PicoBlog

I met Dan Dennett during the first week of classes at Tufts University, in the Fall of 2003. I had just turned 23. At that point I’d have been living in the US for less than a month and was starting a master’s program in a language that wasn’t my own. I recall having to pre-play every conversation in my mind to make sure I wasn’t going to say something grammatically incorrect. I was so afraid of showing how poor my English was—I second-guessed every sentence I wanted to utter. Dennett’s office was on the right side of Miller Hall, toward the end of a hallway. I walked in slowly, mentally rehearsing every word. “Good afternoon, Dr. Dennett. My name is Felipe De Brigard.” No, I thought. I should probably call him “Professor”. “Good afternoon, Professor Dennett. My name is Felipe De Brigard.”

I must have been mumbling because I heard him call me from his desk. “Is that Felipe?” So, I walked in, and I noticed that he was flipping the pages of the textbook I had just published in Colombia, along with my undergraduate advisor Dr. Patricia Montañés, on clinical and cognitive neuropsychology. In my desperate attempt to make a good impression during the application process, I had sent him a copy on the mail. I doubt it made a difference—I don’t think Dennett was in the admissions committee that year—and, back then, I had zero faith in the Colombian airmail system. But there it was. I was taken totally aback by the fact that the very first image I would have of Dennett, would be one of him holding my book. I lost all my knowledge of English grammar, all resemblance of cogent thought, and my nervousness took over. 

“Good afternoon, Professor, er, Dr. Dennett. Yes, I am Felipe De Brigard.”

“Call me Dan”—he replied.

“Ok Professor Dennett,” I said, shyly.

“Dan is fine”

It would take me quite some time to start calling him Dan, comfortably. Yet eventually I did. And little did I know, one day I would be very comfortable referring to him as “basically, my dad in the US”. I have lost my dad in the US, and I am destroyed.

My first year in the master’s program at Tufts was very hard. Boston was expensive and I didn’t have much money. I ended up renting a cheap room without proper insulation. During that first winter it got so cold, that I had to sleep inside my winter coat and under all my clothes so as not to freeze. I also worked as a Spanish tutor and had a few weekend gigs that paid under the table, since I wasn’t allowed to TA during my first year and I had no other source of income. The little I had saved back in Colombia did not last. Plus, I probably underestimated the shock of living in a different culture and away from my family. I made some friends, though, and had some very sweet teachers—particularly Nancy Bauer—that helped me along the way. But if it wasn’t for Dan, I don’t think I could have made it. He welcomed me in his classes from day one and gave me constant advice and feedback on my written work, and on life.

When the second year started, he asked me to be his TA both semesters, including the semester in which he was writing Breaking the Spell. That semester was extraordinary. As part of being his TA, I had to read a pile of books on cognitive science of religion, and we would have frequent meetings to talk about them. “What did you think?”—he’d ask me, as well as my fellow classmate Avery Archer, now at George Washington University, who was the other TA in his class. What I found remarkable is that he really did care about our opinions. In every meeting he took notes, argued for theses that sometimes opposed those of the books we head read, and seriously considered our objections. One of the books we read was Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained, which I loved. I remember how, when discussing that book, I invertedly ended up showing support for Boyer’s multiple criticisms of memes with a bit too much fervor. And for a second, I sort of forgot that I was talking to, well, arguably one of the fathers of memetics. I froze. I was scared I had crossed some line. But, instead, the criticism was welcomed. Far from being mad at me, Dan wanted to hear more, and encouraged me to keep exploring the many ways Boyer’s view clashed with his. That day, I had a strange, almost foreign feeling—a kind of “argumentative high” you can only achieve when you separate the argument from the person. We were, as Plato would have put it, “mouthpieces of reason”. At no point did I feel that my vehemently disagreeing with him was received as a judgment on my character, which is something I had often experienced before as an undergraduate student, nor did he seem to mind that I wasn’t buying his defense of memetics.

