Dennett

Daniel Dennett

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    Religious Stance

    A staunch, and somewhat aggressive atheist, Dennett has been lumped together with the likes of Richard Dawking, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens and labeled as the "Four Horseman of the New Atheism". To the extent he claims in the debate between evolution and crationism, that "one needn’t always counter a theory with a theory. We won’t need a theory of clairvoyance, for instance, if we can confirm the hypothesis that all apparent clairvoyants are cheats".
  • Brainstorms

    Brainstorms
    In 1981, Daniel Dennett published his first major work. A collection of seventeen essays, he began to weigh in with his thoughts on human consciousness and free will. Even though philosophy of the mind was an emerging area of study, Dennett proved an immediate impact and opened the flood gates on the study of the human mind.
  • Cog

    Cog
    In 1993, Dennett joined a team from MIT on the Cog Project, to create what they called a Humanoid Robot. The idea was to create an artificial infancy for a machine in hopes it would gradually gain skills and intelligence. Some cognitive behaviors would have been "hardwired" but the thinking was that Cog would eventually teach itself to protect itself and to search out it's "mother's" face. Certainly the technology was state of the art, although lacking in retrospect.