Remembering Dad and Dennett

Keith Douglas

Last time, I talked about presuppositions in the work of Daniel Dennett.

No responses came at the time of writing. I would like to make one remark on the response Seanna gave to the previous month’s column. She was able to show that answering a question with strange presuppositions is always possible. To my mind the metaquestion of interest is therefore what norm is one following if one does this?

Dad and Dennett

I would like to address a more personal topic this time. Should we honour the dead?

This came up for me recently. Shortly after my reflections on Dennett, my father died. It was not unexpected in a way, and he had a good and a decently long life. I would like to take the editorial indulgence I have been granted and compare and contrast some aspects of both important persons. I have done this under six headings, followed by a brief conclusion.

Dad and Dennett were very close in age, within one or two years. Both grew up in intellectual households, though Dennett’s parents were formally educated whereas my paternal grandparents were largely informally such. Dad and I often argued with my grandfather on what he had seen on The Nature of Things or had read in Carl Sagan. I never did discuss Bertrand Russell with them, despite that one of Russell’s books was in my grandfather’s collection. Each of Dennett and Dad, however, managed to get to university in England to study for a doctorate.

Both returned to North America after spending time in England during the tumultuous 1960s, somewhat aloof from the convulsions that shook that period. But in my father’s case, I remember once, during the 1990s, a friend of his suddenly brought up the Vietnam war. My father, however his distance, was well informed. As I aged, I got the impression he knew well about world affairs.

Dad was also trained in organic chemistry. Dennett always expressed an interest in science but regretted not having a more solid scientific foundation. Scientifically, Dad was interested in matters beyond his speciality; he had geology and botany books around the house, and very few chemistry ones, which seemed odd to me. Then, when he retired, I realized his chemistry books had been at his office at work; I now have most of them and can somewhat reconstruct what he would have studied.

Dad and Dennett also took a scientific approach to hobbies. I have been reading Dad’s hiking and mountaineering books, of which I had no interest as a child. I did enjoy the hikes, including one of our last ones I can remember well: an almost total ascent of Mount Royal. We walked from the Peel Basin to the summit and he remarked that if we were to try to get to sea level — noting the sign asserting 10 meters above — we’d have to start in Gaspesie or something. The “thinking person’s physical activity” is described in his mountaineering books and I will never know if this was what interested Dad in climbing.

I also have Dad’s geology text. He told me once why he had it, but I don’t remember, alas. It is not from his student days; I think it may have been bought when he was a postdoc at the National Research Centre here in Ottawa. He certainly told me of the local geology and botany on the hikes we did wherever it may have been. The latter never stuck with me at all, though the remark that we were into “bushes only” after a certain elevation, even in the Adirondacks, was weird to me as a child, and still is.

Dennett was of course a trained philosopher, and the first one I read outside of the classroom, while I studied at CEGEP and had only some of my required sequence in the humanities. Dad, by contrast, for a long time, did not understand why I would enjoy something so hypergeneral. Yet it was he and Mom who bought me the book of Dennett’s (The Mind’s I) that helped get me started in philosophy. However, later Dad and I would talk about my studies at university in philosophy and I got the impression I succeeded in convincing him that it could be done concurrently with science.

In fact, Dad was the one who first clued me in that there were philosophers and chemists working in the philosophy of chemistry, which in the last 30 years or so has grown to be a relatively minor but well established branch of the philosophy of science. My wish is to have more philosophers interested in metaphysics, and to have them read the philosophy of chemistry. It has yet to happen.

Dad told me once the most astonishing thing. Temperature affects what sort of stuff you can have. Not in terms of thermal decomposition, which a high school student knows about. And not about whether ice and steam and liquid “are the same.” But in terms of separability, in the context of for example cyclohexane and the so called “boat” and “chair” arrangements of the atoms. Despite his skepticism towards the merits of philosophy as a field, Dad ensured (even financially) that I was able to pursue my interests in it. I think he must have held Wil Wheaton’s dictum that “Being a nerd is not about what you love; it is about how you love it.”

Dennett was a philosopher’s technologist and a technologist’s philosopher, eventually working on the philosophy of computing. Dad and I discussed the relationship between science and technology, and the responsibility of the technologist to society, to employers, etc. I owe some of my views on the distinctions here to our conversations. He (and Mom, my first computers teacher) also brought into our home a personal computer during the “second wave” of personal computers in the mid- to late 1980s. We were the second of my circle of friends at the time to own one.

