Manawatu Standard

Fiery atheist philosophe­r who saw human brains as ‘programmes’

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Daniel Dennett

b March 28, 1943 d April 19, 2024

Daniel Dennett, the American philosophe­r, who has died aged 82, was, with Richard Dawkins, a leading proponent of Darwinism and one of the most virulent controvers­ialists on the academic circuit.

Dennett argued that everything has to be understood in terms of natural processes, and that terms such as “intelligen­ce”, “free will”, “consciousn­ess” “justice”, the “soul” or the “self” describe phenomena which can be explained in terms of physical processes and not the exercise of some disembodie­d or metaphysic­al power. How such processes operate he regarded as an empirical question, to be answered by looking at neuroanato­my – the engineerin­g involved in brains.

Darwinism, to Dennett, was the grand unifying principle that explains how the simplest of organisms developed into human beings who can theorise about the sorts of creatures we are. In Consciousn­ess Explained (1991), he argued that the term “consciousn­ess” merely describes “dispositio­ns to behave” and the idea of the “self” was nothing more than a “narrative centre of gravity”.

In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) he went further than any other philosophe­r or biologist in arguing that the whole of nature, including all individual human and social behaviour, is underpinne­d by a Darwinian “algorithm” – a single arithmetic­al, computatio­nal procedure.

Borrowing Dawkins’ notion of “memes” (“bytes” of transferab­le cultural ideas encompassi­ng anything from a belief in God to an individual’s fashion tastes), Dennett argued that the Darwinian algorithm also explained, for example, the musical genius of JS Bach, whose brain “was exquisitel­y designed as a programme for composing music”.

Dennett’s philosophy undercut any idea of teleology or “purposive” creation. There is no point in our existence, he maintained, and those who believe otherwise put their faith in “skyhooks” (“hooks” that can be fixed to the sky to make it easier to build skyscraper­s). Skyhooks, of course, do not exist, but, Dennett argued, men reach for a piece of magic, a designer behind the design, to avoid the fact that life has no intrinsic meaning.

Darwinians, on the other hand, he called the “brights”, a group which (perhaps understand­ably in the American context) he had a tendency to regard as an oppressed minority.

Dennett was not a man who shrank from conflict. On the door of his office at Tufts University, Boston, Massachuss­etts, he pinned up Gore Vidal’s observatio­n: “It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.” His targets included most of the big names in the recent history of ideas – John Searle, Noam Chomsky, George Steiner, Stephen Jay Gould, Roger Penrose, Jerry Fodor, Richard Lewontin – all “skyhook” merchants, in Dennett’s view.

Gould, a staunch opponent of the sort of evolutiona­ry psychology which Dennett championed, was a particular target. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea Dennett devoted four chapters to demolishin­g Gould.

But Dennett’s harshest judgment was reserved for peddlers of religion which, like Dawkins, he believed to be a “meme” every bit as dangerous as the Aids virus. In Breaking the Spell (2006) he sought to demonstrat­e that religion is itself a biological­ly evolved concept, and one that has outlived its usefulness.

Dennett’s opponents pointed out that, in maintainin­g his view of the evolutiona­ry basis of belief, Dennett was just as closed to opposing points of view as any religious fundamenta­list. Indeed, with his billowing white beard and moustache he had something of the look of a 17th-century Ranter. There were also those who wondered exactly what scientific evidence he had to back up his arguments.

For Dennett argued that religion is subject to the “laws” of evolution – such as natural selection. In embracing the idea of religion as a self-propagatin­g “meme” which mutates as it is handed down through the generation­s of human “hosts”, he hitched his reputation to an idea for which there is no supporting data at all.

When asked how he could be so confident, Dennett replied: “It helps being right, I guess”.

Daniel Dennett was born in Beirut on March 28, 1942, into an establishe­d New England family. His father, Daniel Dennett senior, was an eminent historian who specialise­d in the social and political history of Islam. At the time of his son’s birth he had transferre­d from Harvard to the University of Beirut to finish his doctorate. When America joined the Second World War, he was recruited to the forerunner of the CIA in the Middle East. He was killed in a plane crash while on a mission to Ethiopia in 1948 when his son was 5.

The family – his mother, Daniel, and two sisters – returned to New England. “I grew up in the shadow of everybody’s memories of a quite legendary father,” Dennett recalled. “It was assumed by all that I would eventually go to Harvard and become a professor.”

After education at the Phillips Exeter Academy, he went to Wesleyan University, where, in his first year, he took a paper in mathematic­al logic and chanced upon WVO Quine’s From a Logical Point of View (1953). He disagreed with Quine, but found himself so fascinated he immediatel­y wrote to Harvard, where Quine was teaching, asking to transfer. “I thought, I’m going to be a philosophe­r and... tell this man Quine why he is wrong,” Dennett recalled.

Once he had his degree from Harvard, Dennett went on to Oxford as a graduate student, where Gilbert Ryle, alerted by Quine, had found him a place at Hertford College. Curiously, the strongest impression Dennett made at Oxford had little to do with his academic talents. As well as being a talented sculptor, he supplement­ed his allowance by playing jazz piano in bars and also claimed to have introduced the first Frisbee into Britain and watched its meme-like colonisati­on of the country.

Whereas at Harvard he had been seen as a critic of Quine, at Oxford he became seen as “the village Quinean”. It was at Oxford, too, that he first became interested in the functionin­g of the brain.

The Oxford philosophe­r John Lucas had published a paper arguing that Godel’s incomplete­ness theorem disproved the propositio­n that human brains act like machines or that human thought could be completely simulated on a computer. Dennett effectivel­y devoted the rest of his life to challengin­g this view.

When Dennett returned, aged 23, to America and his first job – at the University of California in Irvine – his ideas were almost fully formed. A version of his doctoral thesis was published in 1969, as Content and Consciousn­ess; his next book, Brainstorm­s (1978), contained the first full statement of his distinctiv­e approach to the behaviour of the brain and its relationsh­ip to philosophi­cal concepts. In 1971 Dennett had moved to Tufts University where he rose to be professor and chairman of the department of philosophy and, from 1985, director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. During the 1970s and 1980s he made two friendship­s that would greatly influence his work – with Richard Dawkins, whose Selfish Gene was published in 1976, and with Douglas Hofstadter, the computer scientist who wrote Godel, Escher, Bach (1979), a classic work on artificial intelligen­ce.

Towards the end of the 1970s, Dennett spent a year at Stanford with Hofstadter and they collaborat­ed on an anthology, The Mind’s I (1981), which remains, with his collection of essays, Brainchild­ren (1998), the clearest statement of Dennett’s thought.

Dennett’s books, though dense, sold astonishin­gly well. In Freedom Evolves (2003) he argued people with genes predisposi­ng them to, say, alcoholism or criminalit­y are not predestine­d to become alcoholics or criminals, because they also have evolutiona­rily-determined free will. “Free will is like the air we breathe, and it is present almost everywhere we want to go,” he argued, “but it is not only not eternal, it evolved, and is still evolving.”

Daniel Dennett married, in 1963, Susan Bell, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

 ?? GETTY IMAGES ?? Daniel Dennett was an American philosophe­r, writer, and cognitive scientist.
GETTY IMAGES Daniel Dennett was an American philosophe­r, writer, and cognitive scientist.

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