Daniel Dennett deflates consciousness

[Magical Realist]

I disagree with most of what Dennett proposes--that consciousness is an illusion. I'm pretty sure my consciousness is real and an active and roughly accurate representation of my experience and my world. Just look at what happens when we remove it. Pretty much everything disappears. I mean everything! Even ourselves. That's how "present" and real consciousness is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYYFQiN052c

[C C]

I disagree with most of what Dennett proposes--that consciousness is an illusion. I'm pretty sure my consciousness is real and an active and roughly accurate representation of my experience and my world. Just look at what happens when we remove it. Pretty much everything disappears. I mean everything! Even ourselves. That's how "present" and real consciousness is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYYFQiN052c

Imagine one avian expert talking about chickens, and another one discussing ducks. However. neither of them specify such with their language, each instead always using the general category of "birds or bird". All sorts of confusion would result, because chickens and ducks have different attributes and habits, despite both slotting under the overarching term of "bird".

That's what happens when philosophers and neuroscientists only refer to "consciousness" rather than narrowing down to what they specifically mean within that umbrella concept.

There are problems of cognition (identification and understanding) which are actually easy because they are amenable to the kind of mechanistic interactions or information processing that AI engages in.

And then there is the problem of experience or manifestation, which stems from matter and its structural and dynamic arrangements having no such capacity even ascribed to it, much less an underlying science that could explain such. Dead people don't just lack presentations of personal thoughts -- the whole world becomes absent as well. That is the normal condition of non-conscious matter and its configurations: It has no evidence of its own existence, no appearances or sensations of any kind (the phenomenal meaning of images, sounds, tactile feelings, odors, etc).

To suggest otherwise about matter is to stray into panpsychism, which is anathema to the conventional materialist and scientism mindset (i.e., contradiction).

Dennett engages in the straw man of treating words like "mind" and "consciousness" in an antiquated fashion, of treating them as if they denote the "supernatural" or "magic", when the majority of naturalistic philosophers and scientists in this day and age don't load them with anything like that.

Ironically, since we're left with an utterly superficial explanation of phenomenal experience -- that it is brutely conjured when the correct choreographed dance or mechanistic procedures are performed by a system (and even then the product is only privately observable to the system itself), it is actually Dennett who is encouraging magic (i.e., executing the equivalent of a spell is necessary). Other parties would like to have a deeper, decent, alternative explanation that would make sense (even if going against the traditional dogma about matter).

When venturing into the proposition that consciousness (or specifically, phenomenal experience) is an illusion, which Keith Frankish promotes and Dennett seems to advocate -- the idea is inherently self-conflicting. Since "illusion" is a subspecies of experience (it entails the latter), you can't have an erroneous appearance or presentation (illusion) unless such appearances are possible to begin with.

One is left with pondering at least three possibilities with respect to such a school of thought:

(1) That its members are intellectually disingenuous at a fundamental level.

(2) That its members are abysmally stupid.

(3) That they are literally philosophical zombies.

The first seems unlikely and the second too crude and insensitive to suggest (along with the first).

With respect to the third... I once considered human p-zombies to be too fantastic to be possible. But aphantasia and blindsight have changed my mind a bit. Neither maps congruently upon p-zombie, but they suggest a person could lack experiences and yet still be natively wired to insist pretentiously to one's self and others that they do (without actually knowing what a manifestation is, in contrast to the nothingness they abide in).

And if the members are kind of indirectly or quasi-directly hinting themselves that they are a p-zombies, then that also mitigates the potential social callousness of the possibility (or inferring that as the source of their bizarre proposals).

RELATED (scivillage): The moral imperative to learn from diverse phenomenal experiences

[Magical Realist]

Consciousness rises up like a star in the infinite nothingness of mere Being. The abyss inside matter is all lit up. Stars and galaxies and black holes and human beings. Then the star descends back into the void, veiled by the darkness it once illuminated. It begins in miraculous wonderment, and ends in inexplicable tragedy. But not fully. For it merely returns to where it came from.

[Yazata]

I disagree with most of what Dennett proposes--that consciousness is an illusion. I'm pretty sure my consciousness is real and an active and roughly accurate representation of my experience and my world. Just look at what happens when we remove it. Pretty much everything disappears. I mean everything! Even ourselves. That's how "present" and real consciousness is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYYFQiN052c

I'm inclined to agree with Dennett. Sort of -- cuz not having studied his writings, I'm not exactly sure what he's saying or why he's saying it.

If he's denying that humans and other animals are conscious, then I disagree pretty vehemently. We clearly are.

But if he's really saying that what it means to be conscious is widely misconceived, then I couldn't agree more.

That's why I'm inclined to think that the philosophy of consciousness is unlikely to advance until somebody clarifies what in the hell they are talking about. What is this "consciousness" that everyone wants to declare the existence or nonexistence of?

Responsiveness to the surrounding environment? If that's all it is (and I'm inclined to think this way myself) then consciousness would seem to reduce to causality. Single celled protozoa react to things like light and pH, all by relatively simple causal mechanisms.

Self-awareness? That's a controversial topic since it would seem to depend on one's concept of 'self'. To me it would seem to be responsiveness not only to the surrounding environment, but to the "inner" environment too, responsiveness to the reactive system's own states.

Or is consciousness some phenomenal experience populated by "stuff" like qualia, and by extension the kind of extra-physicalist ontology that includes those non-physical things? That seems to be the claim of Chalmers, Jackson and their 'hard-problem' followers.

All kinds of complications make their appearance in these considerations, such as the ability to form concepts. An animal might be afraid and its fear is apparent in its behavior, which implies that its neural processing that drives the behavior is responding to the fear (a state of the system). Yet the animal might be totally incapable of thinking propositionally "I'm afraid", let alone considering an abstract question like "What is fear?" or even "What is 'I'?"

So... if all that Dennett is saying is that he doesn't think that the problem of consciousness is a Chalmersian "hard problem", then I think that I'm inclined to agree with him. (Tentatively and provisionally, my thinking is always a work in progress.)

[Magical Realist]

Nicholas Humphries' own take on consciousness as an illusion. He likens it to a magic trick that our brain plays on us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYC0JbN_BmY

[C C]

Nicholas Humphries' own take on consciousness as an illusion. He likens it to a magic trick that our brain plays on us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYC0JbN_BmY

Like Dennett, he's a master of bait and switch. Where in the end he's actually referring to the idea of a supernatural or mystical "self" being an illusion, rather than experience. Completely dodging the challenge of explaining the latter in a conceptual view of matter that excludes the capacity for manifestation from the outset. In contrast to something like Russellian monism, which does not.

Both of these characters seem to believe their audience is always from the 19th or earlier centuries, where they can just stop with convincing them that neural correlates of consciousness exist or whatever applicable brain processes they address, since the key goal in the context of a primitive audience is to rid them of their occult beliefs. Rather than offer anything truly insightful to the problem, or for a modern crowd.

[Syne]

That's why I'm inclined to think that the philosophy of consciousness is unlikely to advance until somebody clarifies what in the hell they are talking about. What is this "consciousness" that everyone wants to declare the existence or nonexistence of?

Responsiveness to the surrounding environment? If that's all it is (and I'm inclined to think this way myself) then consciousness would seem to reduce to causality. Single celled protozoa react to things like light and pH, all by relatively simple causal mechanisms.

Self-awareness? That's a controversial topic since it would seem to depend on one's concept of 'self'. To me it would seem to be responsiveness not only to the surrounding environment, but to the "inner" environment too, responsiveness to the reactive system's own states.

Or is consciousness some phenomenal experience populated by "stuff" like qualia, and by extension the kind of extra-physicalist ontology that includes those non-physical things? That seems to be the claim of Chalmers, Jackson and their 'hard-problem' followers.

