World famend thinker Daniel Dennett, who championed controversial takes on consciousness and free will amongst different mind-bending topics, died in the present day on the age of 82.

(Full disclosure: This loss is private. Dennett was our pal and a colleague of my partner, Sean Carroll. Sean and I’ve many fond recollections of shared meals and stimulating conversations on an unlimited vary of subjects with Dan over time. He was a real unique and will probably be tremendously missed.)

Shocked reactions to Dennett’s surprising passing started proliferating on social media shortly after the information broke. “Wrenching information. He is been an incredible pal and unbelievable inspiration for me all through my profession,” the Santa Fe Institute’s Melanie Mitchell, creator of Synthetic Intelligence: A Information for Pondering People, wrote on X. “I’ll miss him enormously.”

“He was a towering determine in philosophy and specifically within the philosophy of AI,” roboticist Rodney Brooks (MIT, emeritus) wrote on X, bemoaning that he’d by no means replied to Dennett’s final electronic mail from 30 days in the past. “Now now we have solely recollections of him.

A 2017 New Yorker profile described Dennett as “a cross between Darwin and Santa Claus,” with “a fluffy white beard and a spherical stomach.” That jolly look was accompanied by an mental ferocity—generously embellished together with his glowing wit—as he battled such luminaries as Stephen J. Gould, John Searle, Noam Chomsky, David Chalmers, Roger Penrose, and Richard Lewontin, amongst others, over consciousness and evolution, free will, AI, faith, and lots of different subjects.

Dennett’s many books, whereas dense, nonetheless bought very effectively and have been vastly influential, and he was a distinguished speaker in nice demand. His 2003 TED discuss, “The Phantasm of Consciousness,” garnered greater than 4 million views. Whereas he gained explicit prominence as a pacesetter of the “New Atheist” motion of the early 2000s—colorfully dubbed one of many “4 Horsemen of New Atheism” alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—that was by no means his main focus, merely a pure extension of his extra central philosopical considerations.

David Wallace, historian and thinker of science on the College of Pittsburgh, supplied Ars Technica this succinct summation of Dennett’s extraordinary affect:

To me, Dan Dennett exemplified what it means to do philosophy in an age of science. He as soon as stated that there was no such factor as philosophy-free science, solely science that didn’t interrogate its philosophical assumptions; equally, he noticed extra deeply than virtually anybody that the deepest conventional questions of philosophy, from free will to consciousness to metaphysics, have been irreversibly reworked by fashionable science, most particularly by pure choice.

His strategy, as a lot as his personal towering contributions, has impressed generations of philosophers, far past cognitive science and the philosophy of thoughts (his concepts have been influential within the interpretation of quantum principle, as an illustration). He was one of many nice philosophers of the final century, and one of many only a few whose work has been transformative exterior tutorial philosophy.

“Dan Dennett was the embodiment of a pure thinker—somebody who was good on the cautious conceptual evaluation that characterizes the perfect philosophy, whereas caring deeply about what science has to show us concerning the pure world,” Johns Hopkins College physicist and thinker Sean Carroll instructed Ars. “On the similar time, he was the mannequin of a publicly-engaged tutorial, somebody who wrote substantive books that anybody may learn and who had an actual affect on the broader world. Folks like which might be extremely uncommon and valuable, and his passing is an actual loss.”

Born in Boston in 1942, Dennett’s father was a professor of Islamic historical past who grew to become a undercover agent for the OSS throughout World Battle II, posing as a cultural attaché on the American Embassy in Beirut. Dennett spent his early childhood there till his father was killed in a airplane crash whereas on a mission to Ethiopia. Dennett, his mom, and two sisters returned to Boston after that, and his household assumed he would attend Harvard identical to his late father. However after graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, Dennett opted to attend Wesleyan College as a substitute—not less than till he got here throughout Harvard logician and thinker W.V.O. Quine‘s 1963 treatise, From a Logical Level of View.

Dennett ended up transferring to Harvard to check underneath Quine and grow to be a thinker, initially intent on proving Quine fallacious. By the point he was a graduate pupil at Oxford College, he was identified amongst his fellow college students as “the village Quinean.” In his 2023 memoir, I’ve Been Pondering, Dennett traced his curiosity in making use of his area to questions of science to this era. He recalled experiencing the common sensation of 1’s hand falling asleep and feeling like an alien factor, relatively than a part of one’s personal physique. He questioned what was occurring within the physique and the mind to create that sensation.

“The opposite philosophers thought, that’s not philosophy. I stated, effectively, it ought to be,” he instructed Tufts Now final 12 months. “So I began studying. I didn’t even know what a neuron was again then within the early ’60s, however I quickly discovered. I used to be fortunate to get in on the bottom ground of cognitive neuroscience. Among the early pioneers in that area have been my heroes and mentors and mates.”

