I sketched a brief Overview of Dennett’s book a few years ago, if that’s of any interest to people here...
It’s worth stressing that he’s really just explaining the “soft problem” of consciousness, i.e. its informational aspect rather than its qualitative aspect. But he does have lots of interesting stuff to say about the former. (And of course lots of folks here will agree with Dennett that the third personal data of “heterophenomenology” are all that need to be explained. I’m just flagging that he doesn’t say anything that’ll satisfy people who don’t share this assumption.)
Thanks! Lots of interesting stuff there. It does sound like this book isn’t going to be useful in helping me talk about qualia; but that it would have been useful to help me think about intelligent agent architectures back when it came out in 1991.
I sketched a brief Overview of Dennett’s book a few years ago, if that’s of any interest to people here...
It’s worth stressing that he’s really just explaining the “soft problem” of consciousness, i.e. its informational aspect rather than its qualitative aspect. But he does have lots of interesting stuff to say about the former. (And of course lots of folks here will agree with Dennett that the third personal data of “heterophenomenology” are all that need to be explained. I’m just flagging that he doesn’t say anything that’ll satisfy people who don’t share this assumption.)
“position” rather than “assumption”, I think. He doesn’t just assume it, he works hard to justify it.
Thanks! Lots of interesting stuff there. It does sound like this book isn’t going to be useful in helping me talk about qualia; but that it would have been useful to help me think about intelligent agent architectures back when it came out in 1991.
I’ve linked this a few times here, but Dennett’s specific essay on qualia is “Quining Qualia”, and available online.