Closereads: Late Dennett on Consciousness (Part One)

Introducing Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Paper

0:00This is Close Reads, a philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwyn. And I'm Mark Linsenmeier.

0:09It is a new dawn, a new day, and we have a new reading. It is Daniel Dennett's Are We Explaining Consciousness Yet? Something from 2000, which, you know, the Consciousness Explained book that we have been covering on Partial Examined Life. It was 1991, so there was a bunch of back and forth with his critics since then. And this is, as far as I know, the latest comprehensive, I don't know, the latest word on, you know, his improvements on his theory, his coming up with this idea of

0:42fame in the brain that was not in the 1991 paper. And the main purpose, because Wes, you exempted yourself from that four hours of Partial Examined Life conversations, we're going to have, you know, a very encapsulated little treatment here. Are you excited?

Debating Dennett and Intellectual Honesty

1:02Well, you know how I feel about Dennett? I felt like Consciousness Explained is not an intellectually honest book. That's my big problem with it. And I found out with the last episode that constitutionally I am capable of enduring the limitivist, you know, sorts of claims with smart and place. So it's not like I can't, I'm just too prejudiced to consider those views. But we'll see, you know, Dennett, I, when he was arguing with Sam Harris about the odd is distinction, he gave

1:37such a scintillating, clear explanation of that, which Harris was completely obtuse to. And I gained, you know, newfound respect for him. So I'm ready to change my opinion, you know, maybe late stage. What is he doing here? Is he saying, well, maybe there's a little bit of consciousness?

2:00I just think that you're a little bit of your charge that it is in intellectual bad faith is just a misunderstanding. And I thought actually that we, we, in our people, listeners will not have heard this yet probably, but our, our UT place and JJC smart conversation, those guys were writing in the 1950s, but they were making some of the same arguments about qualia. And it was clear that the qualia is not the seeming. So in other words, when we, we have consciousness, there is a way

2:30that things seem to us. That is the stream of consciousness. It is actually the content of the seeming that those folks before Dennett and Dennett picks up on this, we're denying to exist. So if it seems that I'm seeing an orange after image, right, that's a, that's an optical illusion. So I'm looking at an orange light and then I guess you turn the lights off really fast, but I see, I continue to see the orange light. It's an orange after image. We know that there's nothing in the actual world that is that after image. This is just a by-product of how my brain

3:03and my eyes work. And it would be absurd as Galen Strawson pointed out in our recent episode here to say, well, certainly, you know, if you deny that this, that, that the person is seeming to see is having the experience of an orange after image, well, that would be denying the thing to be explained, right? Consciousness explained. He's trying to explain why we have that perception, despite the fact that there is no orange after image in the world. So the question is just

3:33the qualia, the qualia in this, that's always the singular, the qualia in the sense is not the having of the experience. No one is denying that he's having the experience. It is the orange after image itself. Does that exist in an ontology in a phenomenal space? So we have to say our ontology has physical space, but then it also has phenomenal space. What all the things that people perceive that may or may not correspond to anything in the world. And that is the, that these folks starting

4:06with, with UT place in the fifties and probably people before that thought was just not called for. You could somehow get rid of that. Yeah. It's not that I misunderstand the argument and I found it interesting and those other guys. No, I legitimately think he argues in bad faith in various places and is evasive and, and some more about the way he's arguing than what he's arguing. Although I do think, right. I'm not sure we can wriggle out of saying, all right, now we no longer have to worry

4:37about the ontological status of qualia because we're talking about the experiencing because we still have to place events in our ontology and say what they're like and whether or not we've done everything that we need to do by calling it a brain process is a, is a big problem. Now I think it may be just as big a problem to say, as I pointed out in our last episode to say there's, well, there's Cartesian mind stuff there. Actually, when you think about it, it becomes unclear how

5:10that's an improvement on the brain. Yes. None of these problems are solved by admitting that, you know, this argument is just Galen Strawson. And I thought you were following this interpretation of Dennett was saying that Dennett is denying that the seeming happens at all. And nothing of that sort is true. Well, he says that, but I, I think he's self-contradictory about that. And I think, you know, like Chalmers agrees with me. So I think he tries to, Dennett is fishy and evasive about, so I think Dennett is self-contradictory on this. I'm not just making that up, but,

5:41but I, I expect, okay, they'll tell you what I expect with this paper. I expect to be, I expect it to be more moderate and to be, um, maybe to give me a much more positive feeling towards him. We'll see. I'm not sure about that. Really? You've already read it. Okay. I have, I read it as an optional thing before. I forgot about that. Okay, go ahead.

Reading the Global Workspace Abstract

6:06Let's get going. There's an abstract. You can read the abstract. Theorists are converging from quite different quarters on a version of the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness, but there are residual confusions to be dissolved. In particular, theorists must resist the temptation to see global accessibility as the cause of consciousness, as if consciousness were some other further condition. Rather, it is consciousness. A further useful metaphor for keeping this elusive idea in focus is that consciousness is rather like

6:41fame in the brain. It is not a privileged medium of representation or an added property. Some states have. It is the very mutual accessibility that gives some informational states, the powers that come with a subject's consciousness of that information. Like fame, consciousness is not a momentary condition or a purely dispositional state, but rather a matter of actual influence over time. Theorists who take on the task of accounting for the aftermath that is critical for consciousness

7:14often appear to be leaving out the subject of consciousness when in fact, subject with a capital S, when in fact they are providing an analysis of the subject, a necessary component of any serious theory of consciousness. All right. So we've incepted ourselves with that. I don't know that we need to try to explain any of that. I don't fully understand it. We'll unpack it all sentence by sentence. All right. Go ahead. Okay. Yeah. So go ahead with the clawing our way towards consensus.

Modularity and the Global Workspace Model

7:44As the decade of the brain declared by President Bush in 1990 comes to a close, we are beginning to discern how the human brain achieves consciousness. Wait, beginning? When did he explain consciousness? Wasn't that 1980 or something? Sorry. Can I make fun of him? 1991 was his consciousness explained, but he says that, you know, I'm just, I'm just like all philosophers, even though this was a huge fat book, I'm just outlining, you know, it's really for, uh, you know, neurologists and stuff to do the

8:17actual discovery. So I think that's what he's talking about here. Dehaney, Dehane, and Nacache, Nacache, in this volume, see convergence coming from quite different quarters on a version of the global neuronal workspace model. There are still many differences of emphasis to negotiate and no doubt some errors of detail to correct, but there is enough common ground to build on. I agree and will attempt to rearticulate this emerging view in slightly

8:48different terms, emphasizing a few key points that are often resisted in hopes of precipitating further consolidation. On the eve of the decade of the brain, bars had already described a gathering consensus in much the same terms. Consciousness, he said, is accomplished by a distributed society of specialists that is equipped with a working memory called a global workspace whose contents can be broadcast to the system as a whole. If as Jack and Chalice, this volume point out bars,

9:22functional neuron anatomy has been superseded. This shows that some of the progress we've made in the interview shows some of the progress we've made in the intervening years. So I'm not really sure what this, uh, he refers to things in this volume. Uh, the internet is telling me this article appeared in the journal cognition volume 79. So it could be that, that the volume is just that journal. Well, it's probably, it was probably a special issue, a themed issue where he knew

9:53what all the other papers are going to be. Yeah. So, so yeah, it sure, it sure seems like it's a special issue where here are a bunch, you know, cross-disciplinary thing. And you always want to have your philosopher or philosophers weigh in on what all these psychologists and computer scientists and neural, uh, specialists are saying so that you can interpret it correctly. So he's going to want to say just as place or smart, I'll, I'll stop referring to that episode that people have not heard yet. But in any case, there was a section in those articles that we just talked about that, that Wes and I

10:27just talked about two days ago where, uh, one of them picked out a psychologist of his day and was saying, this psychologist seems to have a naive view of there must be some non physical thing consciousness because the neurologist was only able to explain so much. And then somehow after the signal gets to the brain, it gets converted to a conscious experience. And then the neurologist just shrugs their shoulders. Like, I don't know how that works. That's a mystery. And, uh, of course, Dennett is not going to be happy about that kind of thing. Any thoughts so far on what you've read,

11:02Wes? Okay. No, I don't know. I don't know what this means yet. Okay. A consensus may be emerging, but the seductiveness of the paths not taken is still potent. And part of my task here will be to diagnose some instances of backsliding and suggest therapeutic countermeasures. Of course, those who still vehemently oppose this consensus will think it is I who needs therapy. These are difficult questions. Here is the Hane and maybe we should just decide, uh, arbitrarily. Nakaches. Nakachi. Dehaney and Nakaches. It's a short summary of the global neuronal.

11:35Nakache. Nakaches. You can look up the pronunciation while I read here. Uh, global neuronal workspace model to which I've attached some amplificatory notes on key terms intended as friendly amendments to be elaborated in the rest of the paper. Okay. So here is DNN. At any time, many modular cerebral networks are active in parallel and process information in an unconscious manner. As information becomes conscious, however, if the neural population that represents it is mobilized by top-down

12:06attentional amplification into a brain scale state of coherent activity that involves many neurons distributed throughout the brain. The long distance connectivity of these workplace neurons can, when they are active for a minimal duration, make the information available to a variety of processes, including perceptual categorization, long-term memorization, evaluation, and intentional action. We postulate that this global availability of information through the workspace is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state. So that is from, from their abstract.

12:41So generally, I think that this is going to be then its view that for something to be conscious is for it to be available, not just to part of your brain, but to any query of any mode that one might get out of it. If you're asked to write about it, if you're asked to speak about it, if you're asked to push a button in regards to it, anything at all. Whereas there are many other things that we probably notice a little bit, you know, we don't remember there, there are things that were on the, the, uh, edge of our perception, right? Just noticing the obstacles when we walk

13:16through a room, like we noticed them enough to get out of their way. But if I asked you five seconds after you're done walking through the room, tell me all the obstacles you had to shift slightly to avoid, you may or may not be able to do that. So the question was, were you conscious of those things or not? Well, I mean, Dennett doesn't think that there is a sharp line there, like between the subconscious and the conscious. If something is globally available though, you actually stop and you contemplate it, right? It's like you're using the hammer. This is Heidegger's example. You don't

13:47notice the hammer until it breaks. And then you look at the hammer and then, so that is, you're totally conscious of the hammer. It is globally accessible. Yeah. So it sounds like, you know, attentional consciousness, giving attention to something is, I guess they're calling it attentional amplification. I mean, the other aspect here is that it has material to work with is the way I would put it. So we're not just trying to bootstrap from nothing to what we would call attentional consciousness.

14:22We have this, what Freud would call a pre-conscious state that we're working with. And then it's this meta relationship to the various pre-conscious or whatever pre-conscious state becomes the object of attention that is taken as the object of attention that we, in the loose sense, that becomes consciousness, which is really, you know, this is the way I think of it as well. I don't know how it addresses the hard problem of consciousness. Yeah. And the, well, that's right. That's the

14:53question is whether there is anything left to address after this account. And of course he's putting the, the DNN are putting this in neural terms. So it's not just, you know, as I was saying, as you were saying, there's stuff that we sort of notice or stuff that is unconscious. It means there are cerebral networks active in parallel processing information. So presumably it got into us some way, but maybe some of the information is from a memory. It's not even something, you know, that is from a perception. Maybe we could even cogitate whole things, right? A whole imaginative scenarios.

15:29I remember Stephen King describing his, uh, his process that he sort of just, you know, starts an idea going and then lets the, lets the unconscious workers, the furniture movers in his mind move, move everything around. And then voila later, like, Oh, it's like the story's done that he didn't have to. So it's not, yeah, it's not just a, a matter of dumb processes that store up. It's not just like a perceptual buffer, you know, short-term or long-term. Modularity comes in degrees and kinds. This is, this is point one that he's going to make here.

16:08Modularity comes in degrees and kinds. What is being stressed here is only that there are specialist networks with limited powers of information processing. Yeah, I should, I should say I, when I was reading DNN, I left out the numbers. So the numbers were sort of the, so you might have to refer it back to what in that paragraph he's referring to, because he's kind of giving footnotes on each little bit of what they had to say.

16:32So they had said cerebral networks are active in parallel and process information in an unconscious manner. And is this a response to that? Modularity comes in degrees and kinds. What is being stressed here is only that there are specialist networks with limited powers of information processing. Yeah. All right. So I don't, what is the response here? Well, the speech, the speech processing, the visual discrimination or color processing, like just there are different parts of the brain that do different things. That's all.

17:05And they, they do it in an unconscious manner, right? The, the behind the scenes, it's not something we're conscious of happening, but then he's thinking of this as modularity. Okay. We have different modules who are doing different things. And then there's the degree in kind thing. So maybe that's the quibble here is that they say it's unconscious. And he wants to say there's a spectrum, maybe second point is responding to information and information. I wonder what it's as it should be as

17:37it's just a typo. No, because an information becomes conscious if neuro. Okay. You're right. I fixed a typo wrongly because it was not. I don't like the word information as a singular noun. I do not like that. Yeah. You know, I guess they're trying to be because of the modularity here or something like that. There may be little bits, right? Yeah. Thinking of these in little packets of information. So it becomes conscious if the neural population that represented is mobilized by

18:11top-down processes that he's going to describe in three and four. And so Dennett's response to that is that there is no standard term for an event in the brain that carries information or content on some topic. For example, information about color or retinal location. Color at a retinal location. Yep. Okay. Color. Yeah. Information about a phone phoneme heard information about the familiarity or novelty of other information currently being carried, etc. Whenever some specialist network or

18:46smaller structure makes a discrimination, fixes some element of content and information in quotes, in their sense comes into existence. Signal content, fixation, micro taking, wordless narrative, and representation are among the near synonyms in use. And he's got references to other thinkers who use those terms. Uh, weren't you, one of them is Damasio. Weren't you wanting us to have Damasio on at some point? I thought you were a fan several years ago. I don't know if I'm a fan. I don't

19:22know. I can't remember. Being conscious. Okay. Is a matter of a neuronal population that represents it, the piece of information. Okay. Sorry. If, if the neuronal population is mobilized by a top down process. So the information is represented. They're saying by a neuronal population. If that particular population is mobilized by these top down processes, then we get consciousness.

19:59And so what's his response here? He's saying there's no standard term. It's unclear how, what he's disagreeing with or not, or what, or if these are just side things. But so one of, one of these little packets of information that these guys are talking about might be the, you know, information about color at a particular retinal location, right? So where these are kind of atomic, I guess. Yeah. And I, I like the, the sit among his list of synonyms signal seems very, you know, you get a signal, you get a transmission of that bit of data,

20:35that information. So the information comes into existence at the point where the specialist network, the module makes a discrimination. Discrimination is a very important word here. Yep. Because this is what our, you know, perceptual apparatus, for instance, helps us do. Color is about this versus that, right? Where the red thing stands out against the green thing or whatever, or the, you know, the bees see the colors on the one flower as opposed to another or something like that. So the color is

21:12about difference. It's very Spindosan, right? I think the idea with some of these guys, it's almost sounds like post-structuralist or like, so sir, is that the, the discrimination itself, if you put it in this larger space of difference of all the differences, you can somehow milk the qualitative experience out of that, but I'm not going to try to explain that idea further, but okay. So and information comes into existence, the synonyms for what he gives all these synonyms for what

21:43information, the neural population that represented is mobilized by. Okay. So I think it's for neural population, contact fixation, wordless narrative representation. Well, in the context of the sentence, it's an information comes into existence. Well, it becomes conscious, however, maybe the information exists even when a cerebral network makes any discrimination that a discrimination creates an information. So what makes it become conscious? And then we have to finish the sentence

22:17somehow. Yeah, but I, I don't think he's thinking of signal and content fixation as the consciousness. It's when information comes into existence, one of these little atomic packets, we have a content fixation or a representation. Okay. Yeah. All right. So information becomes conscious. This is DNN. If the neural population that represented is mobilized by top down number three, attentional amplification into a brain state of coherent activity that involves many neurons distributed throughout the

22:49brain. The long distance connectivity of these workplace neurons can, if they're active for minimal duration. All right. So then this three, attentional amplification into a brain state of

Top-Down Amplification and Neural Networks

23:00coherent activity. His comment on that, we should be careful not to take the term top down too literally since there's no single organizational summit to the brain, right? This is his whole multiple drafts model. It's not that the brain is being ordered organized by a homunculus. It is, it's a bunch of little homunculi doing their own pre-programmed things. There was no simple signal organizational summit to the brain. It means only that such attentional amplification is not just modulated bottom up by features internal to the processing stream in which it rides, but also by

23:33sideways influences from competitive, cooperative, collateral activities, whose emergent net result is what we may lump together and call top down influence. In an arena of opponent processes, as in a democracy, the top is distributed, not localized. Nevertheless, among the various competitive processes, there are important bifurcations or thresholds that can lead to strikingly different sequels. And it is these differences that best account for our pre-theoretical intuitions about the difference between conscious and unconscious events in the mind. If we are careful, we can use top down as an innocent allusion, allusion with an A, allusion,

24:10an image of exploiting a vivid fossil trace of a discarded Cartesian theory to mark the real difference that that theory misdescribed. Okay. All right. So what they're saying is that when one of these little information packets gets what DNN are saying, when it, when it gets amplified into a larger distributed and coherent network, right? Long distance connectivity between workplace neurons, that's when we get consciousness.

24:47And Dennett is saying, do they say top down? It's right before number three. They do say top down. Yeah. Okay. A top down intentional amplification. Yep. Yeah. So it sounds for DNN as if there's, yeah, there's some Uber module that amplifies and almost sounds like it's giving attention, right? It's giving it, it's, oh, here's the Uber module and it's giving attention to the packet and the Uber module somehow distributed widely through the brain. And he wants to say, well, in fact, there's these bottom up processes and

25:23sideways influence and what we, whatever we would call the top down thing, easy merging on all that. Yeah. He always makes allusions to natural selection and, you know, it's as if organisms are being selected for in a top down way, as if somebody is saying you are the most fit and I'm killing off everybody else. But of course that's, we don't need a top down, a wrathful God hashing things out to, to make natural selection happen.

25:53Yeah. The long distance connectivity of these workplace neurons can, when they are active for a minimal duration, make the information available for a variety of processes. Okay. So here's the minimal duration part is number four. Then it says, how long must this minimal duration be? Long enough to make the information available to a variety of processes. That's all. One should resist the temptation to imagine some other effect that needs to build up over time because here's number five. We postulate this global availability of information throughout the workspace is what we subjectively experience as a

26:26conscious state. That was DNN. And his comment on that is the proposed consensual thesis is not that this global availability causes some further effect of a different sort altogether, igniting the glow of conscious qualia, gaining entrance to the Cartesian theater or something like that, but that it is all by itself a conscious state. This is the hardest part of the thesis to understand and embrace. In fact, some who favor the rest of the consensus balk at this point and want to suppose that global availability must somehow kindle some special effect over and above the merely computational or

27:00functional competencies such global availability ensures. Those who harbor this hunch are surrendering just when victory is at hand, I will argue, for these merely functional competencies are the very competencies that consciousness was supposed to enable. I think it's competent, competences. Competences. I don't know why he's saying that instead of competencies.

27:23Are they the same word pronounced differently? Because I, is there a C-I-E-S? Is that even a word? Yeah. That's usually the way it's spelled. Okay. Isn't it? I guess you're right. Cause competence, well, no, cause there's not competency with a Y it's just. Yeah, there is. Am I imagining it? All right. Let's hash this out. Well, competence, of course we know is a word is competency with a Y. Okay. So both of them, whatever. I don't understand that. Why? What's the difference between a competence and

27:55competency? But I think of competency, this is an absurd conversation to be having. I think we're just taking a break from this difficult material. All right. I mean, in five, he's just saying, hey, I'm Dan Dennett, you know, and you guys aren't, and this is my eliminativist theory and it's hard to understand. I hope I under, I hope he can convey this. Cause I do feel like there's something I don't quite get. And that I was maybe on the verge of getting a little bit

28:27with that last episode we recorded. So I do want to get it, but it is, as he admits here, it's the, it's hard intuitively to get it. So we'll see. All right. Proceed. So now we're done with DNN. He's just proceeding on his own.

Challenging the Hard Problem of Consciousness

28:42Thank God. Cause that's a really jacked way to present something. The weather, what he just did. Here is where scientists have been tempted or blackmailed into defending unmistakably philosophical theses about consciousness on both sides of the issue. Some have taken up the philosophical issues with relish and others with reluctance and foreboding with uneven results for both types. In this paper, I will highlight a few, a few of the points made and attempted

29:13supporting some and criticizing others, but mainly trying to show how relatively minor decisions about word choice and emphasis can conspire to mislead the theoretician's imagination. Is there a hard problem? Chalmers. And if so, what is that? And what could possibly count as progress towards solving it? Although I have staunchly defended and will defend here again, the verdict that Chalmers hard problem is a theorist's illusion, something inviting therapy

29:45and not a real problem to be solved with a revolutionary new science. I view my task here to be dispelling confusion first and taking sides second. Let us see as clearly as we can what the question is and is not before we declare any allegiances. All right. The therapeutic thing is where I, ironically, give that up a therapist, become suspicious. And that's what I tend to think is in bad faith. Someone says, oh, you know,

30:17I'm going to tell you how you're using words wrong and we're going to do some therapy here. And you're going to see that the philosophical problem dissolves into thin air. That's what I tend to think is in bad faith. Maybe it's just Wittgenstein. It's, you know, there's a tradition of this. It's not like he's, it's not unique to him. And Oxford language philosophers. So yeah, I do have a bias against it and, and maybe I don't understand and we're going to see if I can be converted.

Historical Precedents for the Global Workspace

30:46DNN, this volume provide a good survey of the recent evidence in favor of this consensus. Much of it analyzed in greater detail in greater deal in the other papers in this volume. I got to think that's a typo really. And I would first like to supplement their survey with a few anticipations drawn from farther afield. The central ideas are not new though. They've been overlooked or underestimated in 1959, the mathematician and coiner of the term artificial, artificial intelligence, John McCarthy commenting on all of her Selfridge's pioneering pandemonium.

31:20The first model of a competitive non-hierarchical computational architecture clearly articulated the fundamental idea of the global workspace hypothesis. So this is John McCarthy. I've never heard of him. The fact that he invented the term artificial intelligence is shocking to me given that I've never heard of them, but all right. So here's the quote from John McCarthy to page 224. I would like to speak briefly. Maybe we need a British accent. I would like to speak briefly about the, some of the advantages of the pandemonium model as an actual model of conscious behavior. In observing a brain,

31:55one should make a distinction between the aspect of the behavior which is available consciously, and those behaviors no doubt equally important, but which proceed unconsciously. If one conceives of the brain as a pandemonium, a collection of demons, perhaps what is going on within the demons can be regarded as the unconscious part of thought, and what the demons are publicly shouting for each other to hear as the conscious part of thought. Oh, was that too distracting? Mark, what you didn't know here is that he, he had a, it was, but he had a Cockney accent. So you're gonna have to re-read the

32:27whole thing. So I was trying to be a little subtle about it. Governor. No, your British accent wasn't as bad as I, you know, as it might have been. As it could have been. Let's put it that way. That it often is with people. But all right. So I imagine, I don't know if Dennett's going to endorse this or not. I don't think he likes the demons, demons and pandemonium, but. I mean, I think so. I think that the distributed processes are the collection of, of demons are the collection of dumb homunculi that are just doing one little discriminating task. Yeah.

33:01What is going on with them? It's just that we don't want to think of them as homunculi, do we? Well, it's okay to have homunculi. They just have to be stupid homunculi. Yeah. Okay. But I guess what you're asking is, is there a, what it's like to be the homunculous? Probably not. Just, it's just that you're doing something. So you can have your, your agents, your, your clawed agents do not have a, a, what it's like to be that particular clawed agent. Well, look, whatever is doing the right. This is the example I already, I always use, but I wasn't

33:32paying attention to the feeling of the chair against my leg, but now I just paid attention to it. But the attentional, the feeling didn't just appear out of thin air. Now that I'm paying attention to it, I know it was there all along. So that little packet, it's probably too large to even be called one of these little information packets, but we'll just, for the sake of convenience, call it that. Sure. Yeah. I think there's some split off part of consciousness for which there was a, well, maybe there isn't, maybe it's even the wrong question. Maybe it's not that there is,

34:05and it's not that there isn't, or it's like maybe as Dennett might be saying it's, there's, it's in between. Right. There is a discrimination that is going on. And as you said, there's probably lots of little micro discriminations going on that then by a different part of the brain are pulled together in the one macro, this is a chair feeling on my leg. And the question is, does that become conscious or not? Well, does it become globally available for thought or not? That's the way. Yep. But the state itself, I'm not sure if Dennett is saying this, but maybe,

