Daniel C. Dennett
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View article: Doing and Knowing
Doing and Knowing Open
A naturalistic view of consciousness depends on a naturalistic view of agency, which draws a distinction between things just happening and things doing things. Agents depend on control, which depends on information used by agents to antici…
View article: Review of: "Femmes finales: natural selection, physiology, and the return of the repressed"
Review of: "Femmes finales: natural selection, physiology, and the return of the repressed" Open
Potential competing interests: No potential competing
View article: Comment on “Can memes explain the birth of comprehension?”
Comment on “Can memes explain the birth of comprehension?” Open
View article: Comment on “Affordances in “Dennett’s ‘From Bacteria to Bach and Back’”
Comment on “Affordances in “Dennett’s ‘From Bacteria to Bach and Back’” Open
View article: Comment on “Thinking about Semantic Information”
Comment on “Thinking about Semantic Information” Open
Marcin Milkowski provides an insightful overview of work on information theories over the years, from Gabor and Shannon to Wolpert and Kolchinski.He accurately summarizes my work, distilling four claims that I made in BBB, and argues that …
View article: The Rationale of Rationalization
The Rationale of Rationalization Open
Fiery Cushman argues that “[r]ationalization is designed not to accurately infer unconscious mental states, but to construct new ones; it is not a discovery, but a fiction”. While we agree in broad strokes with the characterization of rati…
View article: Philosophy or Auto-Anthropology?
Philosophy or Auto-Anthropology? Open
Timothy Williamson is mainly right, I think. He defends armchair philosophy as a variety of armchair science, like mathematics, or computer modeling in evolutionary theory, economics, statistics, and I agree that this is precisely what phi…
View article: Facing up to the hard question of consciousness
Facing up to the hard question of consciousness Open
The so-called hard problem of consciousness is a chimera, a distraction from the hard question of consciousness, which is once some content reaches consciousness, ‘then what happens?’. This question is seldom properly asked, for reasons go…
View article: Response to De Caro, Lavazza, Lemos, and Pereboom
Response to De Caro, Lavazza, Lemos, and Pereboom Open
Author's reply to De Caro's, Lavazza's, Lemos', and Pereboom's comments on D.C. Dennett, Reflection on Sam Harris' "Free Will"
View article: Reflections on Sam Harris' "Free Will"
Reflections on Sam Harris' "Free Will" Open
In his book Free Will Sam Harris tries to persuade us to abandon the morally pernicious idea of free will. The following contribution articulates and defends a more sophisticated model of free will that is not only consistent with neurosci…
View article: Haig’s ‘strange inversion of reasoning’ (Dennett) andMaking sense: information interpreted as meaning (Haig)
Haig’s ‘strange inversion of reasoning’ (Dennett) andMaking sense: information interpreted as meaning (Haig) Open
David Haig (this issue) propounds and illustrates the unity of a radically revised set of definitions of the family of terms at the heart of philosophy of cognitive science and mind: information, meaning, interpretation, text, choice, poss…
View article: From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds Open
'Required reading for anyone remotely curious about how they came to be remotely curious' Observer 'Enthralling' Spectator What is human consciousness and how is it possible? These questions fascinate thinking people from poets and painter…
View article: Entropic Brain-computer Interfaces
Entropic Brain-computer Interfaces Open
View article: What is the Bandwidth of Perceptual Experience?
What is the Bandwidth of Perceptual Experience? Open
View article: What is the Bandwidth of Perceptual Experience
What is the Bandwidth of Perceptual Experience Open
View article: How our Belief in Qualia Evolved, and why we Care so much
How our Belief in Qualia Evolved, and why we Care so much Open
David Baßler’s commentary identifies five unasked questions in my work, and provides excellent answers to them. His explanation of the gradual evolution of higher-order intentionality via a Bayesian account leads to an explanation of the p…
View article: Why and How Does Consciousness Seem the Way it Seems?
Why and How Does Consciousness Seem the Way it Seems? Open
Are-expression of some of the troublesome features of my oft-caricatured theory of consciousness, with new emphases, brings out the strengths of the view and shows how it comports with and anticipates the recent introduction of Bayesian ap…