From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: "Consciousness Explained"
Date: 12 Oct 92 18:11:41 GMT
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

In article <26753@castle.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
>In article <7650@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>
>>Perhaps you saw the tv show about Dennett.  Was it Panorama?
>>BBC?  ITV?  Maybe I'd better look it up...  

Antenna: Mind Movies -- Dennett on Consciousness.  BBC 2, 3 August 1992.

>>Anway, I found that more or less infuriating.  For instance, Dennett
>>told us a bit about Descartes, consciousness and the pituitary gland,
>>etc, and then tried to make it sound like virtually all philosophers
>>held that view!  We call this a straw man where I come from.

He also calls the Cartesian options "Orwellian" and "Stalinist", so if
you accept either one you have to deal with this label...  Presumably
he does this in the book too.

>>Then, again and again, there was a huge gap between some amazing
>>example or experiment and the conclusion Dennett seemed to want
>>us to draw from it.
>
>I'm a Dennett fan and made a point of recording it. I was so disgusted
>after watching it that I erased it. It was a comic-book travesty and I
>can't understand why Dennett allowed it to appear. In his book he is
>gravely aware of the problems he faces in putting forward such
>counter-intuitive views to his readers, whose very language has so
>strongly infected them with Cartesian dualism, and he spends a lot of
>time trimming the undergrowth of misconceptions and assumptions.

Ah!  But, you  see, this is just what I think Dennett's up to:
shifting the meanings of words so it's a lot harder to see the
aspects of mental life his "explanation" doesn't cover.  As in
the bit of _The Origin of Consciousness_ I often quote:

   And this totality is obtained
   not by actually explaining everything, but by an encasement of its
   activity, a severe and absolute restriction of attention, such that
   everything that is not explained in not in view.

There could be languages, or cultures, in which there were no words
that had aspects of conscious experience as all or part of their
meaning.  It would then be very difficult to pick out conscious
experience as a subject to talk about and very difficult to point to
what's omitted by Dennett's view that, say, colour qualia are just
"dispositions to react".

Indeed, it often seems that people are trying to make _our_ culture
be one of these.  The success of science has given us a tremendous
bias towards the third person point of view.  Behaviorist psychology
did some damage to our vocabulary (which is hard to completely undo).
And the "logical behaviorism" of philosophers such as Ryle had an
influence that extends at least to Dennett.  

So we've already gone some way in this direction.  Some words, such as
"intelligence" have already more or less been lost.  Intelligence is
pretty much just a matter of performance these days.  That's why we
can have intelligent terminals, intelligent front ends, and the like.

Learning has gone the same way.  It's just a question of "adaptive
changes in behavior" (Chalmers in <Buoy66.ArF@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>.
So if I learn a new way to express something in Lisp, for instance,
all that we should care about is how it affects my behavior.  That
I now see certain problems in a different way -- that they seem
different to me -- is an irrelevance.  Some learning -- such as
learning to ride a bicycle -- is like this.  There's little, if
any role, for consciousness.  But all learning?  If so, at least
it ought to be something that needs evidence, not something true
by definition.

But how can I argue against this view of "learning"?  I can't say
"look, when I learn something, I can have different beliefs than
before", because "belief" is supposedly just a matter of behavior
too.  Pretty soon there won't be any words left.  Qualia is about
the only one, because that's its whole purpose, but it's too narrow.  
It applies naturally to the experience of colour or pain, but are
qualia involved when we're just thinking about things to ourselves?

Now, some people will deny that there is any attempt to change, or
take over, our vocabulary.  But it can be fairly explicit, such as
when David Chalmers writes:

   If someone insists in making consciousness constitutive of the
   notion of belief, I'll just starting talking about "schmeliefs"
   instead.  They'll do all the explanatory work that we wanted
   beliefs to do.

That is, some people are interested in belief only as it functions in
the explanation of behavior -- only in belief as a "disposition to
behave" -- but rather than say "we're interested only in that aspect
of belief" they want to exclude everything else from the meaning
of the word.  And the rhetorical strategy here is to act as if
it's the other guys (the ones interested in more than the behavioral
aspects of belief) who are distorting things: "look we [the behavior
side] could use a different word.  But why should we?  It would be
silly.  We'd have to use a silly word, and there's this perfectly
good word we're already using."  Someone who disagrees is "insisting",
trying to force "us" into this unreasonable step.

Of course, this is not to say that the people doing this see it 
that way themselves.  I've made it sound like Dennet and Co are
arguing in bad faith.  They know full well that they're misleading
us, that they're being economical with the truth, but they're doing
it anyway, for nefarious reasons of their own.

But ... probably not.  

-- jd