Mike Tintner wrote:
And if you're a betting man, pay attention to Dennett. He wrote about
Consciousness in the early 90's, & together with Crick helped make it
scientifically respectable. About five years later, consciousness
studies swept science and philosophy.
Nonsense.
Dennett's approach was scorned by many as a whitewash. He did not make
it "respectable".... if anyone did that, it was Dave Chalmers.
Crick, like many other philosophy wannabes, gave an opinion on the
matter that was just a big pile of evasions. Just about everyone and
their mother has written a book about consciousness, most of them trash.
Dennett, although a smart cookie, bit off more than he could chew on
that one. I note that he did not even bother to turn up at the Tucson
conference last year. I did -- and *my* theory of consciousness was the
first one ever to actually explain anything ;-) ;-). (Chalmers noticed,
but I don't think anyone else did).
Richard Loosemore.
Now he has just written about
free will, and although the book was pretty bad, it was important in
being arguably the first by a scientific philosopher to assert that free
will is consistent with science and materialism. I'll gladly place a
friendly (and you might think outrageous) bet with you that that book is
similarly prescient and free will will be the new default philosophy of
science within 5-10 years. In case you haven't noticed, it is actually
already being widely taken in a kind of de facto, implicit rather than
explicit way, as the basic philosophy of autonomous mobile robotics.
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