RIP. May you and your invaluable contributions to modern philosophy be long remembered.

Dennett was an author of some of the best books I´ve read. Great humour, great person. Now, the reason för religious beliefs is simple, it is the fear of death. Religious persons do not admit that when you die, you do not longer exists. They find all kinds of elaborate explanations, there is a soul which continues to live in heaven - that is if you have behaved. An atheist i.e an honest person knows that you live for a while and then you go back to the status you had before you were born.

Rest in peace Dan. The world is poorer without you❤

Rest in oblivion Mr Denett thanks for breaking down religion for the rest of us

RIP. Fortunate to attend his lecture in Boston...🙏🏼... grateful for your intellectual courage...

I just learned that Dennett passed away today. He was a profound philosopher that I greatly enjoyed. I've been working the past six months on an animated video, and he is one of the 10 animated characters along with Sabine Hossenfelder, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Edward Witten, Richard Dawkins, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, J.K. Rowling, Marcelle Hanselaar, and the Pope. I'll include a dedication to Dennett at the beginning.

Dan Dennett will surely be missed farewell Sir…

R.I.P, Daniel Dennett ❤

Oh ! Dan dennet gone 😢. Am so sad to hear this. Such a legend

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Mr. Dennett over the years, and I'll miss his perspective on life's most profound mysteries. Goodbye sir and thank you.

I'm a huge fan of Daniel Dennet. For me he advanced the topic of atheism and the analysis of religion.

Rest in peace mr. Dennett! And I've thought about the usefulness of religion. There are many ways and levels to think about it but if you look at the individual level. Religion gives a structure, a set of rules to live by. Humans are a creature of habit and having to set up all of that structure yourself can be exhausting. Religion gives a sense of purpose, it gives you comfort thinking that a father like figure cares for you and gives you guidance and support, it gives you an explanation for what is dark and unknown. So you don't have to worry about it. And it gives a sense of community, a community of like minded individuals meeting each other once/twice times a week or more, giving you the feeling that you're not alone. In a way, I sometimes wish I could've been a believer given the reasons I've pointed out above. But I just can't believe in something without evidence. I will keep searching for my own meaning and purpose, my own sense of community. without having to turn to a supernatural being.

Goodbye Daniel! 😢 What a great guy!!

Thank you for everything, Dan.

Love u Dan dennett. Deeply saddened that u are no more. U are my top intellectual hero. A foremost philosopher and thinker of modern age. Ur name and work will live forever.

Beautiful man, Dan Dennett! Great philosopher, great human being! 👍🏼RIP Dan!

RIP sir

I'm thankful we were on earth school together. I survived Catholic school in part because our paths crossed.

RIP Daniel Dennett

One of the biggest influences in my life. Your work is amazing and we will make sure it keeps being alive. Thank you for your contribution to the world and, personally, to my life. Also, how amazing is Robert's reactions to Dan in this interview. So cute

God is a symbolic character in the dramas we create about our own desires and fears. Religion is a language by which we communicate our values throughout society and between generations. Children understand personalities more readily than they grasp philosophical concepts, so we personify abstractions in the form of heroes and deities.

R.I.P He was a brave philosopher!!!

Short answer: Easily.

I like Dennett, but I just can’t understand why he doesn’t recognize that atheism can also be understood as a meme. And if we consider that far more people have been religious than atheist, then it suggests that atheism is the wild meme rather than the concept of religion as a whole.

I loved Dr. Daniel Dennett, very sad to hear about his passing, I would have loved to meet him, he was my absolute favorite, an intellectual giant, a legend, true sage, heard he was also very kind gentle person, huge loss to civilization, I will watch tons of his lectures in the next few weeks in his memory, I made a playlist of his lectures and interviews for myself to work through, listening to Dr Dennett lectures would be my idea of Heaven 7:17

The parallels between religion and instinctive needs or even pure mechanical side effects like 'it happened because it could' are missing something fundamental at the core of most religions : that of transcendance. From as far back as we can trace the origins of religion we can see the experience of transcendence being played out. Shamanism is about transcendence, mushrooms or crocodile ceremonies are about transcendence. A crucial aspect of our human nature is and has always been the search for transcendence (right back to cave paintings and prehistoric statuettes showing examples of Shamanism). What is transcendence? It is a search for another world, a different level of consciousness and in modern religions, a connection with the spiritual world or with God. The experience of transcendance is not about feeling good about yourself and the environment but to seek an understanding of it. It's not simplistic in a biological sense but complex in its attempt to find connections and understanding. It leads towards patterns and symbols and, like languages, it both creates and reveal reality.

It is a means of control.

