Dan Dennett died yesterday, and I still can’t believe he’s gone, though he’d used up a good portion of his nine lives in a series of cardiac events. His NYT obituary can be read by clicking the screenshot below, or you can find it archived here.
The subheading seems to me a bit inaccurate. For one thing Dennett certainly did not think religion was an illusion, though he’s quoted saying that below. Perhaps he thought it was a delusion, but he certainly took it seriously as a human behavioral phenomenon, even though he was an atheist. What the subheading means is that he thought the idea of god and its concomitants were an illusion, but that is not all that religion comprises.
More important, Dan certainly did NOT believe that free will was a fantasy: Dan was a compatibilist who didn’t believe in libertarian free will, but wrote two books and several other papers and half of another book defending the idea that free will was not a fantasy, but that we did indeed have it: it was, he said, simply different from what most people thought.
Dan and I disagreed strongly on Dan’s compatibilism (Sam Harris disagreed as well), but free will being a fantasy? Nope.
Finally, yes, Dan concentrated on natural selection as the only process that could produce the appearance of adaptation, but didn’t deny, as I recall, the fact that genetic drift could cause some evolutionary change. (For a rather critical review of his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by my ex-student Allen Orr, go here.) But Dan concentrated on adaptations, including human behaviors, because the appearance of design, for centuries imputed to God, is what really demands explanation.
(*Note the misplacement of “only” in the subheading; it should appear after “explained,” not after “could”. Where are the proofreaders?)
At any rate, here’s an excerpt from the NYT that is more accurate than the subheading:
Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82.
His death, at Maine Medical Center, was caused by complications of interstitial lung disease, his wife, Susan Bell Dennett, said. He lived in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
Mr. Dennett combined a wide range of knowledge with an easy, often playful writing style to reach a lay public, avoiding the impenetrable concepts and turgid prose of many other contemporary philosophers. Beyond his more than 20 books and scores of essays, his writings even made their way into the theater and onto the concert stage.
But Mr. Dennett, who never shirked controversy, often crossed swords with other famed scholars and thinkers.
An outspoken atheist, he at times seemed to denigrate religion. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” he said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.
According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.
For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.
And on free will:
His first book to attract widespread scholarly notice was “Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology,” published in 1978.
In it, Mr. Dennett asserted that multiple decisions resulted in a moral choice and that these prior, random deliberations contributed more to the way an individual acted than did the ultimate moral decision itself. Or, as he explained:
“I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: ‘That’s enough. I’ve considered this matter enough and now I’m going to act,’ in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.”
Some leading libertarians criticized Mr. Dennett’s model as undermining the concept of free will: If random decisions determine ultimate choice, they argued, then individuals aren’t liable for their actions.
Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.
“We couldn’t live the way we do without it,” he wrote in his 2017 book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.” “If — because free will is an illusion — no one is ever responsible for what they do, should we abolish yellow and red cards in soccer, the penalty box in ice hockey and all the other penalty systems in sports?”
First of all, the notion of a separation between mind and body is not “outdated”: a huge number of people believe in libertarian free will: that your mind alone can, at any given moment, allow you to make any one of two or more choices. It’s outdated among scientists and philosophers, but not among the general public, as surveys have shown.
Further, “random decisions” aren’t really random to either libertarians or determinists. Even Libet-like experiments show that what you do is to some degree predictable using fMRI, and is probably entirely predictable if we had a complete understanding of the brain. No determinist argues that decisions are “random”, as they’re based on the pattern of your neurons produced by your genes and your environment. And libertarians would argue that decisions aren’t random, for if we were we’d have no ability to predict what anybody we know does. Finanly, determinists don’t claim that individuals aren’t liable for their actions. They are liable, but not in the way that most people think. If somebody murders someone else, we don’t just let him go and say, “well, he wasn’t responsible for the killing.”
Do note that Dennett is credited with believing something that I always maintained: he favored compatibilism, at least in part, because of “belief in belief”: without belief in some kind of free will, he said, society would fall apart (he said that at least twice):
Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.
But if religion is also thought necessary by some (not Dennett) as necessary to maintain a stable, society, then why is free will TRULY necessary to maintain a stable, functioning society? Perhaps our feeling of free will is necessary for that, but, like religion, that’s a delusion that we simply can’t avoid feeling. I function very well even though I’m a hard determinist, even though I feel like I have a choice. And, in the last sentence, I don’t think one can characterize Dan’s view of free will as an “illusion”. He argued strenuously for a form of free will that was not an illusion.
But I digress. Dan was an important figure in bringing philosophy and Darwinism to educated readers. How often do philosophers produce bestselling popular works? Yes, he could be wrong, and the force of his personality led some to adopt what I thought were erroneous ideas (like “we have the kind of free will worth wanting”), but more often his arguments were cogent, important, and vividly expressed.