All kinds of complications make their appearance in these considerations, such as the ability to form concepts. An animal might be afraid and its fear is apparent in its behavior, which implies that its neural processing that drives the behavior is responding to the fear (a state of the system). Yet the animal might be totally incapable of thinking propositionally "I'm afraid", let alone considering an abstract question like "What is fear?" or even "What is 'I'?"

So... if all that Dennett is saying is that he doesn't think that the problem of consciousness is a Chalmersian "hard problem", then I think that I'm inclined to agree with him. (Tentatively and provisionally, my thinking is always a work in progress.)

Self-awareness would seem like the most sensible candidate, as it includes concepts such as qualia (what things seem like internally) and seems quite varied, even just in humans. The variability would seem to cover what we might attribute in animals as a very diminished form of self-awareness, although instinctive reactions, even in humans, don't require any thought or self-reflection. Fear in an animal could just be a reaction to external stimuli that we interpret as an internal process simply because we experience one.

Claiming responsiveness to the environment is sufficient for consciousness would necessarily have to include plants that will turn to face the sunlight. At best, we could say that is a further diminished form of self-awareness, as the plant is reacting to both the environment and its internal needs, or just the analog to survival instinct. Following this variable and increasingly diminished self-awareness in decreasing complexities of form, we could possibly entertain the concept of panpsychism, where matter just ceases to display it at all, but the potential could just be dormant.

If we take pansychism seriously, then consciousness is an accumulation of some property of matter that increases with complexity. So it's not simply about the mass, and things like the Earth are in no way conscious, as its complexity is no greater than its constituents. If so, consciousness would be inherent in matter but only reach a crucial, effective agency as an emergent result of complexity.

That would raise the question of whether this inherent property of matter is an indicator as to the nature of matter itself, with all existence essentially being cognitive. Not an illusion, in teh sense of a simulation and simulator, but already being the substance of a mind.


So unless you're satisfied with acknowledging plants as on a conscious par with humans, it's difficult to avoid some form of postulation of a god or ultimate mind. Most secularists try to avoid both by simply claiming consciousness is an illusion, but there's no compelling reason to believe that evolution alone would have developed such a self-deception... or the sense of self that would necessitate any such deception in the first place. IOW, they try to explain it away so they don't actually have to explain anything at all... including any clear definition of terms.

[confused2]

So unless you're satisfied with acknowledging plants as on a conscious par with humans,

Haha.

One of the regular visitors to our garden is a squirrel which I will call Self. On arrival at the garden Self checks for anything new or moved - Self clearly has a mental picture of what the garden ought to look like and will treat anything new as a potential threat - there's a risk/benefit assessment going on. As the initial inspection is from a safe location Self would seem to be assessing what the risk would be if she were in another location - it seems like she can move through her mental map without physically moving but without being a squirrel there's no way to know for sure. I would identify (even define) 'consciousness' as the ability to maintain a virtual representation of self beyond the immediate circumstances.

[Magical Realist]

Yazata said: That's why I'm inclined to think that the philosophy of consciousness is unlikely to advance until somebody clarifies what in the hell they are talking about. What is this "consciousness" that everyone wants to declare the existence or nonexistence of?

I take consciousness to mean the phenomenal experience of anything--a bodily state, an emotion, a sensation, a thought, a situation, an object, etc. This is the sense in which Chalmers defines it I believe. So for example feeling tired is being conscious of it. Sitting in a chair is being conscious of it. Remembering your grandmother is being conscious of it. Being terrified is being conscious of it. The smell of coming rain is being conscious of it. Being in pain is being conscious of it. Any experience of anything whatsoever. So in this sense I'd say that animals are conscious too. They clearly experience most the qualia and sensations that humans do.

[confused2]

I take consciousness to mean the phenomenal experience of anything

Go into a room (at night) and turn the lights off .. in your mind ('consciousness'?) the room continues to exist and you can move through it (your mental model of it) as though you could see it. Kind of like what I was trying to say about the 'self' existing outside of the immediate ( phenomenal?) situation.