I’ve read two of Daniel Dennett’s books, and while I enjoyed them at the time I find myself unable to remember what they were about, what their arguments were, or indeed any memorable passages. Maybe it’s just me, but I remember almost nothing from “Freedom Evolves”.
I’ve just watched one of Dennett’s TED talks, having been pointed there by 3quarksdaily. The title of the talk is “The Illusion of Consciousness”. Maybe I’m being thick, but I after 20 minutes I’m left with this question: what does any of this have to do with consciousness at all, let alone showing it to be an illusion? Before I move on, I should stress that I’m no kind of philosopher of mind or neuroscientist. I’m not even particularly well-read in the popular literature of these fields. Comments, please!
What I’m going to try to do today is to shake your confidence … that you know your own, inner-most mind, that you are, yourselves, authoritative about your own consciousness. …
Somehow we have to explain how, when you put together teams, armies, battalions, of hundreds of millions of little robotic unconscious cells … the result is colour, content, ideas, memories, history. And somehow all that concept [content?] of consciousness is accomplished by the busy activity of those hoards of neurons.
So we’re off to a good start. The hard problem of consciousness is to explain why certain collections of cells become conscious at all. Dennett particularly wants to question whether we really know our own conscious selves. Good. What is his method?
How many of you here, if some smart alec starts telling you how a particular magic trick is done, want to block your ears and say, “I don’t want to know. Don’t take the thrill of it away. I’d rather be mystified. Don’t tell me the answer.” A lot of people feel that way about consciousness, I’ve discovered. I’m sorry if I impose some clarity, some understanding on you. You better leave now if you don’t want to know these tricks.
Method: condescension. He’s going to smug those illusions right out of us.
The example is wrong. I don’t want you to tell me how a magic trick is done for the same reason I don’t want the stranger on the train to lean over and give me crossword answers. It’s a puzzle. The fun is thinking about it yourself. No one says “I don’t want the crossword answers. I just want the mystery of the empty squares.”
Note the implicit ad hominem. Anyone who disagrees with Dennett is weak-minded, a blissful ignoramus. Actually, those who criticised books such a Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained” usually complained that it failed to explain consciousness.
I’m not going to explain it all to you. … You know the sawing the lady in half trick? The philosopher says “I’m going to explain to you how that’s done. You see – the magician doesn’t really saw the lady in half. He merely makes you think that he does.” How does he do that? “Oh, that’s not my department”.
This is all very amusing, and delivered with a twinkle in the eye. But the message of the metaphor is this: brace yourself for some bald assertion. I’ll tell you what follows from my assumptions, but don’t expect any evidence.
Example 1. People are unable to pick up large changes in a picture they’re looking at if they are distracted by other motion. How can we not be aware of them? The high-resolution part of our eye is a very small region. The rest is filled in by the brain. You’re getting less information than you think.
Example 2. The brain will sometimes guess at detail that the eye cannot resolve, based on the information it has and previous experience. And sometimes it won’t.
Example 3. Which of the 3D figures did you rotate to see if it matched the other one?
Therefore,
Scientists, using their from-the-outside, third-person methods, can tell you things about your own consciousness that you would never dream of. And that, in fact, you are not the authority on your own consciousness that you think you are.
How the hell does any of that say anything about consciousness?! The most that Dennett could show from these examples is that sometimes our beliefs don’t match the outside world, that sometimes our perceptions are mistaken, that we sometimes draw incorrect conclusions from incomplete information. Really? You’ve never dreamed that your experiences might not be a perfect representation of the external world? What about your dreams?
Think about Dennett’s example of the characters in the painting on the bridge that on closer inspection turn out to be just splodges of paint. How does this realisation show that I don’t know my own mind? I think I see people. Then on closer examination I think I see splodges. In both states, I know my own mind. I know what I think I’m seeing. You can convince me (as if I needed convincing) that my subjective experiences are not the authority on the external world. But I know my own mind, because it’s my frigging mind.
Finally, consider the example of the two 3D figures. After asking which figure we rotated in our minds, Dennett asks “how do you know that’s what you did?”. The audience laughs as if some great mystery had been illuminated.
Seriously. The whole point of first person, subjective, conscious experience is that it is immediate. Immediate in the sense that it is knowledge not based on anything else, anything deeper. It is not like seeing smoke and inferring fire. The experiences of my consciousness are direct. I know that’s what I did because I experience a unified self. The me who rotated the image and the me who knows that I rotated the image are the same me. There is no message to be passed, no inference, no perception, no place to lose or garble the information.
