1. Comment #78977 by Matt7895 on October 15, 2007 at 3:59 pm

This was a great talk. I loved every minute of it.

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2. Comment #78986 by Crazymalc on October 15, 2007 at 4:38 pm

I love that "Thank Goodness" piece so much

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3. Comment #78992 by obscured by clouds on October 15, 2007 at 6:11 pm

Good job editing Josh! The guy who kicked my tripod was barely noticeable, Thank Goodness!!

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4. Comment #78994 by Atticus_of_Amber on October 15, 2007 at 6:13 pm

Great lecture. I hope he writes it up and puts it online because it draws together a lot of useful threads in a very accessible way.

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5. Comment #79003 by aoratos philos on October 15, 2007 at 7:08 pm

Thx for all these wonderful speeches and lectures.

I love Dan's not-so-heavy practical approach, it's a great compliment to the styles of the other members of the musketeers. (is this collective phrase still in use here ? lol )

In the interest of science, and in light of Dan's description of the some of the underlying reasons for belief (in belief), I for one am going to adopt a different tact to see if I can coax a different response from the religious.

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6. Comment #79072 by Atticus_of_Amber on October 16, 2007 at 4:00 am

I'm particularly attracted to his delineation of a third type aside from "brights" (hate that term, but I get his drift) and "supers" - the "murkies" or "mysterians".

One of the reasons I thing it is is so immensely frustrating to argue with religious moderates is that they are often not supers but murkies. And Dennett lays out some useful strategies for dealing with them.

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7. Comment #79159 by namtog on October 16, 2007 at 10:58 am

Greetings,

Loved it.

More I say, more.

Why isn't this on one of my cable channels?

Namtog

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8. Comment #79162 by steve99 on October 16, 2007 at 11:06 am

This has to be one of the best videos posted on this site. Dennett's wisdom and clarity of thinking are so impressive. I may not always agree with many of his philosophical positions, but he is such an impressive speaker.

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9. Comment #79316 by Teratornis on October 16, 2007 at 10:31 pm

In reply to comment #79162 by steve99:

This has to be one of the best videos posted on this site. Dennett's wisdom and clarity of thinking are so impressive. I may not always agree with many of his philosophical positions, but he is such an impressive speaker.

When I listen to really smart people, I tend to agree with whichever one I listened to most recently. And then I listen to the next one...

One problem with the human capacity for belief is that we tend to base it on a few tiny little brush strokes from the whole painting, individual strands of thread from the vast circus tent of reality. Because, basically, that's all we can fit into our short-term memory at a time. So it might just be one silly thing, like a Nancy Drew story, that melts a little more ice off the submerged hulk of the iceberg, making it suddenly top-heavy and causing it to violently flip.

I liked what Prof. Dennett observes about getting our message out in all the ways we can, because you never know when one particular point will get across to someone.

This notion came up in a previous thread about the debate that was structured to slant against Prof. Dawkins. I mentioned that it doesn't matter how many extra rebuttals the theists got, just the fact that some people were hearing the arguments in The God Delusion at all might have made a difference with some of them. If one of those ideas found its mark with someone, the following rebuttals might have been like so much white noise. Or the ideas might roll around in a hearer's mind for days or months, and then later suddenly emerge when the faith-head hears the pastor, priest, or imam say something that just doesn't add up. People in the pews are used to sort of just letting those bothersome bits gloss right over, but once the seed of doubt finds purchase, the contradictions become steadily harder to ignore.

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10. Comment #79387 by robotaholic on October 17, 2007 at 6:33 am

I love Daniel Dennett

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11. Comment #79388 by robotaholic on October 17, 2007 at 6:33 am

I love Daniel Dennett

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12. Comment #79662 by Crossman on October 18, 2007 at 5:18 am

Does anyone know what his Turkish phrase means? "Her insan dogar, yasar, ve olur"... I've been wondering for ages.

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13. Comment #79663 by steve99 on October 18, 2007 at 5:21 am

Does anyone know what his Turkish phrase means? "Her insan dogar, yasar, ve olur"... I've been wondering for ages.

Well, machine translation gives:

"Every human being dogar, law, and all right"

Obvious really.

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14. Comment #79667 by Logicel on October 18, 2007 at 5:33 am

Oudfreak in the comments under the youtube vid part one writes:

Hi,
the Turkish line "Her insan doğar, yaşar ve ölür" means
every man (human being) is born, lives and dies.

