https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead.html

Daniel C. Dennett, Widely Read and Fiercely Debated Philosopher, 82, Dies

Espousing his ideas in best sellers, he insisted that religion was an
illusion, free will was a fantasy and evolution could only be explained by
natural selection.

By Jonathan Kandell
April 19, 2024

Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American
philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will,
religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He
was 82.

His death, at Maine Medical Center, was caused by complications of
interstitial lung disease, his wife, Susan Bell Dennett, said. He lived in
Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Mr. Dennett combined a wide range of knowledge with an easy, often playful
writing style to reach a lay public, avoiding the impenetrable concepts
and turgid prose of many other contemporary philosophers. Beyond his more
than 20 books and scores of essays, his writings even made their way into
the theater and onto the concert stage.

But Mr. Dennett, who never shirked controversy, often crossed swords with
other famed scholars and thinkers.

An outspoken atheist, he at times seemed to denigrate religion. “There’s
simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an
illusion,” he said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.

According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating
as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe
otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.

For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making
than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a
fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that
govern society, he said.

Mr. Dennett irked some scientists by asserting that natural selection
alone determined evolution. He was especially disdainful of the eminent
paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, whose ideas on other factors of
evolution were summarily dismissed by Mr. Dennett as “goulding.”

Not surprisingly, Mr. Dennett’s writings could elicit strong criticism as
well — to which he sometimes reacted with fury.

Daniel Clement Dennett III was born on March 28, 1942, in Boston, the son
of Daniel Clement Dennett Jr. and Ruth Marjorie (Leck) Dennett. His
sister, Charlotte Dennett, was a lawyer and journalist.

Mr. Dennett spent part of his childhood in Beirut, Lebanon, where his
father was a covert intelligence agent posing as a cultural attaché in the
United States Embassy, while his mother taught English at the American
Community School.

He graduated from Harvard University in 1963 and two years later earned a
Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University. His dissertation began a
lifelong quest to use empirical research as the basis of a philosophy of
the mind.

Mr. Dennett taught philosophy at the University of California, Irvine,
from 1965 to 1971. He then spent almost his entire career on the faculty
of Tufts University, where he was director of its Center for Cognitive
Studies and most recently an emeritus professor.

His first book to attract widespread scholarly notice was “Brainstorms:
Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology,” published in 1978.

In it, Mr. Dennett asserted that multiple decisions resulted in a moral
choice and that these prior, random deliberations contributed more to the
way an individual acted than did the ultimate moral decision itself. Or,
as he explained:

“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.”

Some leading libertarians criticized Mr. Dennett’s model as undermining
the concept of free will: If random decisions determine ultimate choice,
they argued, then individuals aren’t liable for their actions.

Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on
the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the
physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to
maintain a stable, functioning society.

“We couldn’t live the way we do without it,” he wrote in his 2017 book,
“From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.” “If — because
free will is an illusion — no one is ever responsible for what they do,
should we abolish yellow and red cards in soccer, the penalty box in ice
hockey and all the other penalty systems in sports?”

Already with the 1991 publication of his book, “Consciousness Explained,”
Mr. Dennett had expounded his belief that consciousness could be explained
only by an understanding of the physiology of the brain, which he viewed
as a kind of supercomputer.

“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,” he wrote.
“Information entering the nervous system is under continuous ‘editorial
revision.’”

By the 1990s, Mr. Dennett had increasingly sought to explain the
development of the brain — and illusions of a separate consciousness and
free will — in terms of the evolution of human beings from other animal
life.

He believed that natural selection was the overwhelming factor in this
evolution. And he insisted that physical and behavioral traits of
organisms evolved primarily through their beneficial effects on survival
or reproduction, thus enhancing an organism’s fitness in its environment.

Critics, like Mr. Gould, cautioned that while natural selection was
important, evolution would also have to be explained by random genetic
mutations that were neutral or even somewhat damaging to organisms, but
that had become fixed in a population. In Mr. Gould’s view, evolution is
marked by long periods of little or no change punctuated by short, rapid
bursts of significant change, while Mr. Dennett defended a more gradualist
view.

Underlying the increasingly acrimonious debate between the scholars was a
natural friction in the scientific and philosophical communities over
which side merited more credibility on the subject of evolution.

