muflax65ngodyewp.onion/content_muflax/reflections/con_exp.mkd

title	date	techne	toc	episteme	disowned
Consciousness Explained	2010-05-13	:done	true	:discredited	true

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 recommended 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"¹, 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. The 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 they want (provided they have more). 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 realizing 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 not that foor of, maybe this century even, 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 take 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 impulse 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 consciousness² 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.³

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 about "Consciousness Explained". If I actually owned his book, I literally would have thrown it 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!

To get a better idea of the context Dennett operates in, I needed to first know all current models of consciousness, which lead to a tremendous amount of reading. I spent a good 4 months or so going through many books per week, trying to develop a better understanding of the topic, and mostly, to understand my own motivations and beliefs.

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 hypothesis⁴ 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 the sense of self, the ego, can entirely disappear⁵. 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?⁶

Pandaemonium

The crucial part in Dennett's draft, I think, is the chaotic and decentral nature of it. There isn't "one" mind or "one" meaner that does all the meaning, but many small, independent circuits, often only temporary units that realign themselves constantly, that cooperate, but also compete with each other for dominion in the brain. The ultimate results are just the winner of that battle and may shift or even disagree all the time.

This is an astonishing fact, without which no action of the brain can ever be properly understood. Still, it took Dennett, what?, 250 pages to get there? Really? This is my main criticism of the book; it just meanders on and on without getting its real message across. And the excuse that it takes that long to explain doesn't fly with me. The problem is not so much the message, not the science. Discordian literature, for example, has no problem explaining this point right away. Robert Anton Wilson even starts "Prometheus Rising" right with it because you can't understand anything without it. The first lesson in any mystic tradition was always breaking the self. As long as you believe in the unity of self, you can never learn, or in other words, as long as something looks like a black box to you, it will always be a black box to you. Only magic can help you then.

The problem really lies with the reader. Dennett understands how stubborn and difficult to modify the human mind is, so he sugarcoats his message as much as he can, trying to distract the reader long enough that he can get them to agree with each part step by step, until the difficult conclusion will seem obvious. This may even be a good tactic, but I feel utterly disgusted by it. You are effectively trying to upgrade a broken system not by fixing it, but by slowly, tenuously, working around its bugs. The proper solution would be to get rid of the system altogether! Destroy their superstitions, make all their assumptions crash and contradict each other, lead them into a state of pure chaos from which nothing old can ever emerge again! Operation Mindfuck!

But we don't do this. Buddhism understood this perfectly. First you must make the student enlightened, then you can teach them about their mind and meta-physics and so on. The Buddha never discussed any teaching with a beginner, simply because it would be impossible. Only after you have a prepared mind can you understand the problem properly. But nothing of this sort happens in modern science. No neuroscientist is required to learn meditation, or take courses on philosophy, or is given a spiritual challenge: "You are going to take DMT, and until you can properly deal with it, your research will be considered worthless. When you stop screaming and sobbing like a baby and can sit calmly through it, we'll read your paper. Otherwise, you haven't even seen the real mind, so what could you tell us about it?"⁷

And this shows, again and again. Because of this we get clusterfucks like the Beyond Belief conference, on which I can really only quote Scott Atran⁸:

I certainly don't see in this audience the slightest indication that people here are emotionally (or) intellectually equipped to deal with the facts of changing human knowledge in the context of unchanging human needs; (needs) that haven't changed much since the Pleistocene. And I don't see that there's any evidence that science is being used to try to understand the people you are trying to convince to join you.

So, for example, the statements we've heard here about Islam, in this audience, are worse than any comic book statements that I've heard about it and make the classic comic books look like the Encyclopedia Britannica. Statements about who the Jihadis are, who a suicide bomber is, what a religious experience is; except for one person, you haven't the slightest idea, you haven't produced one single fact, you haven't produced one single bit of knowledge, not a single bit. Every case provided here is an N of 1, our own intuition, except for Rama⁹, who had an N of 2 (one brain patient).

Luckily, we had some diversity. And from there, generalizations are made about religion, about what to do about religion, about how science is to engage or not engage religion, about what is rubbish and what is not. It strikes me that if you ever wanted to be serious and you want to engage the public to make it a moral, peaceful and compassionate world, you've gotta get real. You've got to get some data. You've got to get some knowledge. And you can't trust your own intuitions about how the world is. Be scientists! There is no indication whatsoever that anything we've heard shows any evidence of scientific inquiry.

Evasion

But enough praise. The last might have given you the impression that I was convinced by Dennett, that his approach seemed reasonable to me. And in fact, for a while, I was. Fortunately, along came another chapter, the one about "philosophical problems of consciousness", in which Dennett tries to answer some criticism of his model. Most of it is just fine, including the zombie¹⁰ part, but the part on seeming... oh, seeming...

