Daniel Dennett | |
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 Dennett in 2012 | |
| Born | Daniel Clement Dennett III (1942-03-28)March 28, 1942 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | April 19, 2024(2024-04-19) (aged 82) Portland, Maine, U.S. |
| Spouse | |
| Awards |
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| Education | |
| Education | |
| Thesis | The Mind and the Brain (1965) |
| Doctoral advisor | Gilbert Ryle |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | 20th,21st-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | |
| Institutions | Tufts University |
| Main interests | |
| Notable works |
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| Notable ideas | Heterophenomenology Intentional stance Intuition pump Multiple drafts model Greedy reductionism Cartesian theater Belief in belief Real patterns Free-floating rationale[3] Top-down vs bottom-up design[4] Cassette theory of dreams[5] Alternative neurosurgery[6] Sphexishness Brainstorm machine[7] Deepity[8] |
| Signature | |
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Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 – April 19, 2024) was an American philosopher andcognitive scientist. His research centered on thephilosophy of mind, thephilosophy of science, and thephilosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate toevolutionary biology andcognitive science.[9]
Dennett was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy atTufts University inMassachusetts.[10] Dennett was a member of theeditorial board forThe Rutherford Journal[11] and a co-founder ofThe Clergy Project.[12]
A vocalatheist andsecularist, Dennett has been described as "one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers".[13] He was referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen" ofNew Atheism, along withRichard Dawkins,Sam Harris, andChristopher Hitchens.
Daniel Clement Dennett III was born on March 28, 1942, inBoston, Massachusetts, the son of Ruth Marjorie (née Leck; 1903–1971) and Daniel Clement Dennett Jr. (1910–1947).[14][15][16]
Dennett spent part of his childhood inLebanon,[10] where, duringWorld War II, his father, who had aPhD inIslamic studies fromHarvard University, was a covert counter-intelligence agent with theOffice of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to theAmerican Embassy inBeirut. His mother, an English major atCarleton College, went for a master's degree at theUniversity of Minnesota before becoming an English teacher at the American Community School in Beirut.[17] In 1947, his father was killed in a plane crash inEthiopia.[18] Shortly after, his mother took him back to Massachusetts.[19] Dennett's sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.[17]
Dennett said that he was first introduced to the notion of philosophy while attendingCamp Mowglis in Hebron, New Hampshire, at age 11, when a camp counselor said to him, "You know what you are, Daniel? You're a philosopher."[20]
Dennett graduated fromPhillips Exeter Academy in 1959, and spent one year atWesleyan University before receiving hisBA degree in philosophy atHarvard University in 1963.[10] There, he was a student ofWillard Van Orman Quine.[10] He had decided to transfer to Harvard after reading Quine'sFrom a Logical Point of View and, thinking that Quine was wrong about some things, decided, as he said "as only a freshman could, that I had to go to Harvard and confront this man with my corrections to his errors!"[21][22]
In 1965, Dennett received hisDPhil in philosophy at theUniversity of Oxford, where he studied underGilbert Ryle and was a member ofHertford College.[23][10] His doctoral dissertation was entitledThe Mind and the Brain: Introspective Description in the Light of Neurological Findings; Intentionality.[24]
From 1965 to 1971, Dennett taught at theUniversity of California, Irvine, before moving toTufts University where he taught for many decades.[13][10] He also spent periods visiting atHarvard University and several other universities.[25] Dennett described himself as "anautodidact—or, more properly, the beneficiary of hundreds of hours of informal tutorials on all the fields that interest me, from some of the world's leading scientists".[26]
Throughout his career, he was an interdisciplinarian who argued for "breaking the silos of knowledge", and he collaborated widely with computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and biologists.[22]
He wrote an introduction to a 2002 edition ofGilbert Ryle'sThe Concept of Mind.[27] Dennett was the recipient of aFulbright Fellowship and twoGuggenheim Fellowships.
While he was a confirmedcompatibilist onfree will, in "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want"—chapter 15 of his 1978 bookBrainstorms[28]—Dennett articulated the case for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast tolibertarian views.
The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined, produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent's final decision.[29]
While other philosophers have developed two-stage models, includingWilliam James,Henri Poincaré,Arthur Compton, andHenry Margenau, Dennett defended this model for the following reasons:
- First ... The intelligent selection, rejection, and weighing of the considerations that do occur to the subject is a matter of intelligence making the difference.