As I dips me lid to a giant, that walked amongst us mere mortals... RIP Professor Dennett. 😔

I haven't watched Closer to Truth recently, I should watch it more often. It is an incredibly interesting channel.

In 1980 I knew an 80 year old man who went to the same church for 40 years. When I asked him about belief in God, he said, "I am an atheist. I like the teaching. I like the people." He passed on, but I still think of him as the finest Christian I have met.

RIP Dr. Dennett

Great person and thinker. This is splendid interview. He passed away just under watching this.

I agree. It is not about the veracity of your religious claim, it is about the behavior that those beliefs have engendered over the ages. Practical religious intuition is over 50,000 years in terms of first egalitarian societies and then eventually priest and shaman-led belief systems. Individual and to a lesser extent group behavior is based on agency assumptions and the dangers and benefits of those agencies. The agents need not exist in reality, Mr. Dennett was spot on. Billions of modern religious adherents are still supposing that the shadows on the cave walls are real. This reminds me of "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins.

RIP. Had a way of always forcing people to think :)

I have to be hated by others, but good to myself. I am happy with that result.

R.I.P.

This fellow spoke in parables all the way about biology, sheep, and Shepherd.

God bless you Dennett

Brilliant 👏 Bravo

Brilliant man ❤️ RIP

Great 😃

He was very incisive on “consciousness”. Getting rid of God is easy. You should do it before you start to shave. Getting rid of consciousness, the fall-back defence of the supernaturalist, is more painstaking. He was very patient and affable. Hard to imagine the world without him.

It is amazing what lengths a great mind will go to try to convince itself that it is not wrong.

The actual scientific answers to the questions of the origins of the universe, the evolution of man, and the fundamental nature of the cosmos involve things like wave equations and quantum electrodynamics and molecular biology that very few non-scientists can ever hope to understand and that if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we accept the incredibly complex scientific phenomena in physics, astronomy, and biology through the process of belief, not through reason. When Richard Fenyman wrote, 'I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics,' he was including himself which is disconcerting given how many books he wrote on that very subject. The fact is that it takes years of dedicated study before scientific truth in its truest, mathematical and symbolic forms can be understood. The rest of us rely on experts to explain it, someone who has seen and understood the truth and can dumb it down for us in a language we can understand. And therein lies the big problem for science and scientists. For most people, science is really a matter of trusting the expert who tells it to us and believing what they tell us. Trust and belief. Faith. Not understanding. How can we understand science, if we can't understand the language of science? 'We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history. Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were?' . Just look at Nutritional Science as an Example. 1. Eat breakfast vs skip breakfast 2. eggs are healthy vs eggs are not healthy 3. Cow's Milk is healthy, rich in calcium vs Cow's Milk is unhealthy , can't absorb calcium 4. Avoid eating Fats , Eat less Fats vs Eat more Fats (Ketogenic Diet) 5. Take multivitamin supplements vs Multivitamin supplements are useless

He knows the secret now, that consciousness is eternal. I used to be a skeptic UNTIL I started having what is called Out of Body Experiences and through these experiences it confirmed to me that awareness is "non-local" and now this great man knows this, finally.

I hope the scholars and the researchers take up the project Dennett suggests here

ECOLOGY, DISTANCE, AND USEFULNESS.

Yes

A brave and beautiful mind. You certainly made this monkey a little bit smarter. Thank you and Farewell Dan Dennett 🧠

rest in peace

another sad loss of a distinguished thinker... Dennet's wisdom has always been a beacon of light for many of us... may the other doors of existence open up to welcome such a graceful mind...

Well finally a segment i have no issues with. Religions as simply a creation of our many human cultures. That just happens to provide validation for the existence of their ruling classes.

Rest in Peace sir

Correct me if I'm wrong: many religions without a god, right? Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism are some.

FINALLY I FOUND A PLACE.

