Group items tagged

Response to Glicksohn and Salter in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 18, no. 4, 1995, pp. 810-11. "We have learned that the issues we raised are very difficult to think about clearly, and what "works" for one thinker falls flat for another, and leads yet another astray. So it is particularly useful to get these re-expressions of points we have tried to make. Both commentaries help by proposing further details for the Multiple Drafts Model, and asking good questions. They either directly clarify, or force us to clarify, our own account. They also both demonstrate how hard it is for even sympathetic commentators always to avoid the very habits of thought the Multiple Drafts Model was designed to combat. While acknowledging and expanding on their positive contributions, we must sound a few relatively minor alarms. "

"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)

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.

Discussion Board on Dennett's thesis

"Dennett maintains that cognitive discriminations need only be made once. The information does not then need to travel to any special area of the brain in order to become conscious. Without the 'theatre', there is no need for such a 'presentation' to take place." - Philosophy, et cetera

" Dennett is the great demystifier of consciousness. According to him there is, in the final analysis, nothing fundamentally inexplicable about the way we attribute intentions and conscious feelings to people. We often attribute feelings or intentions metaphorically to non-human things, after all. We might say our car is a bit tired today, or that our pot plant is thirsty. At the end of the day, our attitude to other human beings is just a version - a much more sophisticated version - of the same strategy. Attributing intentions to human animals makes it much easier to work out what their behaviour is likely to be. It pays us, in short, to adopt the intentional stance when trying to understand human beings. "