And Dan was a nice guy, one who befriended me when I was just a stripling. One thing missing from the NYT piece—and something I hope they’ll add—are quotations from Dennett’s friends and colleagues. Where, for instance, is an assessment by Richard Dawkins? I expect that will appear on Richard’s Substack site, but we needed some quotes for the NYT obit. Here’s Richard’s tweet about Dan’s death:
Dan Dennett was a great philosopher, skilled with words, images, thought experiments & intuition pumps. But unlike many clever philosophers (to borrow from PB Medawar) he had something important to be clever ABOUT, namely science. Much more yet, he was a dear friend. So very sad.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 19, 2024
You can find other obituaries at the Torygraph, at Ars Technica, and at the Daily Nous, which is short but has a recent video interview, which I put below. And I’d recommend reading his recent autobiography, I’ve Been Thinking.
And what’s with that “Espousing his ideas in best sellers” wording? You espouse, or embrace, someone *else’s* ideas, not your own. I think “Exposing his ideas” was what the author had in mind.
You’re right about “espousing.” What’s going on at the NYT? Another possibility: “Expounding his ideas….”
Dan (and daughter) gets massive credit in my book for the equally massive idea of “Deepity”.
Perhaps a slight jab at Deepak – but a brilliant mockery of post modernism (and it’s cousins like post-structuralism)
Yes. I love that he identified deepities. You run into them all the time and recognizing them is now easier.
A friend and I are having an e-mail conversation about Dennett’s death. I’ll send him the link to your article.
Rather than ‘necessary illusion’ I prefer the term ‘useful fiction’.
As a naturalist and determinist I don’t think that (some versions) of Free Will exist. I am quite happy that the story of having a free will is useful – for at least explaining our actions to others and ourselves. So much is hidden from ourselves (too small, too big, too long ago, too faint, mistaken ideas) that we need a handy rule or principle (useful fiction) that provides guidance to appropriate behaviour without endless introspection. As long as it ‘works well enough’ the fictional nature of Free Will is not important in daily life. Keeps the philosophers occupied too.
The beauty of Dan Dennett’s work was that it was clearly articulated and you could engage with it.
Useful fiction? A useful confabulation?
The reason I found WEIT is Dan Dennett’s Freedom Evolves. I agreed with every word Dan wrote except the conclusion. I thought the book was an excellent source of information against free will.
I looked for reviews of the book and I found Jerry’s, and I have been coming here ever since regarding posts and discussions on free will.
Now would be a good time to put to rest the myth that Dennett was a fan of “the little people’s argument” or “belief in belief”. At least when it comes to free will, that was not Dennett’s position. The transcript of his interview on Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast has a decisive passage:
Punctuation corrected (the transcript misses some sentence endings, and some words (but no words in the quote needed correction)). Emphasis added – earlier in the podcast, Dennett talked about “real patterns”, which are things we need to explain observations in a perspicuous way; the emphasized passage refers to that discussion.
There is a hilarious comment over at Free(From)ThoughtBlogs, namely Pharyngula, under PZ’s post about Dennett.
A poster claims: But the main purpose of this comment is to mention sad little Jerry Coyne, who so desperately wanted to be a horseman but could not attain in the eyes of the acolytes even the stature of Sam Harris.
I mean, it was PZ Myers who was always contriving for relevance around the time of the “Horseman” era, yet even back then, nobody took him seriously enough. It was PZ Myers who was desperate to be a “Horseman”, despite what he says now, and what his horde think. It was PZ Myers who was performing silly stunts like tearing a page of the Koran (he tries to desperately memory hole that, these days) and burning a Bible, etc. all to promote himself around the time of the “Horseman”.
I briefly thought the poster over there was mocking PZ with that comment, but it is from one of the silly regulars. So, their stupidity is genuine.
I read that post and some of the comments and it’s so snarky. I don’t know why PZ would write about someone who just died to get in all the jabs at Sam Harris and anyone else then continue with his Sam Harris hate in the comments.
When I read stuff like that, it’s a reminder of why I stopped commenting there. Sad, really.
I credit Dan Dennett as one of the main philosophers (along with Massimo Pigliucci and A.C. Grayling) who pushed me down the philosophical rabbit hole, and there’s no philosopher I’ve read more. For a layman like myself, I find his writing style to be engaging and always with the need to explain. Agree or disagree with his ideas, he could never be accused of trying to obscure his position in technical jargon or talking down to the reader.
Oh, and I’m utterly baffled with the NYY obit. For someone who wrote so clearly, There’s a Dan Dennett quote for that: “You can make any philosopher – any, Aristotle, Kant, you name it – look like a complete flaming idiot with just a slightest little tweak.”
Here’s a good obituary of Dennett by Jennifer Ouellette:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/philosopher-daniel-dennett-dead-at-82/