Consciousness Explained

Daniel Dennett's eliminative materialism tries to cut through the hard problem of consciousness by completely removing the concept of qualia as a wrongheaded folk psychological epiphenomenon and replacing it with reductionist models of self-reflection and intentionality. To give him credit, if his thesis is correct then he really has explained consciousness, at least from a high-level conceptual perspective without the messy details. While I do think a lot of what he writes about is on the right track, I fear he goes one step too far by prematurely declaring qualia an illusion through a priori reasoning without any empirical justification. The problem of empirically understanding qualia is unique mainly because of the epistemological show more limitation of probing subjective experiences which breaks with the historically objective methods of scientific investigation. Dennett introduces heterophenomenology as a possible way to circumvent this limitation, but I feel it is just a sideshow that doesn't address the core of the problem. Furthermore, due to this epistemological limitation, the ontological reality of qualia is left as mysterious as ever, that doesn't mean it will always be mysterious, but for the moment it has not been explained, despite Dennett's claims. I can sympathize with Dennett's project, I don't think the alternatives to his views have been very fruitful either, for example, I agree with him that Chalmers' p-zombie thought experiment is an incoherent idea, however, just because your opponents are wrong doesn't mean you are right. I still liked the book, I think Dennett's ideas are helpful and point the way towards further research, but I'll stop short in agreeing with him that consciousness has been conceptually explained. Explained away, maybe, but not explained. show less

What do we know about consciousness? With such an alluring title, I picked this book expecting to know more on the topic, especially given the credits of the author (a philosopher, whose ideas are strongly rooted into hard sciences). Well, I was... disappointed! Daniel Dennett here indeed tells us more about what consciousness isn't, than about what it is -if at all.

He starts by destroying Cartesian dualism, not because he thinks that such view is still common but, rather, because he argues that its core fallacy (the idea that consciousness can be found in a very specific area) still drives even part of materialism. Ironic? It surely is. He, in fact, debunks such materialism as being nothing but 'Cartesian materialism'... But then so show more what?

Then he expands upon an alternate view, which he calls the Multiple Drafts Model. Consciousness, according to such model, doesn't exist in the traditional sense. It is, in fact, nothing but basic brain functioning -the receiving of data in certain parts, before then propagating them to the whole in order to trigger a reaction. The key, though, is that he links the arising of such functioning to evolutionary biology, by delving upon the complexity of our nervous system, detailing the Baldwin effect, and tackling memetic. What he does, in other words, is to describe consciousness as being to biological beings (us) what Von Neumann's architecture is to computing. Is this a radical approach?

Comparing the human brain to a computer, solely based on their basic functioning (the processing of received data/ stimuli) is, of course, far from being new. What makes this read interesting, then, is not so much the hypothesis put forward, but, his attempts at dismissing the usual criticisms thrown against such pitfall. The last chapters are therefore the most engrossing (although, also, the most challenging!), especially when he uses heterophenomenology to address the problems posed by qualia. He, in fact, even applies such model to animals (e.g. bats).

As always with Dennett, then, here's a book touching upon a wide array of topics (philosophy, biology, neurosciences, computing and engineering, artificial intelligence and else), which makes it as fascinating as it can be difficult to go through. The endeavour, here, might have been misleading (again, it feels like a redefining of 'consciousness' to outlie what it isn't over what it truly is -the subject is still highly controversial!); nevertheless, it remains a highly recommended read. show less

In a way I wish the book had been named Dennett’s Theory of Consciousness, Explained–although, I’m not sure I would have read a book of that title (who wants to read yet another person’s theory?). Indeed the book’s audacious title does its job well in terms of marketing: I purchased and began reading the book with great gusto. But, obviously, since the book was published in 1992 and we here in 2016 still cannot agree that consciousness has been explained, we know that Dennett doesn’t deliver on what we perceive as his initial promise to give us “…an empirical, scientifically respectable theory—of human consciousness” (4). Sure, while there is an abundance of scientific experimentation used in the argument of this show more book, we ultimately get what Dennett calls “a family of metaphors” (455). So, despite the anticlimactic ending, Dennett does give us an explanation, and I cannot say the journey wasn’t worth it.

Review: http://www.chrisviabookreviews.com/2017/09/13/consciousness-explained-1991/ show less

(Original Review, 1992-10-25)

I feel uncoupled.

Who knows for certain: their inner experience of sights, smells, emotions, and the rest?

And this is why I often find the discussion frustrating; from my reading of his work, Dennett has never denied the experience of being conscious. What he is saying is that if you create a zombie doppelganger that resembles you in every way then the "zombie" will by necessity be of such complexity that it gives rise to consciousness. And it will do so from normal, physics-obeying, materialistic processes. It is in this way that we are all the zombies of the thought experiment - not that we are all empty machines that experience nothing.

A nice analogy I read somewhere on this is that it’s like the show more opposite of a personal computer. A processor can do one task at a time, but it works so fast that to the user it looks like it is doing many different things simultaneously. A human brain on the other hand has countless different threads of activity happening concurrently; consciousness is the culmination of (some of) these to give the appearance of a single unified agent.

