Dennett

According to available research, Americans hold atheists suspect more than any other group, including Muslims, and homosexuals. Americans tend to identify atheists as ‘other,’ associating them with immorality and selfi sh indulgence. Moreover, since common wisdom holds that religion is a source for morality, many believe that children are better served by being raised in a religious environment. Atheists
whose voices have become increasingly present in popular culture, however, are challenging this perception, both indirectly and directly. Th e following work draws particular attention to the recent birth of atheist parenting literature, which implicitly challenges the broader American public’s many assumptions. Moreover, in a kind of reversal, the literature explicitly critiques religious approaches to parenting, a minority of which (Richard Dawkins, for example) expresses concern that religious indoctrination harms children.

In particular, this work tests the prevailing wisdom about the diff erences between atheist and Christian approaches to parenting. Unsurprisingly, I find thatChristians aim to develop their children into faithful followers of God,while atheists aim to develop their children into rational free-thinkers who disdain dogmatism. Th e signifi cant discovery, however, is that
while the overarching aim of these parenting approaches is fundamentally different, the moral qualities which both seek to instill in their children are virtually identical. In short, both Christian and atheist parenting approaches are enthusiastically committed to instilling in their children a deep appreciation of honesty, consideration of others, and honest living. Finally, this chapter also shows that emerging
leaders within the atheist movement generally are highly critical of the ridicule and abuse of religion exerted by the new atheists specifically.

This chapter questions the reductionist assumption that bits of lifeless matter must have grouped themselves into complex patterns that eventually became living conscious beings. There is no decisive reason to question Peirce’s suggestion that mind came first and that mechanical causality emerges when regions of a fundamentally conscious universe settle into deterministic habits. If we define consciousness in a way that ignores clearly accidental properties such as looking and behaving like us, some form of panpsychism is not only possible but plausible. Ignoring this possibility could cause us to subconsciously exclude legitimate avenues of research.

This paper is primarily focused on William Lane Craig's article The Absurdity of Life without God. The main focus is on challenging Craig on the grounds that 1) his assumption that moral relativism necessarily entails nihilism simply does not follow and 2) that the conditions he advances as necessary for `objective meaning' are in fact both counter-intuitive and too strict. I offer an alternative conception of `objective meaning' that draws on Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument and on MacDowell's well known essay Values as Secondary Qualities.

Exploration of INTERSUBJECTIVITY is continued. Different kinds of if are differentiated and signs for its presence and effects are shown. The difference between it, subjectivity and objectivity are explored.
Intersubjectivity is crucial and universal for general everyday discourse in all cultures, sub-cultures, institutions, communities and socio-cultural practices such as religion, sport, etc or the so-called Manifest Image. It is essential for specialized areas, for example religion, sport and disciplines such as the humanities, arts, sciences, philosophy and all institutions.
It is a necessity for both cultural, social, interpersonal as well as intra-personal existence, emotions, attitudes, values and norms. But, it is not limited to human existence, life-worlds, realities and worlds, but also for animals and all organisms. Object Oriented Ontology would emphasize that is it not merely something anthropocentric and restricted to human existence and consciousness (and anthropocentric interpretations of and projections on other objects, non-human creatures and all organisms, as well as all objects.. In the case of the latter one would probably replace the notion of intersubjectivity with terms such as energy and other ways of action and interaction for example intra- and inter-atoms.)
In the Appendix is included work related to the above by others such as Sellars, Brandom (and his two images, Manifest and Scientific), Davidson, Dennett, Habermas, Nagel, etc.

Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in
contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive
sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental
philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund
Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick
M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s
Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun
Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall
review recent discussions of intentionality, including some recent explora-
tions of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm),
and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and
Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and
consciousness.

