RIP Daniel Dennett

[Shake me up Judy]

I see that the great evolutionary philosopher and one of the 'four horsemen' with Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris has died. As well as being one of the world's great thinkers he was also a farmer. I always admired that. RIP Daniel.

[Chinahand]

I have to admit that Daniel Dennett is one of my intellectual heroes.

When I was at University I read Doug Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach and that made me curious to learn more about our understanding of consciousness and one time in some bookshop I picked up a book called The Mind's I which was co-written by Hofstadter and Dennett and started reading Dennett's introduction (you can read it here).

It was the first time I'd come across Dennett's ideas and I'd never thought about teleporters in the way Dennett introduced them and the realisation that you can not only swap bodies but brains intrigued me. Later I read Consciousness Explained and then Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Now that was a book to make your brain ache and I loved that Dennett would use the words of a creationist critique to sum up just how dangerous Darwin's idea was:

In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE, IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all of the achievements of creative skill.

He also used this quote from Darwin himself, to explain how natural selection is an algorithm, a universal solvent to melt any barriers to life doing what it does - because if it cannot it dies and if it can it does:

If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organisations, and I think this cannot be disputed, if there be, owing to the high geometric powers of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; … [and] if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle of life; and from this strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This is the principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.

Dennett was one of the 'four horsemen' but I found his approach very different from the others who tended to highlight (and sneer) at the wrongs of religion. Dennett saw it as a natural phenomenon spread not necessarily because a particular theology was good or even useful, but simply because it readily infected human minds.

I've heard him speak just once - raising concerns about Artificial Intelligence and how it is dangerous as it is highly likely to erode trust and that in some ways may be one of his most important warnings.

Here he's summing up his views on philosophy: