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The outback of the mind

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Andrew Brown on Daniel Dennett

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

"Darwinism gives us a perspective to see how meaning and function and purpose can come to exist in a world that is intrinsically meaningless and functionless - not just biological purpose and function, but in the end, moral purpose and the meaning of life.

and later:

To Dennett, this doesn't matter at all. He's temperamentally opposed to mystery. Like many scientists, he believes a mystery is simply a problem we don't know how to approach yet, but he adds to this a philosophically educated scorn for the idea that there should be really profound mysteries. If you think you've found one, you have probably misunderstood your problem. What matters to him is that consciousness arises from what the brain does - its work as a "syntactic engine" - not from what it is made of.

The semantic engineer
a profile of Daniel Dennett
by Andrew Brown

Darwin machine

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