American philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has died aged 82, was, along with Richard Dawkins, one of the leading advocates of Darwinism and one of the fiercest debaters in the academic community.
Dennett argued that everything should be understood in terms of natural processes, and that terms such as “intelligence”, “free will”, “consciousness”, “justice”, “soul” or “self” describe phenomena that can be explained as not the exercise of a disembodied or metaphysical force , in terms of physical processes. He viewed how such processes worked as an empirical question that needed to be answered by looking at neuroanatomy, the engineering involved in the brain.
For Dennett, Darwinism was the great unifying principle that explained how the simplest organisms evolved into humans who were able to theorize about what kind of creatures we are. In Consciousness Explained (1991), he argued that the term “consciousness” merely describes “tendencies to behave” and that the idea of the “self” is nothing more than the “narrative center of gravity.”
In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), he went further than any other philosopher or biologist by claiming that all of nature, including all individual human and social behavior, is powered by a Darwinian “algorithm”, a single arithmetic, computational procedure.
Borrowing Richard Dawkins’ concept of “memes” (“bytes” of transferable cultural ideas that encompass everything from belief in God to an individual’s fashion tastes), Dennett argued that the Darwinian algorithm also explains, for example, the musical genius of JS Bach. The brain was “designed to be the perfect program for composing music.”
Dennett’s philosophy undermined any idea of teleology or “purposeful” creation. He argued that our existence has no meaning, and those who thought otherwise believed in “sky hooks” (hooks that could be fixed to the sky to make it easier to build skyscrapers). Skyhooks don’t exist, of course, but according to Dennett, men are reaching for a piece of magic, the designer behind the design, to avoid the reality that life has no inherent meaning.
Darwinists, on the other hand, he called “intellectuals”, a group he tended to view (understandably in the American context) as an oppressed minority.
Dennett was not a man who ran away from conflict. He hung Gore Vidal’s observation on the door of his office at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts: “It is not enough to be successful; others must fail. Among his targets were most of the big names in recent intellectual history—John Searle, Noam Chomsky, George Steiner, Stephen Jay Gould, Roger Penrose, Jerry Fodor, Richard Lewontin—all “skyhook” traders, according to Dennett.
Gould, a staunch opponent of the kind of evolutionary psychology advocated by Dennett, was a particular target. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Dennett devotes four chapters to Gould’s destruction.
But Dennett’s harshest judgment was directed at the purveyors of religion, whom he, like Dawkins, believed were a “meme” as dangerous as the AIDS virus. In Breaking the Spell (2006) he attempted to show that religion itself is a biologically evolved concept that is now obsolete.
Dennett’s opponents, while maintaining his view of the evolutionary basis of faith, have noted that Dennett is as closed to opposing views as any fundamentalist. He did indeed look like a 17th-century Ranter, with his flowing white beard and moustache. There were also those who wondered exactly what scientific evidence he had to support his claims.
Because Dennett argued that religion is subject to the “laws” of evolution, such as natural selection. By embracing the idea of religion as a self-propagating “meme” that mutates as it is passed down through generations of human “hosts,” he staked his reputation on an idea for which no supporting data existed.
When asked how he can be so confident, Dennett replied: “I guess it helps to be right.”
Daniel Dennett was born in Beirut on March 28, 1942, into a well-established New England family. His father, Daniel Dennett senior, was a distinguished historian specializing in the social and political history of Islam. When his son was born, he transferred from Harvard to the University of Beirut to complete his doctorate. When America joined World War II, he was made the CIA’s pioneer in the Middle East. He died in a plane crash on his way to Ethiopia in 1948, when his son was five years old.
His family (his mother, Daniel, and his two sisters) returned to New England. “I grew up in the shadow of everyone’s memories of a pretty legendary father,” Dennett recalled. “It was assumed by everyone that I would eventually go to Harvard and become a professor.”
Following his studies at Phillips Exeter Academy, he went to Wesleyan University, where in his first year he took a paper on mathematical logic and chanced upon WVO Quine’s From a Logical Point of View (1953). He disagreed with Quine, but found himself so fascinated that he immediately wrote a letter to transfer to Harvard, where Quine was teaching. “I thought I would become a philosopher and tell Quine why he was wrong,” Dennett recalled.
After receiving his degree from Harvard, Dennett went to Oxford as a graduate student; Here, on Quine’s warning, Gilbert Ryle found him a place at Hertford College. Interestingly, the strongest impression Dennett made at Oxford had little to do with his academic abilities. As well as being a talented sculptor, he supplemented his allowance by playing jazz piano in pubs and claimed to have introduced the first frisbee to Britain and watched over the meme-like colonization of the country.
While at Harvard he was seen as a critic of Quine, at Oxford he came to be seen as a “Kinean village”. He first became interested in the functioning of the brain at Oxford.
Oxford philosopher John Lucas had published a paper arguing that Gödel’s incompleteness theorem refutes the proposition that human brains behave like machines or that human thought can be fully simulated on a computer. Dennett devoted the rest of his life to challenging this view.
His ideas were almost fully formed when Dennett returned to America at the age of 23 and started his first job at the University of California, Irvine. A version of his doctoral thesis was published as Content and Consciousness in 1969; His next book, Brainstorms (1978), contained the first full statement of his distinctive approach to the behavior of the brain and its relationship to philosophical concepts.
In 1971, Dennett moved to Tufts University, where he became a professor and chair of the philosophy department, and from 1985 onwards he was named director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. During the 1970s and 1980s he formed two friendships that would greatly influence his work: with Richard Dawkins, whose book Selfish Gene was published in 1976, and with computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote the classic Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979). . The subject of artificial intelligence.
Towards the end of the 1970s, Dennett spent a year with Hofstadter at Stanford, and they collaborated on an anthology, The Mind’s I (1981), which, along with his collection of essays, remains the clearest expression of Dennett’s thought, Brainchildren (1998). .
Dennett’s books, though dense, sold surprisingly well. In his book Freedom Evolves (2003), he argued that people with genes that predispose to alcoholism or criminality, for example, are not doomed to become alcoholics or criminals because they also have evolutionarily determined free will. “Free will is like the air we breathe and is available almost wherever we want to go,” he argued, “but not only is it not eternal, it has evolved and is still evolving.”
Daniel Dennett married Susan Bell in 1963 and had a son and a daughter with her.
Daniel Dennett was born on March 28, 1942, died on April 19, 2024.