please put your hands together for Daniel dennet can can I ask for the house lights to be put up I'm not an actor I'ma professor I like to I like to see the students eyes I like to see the audience
And we called the up steam drive. Dennett, thank you. Interestingly enough, yesterday on there was a talk about the electric fish.
The Australian philosophers, Ullin Place and David Armstrong, had versions of this that I might touch on a bit later. Daniel Dennett, a leading reductionist thinker about consciousness has been pushing for the last couple of decades the idea that consciousness involves a certain kind of user illusion. And most recently, the British philosopher, Keith Frankish, has been really pushing illusionism as a theory of consciousness.
think of as the everyday sense. And Dennett at one point says, we're all zombies. That is, there is really no inner "what it is like" there at all.
But for many animals, the wrong action may well kill that animal. And Dennett talks about what he calls the tower of generate and test which I want to show you here. It's a really cool breakdown, if you like, way of thinking about intelligence.
I think the idea of Darwinian evolution by natural selection is one of the greatest insights that's ever happened to our species. Dan Dennett calls it a universal acid. And what he means by that is that there is no container you can hold this idea in.
And of course, skyhooks don't exist. Dan Dennett uses them as a metaphor for intelligent design. He says that, essentially, when people say that the human body or the human eye was designed by a creator, they are essentially
That's a very strange theorem. Daniel Dennett has done some work on describing free will as an emergent property of determinism in cellular automata, which
Damien Hirst's reputation is rotting, along with his sharks. Daniel Dennett has a following, but even his followers behave as if their lives have a deeper meaning than plant life, no matter what he says to the countrary. And modern delivery systems are bypassing the critics and gatekeepers.
and which is bad? Daniel Dennett has more advanced ideas in his book, "Consciousness Explained." And I think I better not go on too much with that.
No, actually, on the issue, as it were, that narrative conception of the self being very much a construction, I actually deeply agree with Dennett, and I think he's very subtle and interesting about that. But I really like to restrict it as much as possible to the really basic issue, which is just qualia.
Right? OK. OK. Yeah. So back to Dennett, he was here, and I'd directly confronted him about this. Oh. I didn't know that.
And I'm going to show you another way of thinking about intelligence which I particularly like. And this is Dan Dennett's tower of generate and test. So in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and several other books, I think, Dan Dennett suggests that a good way
But certainly there are plenty of animals that are capable in some form of modeling their world and, as it were, imagining actions before trying them out. And just to complete Dennett's tower, he adds another layer that he calls Gregorian creatures. Here's he's naming this layer after Richard Gregory, the British psychologist.
looking for the authenticity and the original thing. This is a point that Dan Dennett, the philosopher, pointed out, that when you're dealing with machinery and technology, you tend to adopt an intentional stance.
Now, of course, all animals on the planet are Darwinian creatures, including ourselves. But a subset of what Dennett calls Skinnerian creatures. So Skinnerian creatures are able to generate a next possible candidate action, if you like,
That's a very strange theorem. I'd love to meet Daniel Dennett.
That's a very strange theorem. I know-- I think Daniel Dennett has seen the paper because I certainly spoke to him a fair bit about it.
that allows a system to look ahead to the future consequences of actions without committing itself to those actions. I don't know whether John Holland was aware of Dennett's tower. Possibly not. But really saying the same kind of thing as Dan Dennett.
That's a very strange theorem. If you could comment on your thoughts about either Dennett.
Steve: I've put the brain-mind question to dozens of people in my interviews and I've gotten lots of different answers. Even prominent atheists are all over the map on the question of consciousness. Unlike Dennett, Richard Dawkins told me, and I quote, "Consciousness is the biggest puzzle facing biology, neurobiology, computational studies and evolutionary biology. It is a very, very big problem." Steven Pinker, the well-known cognitive psychologist, does not think science will ever figure out how the mind works by studying neurons and brain
I've spoken to animal trainers who notice that they can't make any progress artificial intelligence research program I think in a way as Daniel Dennett has argued some of the some of the most
We've kind of come out of a period of time where the new atheism is very very popular. You had Dawkins, Daniel uh Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, uh Christopher Hitchens. And they made a big impact in the early 2000s. I think we should probably just give some color to what new atheism is.
a word is to use it in such a way that whatever one means by it, it excludes what it actually means. And from where I stand, Dan Dennett has done exactly that. He has looking-glassed the word consciousness.
