Daniel DennettThinkers

The Cartesian theater is on our radar. Try again later or consider contributing!

Consciousness is a bag of tricks, an illusion, a virtual machine running on the parallel material of the neural brain, whose activities are, within this virtual mainframe, now a temporary set of highly structured regularities imposed on the underlying hardware by a program: A structured recipe.

Darwin's strange inversion is that honey is sweet because we like it... it is not that we like honey because it is sweet. Babies are adorable because we love them... it is not that we love them because they are cute.

Evolution is an algorithm. An algorithm needs no God, no designer, just a mindless algorithm. It can create design out of chaos.

Humor is the joy of debugging. It is a reward to the brain.

The Intentional stance is a predictive strategy of interpretation that presupposes the rationality of the people-or other entities-that we are hoping to understand and predict.

Man is the nervous system that the earth has grown.

Mind is not a thing one has, but simply the act of displaying behavior that any other person with a mind responds to as mindful activity.

Origin chauvinism is on our radar. Try again later or consider contributing!

A Person is a certain sort of ape infested with idea memes, fashion memes, behaviour memes, skill memes, all of which which compete to replicate themselves from one brain to another.