Word: dennett
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...with your former body may now have a bum knee, but he won't know why (that misguided dive you took playing touch football to impress your girlfriend in 1971). Summing up his own theoretical musings about the wisdom of a brain swap, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett concluded that it was not an even exchange. "It was clear that my current body and I could part company, but not likely that I could be separated from my brain," he wrote. "The rule of thumb [is] that in a brain-transplant operation, one want[s] to be the donor...
...recent years scores of scientists have grappled with that profound question, among them mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, biologist Francis Crick and psychiatrist Allan Hobson, as well as many philosophers. Their answers have ranged from the optimism of Tufts University's Daniel Dennett, who says consciousness will one day be understood as nothing more complicated than a kind of biological software routine, to the outright pessimism of Rutgers University's Colin McGinn. He regards consciousness as "the ultimate mystery, a mystery that human intelligence will never unravel...
...always open to the possibility that the meme might one day be developed into a proper hypothesis of the human mind. I did not know, before I read Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett and then Susan Blackmore's new book, The Meme Machine, how ambitious such a thesis might turn out to be. Dennett vividly evokes the image of the mind as a seething hotbed of memes. He even goes so far as to defend the hypothesis that "human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes...
...alone in this view. Tufts University professor Daniel Dennett, an enthusiastic and prolific memeticist, acknowledges that it's an unsettling philosophy. "People are terribly afraid that this is going to rob them of authorship and creativity, that it will be the swallowing up of the self." That fear, he speculates, may account for some of the vehemence of the opponents of memetics. "The view of the self that emerges from a proper evolutionary account," he says, "is different enough from the tradition that it can get people fairly upset." One advantage of memetics over tradition, Dennett points out, is that...
Philosopher Daniel Dennett is the author of eight books, most recently Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays...