Dan Dennett
I like me some Daniel Dennett. First there was the anthology he put together with Douglas Hofstadter, "The Minds I". I kind of didn't like him - he seems dismissive of so much when dealing with the questions of what's the mind, or what's the soul, what's an "I" and how can they be what, and where. Hofstadter's approach (they kind of both 'commentated' throughout the book, and also had their own essays), is a little more dreamy, playful. Hofstadter likes to play with feedback loops and stuff like that.
But I kept Dennett in mind -- with titles like "Consciousness Explained" and "Freedom Evolves" I had a definite sense that if I disagreed with this guy it was going to be productive.
The first book I read from Dennet was "Kinds of Minds", which changed my mind a lot -- I kept bouncing all my ideas off of it, and nothing clashed exactly but my thinking was changing a lot. It was a brief book, very focused on things from the 'bottom up'. The bottom being dead matter, carried upward to more and more complex animals, to self-modelling and mind-modelling animals. And the question of "ok, NOW does it have a soul, a self, now does it have inner experience?" kind of seemed to dissolve into the process of... all of this emerging. I guess his answer does tend to be "no" but he's more interested in the questions & the details, than making that final assessment. He recognizes the value of the "intentional stance" even well before creatures 'know' what they're doing. And at some point it becomes useful for the creature to have a model of what's inside them & what's not. And it becomes useful to model others as 'intenders', and themselves as 'intenders'.
I'm now reading "Consciousness Explained" and I've reached the chapter where he's basically summarizing "Kinds of Minds". I don't know where it's going to go but the feeling I have by now is that, yes, once a pattern models itself, and has memory, and can predict the future (and a slew of other things), then yes, that all amounts to life, and life-experiencing-itself. The final witness of it is whatever it already is -- too simple to really be anything 'additional'.
In the first part of the book he spent a lot of time dismantling the concept of time and simultaneity, and went through various experiments showing how memory, even in the short term, is really what tells the story of the 'stream' we call consciousness.
Although I suspect he never goes in this direction, I think it fits pretty well with mystical ideas of consciousness. Not magical ideas, but just the idea that immediate & total 'presence' is utterly different than the normal stream of self-having we record & track & make predictions with. There isn't 'information content' prior to the work of the brain, there isn't even a distinction between being and not being. We tend to dwell, or 'place ourselves' on a more productive level, where we can survive and eat and fend off predators. Or where we can at least have a name and a story. But this is somewhat left or right of 'the now'.
Dennett's thought is probably that 'the now' is nonsense, but also the narrative sequence we place ourselves in is false -- sensible but not an absolute testimony of what really occurred 'for us'. He emphasizes that what really happened didn't happen in a sequence, it happened in parallel. Some information comes in later than other information, but still gets written down as one moment. Revisions are made. Answers about experience change depending on how you ask & when you ask. And there is no 'headquarters', no final resting place where the data 'hits us'. It just keeps moving, and the process keeps our mouths and our bodies ready to answer questions about our experience. We are certainly a unique kind of authority on our experience, but we are limited.
I have continued to discover my own limitations, but I think for every kind of 'magic' I give up, I gain something. While I can see that my body & brain are limited, in deeper ways than I would've thought, I also think I am able more and more to 'identify' with the outside-of-me. When whats-me is not so magical, when it is shown to have common roots with whats-what, it's easier to let go of the idea of having lost anything. And such.
But I kept Dennett in mind -- with titles like "Consciousness Explained" and "Freedom Evolves" I had a definite sense that if I disagreed with this guy it was going to be productive.
The first book I read from Dennet was "Kinds of Minds", which changed my mind a lot -- I kept bouncing all my ideas off of it, and nothing clashed exactly but my thinking was changing a lot. It was a brief book, very focused on things from the 'bottom up'. The bottom being dead matter, carried upward to more and more complex animals, to self-modelling and mind-modelling animals. And the question of "ok, NOW does it have a soul, a self, now does it have inner experience?" kind of seemed to dissolve into the process of... all of this emerging. I guess his answer does tend to be "no" but he's more interested in the questions & the details, than making that final assessment. He recognizes the value of the "intentional stance" even well before creatures 'know' what they're doing. And at some point it becomes useful for the creature to have a model of what's inside them & what's not. And it becomes useful to model others as 'intenders', and themselves as 'intenders'.
I'm now reading "Consciousness Explained" and I've reached the chapter where he's basically summarizing "Kinds of Minds". I don't know where it's going to go but the feeling I have by now is that, yes, once a pattern models itself, and has memory, and can predict the future (and a slew of other things), then yes, that all amounts to life, and life-experiencing-itself. The final witness of it is whatever it already is -- too simple to really be anything 'additional'.
In the first part of the book he spent a lot of time dismantling the concept of time and simultaneity, and went through various experiments showing how memory, even in the short term, is really what tells the story of the 'stream' we call consciousness.
Although I suspect he never goes in this direction, I think it fits pretty well with mystical ideas of consciousness. Not magical ideas, but just the idea that immediate & total 'presence' is utterly different than the normal stream of self-having we record & track & make predictions with. There isn't 'information content' prior to the work of the brain, there isn't even a distinction between being and not being. We tend to dwell, or 'place ourselves' on a more productive level, where we can survive and eat and fend off predators. Or where we can at least have a name and a story. But this is somewhat left or right of 'the now'.
Dennett's thought is probably that 'the now' is nonsense, but also the narrative sequence we place ourselves in is false -- sensible but not an absolute testimony of what really occurred 'for us'. He emphasizes that what really happened didn't happen in a sequence, it happened in parallel. Some information comes in later than other information, but still gets written down as one moment. Revisions are made. Answers about experience change depending on how you ask & when you ask. And there is no 'headquarters', no final resting place where the data 'hits us'. It just keeps moving, and the process keeps our mouths and our bodies ready to answer questions about our experience. We are certainly a unique kind of authority on our experience, but we are limited.
I have continued to discover my own limitations, but I think for every kind of 'magic' I give up, I gain something. While I can see that my body & brain are limited, in deeper ways than I would've thought, I also think I am able more and more to 'identify' with the outside-of-me. When whats-me is not so magical, when it is shown to have common roots with whats-what, it's easier to let go of the idea of having lost anything. And such.