarizing philosopher died on April 19 at the age of 82.
While I must say I disagreed with him on most things, I cannot deny his influence and eagerness to communicate scientific concepts in a fun, interesting fashion.
And it is always good to look for good opponents in philosophy, it keeps one sharp.
In any case, RIP to one of the bigger figures in philosophy of modern times. He will be missed.
While I must say I disagreed with him on most things, I cannot deny his influence and eagerness to communicate scientific concepts in a fun, interesting fashion.
And it is always good to look for good opponents in philosophy, it keeps one sharp.
In any case, RIP to one of the bigger figures in philosophy of modern times. He will be missed.
Comments (44)
The God Genome, Leon Wieseltier.
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A hundred pages. Not bad.
Thanks, Professor Dennett.
A post from yesterday ...
Quoting fishfry
Ah, missed that.
Thanks for sharing.
In his most notorious polemic, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, he compares Darwinian evolution to a 'universal acid' which dissolves the container which holds it. Insofar as this 'container' is an analogy for Western culture, isn't philosophy itself prominent amongst the subjects that are dissolved in this 'acid'?
And, if so, why is what Dennett advocating described as philosophy?
In respect of his compatibilism, he asked:
Of course not, he answers - but only because of pragmatic necessity, not because it represents anything real. In another interview, he said:
The obvious answer to which is simply that science is not, in fact, all-knowing, something he could never acknowledge. He was indeed the most consistent representative of scientism to have come to public attention, and has done a great service by illustrating the impossible contradictions that it entails.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/898001
Indeed. 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.
I think it's the sheer hostility that some of these media atheists have gotten have made them very aggressive. It's not only 9/11 and what basically could be called Islamophobia.
Yet in my view New Atheism and it's Four Horsemen is much of a part media discourse drawn by well known figures that are popular in the media. Yet I think "New Atheism" is only a minor thing compared to Dennet's work.
It was a two-way street. Richard Dawkins often made a point of being deliberately insulting to shock people out of their God delusions. He and Dennett both regarded anyone religious as either pitiable fools or hostile fanatics, depending on their overall congeniality.
And speaking of congeniality, by all accounts Dennett was a very congenial guy, and an excellent lecturer. He also paid his university tuition by playing jazz piano in bars, which definitely gets my respect. But all of that was in spite of his philosophy, not because of it. That's what he describes as 'compatibilism' (a 'wretched subterfuge', according to Kant.)
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.
He says in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea that Darwinian evolution is like a 'universal acid' that dissolves the container in which it developed, suggesting that it cannot be contained or limited to just biological sciencesit seeps into and transforms every field it touches. This idea reshapes our understanding not only of biology but also of philosophy, psychology, and even the social sciences. So in that sense it is 'supersessionist' - it supersedes, or dissolves, classical philosophy, most of which he says is merely self indulgent.
This characterises fairly well Dennett's thinking when he is in his more eliminativist mood about mental states. I had read Darwin's Dangerous Idea one year before my awakening to philosophy, when reductionistic-scientistic-physicalism was my religion. So, I had thought it was a very good book! Since then, I have also read Consciousness Explained, Kind of Minds, and a few dozens essays and book chapters including The Intentional Stance, Where Am I, and Real Patterns. I have not bothered with the religion bashing stuff.
When Dennett's attention turns on the philosophy of mind and the problem of free will (and away from evolutionism), he seldom proposes reductive explanations. He came up at some point with the distinction between explaining and explaining away. Rather than being a reductive eliminativist, he is more of a quasi-realist. (John Haugeland scolded him for this in Pattern and Being, where he suggests to Dennett that his own reflections should lead him to endorse of more robust form of non-reductive realism). In The Intentional Stance, and elsewhere, Dennett often also stresses the distinction between the sub-personal level of explanation (where a design stance may be warranted) and the personal level (where an intentional stance is warranted). The descriptions made at both levels are equally valid, according to him, even thought they serve different functions.
