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

Introduction to Dennett and Consciousness Explained

0:00You're listening to The Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set out doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 399 is something like, how does consciousness relate to the brain? And we read portions of Daniel C. Dennett's Consciousness Explained from 1991. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see PartiallyExaminedLife.com. This is Mark Linsenmeyer,

0:30despite Dennett's claim, smelling my phantom foot in Madison, Wisconsin. This is Seth Paskin, a center of narrative gravity in Austin, Texas. This is Dylan Casey, drafting behind the theater in Madison, Wisconsin. And this is Christopher Heath, doomed to a lifetime of playing Donkey Kong in Hollywood, California.

Multiple Drafts versus the Cartesian Theater

0:52focusing on the very beginning. So we read the prelude, how are hallucinations possible, which is sort of just getting you into it. And then we read what it's supposed to be the meat of it, chapter five, which is called Multiple Drafts versus the Cartesian Theater. So, well, first, Chris, thanks for coming back, giving us a little more continuity, given that Wes was going to be gone this time. Thanks for having me. Love it. Love to talk with you guys. I don't know that it's going to connect to Donald Davidson, particularly, but we're-

1:22I mean, insofar as it's in the realm of the philosophy of mind, sure, but that's about it. Well, people that liked Wittgenstein. Sure. Yeah, they were both Wittgensteinian in that sense. And Quine, I guess, as the intervening figure. So there's some sort of, is there any distinction that doesn't make a difference, pragmatic kind of thing that comes up in this text? Yeah. Right. He's trying to get, well, let's first, I pick this given that Wes was going to be gone because long time ago, our first philosophy of mind episode,

1:54we did one little article by Quine along with like four other articles, five other articles, a lot of articles called Quining Qualia, right, by Dennett. And Wes just had no tolerance for it at all. And I think in talking to him about it now, I think he actually has chilled out and he has more respect for Dennett now, but he just, the whole idea that by explaining consciousness, you are denying, you know, what is it like to be a bat principle, that there is some subjective private

2:26essence that somehow he was denying that. And then as soon as you deny that, well, that's the thing to be explained. So how could you even deny that? And just, that was such a point of furious contention that he just couldn't, you couldn't even have a conversation with him about the rest of it, about like the actual positive thing that we read in chapter five here. And we did have an optional, this chapter 12, where he does respond directly to that article and other ones like it. Maybe we'll do that in a part three or another episode or whatever, but we didn't all read that. So, you know,

2:57we'll. So does that mean I have to change my intro? No, no, your intro is fantastic. But yeah, that's, yeah. And Dennett even points to this like incredulous attitude towards his way of thinking, because it's, it can seem so counterintuitive. So, you know, it's at least, it makes sense that someone might think this is sounds ridiculous on the face of it. Yeah. That's actually one of the virtues. I was surprisingly pleased by this just because, you know, I kind of lump them all together. Dennett, Davidson, you know, like Quine, Nagel, it's all just kind of like soupy.

3:27And, but he's actually quite an excellent. It's a smear. It's a smear. It's a grue. But he's actually quite an excellent writer, does a very good job of clearly explaining. And like you said, Chris, he's quite self-conscious of what he's doing. And when he's saying things that are going to seem counterintuitive to the point where he's like, you make sure you don't sneak this back in and try to take this perspective. Like, you know, the kind of thing that a really good writer does when they're trying to talk about something that hasn't been talked about before, or that

3:58is countervailing, you know, against the dominant paradigm or whatever. And I found myself actually, you know, I'm less, less excited about the specific debate here, you know, about the ways in which we can be, the ways in which consciousness gets constructed, because it's all suppositional in some sense. But as we got into the later part, I actually got really excited about this idea of narratives, you know, this kind of concept of a narrative structure, but also, well, I'll just leave it at that and we'll get to it. But yeah, this was fun to me.

4:31Dylan, opening thoughts? I thought it was awesome. I liked how he framed and explained the problem of consciousness to be addressed, and his sort of careful going, going through it and framing that sort of careful articulation. I just find it utterly uncontroversial to me. There's just nothing about it that seems surprising. If anything, the drawing out that the Cartesian dualism rears its head over and over again,

5:05in a Cartesian theater is seems a very, very clear explanation of why it's a faulty way of thinking about the problem. And I think it actually the account of us as of our experience and what it means for us to be basically interactive entities in the world and, you know, difference machines, and the way in which we can actually gives an account of what the experience of figuring things out in the world is that it gives an account for how we would actually evolve. It aligns really well

5:39with one of my favorite things that we've read in the past with Tomasello. In fact, Tomasello, I think, would be kind of an extension or right in line with it.

