The heart-stopping thing about the new-born is that, from minute one, there is somebody there. Anyone who bends over the cot and gazes at it is being gazed back at. (1995, p99)

Dennett responds:

As an observation about how we human observers instinctively react to eye contact, this is right on target, but it thereby shows how easily we can be misled.

Last night I told a friend, a mother of three, about this and she was horrified—understandably so, I’d say. Viewing and treating a very young child as a “little person” is essential for their socialisation, but Dennett doesn’t seem to care about that sort of thing. In his quest for objectivity, he misses what’s absolutely crucial in the development of a mind: intersubjectivity. He is fixated by cognition to the virtual exclusion of affect. For him folk psychology is all theory and no simulation. That the attribution of personality could be based on the latter rather than the former seems inconceivable to him.

I’d like to pursue the idea that Dennett’s efforts to eliminate subjectivity and intersubjectivity from his own thinking were what caused him to miss their significance in what he’s thinking about: the normal human mind. Given the progress recently made by others, however (such as Vittorio Gallese (Wikipedia)), this issue seems to take on rather a historical tinge: Dennett as dinosaur. Hmmm, yes, I think so, one of the big ones, but…

Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996.
Elaine Morgan, The Descent of the Child: Human Evolution from a New Perspective, Oxford University Press, 1995.

Pat says we don’t know that the “hard problem” is really any more hard than many others (p50-52), and “we don’t know how consciousness is produced in brains” (p51). I know that it’s a pseudo-problem, and that consciousness is not produced.

(Added October 2009: Now that I’m an apprentice academic I shouldn’t say things like that, but what the hell…)

Paul says the brain working at a low level and psychology at a high level are “not two things embracing one another, they’re actually just one thing, looked at from two different points of view.” (p59)

So near and yet so far. . . If he’d just put this together with the fact that the brain is objective while consciousness is subjective, he’d have it. He might even be right that work on the “easy problems” will lead to this understanding, though I’d say it needn’t necessarily do so.

Pat: “. . . there really are these qualitative experiences. . . ” (p60)

But it depends what you mean by “really.” For years I insisted that consciousness was real, despite being subjective, and I’m still tempted sometimes to use that kind of language. But “really” really needs to be qualified. Naive realism just doesn’t cut it in such a subtle and complex context.

In Susan Blackmore’s Conversations on Consciousness [Bla05], Daniel Dennett says that a philosophical zombie “could cry at sad movies, be thrilled by joyous sunsets, enjoy ice cream. . . and yet not be conscious at all.” (p81)

This might seem a trivial point, but it’s a typical example of Dennett’s thinking, or at least his writing. To be thrilled, or to enjoy, of course, one has to be conscious. He should have said “appear to be thrilled” and “act as if enjoying.” These concepts are inter/subjective, even if Dennett thinks they should not be. Of course this is probably just a slip, but there are many other such slips in his writing, which some people, such as myself, find quite off-putting. If these are genuine mistakes, then they’re uncharacteristically sloppy, and if not, then this is the philosophical equivalent of sleight-of-hand, and intellectually dishonest.

Moving on to actual philosophical issues…

Here is how it [the intentional stance] works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then. . . you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. [Den87, p17]

I believe what we usually do when trying to guess what someone else in a given situation might do is to say to ourselves “what would I do?” Rationality will often play a part in that, but projection of the self, identification with the other, is psychologically much more basic.

It could be argued that my story reduces to Dennett’s: that, with sufficient qualification in the way of beliefs, desires and context generally, we can all be treated as rational agents, and that is what we do with each other, in principle. The answer to that is that my view is more practical, on a more appropriate level, closer to the actual action, and has greater explanatory power.

Dennett’s zimbo “would think it was conscious, even if it wasn’t.” [Den91, p311] And Dennett thinks “Nobody is conscious—not in the systematically mysterious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism!” [Den91, p406]

There’s a very easy way to circumnavigate all such difficulties: consider the consciousness of any entity to be entirely a matter of opinion. Of course we want to say, if others consider us not to be conscious, that they’re wrong, but why? Isn’t it just because they might thus fail to consider our feelings? That’s a legitimate concern, but they’d not be factually wrong—if that’s wrong, then it’s morally so. Inter/subjectively, people are conscious, and so is anything else to which we find it useful to attribute consciousness, i.e. with which we might identify. Objectively, the word has no meaning, therefore nor does the question as to whether any entity is conscious.

