Yesterday Daniel Dennett died. He was 82, about the same age as my father when he died a few years ago.
I think I’ve mentioned before that the first writer I read on consciousness was Susan Blackmore. But I know Dennett wasn’t far behind, likely based on Blackmore’s positive discussions of his work, but also because it came up the most for criticism in many articles. I know I read Consciousness Explained pretty early. (Amazon shows me ordering a physical copy in 2011.) I found myself agreeing with much of what Dennett said. Although I remember wondering at the time why he was so combative. I hadn’t yet read any other philosophy of mind, so I didn’t know what he was reacting against.
Over the years, I read a lot more about consciousness, the mind, and the brain. I often found myself growing away from Dennett’s views. At times he just seemed too eliminative, too dismissive of emergent concepts. Although in retrospect, as time passed and I forgot the nuance and details in Dennett’s writing, I probably trusted his critics a bit too much. (Searchable Kindle versions of his books eventually alleviated much of that.)
But it was the immersion into basic neuroscience that repeatedly brought me back to Dennett. Time after time, I would learn something new about the brain, ponder what it meant, reach a conclusion, look around to see who might be talking in terms of that conclusion and its consequences, and rediscover that it was a view Dennett had figured out decades earlier.
Which I think is the strongest compliment that can be paid to an intellectual, that you eventually find yourself reaching the same conclusions independently, that they were right all along. (Another person I’ve often had that experience with is Isaac Asimov, frequently discovering that he reached a conclusion long ago that I was just arriving at.)
Dennett’s biggest insight, I think, was a negative one, that the most common conception of consciousness, the one many of us find undeniable, is wrong, a result of trusting our introspective judgments too much. He called it the “Cartesian Theater” in his 1991 book, the idea that consciousness is like a movie in the brain, a movie whose content is prepared and then watched by an inner observer, with the notion that there is a location in the brain (or somewhere) where the order of arrival of information equals the order in episodic memory. He wasn’t the first to criticize this notion, but he was the strongest voice against it for decades.
The most common reaction to Dennett’s attack is that the Cartesian Theater is a strawman. No one actually thinks that, the argument goes. Oh, maybe a few misguided people fall into that trap, but no one serious. Except that many serious people do. They just use different names, or closely related concepts, such as “sense data”, “phenomenal consciousness”, “qualia”, “what it’s like-ness”, “sensory consciousness”, or more common terms loaded with questionable assumptions, such as “experience”.
After Dennett’s attacks in the 1980s and 90s, many philosophers implicitly redefined those terms, or became evasive about them, if they continued using them. Again, they said, Dennett was attacking a strawman, one that didn’t touch serious understandings of these concepts. But other writers, like Keith Frankish, echoing points Dennett made in his own papers, noted that the stronger versions of these concepts are hard to evade if you’re going to continue regarding consciousness as some kind of metaphysically hard problem.
My own journey brought me through several views. I concluded pretty early that consciousness is largely a definitional issue, something in the eye of the beholder, but was lured away from that conclusion for a time. For years I was taken with theories of animal primary consciousness. But the problems with those led me to higher order thought theories. The problem with those led to global workspace type theories. In pondering the problem with those, I realized that I had worked my way back to something like Dennett’s multiple drafts model, itself a variant of the global workspace.
I don’t think it’s the whole answer, just part of it. But then I don’t think Dennett or the global workspace proponents ever considered their theories the complete answer. For example, Dennett always saw Michael Graziano’s attention schema theory as a valid enhancement of his theory’s more fundamental framework.
Overall, it’s a view that doesn’t deny consciousness, just that there’s any magic line, any point where the lights suddenly come on, a division between systems which have the movie and those that don’t. There is no movie. Unless you want to count episodic memory and introspective impressions as the movie, but then you’re no longer talking about something separate from the functional access of information.
Only time will tell how close Dennett’s ideas are to reality, or how far. Like many earlier thinkers, I doubt he’ll be completely right. But I suspect he’ll be a lot closer than most philosophers or scientists today.
Of course, Dennett was known for much more than his views on the mind. I actually first heard about him when he was interviewed in The Atheism Tapes. I’ve read very little of his material in this area, so can’t say much about it. Although I suspect his role as one of the “Four Horseman” of New Atheism colors a lot of people’s attitudes toward him to this day. Which is interesting, because I recall him as the most congenial and soft spoken of that group.
But the philosophy of mind was his professional turf, and his influence there and in the cognitive sciences has been immense. It’s painful to realize we won’t have any further insights from him. Philosophy and the cognitive sciences has lost a major voice. Although there is some consolation that those he influenced will be using his insights, building on them, or being inspired to find evidence against them, for a long time to come.
