Daniel Dennett, who died in April at the age of 82, was a towering figure in the philosophy of mind. Known for his staunch physicalist stance, he argued that minds, like bodies, are the product of evolution. He believed that we are, in a sense, machines—but astoundingly complex ones, the result of millions of years of natural selection.
To give a sense of the breadth and depth of Dennett’s thinking, we have compiled here 10 snippets from his writings and from interviews he gave over the years.
The mind is a “user-illusion” that we mistake for reality
And what is this self? Not a dedicated portion of neural circuitry but rather like the end-user of an operating system. … Curiously, then, our first-person point of view of our own minds is not so different from our second-person point of view of others’ minds: We don’t see, or hear, or feel, the complicated neural machinery churning away in our brains but have to settle for an interpreted, digested version, a user-illusion that is so familiar to us that we take it not just for reality but also for the most indubitable and intimately known reality of all.
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Free will is a fantasy, but a welcome one
The traditional view of free will, as a personal power somehow isolated from physical causation, is both incoherent and unnecessary as a grounds for moral responsibility and meaning.
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Reality is more magical than miracles
Some people don’t want magic tricks explained to them. I’m not that person. When I see a magic trick, I want to see how it’s done. People want free will or consciousness, life itself, to be real magic. What I want to show people is, look, the magic of life as evolved, the magic of brains as evolving in between our own ears, that’s thrilling! It’s affirming. You don’t need miracles. You just need to understand the world the way it really is, and it’s unbelievably wonderful.
