[Paleopsych] Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness
Steve Hovland
shovland at mindspring.com
Fri Dec 17 03:21:51 UTC 2004
more at: http://cogprints.org/317/00/moving.html
David J. Chalmers <http://ling.ucsc.edu/~chalmers/>
Department of Philosophy
University of California
Santa Cruz, CA 63130
chalmers at paradox.ucsc.edu
*[[[This paper is a response to the commentaries in the Journal of
Consciousness Studies on my paper "Facing Up to the Problem of
Consciousness." Thanks to Gregg Rosenberg, Jonathan Shear, and Sharon Wahl
for helpful comments.]]]
1 INTRODUCTION
I am very grateful to all the contributors to this symposium for their
thoughtful comments. The various papers reflect a wide range of approaches
and of views, yielding a rich snapshot of the current state of play on the
problem of consciousness. There are some interesting criticisms of my point
of view, which I hope to address in this reply in a way that clarifies the
central issues at hand, and there are also a number of intriguing positive
proposals for confronting the problem. I am honored to have provided an
opportunity to bring such a thought-provoking collection of ideas together.
When I wrote my paper, I had no idea that it would be subject to such close
analysis. That may be a good thing, as all the hedges, qualifications, and
citations I would have added if I had known might have made the paper close
to unreadable, or at any rate twice the size. But it also means that the
paper - intended as a crisp presentation of some central issues, mostly for
non-philosophers - skates quickly over some subtleties and has less flesh
on its bones than it might. I will try to flesh out the picture in this
piece, while still keeping the discussion at a non-technical level. A more
detailed presentation can be found in my book The Conscious Mind, to which
I will occasionally point in this response.
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