As a professional legacy, it doesn’t get much better than that.
SelfAwarePatterns 
I had no idea Denett left the group.
I didn’t finish reading consciousness explained and I don’t think I finished any of his other works. Maybe this is the time to finish that book I started years ago.
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Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
One criticism I would have of Dennett is he had a tendency to be a bit long winded in his writing. So you’re probably not alone is not finishing his stuff. His book: Sweet Dreams, which is actually lecture notes, tends to be an easier lift. It’s definitely shorter than most of his books.
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Maybe I should start with that.
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I hadn’t heard of Dennett’s dying, so thank you for his recap of his contributions.
Dennett had the disadvantage of being a philosopher, but had put out considerable effort it seems to me) to look at all of the neuroscience evidence rolling in. I dabble in philosophy so I have read a number of his books, but being old and having read way too much I find I can’t remember specifics about anyone’s works, let alone his. I always found him personable on video and amiable in his writings. His calm, reasoned voice will be missed, just when we need such voices more than ever before.
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Sorry to be the bearer. Agreed that he will be missed.
I know what you mean about everyone blurring together. In truth, if I hadn’t reread sections of a lot of his stuff over time, I’m not sure how much I would have retained. He just turned out to have the answers to a lot of problems which others keep bringing up.
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@selfawarepatterns.com 🙏
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Thanks for writing this, Mike.
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Thanks DM.
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Daniel Dennett had an initial consciousness intuition that was the same as yours Mike. And apparently Alan Turing at the dawn of machine computing. The intuition is that there is no hard line physics of consciousness. Instead it’s presumed to exist as the right sort of information that’s properly converted to the right other information — a gradient if you will regarding computation alone rather than computation that animates some sort of consciousness physics. Here if the right marks on paper were properly converted to the right other marks on paper, then something would experience what you do when your thumb gets whacked. If Dennett was right about this then I agree with all that you’ve said regarding the man’s greatness. In that case his insights and talents should make him a revered figure in an enduring historical way. But also grant me this. If he was wrong then our opinion should be fully reversed. If he was wrong then his talents should have strongly contributed to academic failure in this regard so far. And just as you have your intuition that he was right, I have my intuition that he was wrong.
Validating a truth to his position is tricky however given an unfalsifiable premise. Theoretically after enough decades where our AI seem like they’re conscious, even skeptics like me should need to concede a truth to consciousness by means of an information to information conversion. But what if a falsifiable consciousness theory comes along that gains strong empirical validation? That should settle things the other way regardless how conscious our AI might be perceived.
This is how I think things will go, though hindered by the popularity of people like Dennett. Beyond that it’s now possible to use precise measurements of the brain’s electromagnetic field to interpret someone’s consciousness (and specifically to determine the words that someone attempts to speak), I suspect an opposite form of EMF consciousness test will succeed some day. If researchers were also able to affect someone’s consciousness by inducing an electromagnetic field in someone’s brain that’s similar to the endogenous EM field associated with synchronous neuron firing, then it should be possible to scientifically determine if that endogenous field itself resides as consciousness. Since we’re only in our 50s, I expect this in our lifetimes.
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Maybe so Eric. When there’s evidence (reproducible and validated by a substantial portion of the field) you can say you told me so. Until then, I’m more interested in the direction implied by the evidence we do have.
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What evidence would that be Mike?
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Eric, I’ve done hundreds of posts on this stuff. A good place to start might be Stanislas Deheane’s book on consciousness. https://selfawarepatterns.com/2019/06/23/dehaenes-global-neuronal-workspace-theory/
Also, some books on basic neuroscience would help. (You’d be surprised how much can be explained without using the word “consciousness”.) https://selfawarepatterns.com/2021/05/09/sources-of-information-on-neuroscience/
And finally, scrolling through this list might help. https://selfawarepatterns.com/?s=global+workspace
Of course, Dennett’s books themselves also wouldn’t hurt. I recommended Sweet Dreams to someone above as probably the easiest introduction to his stuff.
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😀 Well played!
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I disagree. Even if Dennett’s computationalism is mistaken, he probably did philosophy a great service by laying out his arguments. For comparison, Carl Hempel did more than any other philosopher to convince me that logical positivism was a dead end, even though he was among the positivists or at least close in spirit. By honestly examining proposals to demarcate science from “metaphysics” and demonstrating their flaws, for one example, Hempel facilitated the necessary course correction.
