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 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.

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.

Dennett points out the fact that as long as people see themselves as able to avoid futility, most people have seen enough of the free will issue.

Dennett concludes by contemplating the possibility that people might be able to opt in or out of moral responsibility: surely, he suggests, given the benefits, they would choose to opt in, especially given that opting out includes such things as being imprisoned or institutionalized.

In fact, owing to the strength of the competition at the time, Dennett was never able to progress even to lower representative levels.

Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting ( 1984 ) is a book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett, which discusses the philosophical issues of free will and determinism.

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 argues that such efforts to salvage free will by finding a way out of the prison of determinism are wasted.

"</ ref > Although compatibilism, the view that determinism and free will are not logically incompatible, is the most popular position on free will amongst professional philosophers, metaphysical libertarianism is discussed, though not necessarily endorsed, by several philosophers, such as Peter van Inwagen, Robert Kane, Robert Nozick, Carl Ginet, Hugh McCann, Harry Frankfurt, Alfred Mele, Roderick Chisholm, Daniel Dennett, Timothy O ' Connor, Derk Pereboom and Galen Strawson.

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

However, Daniel Dennett, in his book Elbow Room, says that this means we have the only kind of free will " worth wanting ".

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

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

A major task taken on by Dennett in Elbow Room is to clearly describe just what people are as biological entities and why they find the issue of free will to be of significance.

In discussing what people are and why free will matters to us, Dennett makes use of an evolutionary perspective.

Dennett then invites all who are satisfied with this level of analysis to get on with living while he proceeds into the deeper hair-splitting aspects of the free will issue.

It is in this sense of people as animals with complex brains that can model reality and appear to choose among several possible behaviors that Dennett says we have free will.

Dennett discusses many types of free will ( 1984 ).

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.

The type of free will that Dennett thinks we have is finally stated clearly in the last chapter of the book: the power to be active agents, biological devices that respond to our environment with rational, desirable courses of action.

Dennett has slowly, through the course of the book, stripped the idea of behavioral choice from his idea of free will.

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

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.

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 ).

Dennett spends a chapter criticising Robert Kane's theory of libertarian free will.

Dennett finds an essentially indetectable notion of free will to be incredible.

In turn, Daniel Dennett argues in Darwin's Dangerous Idea that this represents a " universal acid " that may be applied to a number of seemingly disparate areas of philosophical inquiry ( consciousness and free will in particular ).