Ep. 399: Dan Dennett's Model of Mind (Part Two)

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

In this continuation of their discussion on Daniel Dennett's 'Consciousness Explained,' the hosts explore the distinction between appearance

Key takeaways

Dennett's multiple drafts model suggests that conscious experience is not a unified stream but a collection of competing interpretations, constantly revised by new information.
The distinction between 'what seems to be' and 'what is judged to be' collapses in Dennett's framework—there is no separate 'appearance' independent of judgment.

Main topics

Dennett's multiple drafts model
Perceptual illusions and their interpretation

Notable quotes

"There is no distinction between judging that there was motion or that there was apparent motion and actually having the experience of the apparent motion."

"The closest thing to the wholeness of our conscious experience is the fact that we have a bunch of judgments that we've made."

Conclusion

The episode concludes that while Dennett's model challenges traditional views of consciousness as a unified, inner

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:07) You're listening to The Partially Examined Life, episode 399, part two. We've been discussing Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained, and we had gotten into chapter five on the multiple drafts versus the Cartesian theater. Talked about the five phenomena. I guess one of the points you ended with, Dylan, was just the bent stick. And to sort of get, I think this might be illicitly tugging on some things from that. chapter 12 that we're not supposed to talk about. So do you think that if you know, Dylan, that the stick, right? So a normal glass of water, you put a stick in it or you put a pencil in it and you know the rules. So do you actually see the stick, the pencil as bent? Speaker 1 (0:50) I make the distinction between what I see and what I think this. So if you ask me, is the stick bent? I would say no. Speaker 2 (0:57) Right. Okay. So one of the things that I was claiming in the first half here, That might've been an overstatement, but it's definitely something that he plays with is at least in some circumstances, is there a difference between experiencing something and gaining a fact about something? And I was saying, at least in the Phi example, he thinks there is no distinction between merely gaining what you take to be a fact, right? It's actually not a fact that the first dot that flashed on the screen moved and transformed into the second dot. Did you experience it? Or did you, do you know that it happened? And he thinks that there actually is no difference between those things. Although even just the way I put it, like, no, actually, you know, because you've had this explained to you in a book that it didn't happen. You know, that one dot did not transform into the other one. So the same way, the stick, you know, that the stick is straight, but it looks, looks straight. So have Speaker 1 (1:55) I just disproved? This is where I think that. At some point, he talks about the fact that what's really going on in your consciousness is basically your experience of it is judgments. So the closest thing that you have to what we would call the wholeness of our conscious experience is the fact that we have a bunch of judgments that we've made. And that what's going on with the bent stick or with the dots is that you have a set of judgments that you've made. And then those judgments are up to be revised based upon whether or not you get more experience. You get more information about it. So the bent stick one is, is to me fairly easy because you have the extra experience of pulling the stick out and seeing that it's not bent. And in fact, you could mess around with somebody, right? Where you have a stick that's bent in such a way that when you stick it in the water, it looks like it's straight. Speaker 1 (2:51) You know, this is what illusions are about, right? Illusions may become illusions. You call them illusions because there is a fact of the matter that it doesn't look like. So you make a judgment that is contrary to the fact of the matter, where that fact involves something that you can probe more deeply to say that this is what was really going on. So you have a refined judgment of the situation. And the fact is that you could totally get fooled again. The conclusion that you come up with, the judgment that you come up with ends up, it's undermined by some other new facts of the matter that are really are judgments that you made about what was really going Speaker 3 (3:27) on. I find this particular example problematic. It's almost like the way that Dennett describes the colorblind color scientist or the whatever problematic. Mary's room or whatever. Mary's room. I think that's problematic. The way he described it. So the illusion in this case is a straight stick looks bent. Now, in order for that illusion to work, you have to already know that it's straight or have had the experience of it being straight and the expectation that when you look at it, it will be straight. And then in this context, you look at it and instead of being straight, it's bent. But that expectation... only comes up after habituation through many types of experience where you learn that this is an effect of water, et cetera, et cetera. And if the stick is already in the water and you come upon it, so if you have not seen the stick before and you walk up and you look at it and it looks bent in the water, somebody says, is that stick straight or bent? It could be straight or it could be bent in some way. that the refraction makes it look right. You don't have that. Well, it's Speaker 2 (4:43) bent, but not that bent. Not Speaker 3 (4:44) bent as it looks. Bent in a different way. But I think my point in this is that what's important about the illusion is that it's a structure that has all those different elements. And that's kind of Dennett's point is that it's like you need a cause and an effect and you need these precursors and you have all this stuff in order to have a quote unquote immediate present experience of something now, you actually need to construct this. almost causal chain and put all these pieces together. Isn't that kind of what he's driving at? Yeah. Speaker 1 (5:14) I mean, part of it is that there's nothing that you experience that doesn't come without a frame for that experience. You have a set of expectations that you're bringing. This is to anything that you see here or experience at all. And that this is the multiple, to me, the core of the multiple drafts model is that there's constantly this distillation and set of judgments that are happening, identifying or not identifying things. All the time. Yeah, Speaker 4 (5:39) they're distributed processes. You say judgment, but processes of interpretation that are just running simultaneously and they're under constant revision. There's no fixed display that happens. So it's like a, yeah, that's for sure the picture. Speaker 1 (5:54) Yeah, the closest thing to the fixed display ends up being what you end up writing down in your memory that you refer back to. And even that could be wrong, right? You could have things that were wrong about that, but that's the closest thing to. where you have, and in fact, he doesn't really talk about this, but it seems obvious that part of this component has to do with the way in which those multiple drafts are working off of memory. It's not as if all of this is constantly in active motion all the time, but it's also interacting with memory as well. Sure. That's one of those processes. Speaker 4 (6:29) Yeah. Yes. Speaker 2 (6:30) I think the confusion in the way I was presenting this stick thing was that there's a physical fact of the matter, and then there's a way it appears, and then there's a judgment that you might make in the moment, and then a revised judgment, given that you know the scientific fact. So the quote I was sort of focusing on, this is page 133, this is in chapter five that we did. Consider how natural is the phrase, I judged it to be so because that's the way it seemed to me. Here we are encouraged to think of two distinct states or events, the seeming a certain way. and a subsequent and consequent judging that it is that way. The trouble, one may think, with the multiple drafts model of color five, for instance, is that even if it includes the phenomenon of the subject's judging that there was an intervening motion, it does not include, it explicitly denies the existence of any event which might be called the seeming to be intervening motion on which this judgment is based. That's right. He's putting it in terms of what a problem somebody might have with his theory, but he's also just stating. what his theory does imply. His theory does imply that there is no distinction between in this particular example, maybe not in every example, judging that there was motion or that there was apparent motion and actually having the experience of the apparent motion, which then could subsequently be judged to be false or something like that. Speaker 4 (7:53) Yeah, once it's discriminated by one specialized. part of the brain or whatever. It doesn't need to be remade or rediscriminated by some homunculus for some homunculus. Yes. Yeah. We Speaker 1 (8:03) don't need that part. To me, that just goes right along with the fact that you can have illusions that you have real reactions to. So I'm sitting in my car and someone backs out of the spot beside me. I have had many times experience that I thought I was moving and I felt like I was moving in the sense that, in fact, you can go to Rides where it's like this, where it's actually not, you can feel like you can have the experience even having your stomach drop out like you're going down a roller coaster because you have enough of your visual area filled up by the film of a roller coaster. That's Speaker 3 (8:42) the Simpsons ride at Universal. Yeah. It's just basically a multi-seat cart that goes, that tilts and slams and does this. And there's a screen in front of you. I got motion sickness at the Sphere in Las Vegas. We went to see Dead & Company and there's a sequence where it kind of like the camera follows from whatever the Seven Sisters Street is in San Francisco and it goes up into- Haight-Ashbury? It's one of the neighborhoods where there's a famous slanted road with different colored houses or something. Anyway, the camera kind of goes off the ground and you start to- recede from the ground as if you're rising up into the atmosphere, and you start to go higher and higher until you get into outer space. And I was just like ill, Speaker 6 (9:26) violently ill. Speaker 3 (9:29) This actually, Dylan, your point goes back to something we didn't, I don't think we mentioned in the first part, but that part of Dennett's problem with the whole Cartesian, it's not the Cartesian, but the evil brain in a vat, which is the modern take on the evil demon, is that not only would all of the stimuli have to be produced. But the fact that there's this discriminating characteristic in you as to how and what to pick and all that would also somehow have to be stimulated or encouraged. He's saying because it's a constructive, discriminating, active parallel process, it's not like we could just create all the stimuli in the absence of... because these things were born to work together, but you would have to actually direct your attention as well, I think. But you know how we've gone through numerous iterations of this idea of process versus substance ontology? Sure. Does it not feel in some way that he's kind of captured that kind of dichotomy where you have this two-part constructive system, and it's almost like our philosophical analysis of the stimuli tells us substance. It tells us things with properties and characteristics, but our experiences are of process. And we always have this gap, like Zeno's paradox or whatever. We're always trying to, why is it that the world is material and things with properties and all this, but we have motion and we have all this stuff. And it's like, well, it's because that's the way in which we experience the world. That's the way the construct works. It's almost like there's a tension there. Both are true in the sense that they're both part of one system. Don't cut that. You're Speaker 2 (11:11) bringing process versus substance to me was making me think of our Grant Harmon episode recently on object-oriented ontology, where he talks about all science as undermining or overmining, right? And doesn't actually talk about the phenomena. And I think that is a criticism he would definitely aim at Dennett, that Dennett wants to... He explicitly is like, look, this is the way science works. You want to explain consciousness in terms that are not involving consciousness. You want to explain it in mechanical patterns. And that's what scientific explanation is. And that's not, that doesn't mean you're, you're denying the initial phenomena or you're explaining it away or you're reducing it in such a way that we're no longer talking about this thing anymore. Just that's the way science works. And, you know, Harmon's focus was. Well, a lot of what philosophy has to do is different than science thus. So he's not just saying there's this just residual remainder of qualia like that Chalmers seems to think, you know, that we can't talk about scientifically. Actually, there's a whole lot of work to do in the area of the qualia of the phenomena without reducing it to something else, which is exactly just what Dennett doesn't really have any tolerance for that, that he. I think follows with the Churchlands and these other reductionists to say that, right, I'm not denying that you have these experiences, right? I mean, that would be absurd to deny the very thing that you're trying to explain in the first place. But if you think they are giving you factual information, if you think that they are revealing anything, you are wrong. We have to figure out why the, right, it's like dreams. You might think that the narrative of a dream is giving you some. great picture, but with this picture of the psychoanalytic game that we gave out, no, the dreams are just sort of random firings that are grasping on. It's, you know, using things that you were concerned with during the day and constructing a story out of it. You know, that's just very different. So that really it's not a denial of the whole realm of the phenomenal. It's just to say that the realm of the phenomenal has nothing to teach us. Am I overstating that? Speaker 1 (13:17) It's such a weird conclusion to me. Speaker 2 (13:19) Wait, you Speaker 4 (13:19) think he's saying, not denying phenomenal consciousness, but saying that there's no role it can play in our