Naturalism and the Problem with Dennett's Tone

5:48I would say that I feel similarly in that I'm super sympathetic to his project, The Naturalism. I agree that Tomasello's account of how agency evolved sort of co-occurs with this really nicely. I feel like Dennett has a branding problem. I feel like sometimes the language that he uses seems to overstate and it hurts his point because I sometimes he'll use words like merely illusory. And I just don't think these sorts of ways of care, even just the term illusionism is just, I think it unfortunately alienates a lot of people. But when you get into the nitty gritty of it,

6:22it makes a lot of sense. I mean, yeah, I found myself sometimes frustrated with some of the flippant language he uses. It's very rare, but it happens. And so I get frustrated with what exactly he's trying to point out because I'm totally fine with being dismissive of the Cartesian theater and the brains organization is going to be, it's just like multiple processes, you know, in parallel and why you wouldn't have a single, you know, man sitting, enjoying a screening of what's happening, all that I'm on board with. But I do think sometimes he, I don't know, maybe we'll get into it when we get into the specific chapters, but sometimes I can't tell if he's saying something stronger than he is or not.

6:55Sometimes I've waffled back and forth on whether he's, because I want to make room for something like felt experience. But anyway, I, yeah, we can get into the specifics if we'd like, but I agree with you that a lot of it is just, I'm very sympathetic too, in terms of, I love that there's an evolutionary case to be made and all that stuff. I'm totally down. So the tone, I agree with you, Chris. I like Mark listened to a bunch of it as part of, I just driving around doing errands and it might've been accentuated by the guy who did the, who did the reading of it. Yeah. Who is even more annoying voice than Dennett's himself, but a very similar

7:28in tone to Dennett's. Yeah. And so he leans into all of those kind of merely and the, the, the kind of a dismissive tone of certain paragraphs really comes through in that narration where I was like, and I didn't know really the history. I knew that, that Wes, um, uh, has, you know, you know, not, you know, within the podcast, not appreciated Dennett. That qualifile, they call Wes a qualifile. Yeah. The qualifile. Yeah. I didn't know the reason that you gave Mark was much better than the,

8:01what I thought it was, which is that he's just too annoying because when I was listening to it, I was like, Oh my God. But I got over the tone. I'd agree with you that there's a kind of dismissive tone about it where he sometimes comes off as like the most obnoxious nerdy guy in your math class.

The Persistence of Cartesian Dualism in Culture

8:22Who's right. I see the overall project here is kind of like Nietzsche's right. Nietzsche was saying, just, I'm giving an analogy. It's not really like Nietzsche's, but Nietzsche was saying, we no longer believe in God, but we have a whole ethics that is still built around the model as if God was at the center of it, dictating things, thou shalt not, et cetera. And here it's, we no longer believe in Descartes model of, you know, a soul, a ghost in the machine, a soul comes down, gathers some matter onto it and acts through this matter as like a puppet master

8:58moving around that. Well, we don't believe in that it's substance. Dualism is too problematic. How would the mind stuff possibly talk to the body stuff? No, it has to be just body stuff that we are somehow our minds are our brains, but how could that make any sense? I mean, clearly like, well, you know, consciousness, your inner life is giving, seems to give you a different perspective on whatever is going on in your brain, right? It is not, you're not perceiving your brain,

9:28you're using your brain, you know? So even just talking about it, our language. So I think according to Dennett, Descartes view has completely permeated our language and culture. And it's not just, you know, a cultural accident that this has happened though. Maybe, you know, he doesn't really go through the history of ideas here, but there's something just inherent in the way that we're set up that would give us these wrong headed ways of describing our experience in our relationship to matter, to our brains that gets in the way of coming up with a scientific theory of consciousness.

10:03So mostly he's concerned with giving like here, I'm not going to give you the full theory. I'm going to outline the kind of approach one could take in forming a scientific theory of consciousness, but it's going to run into these philosophical problems with qualia and things like that. I need to, that, you know, he sees that as really his role as philosopher who has read all this philosophical literature, David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Frank Jackson, John Searle, et cetera, that would rule out the brain being literally the same as the mind. And hence, well, we're making a

10:39little jump. I think he says he's a type of functionalist. So it should be, if you had a complex enough set of functions going on that duplicate what happens in the brain, then you could have a computer that is conscious, that is just pure. We can't know really until somebody tries it, but that there is nothing since what the mind ends up being is essentially on the model of software running on this hardware that is our brains. Then you could have other things

