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142-435: Proponents of the hard problem argue that it is categorically different from the easy problems since no mechanistic or behavioral explanation could explain the character of an experience, not even in principle. Even after all the relevant functional facts are explicated, they argue, there will still remain a further question: "why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?" To bolster their case, proponents of

284-829: A PhD in Islamic studies from Harvard University , was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut . His mother, an English major at Carleton College , went for a master's degree at the University of Minnesota before becoming an English teacher at the American Community School in Beirut. In 1947, his father

426-493: A " physicalist " position, disagree with the argument in its stronger and/or weaker forms. For example, Nagel put forward a "speculative proposal" of devising a language that could "explain to a person blind from birth what it is like to see." The knowledge argument implies that such a language could not exist. David Chalmers' formulation of the hard problem of consciousness provoked considerable debate within philosophy of mind , as well as scientific research. The hard problem

568-546: A 1994 talk given at The Science of Consciousness conference held in Tucson, Arizona. The following year, the main talking points of Chalmers' talk were published in The Journal of Consciousness Studies . The publication gained significant attention from consciousness researchers and became the subject of a special volume of the journal, which was later published into a book. In 1996, Chalmers published The Conscious Mind ,

710-585: A 2020 PhilPapers survey, a majority (62.42%) of the philosophers surveyed said they believed that the hard problem is a genuine problem, while 29.72% said that it does not exist. There are a number of other potential philosophical problems that are related to the Hard Problem. Ned Block believes that there exists a "Harder Problem of Consciousness", due to the possibility of different physical and functional neurological systems potentially having phenomenal overlap. Another potential philosophical problem which

852-628: A Theory of Consciousness, Dennett responded with his own paper with the spin-off title Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness. Dennett has been arguing for the illusory status of consciousness since early on in his career. For example, in 1979 he published a paper titled On the Absence of Phenomenology (where he argues for the nonexistence of phenomenal consciousness). Similar ideas have been explicated in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained . Dennett argues that

994-701: A bipartite structure, he similarly divided Brainstorms into two sections. He would later collect several 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 development of his views. In chapter 5 of Consciousness Explained, Dennett described his multiple drafts model of consciousness. He stated that, "all varieties of perception—indeed all varieties of thought or mental activity—are accomplished in

1136-455: A book-length treatment of the hard problem, in which he elaborated on his core arguments and responded to counterarguments . His use of the word easy is "tongue-in-cheek". As the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, they are about as easy as going to Mars or curing cancer. "That is, scientists more or less know what to look for, and with enough brainpower and funding, they would probably crack it in this century." The existence of

1278-427: A brain structurally identical to Davidson's and will thus presumably behave exactly like Davidson. He will return to Davidson's office and write the same essays he would have written, recognize all of his friends and family, and so forth. John Searle 's Chinese room argument deals with the nature of artificial intelligence: it imagines a room in which a conversation is held by means of written Chinese characters that

1420-512: A capacity could explain phenomenal consciousness without positing qualia. On the higher-order view, since consciousness is a representation, and representation is fully functionally analyzable, there is no hard problem of consciousness. The philosophers Glenn Carruthers and Elizabeth Schier said in 2012 that the main arguments for the existence of a hard problem— philosophical zombies , Mary's room , and Nagel's bats —are only persuasive if one already assumes that "consciousness must be independent of

1562-443: A certain amount 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 have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case. Leading libertarian philosophers such as Robert Kane have rejected Dennett's model, specifically that random chance

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1704-402: A conscious system, yet not be conscious. Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 – April 19, 2024) was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of mind , the philosophy of science , and the philosophy of biology , particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science . Dennett was

1846-399: A false belief. Lynch thinks denying the possibility of zombies is more reasonable than questioning our own consciousness. Furthermore, when the concept of self is deemed to correspond to physical reality alone (reductive physicalism), philosophical zombies are denied by definition. When a distinction is made in one's mind between a hypothetical zombie and oneself (assumed not to be a zombie),

1988-411: 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

2130-424: A hot potato". The knowledge argument, also known as Mary's Room , is another common thought experiment: A hypothetical neuroscientist named Mary has lived her whole life in a black-and-white room and has never seen colour before. She also happens to know everything there is to know about the brain and colour perception. Chalmers believes that when Mary sees the colour red for the first time, she gains new knowledge —

2272-447: A normal human being but lacking conscious experiences is therefore not logically possible according to the behaviorist, so an appeal to the logical possibility of a p-zombie furnishes an argument that behaviorism is false. Proponents of zombie arguments generally accept that p-zombies are not physically possible , while opponents necessarily deny that they are metaphysically or, in some cases, even logically possible. The unifying idea of

2414-478: A paper on John Dewey 's approach to the problem of consciousness (which preceded Chalmers' formulation of the hard problem by over half a century), noted that Dewey's approach would see the hard problem as the consequence of an unjustified assumption that feelings and functional behaviors are not the same physical process: "For the Deweyan philosopher, the 'hard problem' of consciousness is a 'conceptual fact' only in

2556-632: A priori physicalism ) is a view characterized by a commitment to physicalism and a full rejection of the hard problem. By this view, the hard problem either does not exist or is just another easy problem, because every fact about the mind is a fact about the performance of various functions or behaviours. So, once all the relevant functions and behaviours have been accounted for, there will not be any facts left over in need of explanation. Thinkers who subscribe to type-A materialism include Paul and Patricia Churchland , Daniel Dennett , Keith Frankish , and Thomas Metzinger . Some type-A materialists believe in

2698-420: A reason to reject his principle. Frank Jackson 's knowledge argument is based around a hypothetical scientist, Mary, who is forced to view the world through a black-and-white television screen in a black and white room. Mary is a brilliant scientist who knows everything about the neurobiology of vision. Even though she knows everything about color and its perception (e.g. what combination of wavelengths makes