Por más de medio siglo Daniel Dennett ha estado a la vanguardia de la filosofía de la mente, de las ciencias cognitivas y de la biología evolutiva. En su obra podemos encontrar cómo ha utilizado las mejores herramientas (o thinking tools, como las llamaría él [Dennett, 2013]) de dichas disciplinas para abor-dar temas como lo son la naturaleza de la conciencia (Dennett, 1991), la evolución de la mente (Dennett, 1996) y la posibilidad del libre albedrío en un universo determinista (Dennett, 2003). En su último libro, Dennett (2017) nos invita de nuevo a poner en uso sus bombas de intuición (Dennett, 2013) y extrañas inversiones del razo-namiento (Dennett, 2009; 2013b) para lograr transformar los misterios de la mente en problemas. Estos últimos, a diferencia de los primeros, ofrecen al menos una posibilidad de resolución. Como se podría esperar de un libro con dichas aspiraciones, el material que re-toma no sólo es inmenso sino también ecléctico. Por el anterior motivo, la presente reseña da un bird-eye view del argumento que da cabida a la aliteración del título. Pero en lugar de partir de las bacterias, llegar a Bach y regresar, co-menzaremos desde el proceso ciego de la evolución por medio de la selección natural, llegando hasta la mente humana y, como propone Dennett, regresaremos de nuevo al punto de partida.

Darwinian atheists ridicule the “God of the Gaps” argument, claiming that it is theology and/or metaphysics masquerading as science. This is true as far as it goes, but Darwinian atheism relies on an argument which is equally metaphysical, which I call the “No Gaps, No God” argument. This atheist argument is metaphysical because it relies on a kind of conceptual necessity, rather than scientific observations or experiments. “No Gaps No God” is a much better metaphysical argument than “God of the Gaps,” because the latter is based on a clearly false conditional inference. However, there are also good, but not decisive, arguments against the “No Gaps No God” argument. Because metaphysical arguments never resolve as decisively as scientific research questions, there will probably always be a legitimate controversy at the metaphysical level on this topic, even though there is no serious controversy about Darwinian science itself. If this fact were more widely acknowledged, it could help to defuse the controversy over teaching Darwin in thepublic schools

A Memética é, então, a ciência que estuda como memes se propagam. O que a genética faz com os genes, a Memética faz com os memes. Ou, mais precisamente, o que a genética de populações e a epidemiologia fazem com as informações genéticas, a Memética faz com as informações culturais. O ponto a ser discutido então é apenas se os modelos matemáticos aplicados na primeira podem também ser usados na segunda. Isso, é claro, levanta enormes problemas. Será que a cultura realmente pode ser dividida em unidades de informação? De que são feitos os memes? Como eles são passados? Como saber se eles foram realmente passados ou não? O que determina que um meme vai infectar a mente de uma pessoa e de outra não? Quem manda no meu comportamento sou eu ou meus memes? Eu posso escolher quais memes vão me infectar? Utilizar modelos biológicos para tratar a cultura não seria reducionista e mecanicista? [...] É com este espírito que o livro foi escrito. Mas, antes de tudo, é um livro de divulgação científica. Pretende dar ao leitor a fundamentação filosófica e científica para discutir os conceitos aqui tratados. Pode, então, ser lido por um não-filósofo que só sabe de biologia aquilo que aprendeu na escola

Aqui pretendo defender que o conceito de consciência de Daniel Dennett é incompleto, pois é constituído de uma teoria falaciosa, a saber, os memes. Para Dennett a consciência humana não passa de coleção de memes a formar uma máquina virtual que roda na arquitetura paralela de nossos cérebros. Penso que os memes não são uma analogia correta com os genes em um aspecto relevante. Por isso, defenderei que se os memes não podem dar explicação evolucionista correta à cultura humana, tão pouco, podem formar um conceito de consciência correto.