11:13serving those functional roles. So again, he doesn't go deep into functionalism per se, you know, he wants to just, here's my view, categorize it however you want, but it certainly has things in common with functionalism as we've discussed it on this podcast. I want to just make a clarification that maybe you guys can agree or disagree with it. I don't think that brain is necessarily the seat of consciousness either, or even where it all happens. I think that Dennett's view would, it's at least harmonious with, but I think you would understand your entire physical

11:48organism as being extended as mind. It's not just your brain as that organ, right? Your eyes are part of that extended nervous system. It wouldn't even be just your nervous system. It would include everything about the way in which you are in an extended way, receiving information. I'm going to use words like data and experience and stuff like that, but they get overloaded in a way, undermined in Dennett's account. It's really the physical activity of your body interacting with the world.

12:20Yeah. Philosophy's ruined all of our words, so we can't really. Because they end up being singular in a way that that's not the way you look at it in Dennett's view. There's sort of all the multiple drafts model, right? So you're constantly, the distillation that you get is something of ours, right? It's not something that is there.

Rejecting the Cartesian Theater and Passivity

12:41Yeah. There are a number of different characteristics of what he calls the Cartesian theater that I think he thinks. One, Dylan, you just kind of pointed out is that the Cartesian theater suggests a kind of passivity of reception that he will go on. And I think he says, you know, the neuroscience is showing that that's not really the way things work. We're not nearly as passive. That there's a single place or a point, a finish line at which all sensations converge to create this theater. So there's like

13:14a point in time at which all things come together and create the picture, the internal image, right? And then there's, of course, the idea that there is such a place where you could actually see a thing in a point of time and represent it to yourself in that way. And he's, you know, trying to say, Hey man, it's a lot more complicated than that. And that's actually, I think we kind of toss away the first chapter, I think, because it's sort of preparatory. But the idea that there is work being done at the physiological level, we'll call it,

13:49I don't want to say pre-conscious, pre-theater, right? You know, he needs to point this out is that your eyes and your ears, there's a lot of work being done to construct something out of the sensations that are received, that is not, that would then have to be, quote unquote, presented to your consciousness. So in other words, it's a much more complex process. And that's the piece at which he's going to start breaking it down. Well, yeah. So I like that you're breaking it down into what, what the elements are here, because right, the seller's myth of the given, Kant, there's no such thing as sense data that we

14:24actually experience. He's definitely on board with that thing, which is an earlier development. But then he adds to that, this idea that, you know, the way you were just describing it, Seth, is that, okay, there's a lot of processing before it gets passed into sort of experience. But he wants to make the more radical claim that there is no single, either place in the brain or even place in consciousness, that there's, there's no single Cartesian theater in which all the data, even if it gets pre-processed is then passed to sort of, okay, well, this is where experience

14:59happens. And then, well, you know, then you have memory and things that are post experience. And a lot of the reasons he gives, I think that's the really hard thing to understand is, is why he says, it's not possible, especially on very tight time scales, we can get into that for there to be, you know, this is when it's been being experienced. Right. And I was trying to lead up to that point was, you know, he's saying, okay, we have all this research now that shows that your eyes do all this work and your ears do all this work. And if we stick with the Cartesian model, then we think, oh, they're going to do the work

15:31and then they're going to sync up and present it to, you know, consciousness that this way. But he says, if you actually look at the numbers, right, like light travels faster than sound. So when you start looking at how things actually work, the brain has to be doing like a time delay, like it has to sync up like we do at the beginning of this podcast that the listeners probably never hear, but that is so inculcated after 19 years of 17 years of doing this, right? We sync up our audio tracks before we start recording to check out the lag. Apparently,

16:03the brain does something similar and he's like, okay, well, if the brain is making its own decisions about timing of the presentation of the so-called experience, you have to question the idea that there is this central point or this finish line at which that everything's crossing over because there's something being done that's actually fucking with the timing of your own experience. Yeah. It's never presented as a, as a whole for a viewer, right? It's this rabble, this sort of

16:35crowd of multiple processes going on and where it gets sticky is why does it feel like, if you will, to us that it's a unified whole? Why do we have this persistent illusion? What's going on there? And he wants to say that it's, yeah, but it's not going to be good. Yeah. So when you use that word illusion, I immediately want to jump on it and I'm reminded that you already jumped on it.

16:58I just wanted to try to use his language. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's worth hating it because it's the notion that our felt experience isn't real, doesn't require the conclusion that it sits in our pineal gland, right? Any more than the conclusion that we are actively processing the world and that there's a set of narrative conclusions about it doesn't mean that the world, it doesn't exist in its own as a real thing.

