I Never Stopped Learning from Daniel Dennett
T hey say, never meet your heroes. Daniel Dennett, who was exceptional in so many ways, and who died last month, was for me an exception to this rule, too.
Like so many, I was first inspired by Dennett on reading one of his many bestsellers: Consciousness Explained. It was 1991 and I was a fresh undergraduate with a powerful but undirected interest in consciousness. I had no idea how to go about studying it, or how to think about it. I was studying physics at Cambridge and had just plowed my way through Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind, which had left me confused and despondent. Dennett’s book, with its presumptuous but oh-so-appealing title, was both a tease and a salve. I devoured it.
I didn’t agree with, or follow, everything. But I learned so much from his clear, witty writing, and from his famous “intuition pump” thought experiments. I was left with the strong impression that consciousness, if not explained, was explainable, and I now had a north star to steer by.
Years passed. I thought I might meet him when he examined the doctoral thesis of a friend of mine who was studying with me at the University of Sussex, but it turned out they met over Skype. I would hear stories about him from one of my mentors at the University of Sussex and one of Dennett’s great friends, the philosopher Maggie Boden. These were tales of philosophical bust-ups, of sailing adventures, and of a voracious and seemingly unbounded intellectual appetite. The impression was of someone larger-than-life, who delighted in engaging with the world rather than preaching from an ivory tower. I read every book he wrote, and many of his papers. But the man himself remained remote.
