Daniel Dennett

From his homepage on http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/~ddennett.htm (last updated in 1998):

"Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Freedom Evolves (Viking Press, 2003) [ISBN 0670031860 , ISBN 0142003840 (Penguin USA, 2004)] and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon and Schuster, 1995), is Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and a grandson. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.

His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978) ISBN 0262540371 , Elbow Room (1984) ISBN 0262540428 , The Intentional Stance (1987) ISBN 0262540533 , Consciousness Explained (1991) ISBN 0316180661 , Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) ISBN 068482471X , Kinds of Minds (1996) ISBN 0465073514 , Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (MIT Press) ISBN 0262540908 . He co-edited TheMindsIbook ISBN 0553345842 with DouglasHofstadter in 1981. He is the author of over a hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. His most recent book is Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (MIT Press and Penguin, 1998)." An example is RealPatterns.

A lovely quote from Consciousness Explained:

"With so many underdefended fragments of theory and speculation, it is a good idea to postpone our demand for proof and look instead for more or less independent but also inconclusive grounds that tend to converge in support of a single hypothesis. We should try to keep our enthusiasm in check, however. Sometimes what appears to be enough smoke to guarantee a robust fire is actually just a cloud of dust from a passing bandwagon."

(Originally referring to theories of consciousness, but I think we in the software field want to keep these words in mind.)

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained

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