Gee wrote:
Dennett is difficult for me to understand. I watched a video about his book, Consciousness Explained, where the speaker stated that if one follows all of the thinking in that book and applies it, then Google should be conscious. As far as we know, Google is not conscious.
Then consider that Dennett is a philosopher, not a scientist, but he has adopted science's definition of consciousness as conscious thought -- produced by a brain. But the philosophical definition of consciousness is awareness -- no actual thought or brain required. If you go to the on-line SEP (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) and look up consciousness, the first explanation and level of consciousness is sentience. All life is sentient, this is not disputed by anyone, but all life does not have a brain and thought. An example of this would be trees, as they have no brain, no thought, yet they are aware. So in studying cognitive science, Dennett is studying conscious thought, not consciousness. This is very misleading.
If Dennett argues that consciousness is illusion, then he is stating that it is different from matter which would make him a dualist -- which I am sure he would deny, as being a dualist is not popular at this time. But if you think about it, the only difference in stating that consciousness is illusion or stating that consciousness is souls and "God" is belief. One accepts the "illusion", the other does not, but it is still dualism.
I can not make up my mind if Dennett is a wannabe scientist or a wannabe philosopher. So, I can not say that I am pleased with him.
A lot of people are not pleased with Dennett, but this sayings nothing about the rightness or wrongness of this theory. I think he is difficult to understand because what he says is mostly counter intuitive, but again this has nothing to do with rightness or wrongness.
Yes, Dennett says consciousness is an illusion, but he is definitely not a dualist in making this claim. Dennett provides us with a classical materialist explanation for consciousness. By saying that consciousness is an illusion Dennett actually means there is no actual first person account of consciousness. Another way of saying this would be that the observer of our thoughts is just an illusion.
The basis for this explanation can be found here:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater
This is a very odd claim because it defies common sense, but interestingly enough this is were neuroscience is at the moment. That's another long story, but scientific experiments show that consciousness is actually dis-unified rather than unified in terms of a first person perspective. All of our sensory information does not go via spike trains to the neural seat of consciousness simply because there is no such place; consciousness is distributed throughout the brain in a somewhat random fashion.
The upshot of this is that "google" would be conscious if it were complex enough. At the moment it is not complex enough for consciousness to becomes an emergent property. In other words, consciousness will become an emergent property from complexity given enough time. Still another way of saying this would be that consciousness is just information and any talk of the hard problem of consciousness is just a unnecessary appendage to consciousness that attempts to explain the first person perspective.
According to Dennett's theory "google" could becomes conscious given enough time and complexity. Dennett is not a dualist because the "illusion" is not a division of consciousness.
