Daniel Dennett
1942–2024
Argued that consciousness is not what it seems to be, and that the appearance of a unified inner theatre is itself what needs explaining.
- 1942LifeBorn
- 1991EventConsciousness Explained (1991) attacks what he calls the Cartesian theater — the picture of a place in the brain where everything comes together and…
- 1995EventDarwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) treats natural selection as a universal acid that dissolves the boundary between designed and undesigned.
- 2024LifeDies
Daniel Dennett was an American philosopher at Tufts whose work on mind, evolution and free will defended a thoroughgoing naturalism against what he regarded as persistent illusions.
The intentional stance
His most portable idea. There are three ways to predict a system's behavior: the physical stance, using physics; the design stance, using what it was built to do; and the intentional stance, treating it as an agent with beliefs and desires.
The intentional stance works spectacularly well on people, reasonably on animals, and usefully on thermostats and chess programs. Dennett argues that having beliefs just is being reliably predictable this way, which deflates the question of whether a system really has them.
Consciousness
Consciousness Explained (1991) attacks what he calls the Cartesian theater — the picture of a place in the brain where everything comes together and is presented to an audience. There is no such place and no such audience, and he argues that almost every puzzle about consciousness depends on quietly assuming one.
His alternative is the multiple drafts model: various processes run in parallel, no version is the official one, and the sense of a single unified stream is constructed after the fact.
On qualia he is deflationary to the point of denial, holding the concept incoherent and the intuitions supporting it artifacts of badly built thought experiments. Critics say he changes the subject rather than explaining it — his own term for the charge is that he is accused of explaining consciousness away.
Evolution and free will
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) treats natural selection as a universal acid that dissolves the boundary between designed and undesigned. Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves defend a compatibilist free will: the kind worth wanting is the kind we demonstrably have, and the libertarian version was never coherent enough to lose.
Questions
What is the intentional stance?
Dennett's term for predicting a system by treating it as an agent with beliefs and desires. He argues that being reliably predictable this way is what having beliefs consists in.
What is the Cartesian theater?
Dennett's name for the mistaken picture of a place in the brain where experience is presented to an audience. He argues most puzzles about consciousness assume one without noticing.
Did Dennett deny consciousness exists?
He denied that it is what it appears to be, treating qualia as an incoherent concept. Critics say this changes the subject; he argued the appearance is exactly what needs explaining.