Daniel Dennett is mired in the mud of consciousness
The New Atlantis recently published a very interesting article written by David Bentley Hart, a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. The article notes in the attribution that Hart is the author, most recently, of The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Eerdmans, 2017) and The New Testament: A Translation (Yale, 2017). He is also the author of the enjoyable Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies.
In the New Atlantis article entitled, "The Illusionist: Daniel Dennett’s latest book marks five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness," Hart evaluates the latest book by Daniel Dennett entitled From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. The article is gracious towards Dennett, but does an excellent job of pointing out some of the holes in Dennett's thinking.
For example, early in the article, Hart makes the following point:
After five decades, it would be astonishing if Dennett were to change direction now. But, by the same token, his project should over that time have acquired not only more complexity, but greater sophistication. And yet it has not. For instance, he still thinks it a solvent critique of Cartesianism to say that interactions between bodies and minds would violate the laws of physics. Apart from involving a particularly doctrinaire view of the causal closure of the physical (the positively Laplacian fantasy that all physical events constitute an inviolable continuum of purely physical causes), this argument clumsily assumes that such an interaction would constitute simply another mechanical exchange of energy in addition to material forces.Overall, the article is interesting to read, and I recommend it as a reasonable critique of Dennett's work.
In the end, Dennett’s approach has remained largely fixed. Rather than a sequence of careful logical arguments, his method remains, as ever, essentially fabulous: That is, he constructs a grand speculative narrative, comprising a disturbing number of sheer assertions, and an even more disturbing number of missing transitions between episodes. It is often quite a beguiling tale, but its power of persuasion lies in its sprawling relentlessness rather than its cogency.
Comments
Pix
Pix
Brain and consciousness go together like a wave and the energy that pushes the wave but they are not the same thing. They go together, consciousness supervenes upon brain structure but that does not make one reducible to the other.
So is it localised to the brain, or a specific part of the brain, or spread out across the cosmos?
How does it interact with the brain? How is it affected by hormones or alcohol? Why do we forget things?
When does it enter the body? Does it grow as we get older? Do chimps have it? How about cats or slugs? Or computers?
Obviously I will be following your methodology, given your knowledge of the philosophy of science, and will utterly reject your theory if it does not adddress each and every one of these questions properly.
Pix
You have no actual theory of what consciousness really is, just a dogmatic belief in the soul, and that consciousness must somehow be there. So of course you want to avoid the mire of a myriad questions because you have no clue.
Personally I think consciousness is an emergent feature of the brain. This is a coherent theory, and so I can offer answers to that myriad of questions.
So is it localised to the brain, or a specific part of the brain, or spread out across the cosmos? Local to the brain
How does it interact with the brain? It is a product of the brain
How is it affected by hormones or alcohol? As it is a product of the brain, it is directly affected by chemicals in the blood
Why do we forget things? Physical connections in the brain deteriorate over time
When does it enter the body? The brain grows during the later stages of pregnancy, and degrees of consciousness emerge over time
Does it grow as we get older? It develops during childhood
Do chimps have it? To a limited degree; they have complex brains but not as complex as ours
How about cats or slugs? Cats might, their brains are rather simpler, but slugs brains are too primitive
Or computers? No, but potentially they could
Pix
My prior answer stands. And the conversation is over.
there is no reason why BK needs a theory of consciousnesses,reductionist don't have presumption, it's not as though it'a scientific fact that consciousness reduces to brain function,
So basically this is like Intelligent Design. You know the current scientific reason is wrong - because it disagrees withyour faith - but you cannot offer a theory that better matches the evidence.
Pix
JH: there is no reason why BK needs a theory of consciousnesses,reductionist don't have presumption, it's not as though it'a scientific fact that consciousness reduces to brain function,
So basically this is like Intelligent Design.
what is? what is "this?" BK's understanding consciousness? Or the presumption reductionist don't have? Or our notion of scientific fact?
You know the current scientific reason is wrong - because it disagrees withyour faith - but you cannot offer a theory that better matches the evidence.
there is no current "scientific reason." Consciousness studies in still open to any disciplined es, It's rife with philosophers. There several models. Physical science don't like that but social science does. Physical science seeks one model but they have not yet established it.
The fundamental assumption is that we are our brains and this, I will argue presently, is not true. But this is not the only reason why neuroscience does not tell us what human beings “really” are: it does not even tell us how the brain works, how bits of the brain work, or (even if you accept the dubious assumption that human living could be parcelled up into a number of discrete functions) which bit of the brain is responsible for which function. The rationale for thinking of the kind – “This bit of the brain houses that bit of us...” – is mind-numbingly simplistic.[23]
Specifically Tallis has refernce to experiments where the brain is scanned while the subject does some activity and the differences are attributed to some structure in that part of the brain. Tallis is highly skeptical of this method.
Why is this fallacious? First, when it is stated that a particular part of the brain lights up in response to a particular stimulus, this is not the whole story. Much more of the brain is already active or lit up; all that can be observed is the additional activity associated with the stimulus. Minor changes noted diffusely are also overlooked. Secondly, the additional activity can be identified only by a process of averaging the results of subtractions after the stimulus has been given repeatedly: variations in the response to successive stimuli are ironed out. Finally, and most importantly, the experiments look at the response to very simple stimuli – for example, a picture of the face of a loved one compared with that of the face of one who is not loved. But, as I have pointed out elsewhere (for the benefit of Martians), romantic love is not like a response to a stimulus. It is not even a single enduring state, like being cold. It encompasses many things, including not feeling in love at that moment; hunger, indifference, delight; wanting to be kind, wanting to impress; worrying over the logistics of meetings; lust, awe, surprise; imagining conversations, events; speculating what the loved one is doing when one is not there; and so on. (The most sophisticated neural imaging, by the way, cannot even distinguish between physical pain and the pain of social rejection: they seem to “light up” the same areas!)[24]
[22] Raymond Tallis New Haumanist.org.uk Ideas for Godless People (blog—online researche) volume 124 Issue 6 (Nov/Dec 2009) URL: http://newhumanist.org.uk/2172/neurotrash visited 5/9/12
[23] ibid
[24] ibid
THIS THREAD I CLOSED