Stripped of philosophical rhetoric, the Hard Problem of Consciousness is: Why does it feel this way to be me? It's about the inner experience of being. I won't digress into the history and controversy of the issue except to say that I do indeed regard the problem as "hard". It seems to me that no amount of understanding of the "mind" as an epiphenomenon of physics can explain the feeling of being in the world. In fact, it is hard to imagine what such an "explanation" would look like. For me, the first step in tackling a hard problem is to recognize that it is, indeed, hard. The most critical step in my Master's thesis research was to recognized that the problem I was trying to solve was provably impossible . The key was to ask the right question and to know that the question you'd really like to ask is unanswerable . For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the term "soul" to refer to a (possibly hypothetical) entity that ...

Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" has inspired me, at last, to write a book. Maybe. I'd call it "Better Intuition Pumps" (BIP). Dennett's book is a lovely "intuition pump" in its own right, but it cries out to be rewritten, refuted or at least challenged. In other posts, I'll flesh out possible chapters in BIP, but I can outline some main points here. Dennet champions as "Scientific" discipline for the study of mind, which he calls heterophenomenology  "H". The idea is that anything important about the mind can be learned from the "outside", through experiments, interviews etc.  The data "H" works with is the set of observable, documented "observations" along these lines. My problem with H is that it doesn't actually study the mind. Dennett is making the assumption that the mind is , for all intents and purposes, the brain. But one would think this is exactly what he needs to prove. "Pump...

What, if anything, is "consciousness"? This is a central question of Zen . I have recently taken a look at the more "Scientific" view on the question. I just read Daniel Dennett 's discussion of consciousness. There are lots of Dennett lectures online. He's articulate and entertaining.  Dennett is a philosopher so tends to dig himself into obscure debates about language, terminology and disputes with other philosophers. He borrows a lot of experimental results, but he's not really part of the Scientific culture. Sorry, philosophers, philosophy is not Science. As Robert Laughlin reminds us, scholars of the humanities talk about words; physicists talk about facts. Dennett is still well worth reading though. Let me sketch out what I think he's talking about. He seems to be arguing against the intuitive view of consciousness, best represented by what's called the Cartesian Theater . This pictures the mind as something sitting in a theater watching t...