Letters to the Editor
greggwolf
Published Letters: 2 Editor's Choice: 1
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BSG in the distant past?
[Read the article: Space balls]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]OK - I'm a nit-picking geek. But BSG takes place in the present, not the distant past. Earth is not some uninhabited planet - it is an entire lost colony that (for whatever reason) got separated from the other 12 long, long ago. Its sort of a Chariots of the Gods premise. It shames me to admit that I remember this, but the old show made this pretty clear, especially when they finally found Earth in the short-lived "Gallactica 80".
-John Gregg
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What is it like to see red? Give your answer in Braille.
[Read the article: A penny for your deepest thoughts]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Gary Wolf seems not only to have bought the reductive materialist line, but he appears to think its the only game in town. Dennett never did explain consciousness. You can run all the brain scans you want, and find all the neural correlates to my experience of redness you want, but you still haven't explained how it could possibly come to be that there is this subjective experience, or why it has the peculiar character that it does. Being mistaken in my cognitive judgments is not at issue in this debate (did I really picture the soldier's legs? What color were his shoes?) but why there should be the raw experience itself in the first place. Not the verbal report of the experience, or the opinion about the experience, but the experience. See "The Conscious Mind" by David Chalmers for a different take on this actively debated topic.