Category: Dennett
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Consciousness is an Illusion but Truth is Not?
From an interview with Daniel Dennett in the pages of The Guardian (HT: Dave Lull): I was thinking that perhaps philosophers are exactly what’s needed right now. Some deep thinking about what is happening at this moment? Yes. From everybody. The real danger that’s facing us is we’ve lost respect for truth and facts. People…
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Social Utility and the Value of Pure Inquiry: The Example of Complex Numbers
Much as I disagree with Daniel Dennett on most matters, I agree entirely with what he says in the following passage: I deplore the narrow pragmatism that demands immediate social utility for any intellectual exercise. Theoretical physicists and cosmologists, for instance, may have more prestige than ontologists, but not because there is any more social utility…
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Sweet Dreams of Dennett
The following first appeared on 15 January 2006 at the old Powerblogs site. Here it is again, considerably reworked. ……….. I saw Daniel Dennett's Sweet Dreams (MIT Press, 2005) on offer a while back at full price, but declined to buy it: why shell out $30 to hear Dennett repeat himself one more time? But the other day it…
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The Self as Center of Narrative Gravity?
According to the The New York Times, Daniel Dennett has a new book coming out entitled Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. Here are a couple of tidbits from the NYT piece: The self? Simply a “center of narrative gravity,” a convenient fiction that allows us to integrate various neuronal data streams. The elusive…
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The Ultimate in Self-Alienation
Dennett is so alienated from his own nature as a conscious, thinking being that he denies qualia and holds an ascriptivist theory of intentionality. It is amazing how, in the grip of a theory, one can bring oneself to deny the self-evident.
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Dennett, Anthropomorphism, and the ‘Deformation’ of the God Concept
One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006) is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of the concept of God: "I can think of no other concept that has undergone…
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Dennett on the Consequence Argument Against Compatibilism
Daniel Dennett is a compatibilist: he holds that determinism and free will are logically compatible. (Compare Dennett's position to Coyne's hard determinism and free will illusionism.) On p. 134 of Freedom Evolves (Penguin, 2003), Dennett considers the following incompatibilist argument. Itwill be interesting to see how he responds to it. 1. If determinism is true,…
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Can Consciousness Be Explained? Dennett Debunked
To answer the title question we need to know what we mean by 'explain' and how it differs from 'explain away.' 1. An obvious point to start with is that only that which exists, or that which is the case, can be explained. One who explains the phenomenon of the tides in terms of the gravitational…
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Intentionality in Locks and Keys?
The mind-body problem divides into several interconnected subproblems. One concerns the relation of consciousness to its material substratum in the brain and central nervous system. A second concerns the aboutness or intentionality of (some) conscious states. A third problem is how a physical organism can be subject to the norms of rationality: How does an…
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Dennett’s Dismissal of Dualism
Daniel Dennett is a brilliant and flashy writer, but his brilliance borders on sophistry. (In this regard, he is like Richard Rorty, another writer who knows how to sell books.) As John Searle rightly complains, he is not above "bully[ing] the reader with abusive language and rhetorical questions. . . ." (The Mystery of Consciousness,…
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Original and Derived Intentionality, Circles, and Regresses
1. Original/Derived Intentionality. All will agree that there is some sort of distinction to be made here. A map is not about a chunk of terrain just in virtue of the map's physical and geometrical properties. Consider the contour lines on a topographical map. The closer together, the steeper the terrain. But that closer together…
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The Supernatural and the Miraculous
I think it is important to distinguish the supernatural from the miraculous especially inasmuch as their conflation aids and abets the 'Dawkins Gang.' (That's my mocking moniker for Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, and their fellow travellers.) Let's briefly revisit Daniel Dennett's definition of religions as . . . social systems whose participants avow belief in…
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Searle, Dennett, and Zombies
A zombie is a critter that is physically and behaviorally exactly like a human being (or any being that we consider to be conscious) but lacks consciousness. That is a stipulative definition, so don't argue with me about it. Just accept it. I'll use 'zombie' to refer to human zombies and won't worry about cat…