Consciousness: Dennett says it is an illusion (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, September 26, 2019, 20:30 (1674 days ago) @ David Turell

An essay by a Dennett follower:

https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-your-consciousness-is-an-illusion-created-by-your-brain?...

"Neuroscientists are beginning to understand the brain processes underlying all this. To put it simply, light reflected from the apple stimulates light-sensitive cells in the retina, sending trains of electrochemical impulses along the optic nerve to the lateral geniculate nucleus and then on to the visual cortex at the back of the brain. Here these signals trigger activity in hierarchically organised groups of cells specialised for the detection of increasingly complex features (edges, colours, motion, faces and so on). When you attend to what you are seeing, this visual information is ‘globally broadcast’ to mental systems involved in memory, reasoning, emotion and decision making, generating the host of effects mentioned. This process of global broadcast is called access consciousness, since it makes sensory information accessible to the rest of the mind, and thus to ‘you’ – the person constituted by these embodied mental systems. Again, I don’t deny the reality of consciousness in this sense.

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"Here you might want to object (rightly, I think) that these sensory qualities don’t seem to be features of our experiences but of the things we experience. When you attend to the apple, the red quality you experience seems to be a feature of the apple, which causes the reactions in you. (You believe the apple is red because it looks red.) Similarly, the sound seems to be in the air, the taste in the wine, the pain in your toe, and so on. But it is generally agreed that this can’t be right. For science tells us that objects don’t have such qualitative properties, just complex physical ones of the sort described by physics and chemistry. The atoms that make up the skin of the apple aren’t red. Considered as properties of external things, colours are light-reflective surface features, sounds are vibrations in the air, tastes and smells are chemical compounds, and the pain in your toe is cell damage. It seems, then, that the qualities of colour, sound, pain and so on exist only in our minds, as properties of our experiences. Philosophers refer to these subjective qualities of experience as ‘qualia’ or ‘phenomenal properties’, and they say that creatures whose experiences have them are phenomenally conscious.

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"For it is not only illusionists who must address this problem. The notion of mental representation is a central one in modern cognitive science, and explaining how the brain represents things is a task on which all sides are engaged. Indeed, even realists about phenomenal consciousness must explain how we mentally represent phenomenal properties, if they are to account for the fact that we think and talk about them. There is a challenge here for illusionism but not an objection.

"Finally, who is the subject of this illusion? Doesn’t illusionism presuppose a conscious subject who experiences the illusion? My answer is that the subject is the person as a whole, the autonomous evolved organism composed of interacting biological subsystems. ‘We’ are aware of something if information about it reaches enough of our neural subsystems for us to be able to think and act flexibly with respect to it – to use it, remember it, tell others about it and so on. Think of a large organisation composed of many departments, each responsible for one function but sharing information with each other. If enough departments possess and use a certain piece of information, then the organisation as a whole can be said to be aware of it. The same goes for biological organisms such as us. If enough mental systems receive and use representations of a certain property, then the organism itself can be said to be aware of the property. And if the representations are illusory, then the organism is under an illusion. It is tempting to suppose that there is a boss system, a self, to which all other mental systems report, and that we are aware of something only if the boss system gets to know about it. But I would argue that this boss system is itself an illusion. That is another story, however.

"The subjective world of phenomenal consciousness is a fiction written by our brains in order to help us track the impact that the world makes on us. To call it a fiction is not to disparage it. Fictions can be wonderful, life-enhancing things that reveal deep truths about the world and can be more compelling than reality. Unlike Neo in The Matrix, you shouldn’t want to escape this fictional world; it’s a benign one, designed by evolutionary processes to help you thrive. But you shouldn’t mistake it for reality either."

Comment: Of course what the brain presents is a neurological representation of the world out there, but it obviously is a realistic presentation or I couldn't be typing these words. Dennett and the author seem upset about this, but is the best our evolved brain can do. We still have no source of our self-awareness but we all experience it.