Hornsby 2000 defiende una interpretación muy particular de la distinción personal-subpersonal tal como fue propuesta por Dennett 1969 y de la doctrina filosófica en la que está enraizada esta distinción. Según Hornsby de la aceptación de la distinción y la doctrina se sigue una defensa de la autonomía explicativa del nivel personal. Esta defensa nos compromete con (a) un nivel personal genuino de explicación y (b) la idea de que los hechos subpersonales no explican hechos personales. Hornsby sostiene, además, que mientras que en Dennett 1969 se defiende la autonomía del nivel explicativo personal, en Dennett post-1969 al modificarse la doctrina de base cambia la manera de entender la distinción y con ello se reniega de ambos compromisos, de lo cual se sigue un abandono de la tesis de la autonomía del nivel explicativo personal. La tesis que vamos a sostener en este trabajo es que si bien la distinción de Dennett 1969 nos compromete con (a), no nos compromete con (b). Dado que una defensa de la autonomía explicativa del nivel personal, tal como Hornsby la entiende, abarca ambos compromisos, se sigue que no hay tal defensa. En consecuencia, si bien hay algunas cuestiones que en Dennett 1969 no se plantean de manera tan explícita y clara como en Dennett post-1969, no hay un cambio sustancial en la concepción de la distinción.

The author asserts that if there is no God, then fifty-five absurdities follow such as: humans possess no unique value, there is no objective morality, human life has no meaning or purpose. Without a transcendent standard or source, one's pursuits and values are simply delusions characteristic of the human species.

The information required for the intricate complexity of the universe, from nothing or chaos to life on earth and the structure of the cosmos, has no contributor in the absence of a transcendent intelligence.

In the year of his death in 1955, the revered scientist Albert Einstein clarified his formerly ambiguous views: "My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God" from Calaprice, ed., The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, (Princeton, 2010), p.325.

In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett claims that evolution is algorithmic. On Dennett’s analysis, evolutionary processes are trivially algorithmic because he assumes that all natural processes are algorithmic. I will argue that there are more robust ways to understand algorithmic processes that make the claim that evolution is algorithmic empirical and not conceptual. While laws of nature can be seen as compression algorithms of information about the world, it does not follow logically that they are implemented as algorithms by physical processes. For that to be true, the processes have to be part of computational systems. The basic difference between mere simulation and real computing is having proper causal structure. I will show what kind of requirements this poses for natural evolutionary processes if they are to be computational.

Bewustzijn is het subjectief kader waarbinnen we kiezen. Het is geëvolueerd als een soort dashboard en dat verklaart ook waarom we ons niet van alles bewust zijn wat in ons brein gebeurt. "Net zoals het van levensbelang is dat de representaties van ons wereldbeeldapparaat soms aansluiten bij structuren in de ware wereld, zo moeten onze belevingen soms aansluiten bij onze belangen en die van onze zelfzuchtige genen".

Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review recent discussions of intentionality, including some recent explora- tions of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm), and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness.

Note liminaire : La machine à écrire l'esprit est le chapitre 7 de mon essai L’époque critique de l’écriture. Certains diront, aujourd’hui en 2021, qu’il est l’expression de la pensée occidentale, blanche, coloniale, hégémonique qui, au prétexte de l’universalité, prétend coloniser les esprits. Que ces esprits s’y frottent pour voir…

Preliminary note: Mind writing machine is chapter 7 of my essay The Critical Era of Writing. Today in 2021 some will say it is the expression of Western, white, colonial, hegemonic thought which claims, on the pretext of universality, to colonize the minds. Let these spirits rub against it, just to see what’s going on…

Je tente de montrer comment la question de Heidegger - l’arraisonnement de la  nature - devient, via Dreyfus, celle de la technique de l’esprit, puis, via les réseaux, celle des technologies de l’esprit - l’arraisonnement de l’esprit -, et enfin, via Derrida, celle de l’arraisonnement de l’arraisonnement, tout cela grâce au « don » des créatures grégoriennes récursives que nous sommes, et toujours sous la condition de l’écriture qui est notre condition. 

