The Cowled Engineer

This is a book that takes some time to digest.  I've been reading it in short spurts over many months, allowing the deep subject matter to stew in my mind.  Dan Dennett is a Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University and he has spent his very long career seeking to explain, among other things, how the brain produces mind.  Dan's approach to this question is quite interesting.  He insists on using scientific findings to direct his thinking and he avoids metaphysical prognostication. There is a school of thought in "philosophy of mind" studies that there exists a so called hard problem of consciousness.  The hard problem of consciousness was described by Prof David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher at ANU, as the subjective experience of awareness that transcends the physical.  Chalmers uses the label   qualia  to describe this subjective feeling that arises in our minds when we experience the world.  He believes the nature of qualia  is fundamentally differen