muflax65ngodyewp.onion/src/reflections/con_exp.pdc

% Consciousness Explained

This is a little series of thoughts on the book "Consciousness Explained" by
Daniel Dennett. I was having a lot of problems the first time through and gave
up in a rage, but enough people I respect recommend the book.  

So to find out if it's just me and my personal bias, I started to read it again,
giving Dennett more credit than before. I comment on most of the book, but might
skip parts I simply agree with and have nothing to say about.  I planned to have
at least a detailed criticism the second time through, but actually was
influenced so much by it that it quite literally changed my life and whole way
of thinking, trying to sort it all out and somehow refute Dennett.

Hallucinations
==============

The Brain in a Vat
------------------

They say you only get to make first impressions once and oh boy did Dennett make
some! The book starts off with a little introduction to the old "brain in the
vat" thought experiment. Just 5 pages in and I'm already raging about Dennett's
sloppiness and faulty reasoning.

Let's take it one mistake at a time: He begins by differentiating between
"possible in principle" and "possible in fact"[^det], saying that while an
incredibly (or even infinitely) powerful entity *could* keep your brain in a vat
and fool you into believing their illusion, any remotely plausible being
couldn't do so, therefore we can safely dismiss the argument. I'm going to
address the plausibility next, but first something about the argument itself.

If you are the prisoner of a powerful trickster, then you *can not tell* what
tools they have available. You don't know anything about their universe. They
main idea of running a convincing simulation is exactly that you do not give the
victim any external reference! You do not get to assume that "yesterday was
real", but "today looks different, maybe I was kidnapped by mad neurologists?".
*Any* information you have ever been given can be part of the simulation; that
is exactly *the point of running one*.

Maybe they have access to infinite energy? Their universe could very well be
infinite. You have no way of knowing how many resources they have because, by
definition, you can not see their universe. You can estimate a lower bound, but
that's about it. You can not even tell if *any* property of your simulation is
like the world the trickster is in. They can impose any logic, any amount of
resources (provided they have more) they want. Want to run the simulation as a
finite world? No problem. Impose fake concreteness, enforcing quantization of
any property? Makes the source code a whole lot easier! Let information travel
only at a limited speed to simplify the calculations? Sure. Because you don't
even have to run it in real time, you can enforce any speed you want, even a
faster one than you have in your world! The "real" world could look so utterly
alien to us that we would have to call it supernatural. And then all bets are
off. But Dennett doesn't even pretend to address this. In fact, it looks like he
isn't even aware of the literature.  This is a staple of gnostic teaching, at
least 3000 years old, and he gets it fundamentally wrong. 

The book certainly doesn't start on a good note. But how hard is it really to
lie to a human brain?  Imagine some human scientists wanted to pull this off,
could they do it? Well, sure. Maybe not today, but easily in the near future.
One great simplification they could employ, that Dennett never even mentions, is
taking senses away. If you have never experienced something, then you won't miss
it! If I take a fresh brain without memories and never provide it with visual
feedback, then it won't develop vision and never miss it. The necessary
complexity of the simulation has just gone down a lot. We know that blind people
are just as consciousness as the rest of us and I don't think Dennett would dare
argue against it, so why doesn't he address this?  Nonetheless, there is a limit
here, as demonstrated by Helen Keller. If you cut away too many senses, no
consciousness will develop. But we don't need movement, we don't need vision and
we don't need pain. Sound and speech, plus a few easy parts like smell, should
be enough. We could also add touch as long as we limit movement. The human brain
is also quite flexible and will adapt to new senses, like magnetism, as long as
we can input it.  Some body hackers have achieved neat things in that regard.
Even better, you can do this even after the person has experienced a "real"
world, as long as you modify their memories as well. There are plenty of
documented cases of people losing parts of their brain and not noting it. Losing
a whole direction, like "left", is not that unusual for a stroke victim. They
don't notice at all that they don't see anything to their left, the very concept
is gone.  Ask them to get dressed and they only put on one sock. So if vision is
too complex for you, just cut it all out. Once technology has improved, you can
add it back in again. To lie convincingly, we really only need to be consistent.
If movement and touch is only binary (I touch you or not; you push or not), then
the brain will think of it as normal. 

Furthermore, we already have brains in vats!  There are already complete
simulations of neurons. Some primitive animal brains (worms, mostly) have
already been simulated! As of 2010, the best we can do are small parts of a
rat's brain, but in less than 30 years, we will be able to do human brain's as
well. So his claim of this being "beyond human technology now and probably
forever" is utterly ridiculous. 

Strong Hallucinations
---------------------

Because brains in a vat are impossible in fact, we have a problem with strong
hallucinations, he continues. He defines a strong hallucination as 

> a hallucination of an apparently concrete and persisting three-dimensional
> object in the real world - as contrasted by flashes, geometric distortions,
> auras, afterimages, fleeting phantom-limb experiences, and other anomalous
> sensations.  A strong hallucination would be, say, a ghost that talked back,
> that permitted you to touch it, that resisted with a sense of solidity, that
> cast a shadow, that was visible from any angle so that you might walk around
> it and see what its back looked like

My first reactions to this was: "I *had* such hallucinations!  *Multiple
times*!" But he concludes that they must be impossible, as the brain is clearly
not powerful enough to create them. This puzzled me, to say the least. I can
understand him here, but my own experience seems to contradict this. In fact,
because my hallucinations were so convincing, I was often reluctant to call them
hallucinations at all. They were the primary reason why I was a gnostic theist.
If I talked to a god, saw it, touched it, had it transform the whole world and
so on, how could I possibly have hallucinated that? 

Before I address this, a little side note. I didn't notice it at first,
especially when reading "Breaking the Spell" (a more sensible, but too careful
book), but Dennett mentions Carlos Castaneda as an example of someone describing
such strong hallucinations and how that fact "suggested to scientists that the
book, in spite of having been a successful Ph.D. thesis in anthropology at UCLA,
was fiction, not fact.". And then it dawned on me: Dennett is an **exoteric**
thinker. Let me explain what I mean by this. The terms *esoteric* and
*exoteric*, in this context, refer to where knowledge comes from: esoteric
knowledge is derived from within oneself, while exoteric knowledge is drawn from
the outside world. The perceived duality is false, but this is irrelevant. What
I mean when I say that Dennett is exoteric is that he looks at consciousness as
an outside phenomenon, something you approach like an anthropologist, taking
notes of other people's behaviour and so on. This approach is utterly alien to
me. I have always favored the esoteric approach, in which you think of
consciousness (and related phenomena) as something that can only ever be
addressed in your own mind. The insights of any other person are, ultimately,
useless to you. This is similar to the difference between orthodox religions,
that value history, authority and literalism (You can only learn about God from
his Chosen.), and gnostic religions, that value personal revelations and
experiences (You can only learn about God yourself.). The consequence of this
difference is that Dennett seems to me so completely inexperienced about the
topic of consciousness. As far as I can tell, he never took any drugs, never
meditated, never learned any spiritual teaching or anything like this. How could
anyone *not* do this? I would never trust a chemist that never tried to build a
bomb, nor would I ever trust an engineer that didn't took apart a complex
machine (like their microwave or car engine) for fun (and to see if they could
put it back together again). Those would be the most natural first impulses for
anyone remotely interested in the fields (and not just doing it for the profit),
and they would be valuable first insights and opportunities to learn essential
skills (like, "don't get burned" for all three fields I mentioned). For example,
Susan Blackmore has extensive drug and meditation experiences, as has Sam Harris
and almost everyone else I know that is interested in some aspect of their own
mind. I find it really hard to imagine the mindset of a person that wants to
understand minds, yet doesn't start hacking their own one right away. The term
"ivory tower academic" never seemed more appropriate. 