34:37maybe he is, is somewhere on the spectrum between unconscious and conscious. But. So the second, there's another quote here. And in a classic paper, the psychologist Paul Rosen, 1976, R-O-Z-I-N, Rosen, Paul Rosen argued that specializations form the building blocks for higher level intelligence. At the time of their origin, these specializations are tightly wired into the functional system they were designed to serve and are thus inaccessible to other programs or systems of the brain. I suggest that in the course of evolution, these programs become more accessible

35:10to other systems and in the extreme may rise to the level of consciousness and be applied over the full realm of behavior or mental function. Okay. The key point for both McCarthy and Rosen is that it is the specialist demons accessibility to each other and not to some imagined higher executive or central ego that could, in principle, explain the dramatic increases in cognitive competence that we associate with consciousness, the availability to deliberate reflection, the non-automaticity,

35:43in short, the open-mindedness that permits a conscious agent to consider anything in its purview in any way it chooses. All right. So we can see why he likes the pandemonium thing because it's a bottom-up picture. This idea was also central to what I call the multiple drafts model, which was offered as an alternative to the traditional and still popular Cartesian theater model, which supposes there is a place in the brain to which all the unconscious modules send their results for ultimate conscious appreciation by the audience with a capital A. The multiple

36:20drafts model did not provide, however, a sufficiently vivid and imagination-friendly antidote to the Cartesian imagery we have all grown up with. So more recently, I have proposed what I consider to be a more useful guiding metaphor, fame in the brain or cerebral celebrity. All right. See,

Fame and Clout in the Brain

36:38this could be the thing that I needed all along. When I was then looking back at Consciousness Explained, I found a paragraph that basically said this much, but it didn't have those words, fame in the brain, which he's actually now going to say it's not exactly right because fame sounds like, well, fame for who? It still sounds like it's a performative thing. I guess he's just saying it's accessibility to each other. So this neuron is famous if its signal is available to all the other

37:09neurons. So it's not, you know, before a grand audience. We normally think of fame as something that is, you know, not everybody has their 15 minutes of fame, but, but is a top-down phenomenon, you know, or did you get to be in the movies or on TV or not? And then there's just a bunch of sort of mute spectators. That's not clearly what he's talking about. No, section two, competition for clout. The basic idea is that consciousness is more like fame than television. It is not a special medium of

37:42representation in the brain into which content bearing events must be transduced in order to become conscious. As a canwisher in this volume, does anyone have a normal name in this paper? Like, is that a prerequisite for studying consciousness that you have an unpronounceable name that the hard problem with problem with pronunciation? Maybe he's just making all these people up there. As canwisher aptly emphasizes, here's a quote from camwisher. The neural correlates

38:13of awareness of a given perceptual attitude are found in the very neural structure that perceptually analyzes that attribute. That's a hard sentence. I feel like the neural correlates of awareness of a given perceptual attribute. Maybe that's one of these little information packets are found in the very neural structure that perceptually analyzes that attribute. I have no idea what that means. I think that means like a color. So that's a perceptual attribute. Well,

38:45there's a neural correlate where my perception of green gets stored. Where is that found? It's found in the very neural structure that perceptually analyzes that attribute. Well, the awareness, the greenness, uh, as it shows up on my retina somehow, or is taken in by my retina needs to be transmitted somewhere and identified as green hooked up with all the other instances of green laid against the, uh, you know, the opposing other colors, et cetera. Instead of switching media or going somewhere in order to become conscious here to for unconscious contents, staying right where they

39:19are, can achieve something rather like fame in competition with other fame seeking or just potentially fame finding contents. And according to this view, that is what consciousness is. So they achieve fame by getting globally recognized. Yes. These global brain processes. Yep. Okay. I definitely don't understand that yet, which even that, you know, I was putting that in terms of color. Well, there has to be some part of the brain that analyzes, you know, says that yes,

39:52that it's in fact green. I've compared to the other greens. It seems like that's not necessarily what we would consider pre-den it conscious, right? Can't you identify something as green, like a green light. And that could be a thing that like, okay, I see the green light. I see that it is green. I proceed with my car through, but again, unless the green light is flashing or doing something weird, we don't even necessarily notice or notice that we notice that it is a green light. Like clearly we saw that we saw the green, but were we conscious of the green? Yeah. Exactly. The kind

40:27of question that Dennett says is a stupid question. Like there is no, there's, there's just degrees. There's like, don't ask, is it conscious or not? All right. Okay. Next page. Of course, consciousness couldn't be fame exactly in the brain. Since to be famous is to be a shared intentional object in the conscious minds of many folk, not people. He couldn't just say people. And although the brain is usefully seen as composed of hordes of demons or homunculi,

40:59if we were to imagine them to be in the ways that they would need to be to elevate some of their brethren to cerebral celebrity, we would be endowing these subhuman components with too much human psychology. And of course, installing a patent infinite regress in the model as a theory of consciousness. The looming infinite regress can be stopped the way such threats are often happily stopped, not by abandoning the basic idea, but by softening it. As long as your homunculi are more

