Daniel Dennett died on April 19, 2024, the same calendar day as Charles Darwin in 1882, which the universe surely meant as a nod.
He was the philosopher who respected science and engineering, and I loved his intuition pumps for thinking clearly. A line attributed to him, that one of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance, is what I call low reflexivity.
In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea he argues that natural selection unified the world of mechanism and matter with the world of meaning and purpose, two worlds that until Darwin looked unbridgeable, and that Darwin’s was perhaps the greatest idea anyone ever had. At this point in history I think he was right. The same gradualism dissolves the mind-body problem: the unified self is a marvelous evolved illusion, there is no homunculus at the center of consciousness, and nothing about calculation is “mere”, since it was only ever a question of scale and complexity.
Deep emotional attachment is what life is about, and nurturing it is what brings happiness, the closest thing we have to a highest good. His attributed advice is the one I keep: find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.