The Cartesian Theater Lives
"Brains can have many intervening steps in the circuits mediating between stimulus and response, and still have no mind, if they do not meet an essential condition: the ability to display images internally and to order those images in a process called thought."
-Descartes' Error, p. 89
As you might guess, I agree with Dennett: knowing what we know about how the brain works makes this model of the mind nonsense. I'd say it was, "obvious," but it's not: it's taken centuries of work to reveal the absurdity of a homunculus in the brain watching the world in the Cartesian theater. Still, the idea seems to retain its seductive power: even given the title of his book, Damasio succumbed to another of Descartes' mistakes.
-Descartes' Error, p. 89
As you might guess, I agree with Dennett: knowing what we know about how the brain works makes this model of the mind nonsense. I'd say it was, "obvious," but it's not: it's taken centuries of work to reveal the absurdity of a homunculus in the brain watching the world in the Cartesian theater. Still, the idea seems to retain its seductive power: even given the title of his book, Damasio succumbed to another of Descartes' mistakes.