17:29Yeah. One of the other things, so I think he talks a little bit about split brain patients in this book, but you know, just what I was bringing to the table, you know, if you think that you're a unified thing, I'm experiencing this now experiencing that. And granted, a lot of stuff happens just unconsciously by reflex. Granted that my consciousness has a focal point and then it has a lot of peripheral stuff. So were you conscious of the peripheral stuff or not? I mean, that's a question. It's sort of, it's something that like, I'm only unconscious of it insofar as maybe something crazy happens in there.

18:01And maybe even then I don't notice it, right? There's those experiments of like showing a gorilla running across the video screen and people don't notice it because they've, if their attention, you know, that's what a magician does is focuses your attention on one thing. And I think, so I think this foreground background thing is going to be really important in him saying like, it's fuzzy, what is in consciousness or not? But there's still the idea that I'm having this experience right now. And these split brain patients, you have where you show them something on their, a word on their

18:32right side, their field of vision. I can't remember which is which I think. So it's what the left brain is more about language, right? Okay. So you show it on the right side. And that means the left brain is getting it, even though the right brain doesn't know or something. So there might be things that you think you can't see it, but then you're asked to write it down with your right hand and you can write it down perfectly well. Right? So in other words, there's part of you does see the word, but the conscious part of you that, you know, the verbal reporting says, no, I see no such word.

19:04I don't know what you're talking about. So it seems there that I was not aware that there's an unconscious thing, or maybe that there is a silent witness. There's a second point of, there's a second consciousness in my brain that is also experiencing things alongside me. And so his, his point would just be in analyzing that is why do you think that the one, the verbal one is you as opposed to the other one? Like maybe there are just a bunch of things happening in parallel in the brain that are discerning things at different points. And you can elicit the knowledge

19:41that those points have in various ways, right? By having you write it with your right hand or write it with your left hand, that makes a difference if you're a split brain patient, then you're, you know, the information is not available to both hands apparently. Yeah. So are we aware of like the raw sense data? Well, we might be, there are certain ways that you could test whether there is something, you know, that actually, you know, fix the attention or get some behavioral output that will indicate, or just, you know, actually scan the brain, you know, so you can see that there is something going on. And do you want to call that conscious or not conscious? Well, you just have to

20:15based on the verbal report of the person. And again, is the verbal center necessarily? That's what consciousness is. It's he's just doesn't think it's that clear. I think we can make the point with kind of a less controversial or less confusing kind of example. So ironically, when I was reading that particular section, I'm sitting outside, right, as I do, and I'm focused on my computer, but in the background is my yard, right? Light trees, sun, wind, all that stuff, right? So my eyes are

20:50focused on the text on this PDF on my computer. But of course, they're also taking in all this peripheral scenery, but that's not what I'm focused on. So it's almost like that stuff gets washed over me. But what's being retained, what I'm thinking about what I'm constructing and trying to, you know, is getting retained in memory is the text that I'm reading. And I think then its point here is, we take in way more than ultimately, we quote, unquote, use or retain. And he says, so, given that

21:25that's the case, you know, focus, our choice of how we focus our attention is what determines what, quote, unquote, our consciousness is of, right? Because it's in intentionality. And he's like, so, what happens to all the rest, you know, who makes that decision? What happens to all the rest of the stuff? It just means that the way consciousness works is not nearly as simple as it all comes in, you get a picture, you know, you digest it or whatever. He's like, and the stuff that's going by on the side, the pool and the pond and the wind and the birds in the

21:57background while I'm focusing on the text. You know, those things are not real, they're not incidental. And it's happening at the same time, I can put my focus here and at the same time have an experience in the periphery of a bird. And that's where he gets this idea of parallel processing, which ultimately is going to result in discrimination, right?

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The Party Game Analogy and Authorless Stories

23:25the scene for why you can have, I think even says like there's a coherent story, but it doesn't imply that there's a narrator like, or someone told the story, right? You can have this coherent story without needing this singular entity that, you know, took in the conscious experience and then relate it or something like that. But I think it could be worth giving that example. Because I think it does, it's sort of, for me, it crystallizes what he means by, you know, the process is kind of ongoing and the process is being stupider than the larger coherent story and all that stuff. So I think it's a really good place to start. The nice thing about that one is it gives an example of how something can make sense,

23:58but not have a original source of sense. You know, you want the same kind of thing for natural selection, right? And why something seems to be designed when it was really generated through a process of natural selection. It's a very similar problem. I thought of evolution as well. Yeah. How do you have this belligerent process that produces this coherent narrative? Yeah. Yes. The idea is that you tell somebody, hey, go in the other room, we're going to make up a dream. We're going to, as a group, we're going to make up this dream. And we all know what it is. And you're

