Daniel Dennett

philosopher · 8 mentions across 3 readings

In this course

Dennett provides a foundational framework for thinking about consciousness and systems analysis that the course repurposes rather than directly adopts—the readings play on his work (particularly his arguments about explaining consciousness) to instead ask how we might implicate consciousness in technological and material systems. His 1970s work on "levelism" established a multi-level approach to understanding complex systems that became canonical in computational and philosophical thinking, offering the course a methodological vocabulary for analyzing AI and cybernetic systems without collapsing into metaphysical confusion. His influence here is primarily methodological rather than substantive: he provides conceptual tools for rigorously describing system behavior and abstraction levels that the course leverages to avoid sloppy reasoning about consciousness and machines.

Mentioned in 3 readings

Luciano Floridi

The Method of Levels of Abstraction

Reality can be studied at different levels, so forms of “levelism” have often been advocated in the past.[^1] In the 1970s, levelism nicely dovetailed with the computational turn and became a standard approach both in science and in philoso…Likewise, the use of predicates is essential in subjects like information and computer science, where discrete observables are paramount and hence predicates are required to describe a system behaviour. In particular, state-based methods li…Second, the method is anti-metaphysical, again in a Kantian sense. Metaphysics is—when used as a negative label—what is done by sloppy reasoning when it pretends to develop a theory without taking into consideration, at least implicitly, th…

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Paul M. Churchland

Eliminative Materialism

Daniel Dennett has defended a view along these lines.5 And the view just outlined gives voice to a theme of the property dualists as well. Karl Popper and Joseph Margolis both cite the normative nature of mental and linguistic ac…--- 5: Most explicitly in "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology" (forthcoming), but this theme of Dennett's goes all the way back to his "Intentional Systems," this JOURNAL, LXVIII, 4 (Feb. 25, 1971): 87–106; reprinted in his Br…

Catherine Malabou

Introduction from What should we do with our brain

functioning. Playing on the title of a well-known work by Daniel Dennett, we are not seeking to explain or explicate consciousness, but to implicate it.20 To implicate consciousness, to ask what we should do with our brain, means…

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