Do we still need philosophers? Daniel Dennett, who died last week, believed strongly that we do. ‘Scientists have a tendency to get down in the trenches and commit themselves to a particular school of thought,’ he told me from his home in Maine, not long before he died. ‘They’re caught in the trenches so a bird’s eye view can be very useful to them. Philosophers are good at bird’s eye views.’ Scientists of all sorts valued their conversations with him, ‘I think because I could ask them questions that they realised they should have had answers to,’ he said.

I grew up with Dennett. First, as a teenager, watching YouTube videos as he raged joyfully against the irrationalities of religion. Then, as an undergraduate, I came to his ideas about consciousness. He was perhaps best known as one of the four horsemen of the New Atheist movement – alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris – and was there at the very beginning of cognitive science in the 1960s. ‘When I look back at some of the armchair philosophy about minds and psychology, done by philosophers who don’t know any science, sometimes it is just ludicrously wrong – comically mistaken – because they trust their intuition and their intuitions are just wrong.’

Dennett’s central mission was to demystify consciousness and bring it within the realm of science. ‘It seems to many people that they have this show going on in their heads,’ he........

© The Spectator