It is definitely enhanced

Hi Closer To Truth, I do think this definition of religion is adequate, there is always a great difficulty in defining anything that has no material form or existence, it makes it something beyond precise definition. Very much the same applies to the god delusion as well, that too is something that lacks any empirical evidence upon which to s=-establish identity and definition. What remains is to try to establish a reasonable systematic framework for intelligent discussion, in terms that do not insist on the formal identification of realites, just the relationships between the basic ideas that are involved, ideas that do not themselves demand any real 'proof' or evidence. On that basis I am happy to talk about the cultural and intellectual aspects of religion and it seems to me that since there is no reliable evidence that any gods actually exist but very clearly religion play a major part in many people's lives the identifiable nature of the basic concepts are valid. This then speaks to the ways and means and manners of 'thinking', here it seems we are on very loose ground, it would appear that several slightly differing neurological processes are in play, that emotions imagination and 'reason' play into human consciousness in ways that we are not likely to ever come to terms with!. That alone does not close all the doors on debate, I think that the ri=ole that desire and imagination play in our lives is what promotes the adoption of faith and belief systems that actually lack any rational foundation, they can then be applied as an uncritical basis for all sorts of ritual and doctrine that bypass the need for any critical rational thinking which is slow and difficult and cannot produce the comfort of certainty. All of us have this capacity for cognitive delusion, where we insist that what we choose to believe is 'true', none of us are very good at separating fantasy from reality, in part at least because our powers of observation and perception are distorted by our emotions and imagination. Our dreams are usually more vivid and exciting than the realities of daily life. It has occurred to me that this peculiarity could be an inherited genetic attribute because rational thinking is so slow and difficult but also in the benign environment that produced us is rarely if ever required. Cheers, Richard.

religion for community to focus on and experience God?

Rest in Peace Daniel Dennett

RIP Dr. Dennett.

Definitely! Look at indian religions and traditions. Buddhism ,jainism, mimamsasa, samkhya, yoga...

Religion is to keep the minority of naturally intelligent from overthrowing the caste/gold/hierarchy. Period. The ruler is divine, and half diety, so in direct lineage/connection to the all powerful that can punish past human experience. It's called Banc Law. God is the billboard, or curtain the Wizard of Oz hides behind.

Yessssssssssss!

So sad to hear he passed. RIP

In response to the question, can contemporary religions be explained without God? From my point of view, the answer is yes, and the reason for the positive answer to the question of the form of performance and its effect on the behavior of the world of humanity is only for the direction of the movement of living, and perhaps, God can be explained without religions, because the role of God who rules the planet is in addition to helping humanity. It is in the direction of the movement of living, but it is the movement of all beings, including human beings, and it is nothing but the unique and eternal living air that surrounds the earth, which itself is immersed in the unique and eternal life of another.

Relition should be judged on the universal rule that our beliefs and nature go hand in hand. If a belief has a bad effect on your nature then it's wrong. If it has a good effect on your character then the belief is right. It's also important to understand that the way a belief is worded doesn't constitute the beleif but the understanding of the belief is what affects your nature.

Rest in peace❤

RIP. Dennett has died and with it ended whole epoch in philosophy.

R.I.P

Rest in peace Mr Dennet

This narrative fits perfectly with the existence of God. If there is a God, you would expect him to design the evolutionary process and, thus, human nature in such a way that it would be evolutionarily or otherwise beneficial to humans, thus drawing us closer to him in this intrinsic way. What atheists who see the benefits of religion, such as Dr. Dennett and Richard Dawkins, who recently acknowledged his fondness of the Christian culture, miss, as far as I am concerned as an ex-atheist, is that it is very hard to have ideas spread without substance behind them. If someone said the tree was talking to them, people's natural behavior would be to deem that person crazy. However, if multiple people then hear the tree talk, then due to the impossibility of mass hallucinations, we'd expect them to start believing that the tree talks and, therefore, start communicating with the tree. As more and more people find out that they can talk to the tree, they start talking to the tree. The only difference is that a talking tree wouldn't have extremely consequential implications on the way people live their lives, unlike an omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent God, who is the alpha and the omega of existence - a maximally great being - would.

To the great lights of reason. May they shine on in the memories of we who carry the torch further 🤍

Is there a God? God is both One and Self-Existent (A God = One God) Why does God veil himself as manifoldnes: So not to be alone (Genesis 2:18) What is the purpose of God for this veiling business: Love. (John 13:34-35)

No approval is necessary. Problem solved. Moving on.

Well, maybe YOU define religion as belief in a supernatural agent... but when things get messy, I like to return to first principles and ask "what did this word mean before it degenerated in the hands of the ignorant?" That's always a good start. re = again often used in our language family as a reinforcement. You can double your effort, or make it stronger by REdoubling it. "re" is often used this way in the Indo-European family. lig = attach think of "ligament", a tissue that attaches bones to each other. Or "ligature", a device to attach a reed to a mouthpiece. Or "legato", wherein musical pitches are connected. So, you see, the term "religion" came about to denote a fierce dedication to something. One's religion could be an art or science, if that's their life's major dedication. People have ancient texts that prescribe how people can best protect person and property, how they can best interact with one another etc. Buddhism does that, but it texts don't involve the supernatural. It's still a firm dedication. People whose venerated texts are derived from Abraham's vision of God have a supernatural religion, but that doesn't mean that religion per se involves the supernatural. LISTEN. PARSE. THINK. DO SOME HOMEWORK. BE HONEST. Poor use of language is like a lie -- when you utter it often enough, it starts to appear to be true. This is the technique of scoundrels -- notably preachers and politicians . Fie on such a practice. Sorry I didn't watch beyond 0:36, but any person who's so loose with language doesn't merit my attention. His effort and intent might even be in [what he thinks is[ service to humanity, but I'm old, and haven't enough time left to spend listening to foolish things.

