Tuesday, September 27, 2005

a warning of Dennett musings to come

Inspired by Malcolm Pollack's reference to it, I've printed out Daniel Dennett's fascinating (if typo-ridden) paper, "Quining Qualia," for deeper perusal. One of the things I couldn't help noticing was the almost Buddhist strategy Dennett adopts in the paper, wherein he forcefully questions whether qualia exist at all, and whether there exists an irreducible subject experiencing them. This dovetails nicely with the general tendency in Asian thought to question subject-object metaphysics. The current setup among Western philosophers seems to be that "I [subject] experience my qualia [object]," when the existence of a fundamental "I" is itself in doubt as far as Eastern philo and religion are concerned.

More on this later. Dennett articulates the case far better than I can.


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