Although Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" almost certainly doesn't give a complete picture on the subject, it does provide testable hypotheses that are grounded in scientific reality. Mind/brain dualism has always struck me as an intellectual dead-end, giving up and attributing something we don't fully understand to magic. Where does the conversation go from there? On past form as we increase our knowledge that way of thinking doesn't tend to last.

Which is ok - I accept that conscious experience is the result of normal physical processes, no Cartesian I - but while it removes the dualism problem, it gets us no further in understanding how ordinary bits of matter can come to experience anything at all, and nothing in the neuroscientific literature that I've come across gets any closer than saying "it just happens when things get complex". Well, duh!

Schopenhauer who bangs on for pages on will, which is consciousness with direction, which is an essential part of what consciousness is. And behind, or beyond will is the thing in itself which is unknowable. And this is in all things. As Dylan Thomas put it "The force that through the green fuse drives the flowers drives my green age....." Consciousness cannot know itself reflexively because it is that which "knows" we can only experience will directly from the inside.

I do have a theory of my own on "why it evolved":

Consciousness is only the icing on the cake, a thin veneer that pretends to ride the zombie but may be able to sometime influence its actions. That does not mean the zombie is “atom-for-atom the same as humans”, it only means that today’s techniques are not good enough to find the small difference.

Consciousness developed because it is advantageous.

Animals manipulate other inanimate and living things all the time. We know that animals, different to rocks, have an active self, subjectivity. We must make predictions about a rabbit’s future actions in order to catch it. Same goes for other humans. But they also have a view of our subjectivity, our self, make predictions about our future actions. If we want to be able to manipulate their perception of us, we have to have a view, a sense of that self, first. Hence consciousness. This squares with a lot of research – more social animals (with the usual genetic differences of sexual reproduction – i.e. not ants etc. where genetic interests of individuals are much more aligned) tend to have a more developed brain and more observable traits of consciousness. It also squares with the notion of all of us being "honest liars" because we all (apart from the clinically depressed) have a more flattering view of ourselves than is merited. This helps a lot to induce a more favourable view of ourselves in others.

Good theories, don't you think? I would query one more thing though:

"Consciousness developed because it is advantageous": Is it really so, when we come to think about it ? Technically speaking, no. In evolutionary terms 'success' is quantified in terms of longevity, reproduction and survival. The most successful organisms on the planet are single-cell organisms, amoeba, bacteria, etc., etc. Do these have consciousness? We don't know, but we doubt it. Trees, technically speaking, are more 'successful' than living organisms with consciousness. Are they conscious? We don't know. Consciousness is not necessarily advantageous to survival. Besides which, we still don't know how unconscious matter became conscious in the first place, so long before we theorise on the evolutionary benefits of consciousness, we have the problem of answering how consciousness arose in the first place.

Well, this constant reality and free-will simulation also incurs massive costs - not even the great apes are quite up to it because they can’t ingest enough calories. So it’s a cost/benefit thing. The cost should be low enough, i.e. most mental processes pressed into the service of self-awareness should already be in place. And the benefits should be great enough which is mostly the case were constant management of our relations with individuals from our own species (and again, sufficiently genetically different from us) are essential for surviving and producing offspring.

None of this applies to microbes, trees, or iPhones. Which also means that not only is this “consciousness everywhere” is complete bollocks, but also that consciousness doesn’t quite “arise automatically”. Only if survival and reproduction of AI depends on tricking the minds of other conscious beings than the mere preconditions for it to arise are in place.

Tricky stuff! show less

A fine book. Dennett's a creative and funny writer, and I think the book holds up well. There were a few parts I didn't quite get, but overall I felt like I could keep up with him. It helped that I've read some other of his stuff before, and some other related works. Of course "Explained" is a bit of a stretch, but I thought it was a good try.

(posted on my blog: http://davenichols.net/consciousness-explained)

I wish I had read this book many years ago, though after having read the book, I have to question whether my conscious self illusion had developed enough to know how handle the arguments Dr. Dennett presents. From the opening chapters, this book is a candy store for thinkers. Make no mistake, it is deep and will require concentration from most any reader. The rewards, like any good read, are worth the effort as Dennett makes a profound and intensely engaging argument about his philosophy of mind, consciousness, and self. He makes extensive use of the idea of Virtual Machines, software, and AI-style capabilities in building his model of mind.

Dennett opens up in Part 1 show more with an exploration of the groundwork for his theory, offering the reader some soft (but quickly advancing) concepts of hallucinations, 'mind stuff', and phenomenology (which he abstracts into heterophenomenology for use later). This section skirts some of the more basic philosophical arguments (of which there are general if not specific agreements) in favor of offering challenges to intuition and 'seems to be' type thinking.

