Dennett vs. Searle

John Searle's sprightly May TED talk is entertaining and, in its main message-- consciousness is a biological phenomenon-- indisputable.



But Searle's continuing bout with Dan Dennett is even more entertaining.

John Searle and I have a deep disagreement about how to study the mind. For Searle, it is all really quite simple. There are these bedrock, time-tested intuitions we all have about consciousness, and any theory that challenges them is just preposterous. I, on the contrary, think that the persistent problem of consciousness is going to remain a mystery until we find some such dead obvious intuition and show that, in spite of first appearances, it is false! One of us is dead wrong, and the stakes are high. Searle sees my position as “a form of intellectual pathology”; no one should be surprised to learn that the feeling is mutual...[NYRB, Aug.15, 2013]

Here we are in the goldfish bowl

Annie Dillard's descriptions of collective self-consciousness are unmatched. When we're truly awake we know we're in a "goldfish bowl" of mutual shared awareness. Will we waste this opportunity, while the lights are on, or use it well? That's also the challenge of the classroom.

I am sitting here looking at a goldfish bowl and busting my brain. Ich kann nicht anders. I am sitting here, you are sitting there... Here we are...

Damasio

Antonio Damasio (Descartes' Error, Looking for Spinoza) has a new book, Self Comes to Mind. He talked about in on SciFri the other day.

I like what he says about creativity and consciousness:

Without consciousness--that is, a mind endowed with subjectivity--you would have no way of knowing that you exist, let alone know who you are and what you think. Had subjectivity not begun, even if very modestly at first, in living creatures far simpler than we are, memory and reasoning are not likely to have expanded in the prodigious way they did, and the evolutionary road for language and the elaborate human version of consciousness we now possess would not have been paved. Creativity would not have flourished. There would have been no song, no painting, no literature. Love would never have been love, just sex. Friendship would have been mere cooperative convenience...

I think he's been reading some James. And maybe Lanier. He said some gracious and charitable things on the radio about philosophers, and about how he doesn't think neuroscientists can figure it all out by themselves.

Good. Many minds are better than one.

Conscious planning

Dan Dennett once said something pregnant with meaningful implication, and I'm still not sure if it complements or squeezes his view of consciousness as some sort of chimera:

"One thing that does make us unique as a species is that for the last five or ten thousand years we have been the beneficiaries of conscious planning (my emph.) by our parents and their parents and the cultures in which we've resided. Today we are actively concerning ourselves with what the world is going to be like in the future. We have strong beliefs about this. They play a role in what Homo sapiens is going to be like a thousand years from now."

If you're in favor of planning, aren't you tacitly also acknowledging the reality of consciousness as something more (and less) than brain activity? But what? Can we even hope to say?

The quote, by the way, comes from a remarkable filmed roundtable discussion several years ago that included Dennett, the late Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, Stephen Toulmin, Freeman Dyson, and Rupert Sheldrake, also published in book form as A Glorious Accident. It's hard to find on disk or online, but the separate Dyson interview has turned up (with German subtitles) on YouTube.

Deepak

It's a good day for a domestic provocation.

With "spirituality" like this, who needs magic?