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.

This position is sometimes referred to as eliminative materialism: the view that consciousness is a property that can be reduced to a strictly mechanical description, and that our experience of consciousness is, as Daniel Dennett describes it, a " user illusion ".

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

Dennett's sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.

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.

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.

is: Daniel Dennett

In Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett argues that a no-free-will conclusion is based on dubious assumptions about the location of consciousness, as well as questioning the accuracy and interpretation of Libet's results.

In his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, philosopher Daniel Dennett is especially critical of Gould's presentation of punctuated equilibrium.

: There is no such thing as philosophy-free science ; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination .— Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995.

Two other books, How the Mind Works ( 1997 ) and The Blank Slate ( 2002 ), broadly surveyed the mind and defended the idea of a complex human nature which comprises many mental faculties that are adaptive ( and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism ).

The term greedy reductionism, coined by Daniel Dennett, is used to criticize inappropriate use of reductionism.

The article is included in the books Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind ( ISBN 0-631-19678-1 ) and A Devil's Chaplain.

* Our common-sense understanding of belief is entirely wrong ; however, treating people, animals, and even computers as if they had beliefs is often a successful strategy-The major proponents of this view, Daniel Dennett and Lynne Rudder Baker, are both eliminativists in that they believe (?

Consciousness Explained is a 1991 book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett which offers an account of how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain.

So, as Dennett wryly notes, he is committed to the belief that we are all zombies — adding that his remark is very much open to misinterpretation.

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.

Cunning and with brilliant ability to flight the ball, Dennett was deadly when the pitch helped him but could be effective even on firm, hard pitches.

In addition, a large number of accessible antitheist and secularist books, many of which have become bestsellers, have been published by authors such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Victor J. Stenger.

Dennett returned to lobbying Congress in 1922, pointing out that private opinion of members of congress must be in favor of birth control since the average number of children of a member of congress was 2. 7.

Advisors to the Secular Coalition for America are Woody Kaplan, chair ; Rob Boston ; Daniel Dennett ; Richard Dawkins ; Bruce Flamm ; Sam Harris ; Jeff Hawkins ; Susan Jacoby ; Wendy Kaminer ; Michael Newdow ; Massimo Pigliucci ; Steven Pinker ; Salman Rushdie ; Ellery Schempp ; Todd Stiefel ; and Julia Sweeney.

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.

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.

While other philosophers have developed two-stage models, including William James, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, and Henry Margenau, Dennett defends this model for the following reasons:

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.

* The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies video interview with Daniel Dennett 2010-03-05 ( with transcript )

* 1907 – George Dennett, aided by Gilbert Jessop, dismisses Northamptonshire for 12 runs, the lowest total in first-class cricket.

Daniel Dennett countered that for some things, such as money, baseball, or consciousness, one cannot have the thing without also having the concept of the thing.

) 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.

Plympton operates the Dennett Elementary School for students from kindergarten through sixth grade.

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

Daniel Dennett and others also provide arguments against this notion, see Mary's room for details.

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.

In this book Daniel Dennett explored what it means for people to have free will.

Since Dennett wrote Elbow Room ( 1984 ) there has been an on-going attempt by some scientists to answer this question by suggesting that the brain is a device for controlling quantum indeterminacy so as to construct behavioral choice.

According to Dennett, belief in free will is a necessary condition for having free will.

As Dennett says, " Skinner proclaimed that one simple iteration of the fundamental Darwinian process — operant conditioning — could account for all mentality, all learning, not just in pigeons but in human beings.

Some writers in the philosophy of mind, most notably Daniel Dennett, have cited the behavior of this animal for their arguments about human and animal free will.

The Comstock laws banned distribution of sex education information, based on the premise that it was obscene and led to promiscuous behavior Mary Ware Dennett was fined $ 300 in 1928, for distributing a pamphlet containing sex education material.

The emergentist multiple drafts principle proposed by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained may be useful for prediction: it involves the evaluation and selection of the most appropriate " draft " to fit the current environment.

" Daniel Dennett, in his book Breaking the Spell, suggests that if non-naturalists are concerned with this connotation of the word bright, then they should invent an equally positive sounding word for themselves, like supers ( i. e., one whose worldview contains supernaturalism ).