Who would you have for dinner?

Erid Dolecki asks:

"If you could choose two people to have dinner with, each on their own on different evenings, who would they be and what would you have for dinner?"

What a great question. Now, before I answer, I want to make clear that I'm not interpreting the question as 'who are the two greatest people who ever lived', I think that is a different question and I would answer differently.

Let's see, who for dinner...I have a few candidates. I'd love to have dinner with Ray Kurzweil and talk about his vision of our future.  Kevin Kelly would have to get an invite to that dinner too.

Others I'd have to consider include Richard Dawkins, Tim Berners-Lee, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, Carl Sagan, my grandfather Rafael De La Fuentes (you wouldn't know him, he was an astrologer living in Spain, he wrote several books in Spanish I've yet to read and was regularly consulted by Franco - he died before I really got a chance to know him well), and Arthur C. Clarke.

But to boil it down to the two I would choose to have dinner with, they would have to be Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter. And I'd cheat. They would be invited along to the same evening. Having them for dinner on their own would seem a waste as I'd never be able to prompt them for conversation to the degree they would be able to encourage each other.

What would we have for dinner? Anything they wanted as long as there was copious fine red wine to accompany the meal, good coffee and ample rare cognac to round the evening off nicely.

Who would you have for dinner?