Dennett wasn’t interested in shaping his students into newer versions of himself, and I never felt that he was imposing his views on me. In fact, in the last two decades, I disagreed with him on various issues, sometimes even in writing. More recently, for instance, I argued against his idea of overextending the intentional stance to neuronal activity, as he sought to do in his From Bacteria to Bach and Back (Dennett, 2017), on account that, in so doing, he’d be jeopardizing the very possibility of the hierarchical decomposition required for his homuncular functionalism (Gessell and De Brigard, 2018). Yet, despite those disagreements, it is undeniable that no other philosopher has been more influential in my academic career and philosophical development than Dan. I feel his influence both in what I think but also in how I think. For example, I inherited from him a profound displeasure for propositional attitudes, a notion I’ve always found too awkward to capture anything of value in folk psychology or too useless to explain anything important in cognitive science (De Brigard, 2015). Likewise, Content and Consciousness (Dennett, 1969) opened my eyes to the fact that consciousness was not necessary for the existence of mental contents, and that it is neither constitutive of, nor explanatorily prior to, their intentionality (I often told him that he should have named the book “Content, then Consciousness”). And, of course, many of his papers are among my favorite pieces of philosophical writing: Quining Qualia, Where am I, Real Patterns, and so many others.

But, more fundamentally, there are aspects in how I do philosophy that are profoundly Dennettian. For instance, Dan was always irritated by philosophers’ tendency to reduce a complex view into an “ism”, a sort of conceptual distillation of what’s supposed to be essential to a particular perspective. I learned from Dan that this exercise in labeling, while sometimes useful, often glosses over critical differences between views that shouldn’t be grouped together (Dennett, 1979). Moreover, sometimes the desire to both simplify and relate interestingly distinct perspectives under a single economical label ends up caricaturing them, which not only makes them easy targets of unfair criticism, but also misses conceptual moves that could dispel apparent conflicts between them. Here’s a concrete example. When Intentional Systems first came out (Dennett, 1971), Dan was considered a “functionalist” alongside Putnam (1960; 1967). Putnam’s insight was to treat a mental state as referring to a computational state, which—following Turing (1950)—he understood as a state in a Turing machine. Functionalism then allowed for the postulation of both mind-brain identifications—i.e., when a mental/computational state is identical to a physical/brain state—as well as mind-mind identifications, which occurs when two psychological states are identical. For Putnam, two organisms could have entirely different physical make ups and yet be in the same psychological state, as long as they were in the same state of their identical Turing machine-tables. Block (1978), however, rightly pointed out that this functionalist mind-mind identification was chauvinistic, for it could easily deny mental states to entities that clearly have them despite not being identical to any of the states of our Turing-machine table.

Dennett’s view, however, is impervious to Block’s criticism because, unlike Putnam, he didn’t think that psychological identities are established at the machine table level, but rather from the intentional stance. Two individuals could be running entirely different machine tables, and thus require different computational descriptions from the design stance, and yet share the same psychological descriptions from the intentional stance (Dennett, 2005). Does that mean that Dennett is not a functionalist? Some thought so, and for a while his label changed to “instrumentalist”, for it also looked like, for him, mental terms are like theoretical terms that need not be thought of as referencing something real, so long as they are useful to help us navigate, predict, explain and the like. But, of course, he frequently used intentional terms in the context of psychological explanations and cognitive theorizing in ways that make them sound more ontologically substantive. Does that make him a realist? Who cares! As he so eloquently puts it at the end of Real Patterns: “is the view I am defending here a sort of instrumentalism or a sort of realism? I think that the view itself is clearer than either of the labels, so I shall leave that question to anyone who stills find illumination in them” (Dennett, 1991). Personally, I feel the same unease with philosophers’ tendency to taxonomize views under different “isms” and think that often these labels prevent us from attending to distinctive features of a view that, when attended, could help to move the conversation forward.