In Part II, he breaks down his theory of Multiple Drafts as a more reasonable (and often, direct affront to) the traditional Cartesian Theater arguments. To put this simply, Dennett's theory argues against the firm existence of a Central Meaner (audience in the theater, ultimate decider, aka soul or top brain dog) while presenting his Multiple Drafts idea. He supposes that consciousness arises, not due to the presense of a specific observer/decider, but instead as the reflective consequence of multiple contributions to the mental state. These 'drafts', as he refers to them, are temporary versions of introspective narrative which are only true until they get edited (and these edits take place in a decentralized manner based on many factors). Because the information used to develop the self-narration comes from numerous sources whose functional-chains are often specialized and multifaceted, and because one cannot determine between two types of rewriting (Orwellian, which involves revisionist history, or Stalinesque, which includes more real-time 'made-up' explanations treated as if factual), the Multiple Drafts theory seems to satisfy these issues, as well as solve many of the problems of the tangibility and determinism found in the alternative theories.

The final Part of the book explores the numerous objections likely thrown up at this theory, and offers extended discussion of why Multiple Drafts both fits the evidence and offers the scientific advantage of being testable and falsifiable. Using many thought exercises and scientific studies of brain-damaged or abnormally-acting people, Dennett argues that the idea of quale (a rival explanation in the Cartesian Theater model) doesn't fit the evidence, is self-contradictory, and cannot be reduced in a meaningful and testable manner.

The most fascinating discussion in Explained is Dennett's thoughts on the creation and indoctrination of consciousness. His theory is basically the following: early creatures gained advantage by taking traditional basic instincts and abilities (like fight-or-flight, verticle symmetry detection, etc) and making them more active and available. Rather than only being called for under extreme conditions (or more specifically, only available when the instinct itself notices stimuli it is both equiped to notice and for which it 'cares'), an 'always-on' mentality allowed greater observation and more information collection. This lead to stronger, more efficient means of distributing observation-based data and acting upon instructions that are more likely to be advantageous. Primates in particular got especially good at saccade (visual jumpiness that allows the eye to observe more points in its line-of-sight, thereby, collecting more data), which likely increased our ability to protect ourselves and to find food. Shortcuts were created in the brain at this point which began to lay the foundation architecture for the language to come later.

Early pre-language hominids likely used some audio mechanism to communicate very basic information in a one-directional sort of way. 'I'm looking for food' probably elicited no direct response, though it would have been a data point considered by anyone in earshot. At some point, this stopped being simply one-way, and a question/answer process evolved. 'I'm looking for food' might lead to 'I have a lot of food'. The asker, however, was likely unable to ask and then answer himself, leaving an efficiency gap to be filled. Later, a sole homo sapien likely started the process with a question, but no one else was around to answer. However, a surprising thing happened: he answered himself. 'I'm looking for food' might have been answered by his own voice (or perhaps internally) with 'Try the bush by the big rock.' Not consciously aware of self-talking (as we would define it), but in a 'I just asked about X' and 'I received an answer about X'.

While the process was inefficient, having had to be formulated, passed out the vocal chords and mouth, and received back in the ear and reprocessed, the invaluable addition of consulting one's self quickly became an advantageous Big Trick (Dennett's idea that social evolution can take place very quickly if a specific action or ability could be both possible due to genetics and available to learn from others who themselves would have developed or learned the Trick). From this point on, humans developed an efficiency we now call an inner monologue (although Dennett is careful to say that this is not just a textual 'spoken' monologue, but instead a multi-faceted creation from multiple heterogeneous contributors) which didn't require (but in many of us, still is exhibited as) vocally 'talking to ourselves'.

From this point on, the reader can infer that consciousness came about, not through a guided Observer or Meaner, but through the chaotic, pandemoniac contributions of various brain-functions and sub-functions. Consciousness is more of a bucket of interaction where subroutines can pay attention to both hardwired areas of interest (pain receptors looking for pain in the hands, for example) but also have the ability to contribute to areas of temporary interest (those same pain receptors might offer a concept of pain to the bucket in response to the information that a fire is near before a narrative leading to a hand being placed in the fire can be acted upon).

Dennett also contends that consciousness may well be taught to children (as a meme set) rather than inherited in a traditional genetically-driven manner, and consciousness is only made possible by our ability to use and understand language (at least the sort of consciousness as humans know it to be). 'Words do things with us' he titled one chapter. Dennett does argue that we have to be genetically predisposed to be able to be conscious, but that consciousness itself is only one possible arrangement of the various brain functions available to a human. One quote he uses really boils this down in a way that is both enlightening and haunting, in the words of Helen Keller:

"Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious time of nothingness...Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another.'

This review vastly oversimplifies Dennett's discussion and leaves out dozens of key points and sub-elements which make this book a very deep and rewarding read. Highly, highly recommended for the very curious mind, but I'd advise taking this book to a quiet room for a few days and really allowing yourself to disengage some of those constantly vigilant 'demons' of expectationalism and open up your mind (and self) to ideas you may never have dreamed could be true. Believe Dennett or not on these theories, this book will make you think deep and carefully reconsider many things you took as given in your own head. Five stars. show less

I've been trying to read Dennett's book since 1991, when the New York Times named it one of the year's best. I finally finished it and am glad I did, but CE has to be the most challenging book I've read since college. I could only get through about ten pages per day. But . . . brilliant.