24:30going to come in and you're going to ask us questions and that'll tell it, but actually they don't make up a dream. They just say, we're going to have an algorithm for answering questions that it's going to be, you know, one, yes, three, no. Actually, I don't remember the algorithm exactly, but it's good. They ask yes or no questions. And it's roughly, it's based on the last letter of the last word of the question. If it's the first half of the alphabet, you say yes. If it's the second half, you say no with the only other mechanical sort of element rule. Yeah. That you would never contradict yourself. So if you had said yes to your father being whatever,

25:00then you wouldn't. Yeah. So that's the setup. Okay. So it's basically random, but it's just, it's an algorithm that's unconnected to the question asking. And it turns out that the person will then ask questions and they'll get enough answers that with this non-contradiction rule that you'll eventually, a story will emerge that really the questioner has come up with. And so this is, yeah, is this what's something like what's happening in the brain that it's not just that it takes in raw data and then, you know, says, well, what is this data mean? Let me try to

25:33interpret it. No, it's, we're looking for certain things. And so, you know, like we're looking for a moving object. And so anything that, you know, we see a screen actually, you know, the pixels on a screen are not moving, right? It's just different pixels are blinking on and off, but we see movement because we're looking for movement. And so that's just entirely typical of how the brain approaches things. Yeah. It's super important that this thought this, the way of thinking about this, it just shows that there's an author lists process for this story, which is, you know,

26:05you want to be able to make sense of, if you're going to talk about the brain, the way he does, it's essentially the multiple draft model, like right there in the beginning. Well, I'm not sure because it's, I mean, there's a single, there's not parallelism in the game, right? So the multiple drafts model is the idea that it's not one-to-one, but the various people giving their different answers is kind of the, but yeah, I guess in some sense, yeah. Yeah. The difference I guess is those people are still giving their answers to the one person who is like the Cartesian subject, you know, which is what we don't want. But at every stage processing

26:35is going on like that so that there's discrimination. So color is getting discriminated in this part of the brain and shape is getting discriminated in this part of the brain and movement is getting discriminated at this part of the brain at different stages. And there's not necessarily one place where they're all fed together. Right. He's against the homunculus idea. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Part of that example, or he makes this point later in the book, but the illusion without an illusionist or the text without an author, there is the fact that the person who's asking the

27:06questions is making a story themselves. And that is really the kind of act of consciousness that I think then it's referring to, but there isn't a fact of the matter that isn't a separate from what that act, that person who's asking the questions is coming to the conclusion of it. We can't say, is he correct about the story about the dream? There's no sense to be made of that. Yes. You could have a discussion about whether the story about the dream makes more sense or not,

27:36given the questions that were asked and answered. Right. You mean like a question about consistency or coherence and that like within itself kind of? Yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah. I think that answer would be very in line with the way you figure anything out. Yeah, exactly. Right. And the more questions you ask and the more answers you get and the more you demand of it, I mean, very quickly you get something that looks very much like the way in which you figure things out in the world. So he immediately uses this to talk about drugs and dreams, right? That if you

28:09take a drug and you have an elaborate hallucination, it's not like the drug contains within itself a story or something like, but it can directly raise or lower or disorder in some arbitrary way, a confirmation threshold in a hypothesis generation system is what he says. So if that's what consciousness is doing a lot is just generating, I think that that's a tree. And the same thing with dreams, right? The things you're concerned about end up being what comes up in your dreams. And it's not that he thinks that Freud believed in a complex homunculus that is weaving your dreams for you and presenting

28:47them to you. And this is what you need to know. Actually, it's dumb. It's sort of neural firings, you know, just based on what the brain has been doing earlier in the day. And that's the function of dreams. I'm sure that's a misinterpretation of Freud. I'm sure Wes would hate that he called that. But, you know, just to get an idea of what Dennis view is, if there are homunculi, they have to be dumb homunculi. They have to be algorithms that are running. Yeah, I think his example of sensory deprivation does a really good job of it sort of crystallized it for me. Yeah, I just want to read this really quick, because I really liked it.

29:19A number of findings fit nicely with this picture of hallucination. For instance, it is well known that hallucinations are the normal result of prolonged sensory deprivation. A plausible explanation of this is that in sensory deprivation, the data-driven side of the hypothesis generation and test system lack any data, which lowers its threshold for noise, which then gets amplified into arbitrary patterns of confirmation and disconfirmation signals, producing eventually detailed hallucinations whose content is the product of nothing more than anxious expectation and chance confirmation. It's an easy way to picture it for me.

