What, Why & How do we Know ?
I almost said great loss to the intellectual world – but his intellect is indeed a loss to the whole world. I last communicated with Dan only three weeks ago, about the fact he was planning to be attending this year’s “How The Light Gets In” only by telepresence. For various multiple conference priority reasons, … Continue reading “A Great Loss to the World – #RIPDanDennett”
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”