Some might want to put “or desirable” after “useful” in the previous paragraph, but I would argue that the attribution of consciousness is only legitimate where it is genuinely useful to do so—that the concept is “naturally” instrumental, so usefulness is validity, and desirability is insufficient. Thus, attribution is not merely subjective, but intersubjective, because, as it concerns identification, we only find it useful where there are genuine similarities between attributor and attributee. Some opinions are more useful (and more natural) than others. See Intersubjective panpsychism.

“It is tempting to suppose that some concept of information could serve eventually to unify mind, matter, and meaning in a single theory.” [DH87] (emphasis in the original)

I do agree with this and in fact I think it’s quite easily achieved. The concept of physical information is now well established: it is the form or structure of matter, so every material thing is considered to embody its own description. So if we add what I call “the formal stance” to Dennett’s array of stances, in which we focus on form, i.e. information, rather than substance, i.e. rather than taking the physical stance, we get physical information. The common concept of information is intentional, being always about something, but it is always encoded in physical information, and what’s encoded is in the eye of the decoder, thus intentional information is inter/subjective. Meaning is basically intentional information. Mind is the user/processor/creator of intentional information. It could be considered a virtual processor, running on the hardware of the brain. More on this under Mind, matter, meaning, and information.

[Bla05] Susan Blackmore. Conversations on Consciousness. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005.

[Den87] Daniel C. Dennett. The Intentional Stance. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987.

[Den91] Daniel C. Dennett. Consciousness Explained. Allen Lane, London, 1991.

[DH87] Daniel C. Dennett and John Haugeland. Intentionality. In Gregory [Gre87].

[Gre87] Richard L. Gregory, editor. The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.

Each of these examples of symbol-triggering constitutes an act of perception, as opposed to the mere reception of a gigantic number of microscopic signals arriving from some source, like a million raindrops landing on a roof.

So it’s meaning that matters. Which, of course, denies the possibility, or at least the significance, of “raw feels”. But I’m quite convinced that I sometimes perceive sights, sounds, smells and other signals without recognising their source. I don’t mean when I mistake something for something else, but when I’m quite mystified, and have no idea what a particular sound or sight signifies. Some people say that there are no raw feels, because there is always some interpretation, however minimal, but I say, if so, sometimes it’s so minimal as to make no difference, in this context anyway.

In the preceding pages Hofstadter writes quite a lot about video, and especially about video feedback, which he says will serve well in the following discussions of perception and other mental phenomena, so what he’s comparing the sense of smell with, in that passage, is the signals transmitted from a video camera to a television (“receiver”) to which it’s directly connected. Also implicit is the fact that scents are carried through the air by molecules of the substances concerned, so his “million raindrops” stands for millions of molecules, and there’s the matter of levels of explanation too, because these might trigger just one symbol.

My theory of consciousness copes very well with the problem of “meaningless perception”. The crucial point is whether we’re willing or able to identify with the receiver/perceiver. It might be an extremely sophisticated chemical sensor connected to a powerful computer programmed so that it can identify smells just as well as you or I, but unless you imagine yourself as that computer (or software, whatever), “smelling” what it “smells”, it’s still just a piece of automatic equipment to you. To attribute consciousness is to identify with the attributee. That’s what it’s all about.

Later: I just realised, this fits in very well with something Hofstadter wrote earlier, on page 17, which struck me at the time as not quite right:

Some of us (myself included) believe that the late President Reagan was essentially “all gone” many years before his body gave up the ghost, and more generally we believe that people in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease are essentially all gone.

When I read that I made a note: “Does that mean it’s OK to abuse them?” He goes on to say that these peoples’ souls have departed (contradicting “before his body gave up the ghost”), though of course he emphasises throughout that he uses that word “poetically”, not religiously. But then most or all animals lack the higher cognitive faculties, and animals are generally denied souls, so maybe that makes some sort of sense. But like people with Alzheimer’s, they can suffer. Doesn’t that matter?