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Dennett and Crick
Is Dennett's approach compatible with Crick's

Dennett and Crick

spok_vot
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Posted 07/26/07 - 05:51 AM: Subject: Dennett and Crick	#1
From Dennett, Consciousness Explained: It is always an open question whether any particular content thus discriminated will eventually appear as an element in conscious experience, and it is a confusion, as we shall see, to ask when it becomes conscious. These distributed content-dicriminations yield, over the course of time, something rather like a narrative stream or sequence, which can be thought of as subject to continual editing by many processes distributed around in the brain, and continuing indefinitely into the future. This stream of contents is only rather like a narrative because of its multiplicity; at any point in time there are multiple "drafts" of narrative fragments at various stages of editing in various places in the brain. From Dietrich, Introduction to Consciousness: The Crick hypothesis, as we might call it, is this: If a person is presented with a stimulus, a difference must exist for the following two conditions: (1) the subject is aware of it and (2) the subject is not aware of it. If Crick is correct that a difference exists in these two conditions, then how can Dennett be correct that it is always an open question whether the person is consciously aware of the stimulus or not? Does the assumption behind the "Crick hypothesis", that there is a difference between being consciously aware of something and not being consciously aware, contradict Dennetts multiple drafts proposal, that "conscious awareness" is a collection of post-hoc narratives subject to further revision? Would the existence of "neural correlates of consciousness" contradict the multiple drafts model and demonstrate the existence of a "cartesian theatre"?

Faustus
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Posted 07/26/07 - 02:00 PM:	#2
If Crick is a hyper-realist about this, then the two of them have a disagreement on some cases but not all. Consider the question of when a man becomes bald—is there an objective, non-arbitrary way to tell when the threshold has been crossed from non-bald to bald? Dennett is merely saying that there are cases of mental content that are on the border of consciousness in just this sense. spok vot wrote: Would the existence of "neural correlates of consciousness" contradict the multiple drafts model and demonstrate the existence of a "cartesian theatre"? Nope, not in the general way you’ve described them.

spok_vot
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Posted 07/27/07 - 04:38 AM:	#3
Is Dennett simply claiming that consciousness is a matter of degree? That mental contents vary in their degree of consciousness, with some occupying a point on the border where it is an open question whether they are in or out of consciousness? Or is the "multiple drafts" model something more than this? Is Dennet in fact suggesting that consciousness is not a single phenomenon (whether categorical or graded) but is instead composed of multiple narratives, which may disagree with and contradict each other? Is he also suggesting that these narratives are drafts, in the sense of being subject to revision? If the Crick hypothesis were correct that there is some difference between being consciously aware of some content and not being aware then how could this be reconciled with Dennett's claim that there are multiple narratives, some of which include this content as an element of awareness some of which do not? And if none of these narratives are definitive but still subject to revision, how can there exist a definitive difference between awareness and non-awareness?

spok_vot
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Posted 07/27/07 - 05:07 AM:	#4
What does Crick mean by "neural correlate of consciouness"? Is he simply talking about statistical correlation? Or is he talking about a deeper connection between neural activity and consciousness? From Crick, Astonishing Hypothesis: This does not mean that, in the fullness of time, it may not be possible to explian to you the neural correlate of your seeing red. In other words, we may be able to say that you perceive red if and only if certain neurons (and/or molecules) in your head behave in a certain way. From Crick, Astonishing Hypothesis: This is the background, then, against which we have to approach the problem of visual awareness: how to explain what we see in terms of of the activity of neurons. In other words, What is the "neural correlate" of visual awareness? Where are these "awareness neurons" - are they in a few places or all over the brain - and do they behave in any special way? In what way is the postulation of "awareness neurons" distinct from the postulation of a "cartesian theatre", ie a "finish line" defining a threshold for consciousness?

