Does consciousness exist, or is it just a language game without an ontology?

## Workshop # 12, Consciousness Exists, Series 10,

This event begins at 7.30 pm S'pore & WA time, 12.30 pm UK, 7.30 am NY.
You will need to view the relevant podcast below on YouTube before joining the meeting in order to participate in the discussion.
https://youtu.be/LrneX1TTpo0
I know it's stupid, but please click 'like', as it promotes circulation.
The workshops include of a prior presentation of the topic by myself on YouTube. The meeting itself consists of a brief review of the topic followed by questions and discussion. The weekly topic is posted a week before the event, together with a suggested reading from my work The Pursuit of Value, available through Amazon Books or myself. Transcripts of the Youtube presentation are available by email.

THIS WEEK: Galen Strawson described the denial of the existence of consciousness as “the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought”. Yet the denial of consciousness is a view widely held in linguistic philosophy, physicalist theories of mind and postmodernism, by thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Paul Feyerabend and Daniel Dennett. But consciousness is a nebulous phenomenon that raises the question of; what does ‘existence’ mean? Or the better question is; what is the ontological status of consciousness? Can such questions be answered with a simple ‘cogito ergo sum’, or is a more detailed phenomenology required? Reading, The Pursuit of Value, Ch.1, Scn. ii.