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Paul,
I guess I’m not trying to say that Dennett was a bad philosopher if he was wrong about consciousness existing by means of no dedicated consciousness physics — as in the right marks on paper converted to the right other marks on paper. In that case he could still be considered a great philosopher just as Plato was considered a great philosopher. My point is that given how influential his ideas happen to be, if he was wrong then he should have strongly contributed to the failure of science in this regard. And that’s my perception of how things are. Instead of exploring why synchronous neuron firing is the only reasonable neural correlate for consciousness found so far (and perhaps because this sets up an electromagnetic field that itself exists as consciousness), there’s instead a singular focus in science today to validate an unfalsifiable proposal. Instead of searching for “something” scientists search for “nothing”. And I don’t see this as Dennett’s fault alone. He’s simply been the most charismatic proponent for a position that goes back to Alan Turing. Keith Frankish is obviously attempting to march in Dennett’s footsteps.
I do agree however that when a philosopher lays out their position in simple enough ways, then this can aid superior opposing positions. I think Dennett was always too smart to do so however. He never informed his fans, for example, that the right marks on paper converted to the right other marks on paper, should create something that feels thumb pain. Dennett was a master of the art of complexity.
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Interesting. For me it was Quine who demolished logical positivism.
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Sad news. He will be greatly missed.
“Consciousness Explained” was the first book of his I read and I recall not liking it very much. (a) He spent a lot of time attacking a clearly ludicrous idea which surely (beware the “surely” operator! :-)) nobody would ever take seriously — something called qualia. 🙂 (b) He didn’t actually “explain” consciousness,while making some interesting suggestions about it. One observation, ear the end of the book particularly caught my eye: consciousness looks very much like a serial virtual machine implemented within a parallel system — why? That, plus his stress on paying close attention to science was sufficient to read more of his writing… and more, and yet more, gradually coming to rate him as my favourite philosopher of mind. Just a shame about that hubristic title of his magnum opus. Yes, it was long-winded in dealing with qualia and outlining the methodology of heterophenomenology (revolutionary idea at the time: pay attention to the meaning of what experimental subjects report!), but with hind-sight, this long-windedness was necessary. He knew his views were going to be attacked and was trying to make his presentation of them water-tight, closing off as many possibilities of misconstruing them as possible. A hopeless task, of course.
His other major book, which for me was perhaps even more significant, was “Darwin’s Dangerous idea”. That really resonated for me. As was his (insufficiently well known) paper “Real Patterns” and his mantra “There is no second transduction”.
So, very sad news, but he leaves a hefty legacy, pointing, I think, in the right direction.
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I actually thought CE delivered on the promise of the title. Of course, it was an explanation, and not the exotic take many were looking for, that they had been trained to expect from other writers. Or maybe it’s better to say it was a collection of explanations on various aspects of consciousness. A common complaint was that it should have been called “Consciousness Explained Away”. I wonder how much control Dennett had on the title.
I understood the reasons for the long windedness. I just thought labeled sections might have helped, so I could skip the sections on topics I was already convinced of, or find specific items of concern. Steven Pinker writes in a similar fashion: justification after justification after justification. I get the reasons why, but again clearly labeled sections would have helped a lot. Actually having it in big monolithic sections makes it easier for their critics to ignore points they defended, as many do.
I own Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and have read sections of it, but not the whole thing. I picked it up to check on specific points (which I can’t recall now), so never got around to reading the whole thing. I did like what I read. Might have to swing back around to it at some point.
Definitely agreed on “There is no second transduction.” It’s one of those points that is obvious once you understand it, but that most of us implicitly assume the opposite until it’s point out.
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Re “Consciousness Explained Away”, I simply don’t get why Dennett is so often labelled an eliminativists. As he never tired of saying (I think I got it verbatim): “Consciousness exists, it’s just not what you think it is”.
And yes, I did wonder whether the CE title was really the publisher’s contribution.
Re second transduction, that mantra is in fact a much neater and clearer way of saying that there is no Cartesian Theatre. Much harder to attack too.
Another influential idea of his for me was the notion of the intentional stance and his denial of original (non-conferred) intentionality. I don’t know whether you watched any of the live commentary on the epochal match of Lee Sedol against AlphaGo. It was quite comical how Go experts commenting on the game found themselves constantly sliding into intentional talk concerning AlphaGo’s play: what it intended, antisipated etc — and then hastily correcting themselves. Intentional stance in action!
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On eliminativism, I think people see him as an eliminativist toward qualia, phenomenal properties, what it’s like-ness, etc. Of course, getting them to define exactly what they mean by those terms is always the difficulty. (Interestingly, Paul and Patricia Churchland, while developing eliminative materialism toward things like beliefs, are not eliminativists toward qualia, although their understanding of them seems functional.)
I never read Dennett’s book on the intentional stance. It went out of print and they never did a Kindle version. He does talk about it in CE, which has always been my primary source of info about it. I also have Brainstorms, which has his original paper on it, which I really should read.
I work in IT, where we frequently have to talk about interacting systems. It’s very common to fall into the intentional stance in those discussions. ”How does the integration know about that type of transaction?” ”When does the accounting system learn about a student’s purchase?” We even sometimes refer to systems as “he” or “she”. Sometimes we curse them. It’s not worth the effort to avoid that kind of language.
And I think about the discussion of the self driving car that killed a driver several years ago, with reports of it getting “confused” by the white truck in front of a cloudy sky.
The big thing is though, as we become more familiar with all these systems, we seem able to give a qualified intentional stance toward them, rather than having it or not having it. I think of an accounting system as knowing certain things, but I don’t think of it as knowing about its surroundings, competing products, our plans for it, etc.
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Well, yes. I worked as a systems programmer for 30 years and we too sometimes used intentional language, but it was always with implied scare-quotes. Nobody even felt the need to correct themselves. With those Go commentators it was different. It was obvious that they were genuinely sliding into the intentional vocabulary, simply because it was the simplest way of understanding the goings on.
As a book, “Intentional Stance” was a disappointment. It is not a coherent work but a collection of essays written at different times with different aims. The intentional stance is indeed the thread that goes through them all, but I expected more from it.
I have most of Dennett’s books — printed versions. Looking at my bookshelf I count 11 of them. I won’t pretend that I read every single essay in the four essay collections (“Brainstorms”, “Brain Children”, “Sweet Dreams”, “Intrentional Stance”), but other than that… 🙂
There is a good obit of his in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/21/daniel-dennett-obituary
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I read Dennett’s remarks about the intentional stance in Kinds of Minds. (I have a bunch of Dennett books myself; nine in my Kindle account.) The account there looked relatively brief compared to the others. From what I read, he doesn’t see taking the intentional stance as necessarily implying full on human level agency. It’s valid to apply it to any self acting system. He does provide an intermediary: the Design Stance, for systems in between where the Physical Stance and Intentional Stance are productive. But his standards for the intentional one didn’t seem super high, at least not in that book.
On the book “Intentional Stance”, thanks! That’s good to know. I wondered why that one hadn’t been released in ebook form. I wondered if it might be a licensing thing, but not-that-good, in the sense of sales numbers, could be it as well.
That Guardian obit is much better the the NY Times one, which was riddled with errors. They even worked in the intentional stance stuff!
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I was extremely suspicious of the “intentional stance” talk until I read Dennett’s later paper, “Real Patterns”. I don’t know if Dennett had always been guided by an idea of real patterns, or simply changed his mind without admitting it, even to himself. Either way, without the key idea of real patterns (namely, that there are ways of coarse-graining the universe that drastically reduce the mathematical complexity of models, and other ways that don’t) the “intentional stance” would just amount to trying to explain intentionality by appealing to other intentionality.
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You surprise me. As I recall it, Dennett was quite explicit that there was no “original” intentionality. The only kind was “derived”, i.e. conferred by us — including conferred on ourselves by ourselves too. There was no other kind to appeal too. He had a big spat with Searle on this.
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Here’s a link to Real Patterns by the way.
Searle loved to inflate original intentionality and Dennett of course wanted to explode that conception. It’s hard, for me at least, to definitively infer much from that, beyond that Dennett doesn’t like inflated mental metaphysics. Whether to take Dennett as meaning (ever having meant) to deny that intentionality is subject to reductionist analysis is a dilemma.
I’ve never read more than snippets of Consciousness Explained, and likewise for the Intentional Stance book. Maybe he lays it out super clearly in those.
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The brain has a position in spacetime – in the body of the organism which is located in an external world. Any mapping of the world would require the brain itself and its relationships to the body and the world to be accounted for. The mapping of the internal and external pivots around an extended limbic system in vertebrates, the mushroom body in arthropods, and the vertical lobe in cephalopods. These systems are located centrally in the brain and are tied to memory and learning. They are critical for navigation in a complex world. They might be the systems where the final version gets assembled. To the representative self in these systems, the internal and external world might be represented as a “theater.”
Did Dennett ever really explain the theater?
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That’s a different version of “theater” from the one Dennett was attacking. The Cartesian Theater is an internal presentation, prepared for an internal observer. If we redefine “theater” as the world, then I don’t think he’d have an issue with that conception, although I suspect he’d question using the word “theater” for it, since that word usually denotes a place where a prepared facsimile of reality is presented.
