Matthew asked:

What are essentially the main disagreements between philosophers David Chalmers and Daniel
Dennett in their interpretations in Philosophy of the Mind?

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I'm very interested in consciousness... so I probably shouldn't be answering this question. I have to
shrink a mountain into a grain of sand. Oh well. Ok, 65 words or less: Chalmers thinks that we can
meaningfully talk about qualia, i.e., phenomenal qualities, although (he maintains) they are a type of
property of (physical) substances which cannot be described by conventional physical theories.
Dennett does not think we can meaningfully talk about qualia at all, indeed, that they are quite
probably mere illusion. And so for him everything can be described in terms of conventional physical
theories.

Dennett's position is derived, more or less, from Wittgenstein's position on private languages.
Chalmers' is derived from logic and information theory. Oboy... sorry, guys. I'm almost embarrassed
to simplify so much. I mean, really, both of these people are good philosophers and have written
massiveamounts on this subject.

But I'll keep sticking my neck out... I happen to disagree with bothof them. I think that Dennett's
position is an overstatement of rather classical skeptical positions which philosophers have, until he
started them up again, rightly seen as either settled or unresolvable. I think that Chalmers has gotten
overinvolved in hair-splitting logic (not that he's done a bad job of it, mind you), and assumes too
much correspondence between logic, language, and the world. In other words, that conclusions
based on logical considerations pertaining to our analysesmust then pertain to what we are
attempting to analyze: that the way we analyze(these aspects of) reality corresponds to the structure
of reality. I just think that it doesn't to the extent he seems to think it does.

So, all that being crystal clear, you can see that the disagreements between the two are rather
profound.

Steven Ravett Brown