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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Dennett Clarification?
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Date: Sat, 5 Nov 1994 00:39:38 GMT
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In article <389l9f$far@percy.cs.bham.ac.uk> A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:
>I have a further problem: he writes as if there were something to be
>explained and he has explained it. On the other hand I believe there
>is no phenomenon that we refer to by the words "conscious",
>"consciousness", "awareness", etc. Rather there's a whole range of
>very different phenomena with more or less in common and a whole
>range of different kinds of explanations required.

>[...]

>And whereas Dennett wants to discredit qualia (which probably cannot
>be accommodated within the intentional stance) I think that a deep
>analysis of how sophisticated perceptual systems need to work (with
>many sorts of intermediate data-stores) will show that the phenomena
>that make some philosophers want to talk about qualia, far from
>being mystical or resistant to scientific explanation are natural
>consequences of how things work!
>
>(Penrose also assumes there's some thing or state that we refer to
>as consciousness that needs to be explained and can't be explained
>by computational mechanisms. But it's no less a muddle for being
>assumed by a superb scientist!)

I think that's mostly a red herring.  Sure, the word "consciousness"
doesn't refer to one thing or state; it's used in a number of different
ways.  And, sure, even if we fix the reference, it may not be to a
thing or state per se.  But that doesn't mean that Penrose isn't
basically right.  If he's not basically right, it's for some other
reason.

Now, perhaps you can convince me that I'm wrong here, but I've
never seen anything approaching convincing arguments on this point.

-- jeff
