Can we be held morally responsible for our actions? Yes, says Daniel Dennett. No, says Gregg Caruso. Reader, you decide.

Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, Daniel Dennett asserts in this first full scale presentation of...

Author's reply to De Caro's, Lavazza's, Lemos', and Pereboom's comments on D.C. Dennett, Reflection on Sam Harris' "Free Will".

A memoir by one of the greatest minds of our age, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel C. Dennett.

[opening paragraph]: Today, the planet has plenty of conscious beings on it; three billion years ago, it had none. What happened in the interim was a lot of evolution, with features emerging gradually, in one order or another. Figuring out what order and why is very likely a good way to reduce perplexity, because one thing we have learned from the voyage of the Beagle and its magnificent wake is that puzzling features of contemporary phenomena often are fossil traces of (...) earlier adaptations. As the great biologist D'Arcy Thompson once said, ‘Everything is the way it is because it got that way'. And even when we can't remotely confirm our Just So Stories about how things got the way they are, the exercise can be salutary, since it forces us to ask (and try to answer) questions that might otherwise never occur to us. We do have to get the left and right sides of our equation to match in dimensionality -- I am grateful to Humphrey (2000) for this useful proposal about how to think about the issues -- and adding wrinkles on the right needs to be motivated by, and in the end justified by, more than the sheer need for a few more dimensions. As Just So Stories go, Humphrey's account of the emergence of sensation is a valuable one, traversing ground that must be traversed one way or another, and providing along the way some reasonable grounds for supposing things happened roughly the way he supposes. (shrink)

Today’s Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better ed. John Brockman, Harper Perrennial, 2007, pp. xvii-xxii; also appears in The Wall Street Journal Online January 25th, 2008, http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120120661987514417.html.

Michael Behe's book is an interesting attempt at a frontal assault on Darwinism, based on an analysis of the complexities of molecular structures inside the cell--Darwin's black box.

Little, Brown, 1992 Review by Glenn Branch on Jul 5th 1999 Volume: 3, Number: 27.

When Professor Orr published his hostile review of Darwin's Dangerous Idea in the biology journal, Evolution, last February, I was not pleased. His review was full of falsehoods and misconstruals, but I had no recourse; that journal, like most academic journals, does not permit authors to respond to reviews. Luckily for me, Orr has been so eager to warn the world of my errors that he has restated his attack, with embellishments, in the Boston Review, which has invited me to (...) respond. Months have passed, the damage has been done, but at least I get to set the record straight. (shrink)

Daniel C. Dennett is a brilliant polemicist, famous for challenging unexamined orthodoxies. Over the last thirty years, he has played a major role in expanding our understanding of consciousness, developmental psychology, and evolutionary theory. And with such groundbreaking, critically acclaimed books as Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist), he has reached a huge general and professional audience. In this new book, Dennett shows that evolution is the key to resolving the ancient (...) problems of moral and political freedom. Like the planet's atmosphere on which life depends, the conditions on which our freedom depends had to evolve, and like the atmosphere, they continue to evolve-and could be extinguished. According to Dennett, biology provides the perspective from which we can distinguish the varieties of freedom that matter. Throughout the history of life on this planet, an interacting web and internal and external conditions have provided the frameworks for the design of agents that are more free than their parts-from the unwitting gropings of the simplest life forms to the more informed activities of animals to the moral dilemmas that confront human beings living in societies. As in his previous books, Dennett weaves a richly detailed narrative enlivened by analogies as entertaining as they are challenging. Here is the story of how we came to be different from all other creatures, how our early ancestors mindlessly created human culture, and then, how culture gave us our minds, our visions, our moral problems-in a nutshell, our freedom. (shrink)

Because, as Palmer shows, the only kinds of differences that can be detected are differences in relational structure, and relational structure is precisely what is preserved by isomorphism, his own arguments can be used to expose the incoherent motivation behind the traditional idea of “intrinsic qualities” of experience.

This collection of 17 essays by the author offers a comprehensive theory of mind, encompassing traditional issues of consciousness and free will.

After decades of persistent work by researchers in many fields, building foundations and patiently filling in details, the gigantic jigsaw puzzle of consciousness is beginning to come into focus. As large assemblies fall into place with a gratifying convergence of details drawn from different disciplines, the pace is quickening. Everybody wants to be in on the delicious task of describing what the Big Picture is going to look like, predicting the outlines before the mopping up operations confirm them. Well, not (...) quite everybody. There are also those who dislike what they see happening: consciousness is turning out to be "just" a great big jigsaw puzzle. What? No cosmic revolutions in quantum physics? No Impenetrable Mysteries? Bummer! (shrink)

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Clark and Karmiloff-Smith (CKS) have written an extraordinarily valuable paper, which sympathetically addresses what has all too often been an acrimonious and ideology-ridden "debate" and begins to transform it into a multi-perspective research program. By articulating the submerged hunches on both sides in a single framework, and adding some powerful new ideas of their own, they dispel much of the smoke of battle. What we can now see much more clearly is the need for a model of a brain/mind that, (...) as they say, "enriches itself from within by re-representing the knowledge that it has already represented.". (shrink)

Jackendoff's “mentalistic” semantics looks more radical than it is. It can best be understood as a necessary corrective to the traditional oversimplification that holds that psychological variation “cancels out” on the path from word to world. This reform parallels the “evo-devo” reform in evolutionary biology.

The differences Block attempts to capture with his putative distinction between P-consciousness and A-consciousness are more directly and perspicuously handled in terms of differences in richness of content and degree of influence. Block's critiques, based on his misbegotten distinction, evaporate on closer inspection.

Allen Funt was one of the great psychologists of the twentieth century. His informal demonstrations on Candid Camera showed us as much about human psychology and its surprising limitations as the work of any academic psychologist. Here is one of the best : he placed an umbrella stand in a prominent place in a department store and filled it with shiny new golf-cart handles. These were pieces of strong, gleaming stainless steel tubing, about two feet long, with a gentle bend (...) in the middle, threaded at one end and with a handsome spherical plastic knob on the other end. In other words, about as useless a piece of stainless steel tubing as you could imagine, unless you happened to own a golf cart missing its handle. He put up a sign. It didn't identify the contents but simply said: "50% off. Today only! $5.95." Some people purchased them, and, when asked why, they were quite ready to volunteer one confabulated answer or another. They had no idea what the thing was, but it was a handsome thing, and such a bargain! These people were not brain- damaged or drunk; they were normal adults, our neighbors, ourselves. (shrink)