Dennett reviews his progress so far and pretends to address one obvious criticism: that he still hasn't explained qualia. And he is very much aware of it, but he just plainly refuses to answer, just throwing a few smoke-bombs instead, hoping the reader forgets all about it! It's like, "Why are there still qualia?" -> "To understand qualia, we must understand phenomenology." -> "To understand phenomenology, we must understand selves." -> "Hey I got really cool stories about them multiple selves! Let me show you them!" -> "Any questions?". Like, what?! I feel I just got mugged by that stupid... ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD.

Dennett still completely depends on a big leap of faith. He can not explain the particular features of consciousness. His draft, or functionalism in general, may be capable of explaining the observable outside behaviour, but not the resulting subjective experience. Or in other words, functionalism may figure out what particular point in Design Space we inhibit and how we got there, but not why Design Space looks the way it does. To give an example, functionalism and evolution explains just fine why the difference between ripe and unripe apples is reflected in a different perceived color for each, but not why red looks like red and not like green instead. He can only explain the differentiation, but not the absolute position!

I'm sure Dennett would answer that this is a meaningless question to ask and that's exactly what's infuriating me so much about the book. To me, that is a perfectly obvious and most important question to ask! The problem is essentially that Dennett seems to believe that giving a full description is enough. It isn't. This is most clearly demonstrated, in my opinion, by [Langton's Ant][].

Basically, Langton's Ant is a little ant on an infinite 2-dimensional grid. Every step, it will look at the color of the field it is on: if it is white, it colors it black and turns left, or if it is black, it colors it white and turns right. Afterwards, it moves one field straight ahead and then repeats itself.

There, I just gave you a full description of the universe of Langton's Ant. I left nothing out, all the rules are in there. If you want, you can build your own genuine Ant from that, without anything missing. But then you observe the ant and the following happens:

<%= image("LangtonsAnt.png", "Langton's Ant builds a highway") %>

Once the highway is started, the ant will build nothing else anymore. This seems to be true for all possible starting grids, and it has been proven that the ant will always expand beyond any finite grid, but will it always build a highway? Nobody knows.

Do you see now that very interesting and important facts about the ant are still left out, even though we have a perfect functional analysis of it? There's clearly more to it, more yet to learn!

If that's the best functionalism can do, then the Titanic just met its iceberg.¹¹

Conclusion

In the end, Dennett makes many good points. He successfully points out the false Cartesian theatre many people are still trapped in and presents a reasonable draft as a way out. Most of the confusion and ignorance is the fault of the poor state of current science and lies not with Dennett. He, ultimately, succeeds in pointing it out and dismantling it, showing what a proper theory of consciousness must look like, what it all must explain and what parts we can not just ignore.

Nonetheless, he still lacks one thing the most, and he himself reminds us of this:

'Why, Dan", ask the people in Artificial Intelligence, "do you waste your time conferring with those neuroscientists? They wave their hands about 'information processing' and worry about where it happens, and which neurotransmitters are involved, and all those boring facts, but they haven't a clue about the computational requirements of higher cognitive functions." "Why", ask the neuroscientists, "do you waste your time on the fantasies of Artificial Intelligence? They just invent whatever machinery they want, and say unpardonably ignorant things about the brain." The cognitive psychologists, meanwhile, are accused of concocting models with neither biological plausibility nor proven computational powers; the anthropologists wouldn't know a model if they saw one, and the philosophers, as we all know, just take in each other's laundry, warning about confusions they themselves have created, in an arena bereft of both data and empirically testable theories. With so many idiots working on the problem, no wonder consciousness is still a mystery.

All these charges are true, and more besides, but I have yet to encounter any idiots. Mostly the theorists I have drawn from strike me as very smart people

• even brilliant people, with the arrogance and impatience that often comes with brilliance - but with limited perspectives and agendas, trying to make progress on hard problems by taking whatever shortcuts they can see, while deploring other people's shortcuts. No one can keep all the problems and details clear, including me, and everyone has to mumble, guess, and handwave about large parts of the problem.

One thing I'm entirely missing are the exploits. Where are all the useful things his first draft allows me to do? We still don't understand quantum theory, but we sure can build technology based on it, so we can't be totally wrong. Where's the collection of useful mind hacks, which must exist, if Dennett's meme theory is correct? What cool things can I do, knowing that my mind is a chaotic pandemonium?

The first sign of enlightenment in Buddhism, the so-called stream entry, is officially categorized by, among other things, the disappearance of doubt in the teachings - you still don't understand them, but you have seen such great results, that there must be something to it. The Buddha must know something.