But back to the book itself. As I mentioned, I was still, at least partially,
convinced I had experienced strong hallucinations before. So is Dennett's
conclusion just bullshit? Well, no. He goes on to explain how they actually
might come about, and provides a great analogy in the form of a party game
called "Psychoanalysis":

> In this game one person, the dupe, is told that while he is out of the room,
> one member of the assembled party will be called upon to relate a recent
> dream. This will give everybody else in the room the story line of that dream
> so that when the dupe returns to the room and begins questioning the assembled
> party, the dreamer's identity will be hidden in the crowd of responders. The
> dupe's job is to ask yes/no questions of the assembled group until he has
> figured out the dream narrative to a suitable degree of detail, at which point
> the dupe is to psychoanalyze the dreamer, and use the analysis to identify him
> or her. Once the dupe is out of the room, the host explains to the rest of the
> party that no one is to relate a dream, that the party is to answer the dupe's
> questions according to the following simple rule: if the last letter of the
> last word of the question is in the first half of the alphabet, the questions
> is to be answered in the affirmative, and all other questions are to be
> answered in the negative, with one proviso: a non-contradiction override rule
> to the effect that later questions are not to be given answers that contradict
> earlier answers. For example: Q: Is the dream about a girl? A: Yes. but if
> later our forgetful dupe asks Q: Are there any female characters in it? A: Yes
> [in spite of the final t, applying the noncontradiction override] When the
> dupe returns to the room and begins questioning, he gets a more or less
> random, or at any rate arbitrary, series of yeses and noes in response. The
> results are often entertaining.  Sometimes theprocess terminates swiftly in
> absurdity, as one can see at a glance by supposing the initial question asked
> were "Is the story line of the dream word-for-word identical to the story line
> of War and Peace?" or, alternatively, "Are there any animate beings in it?" A
> more usual outcome is for a bizarre and often obscene story of ludicrous
> misadventure to unfold, to the amusement of all. When the dupe eventually
> decides that the dreamer — whoever he or she is — must be a very sick and
> troubled individual, the assembled party gleefully retorts that the dupe
> himself is the author of the "dream."

This is, in a way, very close to how some parts of the human brain actually
work. Most processing doesn't start with the facts and derives a hypothesis that
it then tests (as science should work), but rather is overeager to find
patterns. Instead, you get a face recognition system that is totally convinced
that this is a face, no doubt about that! Oh, it was just some toast, oh well.
But it totally look like a face! Like the Virgin Mary, even! You just need to
slightly disorient this part, or feed it random noise, and it will see faces
everywhere, in the walls, the trees, your hand, everything. Or nowhere, of
course, depending on the exact disturbance. And I began to think, if you just
disturb a few crucial areas involved in parsing important objects (like faces,
intentions, geometric patterns and so on), and this isn't particularly hard, you
really only need to cut off the regular input (as when sleeping), then the
narrative parts of the brain are in quite a tricky situation. Their job is to
make sense of all that, rationalizing both the outside world and your own
behaviour.  This is crucial in social situations; you really wanna figure out
fast who is plotting against you and whom you can trust. In fact, it is so
useful, that even quite a bit of false positives isn't so bad. Some paranoia or
thinking your PC hates you isn't so bad and can even help you analyze situations
(like thinking that "the fire wants to eat up all the oxygen"). Dennett calls
this particular analysis the _intentional stance_. Now, if the narrator is only
given (pseudo-)random noise, it will impose any story it thinks is most natural,
i.e. most of the time other human(oid)s, recent emotions and so on. This is
exactly how dreams work and, in fact, most drug-induced hallucinations as well.
The exact distortion and resulting flexibility in making up a good story depends
on the drug, of course, and is quite interesting in itself. 

But does this really explain my own strong hallucinations? I was reluctant to
accept this at first, but now have to agree with Dennett here.  Thinking back,
and based on the most recent experiments, I am forced to concede this point. I
never met an agent, or phenomenon at all, that was able to act against my own
will. James Kent describes this on [tripzine]:

> However, the more I experimented with DMT the more I found that the "elves"
> were merely machinations of my own mind. While under the influence I found I
> could think them into existence, and then think them right out of existence
> simply by willing it so. Sometimes I could not produce elves, and my mind
> would wander through all sorts of magnificent and amazing creations, but the
> times that I did see elves I tried very hard to press them into giving up some
> non-transient feature that would confirm at least a rudimentary "autonomous
> existence" beyond my own imagination. Of course, I could not. Whenever I tried
> to pull any information out of the entities regarding themselves, the data
> that was given up was always relevant only to me. The elves could not give me
> any piece of data I did not already know, nor could their existence be
> sustained under any kind of prolonged scrutiny. Like a dream, once you realize
> you are dreaming you are actually slipping into wakefulness and the dream
> fades. So it is with the elves as well.  When you try to shine a light of
> reason on them they dissolve like shadows.