His answer for our knowing perception of reality was the multiple drafts model, which he later relabeled as “fame in the brain” (and even later noted that “clout in the brain” might have been better), with additional theories for metacognition as valid add-ons.
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Well, the theater I’m speaking of is internal and does have an internal observer. The observer is a representation of the brain, the head, the body, the memories, and expands outwards to the physical world, and for humans to the social and idea spheres. Not so oddly, these expanding realms mimic roughly the physical and functional layout of the brain, although contralaterally.
Memory is hugely involved because without any kind of complex learning is impossible. I think I quoted this before from “Consciousness as a Memory System.”
“Consider episodic memory. If we believe that episodic memory evolved solely to accurately represent past events, it seems like a terrible system—prone to forgetting and false memories. However, if we believe that episodic memory developed to flexibly and creatively combine and rearrange memories of prior events in order to plan for the future, then it is quite a good system. ”
In a way, it seems similar to multiple drafts.
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“Well, the theater I’m speaking of is internal and does have an internal observer.”
I think the question here would be, does that mean you expect to find a presentation somewhere in the brain? And how do you see this internal observer working? Does it have its own internal observer? If not, then why can’t we use the explanation for this internal observer instead for the overall system? We do we need nested observers?
“The observer is a representation of the brain,”
Although this description makes me wonder what you mean by “internal” and “observer”. If we talk about the overall system as the observer, with these representations as part of its observation mechanisms, then we’d be on a similar page.
Totally agree on episodic memory. There’s enormous overlap in the networks between it and imaginative deliberation. They’re mostly the same mechanisms, just pointed in different directions.
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I feel that James has made a straightforward case and your response is digging yourself a deeper hole. For example, “internal” usually means “inside your skin”, why not just stick with the ordinary meaning? ”Presentation somewhere in the brain” just begs James to point out that “somewhere” doesn’t have to mean a particular lobe or contiguous tissue. Etc.
A better approach would be to cite particular features of the “theater” metaphor that Dennett himself pointed to as objectionable, and talk about those. I forget which particular features those were, but presumably the nonoverlapping membership of stage-actors and audience is one of them.
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Paul, I was tying to get at Dennett’s concerns with my questions. But as I note in the second paragraph, the meanings here seem muddled, so I’m not sure what’s being said.
If by “observer” we mean the entire brain-body system, then fine. That’s not Dennett’s concern. But as I noted, I think using “theater” for that is misleading.
If by “observer” we mean some sub-portion of the brain in a location where it “all comes together”, then we’re getting to the conception he challenged. And my question about how this inner nested observer is supposed to work gets to the danger of an infinite regress of homunculi, each of which need their own nested theaters.
If something else is meant, then I guess I need the “straightforward case” explained to me more straightforwardly.
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I’m really just saying that the extended brain-body system is modeled as an observer in the world map.
In my fragmented consciousness view (which I still hold), I downplayed the idea of things coming together but I’m inclined now to think that maybe there are some integration centers and that a primary one is an extended limbic system in vertebrates. There is increasing evidence for this.
For example, there is a retinotopic mapping of the neurons in retina in the visual cortex (almost like the screen in a theater it seems), but research has found this mapping is duplicated throughout the brain including the memory centers. Zeki notes that damage in the hippocampus can cause problems in color processing. Other studies show traveling waves associated with memory formation and recall. There’s more but I’ll reserve it for a future post.
It seems to be that the core idea of consciousness, even as the word is used in common parlance, is the notion of awareness of the world. The mapping of ourselves in space and time would be an indispensable requirement for that and would tie directly to types of processing found in hippocampal-like formations in vertebrates, cephalopods, and arthropods.
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Thanks for the clarifications. I suspect Dennett would have had an issue with various aspects of this, particularly the fragmented consciousness concept. For me, as usual, it comes down to what we mean by “consciousness”. In any case, I don’t think these concepts specifically are what he was arguing against with the Cartesian Theater.
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Multiple drafts seems somewhat “fragmented” to me.
The problem with the “theater” metaphor is there does appear to be a places or places in the brain where spatial and temporal positioning occurs. That mapping would need to include our selves in representational form. I’m not sure whether the research on place cells was available when Dennett wrote his book, but there is good evidence now that information is integrated in the brain even if consciousness itself may play a minor or no role in the integration
I don’t think there is a place where everything comes together, but the “theatrical” appearance of consciousness could arise from the parts of the brain involved in managing our bodies in space and time. In humans, this involves the hippocampus, surrounding structures, and the temporal lobe. Misfirings in the temporal lobe and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) can produce the out of body experience. The TPJ interacts with the limbic system is also known to play a crucial role in self–other distinctions processes and theory of mind (ToM) per Wikipedia.