Mr. Dennett also plunged into controversy with his strident views on
atheism. He and a colleague, Linda LaScola, researched and published a
book in 2013, “Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind,” based on
interviews with clerics of various denominations who were secret atheists.
They defended their decision to continue preaching because it provided
comfort and needed ritual to their congregations.

Interviews with clergy from the book became the basis of a play by Marin
Gazzaniga, “The Unbelieving,” which was staged Off Broadway in 2022.

Eight years earlier, Mr. Dennett’s views on evolutionary biology and
religion were the subject of “Mind Out of Matter,” a 75-minute-long
musical composition by Scott Johnson performed in a seven-part concert at
a theater in Montclair, N.J. The composer used recordings from Mr.
Dennett’s lectures and interviews.

Mr. Dennett’s fame and following extended to both sides of the Atlantic.
As he grew older, he was accompanied by his wife on his lecture tours
abroad. In addition to his wife, his survivors include a daughter, Andrea
Dennett Wardwell; a son, Peter; two sisters, Cynthia Yee and Charlotte
Dennett; and six grandchildren.

While Mr. Dennett never held back in contradicting the views of other
scholars, he bristled at harsh comments about his own work. This was
especially the case when Leon Wieseltier, a well-known writer on politics,
religion and culture, strongly criticized Mr. Dennett’s 2006 best seller,
“Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” in The New York
Times Book Review.

Contending that Mr. Dennett was intolerant of people who didn’t share his
basic belief that science could explain all human conditions, Mr.
Wieseltier concluded: “Dennett is the sort of rationalist who gives reason
a bad name.”

In a lengthy, angry rebuttal, Mr. Dennett denounced Mr. Wieseltier for
“flagrant falsehoods” that demonstrated a “visceral repugnance that fairly
haunts Wieseltier’s railing (without arguments) against my arguments.”

An earlier, more positive appraisal of another of his best sellers, “Kinds
of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness” (1996), that ran in
New Scientist magazine might have come closest to explaining Mr. Dennett’s
enduring appeal.

While he admitted that many of the questions he raises in his work “cannot
yet be answered,” wrote the reviewer, Mr. Dennett “argues that putting the
right questions is a crucial step forward.”

Kellina Moore contributed reporting.

There's more discussion of the late Dennett a few threads below, Mongo, and unlike me, you didn't lack a letter spelling Philosopher.

By the way, the contrarian evolutionary idea the late Stephen Gould was talking about in your posted piece was what Gould termed "punctuated equilibria".

I once reviewed Gould's book on the Darwin-modifying theory for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in the mid-80s. I was assigned it by the Books Editor--the late Digby Diehl, as it happened, who later went on to great success as a celebrity-memoir collaborator. Diehl selected me for the Gould book because I'd been reliable covering several other science-oriented tomes for him, but a lot of Gould's material was well above my mental pay-grade. (I seem to recall implying as much in my review, but can't check as my clipping was lost decades ago, and I'm guessing there's no Herald-Examiner memorial website, much less an e-morgue [speaking of death, as we do here].)

But then again, as I pointed out in tribute to the late Four-Horsemen thinker Daniel Dennett, he often writes way over head, too. (But the other Horsemen guys Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris all make perfect sense to me.) Instead of history, science and media, perhaps Diehl should have just been assigning me romance novels?

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida
==================
https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-digby-diehl-20171003-story.html

Egomaniac much, Mr. BS? Another post about you. Get a friend.

In article <708971d8808848198ce636900fe2b5f8@www.novabbs.com>,
unsubscribe <unsubscribe@gjones.com> wrote:
>Egomaniac much, Mr. BS? Another post about you. Get a friend.

Just put him in your killfile and be done with it.

As I have.

--
The randomly chosen signature file that would have appeared here is more than 4
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in compliance with said RFCs, the actual sig can be found at the following URL:
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bryan_styble <radioactiveseattle@hotmail.com> wrote:

> By the way, the contrarian evolutionary idea the late Stephen Gould
> was talking about in your posted piece was what Gould termed
> "punctuated equilibria".

Wrong.

-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.

Well, maybe you know more about evolution than I do--easy to clear THAT bar--but the late Gould (along with a co-author whose name I can't recall four decades after publishing that Los Angeles Herald-Examiner review of the volume) DID scribe a book with that title.

I appreciate every correction whenever i'm factually inaccurate, Louia--so WHAT specifically is "wrong" with my posting ?

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida