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 ========================================= Need Something? Check here: http://ludwig.squarespace.com/wittrslinks/