When I was working for Leeds Libraries, we discussed the need for some sort of Linked Data/Semantic Web app that could help answer the “… I can’t remember what it was called, but it had a blue cover” type of query. I might suggest it to my current employers .

“Almost certainly wrong”? Perhaps in some details, but Gödel and quantum theory certainly have significant implications for philosophy of mind.

I have not long since re-read Consciousness Explained and have doubts myself. I am not sure that the brain in all it’s analogue parallelness would need to simulate a von-neumann machine (and dont understand what he means by a joyceian machine). Fortunately it’s not a choice between Dennett and Penrose however as Penrose is almost certainly wrong (Im struggling to remember the name of a logician who completly destroys his argument, annoyingly I can remember the publisher and colour of a book of his I used at uni but not his name!)

Freedom Evolves is the most compelling and original of the 3 I think.

Tom

I did read Consciousness Explained many years ago. He failed to convince me, and I finished it thinking that “Consciousness Expained Away” would have been a better title. He tries to reduce consciousness to “reactive tendencies” and information processing, things that can be attributed to computers without the need to suppose they have any awareness of what they are doing. It is this basic awareness that I think there is a desperate need to explain.

So, I am on the side of Roger Penrose in all this. However, I was very glad I had read Dennet’s book. Although I did not agree with him, he argues his case well, which pushed me to examine my own arguments more closely – “opposition is true friendship,” as Blake would say.