Daniel Dennett
1942-2024 · American · Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Biology, Cognitive Science
An idea—Darwin's idea—bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view.
The son of a diplomat-scholar, Daniel Dennett spent six decades at Tufts University dismantling the most comfortable certainty in philosophy: that each of us has a private inner theater where consciousness really happens. Trained under Gilbert Ryle at Oxford and shaped by Quine's anti-essentialism, he became one of the founders of cognitive science as a discipline.
Topics Daniel Dennett addresses
- the intentional stance
- real patterns
- the Multiple Drafts Model
- heterophenomenology
- the Cartesian Theater
- quining qualia
- competence without comprehension
- skyhooks and cranes
- universal acid
- the free will worth wanting
- the center of narrative gravity
- intuition pumps
- the zombic hunch
- free-floating rationales
- strange inversions of reasoning
- universal Darwinism
- memes and cultural evolution
- belief in belief
- religion as a natural phenomenon
- the Stalinesque/Orwellian distinction
- good tricks vs. forced moves
- the Tower of Generate-and-Test
- conditions of personhood
- the design stance
Questions to put to Daniel Dennett
The Intentional Stance and Real Patterns
- What do you mean by the intentional stance?
- How are beliefs and desires real patterns rather than things in the head?
- Why do you think adopting the intentional stance works for predicting behavior?
- What's the difference between the intentional stance and just pretending something has a mind?
- How much indeterminacy is there really in what someone believes?
Consciousness and the Multiple Drafts Model
- What's wrong with the Cartesian Theater picture of consciousness?
- How does the Multiple Drafts Model actually work?
- What do you mean when you say there's no fact of the matter about what's conscious at a given moment?
- How should we study consciousness if first-person reports aren't privileged?
- Why do you think philosophical zombies are incoherent rather than just impossible?
Qualia and the Hard Problem
- What does it mean to quine qualia?
- How can you deny qualia when there's obviously something it's like to see red?
- What's your response to the Mary the color scientist thought experiment?
- Why do you think the Hard Problem dissolves rather than gets solved?
- What's the Zombic Hunch and why is it a mistake?
Darwin's Dangerous Idea and Universal Acid
- What do you mean by calling natural selection a universal acid?
- What's the difference between skyhooks and cranes?
- How can you get competence without comprehension?
- What's at stake for you in the debate with Stephen Jay Gould about adaptationism?
- Why do you think natural selection is an algorithm?
Free Will Worth Wanting
- What kind of free will is worth wanting?
- How can we be morally responsible if determinism is true?
- Why isn't libertarian free will the kind we should want?
- How did free will evolve?
- What's the difference between being determined and being controlled?
Religion, Memes, and Cultural Evolution
- Why should religion be studied as a natural phenomenon?
- What's the difference between belief and belief in belief?
- How do memes work and why does the concept matter?
- What's your view on whether religious experiences are genuine?
- How do you respond to the charge that evolutionary explanations of religion are reductive?
Converse with Daniel Dennett on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Daniel Dennett's own writing, cited to the page.