drscott | D.C. Dennett's Consciousness Explained

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.