Teuber Lecture & Awards Ceremony: Consciousness and the Brain: Replacing the “Hard Problem” with the Hard Question
Description
BCS Department Head Jim DiCarlo will present the following awards immediately preceding Dr. Dennett's lecture:
-Angus MacDonald Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
-BCS Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising
-BCS Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
-Walle Nauta Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching
-Walle Nauta Award for Continuing Dedication to Teaching
-BCS Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring
-BCS Postdoc Award to an Outstanding Mentor
As neuroscience homes in on the neural processes of consciousness, awkward questions arise about how to explain the “first person point of view” of personal consciousness from the “third person point of view” of neuroscience. Chalmers has dubbed this “The Hard Problem” and argued that nothing short of a revolution in science (a return to dualism, perhaps) will solve it. But this is a cognitive illusion, I will argue, due to failure to ask—let alone answer—what I call the Hard Question: “And then what happens?” Handwaving on this score is ubiquitous even from the most ambitious theorists of consciousness, but I will argue that the outlines of a sane, non-miraculous, materialistic answer can already be sketched, and it ties nicely to the “Global Workspace Model” and current work on Bayesian predictive coding. It also shows how a largely abandoned concept from 20th century philosophy—the Intentional object—can be rescued and put to good use in answering the Hard Question.
Speaker Bio
Daniel C. Dennett is Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy. He is the author of Breaking the Spell (Viking, 2006),Freedom Evolves (Viking Penguin, 2003) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster, 1995), is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and four grandchildren. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the London School of Economics and the American University of Beirut. His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (MIT Press and Penguin, 1998). Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, was published in 2005 by MIT Press. He co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981. He is the author of over four hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. His most recent books are Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (Norton, 2013) and, with Linda LaScola, Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind(Amazon.com, 2013). He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987. He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston. After more than forty summers hobby farming in Maine, he is selling his farm and moving to a house on an island in Maine, where he can continue his sailing and maybe resume his sculpting.