[Wittrs] The System Level Issue
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 26 May 2010 17:32:05 -0000
In reviewing your post and my earlier one I noticed the context in which I gave
you the response you offered below:
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Joseph Polanik <jPolanik@...> wrote:
<snip>
> SWM wrote:
>
> >Joseph Polanik wrote:
>
> >>however, it is self-refuting to attempt to explain consciousness as
> >>nothing other than a non-conscious brain activity.
>
> >That's because it isn't described, on this view, as "nothing other than
> >a non-conscious brain activity".
>
> on the contrary, Dennett specifically says "the mind is somehow nothing
> but a physical phenomenon". [_Consciousness Explained_ p. 33]
>
Aside from the fact that my subsequent response to this, pointing out the
confusion you seem to be making between thinking of a claim that mind is
"nothing but a physical phenomenon" as a claim about the existence of
subjectivity rather than about the cause of the existence of subjectivity, the
original context of my remark, to which you responded with the above, actually
was making a different point.
You had written:
it is self-refuting to attempt to explain consciousness as
> nothing other than a non-conscious brain activity.
>
To which I responded by saying:
"That's because it isn't described, on this view, as 'nothing other than a
non-conscious brain activity'. The thesis offered by Dennett and to which I
subscribe posits that consciousness is a multiplicity of non-conscious brain
activities at various levels, arranged in a certain way and interacting in a
way made possible by that arrangement.
"Any given 'non-conscious brain activity' (or computational process if we
extend the analogy to computers) is not, itself, what we mean by
'consciousness'.
"Since this hinges on describing consciousness as a system-level feature (or
phenomenon), it does not imply anything about the constituent elements being
conscious themselves -- or needing to be."
The point I was making of course, to which your response does not seem to me,
from the available context, to respond, is that the claim of people like
Dennett is NOT that consciousness is "nothing other than A non-conscious brain
activity" (the capitalized "a" added by me for emphasis). It's that it's a
complex of such activity, i.e., a system. Thus I was explaining that
consciousness is not being equated with any given computational process but
with an appropriate amalgam of them.
My point about the distinction between the existence of the subjective and the
cause of the subjective still stands, of course. But my response to you was
about your misstating the claim as being that any given process just WAS
consciousness. The Dennettian view, to which I subscribe, is that it's the
outcome of many such processes working together in a system.
SWM
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