Monday, July 22, 2002

The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel Wegner looks very promising, at least up to page 50. I've thought about this topic the many times I've been infuriated by the computational naïveté of almost all philosophy of mind. Even Dennett's Consciousness Explained falls apart when a subtler understanding of asynchronous distributed computation is required. Leslie Lamport's writings on the foundations of synchronization, especially his underground classic Buridan's Principle on arbitration, are essential here (The commentary on the checkered history of the paper is priceless). 10:04:47 PM