If someone has been unconscious and appears to be waking up, what do we ask? Do you know where you are? Followed by, do you know the day of the week?
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On multiple drafts and fragmented, right. I’ve pointed out the similarities myself. The main difference is in what we’re prepared to call “conscious”. MDM and other global outlooks would say that the fame in the brain mechanism is what leads to us considering something “conscious”. In that view, the fragments would be pre-conscious. Of course, you can say the fragments are conscious, and the competition mechanisms just enable the system to access that consciousness. Six-of-one / half-of-dozen of another in my view, but I know many disagree strenuously.
Definitely there are many integration centers in the brain. Each one happens for various adaptive purposes. But the idea is that none are the ultimate final integration. There’s no one place (other than the brain overall) where all the information funnels through, no path that if info goes through it, it’s guaranteed to be part of consciousness. In global workplace / multiple drafts / fame in the brain type theories, the information needs to have causal effects in many regions to be part of our conscious experience.
For someone to answer those questions, a lot of separate interacting integration centers need to be working.
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I might agree with Dennett on this: “The Multiple Drafts model makes [the procedure of] “writing it down” in memory criterial for consciousness”.
Whatever was conscious can be recalled for some period of time, albeit that time may be short in many cases.
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The full paragraph around that quote is interesting.
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“memory criterial for consciousness”
Dennett wants to reject any causal role for consciousness, yet he himself has connected it to memory. So, how is it connected? Why is it necessary?
No answer from Dennett because he is too busy deriding his strawman Cartesian Theater and positing that conscious experience is just “effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action.” But none of those effects require consciousness. They could as easily be effects of gears, wheels, and pulleys. Something strikes a sensor and the gears start to turn in some weird Rube Goldberg device that ultimately outputs “ouch!”
But the connection goes directly to the explanation for consciousness, maybe even why the seems-projector seems to exist.
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In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have shared that paragraph. Outside of the context of its overall chapter, it comes across as very strident. Sorry, my bad.
For the record, Dennett doesn’t actually reject any causal role for consciousness. Just the opposite. He rejects consciousness without a causal role. Which I think is the overall thrust of the paragraph. In more contemporary Ned-Block language, the assertion here is there is no phenomenal consciousness, at least not independent of access consciousness.
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What is its causal role? It seems like Dennett just redefines all of the causes and effects in the brain as nothing different from consciousness.
The seems-projector may be the evolutionary best solution to modeling an organism to an environment because it can spacetime stamp experiences in their relational context with the organism. Without that context a memory would be far less useful and unable to be involved in complex learning.
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On its causal role, he notes it above, but ultimately it’s behavior, the only thing natural selection can act against. Of course, there can be intermediates, such as memory, cognition, and other conscious states (such as affects).
Modeling an organism’s body, its environment, and the relations between the two is definitely adaptive. And as you noted, there’s plenty of evidence for it. But preparing a presentation to be projected on some kind of internal screen? There’s no evidence for that (which is why people think there’s a hard problem), and it would seem wasteful given the amount of energy required to do it.
Sorry for pointing to a grainy PDF, but this paper gets the idea across. https://dl.tufts.edu/concern/pdfs/v118rs17v
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Does consciousness feel to you like a presentation projected on a screen?
It may be described metaphorically like that but, as others have noted, nobody expects to find a real screen or little man/woman looking at it.
Despite that, the research on the hippocampal–entorhinal circuit with its place, grid, and border cells might suggest the metaphor to be more real than Dennett probably could ever have imagined.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4315928/
I was at Woodstock and actually do remember some of it, but I think maybe Dennett overplayed his hand in his arguments.
For example he talks about the red light and hitting the brakes or the body swinging into motion before the tennis ball registers consciously. Sure, that happens. That’s the way it works. But in both cases, the red light and the tennis ball with its projected path do eventually register in consciousness. They didn’t have to register for action or behavior to occur but then the question becomes why did they register at all in consciousness if it wasn’t necessary for behavior? Why does the tennis ball appear to be streaking towards me when by the time it registers I’ve already hit to back or, more likely, whiffed on it?
Perhaps consciousness of the path of the tennis ball streaking towards me doesn’t help me hit the ball that is coming towards me but it helps me hit the next ball that is coming towards me?
