Douglas Hofstadter at Marcus on AI:
I just received the very sad news about the passing of Dan Dennett, a lodestar in my life and in many thoughtful people’s lives.
Dan was a deep thinker about what it is to be human. Quite early on, he arrived at what many would see as shocking conclusions about consciousness (essentially that it is just an emergent effect of physical interactions of tiny inanimate components), and from then on, he was a dead-set opponent of dualism (the idea that there is an ethereal nonphysical elixir called “consciousness”, over and above the physical events taking place in the enormously complex substrate of a human or animal brain, and perhaps that of a silicon network as well). Dan thus totally rejected the notion of “qualia” (pure sensations of such things as colors, tastes, and so forth), and his arguments against the mystique of qualia were subtle but very cogent.
Dan had many adversaries in the world of philosophers, but also quite a few who shared his views, and as for myself, I was almost always aligned with him. Our only notable divergence was on the question of free will, which Dan maintained exists, in some sense of “free”, whereas I just agreed that “will” exists, but maintained that there is no freedom in it.
More here.