Word: ryles
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This pseudo-square offers two entertainment options. The first is Improv Boston, which has performances Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 8 and 10:30 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. The other is Ryle's Jazz Bar, which is billed as a neighborhood jazz bar, although top acts occasionally appear to secure its reputation as a top jazz venue in the city. A jazz brunch is offered on Sundays form 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Another night spot is the requisite Irish pub: the Druid. Its decor pleases the eye as much as the Guinness slakes the thirst...
...roots of the debate between Chalmers and Dennett--the debate over how mysterious mind is or isn't--lie in the work of Dennett's mentor at Oxford University, Gilbert Ryle. In 1949 Ryle published a landmark book called The Concept of Mind. It resoundingly dismissed the idea of a human soul--a "ghost in the machine," as Ryle derisively put it--as a hangover from prescientific thought. Ryle's juiciest target was the sort of soul imagined back in the 17th century by Rene Descartes: an immaterial, somewhat autonomous soul that steers the body through life. But the book...
Some adherents of the "materialist" line that Ryle helped spread insisted that these things don't even exist. Others said they exist but consist simply of the brain. And by this they didn't just mean that consciousness is produced by the brain the way steam is produced by a steam engine. They meant that the mind is the brain--the machine itself, period...
...Ryle's book was published three years after ENIAC's birth, and at first glance his ideas would seem to draw strength from the computer age. That, at any rate, is the line Dennett takes in defending his teacher's school of thought. Dennett notes that AI is progressing, creating smart machines that process data somewhat the way human beings do. As this trend continues, he believes, it will become clearer that we're all machines, that Ryle's strict materialism was basically on target, that the mind-body problem is in principle solved. The title of Dennett...
Dennett's book got rave reviews and has sold well, 100,000 copies to date. But among philosophers the reaction was mixed. The can-do attitude that was common in the decades after Ryle wrote--the belief that consciousness is readily "explained"--has waned. "Most people in the field now take the problem far more seriously," says Rutgers University philosopher Colin McGinn, author of The Problem of Consciousness. By acting as if consciousness is no great mystery, says McGinn, "Dennett's fighting a rearguard action...