There's been somewhat frequent coverage of Daniel Dennett on Lesswrong:

How not to be a Naïve Computationalist

Dennett's "Consciousness Explained": Prelude

"Where Am I?", by Daniel Dennett

Dennett's heterophenomenology

My personal favorite: Zombies: The Movie

I've written a book called Simulating Dennett nearly five years ago now (if you are considering an academic career, keep that slow paced speed in mind, for good or ill). It summarizes Dennett's philosophy  while trying to make the reader able to think like Dennett. It seemed to me at the time, and still does now, that Dennett's kind of mind is very interesting and we should have more of those, so I tried my best to create a Dennett installer in book form.

Simulating Dennett: Tools and Constructions of a Naturalist

Is the 244 pages that ensued. Portuguese or Spanish reading skills advised. Or use it to learn Portuguese prior to your trip to Rio, Pantanal, Iguaçu Falls and the Amazon Forest. (for legal reasons I've chopped out the second half of the file, but there are instructions on how to get it when you get to the end of the first half)

Abstract

This dissertation intends to provide the reader with an inner simulation of Daniel Dennett’s form of reasoning, spreading over his whole philosophy, emphasizing his treatment of patterns, the evolutionary algorithm, consciousness, and his use of illata, abstracta, semantic, and syntax, to carve nature at its joints, especially biology and the human mind. It recasts, in a new light, great part of his most important ideas, and reverse engineers what made him think in particular ways, walking the reader through similar pathways, fostering an active learning of a thinking style, above and beyond a mere exposition of the results obtained by this thinking style over the years.

Keywords: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness, Memetics, Intentional stance, Evolution,

Algorithm.

This Wednesday 2013-03-19 at 14:00 I’ll be presenting it as thesis in the University of São Paulo. Lesswrongers passing by Brazil, or the 20 of us who actually live here are welcome to join.

Here is the Facebook event.

Dennett:

Mike Merzenich sutured a monkey's fingers together so that it didn't need as much cortex to represent two separate individual digits, and pretty soon the cortical regions that were representing those two digits shrank, making that part of the cortex available to use for other things. When the sutures were removed, the cortical regions soon resumed pretty much their earlier dimensions. If you blindfold yourself for eight weeks, as Alvaro Pascual-Leone does in his experiments, you find that your visual cortex starts getting adapted for Braille, for haptic perception, for touch.

The way the brain spontaneously reorganizes itself in response to trauma of this sort, or just novel experience, is itself one of the most amazing features of the brain, and if you don't have an architecture that can explain how that could happen and why that is, your model has a major defect. I think you really have to think in terms of individual neurons as micro-agents, and ask what's in it for them?

Why should these neurons be so eager to pitch in and do this other work just because they don't have a job? Well, they're out of work. They're unemployed, and if you're unemployed, you're not getting your neuromodulators. If you're not getting your neuromodulators, your neuromodulator receptors are going to start disappearing, and pretty soon you're going to be really out of work, and then you're going to die.

I hadn't thought about any of this-- I thought the hard problem of brains was that dendrites grow so that neurons aren't arranged in a static map. Apparently that is just one of the hard problems.

He also discusses the question of how much of culture is parasitic, that philosophy has something valuable to offer about free will (I don't know what he has in mind there), the hard question of how people choose who to trust and why they're so bad at it (he thinks people chose their investment advisers more carefully than they chose their pastors, I suspect he's over-optimistic), and a detailed look at Preachers Who Are Not Believers. That last looks intriguing-- part of the situations is that preachers have been taught it's very bad to shake someone else's faith, so there's an added layer of inhibition which keeps preachers doing their usual job even after they're no longer believers themselves.

”Where Am I?” is a short story by Daniel Dennett from his book Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. Some of you might already be familiar with it.

The story is a humorous semi-science fiction one, where Dennett gets a job offer form Pentagon that entails moving his brain into a vat, without actually moving his point of view. Later on it brings up questions about uploading and what it would mean in terms of diverging perspectives and so on. Aside from being a joy to read, it offers solutions to a few hurdles about the nature of consciousnesses and personal identity. 

Suppose, I argued to myself, I were now to fly to California, rob a bank, and be apprehended.  In which state would I be tried:  in California, where the robbery took place, or in Texas, where the brains of the outfit were located?  Would I be a California felon with an out-of-state brain, or a Texas felon remotely controlling an accomplice of sorts in California? It seemed possible that I might beat such a rap just on the undecidability of that jurisdictional question, though perhaps it would be deemed an interstate, and hence Federal, offense.