Greg Detre
Thursday, 15 February, 2001
Clancey is a neuroscientist, probably working with vervets. He starts with a certain amount of contempt for Chalmers� approach to consciousness and the philosophical enterprise in general. But he talks about how he had a nasty review filled with invective and narrow-mindedness, and is keen to avoid doing the same thing.
He says he then re-read Chalmers� book, and understood better exactly what Chalmers is trying to achieve, and what sort of accounts he is concerned with when talking about the �hard problem� of consciousness. But despite appearing to understand, Clancey�s following discussion of his own interests in a weird table of categorisations of categorisations, and emphasis on social interaction, would seem to bely this.
Clancey thinks Chalmers needs to consider the conscious animal more, and neuroscience in general, and that the hard problem of consciousness comes down to why consciousness evolved. He says that Chalmers� reported ability to conceive of a physically identical world of zombies rather than men is ill-conceived � in fact, the zombies would have no sense of identity or empathy, and so their morality and society would be unrecognisable.
Interestingly though, he criticises Chalmers for being too simplistic in his lumping together of all conceptions and experiences under �propositions� � his entire understanding of representation is apparently too dry and flat.