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Topic: Daniel Dennett

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	All In The Mind - 29 July 2006 - Breaking the Spell: Daniel Dennett on religion
		Daniel Dennett: No, in fact if I were a devious sort of person and had been hired to design the most impenetrable shield I could dream up to put between science and religion so that scientists would just keep their hands off religion, I think I couldn't improve on what was in fact erected.
		Daniel Dennett: Pretty soon the whole town and even the ones that are sceptical say ah, there's no such thing as a talking tree, but every time they say it they make another copy of that idea, and pretty soon the idea of the talking tree is everywhere.
		Daniel Dennett: And in that book, to illustrate the power of Darwinian processes, the power of evolutionary processes, he drew attention to the fact that nowhere does it say that evolution has to be restricted to protein and to DNA; that anywhere you have a few features present you should get an evolutionary process.
	www.abc.net.au /rn/allinthemind/stories/2006/1698423.htm (4505 words)

	Daniel Dennett
		Dennett’s approach is not only naturalistic, but also functionalist, in the sense that human organisms are biological machines whose behavior is controlled by their brains.
		Dennett appeals to an interesting "visit to the phenomenological garden", in order to show that we do have some privileged access to our conscious experience, but that we also do tend to think that we are much immune to error in this field than we really are.
		Dennett argues that the idea of a "self" results from our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition, which consists in telling stories about who we are.
	www.vusst.hr /ENCYCLOPAEDIA/Daniel-English.htm (2726 words)

	Daniel Dennett - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Dennett is currently (August 2005) the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, University Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies (with Ray Jackendoff) at Tufts University (Medford, MA).
		Dennett is also well known for his argument against qualia; he claims that the concept is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism.
		Dennett's views on evolution are identified as being strongly adaptationist, in line with the views of zoologist Richard Dawkins.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Daniel_Dennett (1407 words)

	Consciousness Explained - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Dennett places the parallelism of the brain in opposition to the sequentiality of the mind.
		Critics of Dennett's approach, such as David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel, argue that Dennett's argument misses the point of the inquiry by merely re-defining consciousness as an external property and ignoring the subjective aspect completely.
		Dennett and his supporters, however, respond that the aforementioned "subjective aspect" as commonly used is non-existent, and that his "re-definition" is the only coherent description of consciousness.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Consciousness_Explained (386 words)

	Daniel Dennett: biography and encyclopedia article (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		Dennett is also well known for his argument against qualia qualia quick summary:
		Consciousness explained (published 1991) is a book by the american philosopher daniel dennett which attempts to explain how consciousness arises...
		Darwins dangerous idea: evolution and the meanings of life (1995) is a controversial book by daniel dennett that argues that darwinian processes...
	www.absoluteastronomy.com /encyclopedia/d/da/daniel_dennett.htm (1559 words)

	Daniel Dennett
		Daniel C. Dennett is a leading researcher of consciousness, philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence at Tufts University where he is the Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies.
		Dennett earned his B.A. from Harvard University in 1963, and completed a Doctorate in Philosophy at Oxford University in 1965 under the supervision of Gilbert Ryle.
		Daniel Dennett is the author of several popular and academic books.
	www.iscid.org /encyclopedia/Daniel_Dennett (198 words)

	Supernatural selection - The Boston Globe
		Daniel Dennett, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, in his office on campus.
		Daniel Dennett, however, is no great believer in respectful noninterference, and in his new book, ''Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" (Viking), he argues vehemently against it.
		Dennett's new book is concerned primarily with this more recent work, in which a new generation of researchers have begun to suggest that religion may be neither a matter of revealed truth nor willed ignorance, but something a bit more complicated.
	www.boston.com /news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/01/29/supernatural_selection/?page=full (1683 words)

	Dan Dennett
		Dennett is perhaps most famous in philosophical circles for his approach to the problem of intentionality.
		Dennett asks us to consider the various ways we can look at an object with the goal of predicting and understanding what it is going to do.
		Dennett claims that there are no such thing as qualia; the quality of conscious experience is a result of micro-judgements made by various parts of our brain.
	www.philosophers.co.uk /cafe/phil_apr2003.htm (1196 words)

	The Dogmatic Determinism of Daniel Dennett
		Daniel Dennett is a philosopher known for advocating a reductionistic view of consciousness, and for promoting the theory of evolution as of central importance to understanding man and his place in the universe.
		Dennett assumes that causality is a relation between events: The motions of atoms or ions at one moment cause their motions at the next moment; the firing of a nerve in the brain causes a muscle to contract.
		Dennett goes on to discuss how organisms that act in isolation can evolve, through the process of Darwinian evolution, into organisms that act cooperatively with each other; and then to claim that concepts of morality, responsibility, and blame (which is what he means by "free will") can be based on such evolved cooperation.
	www.objectivistcenter.org /cth--766-The_Dogmatic_Determinism_Daniel_Dennett.aspx (2362 words)

