...I have argued at length, in Consciousness Explained (1991), that the sort of informational unification that is the most important prerequisite for our kind of consciousness is not anything we are born with, not part of our innate "hardwiring," but in surprisingly large measure an artifact of our immersion in human culture. What the early education produces in us is a sort of benign "user-illusion" -- I call it the Cartesian Theater: the illusion that there is a place in our brains where the show goes on, towards which all perceptual "input" streams, and whence flow all "conscious intentions" to act and speak. I claim that other species -- and human beings when they are newborn -- simply are not beset by the illusion of the Cartesian Theater. Until the organization is formed, there is simply no user in there to be fooled. This is undoubtedly a radical suggestion, hard for many thinkers to take seriously, ; hard for them even to entertain. Let me repeat it, since many critics have ignored the possibility that I mean it -- a misfiring of their generous allegiance to the principle of charity.
In order to be conscious -- in order to be the sort of thing it is like something to be -- it is necessary to have a certain sort of informational organization that endows that thing with a wide set of cognitive powers (such as the powers of reflection and re-representation). This sort of internal organization does not come automatically with so-called "sentience." It is not the birthright of mammals or warm-blooded creatures or vertebrates; it is not even the birthright of human beings. It is an organization that is swiftly achieved in one species, ours, and in no other. Other species no doubt achieve somewhat similar organizations, but the differences are so great that most of the speculative translations of imagination from our case to theirs make no sense.
My claim is not that other species lack our kind of self-consciousness, as Nagel (1991) and others have supposed. I am claiming that what must be added to mere responsivity, mere discrimination, to count as consciousness at all is an organization that is not ubiquitous among sentient organisms. This idea has been dismissed out of hand by most thinkers.(1) Nagel, for instance, finds it to be a "bizarre claim" that "implausibly implies that babies can't have conscious sensations before they learn to form judgments about themselves." Lockwood is equally emphatic: "Forget culture, forget language. The mystery begins with the lowliest organism which, when you stick a pin in it, say, doesn't merely react, but actually feels something."
Indeed, that is where the mystery begins if you insist on starting there, with the assumption that you know what you mean by the contrast between merely reacting and actually feeling. And the mystery will never stop, apparently, if that is where you start....
Daniel Dennett Animal consciousness: what matters and why
Sandy LaFave, Study Guides Fall 2003 West Valley College Philosophy Department
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...The world and the self who experiences it seem separate, even though no self can be found within the brain, and there are good reasons for thinking it is an illusion. For anyone who wants to avoid dualism the interesting question is this. Why should we humans live under the illusion of being a self with consciousness and free will, if such a thing does not exist?
Evolutionary theory might provide an answer, yet a false sense of self does not obviously contribute to inclusive fitness and may even reduce it. I propose that the correct evolutionary explanation is not in terms of benefit to genes, but benefit to memes.
Memes are information that is copied from person to person by imitation. They are replicators subject to heredity, variation and selection, and they compete for space in our minds and cultures, shaping human nature as they go. We humans are meme machines; selective imitators, who spend our lives copying memes. Why then do we have selves?
A self is a co-adapted meme complex (or memeplex) whose function is to protect and propagate its constituent memes. A memeplex forms whenever a group of memes can propagate better together than they can alone. Examples include religions, languages, political systems and scientific theories that have evolved over long periods, with adaptations that protect them from dissolution or from competing memeplexes.
The selfplex is a large collection of memes using a single body for their protection and propagation. Once a selfplex begins to grow it provides a haven for more memes. For example, people may argue strongly for their beliefs, using emotional language and phrases such as "I believe ..." "I think ..." "I want ...". This behaviour promotes the memes, and in addition feeds the false idea that there is an inner self who has the opinions, makes the decisions and perceives the world...
Susan Blackmore Dismantling the selfplex ; meme machines and the nature of consciousness
University of West Bristol (UK)
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...The rest of the book is devoted to discussing the consequences of this view of consciousness for several well known thought experiments and problems in the philosophy of mind (zombies, inverted spectra). It includes a rousing rejection of the whole concept of qualia, a chapter which I found particularly enjoyable. Unlike many philosophers Dennett keeps his feet firmly on the ground at all times, and doesn't get himself stuck in hermeneutic wrangling over obscure details. His thinking is solidly based on experimental results from neuroscience, cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology...
short review of Dennett's Consciousness Explained by Danny Yee (cooked tubers!)
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This is I think what people have in mind when they aver that 'consciousness is not a thing'. The thought expressed here is not the trivial one that to refer to consciousness is to invoke a category of events or states or processes and not a category of objects or continuant particulars. Our intuition that conscious states are not spatial is not the intuition that no state is an object. For ordinary physical states and events are spatial entities in the intended sense: we apprehend events as occurring in space, and states are features of spatially constituted objects. So it would be wrong to offer a deflationary interpretation of our non-spatial conception of consciousness by insisting that it comes to nothing more than a recognition that talk of consciousness is talk of events and states - just like talk of explosions and motions and electric charge. The non-spatial nature of consciousness, as we conceive it, is much more radical than that diagnosis suggests. Descartes was not committing the simple howler of failing to notice that conscious phenomena are not objects at all and hence not spatial objects. In fact, even when we do speak of something that belongs to the category of continuant object, namely the subject of consciousness, we are still insistent upon its non-spatial character.(4) The self is not a 'thing' either, in the intended sense. The realm of the mental is just not bound up in the world of objects in space in the way that ordinary physical events are so bound up. So, at any rate, our pretheoretical view assures us.
Colin McGinn Consciousness and Space
Rutgers University Philosophy Dept.
