No Mic Podcast Scribed By Facelesslingjutsu - Profile: Daniel Dennett
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First ... The intelligent selection, rejection, and weighing of the considerations that do occur to the subject is a matter of intelligence making the difference.
Second, I think it installs indeterminism in the right place for the libertarian, if there is a right place at all.
Third ... from the point of view of biological engineering, it is just more efficient and in the end more rational that decision making should occur in this way.
A fourth observation in favor of the model is that it permits moral education to make a difference, without making all of the difference.
Fifth—and I think this is perhaps the most important thing to be said in favor of this model—it provides some account of our important intuition that we are the authors of our moral decisions.
Finally, the model I propose points to the multiplicity of decisions that encircle our moral decisions and suggests that in many cases our ultimate decision as to which way to act is less important phenomenologically as a contributor to our sense of free will than the prior decisions affecting our deliberation process itself: the decision, for instance, not to consider any further, to terminate deliberation; or the decision to ignore certain lines of inquiry.
These prior and subsidiary decisions contribute, I think, to our sense of ourselves as responsible free agents, roughly in the following way: I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: "That's enough. I've considered this matter enough and now I'm going to act," in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case. - Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett was a leading philosopher and cognitive scientist recognized for his work on consciousness, free will, and the philosophy of mind, arguing these are products of physical brain processes rather than a non-physical entity. He also applied evolutionary theory to understand complex human phenomena like religion and the development of language. While he primarily worked and published in English, his influential ideas have been translated and discussed globally in numerous languages within academic and popular discourse.
Daniel Dennett was born on March 28, 1942, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, Daniel Clement Dennett Jr., was a scholar of Islamic studies with a PhD from Harvard, and worked as a covert counter-intelligence agent for the Office of Strategic Services (a precursor to the CIA) posing as a cultural attaché at the American Embassy in Beirut during World War II. Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon. His mother, Ruth Marjorie (Leck) Dennett, was an editor and teacher.
In 1947, when Dennett was five years old, his father was killed in a plane crash in Ethiopia. Following his father's death, his mother moved the family back to Winchester, Massachusetts. Dennett was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy before attending Harvard University, where he received his B.A. in philosophy in 1963. He then pursued graduate studies at the University of Oxford, earning his D. Phil. in philosophy in 1965, under the supervision of Gilbert Ryle. His doctoral thesis on consciousness later became his first book, Content and Consciousness (1969).
Daniel Dennett's professional career was primarily spent at Tufts University. After receiving his D. Phil. from Oxford in 1965, he taught at the University of California, Irvine, from 1965 to 1971. In 1971, he moved to Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where he became an associate professor, then a full professor in 1975, and chaired the Department of Philosophy from 1976 to 1982.
At Tufts, he was appointed University Professor in 2000, the highest honor for faculty members, and also became the Fletcher Professor of Philosophy. He directed the university's Center for Cognitive Studies since its inception in 1985 and co-founded the Curricular Software Studio. He retired at the end of 2022, becoming University Professor Emeritus.
"The Message is: There is no Medium" (1993): This work, often discussed in the context of his broader views on consciousness and the "Cartesian Theater" (his term for the intuitive but flawed idea of a central place in the brain where consciousness resides), continues his arguments against a single, unified, or privileged point of conscious experience.
Throughout his career, Dennett focused on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly their relation to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He published 21 books and over 560 articles, with notable works including Content and Consciousness (1969), Consciousness Explained (1992), and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995). He also held visiting professorships at various universities, including Harvard, Oxford, the London School of Economics, and the American University of Beirut. He received numerous awards and fellowships, such as the Jean Nicod Prize, the Mind and Brain Prize, the Erasmus Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a Fulbright Fellowship.
"Quining Qualia" (1988): This influential paper, originally presented in 1982 and widely published in various collections, provocatively argues against the existence of "qualia" – the subjective, qualitative aspects of experience often considered the hardest problem of consciousness. Dennett proposes that our intuition about qualia is flawed, and that a scientific understanding of consciousness does not require them.
"Realism, Instrumentalism, and the Intentional Stance" (1987): In this paper, Dennett introduces and elaborates on his concept of the intentional stance, a powerful explanatory strategy where we predict the behavior of a system by treating it as if it were a rational agent with beliefs, desires, and intentions. This approach has been widely influential in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and even artificial intelligence.
Even after officially retiring from his main professorship at Tufts University at the end of 2022, Daniel Dennett remained an active and influential figure in philosophy and cognitive science until his passing on April 19, 2024, at the age of 82. He retained the title of University Professor Emeritus at Tufts and continued to be associated with the university's Center for Cognitive Studies, which he had directed for many years.
His later years saw him continuing to write and engage in public discourse, solidifying his legacy. He published his memoir, I've Been Thinking, in 2023, offering reflections on his life and intellectual journey. Dennett also maintained his role as an advisor in CIFAR's Brain, Mind & Consciousness program, an international research organization, and was an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary research center focused on complex systems, where he had been a frequent visitor and collaborator since 1996. He continued to participate in workshops and deliver lectures globally, even attending virtual events post-pandemic.
Notably, he remained a prominent voice in the "New Atheism" movement, alongside figures like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, advocating for a naturalistic understanding of religion. His book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) and his co-authored work Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind (2013) were significant contributions to this area. Despite his retirement from full-time teaching, Dennett's intellectual curiosity and dedication to engaging with complex ideas persisted, and he remained a sought-after speaker and commentator on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to the nature of consciousness, often giving interviews and sharing his insights on evolving scientific and philosophical discussions. His final interviews, given shortly before his death, even touched on his concerns about the future of human civilization in the age of AI.
[As Dennett admits,] a causal indeterminist view of this deliberative kind does not give us everything libertarians have wanted from free will. For [the agent] does not have complete control over what chance images and other thoughts enter his mind or influence his deliberation. They simply come as they please. [The agent] does have some control after the chance considerations have occurred.
But then there is no more chance involved. What happens from then on, how he reacts, is determined by desires and beliefs he already has. So it appears that he does not have control in the libertarian sense of what happens after the chance considerations occur as well. Libertarians require more than this for full responsibility and free will - Robert Kane
Postmodernism, the school of "thought" that proclaimed "There are no truths, only interpretations" has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for "conversations" in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster. - Dennett
References
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Dennett, Daniel C. "Conversion and the poll tax in early Islam". catalog.library.vanderbilt.edu. Archived from the original on October 2, 2022. Retrieved February 10, 2023.
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Dennett, D. C. (1978). Beliefs about Beliefs (commentary on Premack, et al.). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1, pp. 568-70.
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