	Daniel Dennett's Dangerous Idea(The New Criterion): Johnson, Phillip
		Daniel Dennett's fertile imagination is captivated by the very dangerous idea that the neo-Darwinian theory of biological evolution should become the basis for what amounts to an established state religion of scientific materialism.
		Dennett contends that whether this or any other model is testable, at least cosmic Darwinism relies on the same kind of thinking that has been successful in scientific fields like biology where testing is possible, and that is enough to make it preferable to an alternative that brings in a skyhook.
		Dennett cannot be accused of avoiding the religious liberty issue, or of burying it in tactful circumlocutions.
	www.arn.org /docs/johnson/dennett.htm (2659 words)

	Roger William Gilman - Review of Daniel Dennett's Freedom Evolves -- Logos: Spring 2004
		Dennett’s strategy is to substitute a “hermeneutical switch of perspectives” (heuristically adopting an intentional interpretation of “avoidance behavior” for the metaphysically and morally hearty choosers we think we are; and then he substitutes “caused as inevitable effects” as a definition of determinism.
		Dennett is motivated to explain how free will could naturally evolve because he believes that the “false belief” that free will is impossible in a causally determined world is the driving force behind most resistance to materialism generally and to neo-Darwinism in particular.
		Dennett claims to have discovered that morally free will—as necessary to secular ethics as it is to religious ethics is missing.
	www.logosjournal.com /gilman.htm (3894 words)

	The New York Review of Books: Genes, Memes, & Minds
		Dennett repeatedly uses the analogy of "cranes" and "skyhooks." These are both devices for lifting things—in evolution, for generating increasingly complex designs—but of very different kinds.
		Dennett suggests that criticisms of the neo-Darwinist synthesis come, in the main, from those who are reluctant to believe that they are the product of an algorithmic process and who lust after skyhooks.
		Dennett tells us that it was the "level of hostility and ignorance about evolution that was unabashedly expressed by eminent cognitive scientists on that occasion" that persuaded him that he could no longer put off writing the present book.
	www.nybooks.com /articles/1703 (4188 words)

	Edge: DANIEL C. DENNETT
		The philosopher DANIEL C. DENNETT is perhaps best known in cognitive science for his concept of intentional systems, and his multiple drafts (or “fame in the brain”;) model of human consciousness, which sketches a computational architecture for realizing the stream of consciousness (the “Joycean machine”) in the massively parallel cerebral cortex.
		In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, he argued that the “universal acid” of evolutionary explanation extends well beyond biology to re-conceptualize culture and science itself, and exposed some of the internal conflicts and misconstruals in the contrary claims of Stephen Jay Gould.
		Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor, Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.
	www.edge.org /3rd_culture/bios/dennett.html (362 words)

	Philosophers : Daniel Dennett (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		Dennett is one of the foremost determinists today, advocating a mechanical explanation of consciousness.
		Dennett goes to great lengths to deconstruct the Cartesian Theater, the celebrated model of consciousness devised by Rene Descartes in the 17th century.
		Dennett puts the theory of multiple drafts, in which our minds react to stimuli by activating a particular draft of action.
	www.trincoll.edu /depts/phil/philo/phils/dennett.html (264 words)

	Universal Acid?
		Daniel Dennett stated that evolution, "Darwin's dangerous idea", was a "universal acid", eating through everything we believed and all the ways we look at the world (3 Dennett, page 63).
		Dennett asserts that humans changed when their minds were "invaded" and made "witting hosts" to memes (3 Dennett page 341).
		Dennett then asserts that contrary to claims that there are things humans can know that cannot be explained by algorithms (or concluded by an algorithm), AI is not possible to a great extent, algorithms can account for all our knowledge (3 Dennett page 443).
	serendip.brynmawr.edu /sci_cult/evolit/s05/web2/ecarey.html (1401 words)

	Breaking the Spell - Daniel C. Dennett
		Dennett's approach is emphatically scientific, as he considers religion as a 'natural phenomenon' and not as the divinely inspired super-natural institution that is so widely held to be beyond scientific inquiry.
		Dennett isn't entirely convinced of much of this -- he notes that some of these effects can also be explained in other ways, and that some anecdotal evidence or beliefs simply aren't true (most notably and emphatically that religious believers are somehow more moral than non-believers).
		Dennett offers a wealth of examples and possible counter-arguments, and his explanation of the evolution of religion is certainly interesting.
	www.complete-review.com /reviews/religion/dennettd.htm (1998 words)

