Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

November 10, 2017

Sorry, Daniel Dennett, the Mind Is Nothing Like a Computer

The illusionist.

In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, elaborating on the materialist stance that has occupied him for much of his career, endeavors to explain how the human mind and consciousness itself are the product of gradual, incremental evolution entirely reducible to physics and chemistry. To Dennett, the brain, like a computer, performs a series of discrete and mindless functions, which together create in us the illusion that we are conscious and sentient beings. David Bentley Hart attacks this argument in his review:

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