2840-402: A series of alternating images. He accordingly argues that consciousness need not be what it seems to be based on introspection. To address the question of the hard problem, or how and why physical processes give rise to experience, Dennett states that the phenomenon of having experience is nothing more than the performance of functions or the production of behavior, which can also be referred to as

2982-614: A significant influence on the work of evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller . Dennett was a vocal atheist and secularist , a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, and a member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry , as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement . Dennett was referred to as one of the " Four Horsemen of New Atheism ", along with Richard Dawkins , Sam Harris , and

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3124-402: A structural or functional description is a complete description. A perfect replica of a clock is a clock, a perfect replica of a hurricane is a hurricane, and so on. The difference is that physical things are nothing more than their physical constituents. For example, water is nothing more than H 2 O molecules, and understanding everything about H 2 O molecules is to understand everything there

3266-434: A thought experiment: Suppose that humanity were to encounter an alien species, and suppose it is known that the aliens do not have any c-fibers. Even if one knows this, it is not obvious that the aliens do not feel pain: that would remain an open question. This is because the fact that aliens do not have c-fibers does not entail that they do not feel pain (in other words, feelings of pain do not follow with logical necessity from

3408-503: A valid refutation of physicalism . This view is rejected by neuroscientists Gerald Edelman , Antonio Damasio , Vilayanur Ramachandran , Giulio Tononi , and Rodolfo Llinás , all of whom state that qualia exist and that the desire to eliminate them is based on an erroneous interpretation on the part of some philosophers regarding what constitutes science. Dennett's strategy mirrored his teacher Ryle's approach of redefining first-person phenomena in third-person terms, and denying

3550-445: A whole. Hacker further states that "consciousness studies", as it exists today, is "literally a total waste of time" and that "the conception of consciousness which they have is incoherent". Eliminative materialism or eliminativism is the view that many or all of the mental states used in folk psychology (i.e., common-sense ways of discussing the mind) do not, upon scientific examination, correspond to real brain mechanisms. According

3692-415: Is an essentially non-subjective state (i.e., that a felt state is nothing but a functional state). In other words, we have no idea of what reductivism amounts to. He believes "every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view." In 1983, the philosopher Joseph Levine proposed that there

3834-513: Is epistemically —as a problem of causal explanation, rather than as a problem of logical or metaphysical possibility. The " explanatory gap "—also called the " hard problem of consciousness "—is the claim that (to date) no one has provided a convincing causal explanation of how and why we are conscious. It is a manifestation of the very same gap that (to date) no one has provided a convincing causal explanation of how and why we are not zombies. The philosophical zombie argument can also be seen through

3976-560: Is irreducible to physical systems such as the brain. This is the topic of the next section. Chalmers believes that the hard problem is irreducible to the easy problems: solving the easy problems will not lead to a solution to the hard problems. This is because the easy problems pertain to the causal structure of the world while the hard problem pertains to consciousness, and facts about consciousness include facts that go beyond mere causal or structural description. For example, suppose someone were to stub their foot and yelp. In this scenario,

4118-410: Is "possible in principle" to create AI with human-like comprehension and agency, Dennett maintained that the difficulties of any such " strong AI " project would be orders of magnitude greater than those raising concerns have realized. Dennett believed, as of the book's publication in 2017, that the prospect of superintelligence (AI massively exceeding the cognitive performance of humans in all domains)

4260-412: Is a being in a thought experiment in the philosophy of mind that is physically identical to a normal human being but does not have conscious experience . For example, if a philosophical zombie were poked with a sharp object, it would not feel any pain, but it would react exactly the way any conscious human would. Philosophical zombie arguments are used against forms of physicalism and in defense of

4402-473: Is a conceptual problem, or, more accurately, a problem with our concepts." Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland , among others, believe that the hard problem is best seen as a collection of easy problems that will be solved through further analysis of the brain and behaviour. Consciousness is an ambiguous term. It can be used to mean self consciousness, awareness, the state of being awake, and so on. Chalmers uses Thomas Nagel 's definition of consciousness: "

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4544-575: Is a proponent of materialism in the philosophy of mind . He argues that mental states, including consciousness, are entirely the result of physical processes in the brain. In his book Consciousness Explained (1991), Dennett presents his arguments for a materialist understanding of consciousness, rejecting Cartesian dualism in favor of a physicalist perspective. Dennett remarked in several places (such as "Self-portrait", in Brainchildren ) that his overall philosophical project remained largely

4686-399: Is an explanatory gap between our understanding of the physical world and our understanding of consciousness. Levine's disputes that conscious states are reducible to neuronal or brain states. He uses the example of pain (as an example of a conscious state) and its reduction to the firing of c-fibers (a kind of nerve cell). The difficulty is as follows: even if consciousness is physical, it

4828-486: Is an illusion and aims to explain why it seems to exist." Frankish concludes that illusionism "replaces the hard problem with the illusion problem—the problem of explaining how the illusion of phenomenality arises and why it is so powerful." The philosopher Daniel Dennett is another prominent figure associated with illusionism. After Frankish published a paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies titled Illusionism as

4970-401: Is an illusion. More substantively, Frankish argues that illusionism about phenomenal consciousness is preferable to realism about phenomenal consciousness. He states: "Theories of consciousness typically address the hard problem. They accept that phenomenal consciousness is real and aim to explain how it comes to exist. There is, however, another approach, which holds that phenomenal consciousness

5112-440: 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 of intention can transform your life." The term has been cited many times. While approving of

5254-452: Is assumed that we can talk about our qualia, the existence of zombies is impossible. Artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky saw the argument as circular. The proposition of the possibility of something physically identical to a human but without subjective experience assumes that the physical characteristics of humans are not what produces those experiences, which is exactly what

5396-754: Is because it establishes the existence of conscious experience as a further fact . Philosopher Daniel Stoljar points out that zombies need not be utterly without subjective states, and that even a subtle psychological difference between two physically identical people, such as how coffee tastes to them, is enough to refute physicalism. Such arguments have been criticized by many philosophers. Some physicalists, such as Daniel Dennett , argue that philosophical zombies are logically incoherent and thus impossible, or that all humans are philosophical zombies; others, such as Christopher Hill , argue that philosophical zombies are coherent but metaphysically impossible. Philosophical zombies are associated with David Chalmers, but it