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Your last sentence, I think, captures it for many cases. Sometimes the point is remembering for future behavior. We don’t need to experience the pain of touching a hot stove to reflexively jerk our hand back, but the memory changes our later behavior.
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It’s almost like the experience needs to be splashed on the “screen” to be useful.
That might make a lot of sense if complex memory needs to be tied to its space, time, and relational context with the organism. That might explain why spatial and temporal location and episodic memory are closely tied to the same parts of the brain.
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You seem to be working hard to find a reason to retain the “screen”. But none of the concepts you are identifying meet its attributes: one central place where everything comes together. Really, nothing within the brain does. If it weren’t for remnant dualist intuitions, I don’t think we’d be surprised. (There’s a reason Descartes thought animals weren’t sentient.) As Dennett points out, at some point an observer has to be explained in non-observer and spatiotemporal terms. The brain overall seems to be the place for it.
But, like many things in science, it will never be intuitive.
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The “screen” is just a metaphor used to stick with Dennett’s theater motif.
“Really, nothing within the brain does.”
This is part of the confusion in Dennett’s thinking. One hundred percent it is true that nothing in the brain comes together in one place. Probably consciousness doesn’t come together in one place.
However, that absolutely doesn’t mean that some part of consciousness – namely the part that determines spatial. temporal, and relational positioning – does not come together in one place. And it may be the part that maps the world with a representative self within it is exactly what explains the observer illusion. It might be argued that the observer/self illusion is the best possible model, given the limitations of biology, that could be evolved to represent the organism for fitness.
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Let’s try the theater metaphor with McFadden’s theory in order to fill in some of the details that Mike has asked for.
From this perspective everything that you see, hear, think, and so on, exists as a highly complex electromagnetic field produced by the right sort of synchronous neuron firing. Thus the EM field itself could be considered a representation or facsimile of reality — this field itself would exist as “you”. When it’s not produced you wouldn’t exist because there wouldn’t be any consciousness, and when it is produced you would exist in the form of that EMF consciousness. Furthermore your thoughts might invoke memories of past consciousness, such as to provide you with an EMF sense of what you did yesterday. Or you might have hopes and worries about the future and thus think about and prepare for what might happen. Here the show could be considered temporal in a forward sense just as EMF memory provides a backward perspective. Also the production wouldn’t just be one way, or an experiencer of existence that can’t affect the world. Theoretically when you decide to do something that requires muscle operation, certain elements of the EM field would cause neurons to fire that operate those muscles as intended. This lies under the heading of “ephaptic coupling”. Also observe that there would be no infinite regress here given that just one show would exist each moment — the singular EM field that constitutes your existence.
If science were to validate this perspective empirically, then Dennett’s extreme influence should have been an obstacle to science in this regard. Not only do I expect more EMF corroboration from Brain – Computer Interface technology (which hasn’t even been attempted yet formally), but I suspect brain implanted EMF transmitters will both interfere with standard consciousness for oral report given expected constructive and destructive interference, and that scientists will be able to impart visual EMF colors and such for oral report to thus learn about which components of the EM field constitute various specific elements of consciousness.
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I think I’ve mentioned this before but the hippocampus is the site of the strongest electrical and electromagnetic activity in the brain.
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I’d think that strong EMF activity would be important to hippocampus based consciousness contributions, since it’s so deep in the brain. Otherwise it might not be able to provided memory based input for a cerebral cortex based EMF thinker to ponder. But that all awaits discovery should the theory both become tested and succeed. What we do know however is that EMF from synchronous neuron firing in a speech area of the cerebral cortex, can effectively be measured and interpreted into the words that someone means to say. Thus conscious decisions regarding speech should result from function stemming from areas around the outside of the brain.
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As you know the physicalist and materialist are not to my taste. Whatever the “truth” I will continue to refuse to believe I am a robot and will maintain my support for the likes of the Neoplatonists, idealists and the rest of the merry crew who will have no trick with Dismal Dennet!
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“truck”
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Dennett is definitely not for everyone. I do think the truth matters (something he emphasizes in one of his final videos). But in the end, metaphysical views beyond empirical models, like idealism, panpsychism, and the like, can’t be ruled out with any finality.
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I too think the “truth” matters. I just don’t think Dismal Dennet found it. Chortle….
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Have you read this book by Dennett?
It looks interesting so I ordered.
According to blurb on Amazon, it “shows how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection” and in that I definitely agree with Dennett.
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I’ve read a lot of it, although not the whole thing straight through. (Always meant to rectify that. Maybe at some point.) There’s a lot of good stuff in it. Of course, this is Dennett, so be prepared for the deflationary take. :-) It’s approached from less of a neuroscience perspective than his earlier consciousness books, and more of a big picture evolutionary one.