There would be much more to say about the bits in Dennet that I agree with, and the bits where I disagree. But I just wanted to put out a word of cautions about portraying him as a crude reductionist. Let me just make two reading recommendations (in addition to Haugeland's aforementioned paper) that are relevant to the present issues:
Jennifer Hornsby: Personal and sub?personal; A defence of Dennett's early distinction, Philosophical Explorations, 2000
Daniel Dennett: Reflections on Sam Harris' "Free Will", Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, 2017
On edit: It just occurred to my that we had a discussion on this forum about Haugeland's paper Pattern and Being eights years ago. It hadn't attracted much interest.
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Fair comment, do you think?
No, I don't think that's accurate. Dennett, like his teacher Gilbert Ryle before him, would deny that our beliefs, intentions, and the reasons why we are acting, are things that our brains (or souls) do rather than them being patterns of behavior in the life of human beings that are being disclosed through the intentional stance (and that the activity of our brains enable).
However, when we introspect and ascribe, on that basis, intentions and beliefs to ourselves, or articulate the reasons why we are acting, Dennett would also tend to say that we are thereby constructing a narrative about ourselves (with the purpose of making sense of our own behavior) and that those things that appear to reveal themselves through introspection are nothing over and above the elements of this narrative that we construct. This seems to me to be true in one respect and misguided in another.
It is true inasmuch as how we narrate our own mental lives isn't merely a matter of observing what takes place within us, as it were, but is also constitutive of those very elements. It is misguided inasmuch as Dennett sometimes fails to consider that this narration isn't merely a matter of us explaining ourselves (to ourselves) but also is a matter of us making up our own minds in a manner that is responsive to reasons. This is something that Dennett himself often acknowledges, and even stresses, especially when the topic at hand is free will and determinism, but when he attempts to relate the philosophy of mind to neuroscience, he sometimes tends to forget it and only considers the narrative aspects of consciousness as expressing the stance of a pure observer/explainer of behavior. I find this rather strange.
On edit: Here are a few useful expansions/reformulations by Claude 3 Opus
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Claude 3 Opus:
Dennett's distinction between the personal and sub-personal levels of explanation is crucial. For Dennett, talk of beliefs, desires, and intentions is not simply a fiction to be eliminated in favor of neuroscientific descriptions, but a valid and indispensable framework for understanding human behavior at the level of persons. The intentional stance, in his view, picks out real patterns in the world, even if these patterns are not reducible to physical states of the brain.
At the same time, you correctly note the tension in Dennett's thought when it comes to the status of introspection and first-person narratives about our mental lives. On the one hand, Dennett often stresses the constructive, interpretive nature of these narratives, suggesting that they are not simple reports of inner states but active attempts to make sense of our behavior. This can sometimes make it sound as if he is dismissing the reality of conscious experience altogether.
Dennett also recognizes the crucial role that these narratives play in our actual reasoning, decision-making, and sense of agency. When we deliberate or make up our minds, we are not simply spinning stories after the fact, but engaging in a process that is constitutive of our mental states and responsive to reasons. In other words, our first-person perspective is not just an explainer of behavior, but a participant in shaping that behavior.
I think you're right that Dennett sometimes loses sight of this latter point. There is a risk of sliding from the valid insight that our introspective reports are fallible and constructed to the stronger claim that they are mere fictions or epiphenomena. A more balanced view, as you suggest, would recognize both the narrative, interpretive dimension of consciousness and its genuine causal and rational role in our mental lives.
Like Ryle, Dennett indeed wants to steer a course between Cartesian dualism, which reifies mental states as inner ghostly causes, and crude behaviorism, which denies the reality of the mental altogether. The intentional stance is meant to provide a third way, a framework for attributing genuine mental states on the basis of patterns of behavior and disposition. But maintaining this balance is not always easy, and Dennett sometimes veers too far in the deflationary direction.
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At some point in time, William Lane Craig is going to die - he's a well known philosopher who I couldn't disagree with more, but when he dies, I'm... probably not going to say anything in the thread titled "RIP William Craig", but if I do say something, it's certainly not going to be "let's all focus on all the things he was wrong about". Even though I think he was wrong about a lot, it's... just a weird place.
Now maybe if someone said "William Lane Craig died, the dude who was right about everything", I might say "I don't think he was right about everything", but... that's not what happened here.
I say, "Yeah well he was a flat earther so..."
"Strange" isn't the word I would use, but yeah.
From the SEP entry on Michel Henry, phenomenologist:
Dennett crossed that line.
Dennett's not an eliminativist though. He's a critic of it.
From SEP. He isn't even an eliminativist toward "experience". Just thinks it's thought of badly.
Anyone know of an interview where he addresses this and restates his position? I recall reading one wherein he said something like consciousness is not exactly an illusion, it just isn't what we think it is.
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.
This is the essence of Dennett's multiple draft model of consciousness. I still think his critique of the pseudo-distinction between Orwellian accounts of fleeting experiences or qualia (as experienced and then forgotten) and Stalinesque accounts of them (as rewritten memories of them) is illuminating. But the main lesson to be drawn from it, it seems to me, is that the making of the unfolding narrative (about our own mental lives) is constitutive of who we are as minded agents. The making of the story is governed by rational norms. This is something that Haugeland stresses when he comments on Dennett's accounts of real patterns (in the world) and of experiential contents (features of the mind). The normative aspect points to the co-constitution of those things through (socially normed) embodied activity.
Dennett, when he goes on to describe the source of the narration, tends to go into a reductive process of homuncular decomposition that bottoms out in the description of neural processes that are explainable through the design stance alone. But that explanation, valid as it might be, is best suited for singling out the enabling causes of our rational abilities, and are irrelevant to the norms that govern our narrative constructions (the multiple drafts) at the personal level of explanation.
Again, I recommend Jennifer Hornby's paper referenced above where she charges Dennett with having forgotten some of the best insights from his own personal/sub-personal early distinction.
But he is included in that same article as a representative of eliminative materialism:
(Personally, I think disputing the apodictic reality of pain, because of not being able to form a concept of it, is all the illustration needed of the shortcoming of this attitude.)
Again, Thomas Nagel summarizes the problem he sees with Dennett's views:
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Analytical Philosophy and Human Life, Chapter 23 - Dennett's Illusions] According to Dennett...the reality is that the representations that underlie human behavior are found in neural structures of which we know very little. And the same is true of the similar conception we have of our own minds. That conception does not capture an inner reality, but has arisen as a consequence of our need to communicate to others in rough and graspable fashion our various competencies and dispositions (and also, sometimes, to conceal them):
"Curiously, then, our first-person point of view of our own minds is not so different from our second- person point of view of others minds: we dont see, or hear, or feel, the complicated neural machinery churning away in our brains but have to settle for an interpreted, digested version, a user-illusion that is so familiar to us that we take it not just for reality but also for the most indubitable and intimately known reality of all. "
The trouble is that Dennett concludes not only that there is much more behind our behavioral competencies than is revealed to the first-person point of viewwhich is certainly truebut that nothing whatever is revealed to the first-person point of view but a version of the neural machinery. In other words, when I look at the American flag, it may seem to me that there are red stripes in my subjective visual field, but that is an illusion: the only reality, of which this is an interpreted, digested version, is that a physical process I cant describe is going on in my visual cortex.
I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes? Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obviousthat in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotles words, maintaining a thesis at all costs.[/quote]
It is this conviction on Dennett's part that I think allows his views to be fairly characterised as 'scientism', that is, 'the view that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality', and then to exclude, or eliminate, as a matter of principle, the first-person perspective, because it is not something that science as currently practiced accomodates.
Nagel adds:
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The approaches that appear to me to be the most sensible are the Wittgensteinian quietism defended by Peter Hacker and the phenomenological approach of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Both of them exemplify the method of "descriptive metaphysics" that Peter Strawson advocated. The point of descriptive metaphysics, as contrasted with analytical metaphysics, is to elucidate concepts (or phenomena) by placing them in relation with a broad family of related concepts (or related phenomena) rather than seeking to provide analytical definitions of them, or seeking necessary and sufficient conditions for them to occur. As 'darth barracuda' (@_db) once said on this forum: "What something is is not simply a question of its material constitution but of its relationship to other things as well." But all of this would be a topic for another thread.
RIP Daniel Dennett.
When I submit a philosophical idea to GPT4 and it says that my idea is "intriguing" (as opposed to "insightful") this is generally its polite way of saying "what a load of bullcrap!" ;-)
I'll reply to this since it's an opportunity to loop back Dennett into the conversation. If phenomenology is viewed as the (connective) analysis of first-personal experience, then its central relevance to consciousness should be apparent. One of Dennett's essay that was reprinted in his Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (and that I had mentioned earlier) is Where am I. You can easily find a standalone copy through Google. It's a very engaging and thought provoking little paper.
When you think of yourself as a self conscious entity, there is a clear sense of there being a place "here" where your experience is happening. This feature of phenomenology is something that Dennett investigates in Where am I. It is one of his most celebrated "intuition pumps". Gareth Evans refers to Dennett's paper it in his posthumously published Varieties of Reference (pp. 254-255):
"It seems possible to envisage organisms whose control centre is outside the body, and connected to it by communication links capable of spanning a considerable distance. An organism of this kind could have an Idea of itself like our own, but if it did, it would be unable to cope with the situation that would arise when the control centre survived the destruction of the body it controlled. Thinking like us, the subject would of course have to regard itself as somewhere, but in this case it would not make any sense to identify a particular place in the world as the place it thought of as here. The place occupied by the control centre is certainly not the subject's here; and even if we counterfactually suppose the control centre re-equipped with a body, there is no particular place where that body would have to be. Because its 'here' picks out no place, there is no bit of matter, no persisting thing, which the subject's Idea of itself permits us to regard as what it identifies as itself. Here, then, we have a very clear situation in which a subject of thought could not think of itself as 'I'; its 'I'its habitual mode of thought about itselfis simply inadequate for this situation. (It forces the subject to think in ways which are no longer appropriate.) This case helps us to see that the reason we do not find the `disembodied brain in a vat' case very disturbing, conceptually, is that the brain is also the last remaining part of the subject's body. (The case is often presented as a limiting case of amputation.) A tiny foothold is thus provided for the idea that the subject is where the brain is, and hence for the idea that the brain is what the subject is."
(Dennett's paper is referenced in a footnote)
Ha! Not at all. I am genuinely interested in phenomenology and the snippets I have gleaned are tantalising and do suggest a way out of some of our dilemmas. Evan Thompsons work in embodied cognition has interested me in recent times.
Im old and tired. I have never privileged philosophy in my life, so much of what I read is incomprehensible and, I have to say, dull. But Im happy enough to scratch around the periphery looking for shiny things I can use. Especially the things that go against my beliefs. I like ideas I would never have thought of. Thanks for your reply and the reference.
Yes, this is fun! You might also enjoy most books by Andy Clark written between 1997 and 2016 as well as Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds by Lisa Barrett.
Speaking of whom:
Excerpt From
Why I Am Not a Buddhist
Evan Thompson
One reason, I think, (other than Dennett's provocative style) is that lay people often see the relatively few public figures like him as representative, if not wholly constituent of their field, whereas in reality, the field is both more crowded and more diverse than they realize. As a result, those public figures are seen as more significant and/or controversial on the outside than on the inside. Among his peers, Dennett is well-known and cited, but not nearly as much as one might assume if one were only reading philosophy of mind topics on this forum.
Take his views on free will, for example: though Dennett had original things to say on the subject, on the whole, he was neither as original nor as controversial in his compatibilism as many seem to think. Views that are broadly like his go back as far as GE Moore and AJ Ayer, and they have been in the philosophical mainstream for the last half-century at least.
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