We Are All Dennettians Now

An homage riff on AI+mind+evolution in honor of Daniel Dennett

The philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942-2024) died last week. Dennett’s contributions to the 1981 book he co-edited with Douglas Hofstadter, The Mind’s I,¹ which I read in 1996 (rather appropriately while doing an undergrad internship at the Center for AI and Robotics in Bangalore), helped shape a lot of my early philosophical development. A few years later (around 1999 I think), I closely read his trollishly titled 1991 magnum opus, Consciousness Explained (alongside Steven Pinker’s similar volume How the Mind Works), and that ended up shaping a lot of my development as an engineer. Consciousness Explained is effectively a detailed neuro-realistic speculative engineering model of the architecture of the brain in a pseudo-code like idiom. I stopped following his work closely at that point, since my tastes took me in other directions, but I did take care to keep him on my radar loosely.

So in his honor, I’d like to (rather chaotically) riff on the interplay of the three big topics that form the through-lines of his life and work: AI, the philosophy of mind, and Darwinism. Long before we all turned into philosophers of AI overnight with the launch of ChatGPT, he defined what that even means.

When I say Dennett’s views shaped mine, I don’t mean I necessarily agreed with them. Arguably, your early philosophical development is not shaped by discovering thinkers you agree with. That’s for later-life refinements (Hannah Arendt, whom I first read only a few years ago, is probably the most influential agree-with philosopher for me). Your early development is shaped by discovering philosophers you disagree with.

But any old disagreement will not shape your thinking. I read Ayn Rand too (if you want to generously call her a philosopher) around the same time I discovered Dennett, and while I disagreed with her too, she basically had no effect on my thinking. I found her work to be too puerile to argue with. But Dennett — disagreeing with him forced me to grow, because it took serious work over years to decades — some of it still ongoing — to figure out how and why I disagreed. It was philosophical weight training. The work of disagreeing with Dennett led me to other contemporary philosophers of mind like David Chalmers and Ned Block, and various other more esoteric bunnytrails. This was all a quarter century ago, but by the time I exited what I think of as the path-dependent phase of my philosophical development circa 2003, my thinking bore indelible imprints of Dennett’s influence.

I think Dennett was right about nearly all the details of everything he touched, and also right (and more crucially, tasteful) in his choices of details to focus on as being illuminating and significant. This is why he was able to provide elegant philosophical accounts of various kinds of phenomenology that elevated the corresponding discourses in AI, psychology, neuroscience, and biology. His work made him a sort of patron philosopher of a variety of youngish scientific disciplines that lacked robust philosophical traditions of their own. It also made him a vastly more relevant philosopher than most of his peers in the philosophy world, who tend, through some mix of insecurity, lack of courage, and illiteracy, to stay away from the dirty details of technological modernity in their philosophizing (and therefore cut rather sorry figures when they attempt to weigh in on philosophy-of-technology issues with cartoon thought experiments about trolleys or drowning children). Even the few who came close, like John Searle, could rarely match Dennett’s mastery of vast oceans of modern techno-phenomenological detail, even if they tended to do better with clever thought experiments. As far as I am aware, Dennett has no clever but misleading Chinese Rooms or Trolley Problems to his credit, which to my mind makes him a superior rather than inferior philosopher.

I suspect he paid a cost for his wide-ranging, ecumenical curiosities in his home discipline. Academic philosophers like to speak in a precise code about the simplest possible things, to say what they believe to be the most robust things they can. Dennett on the other hand talked in common language about the most complex things the human mind has ever attempted to grasp. The fact that he got his hands (and mind!) dirty with vast amounts of technical detail, and dealt in facts with short half-lives from fast-evolving fields, and wrote in a style accessible to any intelligent reader willing to pay attention, made him barely recognizable as a philosopher at all. But despite the cosmetic similarities, it would be a serious mistake to class him with science popularizers or TED/television scientists with a flair for spectacle at the expense of substance.

Though he had a habit of being uncannily right about a lot of the details, I believe Dennett was almost certainly wrong about a few critical fundamental things. We’ll get to what and why later, but the big point to acknowledge is that if he was indeed wrong (and to his credit, I am not yet 100% sure he was), he was wrong in ways that forced even his opponents to elevate their games. He was as much a patron philosopher (or troll or bugbear) to his philosophical rivals as to the scientists of the fields he adopted. You could not even be an opponent of Dennett except in Dennettian ways. To disagree with the premises of Strong AI or Dennett’s theory of mind is to disagree in Dennettian ways.

If I were to caricature how I fit in the Dennettian universe, I suspect I’d be closest to what he called a “mysterian” (though I don’t think the term originated with him). Despite mysterian being something of a dismissive slur, it does point squarely at the core of why his opponents disagree with him, and the parts of their philosophies they must work to harden and make rigorous, to withstand the acid forces of the peculiarly Dennetian mode of scrutiny I want to talk about here.

So to adapt the line used by Milton Friedman to describe Keynes: We are all Dennettians now.

Let’s try and unpack what that means.