The full talk is here http://www.videosift.com/video/Daniel-Dennet-discusses-atheism-runs-70-min but it runs a good 70 minutes, so I thought this portion was alright to take out for itself.

Daniel Dennett is a great scientific thinker but ultimately takes a reductionist view of conciousness which is opposed to thousands of years of philosophic thinking, and ones own experience.

Flan in the face Daniel, flan in the face.

^ Quite true. I tend to agree more with David Chalmers than Daniel Dennett re consciousness http://consc.net/chalmers/ or Jaron Lanier, e.g., when it comes to questions about AI.

He's using "inevitable" in an interesting sense, but one that completely avoids the fundamental question of free will.

He may be right in the sense that this ability to avoid things is all society really needs. We don't really need libertarian (not talking about the political sense) free will within our conceptual apparatus.

But there's no reason to equivocate on "inevitable" in this way.


Dennett is an okay philosopher. He's adequate, but as this clip shows, not really the best.