- Second, I think it installs indeterminism in the right place for the libertarian, if there is a right place at all.
- Third ... from the point of view of biological engineering, it is just more efficient and in the end more rational that decision making should occur in this way.
- A fourth observation in favor of the model is that it permits moral education to make a difference, without making all of the difference.
- Fifth—and I think this is perhaps the most important thing to be said in favor of this model—it provides some account of our important intuition that we are the authors of our moral decisions.
- Finally, the model I propose points to the multiplicity of decisions that encircle our moral decisions and suggests that in many cases our ultimate decision as to which way to act is less important phenomenologically as a contributor to our sense of free will than the prior decisions affecting our deliberation process itself: the decision, for instance, not to consider any further, to terminate deliberation; or the decision to ignore certain lines of inquiry.
These prior and subsidiary decisions contribute, I think, to our sense of ourselves as responsible free agents, roughly in the following way: I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: "That's enough. I've considered this matter enough and now I'm going to act," in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.[30]
Leading libertarian philosophers such asRobert Kane have rejected Dennett's model, specifically that random chance is directly involved in a decision, on the basis that they believe this eliminates the agent's motives and reasons,character andvalues, and feelings anddesires. They claim that, if chance is the primary cause of decisions, then agents cannot be liable for resultant actions. Kane says:
[As Dennett admits,] a causal indeterminist view of this deliberative kind does not give us everything libertarians have wanted from free will. For [the agent] does not have complete control over what chance images and other thoughts enter his mind or influence his deliberation. They simply come as they please. [The agent] does have some controlafter the chance considerations have occurred.
But then there is no more chance involved. What happens from then on, how he reacts, isdetermined by desires and beliefs he already has. So it appears that he does not have control in thelibertarian sense of what happens after the chance considerations occur as well. Libertarians require more than this for full responsibility and free will.[31]
Dennett is a proponent ofmaterialism in thephilosophy of mind. He argues that mental states, including consciousness, are entirely the result of physical processes in the brain. In his bookConsciousness Explained (1991), Dennett presents his arguments for a materialist understanding of consciousness, rejectingCartesian dualism in favor of a physicalist perspective.[32]
Dennett remarked in several places (such as "Self-portrait", inBrainchildren) that his overall philosophical project remained largely the same from his time at Oxford onwards. He was primarily concerned with providing a philosophy of mind that is grounded inempirical research. In his originaldissertation,Content and Consciousness, he broke up the problem of explaining the mind into the need for a theory of content and for a theory of consciousness. His approach to this project also stayed true to this distinction. Just asContent and Consciousness has a bipartite structure, he similarly dividedBrainstorms into two sections. He would later collect several essays on content inTheIntentional Stance and synthesize his views on consciousness into a unified theory inConsciousness Explained. These volumes respectively form the most extensive development of his views.[33]
In chapter 5 ofConsciousness Explained, Dennett described hismultiple drafts model of consciousness. He stated that, "all varieties of perception—indeed all varieties of thought or mental activity—are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under continuous 'editorial revision.'" (p. 111). Later he asserts, "These yield, over the course of time, somethingrather like a narrative stream or sequence, which can be thought of as subject to continual editing by many processes distributed around the brain, ..." (p. 135, emphasis in the original).
In this work, Dennett's interest in the ability of evolution to explain some of the content-producing features of consciousness is already apparent, and this later became an integral part of his program. He stated his view is materialist and scientific, and he presents an argument againstqualia; he argued that the concept of qualia is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation ofphysicalism.
This view is rejected by neuroscientistsGerald Edelman,Antonio Damasio,Vilayanur Ramachandran,Giulio Tononi, andRodolfo Llinás, all of whom state that qualia exist and that the desire to eliminate them is based on an erroneous interpretation on the part of some philosophers regarding what constitutes science.[34][35][36]
Dennett's strategy mirrored his teacher Ryle's approach of redefining first-person phenomena in third-person terms, and denying the coherence of the concepts which this approach struggles with.
