Letters to the Editor
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How much of the shape or "format" of inner experience is "programmed" by the culture around us
versus what follows a more set genetic template?
For example: most people (I would imagine!) experience quick cuts to different scenes in their dreams.
But didn't that come in with cinema?
Did pre-modern peoples (and pre-technological peoples today -- if there are any left) dream like this?
Possibly not...
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Fascinating
I will read this book. I have already bookmarked "The Splintered Mind."
I have long hoped that I would live long enough to actually see the title of Dennett's 1991 book achieved.
Is it possible this might actually happen?
If we can explain consciousness will we have made a huge leap towards AI? What then? What if humans learn to create custom robots and then... but there lies (for now) bad science fiction.
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Consciousness is an illusion.
It's a very powerful illusion, but an illusion, nonetheless.
The purpose of zen meditation is to free the meditator from all consciousness, but especially self-consciousness.
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Concious of Conciousness
It seems strange that Zen meditation work or zazen, should be dismissed in this article as an antique method, irrelevant to this inquiry.Even a poor practitioner of the art(like me)has had the experience of observing the streams of ordinary thought from some point of consciousness apart from those thoughts: it is the most mundane form of that experience; How can this possibly even be in serious question?
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consciousness
I have been a novelist for almost thirty years, and in that time, the way my mind works has changed. I am very self-conscious now, because I am almost always examining my own thoughts for a useful notion or idea. I've also read lots of novels, and so I am aware of the idea of the inner narrator, and that there is often a voice that is separate from but attached to the action. I am also aware of how images appear in the mind--some parts in focus, others not (how could it be otherwise?). My mind is like a vast library of images, some of which I've seen, others of which I've concocted from reading books. My dreams have also changed and become more narrative over the years. Does a pre-literate child have self-consciousness? I don't know. But anyone who has been reading books for any amount of time does--because the author's consciousness arouses a sense in the reader of something different and therefore contrasting to what the reader senses in himself. Doesn't matter whether Daniel Dennett says it's there or not--it is not his experience, and therefore he can't know. All he can know is that he doesn't have a consciousness. But Dorothy does.
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The Salon vortex of silly navel gazing
If these books didn't exist Salon editors would invent them
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What is it like to see red? Give your answer in Braille.
Gary Wolf seems not only to have bought the reductive materialist line, but he appears to think its the only game in town. Dennett never did explain consciousness. You can run all the brain scans you want, and find all the neural correlates to my experience of redness you want, but you still haven't explained how it could possibly come to be that there is this subjective experience, or why it has the peculiar character that it does. Being mistaken in my cognitive judgments is not at issue in this debate (did I really picture the soldier's legs? What color were his shoes?) but why there should be the raw experience itself in the first place. Not the verbal report of the experience, or the opinion about the experience, but the experience. See "The Conscious Mind" by David Chalmers for a different take on this actively debated topic.
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subjective experience
this subject might be over my head. but i want to read this book.
eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. isn't it?
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It Will Probably Never Be Attained
In quantum physics it's said that just the act of observing a particle may change its state, or light can only be measured as a particle at one point, and a wave at another point, but never both states from the same point. If we use words to describe what's going on inside us, the words are descriptions of the event, but not the truth, because the real truth, or "consciousness," was a prerequisite, it had to exist before any word could be invented. The speed of neurons to overtake (or grasp) themselves might be like the speed of light -- you can only physically accelerate to 999999 . . . percent of the goal (like the Zen command, "point to your fingertip").
And maybe if you succeed, you're rewarded with "short-circuit."
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Wow
Great article and fantastic comments. This kind of writing gives dignity and quality to Salon. We want more!!!
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For what it's worth...
If remembering is a process through which we will substantiation of what was experienced... and accepting that the Objective is a tool, it is possibly a probability that the 'tool' may not necessarily represent the Subjective that we may have experienced.
I add to my simplistic and candid analysis, a not so scholarly poem written so long ago in the fifties, that seems just as valid now as it was for me when as a naive and arrogant philosophy student I did attempt to verbalize or possibly try to validate meaning and my existance, whatever...and the fact that it is still valid for me, may also simply mean that I haven't 'grown' or 'matured' that much since when, who knows?
