{"id":187781,"date":"2024-04-20T20:22:21","date_gmt":"2024-04-21T01:22:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/forms-of-life-forms-of-mind"},"modified":"2024-04-20T20:22:21","modified_gmt":"2024-04-21T01:22:21","slug":"forms-of-life-forms-of-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/forms-of-life-forms-of-mind","title":{"rendered":"Forms of life, forms of mind"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/forms-of-life-forms-of-mind.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>We lost a really great human today \u2013 philosopher <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Daniel_Dennett\">Daniel C. Dennett<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Dan was a kind, honest, generous guy. He had a brilliant mind \u2013 insightful, critical, with an encyclopedic knowledge of pithy analogies and clinical examples (\u201cintuition pumps\u201d he called them), as well as who came up with them. And despite all of his experience and accomplishments, he always had a kind of childish excitement about new ideas, and new experiments. What he liked best was new insights, wild ideas, honest argument. I first heard the concept of \u201csteel-manning\u201d from him (opposite of \u201cstraw man\u201d \u2013 putting forth the strongest, best version of an argument you want to critique). He was not interested in cheap wins or rhetorical bullying \u2013 he wanted to get to the best version of every story about nature and about ourselves.<\/p>\n<p>I first came into contact with Dan through his books. As a teenager, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Brainstorms\">Brainstorms<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Elbow_Room_(Dennett_book)\">Elbow Room<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/2073.The_Intentional_Stance\">The Intentional Stance<\/a> were a fantastic introduction to the most interesting questions, and ways of thinking about them. My dad and I would hit the bookstores every Saturday and there was no way a Dennett book would escape us if a new one came out. We had lots of great times discussing the topics in his books. I eventually was able to ask Dan to sign a few of them for dad, as birthday presents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We lost a really great human today \u2013 philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. Dan was a kind, honest, generous guy. He had a brilliant mind \u2013 insightful, critical, with an encyclopedic knowledge of pithy analogies and clinical examples (\u201cintuition pumps\u201d he called them), as well as who came up with them. And despite all of his [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187781\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}