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I got the book and flipped directly to the user illusion chapter and, despite his protestations to the contrary, it looks to me like he has just resurrected the Cartesian Theater in a variant form as “user illusion.” Maybe he doesn’t get that, if consciousness is an user illusion, the Homunculus is alive and well as part of the illusion. If consciousness is an “user illusion” then there must be an user even if it is also illusory.
BTW “user illusion” comes from a book published in the 90’s and that author derived it from people from Xerox working on graphical user interfaces. However, the concept also can be found in Hoffman’s “consciousness as interface” prior to Dennett.
Basically I think user illusion, interface, or whatever we call it is somewhat on the right track. The problem, however, with Dennett’s formulation is the illusion doesn’t really seem to have any role and it appears, on first glance, that he think it is a product of language and not something possessed by animals other than humans.
Needless to say, I need to read the book more carefully but a lot of it looks pretty useful and intellectually stimulating even if I disagreed with it. Perhaps a review will follow eventually.
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Going off memory here, but I think he explicitly points out somewhere that the illusion isn’t some kind of mistake or malfunction, but a vital mechanism. Particularly for social communication, which is where I think the language points come in. It’s just not useful as a guide for understanding how things work in the brain.
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I would say illusion is the brain itself working and it probably serves the role of attaching space, time, and relational information to memory as well as feeding back that same information into the brain’s unconscious processes.
No argument that most of what goes on the brain is outside its purview.
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Whoah!! I didn’t realise he passed away. Rest in Peace 🕊️
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Wow, a very difficult discussion to follow. All the labels of positions for the roles the brain and its parts must play to do the job that from our position as intentional creatures we presume (‘know’, but not scientifically) that the brain must do for us (intentional creatures) to exist. Is what I think Dennett was about.
Dennett likes “the world” split into three big pieces with fluctuating and fuzzy boundaries. The hardcore physical world, the designed world (including biology and human artifacts–computers), and things that operate on beliefs, the intentional world (we communicators and “knowers”), but these “kind of things” are just as much Approaches To Things, as they are things in and of themselves. That is why he always called the big three, “Stances.” Dennett is an antirealist that liked to play in the game with you realists.
He dedicated himself to finding shortfalls on both sides, and making contributions to a better understanding on both sides (materialist reduction and staunch idealism–even deism). Designed things and this Stance was the middle ground for him. From it he could contribute to various sciences (in a pointed way) and also recharacterize Idealist positions.
This why in Darwin’s Dangerous he said Design is real, not just apparent, and that even the deepest levels of biochemistry contained intentional objects. But he also contended that the Cartesian Theatre and “I” were not metaphysically real (not a basic substance), but User Illusions (from the view of physics) and very necessary to us believers and reason-givers. How the brain was a material thing (a computer) and that someday we could come to consider some computers “persons” (intentional objects). How all things in principle could be explained by the physical stance, but it just seems a fact that designed things can appear out of a totally atomistic and determined reality, citing Conway’s Like Game as prime support, other than what is already all around us and in us. This is why he mocks all the scientists who don’t believe in free will yet live by believing it especially as they behave as scientist.
He believed this because he thought that the boundaries between the different sciences (physics and psychology, for example) and also the boundaries between science and practical life (child-rearing, ethics, language-use, art, responsibility…) will always stand. Its an issue of category, not of time.
For Dennett, the Three Stances were most real, and he sought to continue them and relieve the tension between them. He argued that there was more than One Whole Thing that was Real. Physics and its objects are one good way for some purposes to look at a whole world, but just as real is evolutionary biology, also our human societies where “reasons” reside among communicating (cooperating) “persons”. All are Mediated Wholes, and we humans function within these boundaries—science will always seek to break down the apparent and necessary “whole things” in life. That was his new reading of philosophical Idealism.
I think. Thanks for your thinking. (PS, I plan to get back to you with a short defense of Antirealism.)
Here is you on the Global Workspace. I had never heard of this but when I read your characterization I really wanted to right my above reaction.
…”but I’m not sure I buy the implicit description of it as one unified whole. Based on all the reading I’ve done, it strikes me more as a complex web of disparate subsystems communicating with each other, with cross talk between the streams creating an emergent thing that may resemble the global workspace, but more messy, noisy, and less coherent than the theory implies.
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Thanks. I’m not completely sure what Dennett’s philosophy of science was. He owned up to being a sort of verificationist in his 1991 book, but implied it might only be for mental phenomena. I imagine his final book goes into it, but I don’t own that one, at least not yet.
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