So just to remind you, here are the two views, put in terms of whether attention promotes One of my opponents, Daniel Dennett, has used that to caricature my position.
So there's the action selection, if you like. So really, I'm kind of following Dennett's model. I'm really interested in building Popperian creatures.
And this is the way that science proceeds. And I am impatient with people like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris or Daniel Dennett who try to disprove
And we called the up steam drive. It's not Dawkins, it's Dennett.
There have been these big books, I mean Dennett and Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchins and many others.
He famously says, look, in his reply to me, I can read you some quotations. He says, and I quote, Dennett, "I don't deny the existence of consciousness. Of course consciousness exists.
I don't know whether John Holland was aware of Dennett's tower. Possibly not. But really saying the same kind of thing as Dan Dennett. Now before I come on to the work that I've been doing, I want to show you some examples of-- a few examples,
So here's a kind of generic internal modeling architecture for safety. So this is, in fact, Dennett's loop of generate and test. So the idea is that we have an internal model, which is a self-simulation, that is initialized to match the current real world.
the brain? And second, will brain science ever be able to explain how the mind works? I've asked lots of people these questions and here's an excerpt from my interview with the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who makes the argument for a materialist view of consciousness. Daniel: Well, there's lots of puzzles and there aren't any mysteries. I don't think we have any truly, mind boggling, perplexities. There's plenty of very hard problems out there,
>Daniel: Well, so we'll have to do that, too. But I think we're making good progress on that, too. We can't do that now. Might we do that in the future? Certainly. Steve: Ken Wilber is a very different kind of philosopher. Unlike the reductionism of Dan Dennett, Wilber embraces what he calls an integral philosophy; a theory of consciousness with an explicitly spiritual dimension. He says a materialist understanding of consciousness simply doesn't get you anywhere.
lately there's a lot of religious questions or conclusions being drawn. And it sounds like they're very different from the questions and conclusions of the people that you interviewed, of, most prominently, Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, I really think a lot of that is a reaction to 9/11 and they will say that. In effect, Sam Harris
I was at Tufts University for 16 years as the University Chaplain, Dan Dennett was a professor there, we used to have lunch together and
OK. Look, I'm just going to stop, and I'm going to hope someone has some objection, or tells me I'm all wrong or something. Yeah, good. that. I've read some Dennet , and he was here a while back, and I heard him talk. And I don't necessarily feel qualified to like, state his position.
But I won't. So can we keep to that? Do you think you can give a really like, precise definition of like, how-- are you and Dennet using the same definition for that term qualia?
Christopher Hitchens, why God poisons everything, et cetera, et cetera, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris.
Because I would say that-- I mean, I don't know whether any of you know, but I wrote a piece last month on "The New York Review" blog about the silliest claims, a denial of consciousness, and Dennett replied about 10 days ago. And then I replied to him.
And this is Dan Dennett's tower of generate and test. So in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and several other books, I think, Dan Dennett suggests that a good way of thinking about intelligence is to think about the fact that all animals, including ourselves, need to decide what actions to take.
by trial and error, individually learn by trial and error. Now, the third layer, or story, if you like, in Dennett's tower, he calls Popperian creatures, after, obviously, the philosopher, Karl Popper. And Popperian creatures have a big advantage over Darwinians and Skinnerians in that they have an internal model of themselves in the world.
Welcome everybody. It's our pleasure to have with us at Google today, Daniel Dennett.
smart people. You've got Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, , Ali . And this as I said is a book written by a really stupid atheist.
Various polls show that roughly half of all Americans believe the Earth is no more than ten thousand years old, and three quarters of Americans say the Bible is the word of God. This may be partly a reaction to comments by certain atheists, for instance the philosopher Daniel Dennett has talked about Darwinism as a kind of universal asset; it eats away at everything it touches including, in his view, God as creator. To me, the biggest intellectual challenge that the theory of evolution poses to religion has nothing to do with the story
century, from public atheists in Europe and America such as scientists Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, philosopher Dan Dennett -- when
talk about these issues. I actually thought he was a closet Buddhist but he never accepted that. But, anyway, philosopher Dan Dennett, journalist