Dennett’s first tutorial place was on the College of California, Irvine, and a revised model of his doctoral thesis grew to become his first guide: 1969’s Content material and Consciousness. He moved to Tufts College in 1971, the place he remained for the remainder of his profession. Considered one of Dennett’s earliest collaborators was Douglas Hofstadter, creator of the bestselling Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Everlasting Golden Braid, who known as Dennett “a lodestar in my life” in an electronic mail [quoted with permission] to colleagues after listening to of the latter’s dying:

Dan was a deep thinker about what it’s to be human. Fairly early on, he arrived at what many would see as stunning conclusions about consciousness (primarily that it’s simply an emergent impact of bodily interactions of tiny inanimate elements), and from then on, he was a dead-set opponent of dualism (the concept that there’s an ethereal nonphysical elixir known as “consciousness”, over and above the bodily occasions happening within the enormously complicated substrate of a human or animal mind, and maybe that of a silicon community as effectively).  Dan thus completely rejected the notion of “qualia” (pure sensations of things like colours, tastes, and so forth), and his arguments in opposition to the mystique of qualia have been delicate however very cogent.

Dennett was a a confirmed compatibilist on the fiercely debated topic of free will, that means that he noticed no battle between philosophical determinism and free will. “Our solely notable divergence was on the query of free will, which Dan maintained exists, in some sense of ‘free,’ whereas I simply agreed that ‘will’ exists, however maintained that there isn’t a freedom in it,” Hoftstadter recalled.

Johns Hopkins thinker Jenann Ismael recalled corresponding with Dennett after her personal guide on free will, How Physics Makes Us Free, was printed in 2016.  She had not but met Dennett, however his work was naturally a big affect, although her guide was largely essential of his stance on the topic. Ismael opened her guide by discussing Dennett’s fictional quick story, “The place Am I?“, calling it “the perfect of piece of philosophical fiction ever written.” (Take a look at this quick movie primarily based on the story, starring Dennett himself uttering such immortal strains as, “They made a glowing new vat for my mind.”)

Dennett learn her guide and emailed Ismael with just a few notes—not about how he felt she’d misrepresented his views (which he deemed of “regardless of”) however correcting her errors concerning the plot of his quick story. “It seems I bought the story fallacious,” Ismael instructed Ars.  “I might learn it so way back, I simply embellished it in my head and embarrassingly by no means realized. The place I criticized him in my guide, he wasn’t as eager to appropriate me as he was excited to speak concerning the concepts.”

She discovered him to be crammed with infectious heat. “It was true that he may suck the air out of a room when he entered and even sitting at a spherical dinner desk, he in some way grew to become the middle of it, he took possession of the dialogue,” stated Ismael. “However he additionally paid shut consideration to individuals, learn voraciously, listened to and heard what others have been saying, taking what he may and disseminating what he discovered. He had immense curiosity and he wished to share every part that he discovered or favored.”

In his later years, Dennett wasn’t shy about sounding the alarm concerning AI, even writing an article for The Atlantic final 12 months on the subject concerning the risks forward, notably with the arrival of enormous language fashions like ChatGPT.  “Probably the most urgent downside isn’t that they’re going to take our jobs, not that they’re going to alter warfare, however that they’re going to destroy human belief,” he instructed Tufts Now. “They’re going to maneuver us right into a world the place you may’t inform fact from falsehood. You don’t know who to belief. Belief seems to be some of the necessary options of civilization, and we are actually at nice danger of destroying the hyperlinks of belief which have made civilization attainable.”

Dennett was not one to site visitors in false modesty over his many accomplishments and at all times evinced a robust diploma of self-confidence, fondly recounting in his memoir of the time fellow thinker Don Ross wryly noticed, “Dan believes modesty is a advantage to be reserved for particular events.”

His myriad pursuits weren’t restricted to the educational. Dennett liked artwork, music, crusing, pottery, trout fishing, windsurfing, ran his personal cider press, and made his personal Calvados on a Prohibition-era nonetheless. He may name a sq. dance, whittle a wood strolling stick, and was keen on pondering knotty philosophical questions whereas driving his tractor on his 200-acre farm in Blue Hill, north of Boston, which he purchased within the Nineteen Seventies. (He bought the farm round 2014.)

“Dan was a bon vivant, a really zesty fellow, who liked journey and hobnobbing with brilliance wherever he may discover it,” Hoftstadter wrote in his tribute.  “In his later years, as he grew a bit of teetery, he proudly carried a wood cane with him all world wide, and into it he chiseled phrases and pictures that represented the various locations he visited and gave lectures at. Dan Dennett was a mensch, and his concepts on so many topics will go away a long-lasting affect on the world, and his human presence has had a profound affect on these of us who have been fortunate sufficient to know him effectively and to rely him as a pal.”

Ismael recalled him sending her YouTube movies of “swing dancing and foolish outfits” in the course of the pandemic, his emails suffering from colourful emojis. He was “an odd man, who did not take himself as severely as you would possibly suppose,” she stated. “I actually liked him, liked his spirit, his generosity, the expansiveness of his considering, his enjoyment of concepts, and his nice good cheer. Philosophically, I feel he had true greatness. It appears not possible he’s gone.”