5538-468: Is born of an overreliance on intuition, calling philosophical discussions on the topic of consciousness a form of "intuition jousting". But when the issue is tackled with "formal argumentation" and "precise semantics" then the hard problem will dissolve. The philosopher Elizabeth Irvine, in contrast, can be read as having the opposite view, since she argues that phenomenal properties (that is, properties of consciousness) do not exist in our common-sense view of

5680-684: Is closely related to Benj Hellie's vertiginous question , dubbed "The Even Harder Problem of Consciousness", refers to why a given individual has their own particular personal identity , as opposed to existing as someone else. Cognitive scientist David Chalmers first formulated the hard problem in his paper "Facing up to the problem of consciousness" (1995) and expanded upon it in The Conscious Mind (1996). His works provoked comment. Some, such as philosopher David Lewis and Steven Pinker, have praised Chalmers for his argumentative rigour and "impeccable clarity". Pinker later said, in 2018, "In

5822-496: Is compatible with a naturalist view of the world ( Freedom Evolves ). Dennett saw evolution by natural selection as an algorithmic process (though he spelt out that algorithms as simple as long division often incorporate a significant degree of randomness ). This idea is in conflict 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

Hard problem of consciousness - Misplaced Pages Continue

5964-416: Is considered a problem primarily for physicalist views of the mind (the view that the mind is a physical object or process), since physical explanations tend to be functional, or structural. Because of this, some physicalists have responded to the hard problem by seeking to show that it dissolves upon analysis. Other researchers accept the problem as real and seek to develop a theory of consciousness' place in

6106-651: 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 view of this deliberative kind does not give us everything libertarians have wanted from free will. For [the agent] does not have complete control 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 control after

6248-551: Is in part because functions and physical structures of any sort could conceivably exist in the absence of experience. Alternatively, they could exist alongside a different set of experiences. For example, it is logically possible for a perfect replica of Chalmers to have no experience at all, or for it to have a different set of experiences (such as an inverted visible spectrum, so that the blue-yellow red-green axes of its visual field are flipped). The same cannot be said about clocks, hurricanes, or other physical things. In those cases,

6390-427: Is logically possible is also, in the sense relevant here, metaphysically possible. Another response is the denial of the idea that qualia and related phenomenal notions of the mind are in the first place coherent concepts. Daniel Dennett and others argue that while consciousness and subjective experience exist in some sense, they are not as the zombie argument proponent claims. The experience of pain, for example,

6532-402: Is metaphysically possible, which is all the argument requires. Chalmers writes: "Zombies are probably not naturally possible: they probably cannot exist in our world, with its laws of nature." The outline structure of Chalmers's version of the zombie argument is as follows: The above is a strong formulation of the zombie argument. There are other formulations of zombie-type arguments that follow

6674-429: Is mistaken not only to believe there is a hard problem of consciousness, but to believe phenomenal consciousness exists at all. This stance has recently taken on the name of illusionism : the view that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion. The term was popularized by the philosopher Keith Frankish . Frankish argues that "illusionism" is preferable to "eliminativism" for labelling the view that phenomenal consciousness

6816-495: Is non-physical. Therefore, consciousness is non-physical. Galen Strawson argues that it is not possible to establish the conceivability of zombies, so the argument, lacking its first premise, can never get going. Chalmers has argued that zombies are conceivable, saying, "it certainly seems that a coherent situation is described; I can discern no contradiction in the description." Many physicalist philosophers have argued that this scenario eliminates itself by its description ;

6958-464: Is not clear which physical states correspond to which conscious states. The bridges between the two levels of description will be contingent , rather than necessary . This is significant because in most contexts, relating two scientific levels of descriptions (such as physics and chemistry) is done with the assurance of necessary connections between the two theories (for example, chemistry follows with necessity from physics). Levine illustrates this with

7100-526: Is not physical; he is open to the idea that the explanatory gap is only an epistemological problem for physicalism. In contrast, Chalmers thinks that the hard problem of consciousness does show that consciousness is not physical. Philosophical zombies are a thought experiment commonly used in discussions of the hard problem. They are hypothetical beings physically identical to humans but that lack conscious experience. Philosophers such as Chalmers, Joseph Levine, and Francis Kripke take zombies as impossible within

7242-402: Is not reliable here. Yablo says he is "braced for the information that is going to make zombies inconceivable, even though I have no real idea what form the information is going to take." The zombie argument is difficult to assess because it brings to light fundamental disagreements about the method and scope of philosophy itself and the nature and abilities of conceptual analysis. Proponents of

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7384-518: Is not something that can be stripped off a person's mental life without bringing about any behavioral or physiological differences. Dennett believes that consciousness is a complex series of functions and ideas. If we all can have these experiences the idea of the p-zombie is meaningless. Dennett argues that "when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition". He coined

7526-504: Is often construed as a problem uniquely faced by physicalist or materialist theories of mind. The philosopher Thomas Nagel posited in his 1974 paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" that experiences are essentially subjective (accessible only to the individual undergoing them—i.e., felt only by the one feeling them), while physical states are essentially objective (accessible to multiple individuals). So he argued we have no idea what it could mean to claim that an essentially subjective state just

7668-492: Is one of the relevant facts about our world for determining whether a possible zombie world is accessible from our world. Therefore, asking whether zombies are metaphysically possible in our world is equivalent to asking whether physicalism is true in our world. Stephen Yablo 's (1998) response is to provide an error theory to account for the intuition that zombies are possible. Notions of what counts as physical and as physically possible change over time so conceptual analysis

7810-871: Is only one). Dennett's views on evolution are identified as being strongly adaptationist , in line with his theory of the intentional stance , and the evolutionary views of biologist Richard Dawkins. In Darwin's Dangerous Idea , Dennett showed himself even more willing than Dawkins to defend adaptationism in print, devoting an entire chapter to a criticism of the ideas of Gould. This stems from Gould's long-running public debate with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists over human 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

7952-421: Is possible they exist, so dualism is false. Given the symmetry between the zombie and zoombie arguments, we cannot arbitrate the physicalism/dualism question a priori . Similarly, Gualtiero Piccinini argues that the zombie conceivability argument is circular. Piccinini questions whether the possible worlds where zombies exist are accessible from our world. If physicalism is true in our world, then physicalism

8094-603: Is that people will misunderstand the nature of basically "parasitic" AI systems, rather than employing them constructively to challenge and develop the human user's powers of comprehension. In the 1990s, Dennett collaborated with a group of computer scientists at MIT to attempt to develop a humanoid, conscious robot, named "Cog". The project did not produce a conscious robot, but Dennett argued that in principle it could have. As given in his penultimate book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back , Dennett's views were contrary to those of Nick Bostrom . Although acknowledging that it

8236-408: Is the problem of why and how those processes are accompanied by experience. It may further include the question of why these processes are accompanied by this or that particular experience, rather than some other kind of experience. In other words, the hard problem is the problem of explaining why certain mechanisms are accompanied by conscious experience. For example, why should neural processing in

8378-474: Is to know about water. But consciousness is not like this. Knowing everything there is to know about the brain, or any physical system, is not to know everything there is to know about consciousness. Consciousness, then, must not be purely physical. Chalmers's idea contradicts physicalism , sometimes labelled materialism . This is the view that everything that exists is a physical or material thing, so everything can be reduced to microphysical things. For example,

8520-439: 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

8662-464: The Punch and Judy puppet show, they laugh because they know that they know more about what's going on than one of the characters does: Very young children watching a Punch and Judy show squeal in anticipatory delight as Punch prepares to throw the box over the cliff. Why? Because they know Punch thinks Judy is still in the box. They know better; they saw Judy escape while Punch's back was turned. We take

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8804-402: The easy problems and the hard problem . The easy problems are amenable to reductive inquiry. They are a logical consequence of lower-level facts about the world, similar to how a clock's ability to tell time is a logical consequence of its clockwork and structure, or a hurricane being a logical consequence of the structures and functions of certain weather patterns. A clock, a hurricane, and

8946-411: The hard problem of consciousness , which is the problem of accounting in physical terms for subjective, intrinsic, first-person, what-it's-like-ness experiences. Proponents of philosophical zombie arguments, such as the philosopher David Chalmers , argue that since a philosophical zombie is by definition physically identical to a conscious person, even its logical possibility refutes physicalism. This

9088-410: The "other" category. In the 2020 PhilPapers survey, 51.93% of philosophers surveyed indicated that they "accept or lean towards" physicalism and 32.08% indicated that they reject physicalism. 6.23% were "agnostic" or "undecided". Different solutions have been proposed to the hard problem of consciousness. The sections below taxonomizes the various responses to the hard problem. The shape of this taxonomy

9230-412: The 1970s by Thomas Nagel (1970; 1974) and Robert Kirk (1974), but the general argument was most famously developed in detail by David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind (1996). According to Chalmers, one can coherently conceive of an entire zombie world, a world physically indistinguishable from this one but entirely lacking conscious experience. Since such a world is conceivable, Chalmers claims, it

9372-399: The 2020 PhilPapers survey, 4.51% of philosophers surveyed subscribe to eliminativism. While Patricia Churchland and Paul Churchland have famously applied eliminative materialism to propositional attitudes , philosophers including Daniel Dennett , Georges Rey , and Keith Frankish have applied it to qualia or phenomenal consciousness (i.e., conscious experience). On their view, it

9514-884: The Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement . He became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009. In February 2010, he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation 's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers. In 2012, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize , an annual award for a person who has made an exceptional contribution to European culture, society or social science, "for his ability to translate

9656-514: The Social Brain neuroscientist Michael Graziano advocates what he calls attention schema theory , in which our perception of being conscious is merely an error in perception, held by brains which evolved to hold erroneous and incomplete models of their own internal workings, just as they hold erroneous and incomplete models of their own bodies and of the external world. Philosophical zombie A philosophical zombie (or " p-zombie ")

9798-712: The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon , Dennett attempted to account for religious belief naturalistically, explaining possible evolutionary reasons for the phenomenon of religious adherence. In this book he declared himself to be " a bright ", and defended the term. He did 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 loss of faith. This made unbelieving preachers feel isolated, but they did not want to lose their jobs and church-supplied lodgings. Generally, they consoled themselves with

9940-404: The actual world obtains. The general argument goes as follows. Q can be false in a possible world if any of the following obtains: (1) there exists at least one invert relative to the actual world; (2) there is at least one absent quale relative to the actual world; (3) all actually conscious beings are p-zombies (all actual qualia are absent qualia). Another way to construe the zombie hypothesis

10082-428: The agent's final decision. While other philosophers have developed two-stage models, including William James , Henri Poincaré , Arthur Compton , and Henry Margenau , Dennett defended this model for the following 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

10224-431: The argument claims to prove. Richard Brown agrees that the zombie argument is circular. To show this, he proposes "zoombies", which are creatures non physically identical to people in every way and lacking phenomenal consciousness. If zoombies existed, they would refute dualism because they would show that consciousness is indeed physical. Paralleling the argument from Chalmers: It is conceivable that zoombies exist, so it

10366-748: The argument's logical validity include George Bealer . In his 2019 update to the article on philosophical zombies in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Kirk summed up the current state of the debate: In spite of the fact that the arguments on both sides have become increasingly sophisticated—or perhaps because of it—they have not become more persuasive. The pull in each direction remains strong. A 2013 survey of professional philosophers by Bourget and Chalmers found that 36% said p-zombies were conceivable but metaphysically impossible; 23% said they were metaphysically possible; 16% said they were inconceivable; and 25% responded "other". In 2020,

10508-434: The basis of a physicalist argument is that the world is defined entirely by physicality; thus, a world that was physically identical would necessarily contain consciousness, as consciousness would necessarily be generated from any set of physical circumstances identical to our own. The zombie argument claims that one can tell by the power of reason that such a "zombie scenario" is metaphysically possible. Chalmers writes, "From

10650-509: The belief that they were doing good in their pastoral roles by providing comfort and required ritual. The research, with Linda LaScola, was further extended to include 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 . Dennett wrote about and advocated

10792-439: The beneficiary of hundreds of hours of informal tutorials on all the fields that interest me, from some of the world's leading scientists". Throughout his career, he was an interdisciplinarian who argued for "breaking the silos of knowledge", and he collaborated widely with computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and biologists. Dennett was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and two Guggenheim Fellowships . While he

10934-444: The bounds of nature but possible within the bounds of logic. This would imply that facts about experience are not logically entailed by the "physical" facts. Therefore, consciousness is irreducible. In Chalmers' words, "after God (hypothetically) created the world, he had more work to do." Daniel Dennett, a philosopher of mind, criticised the field's use of "the zombie hunch" which he deems an "embarrassment" that ought to "be dropped like

11076-400: The brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under continuous '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 subject to continual editing by many processes distributed around

11218-399: The brain lead to the felt sensations of, say, feelings of hunger? And why should those neural firings lead to feelings of hunger rather than some other feeling (such as, for example, feelings of thirst)? Chalmers argues that it is conceivable that the relevant behaviours associated with hunger, or any other feeling, could occur even in the absence of that feeling. This suggests that experience

11360-521: 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 features of consciousness is already apparent, and this later became an integral part of his program. He stated his view is materialist and scientific, and he presents an argument against qualia ; he argued that the concept of qualia is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute

11502-758: The centrality and indispensability of the intentional stance to our conceptual scheme. Dennett was the recipient of a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences . He was a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism . He was named 2004 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association . In 2006, Dennett received

11644-400: 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 not have control in the libertarian sense of what happens after the chance considerations occur as well. Libertarians require more than this for full responsibility and free will. Dennett

11786-469: The children's excitement as overwhelmingly good evidence that they understand the situation--they understand that Punch is acting on a mistaken belief (although they are not sophisticated enough to put it that way). Much of Dennett's work from the 1990s onwards was 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

11928-571: The co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University in Massachusetts . Dennett was a member of the editorial board for The Rutherford Journal and a co-founder of The Clergy Project . A vocal atheist and secularist , Dennett has been described as "one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers". He

12070-411: The coherence of the concepts which this approach struggles with. Dennett self-identified with a few terms: [Others] note that my "avoidance of the standard philosophical terminology for discussing 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

12212-499: The conceivability of zombies, proponents of the argument infer their metaphysical possibility" and argues that this inference, while not generally legitimate, is legitimate for phenomenal concepts such as consciousness since we must adhere to "Kripke's insight that for phenomenal concepts, there is no gap between reference-fixers and reference (or between primary and secondary intentions)." That is, for phenomenal concepts, conceivability implies possibility. According to Chalmers, whatever

12354-661: The counterfeit bill example brought forth by Amy Kind. Kind's example centers around a counterfeit 20-dollar bill made to be exactly like an authentic 20-dollar bill. This is logically possible. Yet the counterfeit bill would not have the same value. According to Kind, in her book Philosophy of Mind: The Basics , The Zombie Argument can be put in this standard form from a dualist point of view: Zombies, creatures that are microphysically identical to conscious beings but that lack consciousness entirely, are conceivable. If zombies are conceivable then they are possible. Therefore, zombies are possible. If zombies are possible, then consciousness

12496-419: The easy problems are mechanistic explanations that involve the activity of the nervous system and brain and its relation to the environment (such as the propagation of nerve signals from the toe to the brain, the processing of that information and how it leads to yelping, and so on). The hard problem is the question of why these mechanisms are accompanied by the feeling of pain , or why these feelings of pain feel

12638-515: The easy problems of consciousness. Some among them, who are sometimes termed strong reductionists , hold that phenomenal consciousness (i.e., conscious experience) does exist but that it can be fully understood as reducible to the brain. Broadly, strong reductionists accept that conscious experience is real but argue it can be fully understood in functional terms as an emergent property of the material brain. In contrast to weak reductionists (see above), strong reductionists reject ideas used to support

12780-416: The easy problems of consciousness. Thus, Dennett argues that the hard problem of experience is included among—not separate from—the easy problems, and therefore they can only be explained together as a cohesive unit. Eliminativists differ on the role they believe intuitive judgement plays in creating the apparent reality of consciousness. The philosopher Jacy Reese Anthis is of the position that this issue

12922-506: The easy problems, are all the sum of their parts (as are most things). The easy problems relevant to consciousness concern mechanistic analysis of the neural processes that accompany behaviour. Examples of these include how sensory systems work, how sensory data is processed in the brain, how that data influences behaviour or verbal reports, the neural basis of thought and emotion, and so on. They are problems that can be analyzed through "structures and functions". The hard problem, in contrast,

13064-538: The end I still think that the hard problem is a meaningful conceptual problem, but agree with Dennett that it is not a meaningful scientific problem. No one will ever get a grant to study whether you are a zombie or whether the same Captain Kirk walks on the deck of the Enterprise and the surface of Zakdorn. And I agree with several other philosophers that it may be futile to hope for a solution at all, precisely because it

13206-536: The entanglement of language, consciousness, and reality. He posited that our discourse about reality is mediated by our cognitive and linguistic capacities, marking a departure from Naïve realism . Dennett's philosophical stance on realism was intricately connected to his views on instrumentalism and the theory of real patterns. He drew a distinction between illata, which are genuine theoretical entities like electrons, and abstracta, which are "calculation bound entities or logical constructs" such as centers of gravity and

