Daniel Dennett, noted atheist philosopher, 82
Imagine that somehow your body and brain were separated but still working as a team. Your brain sits in a vat. Your body can move around, remotely connected to your brain by some kind of signal.
So where are you? In the vat or with your body? Or both places at once?
Such were the questions raised by Daniel C. Dennett, a prolific and often provocative American philosopher whose theories — including the essence of consciousness itself — reached wide audiences as one of the most discussed thinkers on the human experience.
In the broadest terms, Dr. Dennett used science to challenge notions of faith and inherited traditions such as ideas of a higher mind and immutable soul. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” said Dr. Dennett, who died April 19 at a hospital in Portland, Maine, at age 82.
To him, human brains are essentially biochemical supercomputers, triggering decisions and actions. Concepts such as free will are layered on to help make sense of existence and guide laws and communities, he asserted.
Even self-awareness — what makes you “you” — is another byproduct of our neurons, he theorized. The building blocks of consciousness, memory and sense of self, are no different from other brain functions, he said, and should be studied the same way by neuroscientists and others.
“The only meaning of life worth caring about,” he once said, “is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.” This became one of the pillars in a field known as cognitive science, led by Dr. Dennett at Tufts University since the 1970s and explored in his more than 20 books and hundreds of essays, often written in an engaging and intentionally flippant style meant to introduce his ideas to general audiences.
There was no shortage of criticism of Dr. Dennett’s outlook. Many theologians and faith leaders saw his views as hollow and bleak. (The writer Christopher Hitchens called Dr. Dennett part of his “four horsemen of new atheism,” along with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and neuroscientist Sam Harris.) Ethicists and others derided Dr. Dennett’s work as too narrow, leaving no room to explain the complexity of human emotions such as empathy and compassion.
In “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” (1995), one of Dr. Dennett’s most-read works, he argued that natural selection led to the size and capacities of the human brain, which, in turn, allowed for language, scientific inquiry and discoveries — in addition to wars and other self-imposed miseries.
“I think the people who don’t like magic tricks explained to them are also the people who don’t like free will explained to them, or consciousness,” he told the Guardian. “‘How rude! How philistine, to explain, to even try! How dare you!’”
Among Dr. Dennett’s books were “Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology” (1978); “Consciousness Explained” (1991), and “Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness” (1996).