This talk introduces a recent book by Dennett, rehashing and updating his theories on the mind. I have the hard copy of the book on order. These comments refer to his summary of it delivered as part of the Google Talks series. It is much to Dennett's credit that, as he goes along, his ideas become more precise and articulate. His examples are more apt, his analogies closer to the "essence". He never seems to say, "I was totally wrong about this", but he does make progress - partly by not taking himself too seriously. It is much to Dennett's credit that he is rarely caught in an "argument" -- he sees an element of truth in almost everything, always putting his own ideas on the table without allowing opposition to get personal. This is good because he gets a lot of opposition. " Consciousness Explained " (1991) was a serious over-reach. Rather a mess that didn't come close to delivering on the promise in its title. Yet, in the interveni...

I'm beginning to feel the need to organize my ideas into some kind of structure. Let's call that structure "M1". The name comes from "M for Mind and 1 for the primacy of the first person experience". This should probably be document in a Web Site, rather than a blog, but such a site needs a few initial ideas and some sketch of what it's about. In any case, documentation of M1 needs to be on an interactive platform (not a paper book) to allow dynamic growth and interaction with interested individuals. Mind Maps One key tool on the site should be the "Mind Map", which allows us to draw informal diagrams of the relationship between ideas. This is considerably less formal than UML (Universal Modelling Language) that I was first tempted to use. It takes considerable training to understand a UML diagram and there are subtle objections to the ultimate trap of equating an "idea" with a UML "class". The Mind Map allows us to informal...

Descartes is the poster-boy for the method of " reductionism ", which I think of as "Math Envy". This is the idea that you can build up all knowledge from simple principles. These days, we pretend to start with Quantum  Mechanics, yet we are awarding Nobel Prizes for people who make "baby steps" from Quantum Mechanics to the chemistry of Hydrogen. The fact is that reductionism is dead. There is no path from "simple" to "complex". We need to start somewhere else. That's good news, since it turns out that we all know a Hell of a lot more than we thought we did. It turns out that we can start with what we all share and what we know: the fantastic and virtually limitless capabilities of the human mind. We don't need to "boil it down" to something simpler, or "explain" it in terms of chattering neurons. We learn very little about our minds by comparing them to the "minds" of chimpanzees, cats and frogs. ...

John Horgan is a journalist , not a Scientist. A very successful journalist. You can get the thrust of his approach in The End of Science or a short video Soft vs. Hard Targets Interview Science is a vast endeavour and Horgan is bound to miss as often as he hits. His main technique is to go around and interview famous Scientists, then write articles for the layman exposing the flaws in the reasoning of the experts. His main thesis, which he has tirelessly defended for decades is that there nothing fundamentally discovered in Science since, say, the 1950's. This is ridiculous on its face and he's buried with opposition. He's just plain annoying. His response to the critics is Lots of "advances" are simply not true . He especially likes to cite fads in medicine, but these are "straw men". Does proving that some results are false establish that no advances are being made? Anyone who follows the subject is stunned at how often we find answers to questions we...