Apr 22, 2024 05:20 PM
(This post was last modified: Apr 23, 2024 02:56 AM by C C.)
Consciousness and the Dennett Paradox
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/consc...tt-paradox
EXCERPTS: The idea that consciousness isn’t real has always struck me as crazy, but smart people espouse it. One of the smartest is philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has been questioning consciousness for decades, notably in his 1991 bestseller Consciousness Explained.
I’ve always thought I must be missing something in Dennett’s argument, so I hoped his book From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds would enlighten me. It does, but not in the way Dennett intended.
[...] But human cognition, Dennett emphasizes, still consists mainly of competence without comprehension. Our conscious thoughts represent a minute fraction of all the information processing carried out by our brains. Natural selection designed our brains to provide us with thoughts on a “need to know” basis, so we’re not overwhelmed with data.
Dennett compares consciousness to the user interface of a computer. The contents of our awareness, he asserts, bear the same relation to our brains that the little folders and other icons on the screen of a computer bear to its underlying circuitry and software. Our perceptions, memories and emotions are grossly simplified, cartoonish representations of hidden, hideously complex computations.
None of this is novel or controversial. Dennett is just reiterating, in his oh-so-clever, neologorrheic fashion, what mind-scientists and most educated lay folk have long accepted, that the bulk of cognition happens beneath the surface of awareness. Dennett even thanks the much-vilified Freud for his “championing of unconscious motivations”!
[...] Our thoughts are imperfect representations of our brain/minds and of the world, but that doesn’t make them necessarily false.
Take this thought: “Donald Trump is a narcissistic jerk.” That is an extremely compressed statement about an extremely messy external reality [...] But that doesn’t mean “Donald Trump is a narcissistic jerk” is an illusion, any more than “2 + 2 = 4.”
What if I think "2 + 2 = 5,” “Global warming is a hoax” or “Donald Trump is the wisest man on earth”? What if I am psychotic, or living in a simulation created by evil robots, and all my thoughts are illusions? To say my consciousness is therefore an illusion would be to conflate consciousness with its contents. That’s like saying a book doesn’t exist if it depicts non-existent things. And yet that is what Dennett seems to suggest.
Consider how Dennett talks about qualia, philosophers’ term for subjective experiences. [...] he concludes, bizarrely, that therefore qualia are fictions, “an artifact of bad theorizing.” If we lack qualia, then we are “zombies,” creatures that look and even behave like humans but have no inner, subjective life. Imagining a reader who insists he is not a zombie, Dennett writes:
“The only support for that conviction [that you are not a zombie] is the vehemence of the conviction itself, and as soon as you allow the theoretical possibility that there could be zombies, you have to give up your papal authority about your own nonzombiehood.”
[...] Dennett gets annoyed when critics accuse him of saying “consciousness doesn’t exist,” and to be fair, he never flatly makes that claim. His point seems to be, rather, that consciousness is so insignificant, especially compared to our exalted notions of it, that it might as well not exist.
When I encounter a baffling belief, at some point I stop trying to understand the belief and focus on the believer. What’s the motive? Why would Dennett expend so much energy advancing such a preposterous position?
Like many philosophers, Dennett clearly gets a kick out of defending positions that defy common sense. But his primary agenda is defending science against religion and other irrational belief systems...
[....] Dennett accuses those who question science’s power of bad faith; these doubters don’t want their “beloved mysteries” explained. Dennett can’t accept that anyone might have legitimate, rational reasons for resisting his reductionist vision.
Some people surely have an unhealthy attachment to mysteries, but Dennett has an unhealthy aversion to them...
[...] Agree with him or not, I always find him provocative and entertaining. [...] he ... rouses the rest of us from our zombie-like torpor and makes us more conscious. Call it the Dennett Paradox... (MORE - missing details)
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/consc...tt-paradox
EXCERPTS: The idea that consciousness isn’t real has always struck me as crazy, but smart people espouse it. One of the smartest is philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has been questioning consciousness for decades, notably in his 1991 bestseller Consciousness Explained.
I’ve always thought I must be missing something in Dennett’s argument, so I hoped his book From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds would enlighten me. It does, but not in the way Dennett intended.
[...] But human cognition, Dennett emphasizes, still consists mainly of competence without comprehension. Our conscious thoughts represent a minute fraction of all the information processing carried out by our brains. Natural selection designed our brains to provide us with thoughts on a “need to know” basis, so we’re not overwhelmed with data.
Dennett compares consciousness to the user interface of a computer. The contents of our awareness, he asserts, bear the same relation to our brains that the little folders and other icons on the screen of a computer bear to its underlying circuitry and software. Our perceptions, memories and emotions are grossly simplified, cartoonish representations of hidden, hideously complex computations.
None of this is novel or controversial. Dennett is just reiterating, in his oh-so-clever, neologorrheic fashion, what mind-scientists and most educated lay folk have long accepted, that the bulk of cognition happens beneath the surface of awareness. Dennett even thanks the much-vilified Freud for his “championing of unconscious motivations”!
[...] Our thoughts are imperfect representations of our brain/minds and of the world, but that doesn’t make them necessarily false.
Take this thought: “Donald Trump is a narcissistic jerk.” That is an extremely compressed statement about an extremely messy external reality [...] But that doesn’t mean “Donald Trump is a narcissistic jerk” is an illusion, any more than “2 + 2 = 4.”
What if I think "2 + 2 = 5,” “Global warming is a hoax” or “Donald Trump is the wisest man on earth”? What if I am psychotic, or living in a simulation created by evil robots, and all my thoughts are illusions? To say my consciousness is therefore an illusion would be to conflate consciousness with its contents. That’s like saying a book doesn’t exist if it depicts non-existent things. And yet that is what Dennett seems to suggest.
Consider how Dennett talks about qualia, philosophers’ term for subjective experiences. [...] he concludes, bizarrely, that therefore qualia are fictions, “an artifact of bad theorizing.” If we lack qualia, then we are “zombies,” creatures that look and even behave like humans but have no inner, subjective life. Imagining a reader who insists he is not a zombie, Dennett writes:
“The only support for that conviction [that you are not a zombie] is the vehemence of the conviction itself, and as soon as you allow the theoretical possibility that there could be zombies, you have to give up your papal authority about your own nonzombiehood.”
[...] Dennett gets annoyed when critics accuse him of saying “consciousness doesn’t exist,” and to be fair, he never flatly makes that claim. His point seems to be, rather, that consciousness is so insignificant, especially compared to our exalted notions of it, that it might as well not exist.
When I encounter a baffling belief, at some point I stop trying to understand the belief and focus on the believer. What’s the motive? Why would Dennett expend so much energy advancing such a preposterous position?
Like many philosophers, Dennett clearly gets a kick out of defending positions that defy common sense. But his primary agenda is defending science against religion and other irrational belief systems...
[....] Dennett accuses those who question science’s power of bad faith; these doubters don’t want their “beloved mysteries” explained. Dennett can’t accept that anyone might have legitimate, rational reasons for resisting his reductionist vision.
Some people surely have an unhealthy attachment to mysteries, but Dennett has an unhealthy aversion to them...
[...] Agree with him or not, I always find him provocative and entertaining. [...] he ... rouses the rest of us from our zombie-like torpor and makes us more conscious. Call it the Dennett Paradox... (MORE - missing details)
