Free will vs Determinism While he was 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 Compton, and
Henry Margenau, Dennett defended this model for the following reasons: Leading libertarian philosophers such as
Robert Kane have rejected Dennett's model, specifically that random chance is directly involved in a decision, on the basis that they believe this eliminates the agent's motives and reasons,
character and
values, and feelings and
desires. They claim that, if chance is the primary cause of decisions, then agents cannot be liable for resultant actions. Kane says:
Mind Dennett is a proponent of
materialism in the
philosophy of mind. He argues that mental states, including consciousness, are entirely the result of physical processes in the brain. In his book
Consciousness Explained (1991), Dennett presents his arguments for a materialist understanding of consciousness, rejecting
Cartesian dualism in favor of a physicalist perspective. Dennett remarked in several places (such as "Self-portrait", in
Brainchildren) that his overall philosophical project remained largely the same from his time at Oxford onwards. He was primarily concerned with providing a philosophy of mind that is grounded in
empirical research. In his original
dissertation,
Content and Consciousness, he broke up the problem of explaining the mind into the need for a theory of content and for a theory of consciousness. His approach to this project also stayed true to this distinction. Just as
Content and Consciousness has a bipartite structure, he similarly divided
Brainstorms into two sections. He would later collect several essays on content in
The Intentional Stance and synthesize his views on consciousness into a unified theory in
Consciousness Explained. These volumes respectively form the most extensive development of his views. In chapter 5 of
Consciousness Explained, Dennett described his
multiple drafts model of consciousness. In this model, various streams of information-processing compete for "cerebral celebrity" at any given moment. Central to this theory is the metaphor of the "Joycean machine," which describes human consciousness as a Virtual Machine, a serial software layer composed of language and habits (memes) running on the highly parallel hardware of the biological brain. By this logic, Dennett argues that the "Self" is not a physical organ or a soul, but a "Center of Narrative Gravity"—a useful fiction that the brain constructs to make sense of its own behavior to itself and others. Dennett's strategy mirrored his teacher Ryle's approach of redefining first-person phenomena in third-person terms, and denying the coherence of the concepts which this approach struggles with. Dennett self-identified with a few terms: In
Consciousness Explained, he affirmed "I am a sort of '
teleofunctionalist', of course, perhaps the original teleofunctionalist". He went on to say, "I am ready to come out of the closet as some sort of
verificationist." (pp. 460–61). Dennett was credited with inspiring
false belief tasks used in developmental psychology. He noted that when four-year-olds watch the
Punch and Judy puppet show, they laugh because they know that they know more about what's going on than one of the characters does:
Evolutionary debate Much of Dennett's work from the 1990s onwards was concerned with fleshing out his previous ideas by addressing the same topics from an evolutionary standpoint, ranging from what distinguishes human minds from animal minds (
Kinds of Minds), Dennett saw evolution by natural selection as an
algorithmic process (though he spelt out that algorithms as simple as
long division often incorporate a significant degree of
randomness). This idea is in conflict with the evolutionary philosophy of
paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who preferred to stress the "pluralism" of evolution (i.e., its dependence on many crucial factors, of which natural selection is only one). Dennett's views on evolution are identified as being strongly
adaptationist, in line with his theory of the
intentional stance, and the evolutionary views of
biologist Richard Dawkins. In ''Darwin's Dangerous Idea'', Dennett showed himself even more willing than Dawkins to defend adaptationism in print, devoting an entire chapter to a criticism of the ideas of Gould. This stems from Gould's long-running public debate with
E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists over human
sociobiology and its descendant
evolutionary psychology, which Gould and
Richard Lewontin opposed, but which Dennett advocated, together with Dawkins and
Steven Pinker. Gould argued that Dennett overstated his claims and misrepresented Gould's, to reinforce what Gould describes as Dennett's "Darwinian fundamentalism".