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The astronomical perspective is useful in alerting us to what a peculiar object sits in our heads. The brain begins to seem like a magic box, a font of sorcery. Thomas Huxley captured this sense of miracle beautifully when he wrote in 1886: "How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story." How could simply rubbing a lamp produce something like a djinn (itself a subject of consciousness)? What have brass and oil got to do with beings like djinns? In what sense could a djinn exist inside a lamp (some of these djinns are huge)? The whole idea sounds like nonsense when you think about it, just a fairy tale. But, equally, how can sending an electric current into a bunch of cells produce conscious experience? What do electricity and cells have to do with conscious subjectivity? How could a conscious self exist inside such a soggy clump? It begins to seem that we are all djinns, each magically ensconced in our own personal brain lamps, waiting to be rubbed into life. And just as Aladdin's lamp violates the uniformity of nature, because lamps do not generally have such djinn-generating powers, so we appear to exist by courtesy of a breach in nature's uniformity. Electrochemical reactions don't generally result in subjective experience, yet in the case of our brains they seem to. It is all very puzzling, very puzzling indeed.
Colin McGinn The Mysterious Flame Chapter One, excerpted in the NYTimes(reg.req.)
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Dennet offers another possibility in response, "�[that] there is no bridge over the steam." The idea is simple: consciousness is nothing more than the sum of dominant cerebral processing; there is no Bouncer at the Consciousness Pub that decides who gets in and who stays out. Furthermore, there is no unifying process that determines what information becomes conscious and what does not. Dennet offers a comparison to the British Empire, but I will butcher it for the sake of a Canadian audience. Suppose someone asks you "When did Canada find out about Mercedes-Benz cars?" There are many ways you could answer: the first day a Mercedes was imported here, the first day a Canadian saw one in Germany, or the day that the most Canadians bought a Mercedes in history. In effect, the question is unanswerable. In the same way, Dennet offers his explanation of the question, "Exactly when did I become conscious of some event?" Is one area of the cerebrum considered more important than others? Is one Canadian enough to say that Canada discovered Mercedes? He suggests that consciousness is nothing more than the related processes that occur in the brain.
Down with Big Brother:A Summary of Daniel Dennett Defining Consciousness
at Quick Summary of 'Consciousness'
at The Ontology of Psychology
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Dennett's concept of relational order in relation to the brain is something I find extremely interesting. He suggests that the properties of mind aren't material properties, they're relational properties. That leads to the strong AI position. I tend to take a similar view with respect to artificial life � a view similar to the strong AI position, the idea that you can actually get intelligence in systems that aren't constituted of molecules and cells. You can get life in computers.
Brian Goodwin sidebar at The Third Culture
Edge
The Edge currently features two articles, one by Richard Dawkins and the other by Daniel Dennett, cheerleading for the neologue
'Bright'. much better to read their take on it,
Jaron Lanier has a response up at the same site.
Skeptic's Dictionary Newsletter
the actual coinage was by
Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell
{the important point here for me, in the 'Bright' part, is how beleagured these guys are. even a profound and capable mind like Dennett's. and Lanier's got that hippie thing of 'transcend the oppression' which is cool but it still isn't freedom. this is pretty discouraging to a rank amateur like me. I come at this stuff like a hillbilly.
and this whole mulligatawney is from me wanting to address Dennett's consciousness thing. I saw him on TechTV a while ago, posted on it then, but I've kicked it around a little more. so that's where I was headed. but this 'Bright' thing...
well sign me up I guess, though I do have a large supernatural component, I'm 50-50 on afterlifes, and the concept of some huge sentient being being close at hand is not something I have a problem with. but hey, life is full of contradictions. I have more respect for the Amazing Randi and his cohort than any religious leader on the planet, living or dead.
I don't want to get sucked into all that though. I want to talk about consciousness. Dennett's got it as far as I can understand his stuff.
a point cloud is the graphic design term for that little cluster of dots the computer draws before it makes the 3-D skeletal thing. a point cloud is what I think Dennet's consciousness model most resembles, but one whose points are not fixed. anyway that works for me. the little guy in the center of it all doesn't. but. but but but but but but. there's that point cloud thing in groups too. for a few hours at a music concert or a play, even movies do that. at church, at sports events. people make this meta-consciousness when they have proximity and shared focus. performers know this. so do preachers. and politicians. this accounts for the power and seeming immortality of particularly successful groups, like religions, this is why tribes have all those rituals and amulets etc. one of the reasons anyway. it helps create the group mind. the group mind being just like the individual mind. not centrally located but very real.
ok. I won't get to it here because I don't have the time and undivided attention to give it, that 'Bright' business calls, but. what I think is perfectly possible is a much larger, much much larger, maybe infinite, maybe infinitely growing, maybe exponentially infinitely growing consciousness. a conscious thing, name it in your own tongue, something so much bigger than this that it is easily overlooked. in the same non-centrally located way. a Cosmic Mind.
absurd. well yes and no. every single burp of life that this planet has known got its power from the sun, and from a miniscule bit of solar energy at that. the amount of sunlight necessary to power all of what we are and will ever be is nothing to what the sun gives off constantly and the sun itself so small amongst its great and infinite family. the idea of something zapping around amongst within and around and through all those suns and all that light and the infinite reaches of space and some kind of meta-conformation of what that is being like a brain kind of in a way, it's just not that hard to get to, is it? though I'm not articulating it well.
anyway I got all sidetracked. I'm disturbed by all the nonsense. and remembering Carl Sagan. and I'm as serious as I could be, I'm with the Brights on this, not of them maybe but alongside them. not because they have the truth and the religious people don't, but because they're closer to it, and more open to it, and because the stagnant waters of organized religion are teeming with sickness.}