Faustus
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Posted 07/27/07 - 11:15 AM:	#5
spok_vot wrote: Is Dennett simply claiming that consciousness is a matter of degree? Yes. His new metaphor, sort tacked onto the Multiple Drafts Theory after he wrote Consciousness Explained, is that consciousness is like “fame in the brain” as opposed to “being known by the king”. The content of drafts with more fame will have more of an influence, leaving bigger traces in memory and behavior. Just as it is unproblematic to say that a man with no hair is bald, it is unproblematic to say that if someone can report a stimulus that they are quite obviously conscious of it. But experiments in cognitive science can produce situations where even the subject herself is not entirely confident whether she was aware of a stimulus, or situations where she will report never having seen something even though traces of the brain having recognized and processed the stimulus to a very high degree of sophistication can be observed. So any theory of consciousness has to deal with these cases, not just the easy and obvious ones. spok_vot wrote: Is Dennett in fact suggesting that consciousness is not a single phenomenon (whether categorical or graded) but is instead composed of multiple narratives, which may disagree with and contradict each other? Is he also suggesting that these narratives are drafts, in the sense of being subject to revision? Yes. spok_vot wrote: If the Crick hypothesis were correct that there is some difference between being consciously aware of some content and not being aware then how could this be reconciled with Dennett's claim that there are multiple narratives, some of which include this content as an element of awareness some of which do not? It depends on how much of a realist Crick is on this subject. If he thinks that it is absolutely the case that one is either fully conscious of something or not, and that there are no degrees, then the two views cannot be reconciled, at least on this point. From a Dennettian perspective, this would be like arguing that there is a fact of the matter about how many hairs on a man’s head have to be missing, an absolutely objective threshold when he becomes bald. I take it that no one would want to argue such a thing, but to be a realist in this sense about mental content strikes someone in Dennett’s camp as equally absurd. spok_vot wrote: In what way is the postulation of "awareness neurons" distinct from the postulation of a "cartesian theatre", ie a "finish line" defining a threshold for consciousness? It might be distinct, it might not be. I’d have to see how these speculated awareness neurons function in the context of a theory to see if the theory was an example of Cartesian materialism or not. Dennett has no problem with the idea of there being neural correlates of consciousness—and a good thing, seeing as we discover them all the time. It’s the role those correlates play in the larger theory that makes the difference.

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Posted 07/31/07 - 04:00 AM:	#6
Faustus wrote: Is Dennett simply claiming that consciousness is a matter of degree? Yes. I don't think you actually understand Dennett.

probeman
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Posted 07/31/07 - 12:18 PM:	#7
Actually Faustus is correct. Dennett would argue that even a thermostat has a vague, hand-waving sort of "consciousness", though obviously not even as interesting as the kind of "intentional" behavior (in a Dennettian sense) that a virus exhibits (which doesn't even have a brain!). This is because Dennett sees consciousness as a bottom up product of evolution, from simple replicating molecules. Dennett would say that the story of the origins of consciousness will be analogous to other stories from the evolution of biology, for example the origins of sex. Originally all was asexual reproduction and then slowly by some imaginable series of steps, some of these organisms evolved into organisms with gender and eventually into us. Dennett has said that the parallels between the evolution of sex and consciousness are intriguing: for example, there is almost nothing “sexy” (for humans at least) about the sex life of flowers, oysters and other simple forms of life, but as Dennett says, we recognize in these apparently “joyless routines of reproduction the foundations and principles of our much more exciting world of sex." In the same way, there is nothing especially "selfy" (as Dennett coins the term) about the primitive precursors of human consciousness, but they lay the foundations for our “particularly human innovations and complications.” Dennett suggests that our conscious minds are the result of successive evolutionary processes, piled on top of each other, each one successively much more powerful and complicated than it’s predecessor. As Dennett is fond of saying, there is no magic line that crosses over to consciousness unless you define consciousness as what normal, non-brain damaged adult humans exhibit. To make this point he invokes another thought experiment from evolution: A mammal’s mother is a mammal, yet the history of mammals is finite. The solution to the paradox is to recognize that the evolution of mammals which begins with reptiles and ends with mammals “can only be partitioned arbitrarily.” This is the same problem of trying to define the evolution/appearance of consciousness as a gradual process by using an arbitrary criteria. Paleontologists (as fond of cladistics as they are) will recognize that sometimes it becomes impossible to say if a particular species was more reptile-like or more mammal-like. Likewise there is a continuum of consciousness from simple stimulus and response mechanisms which are almost mechanical chemical "reactions" to the almost infinitely complex (by comparison) kind of self-aware consciousness we know and love. probeman
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TecnoTut
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Posted 07/31/07 - 01:12 PM:	#8
probeman wrote: Actually Faustus is correct. Dennett would argue that even a thermostat has a vague, hand-waving sort of "consciousness", though obviously not even as interesting as the kind of "intentional" behavior (in a Dennettian sense) that a virus exhibits (which doesn't even have a brain!). David Chalmers believes in the same thing. He believes consciousness is a fundamental property that resides on all things, uncluding thermostats. This is panpsychism, hands down. Interestingly enough, Chalmers uses this panpsychism to argue against a strict interpretation of QM that holds there is a wave-function collapse when consciousness enters the picture or makes a measurement of the electron. Since consciousness is ubiquitous, then there can be no Schrodinger cat thaat's both dead and alive before conscious measurement.
He that dies pays all debts - Shakespeare's Stephano from The Tempest Truth is its own measure - Spinoza, Ethics IIp43s Those who deny [Aristotle's] first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped. - Ibn Sina (Avicenna)

