Daniel Dennett on Privileged Access

[kelamuni]

Here, I'm not so much interested in Dennett's ideas on consciousness as I am in his ideas concerning privileged access.

 

I like the opening idea that there is the folk-belief among people that everyone is an expert on their own consciousness. After all, they have a direct relationship with their own consciousness, and this, thereby, makes them an expert on consciousness.

 

I'm not all that impressed with this talk -- not that it's not good -- but he really only presents one piece of evidence, and we are lead to the inference that we don't know our own minds only indirectly through that evidence. I was hoping for something a bit stronger.

 

I like though how he incorporates real time thought experiments into his work.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjbWr3ODbAo&feature=player_embedded

[kelamuni]

Blind Brain Theory of Consciousness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2weE7AMs45U

[Balder]

Kelaaaaa!  Nice to see you round these parts again.  This looks like an interesting essay - I love the opening aphorism...

[Ambo Suno]

Hi Kela - I enjoyed and slogged through this article, apparently grokking enough to feel exhilerated and frightened (his words), and I'll add varying somewhere between acting-as-if-clarity and as floundering plus. As usual.

There is so much here and I'd have to read it quite a lot more to more thoroughly understand it.

I like how this material resonates and interdigitates with much of the other neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, natural sciences, and more that gets placed here on IPS. I'm thinking at the moment of George Lakoff in particular.

Thanks for posting this.

"Habermas’ analogy of “a consciousness that hangs like a marionette from an inscrutable criss-cross of strings” (“The Language Game or Responsible Agency and the Problem of Free Will,” 24) seems more and more likely to be the case, even at the cost of our ability to make metacognitive sense of our ‘selves’ or our ‘projects.’ (Evolution, to put the point delicately, doesn’t give a flying fuck about our ability to ‘accurately theorize’). This is the point I keep hammering via BBT. Once deliberative theoretical metacognition has been overthrown, it’s anybody’s guess how the functions we attribute to ourselves and others will map across the occluded, orthogonal functions of our brain. And this simply means that the human in its totality stands exposed to the implacable indifference of science…

I think we should be frightened–and exhilarated.

Our capacity to cognize ourselves is an evolutionary shot in the neural dark. Could anyone have predicted that ‘we’ have no direct access to our beliefs and motives, that ‘we’ have to interpret ourselves the way we interpret others? Could anyone have predicted the seemingly endless list of biases discovered by cognitive psychology? Or that the ‘feeling of willing’ might simply be the way ‘we’ take ownership of our behaviour post hoc? Or that ‘moral reasoning’ is primarily a PR device? Or that our brains regularly rewrite our memories? Think, Hume, the philosopher-prophet, and his observation that Adam could never deduce that water drowns or fire burns short of worldly experience. What we do, like what we are, is a genuine empirical mystery simply because our experience of ourselves, like our experience of earth’s motionless centrality, is the product of scant and misleading information."



kelamuni said:

"The second is Metacognitive Incompetence, the growing body of evidence that overthrows our traditional and intuitive assumptions of self-transparency. Before the rise of cognitive science, philosophy could continue more or less numb to the pinch of the first and all but blind to the throttling possibility of the latter. Now however, we live in an age where massive, wholesale self-deception, no matter what logical absurdities it seems to generate, is a very real empirical possibility.
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/brassiers-divided-soul/

[Ambo Suno]

Pithy video on the topic, K.



kelamuni said:

Blind Brain Theory of Consciousness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2weE7AMs45U

[kelamuni]

Hello all,
I guess I posted this as I was looking up Ray Brassier and this chap, R.S. Bakker and his “blind brain theory of consciousness" came up. Bakker is a sci fi writer but he seems fairly well read in philosophy of mind. Bakker's whole tack reminded me of this discussion, and I thought I’d tie in Brassier and his current work on Sellars and the “scientific image” of man and the “manifest image” of man for good measure.
Still thinking about this stuff. Was recently reading Marcus Aurelius and thinking about his “view from above,” and how it fits in with the "scientific image” and with non-anthropomorphic/anthropocentric thinking.
Have recently been introduced to the writing of John Gray -- no, not the “Men are from Mars” dude -- the famous pessimist. Have been reading Straw Dogs, where he attacks teleological and progressivist thinking. He also a proponent of the Gaia hypothesis, at least he is in this book, so it’s a odd mix reading him. :-)

[kelamuni]

Yes, I can’t say that I grokked it all in one reading, but thought this “Blind Brain Theory” of consciousness might be of relevance to this thread.

Ambo Suno said:

Hi Kela - I enjoyed and slogged through this article, apparently grokking enough to feel exhilerated and frightened (his words), and I'll add varying somewhere between acting-as-if-clarity and as floundering plus. As usual.

[kelamuni]

Hi,
yes, I’m not sure the degree to which I agree with Bakker or even  Brassier, but I thought it all relevant to this thread. Yet another “theory of consciousness” to add grist for the mill.

Balder said:

Kelaaaaa!  Nice to see you round these parts again.  This looks like an interesting essay - I love the opening aphorism...