13348-589: The equator, placing beliefs and the like among the latter. One of Dennett's principal arguments was an instrumentalistic construal of intentional attributions, asserting that such attributions are environment-relative. In discussing intentional states, Dennett posited that they should not be thought of as resembling theoretical entities, but rather as logical constructs, avoiding the pitfalls of intentional realism without lapsing into pure instrumentalism or even eliminativism. His instrumentalism and anti-realism were crucial aspects of his view on intentionality, emphasizing

13490-559: The existence of a hard problem (that the same functional organization could exist without consciousness, or that a blind person who understood vision through a textbook would not know everything about sight) as simply mistaken intuitions. A notable family of strong reductionist accounts are the higher-order theories of consciousness . In 2005, the philosopher Peter Carruthers wrote about "recognitional concepts of experience", that is, "a capacity to recognize [a] type of experience when it occurs in one's own mental life," and suggested that such

13632-505: The feeling of what it is like to be something." Consciousness, in this sense, is synonymous with experience. . . .even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? The problems of consciousness, Chalmers argues, are of two kinds:

13774-413: The firing of c-fibers). Levine thinks such thought experiments demonstrate an explanatory gap between consciousness and the physical world: even if consciousness is reducible to physical things, consciousness cannot be explained in terms of physical things, because the link between physical things and consciousness is a contingent link. Levine does not think that the explanatory gap means that consciousness

13916-430: The hard problem frequently turn to various philosophical thought experiments, involving philosophical zombies (which, they claim, are conceivable) or inverted qualia , or the claimed ineffability of colour experiences , or the claimed unknowability of foreign states of consciousness, such as the experience of being a bat . The terms "hard problem" and "easy problems" were coined by the philosopher David Chalmers in

14058-407: The hard problem is a real problem then physicalism must be false, and if physicalism is true then the hard problem must not be a real problem. Though Chalmers rejects physicalism, he is still a naturalist . The hard problem of consciousness has scholarly antecedents considerably earlier than Chalmers. Chalmers himself notes that "a number of thinkers in the recent and distant past" have "recognised

14200-697: The hard problem is disputed. It has been accepted by some philosophers of mind such as Joseph Levine , Colin McGinn , and Ned Block and cognitive neuroscientists such as Francisco Varela , Giulio Tononi , and Christof Koch . On the other hand, its existence is denied by other philosophers of mind, such as Daniel Dennett , Massimo Pigliucci , Thomas Metzinger , Patricia Churchland , and Keith Frankish , and by cognitive neuroscientists such as Stanislas Dehaene , Bernard Baars , Anil Seth , and Antonio Damasio . Clinical neurologist and skeptic Steven Novella has dismissed it as "the hard non-problem". According to

14342-448: The hard problem is misguided in that it asks how consciousness can emerge from matter, whereas in fact sentience emerges from the evolution of living organisms. He states: "The hard problem isn’t a hard problem at all. The really hard problems are the problems the scientists are dealing with. [...] The philosophical problem, like all philosophical problems, is a confusion in the conceptual scheme." Hacker's critique extends beyond Chalmers and

14484-430: The hard problem is misguided, resulting from a "category mistake". He said: "Of course an explanation isn't the same as an experience, but that's because the two are completely independent categories, like colors and triangles. It is obvious that I cannot experience what it is like to be you, but I can potentially have a complete explanation of how and why it is possible to be you." In 2017, the philosopher Marco Stango, in

14626-409: The hard problem, being directed against contemporary philosophy of mind and neuroscience more broadly. Along with the neuroscientist Max Bennett , he has argued that most of contemporary neuroscience remains implicitly dualistic in its conceptualizations and is predicated on the mereological fallacy of ascribing psychological concepts to the brain that can properly be ascribed only to the person as

14768-416: The hard problem. As of the 2020 survey results, it seems that the majority of philosophers (62.42%) agree that the hard problem is real, with a substantial minority that disagrees (29.76%). Attitudes towards physicalism also differ among professionals. In the 2009 PhilPapers survey, 56.5% of philosophers surveyed subscribed to physicalism and 27.1% of philosophers surveyed rejected physicalism. 16.4% fell into

14910-569: The hypothetical zombie, being a subset of the concept of oneself, must entail a deficit in observables (cognitive systems), a "seductive error" contradicting the original definition of a zombie. Thomas Metzinger dismisses the zombie argument as no longer relevant to the consciousness community, calling it a weak argument that covertly relies on the difficulty in defining "consciousness" and an "ill-defined folk psychological umbrella term". According to verificationism , for words to have meaning, their use must be open to public verification. Since it

15052-453: The increase in efficiency that humans reap by using resources such as expert systems in medicine or GPS in navigation, Dennett saw 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 attribute intellectual powers to them that they do not possess. He believed the relevant danger from artificial intelligence (AI)

15194-495: The knowledge of "what red looks like" — which is distinct from, and irreducible to, her prior physical knowledge of the brain or visual system. A stronger form of the knowledge argument claims not merely that Mary would lack subjective knowledge of "what red looks like," but that she would lack knowledge of an objective fact about the world: namely, "what red looks like," a non-physical fact that can be learned only through direct experience (qualia). Others, such as Thomas Nagel, take

15336-427: The late Christopher Hitchens . In Darwin's Dangerous Idea , Dennett wrote that evolution can account for the origin of morality. He rejected 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 support values per se, but rather to rush from facts to values. In his 2006 book, Breaking

15478-490: The mental and the physical. In physicalism, material facts determine all other facts. Since any fact other than that of consciousness may be held to be the same for a p-zombie and for a normal conscious human, it follows that physicalism must hold that p-zombies are either not possible or are the same as normal humans. The zombie argument is a version of general modal arguments against physicalism, such as that of Saul Kripke . Further such arguments were notably advanced in

15620-405: The mind. Physicist Adam Brown has suggested constructing a type of philosophical zombie using counterfactual quantum computation , a technique in which a computer is placed into a superposition of running and not running. If the program being executed is a brain simulation, and if one makes the further assumption that brain simulations are conscious, then the simulation can have the same output as