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Posted 07/31/07 - 02:48 PM:	#9
spok_vot wrote: I don't think you actually understand Dennett. Far from it—Probeman and myself are among your best Philosophy Forum resources for information about the guy. I’ve personally read virtually everything the man has written several times and devoured multiple analyses of his work by others. After I post this I’m going to bump an old (and still incomplete) thread devoted to discussing Consciousness Explained in detail. There you will see the chapter summaries Probeman and I wrote as a sort of Cliff notes for the book. Trust me—we went over each chapter sentence by sentence very carefully to produce those essays. If you like discussions that involve close reading of the text, you’ll like our chapter summaries (most of the participants, however, seemed to want to discuss anything but Dennett’s real words, hence the thread died a slow death). Anyway, what in the world do you think the point of Dennett’s Multiple circulating drafts was supposed to be if not an explanation of consciousness with no clear finish lines between conscious and non-conscious content? What in the world was supposed to be the point of the distinction he drew between Orwellian and Stalinesque readings of the evidence? How, for instance, do you account for passages like this (my emphasis): As "realists" about consciousness, we believe that there has to be something--some property K--that distinguishes conscious events from nonconscious events. Consider the following candidate for property K: a contentful event becomes conscious if and when it becomes part of a temporarily dominant activity in cerebral cortex (Kinsbourne, 1988, and in preparation). This is deliberately general and undetailed, and it lacks any suggestion of a threshold. How long must participation in this dominance last, and how intense or exclusive does this dominance need to be, for an element to be conscious? There is no suggestion of a principled answer. Such a definition of property K meets the minimal demands of "realism," but threatens the presumed distinction between Orwellian and Stalinesque revisions. Suppose some contentful element briefly flourishes in such a dominant pattern, but fades before leaving a salient, reportable trace on memory (a plausible example would be the representation of the first stimulus in a case of metacontrast). Would this support an Orwellian or a Stalinesque model? If the element participated for "long enough" it would be "in consciousness" even if it never was properly remembered (Orwell), but if it faded "too early" it would never quite make it into the privileged category, even if it left some traces in memory (Stalin). But how long is long enough? There is no way of saying. . .No discontinuity divides the cases in two. . . Suppose, then, that what makes some contentful brain events conscious is a property K that has a rather clearcut onset. On such a view, contentful events, like plants, have rather long histories; they are unconsciously sown, develop, briefly bloom (rather suddenly acquiring some salient property K), and then fade into longterm memory or oblivion (losing property K). A single contentful event, let us suppose, can have a temporal subpart that is conscious, marked by the onset and offset of property K. To identify the subset of conscious events, just identify property K and motivate its identification. In order for any such claim to be taken seriously, some reason(s) must be given for singling out this property K, whatever it is, as the mark of consciousness (and hence the time of onset of K as the time of onset of consciousness). It will not do just to announce without further explanation that when events acquire property K, unlike their unconscious kin, they glow in the dark, as it were. It is this independent motivation, we claim, that cannot be provided. --Escape from the Cartesian Theater, Dennett and Kinsbourne Technotut, thanks for that interesting tidbit about Chalmers. I knew about his panpsychism, but I didn’t know he connected it at all with QM.

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Posted 07/31/07 - 04:20 PM:	#10
TecnoTut wrote: David Chalmers believes in the same thing. He believes consciousness is a fundamental property that resides on all things, uncluding thermostats. This is panpsychism, hands down. Interestingly enough, Chalmers uses this panpsychism to argue against a strict interpretation of QM that holds there is a wave-function collapse when consciousness enters the picture or makes a measurement of the electron. Since consciousness is ubiquitous, then there can be no Schrodinger cat thaat's both dead and alive before conscious measurement. Yes, but I don't want Spok Vot to get the wrong impression... Spok Vot, Dennett and Chalmers might both describe thermostats as having the faintest imaginable whiff of consciousness, but that's as far it goes. Dennett would not agree with TecnoTut's second sentence because he does not attribute "fundamental properties" of consciousness to matter as the essentialist does. According to Dennett, the oxygen, carbon and hydrogen in our brains are indistinguishable from the atoms that comprise dirty ice. Just as the iron and copper atoms in metal ores are indistinguishable from the iron and copper atoms in the thermostat, yet they "know" how to respond to temperature changes in a useful way! Isn't it amazing? Dennett, the functionalist would say that what makes a thermostat respond, a virus virulent, a muscle contract or a brain think is nothing fundamentally intrinsic to the atoms in question. The difference to Dennett between a pile of metal, plastic and rubber and an functioning engine is "simply" the manner in which the atoms and the parts they make up are arranged. To Dennett the whole is greater than the sum of these parts and that (plus a lot of evolution by natural selection) is all we need to explain the behavior of living organisms and ultimately brains. I think Chalmers, Searle and Nagel would disagree more or less with this position because I suspect they want to believe that brains operate under different physical laws than the rest of the universe. As far as science can ascertain so far- they don't. But you can look at works by Penrose if you are interested in these QM claims.
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