And so I gave up on believing in them, as reality, as Philip K.  Dick said, "is
that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". One last thought
one the topic, though: Dennett contradicts himself here. If it is so relatively
easy to lie to the brain, to convince it to see patterns that aren't there - and
he even provides a mechanism: don't lie to the senses, lie to the interpreting
part - how can he still dismiss the brain in the vat so easily? He has just
described, in detail, how you would go about setting up a relatively easy
simulation! It will become clear later that Dennett has thought of this, but at
first, his argument is very inconsistent and sloppy.

Imagine 
=======

Dennett begins chapter 2 with a little justification, almost an apology. "If the
concept of consciousness were to 'fall to science', what would happen to our
sense of moral agency and free will?" Personally, I think the whole sentiment is
silly, but then I've been in contact with non-dualistic ideas since I was a
child, so I tend to underestimate the confusion an Abrahamic influence in
upbringing can cause. I still wonder why people care so much about free will,
but Dennett is right both in anticipating the response and in disarming it. Even
experts in cognitive science often believe in dualistic concepts, like
Descartes' mind vs. matter, or a more toned down version Dennett calls the
"Cartesian theatre", i.e. the idea that somewhere in their brain there is a
central place where consciousness happens, a seat of the "I", if you will. It is
unfortunate that we still have to deal with this (even though it has been
dismantled by Greek, Indian and many other thinkers for at least 2000 years),
but the illusion is still powerful and has to be addressed. 

I also want to add that Dennett's point here (and later on, when he goes into
the details) is that there is no one central point _where consciousness
happens_, not that the brain is entirely decentral. Recent research hints at the
fact that visual processing may actually have a central HQ, but the important
thing is that not _all_ final processing happens there. Some high level
functionality may have a center here or there, but they are all separate and
provide no basis for a _unity of consciousness_[^unity] as it is naively
perceived.

But let's continue with more meaty stuff. Dennett outlines the following rules
for his approach of explaining consciousness:

> (1) *No Wonder Tissue allowed.* I will try to explain every puzzling feature of
> human consciousness within the framework of contemporary physical science; at
> no point will I make an appeal to inexplicable or unknown forces, substances,
> or organic powers. In other words, I intend to see what can be done within the
> conservative limits of standard science, saving a call for a revolution in
> materialism as a last resort. 
>
> (2) *No feigning anesthesia.* It has been said of behaviorists that they feign
> anesthesia — they pretend they don't have the experiences we know darn well
> they share with us. If I wish to deny the existence of some controversial
> feature of consciousness, the burden falls on me to show that it is somehow
> illusory. 
>
> (3) *No nitpicking about empirical details.* I will try to get all the
> scientific facts right, insofar as they are known today, but there is abundant
> controversy about just which exciting advances will stand the test of time. If
> I were to restrict myself to "facts that have made it into the textbooks," I
> would be unable to avail myself of some of the most eye-opening recent
> discoveries (if that is what they are).  And I would still end up unwittingly
> purveying some falsehoods, if recent history is any guide. [...]

I find (2) particularly funny, given that I have criticized him for this very
thing before. But then, he really might not have had these kind of experiences
he dismisses so easily. In fact, there seems to be a tremendous difference
between people how receptive their brain is to religious experiences. Actual
experiences, like visions, profound meaning or higher (sometimes called _pure_)
consciousness are rare (and independent of religions - they just provide a
common framework). It is therefore not surprising that the vast majority of
scientists and philosophers simply doesn't know what the few people that had
those mystic experiences are talking about, leading to much rationalization and
dismissal as "metaphors" or "confabulation". Luckily, this is slowly changing,
and I do have the suspicion that Dennett himself is becoming more aware of this.
Work on Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, for example, has demonstrated such experiences
as real and very challenging to our normal constructions of reality. Our brain
is far stranger and less organized than Dennett portraits it here.

The Garden of Arcane Delights
-----------------------------

Dennet then provides a "phenomenological garden", i.e. a wide catalogue of
experiences that are considered as "part" of the mind, like vision, hunger or
fear. In this garden, he emphasizes vision the most and among his examples, he
demonstrates just this large variety among humans how and when mental images
appear. Personally, I found several of his examples to be entirely non-visual,
like:

> For instance, it's hard to imagine how anyone could get some jokes without the
> help of mental imagery. Two friends are sitting in a bar drinking; one turns
> to the other and says, "Bud, I think you've had enough — your face is getting
> all blurry!" Now didn't you use an image or fleeting diagram of some sort to
> picture the mistake the speaker was making?

I didn't. Humor, or stories in general, tend to be non-visual for
me. They happen "as language", not "as vision", if that makes any
sense. But for other experiences he doesn't emphasize the visual
component and I wonder, doesn't he have one there? He talks a lot
about music and tones, but never mentions seeing music, which I do,
to a degree. Different tones *look* different to me, but they don't
*sound* very different - and least not in any meaningful way.[^vis]

[^vis]: You can even hack your brain here and change what part of it handles
what. You can shift, through practice (and not very much, really - a few weeks
may be enough to get very cool results) or drugs, your thoughts from being _an
inner voice_ to _pure text_ to _images_ and so on, and mix-and-match wildly. I
wrote some about that in my experiment on [speed reading].

Now, this in itself is not a problem - different parts of the brain doing the
parsing and so on, which (for a multitude of reasons) is very different among
individuals. I just find it weird that Dennett seems to assume that, in general,
we all work the same. Sure, there might be blind people that have fundamentally
different experiences, or someone might "prefer" mental diagrams to faces, but
if I "see" a person when I'm thinking of them, you do too, right? Well, no. The
differences can be profound, seemingly arbitrary and often go unnoticed for a
long time, maybe even for life. Just compare what mathematical statements and
explanations are "obvious and trivial" to some people and "confusing and
impossible to understand" to others upon first hearing them. Or go into the
Mythbusters forum and watch multiple people arguing that, of course!, X is true
or false, it's so obvious!, but everyone with a different argument, often all
contradicting each other. Personally, I don't even feel that it is justified to
assume that there even is such a thing as an "experience" in any non-individual
way. To say that there is such a thing as "a mental image of a face", in
general, instead of saying "that what John Doe calls a mental image of a face",
is very counter-intuitive and needs strong evidence to back it up. There
probably is a unique brain pattern, a specific firing of neurons perhaps, that
can be called a specific "experience", but those are unique to each brain. It
might be true that there are common patterns among people, at least in some
cases, but those have to be established - which Dennett simply doesn't do. The
very idea, that like we mean the same animal when we say "dog" (with small
caveats), we mean the same mental state when we say "think of a dog", is, to me,
almost absurd. There is some functional equivalence going on, sure, otherwise
communication would be impossible, but the exact implementations vary so much
that such a catalogue is doomed from the start. 

There is a common advice among users of strong hallucinogenic drugs: If you feel
something discomforting and can't figure out what it is - like you never had
this experience before? Almost certainly, you just have to pee.  "When in doubt,
go to the toilet." has so far never let me down, even though the same thing has
felt very different every time.

Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit
==============================

> I thought people were still going to throw the book across the room, but I
> didn't want to give them an excuse to throw the book across the room. I wanted
> them to feel a little bit bad about their throwing it across the room, maybe
> go and retrieve it and think well, hang on, yes, this irritated me but maybe I
> don't have the right to be irritated. 
> -Daniel Dennett, about [Breaking the Spell]

Although Dennett meant a different book, he still pretty much sums up how I feel
"Consciousness Explained". If I weren't reading PDFs and library books, I
literally would have thrown them against the wall. Multiple times, in fact. 

But the more I came to think about it and analyzed *why* I disagreed so much
with him, the more I realized that I really had very poor reasons to do so. No
matter how weak I thought his arguments were, I couldn't just reject them
without good arguments of my own, and I found out I didn't have any! 

I spent a good 4 months or so reading through lots of literature, trying to
develop a better understanding of the topic. Some of my earlier criticism I now
even reject.  No matter how much of his work I might find myself agreeing with
in the future, I already am glad I stuck with the book. Dennett raised all hell
in my brain and demonstrated to me quite clearly that I have been in heavy
rationalization mode for some time now. I will have to deconstruct and tear
apart a lot more until I reach internal consistency again, so let's go on! 

Multiple Drafts and Central Meaning
-----------------------------------

I'm not going to discuss Dennett's core hypothesis[^md] directly much, simply
because I don't see a useful way to *do* it. He successfully demonstrates a
basic model how one might explain the mind without postulation a central
organization, but the problem is that Dennett lacks so much precision in his
ideas that they are barely testable or useful, really. They are more of a first
justification to further pursuit the direction; a demonstration that there may
be something good to be found here. But in itself, it is rather empty.

One thing of note I find astonishing is the fact that Dennett presents the idea
as something radically new, something that needs strong justifications to be
even considered worth thinking about in the broadest of terms. The more I read
Western philosophy, and going by the reactions and statements of many
scientists, Dennett's attitude seems to be right; there really *is* widespread
skepticism and prejudice against this line of reasoning. Many people seem to
really *believe* there is one core self from which all meaning clearly descends,
following dedicated pathways, maybe even a strictly logical design like in a
Turing machine.

*How can that be?!* It completely surprises me. Such ideas go clearly against my
own experiences, clash with all of my introspections, have been widely and
thoroughly taking apart in all the traditions about consciousness  *I* seem to
be aware of, like from Buddhism, Christian and Gnostic mysticism, the whole drug
culture and so on. Really, most of the time the first things a mystic is gonna
tell you is that reality is not fundamental, but can be taken apart, that your
perceptions, emotions and thoughts are independent processes and not *you* and
that most common sense of self, the ego, can entirely disappear[^ego]. In fact,
the belief in the self is the very first thing on the way to nirvana a Buddhist
has to overcome. It can take many forms, but the basic experience of selfless
existence is one thing really *every* mystic or guru or saint has ever said or
written something about that I just thought it to be common knowledge. How could
you *not* know this? Did you also not know that the sun rises in the east?

But then, really, it shouldn't have surprised me. This mainstream ignorance was
exactly what drove me away from many scientists (but not science) and
intellectuals. Many times did I experience how a group of generally smart people
would read a text about or by someone who had a mystic experience, and it
doesn't matter whether the mystic content is just incidental or the only point,
and they would completely *miss it*. I didn't even believe this for years
because it is so obvious to me. They may read the Gospel of John, or talk about
the ideas of St. Augustine, or discuss the purpose of monasteries, and they
either never bring up the mystic content or dismiss it as poetic language. How
someone can read the Gospel of John as a *political* text is beyond me. I would
just listen, confused, how they'd discuss some of Jesus' teaching, say about the
kingdom of god for example, and bring forth all kinds of interpretations; that it
is a political vision (maybe a new state for the oppressed people, or an early
form of communism), or that it is cult rhetoric, or a moral teaching, or a
literary metaphor to drive home a certain point in his parables, and so on, all
taking seriously at least as *possible* interpretations which would now have to
be justified or criticised. It never seemed to occur to them at all that Jesus
*meant exactly what he said*, that he was really speaking of the kingdom of god,
something he had experienced himself and was now reporting on, not something he
had invented in any way or wanted to establish, even though he warns multiple
times explicitly that "though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do
not hear or understand". He, and I, took the experience of these things as a
given. *Of course* they exist, I had seen the kingdom, that's what got me
interested in learning more about it in the first place. Surely you all have,
too? Wait, no? You are puzzled what he could have possible meant? What?! 

Dennett harshly reminds me of this myopia, most profoundly demonstrated by
philosophers. They have never even seen the terrain, yet they try to draw a map
anyway. No wonder Dennett has to take apart so many ideas I didn't even consider
worth mentioning. I now feel sympathy for Dennett.



[^ego]: This is often called "ego death" in hallucinogen culture, but also being
    "born again" in Christian tradition and many other things. It is in my
    opinion the defining experience behind all mysticism and the first and most
    important requirement for any spiritual progress. The best indicator is
    probably the utter lack of a fear of death. It is basically the defining
    characteristic that mystics seem to be entirely without worry about death,
    or much worry in general.

[^md]: Dennett has written good another explanation of the multiple drafts model
    for [Scholarpedia] including some updates and corrections. I'm not going to
    reiterate it here.
    
[Scholarpedia]: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Multiple_drafts_model


[^unity]: Later on, Dennett writes, "To begin with, there is our personal,
    introspective appreciation of the 'unity of consciousness', which impresses
    on us the distinction between 'in here' and 'out there.'" To quote Robert
    Anton Wilson's great "Prometheus Rising", "What I see with my eyes closed
    and with my eyes open is the same stuff: brain circuitry.". This is shortly
    followed up with this exercise for the reader: "If all you know is your own
    brain programs operating, the whole universe you experience is inside your
    head.  Try to hold onto that model for at least an hour. Note how often you
    relapse into feeling the universe as *outside* you."
 
[^det]: As a little side note, he did the same thing when arguing that "free
    will" still exists in a deterministic world. Our world is not deterministic
    (it is, at best, probabilistic) and his re-definition of free will to
    something useful in practice because he doesn't want to face reality is very
    weak. 
    
    That's like arguing that, while impossible in principle, I can still measure
    the momentum of an atom with enough accuracy I would ever need in practice,
    therefore I can ignore all the implications of quantum physics. A weak
    excuse to save his own world view instead of facing the weirdness of
    reality. Also, [Aaron Swartz](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dennettdumb)
    has a nice and simple comment on that.

    Dennett even goes on to state that in a deterministic world, some events may
    actually be _uncaused_, i.e. you can not find a specific cause for them. He
    gives the following example:

    > Consider the sentence "The devaluation of the rupiah caused the Dow Jones
    > average to fall." We rightly treat such a declaration with suspicion; are
    > we really so sure that among nearby universes the Dow Jones fell _only_ in
    > those where the rupiah fell first? Do we even imagine that every universe
    > where the rupiah fell experienced a stock market sell-off? Might it not
    > have been a confluence of dozens of factors that jointly sufficed to send
    > the market tumbling but none of which by itself was essential? On some
    > days, perhaps, Wall Street's behavior has a ready explanation; yet at
    > least as often we suspect that no particular cause is at work.

    He also mentions World War 1 as a good example, and the following snippet: 

    > The bias in favor of not just looking but finding a cause is not idle, as
    > Matt Ridley notes in his discussion of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, for
    > which no cause has yet been found: "This offends our natural determinism,
    > in which diseases must have causes. Perhaps CJD just happens spontaneously
    > at the rate of about one case per million per year".

    I am reminded of Lem's Śledztwo (engl.: The Investigation), where exactly
    this happens: Mysteriously, several corpses seem to stand up and walk a bit
    until they finally collapse again. At first, it is thought that someone
    breaks into the morgue and arranges the corpses, but later on, a
    statistician comes up with an elaborate numerical theory that perfectly
    models all cases (and predicts further cases), but offers no explanation
    whatsoever, except that this kind of phenomenon just happens, according to
    certain rules.

    Dennett commits a (rather brutal) category error here. He confuses
    deterministic causes and narrative causes. He insists on defending that we
    are narratively free - we guss what possible world we are in and can choose
    our actions accordingly. But that is not what causal determinism is *about*.

[tripzine]: http://www.tripzine.com/listing.php?smlid=268 
[Breaking the Spell]: http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1001