And now, there’s Dan Dennett from the world of philosophy — and also, like Hitchens, from the world of Gnu Atheism. (And, yes, that’s how it’s spelled.) But, I really don’t have to do anything beyond color around the edges on this one.
That’s because the same person from whom I heard of Dennett’s passing, John Horgan, had updated a 2017 piece about him that fills in all the basics.
The biggie? Scientism is bad enough coming from a scientist; it’s far worse coming from a philosopher. (Sadly, Dennett’s not alone in that.)
On the issue of consciousness in general as illusion? To nuance Horgan, I think that “something like consciousness” exists below the surface, and is connected to something like Dennett’s subselves.
That said, I’ll go further than Horgan in one way and call Dennett a big old hypocrite. If no “Cartesian meaner” exist, then neither does a “Cartesian free willer.” Across Boston at MIT, Dennett’s peer Daniel Wegner got that one totally right. (But, per Wegner, I think “something like” free will exists in the same way as “something like” consciousness; Wegner also notes that “free will” is as much an affect, an emotional state or value judgment, as anything.)
Back to Horgan. First, he’s totally right in Dennett being wrong in claiming qualia don’t exist. The Samuel Johnson refutation suffices. Horgan rightly also notes that Dennett’s stance on this is a backdoor to David Chalmers’ p-zombies. Hard pass there, as I wait for Dennett to come back as a philosophically undead p-zombie.
Hard pass there, as I wait for Dennett to come back as a philosophically undead p-zombie.
The scientism? This really raised its head with “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.” First, no, the equivalent of “evolution by natural selection” is NOT some “universal acid.” Second, Darwin included sexual selection as part of his idea. What’s the analogy to that elsewhere? Beyond that, life in general is simply not algorithmic in the way Dennett claimed.
Of course, on things like that, Dennett’s hypocrisy again raised its head. In this case, he was a greedy reductionist that he liked to claim others were, but never him. (This is similar to his denial of being a compatibilist on free will.)
The biggest issue in his scientism? Per Horgan, the claim that the mind is like a computer. That was a tired old trope decades ago, and part of a series of generally wrong tropes on “the mind is like X” that started with the beginning of mechanization and industrialization in human society.
John then ties Dan’s scientism to his rejection of wonder. And, that gets its own quote:
Some people surely have an unhealthy attachment to mysteries, but Dennett has an unhealthy aversion to them, which compels him to stake out unsound positions. His belief that consciousness is an illusion is nuttier than the belief that God is real. Science has real enemies—some in positions of great power--but Dennett doesn’t do science any favors by shilling for it so aggressively.
Friend Massimo Pigliucci has dropped his own obituary thoughts. He is kinder than I, and far kinder than John, on Dennett’s relations to religion. Here’s the NYT obit that he says unduly savages Dennett there. Sorry, Massimo, he may have been the kindest of the “Four Horsemen” of Gnu Atheism, but he was one. (That said, I don’t know that, in his book on atheist preachers, he explicitly called them out for being the hypocrites there were. Having potentially been there, and having rejected their hypocritical road, I can state that with high conviction.)
On matters of will? Massimo and I are in the same ballpark, but I don’t think we’ll ever be at the same moment. I’ve encouraged him more than once to read Wegner; I don’t think he has. I don’t think Horgan has, either. I think Dennett was halfway in that ballpark, but not entirely. (Wegner’s “The Illusion of Conscious Will” talks about the illusion in a psychology of mind sense, not that of everyday sociology.)
On the Gnu Atheism, this obit also reminds me of his invention of the word “brights.” Dennett’s later claim that the religious could call themselves “supers” rang hollow.
Massimo does add one thing I’d forgotten all about, and that is Dennett’s hating on Steve Gould. Part of that was, per “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” that Dennett was an ardent ev psycher, which Massimo and I certainly are not. Part of it, IMO, with the recent death of sociobiology founder E.O. Wilson and his hating on Gould’s scientific and intellectual partner Richard Lewontin, was larger political issues. (At this point, I’ll interject that Dennett’s father worked for the OSS in World War II and most obits mention him being of “Old New England stock” or similar. )
But, let’s also end with Dennett’s good. I, too, got an introduction into non-formal logic, non-technical modern philosophy with “The Mind’s I,” a collection of essays edited by Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter of “Gödel, Escher, Bach” fame. It was about 25 percent their own material, but much other, such as Nagel’s “What Is It Like to be a Bat?”, multiple items by the inimitable Raymond Smullyan and more. (That said, read here for a decade-old double-barrelled takedown of both.)
So, for a Facebooker in Horgan’s feed who talks about how much he learned from Dennett? So did I. But I then moved on. And unleared a fair amount.
RIP, Dan.
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