I never shall enjoy
the moment
but the memory
for when I try
to seal
the essence
of that moment
in my mind,
the thought itself
destroys
the very moment
thatI hope to bind...1953 beryl k gullsgate
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thoughts
Fine article, but I hate that locution "our." Zen may be foreign to your awareness. Not mine.
And Dennett has not convinced everybody. His grasp of physics and mathematics is spotty, but he often uses them to support his arguments.
Let us make a distinction between "consciousness" and "awareness." Consciousness is the reflexive attention of the mind to its own processes. Awareness is openness to the nature of existence.
The sages have been saying for a long time that consciousness is provisional, that the self is a creation which we delude ourselves into thinking is the entire being. It requires only a little examination to realize that the ego, or small self, is an artifact, a device we use to test scenarios.
I do not mean we should vanquish ego. That would be like vanquishing your arm. I simply mean it is important to understand the true nature of ego, and to strive to make ego accurate (I don't think people have big egos, I think they have mistaken egos), and to use it the way it functions best.
Zen describes self as the "bundling" of the five senses. That corresponds strongly to what I see as the way we create ego: A very rapid sampling and integration of information from the senses--each sense stream quite distinct, and the information arriving unrelated to the other senses--allows us to fabricate the sense of a single united personality located in a definite place and time. Time and space, incidentally, are essential to ego. I strongly suspect they too are our models of what is actually out there.
WHY does it matter so much to Dennett to proclaim that there is no soul? Is that not a fair question? There is not sufficient evidence to draw such a conclusion, and yet he draws it. Why? Is he not just another champion of a theory that may or may not prove to be accurate? Should he not be required to demonstrate his ideas as certainties before we accept them as truth? He has an opinion. He has a lot of metaphors. He does not have anything that will remotely pass as evidence.
Nevertheless, he is oddly close to the mark. Zen and Buddhism generally state that the small self is empty, is an illusion. If "consciousness" as I have defined it is what Dennett is mistaking for soul, then he agrees with zen (which is in my opinion wiser than Dennett--it is certainly far older). There is no location for personality, for ego. That, however, does not mean the universe is not alive and that we are not beings of spirit.
Are we supposed to think that, of the hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, that only our age has had the wit to investigate consciousness properly? What hubris!
I think Melanie was quite right to laugh at the investigator. Too long we have let these blindly analytical types try to tell us what is what. The really funny thing is that for some reason Schwitzgebel thinks that his doubt of her is more valid than her doubt of him. On what basis?
If one accepts that the self is not the being, but a construct of the being, it is no longer surprising that we think in many different ways and that our images contain only the precision we require them to. Of course it's that way.
Schwitzgebel is fun, but why the hell does he expect thought to render photographically complete images? One only entertains so much of the image as one needs for one's purposes. Has the man never heard of holograms, of information storage that is global and not localized? For crying out loud, does he think that thought is some sort of completely mimetic process and therefore if we imagine an image of a man but do not think of the legs or where they are we are falling short? Doesn't he understand uncertainty? If in the course of dwelling on an image it becomes important to notice the legs, then they will become clear. Perhaps one will invent a bush to hide them. When I think of the person I love most, I do not see her all at once. I usually have an impression of her face. Sometimes other portions of her, if my thought wanders that way. But she's not some confounded movie in my head.
Anyone who thinks this sort of investigation is liable to lead to ultimate answers is mistaken. Of course the mind has some difficulty reporting on itself. It has some difficulty reporting on ANYTHING. Believe me, physicists are face to face with the dilemmas raised by observation of the so-called "natural world" (we are part of it, and that is why we can never truly separate our minds from our investigations).
But there are many of us who have spent our lives practicing the discipline of self-observation. You can tell me all you want to that it is not possible. I know you are wrong. The thing is, it takes constant practice. Almost nobody is willing to make the effort, hence all the confusion. It does not seem strange to a scientist to say, You must master all the jargon and technicalities before you understand my actual point. Why does it seem strange when a man like Suzuki, who has spent his entire life mastering these things, says the same thing about self-awareness?
If these babies are interested in actually learning something about thought and awareness, and not merely proclaiming "interesting" opinions, perhaps they should spend some time with those who have mastered the process.
I find almost all research on "consciousness" deeply frustrating. It presumes a great deal based on preconception, it pays no attention whatsoever to accumulated wisdom from the species--and yes, there is such a thing, otherwise science itself could not proceed--and its methods are slapdash.