Content and Consciousness

What Hacker News says

1. pdonisApr 2024
   > here are direct quotes from Dennett

   Quoting Dennett out of context is the go-to move for people who can't be bothered to actually engage with what he's actually saying. I've read all of his books on consciousness, going all the way back to Content and Consciousness, published in, IIRC, 1969. And I've also read enough of his critics to understand the games they play. Sorry, not buying it.

   > Wikipedia

   So you consider Wikipedia to be a reliable source about a complex topic. It is to laugh.

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2. mcguireOct 2014
   "In a system without the publisher operating as middleman, where the author takes his life’s work and just posts it to Amazon, each book becomes a lonely outpost in the stiff winds of the marketplace, a tiny business that must sell or die....

   "But I’m not sure that even Yglesias would want to live in the world he’s envisioning. Mark Krotov, an editor at Melville House, points out on Twitter that in posts like these two, Yglesias has often recommended 'good, unusual books' such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey and Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. 'I’m confident that none of these books, as different and diverse as they are, could ever have found their audience without a publisher,' Krotov writes."

   I'm rather suspecting that Evan Hughes could stand to be less ignorant of the industry he's discussing.

   For one thing, Tripmaster Monkey is at least the fifth book that Kingston has written (I can't find a complete bibliography.) and Dennett's Content and Consciousness was published in 1969, 22 years before Consciousness Explained. Both of them had already "found their audiences" before those books were written, much less published.

   Further, Dennett has published many of his books with academic presses, where advances are rare. (Anyone know if MIT Press pays them?)

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