Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)

Philosopher-author Daniel Dennett died on 19 April, 2024. He was 82.

One of the finest minds of 20^th and 21^st centuries, he took what can be considered as a deep materialist stand on the phenomenon of consciousness.

A skilled sailor and till 2013, owner of a 42-foot cruiser, he sailed his own philosophical cruise through the stormy and dangerous waters of neuroscience, evolution, and psychology to create a worldview that would play a strong counterpoint to the alternatives that argue for the primacy and fundamental nature of consciousness and also dualism of mind and matter.

Naturally he earned fierce critics, worthy enemies of his philosophical stand and with all of whom he had cordial relations.

His audaciously titled book, Consciousness Explained (1991) was dubbed by his critics as ‘consciousness explained away.’ Nevertheless the book displayed both a sharp analysis and humility before the immensity of the problem.

He was not explaining away consciousness. He was exploring the mystery through varied questions and metaphors and freeing it from a Cartesian error.

He insisted that he had provided a completely new philosophical tool kit containing different metaphors to understand and explain consciousness. He criticized the persistence of Cartesian dualism in the form of what he disparagingly called ‘Cartesian Theatre’.

Instead he brought in the metaphor of what he called ‘Pandemonium’ of ‘Homunculi’ (little men inside) and these Homunculi are mostly derived from the notion put forth by Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) which, ‘have histories and genealogies’ and are ‘developed out of something whose prior existence was not entirely mysterious.’

His book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) explained how Darwinian natural selection is actually an algorithmic process. He characterised an algorithmic processes with three core features: substrate neutrality, underlying mindlessness and guaranteed results. He restated Darwinian view of life thus:

Dennett was known for his strong rejection of religion. Many have pointed out that he was one of the famed four horse men of a galvanised atheism of this century. The other three being Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) and Sam Harris.

Dennett seemed to have devalued the core-experience view of religion proposed by William James for an evolutionary and social theory of religion or in his own words, he found reasons ‘for trading in James's psychological microscope for a wide-angle biological and social telescope’ while at the same time agreed that he ‘could hardly deny the existence of individuals who very sincerely and devoutly take themselves to be the lone communicants of what we might call private religions’.

He also mocks those who claim to be 'spiritual' and not religious, jokingly calling them 'honorary vertebrates.' (‘Breaking the Spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon’, 2006) The book is mostly in the line of Dawkins but more suave. And it comes a surprise that William James whose core concept Dennett diminishes in importance in the book was actually one of his heroes.

But that would not complete the picture of Dennett.

Soon after Consciousness Explained was published came the book Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1993) by Francisco Varela along with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. The book argued for using a Buddhist framework with primacy given to subjective experience: ‘turning to one's own mind’ which though started as a valid strategy in Western sciences, ‘developed by the meditative traditions of India, was aborted for psychology in the West when the nineteenth-century introspectionists, lacking a method of mindfulness, tried to treat the mind as an external object, with disastrous results for inter-observer agreement.’

The book argued how through the Buddhist mindfulness meditation this approach could be revived more robustly and without falling into traps of Cartesian fallacies etc. In his review of the book Dennett made it clear that he was not convinced by their argument. Nevertheless he wrote:

Unfortunately when Breaking the Spell was written, Dennett was in the post-9/11 world with anger towards religious fundamentalism, religious terrorism and the backlash of Christian right-wing. Naturally the book dismisses all religious equally and treats them as Western categories.

All said, with his deep materialism, his critique of Cartesian dualism, his championing of Darwinian evolution, his defence of freewill against certain stands of neuroscientists, Daniel Dennett provided a strong counterpoint to the non-dualist school that stands for the primacy of consciousness and the dualist school of mind-matter separation. The planet is a wiser place after him, than it was before him, thanks to his life and work.