Dennett

existence of God, but they think it is important to do so, leading them to essentially fake their beliefs. Dennett does not believe that believing in God is rational as he states near the end of the chapter “Belief in Belief”: “Maybe in the future, if more of us brights will just come forward and calmly announce that of course we no longer believe in any of those Gods…” (Dennett 2007: 245). Although Dennett, through the entirety of his piece does not believe it to be rational to believe in God, he makes an

regarded as unfounded. “The task of science in the past four centuries had been to demythologize the past.”(Schonfield p.1) Daniel C. Dennett in “Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why” states “that speculating about animal consciousness makes no sense.” (Dennett p.19) He wonders why we need to know about animal consciousness at all. I disagree with Dennett and will explore the possibilities of animals actually experiencing

Genie was never able to learn how to properly talk and was rendered verbally impotent by her silent environment, but according to Dennett, shouldn't she have been able to learn? However, Joann did seem to be able to understand what was being said to her, though she was not capable of responding since she was able to comprehend and follow simple directions. Even some of the most autistic

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2006. – Chapter 2 What Richard Dawkins is trying to say in this piece of superb rhetoric is that if you’ve read the Old Testament that god is a horrendous monster. He regards the god of the Old Testament as the “worst character in all fiction” and when he says fiction it is an statement to show that he himself does not believe in a god. Dawkins says this as a way of introducing the point that he will be attacking the god of the Old

their logic. Dennett's argument about the unity of the body and mind uses the example of a “homunculus”, or a small dwarf. Dennett, a monist, says that this small dwarf is in our mind controlling information intake and output, perception-shape, language, and motion (Resnick). To me, this sounds as if he is describing the mind - something that deals with making us who we are. Dennett goes on to state that he believes the mind learns from mistakes and creates a new, seamless “draft” to use in the next

Dennett says, “The intentional stance is the strategy of interpreting the behavior of an entity (person, animal, artifact, whatever) by treating it as if it were a rational agent who governed its ‘choice’ of ‘action’ by a ‘consideration’ of its ‘beliefs’ and ‘desires,” (Dennett). If an object’s behavior is able to be well-predicted through these means, it is referred to as a “true believer

Dennett argued that the consciousness of events can be restored in scotoma* with self-cues or prompts (Denett, 1991). Inability to visually experience does not indicate the absence of perceptual experience of the stimuli and it could be compensated with the phenomenal states of visual experience and other form of perception that could give rise to the subjective experience. Furthermore, Dennett argued that difference between being able to see and

In the paper "Epiphenomenal Qualia," Frank Jackson presents the concept of Qualia and the knowledge argument in order to prove physicalism false. Jackson 's knowledge argument introduces a thought experiment about a neuroscientist called Mary. His thought experiment is designed to refute physicalism by showing that there is non-physical knowledge in the world. However, there are many flaws in Jackson 's thought experiment that lead to its ultimate failure in proving that physicalism is wrong, such

It is not an astounding observation to say that there exists (or existed at one point in time) thousands, possibly millions, of stories on Earth. Stories that our innocent young selves were subjected to in elementary school that have influenced the way we see ourselves and those around us, more so than we would like to admit. Stories that our parents have read to us late at night willing us with their words of cats in hats and cows jumping over the moon to shut our eyelids and drift off to sleep

that we can take in one way, but the reality might actually be very different. Hence, I support the argument that we, as humans, do not know our minds very well. One such person who defends such a claim is an American philosopher known as Daniel Dennett. He argues that every single person on this world considers themselves a pioneer of the term ‘consciousness.’ This is because consciousness is not a subject that is limited to only pioneers. Every single person experiences consciousness and there