Sensory Deprivation and Hallucination Experiments

29:48So the context of this, the section one of the prelude of chapter one here is a direct attack on Descartes in a way that I think this came up with Wes before. And he said this entirely misses the point, but just that, you know, Descartes wants to give us this possibility that you are being deceived and, you know, about everything. Well, and then, and then of course he wants to say, well, actually you can't be deceived about being yourself. Everybody knows that story, but in the modern interpretation of this, the modern version of this right by Hillary Putnam,

30:19I believe is the brain in the vat thing. And so he starts asking, would it really be possible to in a computer feed in a simulation, feed enough information to really convince someone that they were in the macroscopic normal world with their senses able to fully and freely act. And he says, no, combinatorial explosion would just make this impossible that you can't, you can present a static picture for somebody, right? You can, or a 3d movie, but that's,

30:50you're just passively sitting there. If you want them to be able to actively move among things, well then like, look at how, so this is where we're running up. We're reading a book that alleges to be about science or, you know, allied with science from 1991. I was trying to look up whether he's correct that, you know, the VR of his time was completely unconvincing. And you might say, no, actually we figured out ways now to have a pretty simple algorithm,

31:21all things speaking, all things considered able to convince it. Right. He gives the example of a coin that to just make a fake coin that you can hold in your hand and might convince you is way easier than hooking you up to a bunch of sensors to make you think that you have a coin in your hand. And even right today's VR technology, it doesn't have feel-o-vision. It doesn't have smell-o-vision. Like you could not have the experience of holding a material object and doing, moving it around as you

31:52like and feeling its heft and weight, especially, you know, oh, maybe in the simulation, we want to change gravity. How are you going to do that? You rely in the simulation on the fact that somebody is actually on earth with their VR headset with real gravity. Like you could just couldn't simulate all this stuff. And so what is the alternative to having an infinite amount of data that has to come in? Well, it is something like this party game where it's actually the data doesn't have to come in. It's the mind is just looking, looking, looking for certain things. And so it only has to just

32:26latch onto a little bit of data and then it sort of creates its own bullshit. So that's what happens in dreams, right? It's not like when we have a dream or a hallucination like that, we have these complicated VR simulators going on. Like it's our minds looking for things and sort of making up stuff. I find it funny that we keep this tendency to just characterize, well, what our brains are doing is just making up a whole bunch of bullshit, or we're having all these illusions, because I think it's just falling exactly into the trap that Dennett is saying is a trap, which is that in that way,

33:02I guess Dennett himself falls into this, right? Because he starts using these words like illusion and not elude. And when we use that language, it makes it sound like, oh, well, that there's anything different between us concluding that something is real and it being real. So it's as real as you're able to conclude it to be real. And you have reasons for making that. And your ability to say you're right or wrong is actually a complicated thing for which you don't have an answer where

33:35you can go look it up in the little research book and say, oh, actually, you know, hey, I looked it up, the answer in the back of the book, and I confirmed that I worked out the problem. And I looked in the back of the book, yep, I was right. That image of consciousness is exactly what Dennett is criticizing. And that is the image that we constantly have both about consciousness and about reality and the way in which you experience the world is that there is a set of answers in the back of the book that's different than the figuring it out and deciding whether you're right

Constructive Experience and the Phi Phenomenon

34:03or not. Another way, the way that I think about it and just a different way to kind of frame what Dylan just said is consciousness or the way we experience things is constructive. And he gets to the evolutionary point later in the book, but he's like, there's a couple of great examples. We haven't talked about the two dots, which we should, but he talks about film. He says, film is 24 frames per second. And if you slow it down, right? I mean, he basically says like,

34:37we have to stitch, you know, film is not streamed. It's not streamed experience like we get in the world. It's different. And he's like, but we stitch it, the brain will actually put it together in a way to make it seem smooth. And then, you know, if you go back down, he's got this example with the two dots where he says, if you show two dots on a page, I guess, close enough together and have them blink on and off at the appropriate speed, it will look like the dot is moving. Your brain will make it look

35:09like the dot is moving back and forth, not just two dots separately. And even if you change the color of the dots so that they're two different colors, your brain will make you think that the dot is both moving and changing color. And, you know, the remarkable, there are two remarkable things about this. One is that it does it at all, that there, it creates, it's essentially quote unquote creating an experience that isn't actually quote unquote there, but also that it's anticipatory. So, your brain will start to do this work before it even has the second input. And then he says,

