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Rudy Garns

Time and the Observer | Dennett and Kinsbourne - 0 views

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    Two models of consciousness are contrasted with regard to their treatment of subjective timing. The standard Cartesian Theater model postulates a place in the brain where "it all comes together": where the discriminations in all modalities are somehow put into registration and "presented" for subjective judgment. In particular, the Cartesian Theater model implies that the temporal properties of the content-bearing events occurring within this privileged representational medium determine subjective order. The alternative, Multiple Drafts model holds that whereas the brain events that discriminate various perceptual contents are distributed in both space and time in the brain, and whereas the temporal properties of these various events are determinate, none of these temporal properties determine subjective order, since there is no single, constitutive "stream of consciousness" but rather a parallel stream of conflicting and continuously revised contents. Four puzzling phenomena that resist explanation by the standard model are analyzed: two results claimed by Libet, an apparent motion phenomenon involving color change (Kolers and von Grunau), and the "cutaneous rabbit" (Geldard and Sherrick) an illusion of evenly spaced series of "hops" produced by two or more widely spaced series of taps delivered to the skin. The unexamined assumptions that have always made the Cartesian Theater model so attractive are exposed and dismantled. The Multiple Drafts model provides a better account of the puzzling phenomena, avoiding the scientific and metaphysical extravagances of the Cartesian Theater.
Rudy Garns

Dennett on the "Cartesian Theater" - 0 views

  • The central "Cartesian" claim Dennett targets is that there is a specific location in the brain "arrival at which is the necessary and sufficient condition for conscious experience"
  • The only question is how large that center is.
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    "The central "Cartesian" claim Dennett targets is that there is a specific location in the brain "arrival at which is the necessary and sufficient condition for conscious experience" (p. 106). His argument consists mainly in denying that there's always a fact of the matter about when, exactly, an experience occurs, if one considers events at very small time scales (on the order of tenths of a second). He appears to draw from this argument what seems to be the fairly radical anti-"Cartesian" conclusion that there are, in general, no definitive facts of the matter about the flow of conscious experiences independent of the changing "narratives" we construct about them." The Splintered Mind
Rudy Garns

Multiple drafts model - 0 views

  • Our conscious experience is of events that can usually be objectively timed quite precisely
  • there must be a quite specific moment at which each item makes its entrance in our experience.
  • the timing represented in consciousness
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • the timing of the conscious representing
  • The work done by the imaginary homunculus in the Cartesian Theater must be broken up and distributed
  • doesn’t have to be done again in a central re-presentation process
  • massively parallel process
  • Exactly when did I (as opposed to various parts of my brain) become informed, aware, conscious, of some event?’
  • replaced the metaphor of multiple drafts with the metaphor of fame in the brain
  • not a precisely datable transition in the brain
  • the accumulation of a wide variety of sequelae
  • One team in your brain has taken charge while another team is still sorting out the implications.
  • Like the transition from night to day
  • speciation, in which the same curious retrospective status can be transparently observed.
  • “retrospective coronations”
  • a “neural correlate of consciousness”
  • Andaman Islanders
  • Inuit
  • How much influence is enough for fame?
  • consciousness is not what it seems to be
  • whatever event in the brain happens to boost some aspect of the current content-fixations into prominence,
  • a new stimulus that draws attention (resources) to a particular area of visual space or a particular segment on the auditory stream, for instance, thereby promoting the influence (the fame, the clout) of whatever is occurring there and rendering it reportable and recollectable–if the other drafts competing for this influence permit it.
  • Finding the recurrent processes (which is likely, given the adroitness exhibited by those who drive on auto-pilot) would still leave open the question of whether to call those contents conscious or merely potentially conscious.
  • the historical property of having won a temporally local competition with sufficient decisiveness to linger long enough to enable recollection at some later time.
  • because our interpersonal communications, our discussions and comparisons, generate both the terms and the topics of consciousness.
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    "The multiple drafts model of consciousness (Dennett, 1991, 1996, 1998, Dennett and Kinsbourne, 1992) was developed as an alternative to the perennially attractive, but incoherent, model of conscious experience Dennett calls Cartesian materialism, the idea that after early unconscious processing occurs in various relatively peripheral brain structures "everything comes together" in some privileged central place in the brain-which Dennett calls the Cartesian Theater --for "presentation" to the inner self or homunculus. There is no such place in the brain, but many theories seem to presuppose that there must be something like it." (Dennet & Akins, Scholarpedia)
Rudy Garns

Dennett, Consciousness Explained: Three Theses - 0 views

  • I'm worried about the verificationism here
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    "Dennett has various targets in his book; they all seem to get lumped together, but in fact some seem distinct from others. Here are three that it might be useful to distinguish." Curtis Brown
Rudy Garns

Stage Effects in the Cartesian Theater: A review of Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Expl... - 0 views

  • I hope to have given some impression of the range of topics, without pretending to have surveyed them. As I have made clear, there is much in this book that is disputable. And Dennett is at times aggravatingly smug and confident about the merits of his arguments (comparing his `revelations' about consciousness to a magician's revealing the operation of stage tricks, for example; p. 434). All in all Dennett's book is annoying, frustrating, insightful, provocative and above all annoying. Unfortunately---in this age of academic overproduction---I must conclude that for now Consciousness Explained is unavoidable reading for those who intend to think seriously about the problems of consciousness.
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