During my last year at Tufts, when the time came for me to apply for a PhD, I was still unsure as to whether I wanted to pursue a degree in Philosophy or one in Psychology and Neuroscience. “What do you want to be when you are done?” Dan asked me. “I don’t know,” I replied, “that’s the problem.” So, he said —and I’ll never forget this— “Let me ask a different question: who are the people you want to hang out with?” As he made me realize, my decision was not only about the field of study I wanted to pursue, but one about people too. Who were the people I wanted to be colleagues with, the people I wanted to talk to at conferences and whose lectures I wanted to attend. And in my mind that answer was clear: I wanted to hang out with people like Dan. I wanted to hang out with empirically minded philosophers of mind. I was very lucky to have been taken out of the wait list—on the afternoon of April the 15th (!) of 2005—at UNC, Chapel Hill, where I was fortunate to enroll as a PhD student, and work with several empirically minded philosophers of mind, including Jesse Prinz, Josh Knobe, Bill Lycan and Dorit Bar-O, as well as several amazing graduate students.

Shortly before I left Tufts, Dan received an invitation to speak at a conference in Bogotá. The organizers, which were mostly professors at my undergraduate institution, wanted to secure his participation to attract other “big names”. What Dan didn’t know—although he may’ve suspected—is that the organizers were also contacting me so I could twist his arm into accepting the invite. I remember feeling rather uncomfortable with the whole situation, for I didn’t want to do any twisting, but I also didn’t want to let my undergrad teachers down. Thankfully, Dan accepted the invitation relatively quickly, and asked if I was going. I was so going. In fact, I had already told two of my Tufts friends to go with me. Thus, once I was done with my requirements at Tufts, and shortly before I started at UNC, I got to show Dan my hometown, the colonial center, and even the Gold Museum, where he told me about the similarities between pre-Columbian metallurgic techniques and the sort of sculptures he was working on in Italy when he was young. We also went to a nice hotel in the countryside with some of the conference organizers, were we had long and interesting conversations about Varela, phenomenology, and related topics. It was a lovely trip and, surprisingly, not the only time I’d visit Bogotá with Dan. 

Bogotá, Colombia, 2005. Tucker Lentz, Richard Dub, Dan Dennett and me.

The day I graduated from Tufts, Dan and Susan organized a dinner for me and my family as well as for Amber Ross, now a professor at the University of Florida, who, like me, is another “honorary family member”. I went to that dinner with my sister Maria Cristina, my brother-in-law Francisco, and my mom, who flew all the way to Boston from Bogotá. Imprinted in my mind, there is a beautiful image I’ll never forget: there was my mom, a tiny 5’1’’ woman, four years his senior, already having a hard time walking, holding onto Dan’s arm as he gave her a tour of his house in North Andover. My mom spoke not a single word of English but, having lived in the Vatican for several years as a young teenager shortly after the end of the Second World war, she could speak Italian. And so could Dan. So here they were, walking along side each other, speaking in Italian, saying who knows what about the new furniture on the deck. That evening, as my mom got into the taxi with my sister and brother-in-law, she grabbed my hand and said: “I have met two Popes and, today, Dennett.”

During my time at Tufts, Dan and Susan would have us over at their farm in Maine several times a year. In the fall we would make cider. Dan would drive the little tractor with a trailer, and we would go around the orchard picking apples, which we’d then press the juice out of with a cider press that was barely from the 20th century. We would then pick blueberries, which Susan would bake into a delicious blueberry pie, and that evening we would have dinner with cider from the previous year and, later at night (if lucky!), some Calvados, made, too, by Dan. I loved every second of those trips. Playing board games at night, listening to (and sometimes playing) music, hearing Dan’s stories. But, but far, my favorite visits were in the summers when we would go sailing. Every single summer, from 2005 until 2013, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for a whole week, I would go sailing with Dan. Amber would go too, as well as Justin Jungé, now at Princeton, and Steve Barney, who had been Dan’s student a while back and is now an amazing potter in Mississippi. Some others were a bit less regular, such as Adam Brown, who was there at the beginning, and then Bryce Huebner, Rosa Cao, and Enoch Lambert, all of whom were post-docs with Dan in consecutive years.