41:32stupid. Okay. And ignorant than the intelligent agent, they compose the nesting of homunculi within homunculi can be finite, bottoming out eventually with agents so unimpressive that they can be replaced by machines. So consciousness is not so much fame then as political influence. A good slang term is clout. When processes compete for ongoing control of the body, the one with the greatest clout dominates

42:02the scene until a process with even greater clout displaces it. In some oligarchies, perhaps the only way to have clout is to be known by the king, dispenser of all powers and privileges. Our brains are more democratic, indeed somewhat anarchic. In the brain, there is no king, no official viewer of the state television program, no Cartesian theater, but there are still plenty of quite sharp differences in political clout exercised by contents over time. In DNN's terms, this political difference is achieved by reverberation in a

42:37sustained amplification loop. While the losing competitors soon fade into oblivion, unable to recruit enough specialist attention to achieve self-sustaining reverberation. All right, so why is this fame? Fame is when a bunch of people pay attention to you. In this case, they are attention is,

43:02you know, it's like with selection and natural selection. That's a bit of a misleading metaphor because we don't want to think of these things as literally having attention and being conscious. They have to be stupid. Being affected by, I think is better, right? So even clout, like, is that it's more influence. I mean, is influence the same as clout? So the idea is that the influence might become global. The other parts are gonna let it dominate and pay attention to it. But the process

43:34that elevates it, but what's being elevated? It's not just some particular packet. It's a whole network that's elevated. Why not? I mean, I'm noticing the green of the green light. Like, that's what's being elevated right now as I'm focusing on it. Well, is that being, it becomes available globally though, or is the global net, the larger network, the elevated? Well, I don't know. Well, I might want to come back to this from the other side, like globally in terms of a critique for somebody to be conscious. Does it have to be globally available? I understand it's available for

44:07all behaviors. If I see the green light, I can question whether it is in fact green. I can obey it or disobey it. I could shoot it out with a pellet gun. I could do any number of things with the green now that I have noticed it and I'm conscious of it. But does that mean it is available to the part of my brain that regulates my heartbeat? Maybe. I mean, is it scary to me? But even then, like how global does global have to be? Like everything is hooked to something else eventually, but it's clearly looking at that green does nothing to my heartbeat and does nothing to

44:42many other things that are judged by the brain, I would say. Yeah. I still, yeah. I'm still don't fully understand. Yeah. The whole same metaphor. And then if it's a democracy, yeah. What, what is it exactly that's being elevated? And I'm not quite sure yet. I mean, do you like better? I'm grateful that philosophers, whether they're Dennett or Chalmers or whoever will actually engage with these scientists because if this person is going to say, uh, DNN are going to say the difference is

45:13achieved by reverberation in a sustained amplification loop. Like, well, unless that means something literal physiologically, like it just keeps swirling around that one neuronal pattern again and again and again, like you're a song stuck in your head. Then I don't know what that metaphor means or why they're using a metaphor. I guess, you know, I'd have to read the whole paper. Yeah. What a theory of consciousness needs to explain is how some relatively few

Explaining Attention and Aftermath

45:43contents become elevated. Okay. So it's few become elevated to this political power with all the ensuing aftermath while most others evaporate into oblivion after doing their modest deeds in the ongoing projects of the brain. Why is this the task of a theory of consciousness? Because that is what conscious events do. They hang around monopolizing time in the limelight. We cannot settle for putting it that way. However, there is no literal searchlighter of attention.

46:18So we need to explain away the seductive metaphor by explaining the functional powers of attention grabbing without presupposing a single attention giving source. Okay. That's important. This means we need to address two questions, not just how is this fame in the brain achieved, but also two, which I have called the hard question. And then what happens next? Okay. Two questions. How is the fame in the brain achieved? Second, what happens next? Aftermath. One may postulate activity in one

46:55neural structure or another as the necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness, but one must then take on the burden of explaining why that activity ensures the political power of the events it involves. And this means taking a good hard look at how the relevant differences in competence might be enabled by changes in the status of the brain. Is that clear?

47:22Okay. So some, some contents become elevated to the being the, the political power or the famous one. Not all things in the brain do that. So they, the conscious ones hang around monopolizing time in the limelight. Okay. There is no single attention giving source. There's attention grabbing here, but, um, no single source of that because right attention is what we really is kind of what we're

47:55explaining. Yes. So we can't just say, Oh, there's an attention source. And it does sound like he's going to get a little behaviorist here, right? One may postulate activity in one neural structure or another as the necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. But one must then take the, on the burden of the explaining why that activity ensures a political power of the events it involves. And this might mean taking a good hard look about how the relevant differences in competence might be enabled by changes in the status in the brain. So it's not enough. Even if

48:26you said like, whenever you're conscious of something, uh, this particular part always lights up and you could say, Oh, we've identified consciousness is right there. But like, well, what does it mean to explain that? That is, is consciousness. That is the neural correlate of consciousness. That is the thing upon which conscious supervenes, however you want to put it. Well, it means you look at what competencies are enabled by that. If you say I'm conscious of it, but I can't actually think about it. I can't actually do anything with it. Then am I really conscious of it at all? Or am I sort of conscious of it? I can't, I just can't even think of like,

49:02what a situation here you put on to your under, under hypnosis. They're part of a cult. And so you bring them in and you put them under, under hypnosis and you're like, you know, your cult leader is a, is a complete con man. Don't you? And like, yes, I actually am conscious of that. They say under hypnosis, but I'm so under his spell that I can't do anything about it. And then you wake them up and they, you know, will not admit to that anymore. So was it conscious for somebody to be conscious? It really has to be able to govern your behavior, but you know,

49:32but the hard problem, trauma is going to say, well, that's not what consciousness is. That's, that's a result of consciousness. It's something about consciousness, but it's not the essence of, of consciousness, which is, you know, the, what it's like.

