Topic: Mind
I'm about 150 pages into Consciousness explained. It's a little harder to follow than I expected. I also have to say I'm enjoying it less than his online essays. He drags out the points he's trying to make to the extant that, if you have a bad memory like me, by the time you finish an argument you've got to go back to see what was at stake in the first place. I get the feeling this was calculated. He's trying to build up expectations of a gut-busting feast to come by relishing, with great arrogance, the appetizers. Well, some of that frustration is exaggerated by reading a one-time controversial book 15 years later. At any rate, the mundane parts of the book, as I can get through them, are well worth it. And by that I mean his history of cognitive science to that point. The experiments that he's drawing off of and explains in detail are fascinating enough in their own right and deserve a book for non-experts.
Dennett's belief is that within all branches of knowledge that feed into cognitive science from neuroscience to philosophy, the language of consciousness is permeated by what he calls "Cartesian materialism" even though virtually no one official adheres to such a doctrine. He argues that the standard working model of consciousness is like a filmstrip. The movie you watch on the weekend has the content that it does because it was filmed, and the places where it drifts from reality could either be because of something like, inserting propts into the movie before hand, or editing the rough product. If I've got Dennett right, then get rid of the studio, the director, and the stage crew, and let the reels and microphones run live. Why would we not just do that anyway? The problem raises its head in numorous counter-intuitive psych experiments. For instance, a device is put on the wrist, elbow, and upper arm. The device taps the wrist a few times, then the elbow, then the upper arm. The brain "interprets" (notice the guy in the studio sneaking in to watch, to do the "interpreting") this as taps moving up the arm and so the subject reports something like a rabbit hopping up his arm rather than taps localized at the wrist, and then some more localized at the elbow and so on. For Dennett, get rid of all the talk in the middle about the brain making calls. You have multiple input and calculation streams going on, and you have reports from the "subject". The editing room version of this story would take the first set of taps, wait, then get the second and third set of taps in, do some splicing and touch ups and then give a final presentation to the "subject" for reporting. But Dennett's point seems to be since there is no movie project, there is no one in the editing room to know in this case we've got to wait for the second and third set of reels. And how could that be known anyway? The brain doesn't know that two more set of taps are coming up. And the experiments show that if those don't follow, the subject feels the taps merely on his wrist as expected. Now, getting rid of the "Cartesian" language is hard to do and visualize what's going on and this makes following Dennett a little difficult because he keeps the heavy onslaught of verbiage coming. They key, I guess, is to get rid of any temptation to describe the experiments in terms of "I" felt this and then that, because the "I" already presupposes a single, pure stream of post-editing room consciousness running. So imagine two streams, say audio and video that sometimes run slightly out of sync, and that's all there is to the story. Don't imagine watching and listening and trying to put the two tracks together, because now you're innocently falling into the trap. And once you've gone down that road, you can't stop. You must imagine another guy in the head of the first guy in your head to worry about how the audio and visual inputs are being sorted out in his mind. There is no way to make the story first-person comprehensible.
Well, none of that on its face could possibly be that disputable. It's the implications Dennett supposidly draws. But like I've asked before, is he arguing for radical phenomenal skepticism or is he trash-caning phenomenology? Most people will come away from a basic modern philosophy class having come to believe grounding knowledge is impossible, but still believe they know things. I don't see why phenomenology would be any different. I think the same people who make it through philosophy 102 and still believe they know something can still believe, rationally, that they feel pain even if they come to disbelieve pain exists in real, discrete quantae that can be formally described. I'm not yet convinced Dennett is arguing the strong thesis. Every summary I've read of Dennett presents him this way, but I haven't found the smoking gun yet in his own words from my own reading of him. Dennett presents the common sense view most people hold to as typified in Descartes pineal gland, the mysterious unknown and very, very small part of the brain that connects disembodied mental with physical. I wonder though if that isn't on its surface just symptomatic of a deeper problem, and one that would encompass Dennett's view as well, Descartes introduction of representational knowledge. Anyway, that's for another post.
The last thing I want to mention is when I read Dennett, as I've posted before, I try to think of experiences I've actually had which have something to do with the points he makes. A strange thing used to happen to me frequently a few years ago (trying hard to embellish as little as possible). I'd wake up, open my eyes, and then fear I'd woke up right before my alarm goes off. My alarm isn't loud, but it's nerve grinding, and I prefer to wake up before it goes off so I can flick the switch and not hear it. In these cases, I wake up, open my eyes, fear, and then within a subjective second, have my fears confirm and the alarm goes off. After it happened a couple of times, I thought to myself, "How can I be so unlucky?" Or, how can my wake/sleep cycle be that precise? This was before I had read anything about cognitive science. After it happened a few times though I decided that the alarm was waking me up but somehow there was a delay in my perception of it. And that last sentence is loaded with the mistakes Dennett is talking about.
