Eminent Entities: Short Accounts of Some Major Thinkers in Consciousness Studies

Abstract

I run a blog entitled “Conscious Entities” at http://consciousentities.com which is devoted to short discussions of some of the major thinkers and theories about consciousness. This is another small collection of my writings on consciousness which the editor of JCER very kindly selected to appear here. It contains my short accounts of six major thinkers in consciousness studies including Daniel Dennet, John Searle, David Chalmers, Colin McGinn, Roger Penrose & Gerald Edelman. In reading the books of these writers, I found I had views which were very clear, but also completely contradictory; so these pieces are written in the form of dialogues between a character I call Bitbucket (represented by the abacus) who is a hard-line materialist computational reductionist, and Blandula (the cherub) who leans towards dualism and mysterianism. (The last few words of each article, by the way, are actually quotes from the subject himself.)