49:46Yeah. And I, so I think the other aspect here, it's, you can say the connection to behavior, but you could also just say it's about its relationships to other parts of the brain, right? It's availability or influence or. Right. Yeah. So behavior is taken in a very broad sense here. It's not behavior of the organism, like a sending a signal to another part of a brain is a behavior in that it is the brain doing something, an event, which is not what the behavior said in mind, right? They didn't think you could, but that's why these neural guys are like,

50:18we don't have to be behaviorist. That's like treating the, the organism and the brain, like a black box. We, let's just look at, look in the box and talk about what is happening in the box. And there we go. But we still, in either case, deny that introspection is getting you anything, you know, that can't be cashed out in some other way.

50:38All right. Why don't you read this paragraph and we'll be done.

Rejecting the Cartesian Sandwich and Self

50:41Hurley, uh, 1998 makes a persuasive case for taking the hard question seriously in somewhat different terms. The self and its surrogates, the Cartesian res cogitant, the Cartesian transcendental ego, among others, is not to be located by subtraction, by peeling off the various layers of perceptual and motor interface between a self and world. We must reject the traditional sandwich in which the self is isolated by the outside world, by layers of input and output. On the contrary,

51:12the self is large, concrete, and visible in the world, not just distributed in the brain, but spread out into the world. Where we act and where we perceive is not funneled through a bottleneck, physical or metaphysical, in spite of the utility of such notions as point of view. As she notes, is it Elizabeth Hurley? We'll have to look at the, who, who, who Hurley is this? As she notes, the very content of perception can change while keeping input constant by changes of output. Uh, yeah, we'd have to look what she's talking about exactly.

51:46Yeah. This is a new idea. That's not necessarily helpful in understanding what's come so far. But now we're talking about the self and it's not to be located by subtraction, right? Some core, if you peel off perception and other stuff, you get the core kind of transcendental ego. Although I, I don't think it's kind of fair to throw Kahn in there because it's something else, but we, um, must, so reject the traditional sandwich, right? The sandwich would be the self

52:23and then the input output layers, including perception, I guess, and motor activity. And then the world, the self he says is to spread out into the world. So that's where he gets, you know, well, he's relating what she's saying, but it gets, that's just vague. I don't know. Yeah. Some of this is unpacked by, you know, the, the, we had a whole chapter on the self in consciousness explained just that it is. You might think that the self is like Descartes sees it as

52:56a correlate of the qualia, right? I have introspective access to the contents of my consciousness. There must be something that has those contents of consciousness. We can call it the transcendental ego. We can call it the, uh, the self, whatever you want. But in, in trying to dismiss this folk psychology view of consciousness as he sees it, this, uh, native dualism, he's going to want to say that, no, in fact, the self is not some hidden thing that has our perceptions. The perceptions are just, or, you know, thoughts, it's experiences, you know, these things are just going

53:30on in the brain. And, uh, you could say, you know, they happen in lots of different places in the brain. There's not like one, Oh, there's the self part that is lighting up every time you have an experience again. So that's a physiological thing, but also then philosophically, right? That, uh, and this is a, I want to read this book by Chalmers on the embodied mind, the extended mind. That's the name of it. I believe that since the mind is basically a, a fiction, the self is basically a fiction that is put together. Like it can extend itself to the external tools. So like when you use

54:05your smartphone, I think Chalmer says that essentially becomes part of your mind and you might say, Oh, isn't us using calculators and smartphones, isn't that make us dumb, making us dumber? Well, no, because we have extensions to our minds. We have, you know, which means that our mind is actually bigger. It reaches to further play anyway, without actually reading that book or getting into that. I don't know if I'm going to make a lot of sense in that, but it's just ways of getting out of the Cartesian view of the self, which we have wanted on this podcast. And we will,

54:38I think this is a great thing when soon I do not feel the need to inflict more of these kinds of papers on close reads that I agree with you. It might even be better for a, a series of close reads than a PL episode to have like, what did Kant say about the transcendental ego? What did Sartre say about the transcendental ego? What, like just all these different views of the self that's, we've been sort of doing a little bit of that with the Davidson's first person authority article that we just read and potentially this one. Yeah. Any final thoughts for the moment? All right. We

55:12will start on page six out of 16, 17. Um, hopefully it'll go a little faster so we could do this in just one more. Thanks everybody. Thanks. Bye. Bye.