35:46well, what does that mean? You know, does that mean that we actually get the second input and then we retroactively go back and construct the experience we quote unquote go back in time? And, you know, he's like, this is really weird and screwy. And it just shows that the simplistic model that we have in the Cartesian theater model, but in general, it's just totally untenable. And that is kind of freaky when you think about it. Can I ask a clarifying question on this one? When he describes this, it seemed to me that

36:18the only way you would be able to do the experiment would be able to have the blinking happen many times. There would never be a case where you had it appear one time and another time, right? You would only be able to talk about it over time. Yeah. It also doesn't work. If it's too slow, it also doesn't work. I thought it did that people do experience the illusion, even the first time, right? It's not that they're expecting it to happen because you've done it for them five times. It's even the first

36:49time they run the experiment that you, so you run it multiple times, the first time you do that. Does that make sense? I didn't think it was literally what Dylan's saying where it's just they, this little circles blink once. For the same subject. Yeah, just once. But I wasn't sure about it. You know what's really unfortunate is I watched this illusion and didn't see it and was very frustrated. And I looked up and apparently some people just don't see it. Their visual system just processes it differently and they don't see it. I don't know if I'm one of those people, but I tried, so I felt very excluded from this part of the book, which is very frustrating. But I mean, obviously it doesn't take away from the point. There are many illusions like this,

37:21but I just, I was very sad that I didn't seem to be able to see this color change in between them. It's a little bit like not being able to, you know, do your, there are those, uh, visual pictogram, I forget what they're called. You can't like change the perspective. The magic eye picture. Yeah. Yeah. Where you change your visual field and you're able to like see the dinosaur where you didn't see it before. Right. So this goes all the way, this five phenomenon things, I was just Googling it. He does mention it. So all the way back to 1912 with Max Wertheimer who co-founded Gestalt psychology. So the whole idea that we don't

37:55take in an individual piece of data and another individual piece of data, and then our mind puts them together, but that we somehow take in patterns and holes. And apparently in this case, we create a pattern in a hole. And so this is the foundation for like why motion picture works is because you're not literally seeing, you know, you're seeing a cartoon, even if it's a live action movie, you're seeing a bunch of frames with an apparent motion because of this very same five phenomenon. So, so by saying, instead of like showing you a movie, we're just going to show you

38:27one dot and then another dot and just play with like, well, how far apart can the dots be? And how long can it be when you show one and then you wait and you show the next one? Well, you know, there's a certain point, as you were saying, Chris, where you speed it up enough so that it looks like for the viewer that it is physically moving, that one dot is transforming into the other. It is moving from one location to the other. So Dennis' question is like, how do we understand that that happens? Is it really the mind filling in, which is the way that is normally,

39:03you know, it is creating an illusion. Dennett is ultimately going to say, no, it is not filling in. It is not creating an illusion. It is concluding that. So he really ultimately wants to argue that experiencing something and getting a piece of information are not fundamentally different, right? The Mary, the color scientist, she has all the information about what colors are, and then she can still, when you show her a colored thing for the first time, she actually

39:34sees the color. And then it directly deals with that example in that chapter 12 that we're not really going to talk about. But the principle is right here that according to his analysis, when you see the one dot that then you interpret it as moving and transforming into the other dot in the other location, even though it was just one dot flashed and then another dot flashed, your brain is constructing a piece, is making a discrimination. It is constructing a piece of information that you then say, yes, that's what I saw. I saw one dot transform into the other dot.

40:06Did you really see that? Or did you not see that? And then you're, you got some different information, but your brain put it together to give you a fake memory that you saw it. Like, this is ultimately the question that he wants to say, has no answer, that there is no difference between those two hypotheses, the Stalinist versus the Orwellian. Right. Yeah. You guys want to say more about that? Cause that's pretty important. Yeah. I mean, he lays out those two kind of explanations for what might be going on in the color experiment, where if the Orwellian one is

40:39post experiential, right? So it's the experience was accurate, but like you actually saw what you were supposed to, what happened, but the memory was edited after the fact. And then the Stalinist is the experience was doctored before it even, you saw it. So you actually did see the changing of the colors. So that would be, so yeah, the Orwellian is after the experience and the Stalinist is before the experience. And of course, then it's going to want to say both of these implicitly assume a kind of man watching it in a screen in the brain. And he wants to say, so there's no sense to be made of the question of when it happened. Yeah. These two things are just

