I do have other things that take priority.
Besides, was planning on dancing around that until the end of the book since, in true philosophical tradition, this book is more about asking questions, supposing mind experiments, making suggestions, then shooting them down as often as not.
The title is a bit of a bait and switch, but here are some hints,
P433 14-1 Dennett’s Consciousness Explained.
How could the brain be the seat of consciousness? This has usually been treated as a rhetorical question by philosophers, suggesting that an answer to it would be quite beyond human comprehension. A primary goal of this book as been to demolish that presumption. I have argued argued that you can imagine how all that complicated slew of activity in the brain amounts to conscious experience.
My argument is straight-forward: I have shown you how to do it. It turns out that the way to imagine this is to think of the brain as a computer of sorts. …"
It’s also an example of how they like building up great narratives, only to blast them to hell. It’s more about the debate than a pragmatic solution.
A) Talking about activity in the brain, while ignoring all the brain activity that occurs within our body.
B) We are a biological system that works via mechanisms way beyond binary switching. - The computer analogy has very limited realistic utility and invoking as an element of consciousness is a cop out.
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p.455 14-4 start of final paragraph
"My explanation of consciousness is far from complete. One might even say that it was just the beginning, but it is a beginning, because it breaks the spell of the enchanted circle of ideas that made explaining consciousness seem impossible. I haven’t replaced a metaphorical theory, the Cartesian Theater (of the mind), with a nonmetaphorical (“literal science”) theory.
All I have done, really, is to replace one family of metaphors and images with another, trading in the Theater, the Witness, the Central Meaner, the Figment, for Software, Virtual Machines, Multiple Drafts, a Pandemonium of Homunculi. It’s just a war of metaphors, you say, . . . (Metaphors are tools we can’t do without) . . .
Look what we have built with our tools. Could you have imagined it without them?
Spoken like the superb story teller and intellectual entertainer that Dennett is. Some great ideas, but a lot of chaff.
{cuthbertj I’ll make a point to offer a more meaningful concise 200 words, after I’ve done more homework and chew on it a bit more.}
If you want to really think about your consciousness in a real world sense, I’d suggest a better bet than philosophy would be getting up to speed on work Dr. Solm and that direction of the science. And if you want to tantalize yourself with images of the mind in action check out the Human Connectome Project.
NERV Online - July 29, 2020
David Chalmers’s (1995) hard problem famously states: “It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises.” Thomas Nagel (1974) wrote something similar: “If we acknowledge that a physical theory of mind must account for the subjective character of experience, we must admit that no presently available conception gives us a clue about how this could be done.” This presentation will point the way towards the long-sought “good explanation” – or at least it will provide “a clue”. Prof Solms will make three points:
(1) It is unfortunate that cognitive science took vision as its model example when looking for a ‘neural correlate of consciousness’ because cortical vision (like most cognitive processes) is not intrinsically conscious. There is not necessarily ‘something it is like’ to see.
(2) Affective feeling, by contrast, is conscious by definition. You cannot feel something without feeling it. Moreover, affective feeling, generated in the upper brainstem, is the foundational form of consciousness: prerequisite for all the higher cognitive forms.
(3) The functional mechanism of feeling explains why and how it cannot go on ‘in the dark’, free of any inner feel. Affect enables the organism to monitor deviations from its expected self-states in uncertain situations and thereby frees homeostasis from the limitations of automatism. As Nagel says, “An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” Affect literally constitutes the sentient subject.
The Royal Institution - March 4, 2021
Mark Solms discusses his new theory of consciousness that returns emotions to the centre of mental life. Mark’s book “The Hidden Spring” is available now: https://geni.us/CWaA Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/gmOzBePcRg4 Understanding why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain seems like an impossible task. Mark explores the subjective experiences of hundreds of neurological patients, many of whom he treated. Their uncanny conversations help to expose the brain’s obscure reaches.
Mark Solms has spent his entire career investigating the mysteries of consciousness. Best known for identifying the brain mechanisms of dreaming and for bringing psychoanalytic insights into modern neuroscience, he is director of neuropsychology in the Neuroscience Institute of the University of Cape Town, honorary lecturer in neurosurgery at the Royal London Hospital School of Medicine, and an honorary fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists.