Remarks on Dan Dennett: "Consciousness Explained"

Consciousness as an “emergent property” of the various whirrings going on in the brain.

Dennett… genesis of language and abstraction as “logic of possible re-enactment”.

Use of language for asking questions is fundamental. (Hence Cf Merleau-Ponty: we only have language because we want to do things. The intentionality of our discourse.

The faculty of language leads to the possibility of questioning oneself, to the positing of oneself and to the positing of other selves “central Meaners”. However we are capable of - and are nowadays -conceiving the next step: meaning without a central meaner, “Multiple Drafts” model.

(Dennett against the idea that since we integrate information successfully from all five senses, there must be a “central subject of sensation”. But according to Dennett, we can multitask sensorily and react without positing any such central thing, and experiments show the inability to integrate some sensory streams correctly into a definite “corresponding to central consciousness” narrative. Rather our speech narrative tries to integrate the different drafts, sometimes with success sometimes without.)


Has a lot in common with the Derridian idea of a text without an author and the indeterminacy of meaning, as Dennett notes later on.

[dd: Memory: the learned “refiring” of recent perceptive firings.] Hence Hume’s observation [where is that quote? In Neuroscience book?] of the obvious: all mental images [composed of fragments of things remembered] are much weaker than the most recent images (the most recent firing patterns).

Some experiments showing how the representation of temporal order is not necessarily the same as the actual temporal order. Further, it is not even possible for these to always coincide, as in “illusory” moving light spot experiment. Conclusion: there is no “actual temporal representation chronologically correlate with the ‘actual’ mental eventstream; instead, there is only a story we tell to ourselves and others about how it seems now to have happened.

Difference between what is represented and what is in our heads: p131:

“we have grown sophisticated enough to realise that the products of visual perception are not, literally, pictures in the head even though what they represent is what pictures represent well: the layout in space of various visual properties. We should make the same distinction for time: when in the brain an experience happens must be distinguished from when it seems to happen… The representation of space in the brain does not always use space-in-the-brain to represent space, and the representation of time in the brain does not always use time-in-the-brain”

On the illusion of well-defined atoms of (conscious or unconscious) experience
p319:

“If we individuate states (beliefs, states of consciousness, states of communicative intention, etc) by their content – which is the standard means of individuation in folk psychology – we end up having to postulate differences that are systematically undiscoverable by any means, from the inside or the outside, and in the process, we lose the subjective intimacy or incorrigibility that is supposedly the hallmark of consciousness… And the solution is…[to] replace the division into discrete contentful states – beliefs, meta-beliefs, and so on – with a process that serves, over time, to ensure a good fit between an entity’s internal information-bearing events and the entity’s capacity to express (some of) the information in those events in speech”

On the similarity between computer-storage (representation) of e.g. spatial information and the neuronal brain storage medium, p354.

“introspection provides us - the subject as well as the ‘outside’ experimenter – only with the content of representation, not with the feature of the representational medium itself. For evidence about the medium, we need to conduct further experiments. But for some phenomena, we can already be quite sure that the medium of representation is a version of something efficient, like color-by-numbers, not roughly continuous, like bit-mapping.

... your parafoveal vision … does not have very good resolution.. Yet we know that if you were to walk into a room whose walls were papered with identical photos of Marilyn Monroe, you would instantly “see” that this was the case… Since your eyes saccade [jump to centralise the next object for foveal vision] four or five times a second at most, you could foveate only one or two Marilyns in the time it takes you to jump to the conclusion and thereupon to see hundreds of identical Marilyns”

On blind spots, spatial and temporal, p355:

“The blind spot is a spatial hole, but there can be temporal holes as well. The smallest are the gaps that occur when our eyes dart about during saccades. We don’t notice these gaps, but they don’t have to be filled in because we’re designed not to notice them…

The fundamental flaw in the idea of “filling in” is that it suggest that the brain is providing something when in fact the brain is ignoring something. And this leads even very sophisticated thinkers to make crashing mistakes, perfectly epitomized by Edelman. ‘One of the most striking features of consciousness is it’s continuity’ (1989 [The remembered present: A biological theory of consciousness], p119). This is utterly wrong. One of the most striking features of consciousness is its discontinuity – as revealed in the blind spot, and saccadic gaps, to take the simplest examples. The discontinuity of consciousness is striking because of the apparent continuity of consciousness… As Minsky puts it, ‘Nothing can seem jerky except what is represented as jerky. Paradoxically, our sense of continuity comes from our marvellous insensitivity to most kinds of changes rather than from any genuine kind of perceptiveness’ [1985, The Society of Mind, p257].”

See also from p359 quote from Minsky [1985, The Society of Mind, p257]:

“We have the sense of actuality when every question asked of our visual systems is answered so swiftly that it seems as though those answers were already there”

See also M-P’s account of perception as the answer to continuous questioning about the environment for someone who has projects in that environment.

On the Cartesian residue of a spatial representation over and above our spatially oriented world of action Dennett p397:

“It may still seem just plain obvious that ‘the subjective colours you would be seeing things to be’ would have to be ‘one way or the other’…It may help to break down the residual attractiveness of this idea if we consider further the invited parallel with image-inverting goggles. When the adaptations of the subjects wearing those goggles have become so second nature that they can ride bicycles and ski, the natural (but misguide) question to ask is this: Have they adapted by turning their experiential world upside down? And what do they say? They say different things, which correlate roughly with how complete their adaptation was. The more complete it was, the more the subjects dismiss the question as improper or unanswerable. This is just what the Multiple Drafts theory demands: Since there are a host of discriminations and reactions that need to be adjusted, scattered around in the brain, some of them dealing with low-level ‘reflexes’ (such as ducking the right way when something looms at you) and others dealing with focally attended deliberate actions, it is not surprising that as the adaptations in this patchwork accumulate, subject should lose all conviction of whether to say ‘things look the way they used to look’ instead of ‘things still look different, but I’m getting used to it’. In some ways things look the same to them (as judged by their reactions), in other ways things look different (as judged by other reactions). If there were a single representation of visuo-motor space through which all reactions to visual stimuli had to be channelled, it would have to be ‘one way or the other’, perhaps, but there is no such single representation. The way things look to them is composed of many partly independent habits of reaction, not a single intrinsically right-side-up or upside-down picture in the head…there is just no saying what ‘counts’ as ‘my visual field is still upside down’.

The same is true of qualia inversion. The idea that it is something in addition to the inversion of all one’s reactive dispositions, so that, if they were renormalized the inverted qualia would remain, is simply part of the tenacious myth of the Cartesian Theater”

On the M-P, mystical ideas of the world as immediate and our coincidence with it by occasionally deconceptualising our conscious removals from it as “other”, see p407-8:

“It seemed to him, according to the text, as if his mind – his visual field – were filled with intricate details of gold-green buds and wiggling branches, but although this is how it seemed, this was an illusion. No such ‘plenum’ ever came into his mind; the plenum remained out in the world where it didn’t have to be represented, but could just be. When we marvel, in those moments of heightened self-consciousness, at the glorious richness of our conscious experience, the richness we marvel at is actually the richness of the world outside, in all its ravishing detail. It does not ‘enter’ our conscious minds, but is simply available”