Word: dennetts
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...roots of religious faith is a hot, and heatedly debated, issue of the day. In his 2004 book The God Gene, U.S. molecular biologist Dean Hamer claimed to have located one of the genes he said was responsible for spirituality. Last month, the American philosopher and evolutionary theorist Daniel Dennett provoked more controversy with Breaking the Spell, in which he cast religion in terms of memes - cultural ideas that can spread, mutate and survive in our minds, whether or not they are good for us. Meanwhile in Oxford, England, researchers at the Centre for the Science of the Mind...
Contributors and generally smart guys Steven Pinker, Atul Gawande, Chet Raymo, Daniel C. Dennett and Mike O’Connor will read and discuss selections from the ever interesting The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004. Free tickets can be picked up at the Harvard Book Store. 6:30 p.m. First Parish Church...
...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...
...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...