Dan Dennett on our consciousness

So I'm going to speak about a problem that I have and that's that I'm a philosopher.

When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say, "I'm a professor," their eyes glaze over. When I go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around, they ask me what field I'm in and I say, "Philosophy" -- their eyes glaze over. When I go to a philosopher's party and they ask me what I work on and I say, "Consciousness," their eyes don't glaze over - their lips curl into a snarl.

And I get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they think, "That's impossible! You can't explain consciousness." The very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain consciousness is just out of the question.

My late, lamented friend Bob Nozick, a fine philosopher, in one of his books, "Philosophical Explanations," is commenting on the ethos of philosophy -- the way philosophers go about their business. And he says, you know, "Philosophers love rational argument." And he says, "It seems as if the ideal argument for most philosophers is you give your audience the premises and then you give them the inferences and the conclusion, and if they don't accept the conclusion, they die. Their heads explode." The idea is to have an argument that is so powerful that it knocks out your opponents. But in fact that doesn't change people's minds at all.

It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness. We heard the other day that everybody's got a strong opinion about video games. They all have an idea for a video game, even if they're not experts. But they don't consider themselves experts on video games; they've just got strong opinions. I'm sure that people here who work on, say, climate change and global warming, or on the future of the Internet, encounter people who have very strong opinions about what's going to happen next. But they probably don't think of these opinions as expertise. They're just strongly held opinions. But with regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of us seems to think, "I am an expert. Simply by being conscious, I know all about this." And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the way consciousness is! No, you've got it all wrong." And they say this with an amazing confidence.

And so what I'm going to try to do today is to shake your confidence. Because I know the feeling -- I can feel it myself. I want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost minds -- that you are, yourselves, authoritative about your own consciousness. That's the order of the day here. Now, this nice picture shows a thought-balloon, a thought-bubble. I think everybody understands what that means. That's supposed to exhibit the stream of consciousness. This is my favorite picture of consciousness that's ever been done. It's a Saul Steinberg of course -- it was a New Yorker cover. And this fellow here is looking at the painting by Braque. That reminds him of the word baroque, barrack, bark, poodle, Suzanne R. -- he's off to the races. There's a wonderful stream of consciousness here and if you follow it along, you learn a lot about this man. What I particularly like about this picture, too, is that Steinberg has rendered the guy in this sort of pointillist style.

Which reminds us, as Rod Brooks was saying yesterday: what we are, what each of us is -- what you are, what I am -- is approximately 100 trillion little cellular robots. That's what we're made of. No other ingredients at all. We're just made of cells, about 100 trillion of them. Not a single one of those cells is conscious; not a single one of those cells knows who you are, or cares. Somehow, we have to explain how when you put together teams, armies, battalions of hundreds of millions of little robotic unconscious cells -- not so different really from a bacterium, each one of them -- the result is this. I mean, just look at it. The content -- there's color, there's ideas, there's memories, there's history. And somehow all that content of consciousness is accomplished by the busy activity of those hoards of neurons. How is that possible? Many people just think it isn't possible at all. They think, "No, there can't be any sort of naturalistic explanation of consciousness."

Дата добавления: 2015-10-29