I still remember picking up the Apple //c at Fairview shopping centre, bringing home all those big boxes, and starting the demo/tutorial disk with him, my mother, and my sister. While I had done some computing in school by that point, the constant presence of a computer as a toy, tool, and teacher was an important part of the technologically informed but not excessive lifestyle he brought us up in. (I am realizing as I write this that we had a colour monitor for our first computer before we had a colour television or cable!)

Dad also used computers at work from a very early stage, and I remember visiting and seeing the amazing “graphics terminal for chemists” at one point. At the time it was an astonishing thing. Must have cost the company a fortune. Visiting where he spent most of his working life was a treat we enjoyed from time to time. I think exposure to the pharmaceutical industry directly shaped my philosophy of technology in ways I still cannot quite figure out.

Dad took an interest in my education from an early age. I remember one time when I was in elementary school he said he was going to take my friend and me to the park so we could measure how big it was. Neither of us asked why; we just played along and learned to use a tape measure, the retractable kind. About the same time I came down one morning to the basement to find him setting up a model of the solar system. I had read about the distances and sizes but not grasped them until he pointed out how big the Sun SHOULD be and how far away Pluto — never mind Proxima Centauri — would be at the same scale. The former was “at the golf course,” which was a kilometer or so away!

He also was the first person I know to analyze games. He wanted to know if Monopoly has a strategy worth trying, or whether it was too random to bother. He concluded, correctly as I have come to understand, which properties were worth buying. He missed how important railroads are, however, because of their initial startup costs. His “have higher order fun with games” lasts with me to this day. I still create new games, for example, even doing one for work a few months ago. Dennett also took an expansive attitude towards education. His career at Tufts shows that one need not have a PhD program in your field at your university to do good work. In this case, pioneering computer-aided instruction and convincing many undergraduates that philosophy is worthwhile.

Dad taught me to play chess and to love science fiction and fantasy. We read Tolkien together when I was in the first grade or so. He also tried to give me my first lessons in skiing, which I detested because cross-country was so boring. He always seemed to have more patience than I; he had us kids try music which he had done as a child: violin. Only my sister stuck with it for more than five minutes at a time, even doing piano for several years. Dad remembered enough to sorta play along with her. (I am using “sorta” in Dennett’s sense!)

This did teach an important meta-lesson. I have spent much of my life caring deeply for people who are better musicians than I am. A lot of my female friends over the years have been such. I think it is an important lesson to learn how really bad you are at something, music in my case. It is also important to appreciate those with more talent and determination. Dad also encouraged me to take part in the science fair at school, in which I won two local medals.

Dad sometimes arrived home just as “The Bloodhound Gang” was on. No, not the rap group, but the segment of 3-2-1 Contact that had some young people solve mysteries by thinking them through and gathering evidence. He encouraged us kids to try to solve the mysteries ourselves. I preferred these and those on Square One TV’s “Mathnet” to the ones my sister later learned to love from our parents (Agatha Christie and those sorts). I am not sure why the difference.

Dad applied this skepticism to our schoolyard rumours we brought home. One time I brought news of a “haunted house.” I knew that this was unlikely to be real, but my classmate was likable and earnest about it, so my sister and I asked if we could visit. Dad told us we’d spend time going one weekend but to never go to such a place alone. His admonishment was well placed. The “haunted house” was just a boarded-up condemned building a good walk from our house. So we had a decent outing, just not the one we expected.

Dad also sometimes watched Star Trek: The Next Generation with me and I remember his reaction to a few episodes. He liked “Where Silence Has Lease,” or at least the ending. The villain of the week in this episode, for all its difference from us, shared something with us: our curiosity. He also watched “The Offspring” and found himself agreeing with Dr. Crusher, that Data is not emotionless; and “The Ensigns of Command,” where he found it astonishing that our heroes were so deferent to a bunch of fascists. It was in this context that I learned that fascism and corporatism are a fine line apart. The Sheliak, in his view, are fascists (and not corporatists), because they are willing to exterminate intelligent life to get what they want. Dennett’s work with the practical skepticism movements is too well known to address here, but of course the attitude is common. I never did quite figure out what Dad thought of the movements; he certainly was less “confrontational” than I was.

So should we honour the dead? I just did, I hope, so the normative question remains.