Following up on yesterday’s post about the relationship between consciousness and reality — yeah, yeah, I’ll get back to the Satanic, Loch Ness, avant garde, performance artists next week — here’s a piece from Curiosity about modern day philosopher Daniel Dennett’s idea that consciousness — Descartes’ “I” — is just an illusion…
There’s a quote by religion professor Lee Siegel that Dennett use to illustrate his point: “Real magic is the magic that’s not real. While the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.” There’s nobody out there sawing people in half and putting them back together again, only illusionists using various tricks to make it appear that that’s the case. According to Dennett, the same is true of consciousness. The only difference is that our brains are triple-billed as the saw-wielding magician, the lovely assistant trapped in the box, and the mystified audience. What we think of as our consciousness is actually our brains pulling a number of tricks to conjure up the world as we experience it. But in reality, it’s all smoke, mirrors, and rapidly firing neurons.
If that’s a bit heady, then get ready for Dennett’s next metaphor: If our brain is a smartphone, then consciousness is the screen. In other words, consciousness is not how our brain works, it’s only how we interface with it. A screen doesn’t really have much to do with how the phone works, and in fact, the phone could do nearly everything it does without it. It just wouldn’t be useable by humans. According to Dennett, our brains are like smartphones in another way as well: they are basically robots, or thinking machines, and like any robot, they need a medium through which to communicate with their users. But it goes even further than that: if our brains are robots, then our neurons are smaller robots, which are in turn made up of even smaller robots. So even if we lose the concept of consciousness along the way, we’re still pretty incredible “machines.”
Here’s another cool video about philosophy and consciousness, this time dealing with the Problem of Other Minds and Philosophical Zombies. Oh my…
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