D. C. Dennett's Approach: on the way to explanation of consciousness

Abstract

l'vEnd-Body problem has been a perpetual philosophical issue ever since the dawn of science, and the discussion of Descartes's dualism was the paradigmatic showroom of post:lible solutions for a long time. It wasn't perhaps until the mid-20th century that the debate underwent a considerable conceptual transformation thanks to two impctllses from science: the boom in brainscanning experiments and the boom in computing devices and informatics. The former provided philosophers and scientists with abundance of evidence of correlations between brain activity and mental states. The latter showed how higher mental activities, like pattern recognition Ol' playing chess, could be performed by fast computing machines running a relatively simple programme. Besides these two, there is another important source ať infiuence (only as far as the methodology is concerned) behaviourism. Despite its decline in 1960s marked by renewed interest in the study of mind, theorists were reluctant to rehabilitate the concept of consciousness.