Book versus article(s) & Intro

In the last post I said intentionality as use isn't that trivial, but I think I've changed my mind about that. Not that it isn't important, but rather that it's at least clearly implicit, and maybe somewhere made explicit, in Dennett's intentional stance. Here again we're in danger of wading into the scholarly bog, dealing with what people say about philosophy rather than doing philosophy. So it's looking like the article(s) will be going into the freezer, not just on a back burner, and the book will be getting all my time and effort for the foreseeable. Which is fine by me, I'm feeling quite re-enthused about it now. I've written an new introduction and moved Information to the back, as an example of what's possible using the concepts developed earlier—or rather, to be accurate, what's possible without the burdens that earlier chapters lifted. Here's the current draft of the Intro (sorry about the LaTeX markup):

I am most definitely not the first person to understand consciousness, what it's ``made of,'' how it interacts with the physical body when we feel pain or make a deliberate movement, for instance---but I might well be the first to explain it using Western concepts and language.

In other traditions such understanding goes back at least 2,500 years, but it was available only to those who had studied and meditated for years. I believe that Western ways of thinking have now developed to the point where, with very minor adjustments, they can be used to explain consciousness in a way that makes it understandable to most intelligent, educated, open-minded people. The trouble with the philosophers, though, is that they have so much invested in their current ways of thinking that they're not willing, perhaps not even able, to make these minor adjustments. They're certainly intelligent and educated, but they're not open-minded, at least not in this context.

As an undergraduate I was trained in British/American style analytic philosophy, but before going to university I had read quite a lot on Eastern philosophies and religions, so I was always aware that there were other approaches.

I managed to get an honours degree in philosophy and psychology, but it was only a lower second, not good enough to let me go on to postgraduate studies, because I just wasn't sufficiently committed to put in the work required. In retrospect, I might have chosen different courses or a different institution, but I was far from clear in my own mind what I wanted to do with my life.

As it turned out, though, I'm now ideally placed to write this book. If I'd ``stuck in'' and become an academic philosopher I doubt whether my thinking would have developed in the way it has. Instead, I've worked in many different jobs, including research, got another degree, this time in IT, and, perhaps most importantly, made a fairly serious study of Buddhism and become a long-term regular meditator. The latest development is a chronic knee problem, preventing me from working, but giving me at last the time to write this book, which I've wanted to do for many years.

As an undergraduate studying philosophy and psychology, my ideological archenemy was an American philosopher called Daniel Dennett. I felt honour-bound to defend consciousness against the materialist philosophers who, in my view, tried to diminish its significance and even eliminate it because they could not explain it in material terms, and Dennett was their most formidable representative. Consciousness was not just the capacity to enjoy pleasure and suffer pain, vital as that is, but had more subtle, spiritual qualities, with altered states including religious experience. It had come to encompass all my ideals---I was very idealistic---and I felt that materialism was a serious threat to core human values. To diminish or deny consciousness was to reduce us to mere mechanism, to inhibit compassion for each other and for members of other species and to drain significance from spirituality.

I no longer feel quite like that, and in particular I no longer identify, as I did then, with the philosophers who are now sometimes called ``mysterians,'' due to their pessimism regarding the prospects of a ``proper'' explanation of consciousness. But what about materialism? As an undergraduate I became convinced that consciousness could not be explained in material terms, and I still hold that view. But I did not (and do not) believe in the supernatural, or in spirit as some kind of special, immaterial stuff. So what's the alternative? Any answer to that question would also, we might reasonably hope, help to answer these:
\begin{itemize}
\item How does consciousness interact with the body?
\item How do you know that other people are conscious, have minds of their own, experience their lives and make decisions, are not just bio{}-bots (biological robots) or hyperactive zombies?
\item Could a computer or robot ever have a mind of its own, make independent decisions for which it could be held ``personally'' responsible?
\item What is the essential difference (if any) between things that have the capacity for consciousness, like us, and things that don't, like rocks?
\end{itemize}

These are some of the questions I set out to answer here. It's rather a large remit, and I don't claim to cover every aspect. In particular, there is no attempt to survey the state of the art---this is about my view, and the views of others are mentioned only where they might help elucidate mine. If you'd like to know what (mainly Western academic) philosophers and scientists are currently thinking about these issues you should read Susan Blackmore's excellent books on the subject.\endnote{ Consciousness: An Introduction \cite{SB:C} and Conversations on Consciousness \cite{SB:COC}. }

I now see myself as occupying the centre ground of consciousness studies, with the mysterians on one side and who I call the ``mechanics'' (skeptics on the reality of consciousness and believers in its reducibility) on the other. But rather than compromising, I believe I've found a real synthesis, taking the best of each existing position (or set of related positions) and creating a genuinely new approach to consciousness in the West.

Part One describes and explains that position, and Part Two shows how it can be used to build a comprehensive account of matter, mind and meaning based on the concept of information.