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Daniel Dennett (B: March 28, 1942)

By rbancroft

  • From Graduation to Publication

    From Graduation to Publication
    Daniel Dennett graduated from Harvard University in 1963 with a bachelors of philosophy. Afterwards, he continued his education at the University of Oxford by obtaining his graduate degree.
    Dennett wrote his doctoral thesis on the nature of consciousness and later in 1969, progressed that work to be his first publication, a book called "Content and Consciousness"

  • From Skepticism to Recognition

    From Skepticism to Recognition
    Dennett had strong beliefs in the field of cognitive psychology, some beliefs which were met with skepticism by his fellow scientists in the community. However, as time progressed, more information about the brain was unveiled and the methods and strategies used by Dennett were adopted by other philosophers. For his great work in the field, in 1985 Dennett was appointed as the director of the Center for Cognitive studies at Tufts.

  • Consciousness Explained

    Consciousness Explained
    Dennett went on to write more books, including the bestselling "Consciousness Explained" in 1991. The result was split, with half of the critics agreeing with Dennett and the other half feeling like he missed it entirely. In his book, he described the mind as, "something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain." (Rothman 2017) His comparison of the human mind to a computer processor is foreshadowing of his work to come.

  • Cog

    Cog
    In 1993, Dennett along with a team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set out to create a super robot. They wanted to make the robot smarter than anything before and even tried to give it a consciousness.
    Later, Dennett made known his views that it is dangerous to give robots intellectual powers that they should not possess.

  • Sources

    Sources
    The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2020, March 24). Daniel C. Dennett. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Daniel-C-Dennett Rothman, J., MacFarquhar, L., & Gottlieb, A. (2017, March 20). Daniel Dennett's Science of the Soul. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul