The grand illusionist: An "intellectually consistent fanatic"?

[C C]

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicatio...llusionist

EXCERPT: [...] Not that this is very surprising. After five decades, it would be astonishing if [Daniel] Dennett were to change direction now. But, by the same token, his project should over that time have acquired not only more complexity, but greater sophistication. And yet it has not. [...] In the end, Dennett’s approach has remained largely fixed. [...] he constructs a grand speculative narrative, comprising a disturbing number of sheer assertions, and an even more disturbing number of missing transitions between episodes.

[...] For Dennett, all evolutionary developments occur because they incorporate useful adaptations. He has no patience for talk of “spandrels” — phenotypic traits that are supposedly not adaptations but byproducts of the evolution of other traits — or of large, inexplicable, fortuitous hypertrophies (such as, say, the sudden acquisition of language) that have no specific evolutionary rationale at all. [...] So sanguine, in fact, is Dennett in his certainty that adaptive usefulness is sufficient explanation for why things happen that he often fails to consider whether the things that he claims have happened are, strictly speaking, possible.

[...] Admittedly, part of the problem bedeviling Dennett’s narrative is the difficulty of making a case that seems so hard to reconcile with quotidian experience. But that difficulty is only exacerbated by his fierce adherence to an early modern style of materialism, according to whose tenets there can be no aspect of nature not reducible to blind physical forces. For him, the mechanistic picture, or its late modern equivalent, is absolute; it is convertible with truth as such, and whatever appears to escape its logic can never be more than a monstrosity of the imagination. But then the conscious mind constitutes a special dilemma, since this modern picture was produced precisely by excluding all mental properties from physical nature. And so, in this case, physicalist reduction means trying to explain one particular phenomenon — uniquely among all the phenomena of nature — by realities that are, in qualitative terms, quite literally its opposite.

[...] Traditionally, most philosophical approaches to these issues have merely restated the problems without any real advance in clarity (theories of supervenience, for example), or tried awkwardly to evade them altogether (neutral monism, mysterianism). Sometimes a certain fatigue with the inconclusiveness of simple reductionism has prompted vogues in more exotic naturalisms (say, materialist panpsychism or quantum theories of consciousness), but these simply defer the question to an atomic or subatomic level without in any way diminishing the enigma. In a sense, perhaps, Dennett should be commended for his fidelity to the purer reductionisms of early modernity. In its austere emergentism, his position is very near to eliminativism: Whatever cannot be reduced to the most basic physical explanations cannot really exist.

[...] Usually, when confronted by the computational model of mind, it is enough to point out that what minds do is precisely everything that computers do not do, and therein lies much of a computer’s usefulness. [...] But, curiously enough, in Dennett’s case it does not, because to a very large degree he would freely grant that computers only appear to be conscious agents. The perversity of his argument, notoriously, is that he believes the same to be true of us.

For Dennett, the scientific image is the only one that corresponds to reality. The manifest image, by contrast, is a collection of useful illusions, shaped by evolution to provide the interface between our brains and the world, and thus allow us to interact with our environments. The phenomenal qualities that compose our experience, the meanings and intentions that fill our thoughts, the whole world of perception and interpretation — these are merely how the machinery of our nervous systems and brains represent reality to us, for purely practical reasons. Just as the easily manipulated icons on a computer’s screen conceal the innumerable “uncomprehending competences” by which programs run, even while enabling us to use those programs, so the virtual distillates of reality that constitute phenomenal experience permit us to master an unseen world of countless qualityless and purposeless physical forces.

Very well. In a sense, Dennett’s is simply the standard modern account of how the mind relates to the physical order. The extravagant assertion that he adds to this account, however, is that consciousness itself, understood as a real dimension of wholly first-person phenomenal experience and intentional meaning, is itself only another “user-illusion.” That vast abyss between objective physical events and subjective qualitative experience that I mentioned above does not exist. Hence, that seemingly magical transition from the one to the other — whether a genetic or a structural shift — need not be explained, because it has never actually occurred.

The entire notion of consciousness as an illusion is, of course, rather silly. Dennett has been making the argument for most of his career, and it is just abrasively counterintuitive enough to create the strong suspicion in many that it must be more philosophically cogent than it seems, because surely no one would say such a thing if there were not some subtle and penetrating truth hidden behind its apparent absurdity. But there is none. The simple truth of the matter is that Dennett is a fanatic: He believes so fiercely in the unique authority and absolutely comprehensive competency of the third-person scientific perspective that he is willing to deny not only the analytic authority, but also the actual existence, of the first-person vantage. At the very least, though, he is an intellectually consistent fanatic, inasmuch as he correctly grasps (as many other physical reductionists do not) that consciousness really is irreconcilable with a coherent metaphysical naturalism. Since, however, the position he champions is inherently ridiculous, the only way that he can argue on its behalf is by relentlessly, and in as many ways as possible, changing the subject whenever the obvious objections are raised.

For what it is worth, Dennett often exhibits considerable ingenuity in his evasions — so much ingenuity, in fact, that he sometimes seems to have succeeded in baffling even himself. For instance, at one point in this book he takes up the question of “zombies” — the possibility of apparently perfectly functioning human beings who nevertheless possess no interior affective world at all — but in doing so seems to have entirely forgotten what the whole question of consciousness actually is. He rejects the very notion that we “have ‘privileged access’ to the causes and sources of our introspective convictions,” as though knowledge of the causes of consciousness were somehow germane to the issue of knowledge of the experience of consciousness. And if you believe that you know you are not a zombie “unwittingly” imagining that you have “real consciousness with real qualia,” Dennett’s reply is a curt “No, you don’t” — because, you see, “The only support for that conviction is the vehemence of the conviction itself.”

It is hard to know how to answer this argument without mockery. It is quite amazing how thoroughly Dennett seems to have lost the thread here. For one thing, a zombie could not unwittingly imagine anything, since he would possess no consciousness at all, let alone reflective consciousness; that is the whole point of the imaginative exercise. Insofar as you are convinced of anything at all, whether vehemently or tepidly, you do in fact know with absolute certitude that you yourself are not a zombie. Nor does it matter whether you know where your convictions come from; it is the very state of having convictions as such that apprises you of your intrinsic intentionality and your irreducibly private conscious experience.

Simply enough, you cannot suffer the illusion that you are conscious because illusions are possible only for conscious minds. This is so incandescently obvious that it is almost embarrassing to have to state it. But this confusion is entirely typical of Dennett’s position. In this book, as he has done repeatedly in previous texts, he mistakes the question of the existence of subjective experience for the entirely irrelevant question of the objective accuracy of subjective perceptions, and whether we need to appeal to third-person observers to confirm our impressions. But, of course, all that matters for this discussion is that we have impressions at all.

Moreover, and perhaps most bizarrely, Dennett thinks that consciousness can be dismissed as an illusion — the fiction of an inner theater, residing in ourselves and in those around us — on the grounds that behind the appearance of conscious states there are an incalculable number of “uncomprehending competences” at work in both the unseen machinery of our brains and the larger social contexts of others’ brains. In other words, because there are many unknown physical concomitants to conscious states, those states do not exist. But, of course, this is the very problem at issue: that the limpid immediacy and incommunicable privacy of consciousness is utterly unlike the composite, objective, material sequences of physical causality in the brain, and seems impossible to explain in terms of that causality — and yet exists nonetheless, and exists more surely than any presumed world “out there.”

That, as it happens, may be the chief question Dennett neglects to ask: Why presume that the scientific image is true while the manifest image is an illusion when, after all, the scientific image is a supposition of reason dependent upon decisions regarding methods of inquiry, whereas the manifest image — the world as it exists in the conscious mind — presents itself directly to us as an indubitable, inescapable, and eminently coherent reality in every single moment of our lives? How could one possibly determine here what should qualify as reality as such? Dennett certainly provides small reason why anyone else should adopt the prejudices he cherishes....

MORE: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicatio...llusionist

[Magical Realist]

The entire notion of consciousness as an illusion is, of course, rather silly. Dennett has been making the argument for most of his career, and it is just abrasively counterintuitive enough to create the strong suspicion in many that it must be more philosophically cogent than it seems, because surely no one would say such a thing if there were not some subtle and penetrating truth hidden behind its apparent absurdity. But there is none

An unlivable belief may not necessarily be a false belief, but perhaps what is more important, it is an irrelevant belief. If consciousness is an illusion, the world sure doesn't act like. I mean just socially speaking my experience embraces people I must acknowledge as conscious selves on a daily basis. And then one is left pondering the use of such a hugely impractical illusion as consciousness, given the fact that a zombie mode of life would be more efficient and fit in the competition for survival. Why the waste of energy and brain mass supporting this illusion of being conscious? Why the sluggish digressions of introspection and reflection on our own actions and feelings and thoughts when being a machine of unconscious reflexes would be so much more advantageous? It just seems ludicrous to assume such a fundamentally manifest phenomenal experience as consciousness isn't real. The world just makes so much more sense if consciousness is real.

[C C]

The entire notion of consciousness as an illusion is, of course, rather silly. Dennett has been making the argument for most of his career, and it is just abrasively counterintuitive enough to create the strong suspicion in many that it must be more philosophically cogent than it seems, because surely no one would say such a thing if there were not some subtle and penetrating truth hidden behind its apparent absurdity. But there is none

An unlivable belief may not necessarily be a false belief, but perhaps what is more important, it is an irrelevant belief. If consciousness is an illusion, the world sure doesn't act like. I mean just socially speaking my experience embraces people I must acknowledge as conscious selves on a daily basis. And then one is left pondering the use of such a hugely impractical illusion as consciousness, given the fact that a zombie mode of life would be more efficient and fit in the competition for survival. Why the waste of energy and brain mass supporting this illusion of being conscious? Why the sluggish digressions of introspection and reflection on our own actions and feelings and thoughts when being a machine of unconscious reflexes would be so much more advantageous? It just seems ludicrous to assume such a fundamentally manifest phenomenal experience as consciousness isn't real. The world just makes so much more sense if consciousness is real.

There's a point in David Bentley Hart's review where he remarks:

For instance, he [Dennett] still thinks it a solvent critique of Cartesianism to say that interactions between bodies and minds would violate the laws of physics. Apart from involving a particularly doctrinaire view of the causal closure of the physical (the positively Laplacian fantasy that all physical events constitute an inviolable continuum of purely physical causes), this argument clumsily assumes that such an interaction would constitute simply another mechanical exchange of energy in addition to material forces.

Yet Dennett can still probably or rightfully appeal to that due to the following, despite "crazy" or "nonsensical" seeming to rear its head just about any way which one turns in dealing with consciousness in the context of materialism. Every view may be paddling along in Sewer Creek, unable to completely kick other occupants out of the boat.

The record of transactions not being tied-up neatly is a gripe similar to what bedevils epiphenomenalism. Both epiphenomenalism's solution and its "dog bites master" difficulty is the asymmetry or one-way causation of its dualism. Where experience is a by-product caused by physical activity, yet the former lacks potency itself (has no return effect upon the brain).

How can the human body -- as an instrument governed by and limited to physical interactions -- be publicly reporting as well as semi-privately thinking about phenomenalistic events and properties (the feelings / manifestations of experience)? The latter should be a mere story that neural processing is making-up, since it is not receptive to the influence of their existence as well as having access to their qualitative character. It would be an incredibly long-lived and globally maintained coincidence (embracing all humans) that brain operation should be inherently oriented to make-up stories about "qualia" or "there being something-ness rather than nothing-ness" and that tale of a conjured, parallel realm also accidentally being true.

But even when allowing experience to be causally potent (non-asymmetrical dualism), the influence from a hidden by-product of matter performance would be detectable by sophisticated, future research. Or rather, the total account of interacting brain components would not be sufficient to explain why a human body was reporting about feelings / manifestations. At best, the preferred dodge again would be that the brain is merely inventing a story (eliminativism), albeit seeming utterly absurd from the standpoint of that storytelling being a genetic mandate inherent in the whole population.

A double-aspect approach (one ancestor below) -- which treats experience as an internal property of matter that abides by different rules than the external relationships of matter -- would still have feeling / manifestation facing the same causal gap between its inner and outer dimensions. The account of external relationships and measurements would be inadequate for explaining how / why the body was reporting about the intrinsic character and governance of its skull matter, apart from the evasion that the physiological system had an evolutionary preference for storytelling.

Charles Peirce: [...] Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness. --Man's Glassy Essence

- - -

[Yazata]

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicatio...llusionist

EXCERPT: [...] Not that this is very surprising. After five decades, it would be astonishing if [Daniel] Dennett were to change direction now.

David Bentley Hart, the author of this opinion piece that CC posted is a Christian philosophical theologian and something of a polemicist it seems. I doubt very much whether his own views have changed very much either.

My guess is that he's teeing off on Dennett since Dennett is often identified with the so-called "new atheists".

But, by the same token, his project should over that time have acquired not only more complexity, but greater sophistication. And yet it has not.

Says Hart. Presumably because Dennett hasn't moved towards a position more to Hart's liking.

In the end, Dennett’s approach has remained largely fixed. [...] he constructs a grand speculative narrative, comprising a disturbing number of sheer assertions, and an even more disturbing number of missing transitions between episodes.

That's a serious criticism, assuming it's true.

For Dennett, all evolutionary developments occur because they incorporate useful adaptations. He has no patience for talk of “spandrels” — phenotypic traits that are supposedly not adaptations but byproducts of the evolution of other traits

Spandrels is an architectural term that Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin (major big-time polemicists themselves) introduced as an analogy. ('Spandrels' are the triangular areas where arches are mated to domed vaults.) The argument was that they appeared simply on account of the geometry of the situation and not by any process of selection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)

It apparently refers to the idea that when adaptations occur, they may sometimes involve anatomical or biochemical changes (as "unintended consequences") that have no adaptive significance at the time. These might find an adaptive use later on.

In their typical polemical style, Gould and Lewontin billed this as an attack on orthodox Darwinism, which they often seemed to oppose for (Marxist) political reasons. And inevitably, critics of biological evolution have grasped onto these controversies as evidence that Darwinism is cracking and collapsing, rendered indefensible by Steven Jay Gould's at times hyperbolic polemics.

Dennett has famously pointed out that 'spandrels' are only one of several ways of mating arches with vaults, and that they were presumably selected by ancient architects for their aesthetic qualities. So, contra-Gould, architectural spandrels arguably did have selective advantage.

As for me, I don't have any problem with the idea that some of what we see in living organisms isn't the direct result of selection, but is rather appeared alongside and as a consequence of something that was of selective advantage. (Due to the biochemical or developmental biological mechanisms that brought the latter about.)

I would expect that Dennett accepts this too. (What he seems to me to disagree with is Gould and Lewontin's hyperbolic use of it to attack Darwin and the central evolutionary role of natural selection.) Disagreeing with Stephen Jay Gould isn't an intellectual crime.

— or of large, inexplicable, fortuitous hypertrophies (such as, say, the sudden acquisition of language) that have no specific evolutionary rationale at all.

Human beings seem to have evolved to live and function in cooperative groups. Their ability to communicate concepts, intentions and information to others of the group seems to me to have obvious evolutionary rationale. (The civilization surrounding us every day is evidence of its evolutionary value.)

Admittedly, part of the problem bedeviling Dennett’s narrative

Ah, the truth starts to come out. The goal here isn't to attack Dennett the philosopher of biology on evolutionary theory, it's to attack Dennett the Atheist from every direction that Hart, the philosophical theologian can imagine. The goal is not to pull down any particular position of Dennett's but rather to pull down Dennett the man.

The essay kind of swerves away from evolutionary biology at this point, attacking Dennett successively on supposedly "mechanistic materialist" metaphysics and then the philosophy of mind. New targets of opportunity.

I'll (maybe) react to Hart's criticisms of Dennett's metaphysics and philosophy of mind in a later post.

[Yazata]

Admittedly, part of the problem bedeviling Dennett’s narrative is the difficulty of making a case that seems so hard to reconcile with quotidian experience.

Where is the difficulty reconciling Dennett's views with 'quotidian' experience? (The word means 'everyday'.)

Dennett isn't denying any part of everyday experience. He's just suggesting that it might be better to conceive of it differently. Hart seems to me to be sneaking in the hidden assumption that we directly experience the whole traditional mental ontology. We intuit our 'selves' and 'qualia' and whatever else. Dennett appears to disagree and thinks that those things that we supposedly intuit are really concepts that we apply in order to make sense of our own mental operations. (And where 'we' isn't the soul, but rather the cognitive process.)

But that difficulty is only exacerbated by his fierce adherence to an early modern style of materialism, according to whose tenets there can be no aspect of nature not reducible to blind physical forces.

I think that it's correct that Dennett doesn't see the hand of God in physical events.

But then the conscious mind constitutes a special dilemma, since this modern picture was produced precisely by excluding all mental properties from physical nature.

The philosophy of mind has turned itself into the last bastion, the final redoubt, of old-style supernaturalism.

If one reads the late 19th century biological literature, a central subject of debate was vitalism and the existence of non-material formative principles. Many thinkers just couldn't imagine how a bunch of simple inorganic chemical reactions could somehow become life in all its majesty and complexity. So they imagined that some supernatural principle, some occult non-physical principle within nature, some 'life force' ('pneuma', God's breath) had to be breathed into the chemicals in order for life to exist.

And similarly, many biologists couldn't understand how a single fertilized egg could develop into a hugely complex organism with billions of cells. What guided it? Where was the blueprint, the plan? So they imagined some supernatural formative principle, some 'logos', a principle of order reaching into the physical world like the finger of God, making sure that everything went where it was supposed to go.

Today, those controversies seem strangely naive to contemporary biologists who view things from the perspective of organic chemistry, molecular biology, and developmental biology.

My point is that it seems to me that the same kind of arguments are being made about psychology today that were made about biology 100 years ago. The philosophy of mind is undergoing a very similar evolution as we speak.  

And so, in this case, physicalist reduction means trying to explain one particular phenomenon — uniquely among all the phenomena of nature — by realities that are, in qualitative terms, quite literally its opposite.

Hart's assertion here is almost exactly the same as what was once said by the 19th century vitalists. How can a bunch of blind physical forces produce pattern, form and order? There needs to be some extra-physical organizing principle. Something quite literally the opposite of blind physical principles.

What Dennett is doing is following in the footsteps of the late 19th century pioneers of molecular and developmental biology, trying to understand mind as something natural, something that doesn't require miraculous interventions from outside, inconsistent with the rest of physical reality. I personally agree with Dennett's approach. (It's worked in physics, in chemistry, in geology and in biology. Why stop now?)

Traditionally, most philosophical approaches to these issues have merely restated the problems without any real advance in clarity (theories of supervenience, for example), or tried awkwardly to evade them altogether (neutral monism, mysterianism). Sometimes a certain fatigue with the inconclusiveness of simple reductionism has prompted vogues in more exotic naturalisms (say, materialist panpsychism or quantum theories of consciousness), but these simply defer the question to an atomic or subatomic level without in any way diminishing the enigma.

In a sense, perhaps, Dennett should be commended for his fidelity to the purer reductionisms of early modernity. In its austere emergentism, his position is very near to eliminativism: Whatever cannot be reduced to the most basic physical explanations cannot really exist.

That's too strong. Things don't need to be eliminated, just reconceived.

Usually, when confronted by the computational model of mind, it is enough to point out that what minds do is precisely everything that computers do not do, and therein lies much of a computer’s usefulness. [...] But, curiously enough, in Dennett’s case it does not, because to a very large degree he would freely grant that computers only appear to be conscious agents. The perversity of his argument, notoriously, is that he believes the same to be true of us.

Dennett isn't denying that people are conscious agents. He's trying to better understand what 'conscious' means and what it's ontological implications are.

The entire notion of consciousness as an illusion is, of course, rather silly. Dennett has been making the argument for most of his career, and it is just abrasively counterintuitive enough to create the strong suspicion in many that it must be more philosophically cogent than it seems, because surely no one would say such a thing if there were not some subtle and penetrating truth hidden behind its apparent absurdity. But there is none. The simple truth of the matter is that Dennett is a fanatic

I'm certainly not an authority on Dennett's thought. But even I know that what Dennett is calling an illusion isn't consciousness per se.

What he thinks is an illusion is what he terms the 'Cartesian theatre'. This is the idea that sense data is displayed on an inner stage, an inner TV monitor or something, where representations of events are observed by the self (the mind, the soul, the homunculus) which can never be wrong about what it sees. Illusions are supposed to be mistakes in the performance, the necessity of geometry was explained by Kant as the theatre's stage-directions, and so on.

As for me, I'm 100% with Dennett.  

At the very least, though, he is an intellectually consistent fanatic, inasmuch as he correctly grasps (as many other physical reductionists do not) that consciousness really is irreconcilable with a coherent metaphysical naturalism.

I don't think that Dennett would agree with that. I certainly don't. Obviously defining consciousness as something supernatural would make that supernatural concept of consciousness incompatible with metaphysical naturalism. I think that quite a few contemporary philosophers of mind are trying to do that.

Very well. In a sense, Dennett’s is simply the standard modern account of how the mind relates to the physical order. The extravagant assertion that he adds to this account, however, is that consciousness itself, understood as a real dimension of wholly first-person phenomenal experience and intentional meaning, is itself only another “user-illusion.”

The little spiritual man (the soul, the atman, our true spiritual self) riding around inside our heads, looking at what is represented to it by our eyes and sensory apparatus is almost certainly an illusion. The play on the inner Cartesian stage, the parade of mysterious inner 'qualia', isn't perception by some mysterious inner spectator of some weird non-physical performance.  

I agree with Dennett (and with the Buddhists who said much the same thing 2,500 years ago) that human beings often grievously misconceive themselves and their nature. That's the 'illusion'.

[Syne]

Admittedly, part of the problem bedeviling Dennett’s narrative is the difficulty of making a case that seems so hard to reconcile with quotidian experience.

Where is the difficulty reconciling Dennett's views with 'quotidian' experience? (The word means 'everyday'.)

Dennett isn't denying any part of everyday experience. He's just suggesting that it might be better to conceive of it differently. Hart seems to me to be sneaking in the hidden assumption that we directly experience the whole traditional mental ontology. We intuit our 'selves' and 'qualia' and whatever else. Dennett appears to disagree and thinks that those things that we supposedly intuit are really concepts that we apply in order to make sense of our own mental operations. (And where 'we' isn't the soul, but rather the cognitive process.)

You seem to be making a straw man of the above quote. He doesn't say Dennett's narrative is irreconcilable with a conception of everyday experience. He says it's at odds with the experience itself. If we don't intuit our experience, why are so few even vaguely aware of applying any conception at all?

But that difficulty is only exacerbated by his fierce adherence to an early modern style of materialism, according to whose tenets there can be no aspect of nature not reducible to blind physical forces.

I think that it's correct that Dennett doesn't see the hand of God in physical events.

Again, this seems to be a pretty blatant straw man. Dualism doesn't necessarily postulate a need for any god.

But then the conscious mind constitutes a special dilemma, since this modern picture was produced precisely by excluding all mental properties from physical nature.

The philosophy of mind has turned itself into the last bastion, the final redoubt, of old-style supernaturalism.

If one reads the late 19th century biological literature, a central subject of debate was vitalism and the existence of non-material formative principles. Many thinkers just couldn't imagine how a bunch of simple inorganic chemical reactions could somehow become life in all its majesty and complexity. So they imagined that some supernatural principle, some occult non-physical principle within nature, some 'life force' ('pneuma', God's breath) had to be breathed into the chemicals in order for life to exist.

And similarly, many biologists couldn't understand how a single fertilized egg could develop into a hugely complex organism with billions of cells. What guided it? Where was the blueprint, the plan? So they imagined some supernatural formative principle, some 'logos', a principle of order reaching into the physical world like the finger of God, making sure that everything went where it was supposed to go.

Today, those controversies seem strangely naive to contemporary biologists who view things from the perspective of organic chemistry, molecular biology, and developmental biology.

My point is that it seems to me that the same kind of arguments are being made about psychology today that were made about biology 100 years ago. The philosophy of mind is undergoing a very similar evolution as we speak.  

Again, dualism doesn't necessarily posit supernaturalism, since even dualism in philosophy of mind could simply be that of the natural deterministic and indeterministic processes. "Simple [and even complex] inorganic chemical reactions" have STILL not been demonstrated to "somehow become life". The mind-body problem persists because a materialist monism doesn't explain phenomena like neurolplasticity. Comparing the ongoing mind-body problem to our knowledge of genetics is a bit disingenuous (or at least outright scientism), since we have no demonstrable experiments of the former.

And so, in this case, physicalist reduction means trying to explain one particular phenomenon — uniquely among all the phenomena of nature — by realities that are, in qualitative terms, quite literally its opposite.

Hart's assertion here is almost exactly the same as what was once said by the 19th century vitalists. How can a bunch of blind physical forces produce pattern, form and order? There needs to be some extra-physical organizing principle. Something quite literally the opposite of blind physical principles.

What Dennett is doing is following in the footsteps of the late 19th century pioneers of molecular and developmental biology, trying to understand mind as something natural, something that doesn't require miraculous interventions from outside, inconsistent with the rest of physical reality. I personally agree with Dennett's approach. (It's worked in physics, in chemistry, in geology and in biology. Why stop now?)

Mental properties have always been excluded from reductive determinism, because even to this day we cannot demonstrate causation. Does Dennett just dismiss the mind-body problem out of hand, with only arm-wavy scientism? Physics, chemistry, geology, and biology are not soft-sciences. So you seem to be make a categorical error to buoy that sort of scientism. The hard-sciences provide a degree of empirical testability not known to be possible of mental properties.

Traditionally, most philosophical approaches to these issues have merely restated the problems without any real advance in clarity (theories of supervenience, for example), or tried awkwardly to evade them altogether (neutral monism, mysterianism). Sometimes a certain fatigue with the inconclusiveness of simple reductionism has prompted vogues in more exotic naturalisms (say, materialist panpsychism or quantum theories of consciousness), but these simply defer the question to an atomic or subatomic level without in any way diminishing the enigma.

In a sense, perhaps, Dennett should be commended for his fidelity to the purer reductionisms of early modernity. In its austere emergentism, his position is very near to eliminativism: Whatever cannot be reduced to the most basic physical explanations cannot really exist.

That's too strong. Things don't need to be eliminated, just reconceived.

Reconceptions alone are no more explanatory than any other unsupported scheme.

Usually, when confronted by the computational model of mind, it is enough to point out that what minds do is precisely everything that computers do not do, and therein lies much of a computer’s usefulness. [...] But, curiously enough, in Dennett’s case it does not, because to a very large degree he would freely grant that computers only appear to be conscious agents. The perversity of his argument, notoriously, is that he believes the same to be true of us.

Dennett isn't denying that people are conscious agents. He's trying to better understand what 'conscious' means and what it's ontological implications are.

Really? He sure seems to simply assume his ontological conclusion.

The entire notion of consciousness as an illusion is, of course, rather silly. Dennett has been making the argument for most of his career, and it is just abrasively counterintuitive enough to create the strong suspicion in many that it must be more philosophically cogent than it seems, because surely no one would say such a thing if there were not some subtle and penetrating truth hidden behind its apparent absurdity. But there is none. The simple truth of the matter is that Dennett is a fanatic

I'm certainly not an authority on Dennett's thought. But even I know that what Dennett is calling an illusion isn't consciousness per se.

What he thinks is an illusion is what he terms the 'Cartesian theatre'. This is the idea that sense data is displayed on an inner stage, an inner TV monitor or something, where representations of events are observed by the self (the mind, the soul, the homunculus) which can never be wrong about what it sees. Illusions are supposed to be mistakes in the performance, the necessity of geometry was explained by Kant as the theatre's stage-directions, and so on.

As for me, I'm 100% with Dennett.

"The now standard response to Dennett's project is that he has picked a fight with a straw man. Cartesian materialism, it is alleged, is an impossibly naive account of phenomenal consciousness held by no one currently working in cognitive science or the philosophy of mind. Consequently, whatever the effectiveness of Dennett's demolition job, it is fundamentally misdirected" (see, e.g., Block, 1993, 1995; Shoemaker, 1993; and Tye, 1993)

No one believes the mind can "never be wrong about what it sees". But mistakes are very far from Dennett's assertions, as a dualist mind could be equally likely to make such mistakes...especially one reliant upon indeterministic processes.

At the very least, though, he is an intellectually consistent fanatic, inasmuch as he correctly grasps (as many other physical reductionists do not) that consciousness really is irreconcilable with a coherent metaphysical naturalism.

I don't think that Dennett would agree with that. I certainly don't. Obviously defining consciousness as something supernatural would make that supernatural concept of consciousness incompatible with metaphysical naturalism. I think that quite a few contemporary philosophers of mind are trying to do that.

Well, soft-sciences are so called because they are not as readily amenable to the natural sciences. Strictly speaking, the mind-body problem has proven to be so. Whether Dennett would agree with that or not, I don't know.

Very well. In a sense, Dennett’s is simply the standard modern account of how the mind relates to the physical order. The extravagant assertion that he adds to this account, however, is that consciousness itself, understood as a real dimension of wholly first-person phenomenal experience and intentional meaning, is itself only another “user-illusion.”

The little spiritual man (the soul, the atman, our true spiritual self) riding around inside our heads, looking at what is represented to it by our eyes and sensory apparatus is almost certainly an illusion. The play on the inner Cartesian stage, the parade of mysterious inner 'qualia', isn't perception by some mysterious inner spectator of some weird non-physical performance.  

I agree with Dennett (and with the Buddhists who said much the same thing 2,500 years ago) that human beings often grievously misconceive themselves and their nature. That's the 'illusion'.

That sounds like a misrepresentation of Dennett...unless you can support it with direct quotes. Reduction of the consciousness to physical processes is not inherent in the Buddhist sense of illusion.

[C C]

The entire notion of consciousness as an illusion is, of course, rather silly. Dennett has been making the argument for most of his career, and it is just abrasively counterintuitive enough to create the strong suspicion in many that it must be more philosophically cogent than it seems, because surely no one would say such a thing if there were not some subtle and penetrating truth hidden behind its apparent absurdity. But there is none. The simple truth of the matter is that Dennett is a fanatic

I'm certainly not an authority on Dennett's thought. [...]

How could you (or any of us) be such when Dennett declares that you / I are not an authority regarding our own awareness? We need to hand those final judgments over to neuroscientists and researchers. If how I interpret my own introspective thoughts and the events of outer perception is unreliable or bogus, then what are the chances of you / I representing Dennett or Hart or anyone / anything else genuinely?
(Video of Dennett lecture / talk: "The Illusion of Consciousness")

Now doubtless Dennett would respond that this skepticism about consciousness is not intended to be global (maybe only "half the time our brains are fooling us"). Conveniently and unsurprisingly the content of exteroception which does seem to confidently escape this uncertainty / illusion are Dennett's own ideas.

But even I know that what Dennett is calling an illusion isn't consciousness per se.

Yes, you or we apparently can "know" about Dennett's school of thought after all, since it is immune to the brain's tricks. That's surely at least an informal requirement necessary to prevent his views from canceling themselves out as they loop around back on their master.

But then the conscious mind constitutes a special dilemma, since this modern picture was produced precisely by excluding all mental properties from physical nature.

The philosophy of mind has turned itself into the last bastion, the final redoubt, of old-style supernaturalism.

That's a blatant misrepresentation if encompassing the whole field (but I'm certainly not attributing the origin of that disinformation strategy to you). David Chalmers, for instance, is an atheist, non-religious, non-spiritual, etc as well as many others that identify with naturalism.

I'm not sure to what extent Dennett directly veers off into talk about "gods, souls, mystery, etc" as a tactic for detouring a conversation when it starts dealing with explaining experience in any deeper manner than superficially correlating it to neural processes or an abstraction of their mechanistic relationships. He may only indirectly do it in the manner below (wafting a mysterious aura over such, even when philosophers without theist agendas like Hart use the words).

Dennett: I want to make it just as uncomfortable for anyone to talk of qualia--or "raw feels" or "phenomenal properties" or "subjective and intrinsic properties" or "the qualitative character" of experience--with the standard presumption that they, and everyone else, knows what on earth they are talking about. (Quining Qualia)

In addition to heaping a frosting of "supernatural" upon them, eliminativists calling for the widespread discarding of certain terms (phenomenal, qualitative, manifestation, etc) also supplies a convenient means for dodging explanation of what they refer to. The other half of that is replacing them with mechanistic / functionalist nomenclature which is accordingly devoid of said properties, thereby facilitating the same avoidance of explanation.

Dennett: I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. (Quining Qualia)

But hey, let's instead call those properties different names -- or replace them with other ones concerning the physical apparatus, which then have those nasty phenomenal characteristics abstracted away. Accordingly we don't have to deal with any hard problem of consciousness (explaining experience). Hooray! Horns and glitter dropping.

Below is a rare occasion where an advocate of eliminativism openly embraces panpsychism (or more accurately panprotopsychism) as a potential feature or companion of eliminativism. Rather than the usual evasion with respect to that (i.e., stay in the closet about it). Which would clarify the lack of curiosity (abroad) in explaining experience beyond mere brute emergence (leaving it hanging in a way equivalent to conjuring). There may be less incentive if they quietly deem it a universal / fundamental "given", or that it has a less-complex precursor -- or the very capacity for manifestation in the cosmos is not locally dependent upon higher-level brain structure / dynamics, but any form of computation.

[...] panpsychism: consciousness is intrinsic to computation, having different flavors for different computational systems. [...] Eliminativism and panpsychism may seem like polar opposites, but they're actually two sides of the same coin, in a similar way as 0 degrees and 360 degrees on a unit circle point in the same direction. Both maintain that there's nothing distinctive about consciousness that sharply distinguishes it from the rest of the universe. The Eliminativist Approach To Consciousness

But "computation" is itself another invented human concept or classification superimposed upon non-abstract conditions (like hardware) which manipulate "real" or physics-accepted electromagnetic properties in a style or configuration which satisfies the definition of "computation". The latter need not even be directly the case when it comes to inconveniently large clockwork machinery carrying out the operations instead of electronic or biological substrates.

People often have a gut reflex that it would be ridiculous for clockwork machinery to have "experiences" as its performs the applicable gear-mediated routines (even if they could be speeded up as fast as an electronic computer or brain). Possibly not ridiculous, but at least a scenario that might more urgently demand an explanation beyond the "it just happens", which satisfies the suddenly non-curious folk when it comes to computation carried out by electronic and biological platforms.

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