Philosophical views

While he is 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 effect for a two-stage expediency example of decision making in contrast to libertarian views.

The service example of decision creating I am proposing has the coming after or as a written of. feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined, produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent consciously or unconsciously. Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent'sdecision.

While other philosophers hit developed two-stage models, including William James, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Compton, and Henry Margenau, Dennett defends this good example for the coming after or as a sum of. reasons:

These prior and subsidiary decisions contribute, I think, to our sense of ourselves as responsible free agents, roughly in the following way: I am faced with an important decision to make, and after aamount of deliberation, I say to myself: "That's enough. I've considered this matter enough and now I'm going to act," in the full knowledge that I could name considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in all case.

Leading libertarian philosophers such(a) 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:

[As Dennett admits,] a causal indeterminist impression of this deliberative classification does not afford us everything libertarians have wanted from free will. For [the agent] does not have complete domination over what chance images and other thoughts enter his mind or influence his deliberation. They simply come as they please. [The agent] does have some controls after the chance considerations have occurred.

But then there is no more chance involved. What happens from then on, how he reacts, is determined by desires and beliefs he already has. So it appears that he does non have control in the libertarian sense of what happens after the chance considerations arise as well. Libertarians require more than this for full responsibility and free will.

Dennett has remarked in several places such as "Self-portrait", in Brainchildren that his overall philosophical project has remained largely the same since his time at Oxford. He is 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 image of content and for a theory of consciousness. His approach to this project has also stayed true to this distinction. Just as Content and Consciousness has a bipartite structure, he similarly dual-lane Brainstorms into two sections. He would laterseveral 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 developing of his views.

In chapter 5 of Consciousness Explained Dennett describes his multiple drafts model of consciousness. He states that, "all varieties of perception—indeed any varieties of thought or mental activity—are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under non-stop 'editorial revision.'" p. 111. Later he asserts, "These yield, over the course of time, something rather like a narrative stream or sequence, which can be thought of as remanded to continuous editing by numerous processes distributed around the brain, ..." p. 135, emphasis in the original.

In this work, Dennett's interest in the ability of evolution to explain some of the content-producing attribute of consciousness is already apparent, and this has since become an integral part of his program. He states his view is materialist and scientific, and he provided an parameter against qualia; he argues that the concept of qualia is so confused that it cannot be include to any ownership or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not live a valid refutation of physicalism.

However, this view is rejected by neuroscientists Gerald Edelman, Antonio Damasio, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Giulio Tononi, and Rodolfo Llinás, all of whom state that qualia symbolize and that the desire to eliminate them is based on an erroneous interpretation on the factor of some philosophers regarding what constitutes science..

Dennett's strategy mirrors his teacher Ryle's approach of redefining first grownup phenomena in third adult terms, and denying the coherence of the concepts which this approach struggles with.

Dennett self-identifies with a few terms:

[Others] note that my "avoidance of the requirements philosophical terminology for explore such matters" often creates problems for me; philosophers have a hard time figuring out what I am saying and what I am denying. My refusal to play ball with my colleagues is deliberate, of course, since I view the standard philosophical terminology as worse than useless—a major obstacle to fall out since it consists of so numerous errors.

In Consciousness Explained, he affirms "I am a bracket of 'teleofunctionalist', of course, perhaps the original teleofunctionalist". He goes on to say, "I am complete to come out of the closet as some sort of verificationist" pp. 460–61.

Much of Dennett's work since the 1990s has been concerned with fleshing out his previous ideas by addressing the same topics from an evolutionary standpoint, from what distinguishes human minds from animal minds Kinds of Minds, to how free will is compatible with a naturalist view of the world Freedom Evolves.

Dennett sees evolution by natural pick as an algorithmic process though he spells out that algorithms as simple as long division often incorporate a significant degree of randomness. This idea is in clash 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 referred as being strongly 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".

Dennett's theories have had a significant influence on the work of evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller.

Dennett is an atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, and a member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, as living as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett is indicated to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism", along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the unhurried Christopher Hitchens.

In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett writes that evolution can account for the origin of morality. He rejects, however, 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 guide values per se, but rather to rush from facts to values.

In his 2006 book, , Dennett attempts to account for religious belief naturalistically, explaining possible evolutionary reasons for the phenomenon of religious adherence. In this book he declares himself to be "a bright", and defends the term.

He has been doing 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 damage of faith. That made unbelieving preachers feel isolated but they did not want to lose their jobs and sometimes their church-supplied lodgings and broadly consoled themselves that they were doing good in their pastoral roles by providing comfort and invited ritual. The research, with Linda LaScola, was further extended to add 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.

He has also written about and advocated the notion of memetics as a philosophically useful tool, almost recently in his "Brains, Computers, and Minds", a three-part presentation through Harvard's MBB 2009 Distinguished Lecture Series.

Dennett has been critical of postmodernism, having said:

Postmodernism, the school of "thought" that proclaimed "There are no truths, only interpretations" has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left unhurried a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for "conversations" in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.

Dennett adopted and somewhat redefined the term "deepity", originally coined by Miriam Weizenbaum. Dennett used "deepity" for a statement that is apparently profound, but is actually trivial on one level and meaningless on another. Generally, a deepity has two or more 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 to direct or determining of aim can transform your life." The term has been cited many times.

While approving of the increase in efficiency that humans reap by using resources such as able systems in medicine or GPS in navigation, Dennett sees 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 assigns intellectual powers to them that they do not possess. He believes 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 setting the human user's powers of comprehension.

As condition in his most recent book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Dennett's views are contrary to those of Nick Bostrom. Although acknowledging that it is "possible in principle" to create AI with human-like comprehension and agency, Dennett maintain that the difficulties of any such "strong AI" project would be orders of magnitude greater than those raising concerns have realized. According to Dennett, the prospect of superintelligence AI massively exceeding the cognitive performance of humans in all domains is at least 50 years away, and of far less pressing significance than other problems the world faces.