[Paleopsych] Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness

[Steve Hovland]

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.