) 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.

Dennett also suggests that adherence to high ethical standards might pay off for the individual, because if others know your behaviour is restricted in these ways, the scope for certain beneficial mutual arrangements is enhanced.

Hamilton, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett being frequent examples ) have over-emphasized the power of natural selection to shape individual traits to an evolutionary optimum, and ignored the role of developmental constraints, and other factors to explain extant morphological and behavioural traits.

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.

Dennett says that, when the dualism is removed, what remains of Descartes ' original model amounts to imagining a tiny theater in the brain where a homunculus ( small person ), now physical, performs the task of observing all the sensory data projected on a screen at a particular instant, making the decisions and sending out commands.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ).

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.

A year after Consciousness Explained was published, Dennett noted " I wish in retrospect that I'd been more daring, since the effects are stronger than I claimed ".

In 1926, Dennett retired from the game to take up cricket coaching, though he did play three games for the county in August that year.

Dennett asks how we could see the light change colour before the second light is observed.

Objection: Daniel Dennett argues that Mary would not, in fact, learn something new if she stepped out of her black and white room to see the colour red.

Dennett asserts that if she already truly knew " everything about colour ", that knowledge would necessarily include a deep understanding of why and how human neurology causes us to sense the " qualia " of color.

While working with Catt, she met other social activists, including Mary Dennett and Margaret Sanger.

The main difference between Blackmore ’ s replication of the meme and Dennett ’ s ... was that Blackmore dropped the intentional stance even as she kept its active interpretation.

Dennett feared the negative effect that her involuntary notoriety might have on the organizations she worked with and considered resigning from the Twilight Sleep Association.

Later, Dennett became disillusioned with NAWSA after an unsuccessful attempt to reorganize to be more effective and what she saw as wasteful decisions overly influenced by wealthy donors.

Mary Ware Dennett captured the attention of the public and media for her sex education pamphlet, “ The Sex Side of Life .” Dennett wrote it in 1915 to educate her sons, because she was unable to find any adequate books on the subject.

According to Dennett, consciousness is to be found in the actions and flows of information from place to place, rather than some singular view containing our experience.

Dennett sees this argument as misleading, arguing that consciousness is not to be found in a specific part of the system, but in the actions of the whole.

In 1965 Mike Gray and Jim Dennett co found " Film Group ; a Chicago film production company.