D.C. Dennett's Consciousness Explained

[drscott]

I've finally finished this after working at it in bits and pieces for two months. The book is a bit behind (1991), but there's nothing dated about the arguments, which rage on. Dennett's thesis is that consciousness is an emergent property of multiple sub-conscious threads, and that what we think of as our "stream of consciousness" arose out of the language skills humans developed to communicate with each other, which rapidly were turned to use to communicate internally and to store threads of memory; in other words, once the valuable ability to communicate states and events to others was developed, it became even more valuable as a way to manage the pandemonium of the multiple competing processes ("pandaemonium") taking place in the brain. In particular he takes aim at the "Cartesian theater," the idea that there is a presentation of the processed inputs to some deciding circuitry or homunculus that is the residing place of consciousness.

Those who are worried about the costs threatened by this unasked-for enlightenment should take a hard look at the costs of the current myths. Do we really think what we are currently confronted with is worth protecting with some creative obscurantism? Do we think, for instance,that vast resources should be set aside to preserve the imaginary prospects of a renewed mental life for deeply comatose people, while there are no resources to spare to enhance the desperate, but far from imaginary, expectations of the poor? Myths about the sanctity of life, or consciousness, cut both ways. They may be useful in erecting barriers (against euthanasia, against capital punishment, against abortion, against eating meat) to impress the unimaginative, but at the price of offensive hypocrisy or ridiculous self-deception among the more enlightened.

Absolutist barriers, like the Maginot Line, seldom do the work they were designed for. The campaign that used to be waged against materialism has already succumbed to embarrassment, and the cam­paign against "strong AI," while equally well intentioned, can offer only the most threadbare alternative models of the mind. Surely it would be better to try to foster an appreciation for the nonabsolutist, nonintrinsic, nondichotomized grounds for moral concern that can co­-exist with our increasing knowledge of the inner workings of that most amazing machine, the brain. The moral arguments on both sides of the issues of capital punishment, abortion, eating meat, and experimenting on nonhuman animals, for instance, are raised to a higher, more appropriate standard when we explicitly jettison the myths that are be­yond protection in any case.

Comments

Re: dictionary and thesaurus in hand

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

I guess it helps if you have some background in cognitive science or the earlier philosophical explanations of the mind. The key question is "what is 'you?'" -- and the answer is, you're the result of a very complex system with many contending parts. There are special hardware units like the face recognizer, the sound recorder, the language recognizer, etc., and a lot of associative memory (which allows one thing to activate the the many things that are 'like' it in some way to create new associations.) The 'you' is built on top of all that, but there is no place in the brain or mystical 'soul' necessary to explain its operations. Brain science is one of the most challengin frontiers now, since it is not amenable to simple reductionist ("break it down into parts and understand the parts") scientific methods.

[excessor.livejournal.com]

So if I understand correctly, the thesis includes the idea that not only is consciousness an emergent property, but that it does not require a central structure (physical or not) to coordinate the multiple subconscious threads.

Fascinating.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

That's right. The story-telling facility works over the stream of internal verbiage and impressions into a narrative, which is the residuum of a tremendous data compression effort. It's the result that we remember best, and our descriptions are based on that. While we have direct sensory memories of some things, in particular sound streams, most memories are recalled labellings, not images or impressions themselves.

Consciousness is, like most emergent phenomena, the pattern of things happening throughout the brain (and even in the rest of the body), distilled to a useful narrative.

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

I'll read it when I can more fully concentrate on what you wrote. Sounds fascinating from what little I got to read here at work.

[goldibehr.livejournal.com]

The amazon customer reviews, and the star-rating of those reviews is... interesting.

Do you think this would be a comprehensible first-book to read on the subject, given I have no background in either philosophy or previous what-is-conciousness theory?

Have you ever caught PBS Nova's "Secrets of the Mind" (link) on TV? It was originally broadcast in Oct 2001, and talks about several cases in which accidental brain injury has lead to better understanding of how the brain works. It doesn't directly talk about conciousness, from what I remember.

[goldibehr.livejournal.com]

hmmm, the link didn't show up. It is: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mind/

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

The Amazon reviews show the resistance to "Strong AI" -- a third of the reviewers believe it can't possibly be true because it conflicts with their spiritual beliefs (ears plugged with fingers, loudly saying "La la la, I can't hear you!") and another third haven't really tried to understand the arguments and the supporting evidence. The remaining third either hail the book as a good synthesis or come out of a specialist background and want to quibble about the treatment of issues they are invested in. About as expected.

If I were going to read one of his books on the topic, it'd be Kinds of Minds, written 5 years later and stripped of a lot of the experimental evidence discussions (which I enjoyed) and philosophical infighting (which I couldn't care less about.) It's a much faster and easier read as a result.

Secrets of the Mind was fun, but like a lot of science TV a bit fragmentary -- it's easier to find good video of some interesting patients than to slog through explanations of broader areas of brain science. But it is hard to forget that guy who experienced the sense of religious immanence continuously because of his parietal lobe injury, which reminds me way too much of my father's religious psychosis.

[goldibehr.livejournal.com]

I've ordered Kinds of Minds from Amazon.

In the context you use it, "Strong AI" means creating a non-biological device that is self-aware?

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

The usual definition is that "Strong AI" means a machine that passes the Turing test (and evidences all the ability of self-reflection that that requires) must be considered conscious. "Weak AI" means you concede that a machine might be constructed to pas the Turing test, but that you don't believe that it would be conscious. The people who believe there is something mysterious about the brain that can't be duplicated are the intellectual descendants of Descartes, who posited a homunculus in the pineal gland (a little man in the control tower) which had a mysterious connection to an immaterial soul which held ultimate executive power.

Roger Penrose aided the Mysterians camp immensely when he came up with a bizarre theory which located free will in quantum fluctuations which he guessed were only possible in neurons.