Daniel Dennett

American philosopher of mind at Tufts University, where he co-directed the Center for Cognitive Studies, and a leading defender of the view that minds are what brains, and potentially machines, do. His intentional stanceintentional stance, n.: Predicting what something will do by treating it as if it had beliefs and goals — as we do with people, and often with chess programs and chatbots — whatever is really going on inside. (1971; book 1987) holds that attributing beliefs and desires to a system, whether person, animal or program, is justified to the extent that doing so predicts its behavior. In 'Consciousness Explained' (1991) he replaced the 'Cartesian theater' with a multiple-drafts model of parallel processes, and in essays such as 'Quining Qualia' (1988) he argued that qualiaqualia, n.: The individual felt qualities of experience — the particular redness of red, the taste of mint, the sting of a burn — that seem impossible to capture fully in words., as philosophers define them, do not exist, a forerunner of illusionismillusionism, n.: The view that the inner glow of experience that seems so hard to explain is a kind of trick the brain plays on itself: we are conscious, but not in the mysterious way it seems.. His robot thought experiment in 'Cognitive Wheels' (1984) became a standard illustration of the frame problemframe problem, n.: The difficulty of getting an AI to work out what does and does not change when something happens, without spelling out every one of the countless things that stay the same.. He chaired the prize committee of the early Loebner PrizeLoebner Prize, prop. n.: A yearly contest, held from 1991 to 2019, in which chatbots tried to convince judges they were human in short text chats. Its grand prize was never won, and critics called it a publicity stunt. contests and, near the end of his life, warned that AI systems passing as humans, which he called counterfeit people, threaten social trust.