He had the voice of a young man.

Rest in peace sir.

RIP 😢

DD is my main pal......REB R OOT.

For an atheist, it would be more logical to say "lies forever nowhere and for no reason".

I thought he was Santa Claus.

“Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” -Matthew 15:14 KJV Most people forget the first part of this verse when remembering it but I find it to be the most haunting part of it having once been an atheist.

Before watching… Here’s my two cents… If you were to ask 100 unrelated people/theists on their “death bed” for a detailed description of God, I’ll wager you’d get 100 significantly different answers…. Yet most “denominations” insist that they have THE ONE AND ONLY answer for everyone… That being said, my relationship with a higher power is something I’ll willingly share with anyone who wants to discuss it in person, without expectations. Concurrently, I find it easier to envision a God without a religion, rather than a religious organization without a God…

"Religion is an excuse to stop thinking."

👍👍

As long as birth and death is relevant God is relevant. God is relevant as long as you need to eat, poop, sleep, reproduce become immune to illness and defy death and become self reliant self existing and eternal. To deny God you will have to become god which is out of question.😊

Religions make a lot more rational sense when you realise 'God' can be equated to 'idealised collective belief'. The concept was just personified to make it easier to communicate to the masses.

DD: well I define religion as belief in a supernature agent or agents whose approval is to be sought now once I've defined religion then there are some things which look like they may be their religions that don't meet the definition 0:46 ... 18:00 ❤what kind of next steps do you think would be productive for Human Society to make to understand religions? ❤👉Well I think first of all we have to do what Socrates always told us to do real that's what we don't know the fact is we don't know a lot that we think we know about religion uh I'm saying I don't know it I'm saying nobody knows and we Jolly well should try to find out using good old scientific methods uh we can't just rely on our good intentions and good intentions aren't enough and we can't rely on tradition history tradition isn't good enough let's find out next makes religions tick how they attract people and then we'll have some idea of how to how to build on that there's a lot of people who've tried to reform their religions in the last say 100 years some of those reforms were disastrous why? their intentions were fine they didn't understand the nature of this sort of organism that they're trying to fix um so doesn't matter whether you think religions should go extinct or should become stronger you should try to understand how they work their their physiology if ou like their ecology now if you look at religion now you see hugely different from what it was 100 years ago which was hugely different from what it was a thousand years ago what's religion going to be in 10 years it probably will evolved as much in the next 10 or 20 years as it has in the last 100 I'd like to be part of a planned attempt to channel that evolution of religion down paths that are socially useful.

Soon as you say “mysterious “ or “ not explained “ here comes sir god of the gaps ….

I don’t think he moved his arm during this entire thing

I suppose he either knows the truth now or he no longer is. Either way, he will be missed.

I don't like to go to churches .....

Someone said that there's no room in the theory of evolution for the spirit world.

Always liked him, not strident or offensive. He seemed young to be dying.

I’m far more interested in God without religion than in religion without God. The former is spirituality, the latter is something like communism or fascism.

Religion csn definitely be explained without god; we can just do it much more fully now than we could decades or centuries ago. From the biological side I'd point you, dear reader, to a KZfaq video of an old Robert Sapolsky video on "the biological underpinnings of religiosity." On the more concrete side I'd point you to the honest scholarship out there on the historicity, sociology, and textual analysis of ancient texts that expose religion not as proof of divine influence, but more accurately as a deeply human experience that has evolved in accordance with how our species has progressed. This is why most major religions concern themselves with what happens "after life" - because here in this reality, their core tenets are easily exposed as fairy tales.

Yaeh, it is very simple, Two plus Two, is equal to Four, Everything else, is Religion.

"Religion is an extremely important part of the way people think about this world" -- Jeez, theists. As a lifelong atheist, I find that statement offensive and insulting.

Oof. This is not the first time I've heard on KZfaq of the death of somebody I greatly respected.

Didn't know about him until I read about his passing. Based on all of the kudos in these comments, I'm sure that he was a delightful and engaging fellow. However, this interview did not impress me at all. Just two old atheists whose views about religious belief was predictably shallow and misdirected. Sorry to speak unkindly of the dead.