	THOUGHTS AS TOOLS: THE MEME IN DANIEL DENNETT'S WORK (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		Most people interested in memes know of Daniel Dennett, at least by name; he seems to be the resident philosopher-mascot and is often mentioned in the context of memetics.
		Daniel Dennett loves stories, metaphors and thought-experiments, and so it is suitably Dennettian to start this essay with a cartoon.
		Dennett does not necessarily have the right framework, and we need not only to decide for ourselves, but also to realise that there is a decision to be made in the first place.
	pespmc1.vub.ac.be /Conf/MemePap/Mason.html (3099 words)

	Robert Wright, author of 'NonZero,' wrestles with philosopher Daniel Dennett and wins a point about the purpose of ...
		In his influential 1995 book "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," Dennett insisted that evolution is "purposeless"-and that, indeed, this lack of purpose is part of the "fundamental idea" of Darwinism.
		Dennett didn't volunteer this opinion enthusiastically, or for that matter volunteer it at all.
		The key to Dennett's change of view is the close connection between two separate questions: whether evolution has a purpose, and whether evolution has a direction.
	www.beliefnet.com /story/153/story_15340_1.html (782 words)

	Amazon.com: Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life: Books: Daniel C. Dennett (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		Dennett's analyses of the objections to evolutionary theory are unsurpassed.
		Dennett attempts to invoke evolutionary theory in an effort to buttress his prior claim that the human is a "strong artificial intelligence (AI)" type of architecture, an idea that has been resisted vigorously by a number of other philosophers.
		When Dennett gets into discussions of his positions on the nature of meaning and the strong AI theory of mind, I don't think his evocations of evolutionary theory are very strong and some of his arguments seem based more on analogy than anything else.
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/068482471X?v=glance (2546 words)

	Kids.net.au - Encyclopedia Daniel Dennett - (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		Daniel C. Dennett (born 1942) is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist, presently (2002) employed as the director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.
		He is the author of several books on evolution and consciousness.
		Daniel C. Dennett's homepage at Tufts University (http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/~ddennett.htm)
	www.kidsseek.com /encyclopedia-wiki/da/Daniel_Dennett (426 words)

	Amazon.com: Consciousness Explained: Books: Daniel C. Dennett (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		Central to Daniel C. Dennett's attempt to resolve this dilemma is the "heterophenomenological" method, which treats reports of introspection nontraditionally--not as evidence to be used in explaining consciousness, but as data to be explained.
		Tufts University cognitive scientist Dennett claims to have developed a major new theory of consciousness, yet his view of the brain as a massive parallel processor is a familiar one.
		Dennett seems to start everything he writes somewhere in the middle of a conversation he has been having with himself; he doesn't know how to properly introduce a topic to the reader.
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0316180661?v=glance (2107 words)

	Boston Review:Orr Reviews "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" by Daniel Dennett (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		Halfway through his book, Dennett confides that the "prospects for elaborating a rigorous science of memetics are doubtful." But he assures us that, "[w]hether or not the meme perspective can be turned into science, in its philosophical guise it has already done more good than harm." I confess that I am astonished by this move.
		Dennett explains that a "vivid way of posing the question is to imagine becoming an artificial selector of altruistic people" (his emphasis).
		Dennett, ever optimistic, triumphantly concludes that "[t]here is no denying, at this point, that Darwin's idea is a universal solvent, capable of cutting right to the heart of everything in sight." Drawing his argument to a close, he quotes, with some approval, Nietzsche's bleak vision of a Nature ruled by an apathetic but omnipresent Darwinism:
	www.bostonreview.net /br21.3/Orr.html#1 (5612 words)

	Amazon.co.uk: Freedom Evolves: Books (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-30)
		Dennett claims that misunderstanding of determinism is still prevalent among scientists and philosophers who subsequently misrepresent his views as they continue to resist a materialistic treatment of mind.
		Daniel Dennett shows that human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.
		Daniel Dennett is not a man to shy from grand philosophical pronouncements.
	www.amazon.co.uk /exec/obidos/ASIN/0140283897 (2168 words)

	Reason: Pulling Our Own Strings: Philosopher Daniel Dennett on determinism, human "choice machines," ...
		Dennett has spent his intellectual career trying to extend the Enlightenment project of putting philosophy and morality on a scientific and naturalistic basis.
		In a sense, Dennett is updating David Hume in the light of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
		Dennett: The blank slate is a preposterous myth, and it’s interesting to see how it has been fostered by some on the left as well as some on the right.
	www.reason.com /0305/fe.rb.pulling.shtml (3747 words)

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