Is Consciousness an Illusion?
Book Club Part II
Welcome to the second instalment of our book club.
Today we will be discussing Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett. I have been looking forward to reading this book for a long time. It is widely regarded as one of the foundational texts of modern physicalism and the philosophy of mind. In a sense, it is the Bible of contemporary physicalist philosophy. I therefore came to it with high expectations.
In this 500-page book, Dennett embarks on a rather ambitious journey. He not only wants to explain what consciousness is and how it can be accounted for by purely physical processes, but he also wants to do away with our more traditional understanding of the mind. No small task, and certainly not an easy book to write about. But I have done the work for you.
While this is obviously not a substitute for reading the book yourself, the aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive overview of the entire book. This is why it has become the longest and most time-intensive article I have written to date.
To achieve this, we will not only reconstruct the book’s central arguments step by step, but analyze and cross-examine them to see where they truly hold up (in my opinion).
From Cartesian materialism and the Multiple Drafts model to evolution, memes, virtual machines, user illusions, and philosophical zombies, this will cover the full structure of Dennett’s theory.
By the end of this analysis, we will (hopefully) be in a position to answer that question.
Against Cartesian Dualism
Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Surely we can be certain of our own conscious experience? But what exactly is this thing we are so sure of? Consciousness appears to be the last surviving mystery; the phenomenon that nobody has yet managed to explain. Yet, Dennett proposes that we can dissolve this mystery piece by piece, exposing the underlying confusion. So where does Dennett begin this journey? He starts by dismantling the idea of Cartesian dualism.
Cartesian Dualism is the idea that there are two separate and interacting processes, the physical world and the mental world.
This theory famously has one obvious problem: how does information perceived by the brain get transmitted on to the soul? This is the so called interaction problem. Even if we accept the existence of such a central mechanism — Descartes famously proposed a central transmission in the pineal gland — it is difficult to understand how transmission from a physical process to a conscious one could work. The same difficulty applies in the other direction. Since, on this view, mental states are not physical, they cannot be light or sound waves, nor any electrical or chemical signal. The question then becomes: how can they affect what happens in the brain? How do they affect physical processes? If these two categories are fundamentally different, then the idea of converting one into the other seems logically absurd.
Additionally, one fundamental principle of physics holds that any change in the trajectory of a physical entity requires an acceleration, and therefore an expenditure of energy. Where would this energy come from? It would require some extraordinary source floating, as it were, above our brains. This is precisely what the principle of conservation of energy seems to rule out.
These problems are rightly considered a fatal flaw of dualism. However, according to Dennett, a certain kind of mysterianism about consciousness seems to persist to this day.
This veil of ignorance seems to carve out a special exception for consciousness, placing it outside not only science, but also any coherent logical account. The interaction between the physical and the conscious becomes so opaque and confused that Dennett explicitly aims to avoid dualism at all costs.
“there is the lurking suspicion that the most attractive feature of mind stuff is its promise of being so mysterious that it keeps science at bay forever.”
Thus he concludes:
“Accepting dualism is giving up.”
Similar to caloric energy — the substance that people once believed heat was made of — or ether, the medium that was once thought to pervade space and carry light vibrations, Dennett believes that consciousness shall now be demystified and fully explained by science.
Now Dennett goes one step further, because he also argues that even many self-described materialists still quietly hold on to certain assumptions of Cartesian dualism. Although they would never invoke anything “mysteriously mental” in the course of their professional research, they make a more subtle mistake.
Much of cognitive science — and Dennett was writing in 1991, though his observation remains accurate today — tends to completely sidestep questions about conscious awareness by dividing brain processes into a central arena that is consciously aware of everything, and the peripheral, subordinate systems surrounding it. Thus even unconsciously, these researchers seem to posit some kind of centre where conscious thought takes place. This leads many scientists and theorists to underestimate just how much understanding they are deferring by assuming a kind of theatre in the brain where processes are displayed for an inner observer, a homunculus.
Many theorists, for instance, assume that information is first processed by the perceptual system and then passed through various brain regions until it is ultimately delivered to a central interpreter, which then issues decisions and directives.
Dennett firmly rejects this exact division between presumed subsystems, perception, vision, long-term memory, reasoning etc. and any such central seat of consciousness. This hidden place in the brain where everything supposedly comes together is, as Dennett writes, an “illusion.”
This point is crucial, because Dennett’s aim is to explain consciousness entirely through these subsystems and the processing that occurs between them, without any central theatre at all or stream of consciousness at the center!
Phenomenology and Feenoman
So how can we talk about consciousness? How can we go about analysing something so elusive? The method most commonly used is phenomenology. The term derives from Kant, who famously distinguished between phenomena, things as they appear to us, and noumena, things as they are in themselves. Phenomenology, which bridges the gap between the observation of experience and its theoretical explanation, emerged through Edmund Husserl as the primary method for analysing the content consciousness. The things as they appear in Kantian terms.
It refers to a technique of introspection in which the outer world, its implications, as well as our thoughts and internal processes, are suspended in particular acts of mind known as the epoché. The goal is to analyse these states of mind, yielding what are called the raw objects of conscious experience, or noemata. This for many philosophers is the basis of the study of consciousness.
Now, Dennett has a particular problem with phenomenology. His concern is that the things consciousness seems to be composed of are very different from how they are actually composed. There is, he argues, a significant gap between the seemings of experience and the actual processes underlying them. Importantly, the point is not that Dennett denies that experience seems a certain way, he does not deny the seemings themselves, but rather that phenomenology reveals real underlying states, as there are a lot mistakes we seem to be doing (some of which I will cover later). As he writes:
“(…) The pains and aromas and daydreams and mental images and flashes of anger and lust, the standard denizens of the phenom, those things are not what we once thought they were. They are really so different, in fact, that we have to find some new words for them.”
The point is that there are things in our phenomenology we need to explain, even if their true nature turns out to be something else entirely. We need to take a look at this “phenomenological garden” of sights, sounds, pains, and daydreams, as Dennett calls it. However, the way we go about this should not be purely based on the traditional first-person perspective as it is often inaccurate. Rather, we should adopt a strict third-person perspective, which he calls heterophenomenology.
To illustrate this, Dennett uses the example of Feenoman. Imagine a group of scientists who discover a tribe that devoutly believes in a hitherto unheard-of forest deity by that name. The scientists want to learn everything about this Feenoman, and so they adopt a stance of agnostic neutrality: they do not try to convert or question the existence of Feenoman; instead, they treat the natives’ descriptions of their god as reports to be systematised and catalogued. Over time, a construct emerges, “Feenoman the forest god,” complete with all his traits, habits, and so on.
The scientists analyse this fiction as a logical construct. By analysing behaviour and reports of inner experience in the same way, the inner world can be treated as what Dennett calls a “theorist’s fiction.” With this method, he argues, we can analyse exactly how things seem, while remaining neutral about what is actually happening in the brain.
“The general point is illustrated is this: facts about the world of a fiction are purely semantic level facts about that fiction; they are independent of the syntactic facts about the text (…) the subjects heterophenomological world will be a stable intersubjectively confirmable theoretical posit, having the same metaphysical status as say Sherlock Holmes’s London or the world according to Garp”
The Illusion
You might say that all of this makes sense, but in what exactly are we deceived? How can we be deceived into this seemingly “ineffable” inner stream of consciousness? How can it all just be complex information processing? These fundamental questions are the questions Dennett tries to answer in the steps that follow.