15762-440: The notion of memetics as a philosophically useful tool, his last work on this topic being his "Brains, Computers, and Minds", a three-part presentation through Harvard's MBB 2009 Distinguished Lecture Series. Dennett was 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 behind

15904-504: The particular difficulties of explaining consciousness." He states that all his original 1996 paper contributed to the discussion was "a catchy name, a minor reformulation of philosophically familiar points". Among others, thinkers who have made arguments similar to Chalmers' formulation of the hard problem include Isaac Newton , John Locke , Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , John Stuart Mill , and Thomas Henry Huxley . Likewise, Asian philosophers like Dharmakirti and Guifeng Zongmi discussed

16046-423: The particular way that they do. Chalmers argues that facts about the neural mechanisms of pain, and pain behaviours, do not lead to facts about conscious experience. Facts about conscious experience are, instead, further facts , not derivable from facts about the brain. An explanation for all of the relevant physical facts about neural processing would leave unexplained facts about what it is like to feel pain. This

16188-400: The problem of how consciousness arises from unconscious matter. The mind–body problem is the problem of how the mind and the body relate. The mind-body problem is more general than the hard problem of consciousness, since it is the problem of discovering how the mind and body relate in general, thereby implicating any theoretical framework that broaches the topic. The hard problem, in contrast,

16330-455: The reality of phenomenal consciousness but believe it is nothing extra in addition to certain functions or behaviours. This view is sometimes referred to as strong reductionism . Other type-A materialists may reject the existence of phenomenal consciousness entirely. This view is referred to as eliminative materialism or illusionism . Many philosophers have disputed that there is a hard problem of consciousness distinct from what Chalmers calls

16472-551: The rings of Saturn are a physical thing because they are nothing more than a complex arrangement of a large number of subatomic particles interacting in a certain way. According to physicalism, everything, including consciousness, can be explained by appeal to its microphysical constituents. Chalmers's hard problem presents a counterexample to this view and to other phenomena like swarms of birds, since it suggests that consciousness, like swarms of birds, cannot be reductively explained by appealing to their physical constituents. Thus, if

16614-434: The same from his time at Oxford onwards. He was 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 theory of content and for a theory of consciousness. His approach to this project also stayed true to this distinction. Just as Content and Consciousness has

16756-599: The same general form. The premises of the general zombie argument are implied by the premises of all the specific zombie arguments. A general zombie argument is in part motivated by potential disagreements between various anti-physicalist views. For example, an anti-physicalist view can consistently assert that p-zombies are metaphysically impossible but that inverted qualia (such as inverted spectra ) or absent qualia (partial zombiehood) are metaphysically possible. Premises regarding inverted qualia or partial zombiehood can replace premises regarding p-zombies to produce variations of

16898-683: The same survey yielded almost identical results: "inconceivable" 16%, conceivable but impossible 37%, "metaphysically possible" 24%, and "other" 23%. Though philosophical zombies are widely used in thought experiments, the detailed articulation of the concept is not always the same. P-zombies were introduced primarily to argue against specific types of physicalism such as materialism and behaviorism , according to which mental states exist solely as behavior. Belief, desire, thought, consciousness, and so on, are conceptualized as behavior (whether external behavior or internal behavior) or tendencies towards behaviors. A p-zombie behaviorally indistinguishable from

17040-478: The sense that it is a philosophical mistake : the mistake of failing to see that the physical can be had as an episode of immediate sentiency." The philosopher Thomas Metzinger likens the hard problem of consciousness to vitalism , a formerly widespread view in biology which was not so much solved as abandoned. Brian Jonathan Garrett has also argued that the hard problem suffers from flaws analogous to those of vitalism. The philosopher Peter Hacker argues that

17182-442: The sky seem blue), she has never seen color. If Mary were released from this room and experienced color for the first time, would she learn anything new? Jackson initially believed this supported epiphenomenalism (mental phenomena are the effects, but not the causes, of physical phenomena) but later changed his view to physicalism , suggesting that Mary is simply discovering a new way for her brain to represent qualities that exist in

17324-457: The so-called "hard problem" will be solved in the process of solving what Chalmers terms the "easy problems". He compares consciousness to stage magic and its capability to create extraordinary illusions out of ordinary things. To show how people might be commonly fooled into overstating the accuracy of their introspective abilities, he describes a phenomenon called change blindness , a visual process that involves failure to detect scenery changes in

17466-509: The standard philosophical terminology as worse than useless—a major obstacle to progress since it consists of so many errors. In Consciousness Explained , he affirmed "I am a sort of ' teleofunctionalist ', of course, perhaps the original teleofunctionalist". He went on to say, "I am ready to come out of the closet as some sort of verificationist ." (pp. 460–61). Dennett was credited with inspiring false belief tasks used in developmental psychology. He noted that when four-year-olds watch

17608-401: The structure and function of mental states, i.e. that there is a hard problem." Hence, the arguments beg the question . The authors suggest that "instead of letting our conclusions on the thought experiments guide our theories of consciousness, we should let our theories of consciousness guide our conclusions from the thought experiments." The philosopher Massimo Pigliucci argued in 2013 that

17750-416: The subject cannot actually read, but is able to manipulate meaningfully using a set of algorithms. Searle holds that a program cannot give a computer a "mind" or "understanding", regardless of how intelligently it may make it behave. Stevan Harnad argues that Searle's critique is really meant to target functionalism and computationalism , and to establish neuroscience as the only correct way to understand

17892-690: The term "zimboes"—p-zombies that have second-order beliefs —to argue that the idea of a p-zombie is incoherent; "Zimboes think they are conscious, think they have qualia, think they suffer pains—they are just 'wrong' (according to this lamentable tradition), in ways that neither they nor we could ever discover!". Michael Lynch agrees with Dennett, arguing that the zombie conceivability argument forces us to either question whether we actually have consciousness or accept that zombies are not possible. If zombies falsely believe they are conscious, how can we be sure we are not zombies? We may believe we are experiencing conscious mental states when in fact we merely hold

18034-400: The view that conceivability can tell us about possibility, he provides no positive defense of the principle. As an analogy, the generalized continuum hypothesis has no known counterexamples, but this does not mean we must accept it. Indeed, according to Hill and McLaughlin, the fact that Chalmers concludes we have epiphenomenal mental states that do not cause our physical behavior seems to be

18176-455: The world . She states that "the hard problem of consciousness may not be a genuine problem for non-philosophers (despite its overwhelming obviousness to philosophers)." A complete illusionist theory of consciousness must include the description of a mechanism by which the illusion of subjective experience is had and reported by people. Various philosophers and scientists have proposed possible theories. For example, in his book Consciousness and

18318-464: The world that can solve it, by either modifying physicalism or abandoning it in favour of an alternative ontology (such as panpsychism or dualism ). A third response has been to accept the hard problem as real but deny human cognitive faculties can solve it. PhilPapers is an organization that archives academic philosophy papers and periodically surveys professional philosophers about their views. It can be used to gauge professional attitudes towards

18460-408: The world. Swampman is an imaginary character introduced by Donald Davidson . If Davidson goes hiking in a swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt while nearby another lightning bolt spontaneously rearranges a bunch of molecules so that, entirely by coincidence, they take on exactly the same form that Davidson's body had at the moment of his untimely death, then this being, "Swampman", has

18602-421: The zombie argument may think that conceptual analysis is a central part of (if not the only part of) philosophy and that it certainly can do a great deal of philosophical work. But others, such as Dennett, Paul Churchland and W.V.O. Quine , have fundamentally different views. For this reason, discussion of the zombie argument remains vigorous in philosophy. Some accept modal reasoning in general but deny it in

18744-463: The zombie argument. The metaphysical possibility of a physically indistinguishable world with either inverted qualia or partial zombiehood implies that physical truths do not metaphysically necessitate phenomenal truths. To construct the general form of the zombie argument, take the sentence P to be true if and only if the conjunct of all microphysical truths of our world obtain, and take the sentence Q to be true if some phenomenal truth that obtains in

18886-462: The zombie case. Christopher S. Hill and Brian P. McLaughlin suggest that the zombie thought experiment combines imagination of a "sympathetic" nature (putting oneself in a phenomenal state) and a "perceptual" nature (imagining becoming aware of something in the outside world). Each type of imagination may work on its own but not work when used at the same time. Hence Chalmers's argument need not go through. Moreover, while Chalmers defuses criticisms of

19028-436: The zombie is that of a human completely lacking conscious experience. It is possible to distinguish various zombie subtypes used in different thought experiments as follows: Zombie arguments often support lines of reasoning that aim to show that zombies are metaphysically possible in order to support some form of dualism —in this case the view that the world includes two kinds of substance (or perhaps two kinds of property ):

19170-408: Was 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 case for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to libertarian views. The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output

19312-628: Was a member of Hertford College . His doctoral dissertation was entitled The Mind and the Brain: Introspective Description in the Light of Neurological Findings; Intentionality . From 1965 to 1971, Dennett taught at the University of California, Irvine , before moving to Tufts University where he taught for many decades. He also spent periods visiting at Harvard University and several other universities. Dennett described himself as "an autodidact —or, more properly,

19454-451: Was a student of Willard Van Orman Quine . He had decided to transfer to Harvard after reading Quine's From a Logical Point of View and, thinking that Quine was wrong about some things, decided, as he said "as only a freshman could, that I had to go to Harvard and confront this man with my corrections to his errors!" In 1965, Dennett received his DPhil in philosophy at the University of Oxford , where he studied under Gilbert Ryle and

19596-522: Was at least 50 years away, and of far less pressing significance than other problems the world faces. Dennett was known for his nuanced stance on realism. While he supported scientific realism , advocating that entities and phenomena posited by scientific theories exist independently of our perceptions, he leant towards instrumentalism concerning certain theoretical entities, valuing their explanatory and predictive utility, as showing in his discussion of real patterns . Dennett's pragmatic realism underlines

19738-409: Was first introduced by Chalmers in a 2003 literature review on the topic. The labelling convention of this taxonomy has been incorporated into the technical vocabulary of analytic philosophy, being used by philosophers such as Adrian Boutel, Raamy Majeed, Janet Levin, Pete Mandik & Josh Weisberg, Roberto Pereira, and Helen Yetter-Chappell. Type-A materialism (also known as reductive materialism or

19880-706: Was killed in a plane crash in Ethiopia . Shortly after, his mother took him back to Massachusetts. Dennett's sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett. Dennett said that he was first introduced to the notion of philosophy while attending Camp Mowglis in Hebron, New Hampshire, at age 11, when a camp counselor said to him, "You know what you are, Daniel? You're a philosopher." Dennett graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1959, and spent one year at Wesleyan University before receiving his BA degree in philosophy at Harvard University in 1963. There, he

20022-730: Was philosopher Robert Kirk who first used the term "zombie" in this context, in 1974. Before that, Keith Campbell made a similar argument in his 1970 book Body and Mind , using the term "imitation man". Chalmers further developed and popularized the idea in his work. There has been a lively debate about what the zombie argument shows. Critics who primarily argue that zombies are not conceivable include Daniel Dennett , Nigel J. T. Thomas, David Braddon-Mitchell, and Robert Kirk. Critics who assert mostly that conceivability does not entail possibility include Katalin Balog, Keith Frankish , Christopher Hill , and Stephen Yablo . Critics who question

20164-527: Was referred to as one of the " Four Horsemen " of New Atheism , along with Richard Dawkins , Sam Harris , and Christopher Hitchens . Daniel Clement Dennett III was born on March 28, 1942, in Boston, Massachusetts , the son of Ruth Marjorie (née Leck; 1903–1971) and Daniel Clement Dennett Jr. (1910–1947). Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon , where, during World War II , his father, who had

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