Keywords: Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris, atheist, atheism, rational response squad, god, jesus, philosophy, allah, religion
Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us. As he puts it, our bodies are made up of 100 trillion little robots, none of them with an individual consciousness. So what makes us feel we have one? Or that we're in control of it? Dennett's hope is to show his audience that "Your consciousness is not quite as marvelous as you may have thought it is." He uses thought experiments and optical illusions to demonstrate to the TED audience that even very big brains are capable of playing tricks on their owners.
Keywords: Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris, atheist, atheism, rational response squad, god, jesus, philosophy, allah, religion
Daniel Dennett is a Tufts philosophy professor and cognitive scientist, most famous for his books, Consciousness Explained (1991) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), and now Breaking the Spell. In this particular talk, he takes a chance to respond to the presentation by Pastor Rick Warren that came before him, taking issue with claims in his book, The Purpose-Driven Life.
Keywords: Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris, atheist, atheism, rational response squad, god, jesus, philosophy, allah, religion
Sam Harris is the NY Times best selling author who wrote "End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation." www.SamHarris.org
The Computational Perspective Daniel C. Dennett "There are going to be things that meet those conditions that are not interestingly computational by anybody's standards, and there are things that are going to fail to meet the standards, which nevertheless you see are significantly like the things that you want to consider computational. So how do you deal with that? By ignoring it, by ignoring the issue of definition, that's my suggestion. Same as with life! You don't want to argue about whether viruses are alive or not; in some ways they're alive, in some ways they're not. Some processes are obviously computational. Others are obviously not computational. Where does the computational perspective illuminate? Well, that depends on who's looking at the illumination."
6 mins
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