Daniel Dennett

I think they're human imaginations.

You really get down to the tough, harder questions of, like, what is consciousness? You might even be someone like me who thinks, like someone like Dennett, Daniel Dennett or others think that there's some- it's complex, but it's, it, it, it arises from the materialism in some way.

Um, and then you hit this wall, and you go, "Okay, cool." You learned all this stuff.

H-H-Has this bettered your life? Has this actually given you, like, some sense of, like, "I made it," and you're happier? Or do you feel like, but hold on, I feel like I've gotten to this place where I've sanitized all those superstitions, all these things that maybe some of those things I try to sanitize out of my mind and try to rationalize were, like, products of being human and not just religious.

Yeah.

And Daniel Dennett had Breaking the Spell, and, and then there's a whole bunch of other new atheist screeds.

And, um, they all situate their argument in kind of a, not, not an altruistic way, but, like, as if they have, like, deep concern for the future.

You know, for, uh ...

And I think that unfortunately, a lot of the more just pure, hard science people, they just say, oh, well, those are dumb questions.

Or there's philosophers like Daniel Dennett who say things like, well, there is no self.

It's imaginary.

It's a delusion.

At that time, if you remember, back around the year 2000 or so, the new atheism movement was really taking off.

You had Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, all those guys attacking religious faith.

And using radical Islam as kind of their wedge and reason for doing that because they were viewing religion as being so poisonous.

And so they decided to attack all faith.

Well, obviously like Williamson is core analytic and that's very contemporary, but I just, I put Williamson in an entirely different category.

It may be closer to Davidson than Chalmers and Fodor and Dennett and people like that.

And I'm not sure why that is.

Maybe it has to do with the relationship to science or just the relationship to these being live public issues.

who is still really difficult, who is still, you can't nail down.

He's not fun like Chalmers is.

He's still scathing like Dennett is, but I find him harder to nail down.

And he definitely is not as afraid to go off into mathematics territory.