A lot of the sailing we did was “competitive”—with deliberate square quotes, because you know you are not going to win regattas when your crew is a bunch of philosophy grad students. But we did compete, and for short periods of time we even managed to get ahead. I remember this one time in which we did a particularly good job hoisting up the spinnaker—which featured a lovely image of Wily Coyote on a rocket—and since we were downwind, we ended up ahead of everyone else for a little while, enough for Dan to take a picture of all the other boats from the stern of his Xanthippe. He was beaming. Shortly after, of course, we messed up a tack, got into some dead wind, and lost the race, but whatever. For a few, glorious minutes, we were ahead, and Dan couldn’t be happier.

Somewhere off the coast of Blue Hill, Maine, July 2007. The crew.

Somewhere off the coast of Blue Hill, Maine, 2008. Xanthippe ahead!

Dan also organized yearly “cognitive cruises”, in which he’d invite one of his many academic friends to sail for a few days in the beautiful coast of Maine while talking philosophy, cognitive science, evolution, or whatever topic they were researching. Naturally, Dan needed a crew to help him navigate and we were always at the ready. I met amazing people during those cruises, including Nick Humphreys and Brian Cantwell-Smith. Dan sold Xanthippe in 2013, and we thought that the cognitive cruises would end that year. Luckily, thanks to the generous hospitality of Dan’s friend Dmitry Volkov, in 2015 I was invited aboard a chartered 100-year-old gorgeous boat, in which we sailed for a few days with Stan Deheane and his wife. The cognitive cruise lived another year. I honestly thought that was going to be the last time sailing with Dan, but to my happy surprise, he summoned us again in 2017 to sail, not to race, a boat he had rented for the summer that wasn’t that dissimilar in size and style from Xanthippe. There we were, once again, most of the same crew that sailed with him every summer since 2005. Good times.

Little Deer Isle, Maine, 2017. Setting up the flagpole

Bucks Harbor, Maine, 2017. Sailing the Alamar.

Leaving Tufts did not make my interactions with Dan less frequent—if any, they became more regular. Shortly after I started my PhD at UNC, the Spanish translation of Sweet Dreams was going to be published by a new publishing company in Argentina. Years ago, I had told Dan that I never really liked the Spanish rendition of The Intentional Stance, and he must have remembered it because he asked me to “supervise” the translation of his new book—which I did. And he must have been happy with my role because, shortly after, he agreed to having the Spanish edition of Breaking the Spell be published by the same publisher, but only if I was the translator. Of course, I couldn’t say no (I definitively wanted to say yes!), but I also had no idea the amount of work it would take. Having been his TA/RA while he was writing it, I knew the book very well, but for me the challenge was to really convey Dan’s prowess with English prose. I worked on that translation for almost 8 months, alongside my academic load at UNC. By far, the hardest task was translating the “Quinean crossword” at the end of the book. You see, Dan had designed a 4x4 crossword, inspired by Quine’s indeterminacy of translation (Quine, 1960), in which the same clue could have two different answers and, thus, the puzzle could have two different solutions. Try to translate that. I did try, and I even enrolled my family in Colombia—including my favorite Colombian puzzler, my sister-in-law Lina Pardo—to help me out. I still remember many family members, working on the dining-room table, trying to come up with a version of the Quinian puzzle in Spanish. I visited Dan that summer up in Maine and told him about the difficulty I was having with his Quinean puzzle, and I’ll never forget how Susan, sympathetically, looked at Dan and said: “Poor Felipe!” Dan was then ok with me leaving the puzzle in English, with an explanatory footnote.

