ABSTRACT
Daniel Dennett and Owen Flanagan compare the brain to a computer and think that consciousness can be accounted for as a software program running on the unimaginably complex hardware of the brain. Dennett gives philosophers a functionalist account of consciousness as software running on cranial hardware. John Searle is a mindist, committed to defending the mind against any philosopher whom he takes to be denying it. He opposes in particular functionalists and, in general, any philosophers who deny that the mind is something distinctive that exists in its own right. Throughout his exposition of the concept of person, Charles Taylor sees himself as having to defend his emphasis on the moral side of persons against philosophy of mind's emphasis on persons as knowers, as perceivers and information processors. In the epistemological view consciousness is awareness of the world and an awareness of oneself as a knower of the world.