This is why the first thing that Dennett needs to explain is how could consciousness be an illusion? Having an illusion is a conscious experience! Why, given what Dennett has said, should I doubt my own conscious experience? Why doubt my knowledge of how I rotated the figure? Whence the unified self of consciousness? How does a collection of cells come to experience?
This is Dennett’s home field. He can’t be this far off the mark, can he? What am I missing?
Either way, I’m getting fed up of talks like this.
1. Some people think X.
2. Some people think Y.
3. Science has shown us that we were wrong about Y.
4. Thus, science is about proving that some things we thought were wrong.
5. Thus, we are wrong about X.
This nonsense is behind neurobabble, quantum quackery, and certain cosmologists who think they can answer philosophical questions. It pretends to be pro-science because it is anti-common sense or anti-popular or anti-traditional beliefs. You promote science by expounding the wonders of the world, of the universe, of physics, of complexity, of understanding, of testing ideas with clever experiments. You don’t promote science by pretending it can do what it can’t.
I read two books by Dennett a few years back (I think Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves, but like you, I don’t remember much). My clearest impression of both books is that while I could understand every sentence (sometimes I had to read them several times), I couldn’t see any rational argument or thread which tied the sentences together, so I felt both books explained nothing at all. In the end, they were like white noise.
THis isn’t quite the same as your experience, but probably not all that different.
His ‘Breaking the Spell’ is pretty forgettable too. Perhaps the existence of people like Dennett is the best evidence for zombies — creatures who don’t have any conscious experience, but then incorrectly infer that the rest of us don’t either!
If the illusion of sawing a lady in half was real and not an illusion then she really would be sawn in half. If consciousness was real, rather than an illusion what would it be like? Perhaps Dennett can explain exactly what real, as opposed to illusory, consciousness would feel like.
If something is an illusion then there must be a genuine version which the illusion falsely resembles. What is the genuine version in the case of consciousness? If Dennett can’t say what the real version is then his point about consciousness being an illusion is meaningless.
I think Dennett’s position is really bordering on eliminative materialism. John Searle is an excellent and critical resource on Philosophy of Mind. I remember him saying in a lecture that he really had no idea why these guys (eliminative materialists) were taken seriously, and even got posted in journals. A good analysis here:
http://www.ict.griffith.edu.au/~johnt/1004ICT/lectures/lecture11/Searle-pp27-57.html
I guess you’re familiar with Feser’s characterization of the kind?
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.no/2013/08/mad-dogs-and-eliminativists.html
Dennett is a clever man, but in this area, Dennett and his friends just proceeds to amaze me. What’s up with just dismissing as illusions everything that doesn’t fit with a specific (flawed) view of nature and metaphysics? The more absurd, the better. What’s the next thing? Dismissing life as an illusion? Oh my, Jabr beat him to it:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/2013/12/02/why-life-does-not-really-exist/
An interesting response by Vallicella here:
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2013/12/scientific-american-why-life-does-not-really-exist.html
I really enjoy your posts. Keep it up!
Perfect.
Visual illusion is not the same thing as not know yourself. In fact to even suggest that it is even remotely comparable serves to show the debater as dysfunctional.
I thought I saw water in the desert
It was a mirage
Freewill is a mirage
These peoples arguments are just lame.
we manufacture physics lab equipment such as, Electrical Instruments, Heat Laboratory Equipment, Mechanics Laboratory Equipment, Measurement Instruments, Meteorology Earth Science Apparatus, Modern Physics Instruments, Optical Instruments read more
Agreed. It’s the cry of the Lunatic.
Its an obvious Category mistake to compare the visual cortex to consciousness. Its complete slight of hand . They simply have Nothing in common and are compared because the argument that consciousness is an illusion is self refuting.
It reminds me of the fallacy..
We once thought the solar system was all and then realized it was in a galaxy
We once thought the galaxy was all and then realized it was in a universe
So because discoveries made reality larger…it makes sense we’re in a
multiverse
Problem is .. that doesn’t follow. Its bar room philosophy just as V Cortex pawned off as logical.
Love the blog!
Dennett’s position **isn’t** that consciousness is an illusion. You got falsely hung up on the video’s title. The title is just a pun because he’s talking about optical illusions and visual consciousness.
Philosophy professor Peter Mandik made a great short video on Youtube explaining Dennett’s Multiple Drafts Theory of Consciousness. I recommend checking it out.