Sam's Reviews > Consciousness Explained

** spoiler alert ** The thing that really irritates me about philosophers is their lack of empirical evidence to support their theories; they just borrow whatever suits them from whatever discipline, with scant regard for critical evaluation of the data. Dennett makes suggestions that can be easily countered and writes in a way that he is convinced of the truth but yet has nothing to substantiate it; his theories are built on a lot of assumptions, contradict these and his approach withers away. His rudimentary discussion of psychology was offensive; particularly in reference to ethics in his stating of ‘subjects’ and of false problems with transcripts. Further to this Dennett presented the argument that when information perceived goes into the visual and auditory store ‘does it get rapidly forgotten or was it not even consciously experienced in the first place?’; clear evidence shows that these stores have limited capacity and duration and therefore all were consciously perceived but rapidly forgotten; again another useless argument.

I feel like I’ve been lied to. The book title promises ‘Consciousness Explained’ and for the first 200 pages there is no explanation at all; then there are only a few pages of vague description of Dennett’s ‘Multiple Drafts’ theory. Dennett spends an awful lot time trying to disprove the ‘Cartesian theatre’ as if he’s the only person wise enough to understand the fallacy of having a homunculus inside your mind; it begets the question who then is in their mind? I suppose I should have done my research and understood that this book was written in the early 90’s when perhaps people did believe in this and they needed some convincing. I felt I’d been transported back to reading Darwin’s Origin of Species where I was being circuitously persuaded about the truth of evolution; it was completely unnecessary. Dennett writes as if he’s telling a convoluted story and I felt like Dickens’ Gradgrind as I kept shouting in my head to myself ‘Facts, give me facts!’ It also amused me greatly that Dennett seemed to think that the concept of parallel processing was difficult to understand and accept, as oppose to serial processing. I don’t know if it’s because I did A-level computing, or if because modern psychology understands that the brain works like this, but I found myself aghast at his patronising. Is it really that difficult to imagine multiple processes happening in the brain at once and none having central authority in much the same way a computer time shares processing speed?

I think one issue Dennett has is that he has made the assumption that perception is consciousness; which I doubt to be true. He spends a lot of time discussing the processing of external stimuli and how this broaches consciousness yet he fails to acknowledge until his final pages that a blind person is still conscious, so vision has nothing to do with it. He seems to reject any idea of a preconscious or unconscious which is quite clear when he’s describing the dorsal and ventral streams and the research by Gazzaniga on split-brain patients; it is obvious from this that consciousness is in our left hemisphere and tied to language in some way and our preconscious is in our right hemisphere. He also neglects discussion of different speeds of processing within the brain and seems to think that they all occur at the same time and there are delays for things travelling at greater distances; perhaps one is just faster and they appear at the same time. Dennett is also misguided in his discussions on judgement as there has been recent empirical research that we intuit a lot of our decisions from bias due to our hardwiring before any evidence is actually logicised. It further amused me when Dennett proposes that our brain sizes increased so fast at the dawn of the Ice Age but yet neglects that the fossil records are incomplete; most human fossils have been located in hot countries, where there is no ice to preserve fossils until discovery, so therefore there were no fossils being made during the Ice Age that have subsequently been found; it could very likely have been a slow process. Dennett also made a statement that ‘the way a brain represents hunger must differ, physically, from how it represents thirst’ and I found myself questioning then why do we sometimes eat when we’re actually thirsty? He seems to believe our brain is a touch more sophisticated than I would give it credit for. At one point Dennett quotes Marx who stated that ‘Language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with others’ but yet this does not explain why feral children like ‘Genie’ did not develop language but was still conscious. Dennett suggests that people with schizophrenia when hearing voices are actually just hearing their own voice talking to them but not realising it is them, but I find this quite a naïve explanation as it fails to accommodate that there are often multiple voices of different genders. So overall he talks a lot of rubbish.

All that said, I did like the idea of parallel pandemoniums and that your brain is coming up with multiple streams of responses at once and the best fit is selected; perhaps I’m more aware of my brain working like this and so explains why I find it difficult at times to say the right thing as I’m somehow thinking of several at once. Yet Dennett rejects the idea of a ‘stream of consciousness’ and I believe that it could be feasible that consciousness is just the observation of processes in the brain which actually supports his idea of a feedback loop and translator between different coded inputs. A large problem with consciousness is that it is but a small part of a much larger operation and our brains do things all the time that we have no awareness of. ‘We’, whoever ‘we’ are, are just a grain of sand in a desert of intentions. I’d like to think I control myself and make rational decisions as much as possible but there is a deeper part of me that is in far greater control and conflict with ‘we’, with ‘I’ and with ‘me’. The only fascinating passage I read was about the self on page 416:

“But the strangest and most wonderful constructions in the whole animal world are the amazing, intricate constructions made by primate, Homo sapiens. Each normal individual of this species makes a self. Out of its brain it spins a web of words and deeds, and, like the other creatures, it doesn’t have to know what it is doing; it just does it. This web protects it, just like the snail’s shell, and provides it a livelihood, just like the spider’s web, and advances its prospects for sex, just like the bowerbird’s bower. Unlike the spider, an individual human doesn’t exude its web; more like a beaver, it works hard to gather materials out of which it builds its protective fortress. Like a bowerbird, it appropriates many found objects which happen to delight it – or its mate – including many that have been designed by others for other purposes.”

Yet there is no explanation of how we intuit a thought, where it comes from and how it starts, but yet we never know how anything starts; the Big Bang, a heartbeat for the first time, the very first gene. Odd that, isn’t it; we can’t explain how something occurs out of nothing and I don’t think looking at consciousness is ever really going to answer that existential question for us. Whilst this book was awful in the delivery of its nonsense it did create much opposition in my mind and so I was grateful for the stimulation it provided to think a bit deeper about a concept I don’t yet fully understand.