On and Off in Life and Death
Less than a year after the American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett put out his latest collection of quality ruminations on his life, titled I Was Thinking (2023), he died of interstitial lung disease in a bed at Maine Medical Center in Portland on April 19, 2024. He surely had an intimation of his nearing demise, as he spends some time in the Preface of his memoir, describing his recent visits into unconsciousness and the pull of death.
He establishes his well-known sense of humor with a description of the aftermath of open heart surgery, during which doctors finished by flushing away surgical debris from his heart to prevent ministrokes in his brain. “After the operation, before they removed me from the machine, they reversed the flow of blood to my brain, sending it into the veins and out of the arteries, hoping to flush out any debris that was about to disable my res cogitans, my thinking thing (my brain, not, as Descartes would have it, a distinct and immaterial substance). So I’ve been brainwashed, quite literally.”
Dennett didn’t see any lights at the end of the tunnel, the way a lot of near-dead people do, nor was Diogenes waiting for him with that ironic day lantern and saying, “Thank Christ I’ve got someone honest now to pal around with.” But Dennett writes that he did re-erupt into being, like a rose in May — happy enough to be alive. “Yes, I did have an epiphany,” he writes. “I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say ‘Thank goodness!’ this is not merely a euphemism for ‘Thank God!’ (We atheists don’t believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness!”
And he goes on to reel off all that he has to be thankful for — the people in his life mostly. Frankly, it’s an embarrassment of rich, masculine emotions. It’s a big-hearted memoir, divided up into four parts: childhood; meeting other minds; his long adventures in thought and imagination; and his rough-ups with other academics, especially Richard Rorty.
Dennett was evolutionary psychologist and cognitive scientist, and is probably most remembered for his works From Bacteria to Bach and Back (2017), which traces the biochemical roots of consciousness; and Consciousness Explained(1993), which explores how consciousness has evolved — a brash and surprising notion for many eternalists who would posit ‘eternity in a grain of sand’. Dennett is the perfect palette cleanser after chewing off too much of Descartes’s meaty Meditations and, as with Chinese food, finding you yen for another dumpling a half hour later.
He explains some of the trials and tribulations of seeking answers about the mystery of human consciousness and of writing about it in Consciousness Explained. He feels we’d be much closer to understanding the mechanisms of the state if researchers would let go of their vested interest in the phenomena of mind. He writes, “I was meeting often with leading scientific researchers on consciousness, and in the process beginning to form at least vague ideas of how mechanisms of the brain might do all the work, but only if we deflated some of the overconfident pronouncements of introspectors about the marvels of the phenomena.”
Dennett was a materialist (or physicalist) who saw consciousness as essentially an “illusion,” a state that can be traced back to bodily and neural function. Dualists and the like can’t abide this attitude, writes Dennett. He saw “virtual machines” manufacturing illusions for “users.” . “The philosopher Galen Strawson has called my theory ‘the silliest claim ever made,’ a verdict that ought to arouse a little suspicion in him that he’s misinterpreted me, but he has persisted undaunted. It is apparently just unthinkable by Strawson that he might be an unreliable judge of what his own consciousness is.” Dennett just rolls along. And he would probably regard Stawson’s version of panpsychism as a bit tetchy, too.
An amusing chapter in the memoir is when Dennett recounts his time dealing with Richard Rorty back in the 80s, when Rorty was the president of the American Philosophical Association. Rorty was a leading philosopher of mind in the analytic tradition. But Rorty would seem to want to jovially co-opt Dennett’s views, ascribing qualities he couldn’t remember putting in. Rorty had, probably generously, read too much into Dennett’s work on consciousness. “I [am a] irremediably narrow-minded and unhistorical analytic philosopher, am always looking for a good excuse not to have to read Hegel or Heidegger or Derrida or those other chaps who don’t have the decency to think in English,” he writes, and continues, “if Rorty can find so much more in my own writing than I put there, he’s probably done the same or better for Heidegger— which means I can save myself the trouble of reading Heidegger; I can just read Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979) and come out about 40% ahead while enjoying my reading at the same time.” What a wonderful way to compliment a colleague.
Another excellent discussion is about TED talks. Dennett knew the founder of the TED conferences, Richard Saul Wurman. Originally, they were ultra-exclusive events for the chic and comfortable set. “TED really was about technology, entertainment, and design in 2002,” he writes, “three top desk-chair designers compared and criticized one another’s best chairs. There wasn’t much about saving the world from poverty, climate disaster, oppression, illness, ….”
Dennett recalls the TED talk of 2014 that had whistleblower Edward Snowden’s presence beamed in from Russia. Apparently, Microsoft’s Bill Gates was offended by the invitation to the revealer of state secrets. Writes Dennett humorously,
“Bill Gates—who hadn’t attended the talk—said that he thought Snowden should be sent to prison, and I replied that I thought he should be given the Nobel Peace Prize. Gates was incredulous at first, and a brief discussion ensued, but when I mentioned that one of the things Snowden had divulged was that Gates’s company, Microsoft, had been enlisted into the Prism program by the National Security Agency, which allowed the NSA to gather data on Microsoft users, Gates decided to drop the subject abruptly.”
Funny stuff.
The world loses Dennett at a time when it needs his insights and his way of seeing. As we enter together a wilderness of our own making with Artificial Intelligence (AI), pushing technology toward a consciousness we may come to regret, especially given the continued incompleteness of the project for humans, even after millennia of ‘soul-searching’ and wondering what it is. If all is physical, then why couldn’t AI machines have what we humans call consciousness? Geoffrey Hinton has won the 2024 Nobel Prize for his work with AI while tenured at Google, but he has doubts that AI can be contained. “I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us,” Mr. Doom (a nickname conferred behind his back) now tells us.
In another section he recalls fondly how women have over time managed to “weather” male colleagues determined to keep them down — not only weather but counter-dominate, in some instances. Dennett put together a symposium at Tufts and invited several female philosophers. “All of these women had braved the brickbats and insults of their male colleagues and held the day…While their male counterparts cautiously protected their positions in the old-boy network, these women decided that they might as well go all out.”
He relates a funny scene involving writer Elaine Morgan, author of the The Descent of Woman, who provided the audience with an outline of “Aquatic Ape” theory. The crowd had several top anthropologists who cringed at her theory. But one young anthropologist couldn’t handle what she was implying. Dennett writes:
“Nothing could have so strikingly illustrated and confirmed her account of the way she had been treated by the establishment than this fellow’s badgering. She played him like a violin, calmly rebutting his claims, pointing out his overstatements, and responding cheerily to his ever more hostile retorts. It was obvious that she had thought harder and deeper about these issues than he had, and when she—always respectful, always friendly—was through with him, he was a snarling villain, and the entire audience was cheering her on.”
A very pleasant anecdote to read. And another reminder of how Dennett disliked presumed orthodox privilege when it came to matters of the mind.
I Was Thinking is an excellent, energetic read, full of little stories and anecdotes you might hear at a philosophy conference, as colleagues spread the gossip, in the adjacent bar and grille. Dennett was an atheist, but his book and his outlook seems to have been pure amor fati.
The post On and Off in Life and Death appeared first on CounterPunch.org.