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.
(I had misremembered the author of that original quote, but then :
> Daniel Dennett, while sharply disagreeing on some points, acknowledged Nagel's paper ["What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"] as "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness.")
According to a common definition, moralism involves judgment, but not necessarily imposition. From Wikipedia:
> The term has been used in a pejorative sense to describe the attitude of "being overly concerned with making moral judgments or being illiberal in the judgments one makes".
There is also the 19th century Moralism movement/philosophy, which may have inspired the more general sense of the word, but I’m not sure.
I think we should all step back and question whether we all even mean the same thing by the word “imposition”. When I think about imposition, I can see how people could interpret that to mean a wide range of things, including social pressure, religious rules, as well as the force of law. This is why (above) I interpret moralism (the general term) as a kind of judgment, but not necessarily an imposition of rules or punishments.
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:
Indeed. Do yourself a favor and don't watch any of the videos of him on youtube. That razor sharp wit combined with spontaneous humor will make you really mad at cancer.
Also: Do yourself a favor and (dont? er do?) read/listen to his brother's books! Particularly The Phoney Victory. He writes polemics as good as Christopher. Truly a yin to the yang. I like the way they argue, although I don't necessarily agree with everything they argue.
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")
He may forgive but I am not sure his soul would have wanted to be with Him, based on what I have seen from him he would rather be in oblivion than an Eternal Church.. Obviously I don’t claim to know his true heart.
> 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.
Hacker culture was not well established by the 70s, simply because so few people worked with computers in that decade. You can certainly trace its roots back to at least 1970, but it really did not become established then.
What most people identify as "hacker culture" today arose in tandem with (a) relatively affordable "personal" computers (b) modem-based communication.
The rise of these two things is more or less entirely cotemporal with the most productive phase of Dennett's career.
I consider this definitive evidence that the foundational period of hacker culture was before these books were published. I'm not sure what the point of trying to shift that period forward so as to include Dennett's works is. It's neither true nor necessary.
His first three books were published in 81, 84 and 86.
I agree with you that the foundational period slightly predates these, but I don't consider the foundational period to be the same as when "hacker culture was established".
I began to encounter it myself starting in about 1979 via CoEvolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review, but it was still very, very much evolving and continued to do so in very noticeable ways as I started programming in 1984.
I tend to consider the general use of IP as probably one of the main signifiers of hacker culture being established, and that was far from common in the 75-85 period (though growing rapidly).
It wasn't actually my claim that Dennett had much influence on hacker culture. I was originally disputing the idea that Dennett became well known after 1992.
I'd argue hacker culture goes back much further than the 70s, e.g., with MIT hacks during the 1930s and 40s (see Feynman) and in Cambridge UK, as well as the early HAM radio enthusiasts in the 1900s...
There are certainly antecedents and ancestors for hacker culture long before the 1970s, but in the post I was replying to, the term used was "hacker culture was established", and I would argue that none of these early anticipatory elements represented the "establishment" of a new culture.
It’s the same culture made by the same people entering and leaving across that full period. Hacker culture is really a continuation of the same ad hock machinist culture dating back to the Industrial Revolution. It jumped to computers from the days of analog computers.
You can trace things flowing all over the place with say MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club being often sited as an early example. But it’s really just refinements of the same basic culture, and computers is one of the few places it survived unlike say pinball.
I think about this a lot with reference to the mechanics institute in San Francisco. Who were these mechanics and why did they have a 4 story institute still home to a chess club and private library? Certainly not a direct crossover to a modern car mechanic, even a "hacker" type car mechanic wouldn't stereotypically also be thinking along the philosophy of hacker culture, although I am sure some do.
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.
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.