Your trillion-robot team is gathered together in a breathtakingly efficient regime that has no dictator but manages to keep itself organized to repel outsiders, banish the weak, enforce iron rules of discipline – and serve as the headquarters of one conscious self, one mind. These communities of cells are fantastic in the extreme, but your interests and values have almost nothing to do with the limited goals of the cells that compose you – fortunately.
Page 2
... and it has been tempted over the ages to imagine that these striking differences must be due to the special features of some extra thing – a soul – installed somehow in the bodily headquarters. Until fairly recently, this idea of a rather magical extra ingredient was the only candidate for an explanation of consciousness that even seemed to make sense.
Page 3
The same mismatch between means and ends haunts us today: Noam Chomsky, Thomas Nagel, and Collin McGinn (among others) have all surmised, or speculated, or claimed, that consciousness is beyond all human understanding, a mystery not a puzzle, to use Chomskey’s proposed distinction.
Page 5
Consciousness, from this optimistic point view [third-person perspective(?)], is indeed a wonderful thing, but not that wonderful – not too wonderful to be explained using the same concepts and perspectives that have worked elsewhere in biology.
Consciousness, from the perspective, is a relevantly recent fruit of the evolutionary algorithms that have given the planet such phenomena as immune systems, flight, and sight. In the first half of the century, many scientists and philosophers might have agreed with Leibniz about the mind, simply because the mind seemed to consist of phenomena utterly unlike the phenomena in the rest of biology.
Or so it must have seemed until something came along in midcentury to break the spell of Leibniz’s intuition pump. Computers. Computers are mind like in ways that no earlier artefacts were: they can control processes that perform tasks that call for discrimination, inference, memory, judgement, anticipation; they are generators of new knowledge, finders of new patterns – in poetry, astronomy and mathematics, for instance – that heretofore only humans beings could even hope to find.
Page 6
....they are [(computers)] mechanisms – brute, unmysterious mechanisms operating according to routinely well understood physical principals – that have many of the competences heretofore assigned only to minds.
What about artworks?
Can we harness these new powers of disciplined imagination to the task of climbing out of Leibnitz’s mill? The hope that we can is, for many of us, compelling – even inspiring. We are quite certain that a naturalistic, mechanistic explanation of consciousness is not just possible; it is fast becoming actual.
Page 7
We naturalists think that consciousness, like locomotion or predation, is something that comes in different varieties, with some shared functional properties, but many differences, owing to different evolutionary histories and circumstances. We have no use for fundamental laws in making these distinctions.
Page 16-17
Consciousness is often celebrated as a mystery beyond science, impenetrable from the outside, however intimately known to each of us from the inside. I think this tradition is not just a mistake, but a serious obstacle to ongoing scientific research that can explain consciousness, just as deeply and completely as it can explain other natural phenomena: metabolism, reproduction, continental drift, light, gravity, and so on.
Page 25
One of the tenets of the folk theory [of consciousness] that the Martians would soon discover is that a scientific theory of consciousness is widely held by Earthlings to be impossible. Part of the lore that they would pick up – just as we pick it up, in the course of our enculturation – is that consciousness is utterly private, inaccessible to outsiders, somehow at least partly incommunicable and uninvesticable by science – that is, by the very methods the Martians are using to explore our planet.
Page 27
My question is this: Is there any good reason to believe any of this? And my answer will be No, there is nothing about our consciousness that is inaccessible to the maybe metal-headed methods of the Martians. The third-person methods of the natural sciences suffice to investigate consciousness as completely as any phenomenon in nature can be investigated, without significant residue. What is the import of “significant” here? Simply this: If scientists were to study a single grain of sand, there would always be more that could be discovers about it, no matter how long they worked.
Page 29
In short, no good reasons have been advanced for the popular hypothesis that consciousness is, from the point of view of third-person science, a mystery in a way that other natural phenomena are not. Nor are there any good reasons for claiming that there is something significant that we know (or you know) by being consciousness that is utterly beyond the ken of the Martian scientists, however different they are from us.