L’idée-problème de « l’avance de la conscience » se retourne-t-elle contre elle-même ? La conscience que je décrivais dans les chapitres précédents comme étant en avance sur les procédures automatiques et non conscientes que le scientifique décèle invariablement sur son plan de référence, celle qui anticipe et planifie, serait-elle à son tour devancée par les inscriptions symboliques scellées dans sa matière ? Le plan d’immanence a-t-il désormais une infrastructure scripturale, grammatologique qui consacre une division menaçante : la partie de mon cerveau / le moment de mon esprit qui écrit est en avance sur celle / celui qui sent ou pense et davantage sur celle / celui qui parle. L’écriture sature la question de l’esprit, voici l’épreuve de ce type d’essai, inévitable selon les prémisses de Derrida et de Dennett qui font de la culture une « machine à écrire l’esprit ». Mais nous devrons avoir à l’esprit que la première machine à écrire l’esprit, celle de Turing, est une machine infinie et, comme Deleuze, que c’est une bonne nouvelle : « le sens n’est jamais principe et origine, il est produit ».

Following recent work by Don Ross (Ross, 2000; Ross & Spurrett, 2004), I contrast the influential theories of Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland in information-theoretic terms. Dennett makes much of the fact that the morphological shorthand which emerges before a witness as she looks upon cohesive aggregates of matter commands some measure of predictive power. This, for him, speaks against eliminating recourse to an intentional vocabulary. By contrast, the eliminative materialism defended by Churchland does not gloss such informational compressibility as an explanatory desideratum, and thus regards the informational noise which accrues at higher levels of description as patently unacceptable. Yet, since it is unlikely, as Ross et al. (2007) have recently suggested, that anything remains once we subtract the appeal to patterns, I argue that the ubiquity of informational compression in scientific explanation seriously undermines the claim that talk of the mental could be eliminated.

I briefly review the three basic strategies for naturalizing intentionality discussed by Haugeland (1990), and Hutto and Satne (this volume), recounting their deficits. Then, I focus on Dennett’s version of what Haugeland calls the “second-base … neo-behaviorist” strategy. After briefly explaining Dennett’s proposal, I defend it against four common objections: circularity, relativity, under-specified rationality, and failure to track robustly natural facts. I conclude by recounting the advantages of Dennettian neo-behaviorism over the neo-Cartesian and neo-pragmatist alternatives, as well as Hutto and Satne’s proposal that intentionality comes in two distinct kinds.

Key Words:

Intentionality, naturalization, Dennett, neo-Cartesianism, neo-pragmatism, neo-behaviorism, intentional stance, natural selection, Haugeland, Hutto and Satne

"Representation" is one of those Janus-faced terms that seems blatantly obvious when used in a casual or pre-theoretic manner, but which reveals itself far more slippery when attentively studied. Any allusion to "metarepresentation," it would then seem, only compounds these difficulties. Taking the metarepresentationalist framework in its roughest outline as our point of departure, we shall instead try to articulate four key "structural" features that appear binding for any such theory.

Dennett characterizes his approach as to how intentional terms (those for the so called propositional attitudes) work as a “holistic logical behaviorism,” or a holistic version of some of Ryle’s (1949) conceptual remarks. This paper examines possible contributions and disadvantages of Dennett’s approach, as well as the consequences of this proposal in relation to the employment of intentional terms in psychology. It is argued that Dennett’s approach does not turn out to be more accurate than his predecessor’s, since the mentalistic dimension he adds to the latter is erroneous. Accordingly, Dennett’s contributions and related proposal should be understood without their mentalism dimension. A non-mentalistic alternative, based upon Skinner’s selectionist model, for eventually adopting intentional terms in psychology is briefly discussed.

English Abstract
Moral personhood depends on both embodied and social aspects of human existence. I argue, with Aristotle, that a person has the capacity to do the right or wrong action, only if he or she is capable of using practical wisdom, phronesis. Appealing to recent research in neuroscience, developmental psychology, and phenomenology, I propose a model of moral personhood that relies on an interactive conception of embodied intersubjectivity.