Religion and morality Dennett was a vocal
atheist and
secularist, a member of the
Secular Coalition for America advisory board, and a member of the
Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, as well as an outspoken supporter of the
Brights movement. Dennett was referred to as one of the "
Four Horsemen of
New Atheism", along with
Richard Dawkins,
Sam Harris, and the late
Christopher Hitchens. in July 2017. In ''
Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett wrote that evolution can account for the origin of morality. He rejected the idea that morality being natural to us implies that we should take a skeptical position regarding ethics, noting that what is fallacious in the naturalistic fallacy is not to support values per se, but rather to rush'' from facts to values. In his 2006 book,
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Dennett attempted to account for religious belief naturalistically, explaining possible evolutionary reasons for the phenomenon of religious adherence. In this book he declared himself to be "
a bright", and defended the term. He did research into clerics who are secretly atheists and how they rationalize their works. He found what he called a "don't ask, don't tell" conspiracy because believers did not want to hear of loss of faith. This made unbelieving preachers feel isolated, but they did not want to lose their jobs and church-supplied lodgings. Generally, they consoled themselves with the belief that they were doing good in their pastoral roles by providing comfort and required ritual. The research, with Linda LaScola, was further extended to include other denominations and non-Christian clerics. The research and stories Dennett and LaScola accumulated during this project were published in their 2013 co-authored book,
Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind.
Memetics, postmodernism and deepity Dennett wrote about and advocated the notion of
memetics as a philosophically useful tool, his last work on this topic being his "Brains, Computers, and Minds", a three-part presentation through Harvard's MBB 2009 Distinguished Lecture Series. Dennett was critical of
postmodernism, having said: Dennett adopted and somewhat redefined the term "deepity", originally coined by Miriam Weizenbaum. Dennett used "deepity" for a statement that has two meanings: one that is true but trivial, and another that sounds profound and would be important if true, but is actually false or meaningless. Examples are "Que será será!", "Beauty is only skin deep!", "The power of intention can transform your life."
Artificial intelligence While approving of the increase in efficiency that humans reap by using resources such as expert systems in medicine or GPS in navigation, Dennett saw a danger in machines performing an ever-increasing proportion of basic tasks in perception, memory, and algorithmic computation because people may tend to anthropomorphize such systems and attribute intellectual powers to them that they do not possess. He believed the relevant danger from
artificial intelligence (AI) is that people will misunderstand the nature of basically "parasitic" AI systems, rather than employing them constructively to challenge and develop the human user's powers of comprehension. In the 1990s, Dennett collaborated with a group of computer scientists at
MIT to attempt to develop a humanoid, conscious robot, named "
Cog". Although acknowledging that it is "possible in principle" to create AI with human-like comprehension and agency, Dennett maintained that the difficulties of any such "
strong AI" project would be orders of magnitude greater than those raising concerns have realized. Dennett believed, as of the book's publication in 2017, that the prospect of
superintelligence (AI massively exceeding the cognitive performance of humans in all domains) was at least 50 years away, and of far less pressing significance than other problems the world faces.
Realism Dennett was known for his nuanced stance on realism. While he supported
scientific realism, advocating that entities and phenomena posited by scientific theories exist independently of our perceptions, he leant towards instrumentalism concerning certain theoretical entities, valuing their explanatory and predictive utility, as showing in his discussion of
real patterns. Dennett's pragmatic realism underlines the entanglement of language, consciousness, and reality. He posited that our discourse about reality is mediated by our cognitive and linguistic capacities, marking a departure from
Naïve realism.
Realism and instrumentalism Dennett's philosophical stance on realism was intricately connected to his views on instrumentalism and the theory of real patterns. In discussing intentional states, Dennett posited that they should not be thought of as resembling theoretical entities, but rather as logical constructs, avoiding the pitfalls of intentional realism without lapsing into pure instrumentalism or even eliminativism. His instrumentalism and anti-realism were crucial aspects of his view on intentionality, emphasizing the centrality and indispensability of the intentional stance to our conceptual scheme. ==Recognition==