We – nudge, nudge – know about our consciousness because we communicate about it all the time. In our everyday dealings with each other we presuppose a vast sharing of understanding in all our public representations of consciousness, and as we contribute to that common stockpile, our presupposion is apparently vindicated.
Page 30-31
In other phenomena, what needs to be bracketed is subjects’ manifestly false beliefs about what is present in their own experience. For instance, most people – “naive subjects” in the standard jargon – suppose that their colour vision extends all the way to the periphery of their visual fields, and they also suppose that their visual fields are approximately as detailed or fine-grained all the way out. They are astonished when it is demonstrated to them that they cannot identify a plating card – even though they can see it being wiggled at the edge of their visual fields. Motion detection extends well beyond colour vision in our visual fields, and this is just one of the incontestable facts that play havoc with the folk psychology of vision. What needs to be explained by a science of consciousness in this case is the etiology of a false belief.
Page 41
It seems too many people that consciousness is a mystery, the most wonderful magic show imaginable, an unending series of special effects that defy explanation. I think that they are mistaken: consciousness is a physical, biological phenomenon – like metabolism, or reproduction or self-repair – that is exquisitely ingenious in its operation, but not miraculous or even, in the end, mysterious.
Part of the problem explaining consciousness is that there are powerful forces acting to make us think that it is more marvellous than it actually is.
Isn’t it nicer if we are allowed to wallow in the magical mysteriousness of it?
Page 57
The mind plays tricks on us. The way the brain produces consciousness is quite magical. Those that insist that consciousness is terminally mysterious, for instance, are wont to wallow in the stunning inexplicitly of the effects known to us as the phenomenology of consciousness. And when one of these effects is explained, one can sometimes observe the same disappointment, the same resistance: to explain an effect is to diminish it.
Page 62
I don’t maintain, of course, that human consciousness doesn’t exist; I maintain that it is not what people often think it is. The insistence that consciousness must turn out to be something inexplicable, irreducible, transcendent sometimes rises to fever-pitch...
Page 71
Once we appreciate all the nonmysterious ways in which the brain can create benign “user-illusions” (Dennett 1991, pp. 309-314), we can begin to imagine how the brain creates consciousness.
This “I” you speak of is not some pearly something outside the physical world or something in addition to the tem of busy, unconscious robots whose activities compose you, and hence it should not be left out of the accounting.
Page 75
As the decade of the brain (declared by President Bush in 1990) comes to a close, we are beginning to discern how the human brain achieves consciousness.
Page 123
...consciousness, he [Baars in 1988] said, is accomplished by a “distributed society of specialists that is equipped with a working memory, called a global workspace, whose contents can be broadcast to the system as a whole”[p. 42]
Page 132
,,,We should be careful not to take the term “top-down” too literally. Since there is no single organizational summit to the brain, it means only that such attentional amplification is not just modulated “bottom-up” by features internal to the processing stream in which it rides, but also by sidewyas influences, from competitive, cooperative, collateral activities whose emergent net result is what we may lump together and call top-down influence. In an arena of opponent processes (as in a democracy) the “top” is distributed, not localized.
Page 133
NEW WORK WITH BRAIN AND EYES AND MOUTH etc.
Hurley (1998) makes a persuasive case for taking the Hard Question seriously in somewhat different terms: the Self is not to be located by subtraction, by peeling off the various layers of perceptual and motor “interface” between self and world. We must reject the traditional “sandwich” in which the self as isolated from the outside world by layers of “input” and “output”. On the contrary, the Self is large, concrete, and visible in the world, not just “distributed” in the brain but spread out into the world. Where we act and where we perceive in not funnelled through a bottleneck, physical or metaphysical, in spite of the utility of such notions as “point of view”. As she notes, the very content of perception can change, while keeping input constant, by changes in output (p. 289).
Page 139
If we set aside our philosophical doubts (settled or not) about consciousness as global fame or clout, we can explore in a relatively undistorted way the empirical questions regarding the mechanisms and pathways that are necessary, or just normal, for achieving this interesting functional status.
Page 139
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