French Abstract: Le statut de personne morale d épend de l ’inscription corporelle
aussi bien que sociale de l ’existence humaine. Il soutient, avec Aristote, que quel-
qu’un peut r éaliser une bonne ou une mauvaise action seulement s ’il est capable
de mettre en oeuvre la sagesse pratique, la phronèsis. Dans une perspective con-
temporaine inspirée de la recherche en neurosciences, en psychologie du d évelop-
pement et en ph énoménologie, il propose un mod èle de personnalit é morale qui
requiert une conception interactive de l ’intersubjectivité incarnée. La rationalit é
en cause ici est d ’ordre pratique, caract érisée par une conscience de soi pr éré-
flexive, émotivement inform ée par des r ésonances partag ées, endog ènes à nos
propres syst èmes d ’action. La capacit é de l ’agent moral est pr écisément cette
capacité à agir d’après une saisie intuitive qui se passe au fond de soi-m ême, mais
qui est compl ètement imbriqu ée dans ses relations avec les autres.

This book brings together eminent and rising scholars from religious studies, science, sociology of religion, sociology of science, philosophy, and theology in order to engage the new atheism and place it in the context of broader debates in these areas. Contributors include Richard Harries, Reza Aslan, Amarnath Amarasingam, Robert Platzner, Jeffrey Robbins, Christopher Rodkey, Rory Dickson, Steve Fuller, William Sims Bainbridge, William A. Stahl, Stephen Bullivant, Michael Borer, Richard Cimino, Christopher Smith, Gregory R. Peterson, Jeff Nall, Ryan Falcioni, and Mark Vernon. Follow the book on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Religion-and-the-New-Atheism/127586963983385

Exploration of INTERSUBJECTIVITY is continued. Different kinds of if are differentiated and signs for its presence and effects are shown. The difference between it, subjectivity and objectivity are explored. Intersubjectivity is crucial and universal for general everyday discourse in all cultures, sub-cultures, institutions, communities and socio-cultural practices such as religion, sport, etc or the so-called Manifest Image. It is essential for specialized areas, for example religion, sport and disciplines such as the humanities, arts, sciences, philosophy and all institutions. It is a necessity for both cultural, social, interpersonal as well as intra-personal existence, emotions, attitudes, values and norms. But, it is not limited to human existence, life-worlds, realities and worlds, but also for animals and all organisms. Object Oriented Ontology would emphasize that is it not merely something anthropocentric and restricted to human existence and consciousness (and anthropocentric interpretations of and projections on other objects, non-human creatures and all organisms, as well as all objects.. In the case of the latter one would probably replace the notion of intersubjectivity with terms such as energy and other ways of action and interaction for example intra- and inter-atoms.) In the Appendix is included work related to the above by others such as Sellars, Brandom (and his two images, Manifest and Scientific), Davidson, Dennett, Habermas, Nagel, etc.

Exploration of INTERSUBJECTIVITY is continued. Different kinds of if are differentiated and signs for its presence and effects are shown. The difference between it, subjectivity and objectivity are explored. Intersubjectivity is crucial and universal for general everyday discourse in all cultures, sub-cultures, institutions, communities and socio-cultural practices such as religion, sport, etc or the so-called Manifest Image. It is essential for specialized areas, for example religion, sport and disciplines such as the humanities, arts, sciences, philosophy and all institutions. It is a necessity for both cultural, social, interpersonal as well as intra-personal existence, emotions, attitudes, values and norms. But, it is not limited to human existence, life-worlds, realities and worlds, but also for animals and all organisms. Object Oriented Ontology would emphasize that is it not merely something anthropocentric and restricted to human existence and consciousness (and anthropocentric interpretations of and projections on other objects, non-human creatures and all organisms, as well as all objects.. In the case of the latter one would probably replace the notion of intersubjectivity with terms such as energy and other ways of action and interaction for example intra- and inter-atoms.) In the Appendix is included work related to the above by others such as Sellars, Brandom (and his two images, Manifest and Scientific), Davidson, Dennett, Habermas, Nagel, etc.