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When people imagine their consciousness/free will faculty as its own object, they sometimes see a theatre/stage, where they are in the audience and can observe

When people imagine their consciousness/free will faculty as its own object, they sometimes see a theatre/stage, where they are in the audience and can observe the central point where consciousness ends up forming, or a deamon sitting in front of a bunch of levers and pulling one to make a conscious free will decision. Yet, Dennett shows that there is no such single centralized point where consciousness emerges, just a brain creating that illusion to make a higher-level lossy sense of things (consequence of modeling your own cognitive processes using Descartes-era philosophy is that you have to place an artificial cut-off somewhere). Cognitive science has experiments like the Stroop Test [1], which proof that different cognitive faculties operate at different speeds and in parallel. They may even compete for attention. Consciousness is thus distributed and a "multi-agent" system, you may not even become "consciously" aware of what the fast operating faculties are processing and feeding up to more complex faculties. Other cognitive science reaction speed experiments have shown that data is processed (helping you make decisions) before it enters conscious thought (so all "behind the stage"). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect

throwaway37585 8y ago
> When people imagine their consciousness/free will faculty as its own object, they sometimes see a theatre/stage, where they are in the audience and can observe the central point where consciousness ends up forming, or a deamon sitting in front of a bunch of levers and pulling one to make a conscious free will decision. I don't know anyone who sees consciousness this way, but perhaps we've met different sorts of people. Your second paragraph seems like a red herring. I don't see how any of this addresses the issue of conscious experience in the first place.
- taurine 8y ago
  It addresses the issue by telling you: Don't worry about consciousness in the first place. How your higher-level cognitive faculties see and categorize consciousness is proven to be an illusion. Eliminate this singular consciousness, this artificial construct, and any hard or soft problem disappears with it, and we can start defining conscious experience proper, instead of trying the impossible and give a solution to everyone's subjective (and possibly eternally conflicting) theatric view of consciousness. It is not always the goal (or possible) to create a complete model of conscious experience that is indistinguishable from reality, yet one may model the path of a hurricane without getting blown away by the wind.
  - rosser 8y ago
    And this is why, no matter how many downvotes it gets (and believe me, I get them for it), I will continue to say Dennett's book should have been titled "Consciousness Explained Away." He dances around the thing pretty much everyone else means when they say "consciousness" or "the Hard Problem" and says of everything he can, "Welp, that's not the thing they're talking about!", except the thing we're talking about, which he more or less doesn't even acknowledge. "'Blue' means only Pantone-292. The sky isn't Pantone-292. Therefore, the sky isn't blue." Specious, isn't it?
    - taurine 8y ago
      I think it was because in a time where objectivism ruled, consciousness was still a highly subjective subject. "Consciousness Explained" was an effort to discover the other side of the coin. A subjectivist sees art, and reasons that the art object is fully formed inside his/her mind. An objectivist sees art, and reasons that the art object is entirely contained in the physical manifestation of it. Consciousness Explained was an attempt to show this objectivist view of consciousness. Later on he tried to marry both in heterophenomonology: "The sky seems blue to non-colorblind subjects, but objectively, in reality, it part of the human-visible spectrum of wave-length n.". This framework still gives legitimacy to the subjective experience of a colorblind person, without allowing this to change physical reality (for consciousness: allowing for personal experience and realization of it, without allowing this to change the neuroscience/ontology "i experience sequential thought, therefor thoughts must be sequential, not parallel.").
red75prime 8y ago
There are different kinds of illusions. The world we see around us is an illusion created by the brain's sensory processing. But this illusion is good enough to allow us to act in the world. We don't call it illusion, we just call it the world. If I think "I think", it is a vast simplification of processes going on in my brain, but it doesn't mean that there's no processes corresponding to my thinking "I think". Most of the time I act as a single intelligent agent, not as a bunch of subsystems with no unifying goals. So this "illusion of consciousness", while being simplification of brain processes, falls in the category of things we usually don't call illusions. And that's why Dennett's wording seems misleading to me.
- taurine 8y ago
  > But this illusion is good enough to allow us to act in the world. We don't call it illusion, we just call it the world. I like calling it a "world model". Optical illusions proof that this "world model" can be consistently tricked for a wide range of humans. Now the "illusion of consciousness" is a categorization error: You apply your "world model" to your own internal processes / consciousness. So far so good. But this does not give you the right to claim that consciousness is your "world model" view of it. If it was, then so could people who took LSD and had their "world model" believe they could swim in the sky, claim to change reality/ontology/the world for all of us. The illusion is that your world model of consciousness does not equal consciousness in reality, as proven by science, despite how clearly it may appear to you (not that conscious experience itself is an illusion). > Most of the time I act as a single intelligent agent, not as a bunch of subsystems with no unifying goals. This is the illusion. To you it seems that you act as a single intelligent agent, unaware of the thousands of majority votes by your senses/neurons that lead up to that point. Both your view as a single acting agent and this illusion are still legit. But again, it is a categorization error to conclude that your experience validates that humans are all individually acting single intelligent agents. That's Descartes-era philosophy and the legacy that Dennett was railing against: "I think therefor I am" becomes "I think that I am a single agent, therefor I am such". You can compare "hunger" with "consciousness". Disease can make one feel not hungry, while medical investigation shows that the body is in desperate need of sustenance, or vice versa. Now is it an illusion/delusion to say: "I am hungry" when your body is already full? Maybe. But it becomes a mistake when you declare "I feel hungry, therefor my body needs more sustenance". That seemingly logical conclusion is the result of an illusion.

throwaway37585 8y ago

> When people imagine their consciousness/free will faculty as its own object, they sometimes see a theatre/stage, where they are in the audience and can observe the central point where consciousness ends up forming, or a deamon sitting in front of a bunch of levers and pulling one to make a conscious free will decision. I don't know anyone who sees consciousness this way, but perhaps we've met different sorts of people. Your second paragraph seems like a red herring. I don't see how any of this addresses the issue of conscious experience in the first place.

taurine 8y ago
It addresses the issue by telling you: Don't worry about consciousness in the first place. How your higher-level cognitive faculties see and categorize consciousness is proven to be an illusion. Eliminate this singular consciousness, this artificial construct, and any hard or soft problem disappears with it, and we can start defining conscious experience proper, instead of trying the impossible and give a solution to everyone's subjective (and possibly eternally conflicting) theatric view of consciousness. It is not always the goal (or possible) to create a complete model of conscious experience that is indistinguishable from reality, yet one may model the path of a hurricane without getting blown away by the wind.
- rosser 8y ago
  And this is why, no matter how many downvotes it gets (and believe me, I get them for it), I will continue to say Dennett's book should have been titled "Consciousness Explained Away." He dances around the thing pretty much everyone else means when they say "consciousness" or "the Hard Problem" and says of everything he can, "Welp, that's not the thing they're talking about!", except the thing we're talking about, which he more or less doesn't even acknowledge. "'Blue' means only Pantone-292. The sky isn't Pantone-292. Therefore, the sky isn't blue." Specious, isn't it?
  - taurine 8y ago
    I think it was because in a time where objectivism ruled, consciousness was still a highly subjective subject. "Consciousness Explained" was an effort to discover the other side of the coin. A subjectivist sees art, and reasons that the art object is fully formed inside his/her mind. An objectivist sees art, and reasons that the art object is entirely contained in the physical manifestation of it. Consciousness Explained was an attempt to show this objectivist view of consciousness. Later on he tried to marry both in heterophenomonology: "The sky seems blue to non-colorblind subjects, but objectively, in reality, it part of the human-visible spectrum of wave-length n.". This framework still gives legitimacy to the subjective experience of a colorblind person, without allowing this to change physical reality (for consciousness: allowing for personal experience and realization of it, without allowing this to change the neuroscience/ontology "i experience sequential thought, therefor thoughts must be sequential, not parallel.").

red75prime 8y ago

There are different kinds of illusions. The world we see around us is an illusion created by the brain's sensory processing. But this illusion is good enough to allow us to act in the world. We don't call it illusion, we just call it the world. If I think "I think", it is a vast simplification of processes going on in my brain, but it doesn't mean that there's no processes corresponding to my thinking "I think". Most of the time I act as a single intelligent agent, not as a bunch of subsystems with no unifying goals. So this "illusion of consciousness", while being simplification of brain processes, falls in the category of things we usually don't call illusions. And that's why Dennett's wording seems misleading to me.

taurine 8y ago
> But this illusion is good enough to allow us to act in the world. We don't call it illusion, we just call it the world. I like calling it a "world model". Optical illusions proof that this "world model" can be consistently tricked for a wide range of humans. Now the "illusion of consciousness" is a categorization error: You apply your "world model" to your own internal processes / consciousness. So far so good. But this does not give you the right to claim that consciousness is your "world model" view of it. If it was, then so could people who took LSD and had their "world model" believe they could swim in the sky, claim to change reality/ontology/the world for all of us. The illusion is that your world model of consciousness does not equal consciousness in reality, as proven by science, despite how clearly it may appear to you (not that conscious experience itself is an illusion). > Most of the time I act as a single intelligent agent, not as a bunch of subsystems with no unifying goals. This is the illusion. To you it seems that you act as a single intelligent agent, unaware of the thousands of majority votes by your senses/neurons that lead up to that point. Both your view as a single acting agent and this illusion are still legit. But again, it is a categorization error to conclude that your experience validates that humans are all individually acting single intelligent agents. That's Descartes-era philosophy and the legacy that Dennett was railing against: "I think therefor I am" becomes "I think that I am a single agent, therefor I am such". You can compare "hunger" with "consciousness". Disease can make one feel not hungry, while medical investigation shows that the body is in desperate need of sustenance, or vice versa. Now is it an illusion/delusion to say: "I am hungry" when your body is already full? Maybe. But it becomes a mistake when you declare "I feel hungry, therefor my body needs more sustenance". That seemingly logical conclusion is the result of an illusion.