What, Why & How do we Know ?
That damn meme again. “Dennett denies consciousness”. No he doesn’t. (I already part reviewed Dennett’s memoir recently and added links to a few other sympathetic reviews which all naturally included summaries of his important works. Apart from one footnote of my own on a reconciliation of his physicalist determinist compatibilism with informational subjective pan-proto-psychism (*), … Continue reading “The Illusion of Dennett’s Illusion – Again.”
In theory I’m not reading, so I can focus on writing, but just acquired these three, on top of the two recent reads of Humboldt and Prigogine. Help!!! Guess I can leave the two memoirs until some “time off in reward” and having seen Kevin talk about his latest, I probably have his thinking already … Continue reading “How’s The Writing Going?”
No, he does not say that “Consciousness is an Illusion”. End of. In a sentence: Dennett’s position is that: Consciousness and conscious will are as real and evolved as anything else in the world. The powerful (useful, but misleading) ILLUSION is the Cartesian theatre / video screen with the homunculus viewer / user as things … Continue reading “Is Dennett an Illusionist?”
This is a 2023 Annotation of a 2005 paper prepared originally for the Liverpool Conference on Robert Pirsig and his Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ). The text is unchanged except for correcting a few obvious typos and formatting errors, and to keep me honest the original “It’s Evolutionary Psychology Stupid” remains here complete with old broken … Continue reading “Zero to Pirsig”
Since Dan Dennett’s (Jan 2018) “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” (B2BnB) which I wrote about here, I’m not aware of other general publication work from Dan. When it comes to human consciousness and free-will Dan is a hero of mine I’ve written about in many contexts. I’ve seen a few articles and talks since, … Continue reading “Dennett & Conscious Will – Having the Right Conversation”
I’m reading Philip Goff’s “Galileo’s Error” as mentioned previously. As usual before reading the main content, I read all the intros and the end notes / bibliography / index / refs to see who’s work is mentioned, though I can never know whether positively or negatively at this point. My favourite check is whether the … Continue reading “Goff’s Radical Dennett?”
Often cast in the physicalism vs pan-psychism sense, it’s an argument I’ve left long behind for my “information realism”. Many reacting recently to Kastrup’s Idealism / Pan-psychism as the kind of stuff “only stoned hippies could contemplate as real”. Myself, I get why he’s contemplating (promoting) it, but it’s really just word-play in the end … Continue reading “Realism vs Idealism Saga Continues”
Mentioned a couple of posts ago I was planning to read some Michael Gazzaniga after reading a couple of reviews that rang bells because he was one of the contributors to Iain McGilchrist’s Divided Brain film. Wasn’t sure if I was ordering the right Gazzaniga book in his latest, so I’ve been digging. Basically, I … Continue reading “Serious Research?”