Well, crap. He had a way of expressing ideas pithily, like the "Moral Agents Club." Or the gem about "Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity."
@cigitalgem@JamesGleick I first head Dan speak at “Towards a Scientific Theory of Consciousness” in Tucson in 1997, which he organized. It was like being at Woodstock! I read Elbow Room next (amazing) and then other works. What a great, caring philosopher of mind.
@culturednyc thanks. Dan was really fun to hang out with. I always thought it was great when he showed up at my CS/security talks and people would whisper, "what is Dan Dennett doing here?" just before he said, "hi, Gary."
As I understand what I’ve seen called The Hard Problem, it falls into two camps: One says consciousness is an epiphenomenon of neural activity, and the other says consciousness is the transcendent substrate of creation. Is that a fair way to describe it?
@patrickgillam@cigitalgem The "easy" problem is to determine how consciousness arises from physical structures in the brain (assuming it does). The "hard" problem is to determine how this in turn gives rise to subjective awareness.
@dvdhaven@patrickgillam@cigitalgem I'm only 2/3 through The Conscious Mind, but my take on Chalmers' Hard Problem is that nothing we explain about how consciousness arises from physical matter (which presumably can be done, and is therefore the Easy Problem) explains why we should have conscious experience at all. Why not an Occam-approved world populated by Philosophical Zombies (who act in every way as if they have conscious experience, but don't)?
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