I met my wife, Anne, about 3 months after I started grad school. I told Dan about her that Christmas, and he heard me talk about her many times the following year. I was smitten. Shortly after we decided to get married, and neither of us being religious, we found ourselves wondering who could officiate our wedding. Anne, who’s the most generous soul I’ve ever met, knew how important Dan was for me, and agreed immediately when I suggested him as a possible officiant. I was doubly delighted when Dan accepted the invitation right away. Knowing how, er, incompatible was Dan’s persona with the idea of organized religion, I was extremely surprised when Dan asked me if it would be a good idea for him to become a minister of the Universal Life Church, an online pseudo-religious organization that enables non-denominational individuals to be ordained so they can legally perform weddings. While that could have made things easier—we actually had to ratify our wedding, a few days later, in front of a judge of peace—I just couldn’t bring myself to ask one of the four horsemen of the new atheism to affiliate to some questionable online cult. So, Dan did not become a minister of the Universal Life Church, but he did officiate our wedding, and did a lovely job, and made me feel extraordinarily supported and loved. I wouldn’t have liked not to have my dad in the US in one of the most important days of my life. From that day on, whenever he introduced me to someone new, he’d say “I love this man so much that I married him.” I used to laugh awkwardly at the joke. Today, I miss it more than ever.

Pittsboro, NC. May 2008. Dan Dennett “blessing” the brain-shaped groom’s cake at our wedding.

Pittsboro, NC. May 2008. An unforgettable smile.

Dan often said that a Dennett is what you get when you combine a Quine and a Ryle. I already mentioned how, from Ryle, he inherited an enviable and profoundly generous mentoring trait: a way of influencing one’s views without imposing, a way of lovingly letting you discover the advantages of seeing things from his perspective without belittling your own. He also, of course, exhibited many Rylean themes in his own philosophy: his rejection of the Cartesian Theatre is reminiscent of Ryle’s dismissal of the Ghost in the Machine, for example, as well as the behaviorist flavor of his intentional stance. Quine, too, influenced Dan as much in the content of his philosophy as in his philosophical approach. In particular, Dan—like Quine—thought of philosophy as continuous with science, and he was probably the first philosophy professor I heard question what I was taught to treat as an unassailable truth: that there is an unbreachable gap between science and philosophy. Throughout my life—and, by now, I’ve been in this business for a quarter of a century—I’ve heard many times philosophers ask “how’s this philosophy?” when a talk includes a good chunk of science, as if you somehow abandon your desire to pursue and love knowledge when you leave the realm of the a priori. Dan, however, traversed both disciplines with ease; yet he was more than as a mere consumer of science: he actively interacted with scientists and often helped to shape their research questions. He famously suggested—to mention just one example—what would become a widely used false belief test.

This is another aspect of my way of doing philosophy that I owe to Dan. During my graduate studies at UNC, I wholeheartedly embraced the continuity between science and philosophy. I learned to conduct behavioral and neuroimaging studies that could help to ascertain empirical premises upon which my philosophical views rested while, at the same time, I was able to employ the conceptual tools I was acquiring in my philosophical training to clarify the theoretical and methodological difficulties I encountered while doing empirical work. Dan was always there, along the way, discussing my work, guiding my questions and posing new ones. He generously agreed to be in my dissertation committee and was extraordinarily helpful in providing detailed feedback to each of the chapters.

After I graduated from UNC, I returned to the Boston area for my post-doctoral work. Soon after I arrived, Dan invited me to participate in an informal meeting he had with his post-docs—Rosa and Justin were there at the time—as well as a few other researchers in the area, to talk about our respective projects. Albeit irregular, it was always a fun meeting that allowed me to keep talking philosophy while I was honing in my skills as a cognitive neuroscientist. During that time, too, our family grew—we had a little one now!—and I felt much safer having him and Susan close, advising and solving the occasional questions of new parents.  

In the few years, I did my best to see Dan at least once a year. Whenever we happened to coincide at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, for example, or the Philosophy of Science Association, we would get dinner together and catch up. I still remember, as if it had been yesterday, my last academic trip right before the pandemic, at the Central APA in Chicago, having a drink with him and Peter Carruthers, wondering whether we should worry about this new coronavirus in running amok in Wuhan. If only we knew. Those were difficult times, and I often wondered when the next time would be that I’d be able to see him in person. He was one of the speakers at the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy in 2022, which I co-organize at Duke every year, and I hoped to see him then again, but for health reasons he ended up having to give his talk virtually. We would catch up on zoom every so often and, as usual, we would talk around Christmas, but traveling was becoming challenging.