41:10effectively the same. And so far as they can't be, we can't make sense of any answer for them because there's no finish line for consciousness. And they both implicitly assume that it also kind of assumes that there's a real fact of the matter, a real memory, a real linear process of substituting one thing for another. I didn't think about this as I was studying, but it's coming up now. It's like what he's pointing to is that consciousness isn't, I don't even know how to say this guy. So I'm just going to give me a little latitude, but that it goes back to this idea of

41:40patterns or structures. It's like, we can only experience things structurally. It has to be structured for us to experience it. So just think of it this way, right? Here's an analogy. Suppose you have a simple sentence with a subject, a verb, and an object. And that's the structure, you can only experience things with subject, verb, objects. And what's happening is when you experience is most of the time, there's a clear and obvious and single subject, a clear and obvious and single verb and a clear and obvious and single object. But there will be times when there might be

42:15a choice between two subjects or two verbs or three objects or what have you, or there might be a time when there's no subject. And so for you to have experience at all, you have to kind of either make a choice when there's a plurality or fill in the blank when there's an absence, if that makes sense. Maybe that's not the right, maybe that analogy doesn't quite spell it out. But the idea is that the whole idea of this focus and intentionality is about us constructing a story or an experience

42:46out of what's happening in this complex interaction between the world and our bodies and our brains, except that there are constraints, structural constraints that force us to do work, to make choices where our focus is and to construct relationships between the elements in particular ways that are not necessarily arbitrary. And when we don't, and just to your point, Chris, about the illusions, like when there's a paucity of data, we can't just have the experience of the lack

43:19because structurally we need to have all these pieces in place. So we start hallucinating to fill in the gaps on these things. I think we do want to say that retain the word illusion in that literally in the world, one dot was shown and another dot was shown. So if somehow you get in your brain, I saw it moving, then there, an illusion happened. That's just the definition of an illusion, right? Seeing a mirage in the desert is an illusion. I think it's okay to retain that as long as we don't take it too seriously as it's an illusion being presented to this Cartesian subject

43:51or something like that. Yeah. I agree that that when he uses that illusion, even more generally, he really wants to point to the idea that there, there isn't this single person, single timeline receptivity going on or something like that. Like, you know, he still wants to think that we are subjects still. He still thinks there's a point of view, but he wants to call into question our ideas about, or what seems to follow naturally. If we're thinking about a point of view that there's this singular timeline, singular viewer in the brain, and it's all presented to that viewer or

44:21something like that, that that's just the wrong view. It's messy in parallel rather. Does that make sense? The idea of a point of view or a subject, there's a whole chapter on the subject. Right. Is make sense from at a macroscopic view. When I'm asking, what is your point of view, Seth? And what is your point of view, you know, that that makes sense. But when you get within a person and you want to really focus on like, well, which part of the brain or which part of, you know, is the decision maker is the point of view that no longer makes sense. So one thing that I think the way we're

44:56talking about it articulates is the dot experiment, the dot illusion is characterizing how our brains, our physical apparatus is processing information and making conclusions. And we're finding out that under certain conditions, we will combine it together to make the blue dot transform into a red dot in one single motion. This makes me think that it's actually leveraging the same kind of thing that a movie does or your television screen does, or all those things that you are leaning into the

45:32fact that, well, your processing of the frames of a film will turn into a very, very smooth experience of motion such that it's like watching it out your window. If it's at 24 frames per second, right? And your TV, when you watch TV, it will feel, and you will have the experience like you're watching something out the window more or less. If the rastering goes through and it changes, the time changes between the pixels is fast enough that you interleave it or you can't make the

46:10discrimination. And so, the same thing's going on with that. And I think one of the beautiful things about it is when he talks about it, when you make it much slower, much faster, it changes the way in which you experience it and the conclusion you make about what really is going on. And this now makes me think of it, it's operating just like a lot of other illusions are until you figure out how to interpret what you're seeing and how. So, when I go, you know, the whole bent stick thing that someone like was talked about like in the early science days,

46:42the stick actually isn't bent. It just looks like it's bent because of refraction of the water and stuff like that. It's not that you can't understand that. It still looks bent in one sense, but your account for what it is, is different once you inquire into it. And this is my last point is that that kind of ability to probe what's actually going on by asking lots of questions is then its whole point about the richness of the world outstrips our ability to have it be simulated.

Concluding Part One and Wrap Up

47:10All right. Let that be the last point for part one here. Come back for part two. We will continue through these couple of chapters here. If you are not a Partially Examined Life supporter, you might want to become one because then the part two would be in your feed right away. You can go to partiallyexaminedlife.com support to get that. Otherwise, we'll see you next week. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks.

47:34Thanks.