In an essay posted on the Edge website, Dennett gives his firsthand account of his health problems, his consequent feelings of gratitude towards the scientists, cardiologist, surgeons, EMTs, phlebotomists, orderlies, housekeepers, physician assistants, X-ray technicians, meal-bringers, launderers, physical therapists, perfusionist, neurologist, and nurses whose hard work made his recovery possible, and his complete lack of a " deathbed conversion ".

Dennett gives his definition of determinism on page one: All physical events are caused or determined by the sum total of all previous events.

Dennett gives a two part answer to this question.

For example, Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter argue that anything capable of passing the Turing test is necessarily conscious, while David Chalmers argues that a philosophical zombie could pass the test, yet fail to be conscious.

Daniel Dennett, for example, calls Twin Earth and other experiments like it " intuition pumps ", which play on a strong but ultimately illusory intuition.

Dennett, for example, argues in True Believers ( 1981 ) that intentional idiom ( or " folk psychology ") is a predictive strategy and if such a strategy successfully and voluminously predicts the actions of a physical system, then that physical system can be said to have those beliefs attributed to it.

A canonical example of greedy reductionism, labelled as such by Dennett himself, is the ( radical ) behaviorism of B. F. Skinner.

Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett have used this mechanistic behavior as an example of how seemingly thoughtful behavior can actually be quite mindless, the opposite of free will ( or, as Hofstadter described it, sphexishness ).

For example, the Romans believed in the embodiment of luck as the goddess Fortuna, while the philosopher Daniel Dennett believes that " luck is mere luck " rather than a property of a person or thing.

For example, philosopher Daniel Dennett has proposed that humans are genetically predisposed to have a theory of mind because there has been evolutionary selection for the human ability to adopt the intentional stance.

In reality however, other musicians had input to the record, including producer Ian Stanley, with continued playing and songwriting contributions from Neil Sutton and Russell Dennett ; and Oakey co-writing one track with Jo Callis.

Dennett says that he was first introduced to the notion of philosophy while attending summer camp at age 11, when a camp counselor said to him, " You know what you are, Daniel?

Dennett attended Phillips Exeter Academy and spent one year at Wesleyan University before receiving his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Harvard University in 1963, where he was a student of W. V. Quine.

As of January 2012, Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, University Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies ( with Ray Jackendoff ) at Tufts University.

Dennett has remarked in several places ( such as " Self-portrait ", in Brainchildren ) that his overall philosophical project has remained largely the same since his time at Oxford.

* Inside Jokes Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams, Jr at The MIT Press

* Daniel C. Dennett at Internet Movie Database

In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett ' distinguishes between a purely metaphysical sense of epiphenomenalism, in which the epiphenomenon has no causal impact at all, and Huxley's " steam whistle " epiphenomenalism, in which effects exist but are not functionally relevant.

) In 1999, Susan Blackmore, a psychologist at the University of the West of England, published The Meme Machine, which more fully worked out the ideas of Dennett, Lynch, and Brodie and attempted to compare and contrast them with various approaches from the cultural evolutionary mainstream, as well as providing novel, and controversial, memetic-based theories for the evolution of language and the human sense of individual selfhood.

In this understanding of belief, named by Dennett the intentional stance, belief-based explanations of mind and behaviour are at a different level of explanation and are not reducible to those based on fundamental neuroscience, although both may be explanatory at their own level.

Dennett claims that our brains hold only a few salient details about the world, and that this is the only reason we are able to function at all.

Also Dennett says that only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all: « To explain is to explain away ».

On November 30, 2007, he debated Tufts University professor Daniel Dennett at Tufts on whether or not God was a man made invention.

In 1983, Dennett delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford on the topic of free will.

Dennett suggests that we can have another kind of free will, a type of free will which we can be perfectly happy with even if it does not give us the power to act in more than one way at any given time.

Dennett is able to accept determinism and free will at the same time.

Dennett asks us to look around at the universe and ask, can I even conceive of beings whose will is freer than our own?

As Dennett points out, this is only a report of where it seems to the subject that various things come together, not of the objective time at which they actually occur.

In between these games, Gloucestershire arranged his appointment as assistant coach at Clifton College, Bristol, where he worked on his batting technique with former county cricketers John Tunnicliffe and George Dennett.

Dennett discussed this at the end of his book with a section entitled Consciousness Explained or Explained Away?

And Dennett is at times aggravatingly smug and confident about the merits of his arguments [...] All in all Dennett's book is annoying, frustrating, insightful, provocative and above all annoying.

In 1987, Daniel Dennett invited Humphrey to work with him at his Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

It is 11 kilometres north-east of Strabane, on the banks of the Burn Dennett and at the foothills of the Sperrins.

Dennett points out that a chess program can have the attitude of “ wanting to get its queen out early ,” without having a representation or rule that explicitly states this.

Within philosophy familiar names include Daniel Dennett who writes from a computational systems perspective, John Searle known for his controversial Chinese room, Jerry Fodor who advocates functionalism, and Douglas Hofstadter, famous for writing Gödel, Escher, Bach, which questions the nature of words and thought.

Although some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, have disputed the validity of this distinction, others have broadly accepted it.

Theories proposed by neuroscientists such as Gerald Edelman and Antonio Damasio, and by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, seek to explain consciousness in terms of neural events occurring within the brain.

Some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett in an essay titled The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies, argue that people who give this explanation do not really understand what they are saying.

Daniel Dennett has argued for an approach he calls heterophenomenology, which means treating verbal reports as stories that may or may not be true, but his ideas about how to do this have not been widely adopted.

Daniel Dennett provides this extension to the " epiphenomena " argument.

Daniel Clement Dennett ( born March 28, 1942 ) is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.

Dennett is a firm atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement.

Dennett is referred to as one of the " Four Horsemen of New Atheism ", along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut.

Dennett's sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.

Dennett describes himself as " an autodidact — or, more properly, the beneficiary of hundreds of hours of informal tutorials on all the fields that interest me, from some of the world's leading scientists.

While he is a confirmed compatibilist on free will, in " On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want " – Chapter 15 of his 1978 book Brainstorms, Dennett articulated the case for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to libertarian views.

Dennett admits, a causal indeterminist view of this deliberative kind does not give us everything libertarians have wanted from free will.

In his 2006 book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Dennett attempts to subject religious belief to the same treatment, explaining possible evolutionary reasons for the phenomenon of religious adherence.

In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett writes that evolution can account for the origin of morality.

In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett showed himself even more willing than Dawkins to defend adaptationism in print, devoting an entire chapter to a criticism of the ideas of Gould.

This stems from Gould's long-running public debate with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists over human sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary psychology, which Gould and Richard Lewontin opposed, but which Dennett advocated, together with Dawkins and Steven Pinker.