Earlier in 2023, however, Dan called me on my cell phone. I was in faculty meeting, I remember, and had to rush outside to answer the phone. Typically, Dan would always email me before calling so I figured it must be important. I confess I was worried. Turns out, he had been invited to deliver a lecture in Bogotá, for the Colombian chapter of the Harvard-MIT alumni association, and he was about to turn them down when it occurred to him that maybe I was going to be there at the time.  As it happens, I was going to be in Colombia that week so moving my stay for an additional day was no problem at all. Dan then accepted the invitation and we scheduled our trips and hotels together so that I could stay and travel back with him through the airports. It was lovely to see him there and to spend time along with my good friend Mauricio Artiñano, a former Tufts student from the Breaking the Spell class, who also kept in touch with Dan through the years. On the way back, we both had long layovers in Atlanta, so we sat at the lounge, had dinner and a martini—a favorite of both—while talking about philosophy, and about life, both past and present. It was lovely. Not that there was any question, but that day I ratified, once again, a feeling I had for many years: that one of the reasons I felt so at home with Dan, and (I want to believe) he felt at home with me, is that we not only shared many perspectives on philosophy and on the academic life, but we both wore in our sleeves a profound love for our family, for our friends, our students, and for our role as teachers. When it was time for me to go to the gate to board my flight, we gave each other a big hug. “You know you are like a dad to me, don’t you?”, I managed to mumble while holding tears, and he held tighter. I remember waiting in line to board, no longer holding back the tears, telling my wife on the phone that if that was the last time I saw Dan alive, I would have felt that I was able to tell him how much I loved him. And so it was.

Bogotá, Colombia. April 15, 2023. With Mauricio Artiñano.

Dan Dennett was a brilliant philosopher who revolutionized the study of the mind. His ideas will continue to inspire his readers and students for many years to come. Like the law of effect, his intentional stance, his multiple drafts theory of consciousness, his distinction between Orwellian and Stalinesque views on time perception, his skyhooks, and his many, many other wonderful tools for thinking will never go away. Other obituaries and testimonials have emphasized on different aspects of Dan’s renaissance persona—he was a sculptor, a musician, a wordsmith and an indefatigable player of frigatebird, a game he invented in which players steal each other’s scrabble tiles to write ever so more complex words (I was always hopelessly bad at it). Dan was also a loving husband, father, and grandfather, and an extraordinarily dedicated teacher, who cared for his students in ways that I’ll always try to emulate. And for me, he’ll always be my dad in the US, without whom I’d never be what I am. I’ll miss you, Dan, very much.

Felipe 

References

Block, N. (1978). Troubles with functionalism. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 9:261-325.

De Brigard, F. (2015). What was I thinking? Dennett’s Content and Consciousness and the reality of propositional attitudes. In: Muñoz-Suárez, C.M. & De Brigard, F. (Eds.). Content and Consciousness Revisited. N.Y. Springer. pp. 49-71.

Dennett, D. C. (1969). Content and consciousness. Routledge.

Dennett, D. C. (1971). Intentional systems. Journal of Philosophy, 68(4), 87-106.

Dennett, D.C. (1979). Review of The Self and its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism, by Karl Popper and John Eccles. Journal of Philosophy, 76 (1979): 91-97.

Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown and Company.

Dennett, D. C. (2005). Sweet dreams: Philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness. MIT Press.

Dennett, D. C. (2017). From bacteria to Bach and back: The evolution of minds. W.W. Norton & Company.

Gessell, B.S. & De Brigard, F. (2018). The discontinuity of levels in cognitive science. Teorema. 37(3): 151-165.

Putnam, H. (1960). Minds and machines. In S. Hook (Ed.), Dimensions of mind (pp. 148-179). New York University Press.

Putnam, H. (1967). Psychological predicates. Art, mind, and religion, 1, 37-48.

Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and object. MIT Press.

Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59(236), 433-460.

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