All the good things aside, Dennett extrapolates epically, going from one minor phenomenon to a full description of the brain, explaining nothing along the way, hoping some hand-waving and bold assertions can compensate for it. This is the same major failing so common in psychology and economy; you do a study with a dozen students in a lab and from that interfere the behaviour of nations. Furthermore, Dennett actually leaves out crucial parts. This is not necessarily a problem of his draft (and I think it can be fixed), but he ignores so much of consciousness, all the really weird and extraordinary features, that he can hardly call it all "explained". His hubris is over 9000!

"Consciousness Explained" is badly written, fails to live up to its ideals, points out more the failing of its competition than comes with any strengths of its own, and so just like Linux, is highly recommended. It's what it does to your mind that counts, not what it actually is.

---

1. 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][Swartz Dennett] 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) error here. He defines a "cause" somewhat like the following (which I fully agree with): A cause is a set of "features" of a world, such that they are both sufficient (i.e., if the features are present, then in every possible world the effect will occur) and necessary (i.e., there is no possible world, such that the effect occurs, but the cause not). He then rightfully concludes, aha!, there is no cause for World War 1 because you certainly can't find such a single cause that it would always result in the war. But the proper conclusion to draw in that case is not that there are effects without causes, but that in fact you are dealing with an improper effect, an invalid object. "World War 1" is not a proper thing to call an effect. Instead, you would have to break it down a lot. You can investigate what the cause for the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was, for example, and build your pseudo-effect up from that: "World War 1" is the sum of effects "Murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand" and so on, each of which has a proper cause. (If necessary, you may have to go down to the subatomic level, of course, where you will find a guaranteed proper effect) Or, you go on to create a more abstract framework and investigate what the cause for a major diplomatic catastrophe of that magnitude is, without including any specifics.

   He confuses deterministic causes and narrative causes. He insists on defending that we are narratively free - we can convince ourselves that we are "free enough", even in a deterministic world and can choose our actions accordingly. It may even be in our best interest to do so, as Dennett notes: fatalists often perform far worse. But that is not what causal determinism is about. You can't just toss aside a question and declare that your make-believe is a proper answer just because you don't like the implications. If I wrote a book about how there clearly is a god, citing evidence that believing in it makes me more evolutionary successful, Dennett would rightfully dismiss it because belief and belief-in-belief are clearly different questions!

   "Freedom evolves" is a very nice demonstration of the massive bias present in most recent atheists; they clearly don't show the same rigour or attitude with regard to any other question outside of religion. For them, the conclusion came first and the arguments only later. Except Christopher Hitchens, though, I don't see anyone of them admit that. ↩︎

2. 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." ↩︎

3. 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][]. ↩︎

4. Dennett has written another good explanation of the multiple drafts model for [Scholarpedia][Multiple Drafts] including some updates and corrections. I'm not going to reiterate it here. ↩︎

5. 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. ↩︎

6. 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. ↩︎

7. This is quite close to what many Ayahuasca groups do. Everyone is required to drink it at least once a week, and for quite a while, they are probably going to die and go right through hell again and again, until their soul has become pure and they can begin to learn. This is a rather harsh treatment, but it works exceptionally well. ↩︎

8. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to actually read anything by Scott Atran, but he's very high on my todo. His comments were the highlight of both Beyond Belief 1 and 2. ↩︎

9. [Vilayanur S. Ramachandran][]. Very awesome. ↩︎

10. I'd have to say that I don't know how I stand on the p-zombie issue. Or rather, I am sure that most people are p-zombies. I'm not sure if all are, including me.

    In fact, I consider it a real possibility that most people are less conscious than mystics are, leading to Dennett actually having less features that need explaining. But I wouldn't yet commit fully to this idea, nor would I know whether this is simply a problem of degree, that the mystics simply have better soul-reception with which to receive more programs, if you want, or if there is a real qualitative difference, a distinct property people like Dennett just plain don't have.

    However, my main problem with p-zombies would be that both standard camps aren't radical enough for me. If p-zombies are conceivable, why are you such cowards to not openly speculate that some people, maybe everyone but you, is one? If they are not, why are you hesitating to say that a bat, a thermostat and Mickey Mouse are conscious? Absolutely no balls. ↩︎

11. This chapter makes it look like I have lost all hope in functionalism, but that's probably a bit to pessimistic just now. Functionalism has lead to great discoveries and contains many valuable insights, particularly for AI research, so I'm still sure that it's a worthwhile endeavour for some time to come, but I do have severe doubts that it will succeed in the end to explain consciousness. I see no indication so far that it is even powerful enough to do that, but we'll have to see. There's no reason to abandon something that still produces results. ↩︎