[FRIAM] Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)

Tue Apr 23 04:05:43 EDT 2024

Jennifer Ouellette's piece on Daniel is well written too - like his books very readable and always interesting. Jennifer is the wife of Sean Carroll.https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/philosopher-daniel-dennett-dead-at-82/-J.
-------- Original message --------From: Russ Abbott <russ.abbott at gmail.com> Date: 4/23/24  12:16 AM  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Daniel Dennett (1942-2024) Stephen,Thanks for the link to Michael Levin's piece on Dennett. Levin, also at Tufts, is one of the most insightful and creative biologists around. The article points to a joint Aeon piece Levin wrote with Dennett. Even though it was published 3 1/2 years ago, it's very much worth reading. It will give you a sense of the kind of work Levin does.It also illustrates Dennett's notion of competence without comprehension from his From Bacteria to Bach and Back, published 3 years earlier. The article is a very nice example of the melding of two minds.Many will want to maintain that real cognition is what brains do, and what happens in biochemistry only seems like it’s doing similar things. We propose an inversion of this familiar idea; the point is not to anthropomorphise morphogenesis – the point is to naturalise cognition. There is nothing magic that humans (or other smart animals) do that doesn’t have a phylogenetic history. Taking evolution seriously means asking what cognition looked like all the way back. Modern data in the field of basal cognition makes it impossible to maintain an artificial dichotomy of ‘real’ and ‘as-if’ cognition. There is one continuum along which all living systems (and many nonliving ones) can be placed, with respect to how much thinking they can do.  -- Russ Abbott                                       Professor Emeritus, Computer ScienceCalifornia State University, Los AngelesOn Sun, Apr 21, 2024 at 1:15 PM Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com> wrote:Michael Levin's farewell to Dan Dennett  https://thoughtforms.life/farewell-dan-dennett-i-will-really-miss-you/On Fri, Apr 19, 2024 at 2:46 PM Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com> wrote:Such a loss :-(https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2024/04/19/daniel-dennett-philosopher-atheist-darwinist/yes a loss of a great person and intellectual. Though in the loss is the possibility of progress.  if you consider the above "atheist-darwinist" url representing a certain paradigm in which Dennett has been cast as a central figure. Planck's Principle on paradigms and funerals:An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.— Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97Colloquially, this is often paraphrased as "Science progresses one funeral at a time"_________________________________________________________________Stephen GuerinCEO, Founder https://simtable.comstephen.guerin@simtable.com stephenguerin@fas.harvard.eduHarvard Visualization Research and Teaching Labmobile: (505)577-5828On Fri, Apr 19, 2024 at 1:03 PM Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:Such a loss :-(https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2024/04/19/daniel-dennett-philosopher-atheist-darwinist/I will put his autobiography "I’ve Been Thinking" from last year on my reading listhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/01/ive-been-thinking-by-daniel-c-dennett-review-an-engaging-vexing-memoir-with-a-humility-bypass-J.-------- Original message --------From: Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> Date: 4/19/24  7:32 PM  (GMT+01:00) To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com> Subject: [FRIAM] Daniel Dennett (1942-2024) A sad day today. Daniel Dennett has died :-( For every big question in philosophy there is at least one Daniel Dennett book:"Consciousnes Explained" (1991) about consciousness"Darwin's Dangerous Idea" (1995) about evolution "Freedom Evolves" (2003) about free will"Breaking the spell" (2006) about religionhttps://dailynous.com/2024/04/19/daniel-dennett-death-1942-2024/-J.-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
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