Daniel Dennett

This paper argues that the contemporary debate surrounding artificial intelligence consciousness is fundamentally misguided, resting on outdated folk psychology and conceptual confusion. Drawing upon Wittgenstein's beetle-in-a-box thought experiment and Ryle's formulation of the category mistake, the essay demonstrates that treating consciousness as a private, detached property to be discovered within neural weights is a grammatical and logical error. By applying eliminative materialism and strong illusionism, the author contends that the subjective inner theatre, or qualia, demanded of advanced language models is (...) a theoretical fiction that lacks explanatory power for both biological brains and artificial architectures. Furthermore, while functionalist frameworks like Global Workspace Theory and Integrated Information Theory offer robust structural descriptions, they fail to bridge the explanatory gap to phenomenal experience. Utilizing Parfit's bundle theory, the essay also shows that artificial systems lack the metaphysical stability required for a coherent self. Ultimately, the paper concludes that anthropomorphizing algorithmic behaviour actively distorts AI safety debates, transforming solvable engineering and alignment challenges into intractable metaphysical disputes. Acknowledging that the box of consciousness is empty allows researchers to refocus on the concrete, material impacts of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the central figures of New Atheism, recently surprised many by switching to Christianity. The reasoning prompting her change is not theological but civilizational. As a defender of individualism and free speech, she now claims that safeguarding those values requires adhering to the Judeo-Christian tradition that spawned them. Although I find many elements of Hirsi Ali’s current position sensible, I argue that her justification of religion rests on an overblown inference, since we can and should harness (...) the best parts of the Judeo-Christian tradition while leaving out the worst. Conservative thinkers may deem such alterations incautious, but the truth is that most people already adhere selectively to the Bible’s ideas. What remains, in my estimate, is to come to terms with this in our official self-conceptions. (shrink)

One of the characteristic aspects of Daniel Dennett’s thought is his belief in the explanatory power of science. For Dennett, in order to make progress with certain philosophical problems, e.g. questions about the nature of consciousness, philosophers need to engage with the findings of empirical science. In this paper, I will take up the question of the relation between science and philosophy and I will start by giving a general overview of Dennett’s view of this relation while also addressing the (...) question of whether he can properly be said to embrace scientism. In the second part of this paper, I will argue that philosophical thinking is continuous with science and that, though at the level of theoretical frameworks the intension of the words “philosophy” and “science” are the same, there is a distinction that can be made in practice if we look at the extensions of the terms. -/- . (shrink)

C. S. Peirce is often credited as a forerunner of the verificationist theory of meaning. In his early pragmatist papers, Peirce did say that if we want to make our ideas clear(er), then we should look downstream to their actual and future effects. For many who work in philosophy of mind, this is enough to endorse functionalism and dismiss the whole topic of qualia. It complexifies matters, however, to consider that the term qualia was introduced by the founder of pragmatism (...) himself. Peirce was adamant that only triadic relations can support language and cognition. Even so, he insisted on purely logical grounds that, when we analyze triadic signs all the way, we are left with a qualitative residue he called Firstness. Such an isolated relatum could never be studied experimentally. Yet, given that this primitive state can be confirmed by means of a formal or prescissive distinction, I believe the Peircean account can do justice to many of the intuitions that generate the so-called hard problem of consciousness. My goal, then, is to show that Peirce's semiotic commitment to qualia is compatible with his foundational statements about pragmatism. (shrink)

The question whether consciousness is faster than light recurs in popular and semi-technical discourse, and this paper argues that it is not a hard question but a malformed one. Velocity is a predicate that attaches only to entities with a spatiotemporal trajectory, and consciousness, having no position from which to be displaced, is not such an entity, so the predicate fails to apply in the way that color fails to apply to a number. The diagnosis is developed as a category (...) error in the tradition of Dennett's dissolution of the Cartesian theater, and it is shown to hold even on a strict identity theory, since the organized pattern that neural activity instantiates has no velocity of its own even though the underlying activity does, just as a melody has no propagation speed though the air that carries it does. The paper then takes up the three pressures that keep the question alive and shows that none requires superluminal propagation: the binding problem, treated as the construction of subjective simultaneity in structural analogy to the relativity of simultaneity; quantum non-locality, where what is non-local is the correlation and never any information-bearing signal; and the phenomenology of altered states, where dilation and compression of felt time reflect the variability of the temporal binding window rather than any change in the speed at which consciousness travels. A constructive proposal follows, on which consciousness is a dimensionless coupling coefficient relating an unobserved manifold to experienced reality, and the velocity question dissolves because a dimensionless quantity and a dimensional one cannot be ranked in magnitude. The argument is careful to separate the strong diagnostic claim, which stands independently, from this constructive framework, which is offered but not presupposed, and it closes by conceding that the hard problem of consciousness is untouched, the dissolution operating only at the level of the easy problems. (shrink)

In her article, Stanton (2025) argues that the real pattern analysis of language proffered by Nefdt (2023) fails as a demarcation of language versus non-language. She also makes the case that structuralism about linguistics does not characterise certain important metasemantic aspects of the broader field. In this article, I offer a rejoinder to these points by emphasising the role the linguistic community plays in determining real patterns as well as the theoretical benefits the view that grammars are multilayered compressions algorithms (...) has for semantics and other linguistic disciplines. (shrink)