Dennett self-identified with a few terms:
[Others] note that my "avoidance of the standard philosophical terminology for discussing such matters" often creates problems for me; philosophers have a hard time figuring out what I am saying and what I am denying. My refusal to play ball with my colleagues is deliberate, of course, since I view the standard philosophical terminology as worse than useless—a major obstacle to progress since it consists of so many errors.[37]
InConsciousness Explained, he affirmed "I am a sort of 'teleofunctionalist', of course, perhaps the original teleofunctionalist". He went on to say, "I am ready to come out of the closet as some sort ofverificationist." (pp. 460–61).
Dennett was credited[38] with inspiringfalse belief tasks used in developmental psychology. He noted that when four-year-olds watch thePunch and Judy puppet show, they laugh because they know that they know more about what's going on than one of the characters does:[39]
Very young children watching a Punch and Judy show squeal in anticipatory delight as Punch prepares to throw the box over the cliff. Why? Because they know Punch thinks Judy is still in the box. They know better; they saw Judy escape while Punch's back was turned. We take the children's excitement as overwhelmingly good evidence that they understand the situation--they understand that Punch is acting on a mistaken belief (although they are not sophisticated enough to put it that way).
Much of Dennett's work from the 1990s onwards was concerned with fleshing out his previous ideas by addressing the same topics from an evolutionary standpoint, ranging from what distinguishes human minds from animal minds (Kinds of Minds),[10] to howfree will is compatible with a naturalist view of the world (Freedom Evolves).[40]
Dennett saw evolution by natural selection as analgorithmic process (though he spelt out that algorithms as simple aslong division often incorporate a significant degree ofrandomness).[41] This idea is in conflict with the evolutionary philosophy ofpaleontologistStephen Jay Gould, who preferred to stress the "pluralism" of evolution (i.e., its dependence on many crucial factors, of which natural selection is only one).[citation needed]
Dennett's views on evolution are identified as being stronglyadaptationist, in line with his theory of theintentional stance, and the evolutionary views ofbiologist Richard Dawkins. InDarwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett showed himself even more willing than Dawkins to defend adaptationism in print, devoting an entire chapter to a criticism of the ideas of Gould. This stems from Gould's long-running public debate withE. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists over humansociobiology and its descendantevolutionary psychology, which Gould andRichard Lewontin opposed, but which Dennett advocated, together with Dawkins andSteven Pinker.[42] Gould argued that Dennett overstated his claims and misrepresented Gould's, to reinforce what Gould describes as Dennett's "Darwinian fundamentalism".[43]
Dennett was a vocalatheist andsecularist, a member of theSecular Coalition for America advisory board,[44] and a member of theCommittee for Skeptical Inquiry, as well as an outspoken supporter of theBrights movement. Dennett was referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen ofNew Atheism", along withRichard Dawkins,Sam Harris, and the lateChristopher Hitchens.[45]
InDarwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett wrote that evolution can account for the origin of morality.[46] He rejected the idea that morality being natural to us implies that we should take a skeptical position regarding ethics, noting that what is fallacious in thenaturalistic fallacy is not to support values per se, but rather torush from facts to values.[citation needed]
In his 2006 book,Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Dennett attempted to account for religious belief naturalistically, explaining possible evolutionary reasons for the phenomenon of religious adherence. In this book he declared himself to be "a bright", and defended the term.[47]
He did research into clerics who are secretly atheists and how they rationalize their works. He found what he called a "don't ask, don't tell" conspiracy because believers did not want to hear of loss of faith. This made unbelieving preachers feel isolated, but they did not want to lose their jobs and church-supplied lodgings. Generally, they consoled themselves with the belief that they were doing good in their pastoral roles by providing comfort and required ritual.[48] The research, with Linda LaScola, was further extended to include other denominations and non-Christian clerics.[49] The research and stories Dennett and LaScola accumulated during this project were published in their 2013 co-authored book,Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind.[50]
Dennett wrote about and advocated the notion ofmemetics as a philosophically useful tool, his last work on this topic being his "Brains, Computers, and Minds", a three-part presentation through Harvard's MBB 2009 Distinguished Lecture Series.[citation needed]
Dennett was critical ofpostmodernism, having said:
Postmodernism, the school of "thought" that proclaimed "There are no truths, only interpretations" has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for "conversations" in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.[51]
Dennett adopted and somewhat redefined the term "deepity", originally coined by Miriam Weizenbaum.[52] Dennett used "deepity" for a statement that is apparently profound, but is actually trivial on one level and meaningless on another. Generally, a deepity has two (or more) meanings: one that is true but trivial, and another that sounds profound and would be important if true, but is actually false or meaningless. Examples are "Que será será!", "Beauty is only skin deep!", "The power of intention can transform your life."[53] The termhas been cited many times.
While approving of the increase in efficiency that humans reap by using resources such as expert systems in medicine or GPS in navigation, Dennett saw a danger in machines performing an ever-increasing proportion of basic tasks in perception, memory, and algorithmic computation because people may tend to anthropomorphize such systems and attribute intellectual powers to them that they do not possess.[54] He believed the relevant danger fromartificial intelligence (AI) is that people will misunderstand the nature of basically "parasitic" AI systems, rather than employing them constructively to challenge and develop the human user's powers of comprehension.[55]
In the 1990s, Dennett collaborated with a group of computer scientists atMIT to attempt to develop a humanoid, conscious robot, named "Cog".[56][22] The project did not produce a conscious robot, but Dennett argued that in principle it could have.[56]
As given in his penultimate book,From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Dennett's views were contrary to those ofNick Bostrom.[57] Although acknowledging that it is "possible in principle" to create AI with human-like comprehension and agency, Dennett maintained that the difficulties of any such "strong AI" project would be orders of magnitude greater than those raising concerns have realized.[58] Dennett believed, as of the book's publication in 2017, that the prospect ofsuperintelligence (AI massively exceeding the cognitive performance of humans in all domains) was at least 50 years away, and of far less pressing significance than other problems the world faces.[59]
Dennett was known for his nuanced stance on realism. While he supportedscientific realism, advocating that entities and phenomena posited by scientific theories exist independently of our perceptions, he leant towards instrumentalism concerning certain theoretical entities, valuing their explanatory and predictive utility, as showing in his discussion ofreal patterns.[60] Dennett's pragmatic realism underlines the entanglement of language, consciousness, and reality. He posited that our discourse about reality is mediated by our cognitive and linguistic capacities, marking a departure fromNaïve realism.[61]
Dennett's philosophical stance on realism was intricately connected to his views on instrumentalism and the theory of real patterns.[60] He drew a distinction between illata, which are genuine theoretical entities like electrons, and abstracta, which are "calculation bound entities or logical constructs" such as centers of gravity and the equator, placing beliefs and the like among the latter. One of Dennett's principal arguments was an instrumentalistic construal of intentional attributions, asserting that such attributions are environment-relative.[62]
In discussing intentional states, Dennett posited that they should not be thought of as resembling theoretical entities, but rather as logical constructs, avoiding the pitfalls of intentional realism without lapsing into pure instrumentalism or even eliminativism.[63] His instrumentalism and anti-realism were crucial aspects of his view on intentionality, emphasizing the centrality and indispensability of the intentional stance to our conceptual scheme.[64]
Dennett was the recipient of a Fellowship at theCenter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.[65] He was a Fellow of theCommittee for Skeptical Inquiry and a Humanist Laureate of theInternational Academy of Humanism.[66] He was named 2004 Humanist of the Year by theAmerican Humanist Association.[67][10] In 2006, Dennett received the Golden Plate Award of theAmerican Academy of Achievement.[68] He became a Fellow of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009.[10]
In February 2010, he was named to theFreedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.[69] In 2012, he was awarded theErasmus Prize, an annual award for a person who has made an exceptional contribution to European culture, society or social science, "for his ability to translate the cultural significance of science and technology to a broad audience".[70][10] In 2018, he was awarded anhonorary doctorate (Dr.h.c.) by theRadboud University inNijmegen,Netherlands, for his contributions to and influence on cross-disciplinary science.[71]
In 1962, Dennett married Susan Bell.[72] They lived inNorth Andover, Massachusetts, and had a daughter, a son, and six grandchildren.[13][73] He was an avidsailor[74] who loved sailingXanthippe, his 13-meter sailboat. He also played many musical instruments and sang atglee clubs.[22]
Dennett died ofinterstitial lung disease atMaine Medical Center on April 19, 2024, at the age of 82.[13][75]
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