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15. Comment #79745 by samratpathania on October 18, 2007 at 11:59 am

My wife had a very difficult pregnancy and if it wasn't for the miracles of modern science, neither her nor my lovely daughter would be with me today.
I felt exactly what Dan Dennett stated after his recovery.
I did not know about him or Richard Dawkins back then. But it gives me great happiness and strength to see that there are men like them who have made modern science what it is today.

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16. Comment #79747 by Quine on October 18, 2007 at 12:09 pm

Remember, Dan Dennett asked for something that was true in 'Turkish' not something that is necessarily true when translated into any other language.

EDIT: e.g. "This sentence is in English." will not be true if translated directly (especially by machine) into Turkish.

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17. Comment #79957 by keith on October 19, 2007 at 8:39 am

While listening to Julie Sweeney I couldn't help thinking of my West German friends' comments a year or so after the Berlin Wall came down, sometime around the moment when they realised that reunification wasn't going to be all milk and honey: "Can't we have our wall back?" they used to ask a little sheepishly. I must confess to feeling a little bit the same while listening to Ms. Sweeney. Couldn't we just take the non-annoying de-converts, rather in the way that Switzerland picks and chooses its immigrants?

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18. Comment #80237 by GBG on October 21, 2007 at 12:21 am

Julia Sweeney is probably the most annoying speaker i have ever heard.

"oh my god, my friend was like oh my god and it was so like whatever, oh my god!"

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19. Comment #83330 by Styrer- on October 29, 2007 at 5:31 pm

At first I thought Dan had taken too much from Dawkins' support of his clarity, by 'dumbing down' such that, in the early parts of his speech here, he was speaking directly and only to a nincompoop such as me.

Thank goodness, to borrow, that I stuck with this man's pedestrian language to the end. For I was rewarded with arguably the most beautifully presented, most forceful and, I submit, most persuasively subtle argumentation against that which AAI and RDF seek to combat I have been allowed to see in this year's AAI contributions.

Brilliant.

Best,
Styrer

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20. Comment #83681 by Atticus_of_Amber on October 30, 2007 at 11:31 pm

Can we get a transcript of Dennett's talk?

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21. Comment #84385 by upsidown on November 2, 2007 at 12:41 am

I think someone should point out that Dennett is talking total nonsense when it comes to economics. Hyper-inflation doesn't happen because people lose their confidence in the currency, it happens when the central bank starts printing huge quantities of money; this devalues the currency and *consequently* people lose confidence in it. He totally misunderstands what is the cause and what is the effect in this case. Moreover, people were against going off the gold standard because they were aware that fiat money makes inflation very easy and thus makes the currency unstable - under the gold standard it is very hard to devalue the currency because to do that you would have to dig up large amounts of gold (during the gold rush there was some inflation but nowhere near the modern phenomenon). Dennett should probably read some books on economics before making any more economic analogies.

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22. Comment #85292 by Atticus_of_Amber on November 5, 2007 at 12:36 pm

I think Dennett was talking about deflation resulting from a run on the banks.

A loss of confidence in the financial system leading to a run on the banks will cause a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom that will result in deflation. The inflation results as the money "created" by the credit system is "destroyed" by the banks calling in all their loans to pay for calls on deposits. This, I think, was the analogy he was searching for.

Explanation: By lending out deposits, banks "create" money. If those deposits are called in, the banks have to call in their "at call" loans in order to cover the calls on their "at call" deposits. This effectively reduces the money supply by "destroying" the money previously "created" by the banks' loans. With fewer dollars chasing the same amount of goods and services, average prices must fall - i.e. deflation.

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23. Comment #87033 by upsidown on November 11, 2007 at 3:55 am

He wasn't talking about deflation - he said "hyperinflation". That's the very opposite of deflation.

You wrote: "The inflation results as the money 'created' by the credit system is 'destroyed' by the banks..."

You probably meant: "Deflation results as the money 'created' by the credit system is 'destroyed' by the banks..."

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24. Comment #90286 by SWo2007 on November 24, 2007 at 1:44 am

A shrine to Disney or Islam?

I can't help but wonder whether anti-globalization-ers would regard this in any way more positive than atheists currently regard Mecca.

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