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

Multiple drafts versus the Cartesian theater

0:00You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 399, part two. We've been discussing Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained, and we had gotten into chapter five on the multiple drafts versus the Cartesian theater. We talked about the phi phenomena. I guess one of the

0:30to sort of get, I think this might be illicitly tugging on some things from that chapter 12 that we're not supposed to talk about. So do you think that if you know, Dylan, that the stick, right? So a normal glass of water, you put a stick in it or you put a pencil in it and you know the rules. So do you actually see the stick, the pencil as bent? I make the distinction between what I see and what I think this. So if you ask me, is the stick bent? I would say no. Right. Okay. So one of the things that I was claiming in the first half here, that might've been an overstatement,

1:03but it's definitely something that he plays with is at least in some circumstances, is there a difference between experiencing something and gaining a fact about something? And I was saying, at least in the phi example, he thinks there is no distinction between merely gaining what you take to be a fact, right? It's actually not a fact. That the first dot that flashed on the screen moved and transformed into the second dot. Did you experience it or did you, do you know that it

1:34happened? And he thinks that there actually is no difference between those things. Although even just the way I put it, like, no, actually, you know, because you've had this explained to you in a book that it didn't happen. You know, that one dot did not transform into the other one. So the same way the stick, you know, that the stick is straight, but it looks, looks straight. So have I just disproved?

Consciousness as a set of judgments

1:57This is where I think that he said, at some point he talks about the fact that what's really going on in your consciousness is basically your experience of it as judgments. So the closest thing that you have to what we would call the wholeness of our conscious experience is the fact that we have a bunch of judgments that we've made and that what's going on with the bend stick or with the dots is that you have a set of judgments that you've made. And then those judgments are up to be revised based upon whether or not you get more experience, you get more information about it. So the bend stick one is,

2:32is to me fairly easy because you have the extra experience of pulling the stick out and seeing that it's not bent. And in fact, you could mess around with somebody, right? Where you have a stick that's bent in such a way that when you stick it in the water, it looks like it's straight.

2:51You know, this is what illusions are about, right? Illusions may become illusions. You call them illusions because there is a fact of the matter that it doesn't look like. So you make a judgment that is contrary to the fact of the matter where that fact involves something that you can probe more deeply to say that this is what was really going on. So you have a refined judgment of the situation. And the fact is that you could totally get fooled again by the conclusion that you come up with, the judgment that you come up with ends up, it's undermined by some other new facts of the matter

3:24that are really are judgments that you made about what was really going on. I find this particular example problematic. It's almost like the way that Dennett describes the colorblind color scientist or the whatever problematic. Mary's room or whatever. Mary's room. I think that's problematic the way he described it. So the illusion in this case is a straight stick looks bent. Now, in order for that illusion to work, you have to already

3:58know that it's straight or have had the experience of it being straight and the expectation that when you look at it, it will be straight. And then in this context, you look at it and instead of being straight, it's bent. But that expectation only comes up after habituation through many types of experience where you learn that this is an effect of water, et cetera, et cetera. And if the stick is already in the water and you come upon it. So if you have not seen the stick before and you walk up

4:31and you look at it and it looks bent in the water, somebody says, is that stick straight or bent? It could be straight or it could be bent in some way that the refraction makes it look right. You don't have that. Well, it's bent, but not that bent. Not bent as it looks. Bent in a different way. But I think my point in this is that what's important about the illusion is that it's a structure that has all those different elements. And that that's kind of Dennett's point is that it's like you need a cause and an effect and you need these precursors and you

5:01have all this stuff in order to have a quote unquote immediate present experience of something now, you actually need to construct this almost causal chain and put all these pieces together. Isn't that kind of what he's driving at? Yeah. I mean, part of it is that there's nothing that you experience that doesn't come without a frame for that experience. You have a set of expectations that you're bringing. This is to anything that you see here or experience at all. And that this is the multiple, to me, the core of the multiple draft model is that there's constantly this distillation and set of judgments that are happening, identifying

5:36or not identifying things all the time. Yeah. They're distributed processes. You say judgment, but I would processes of interpretation that are just running simultaneously and they're under constant revision. There's no fixed display that happens. So it's like a, yeah, that that's for sure the picture. Yeah. The closest thing to the fixed display ends up being what you end up writing down in your memory that you refer back to. And even that could be wrong, right? You could have things that were wrong about that, but that that's the closest thing to where you have. And in fact, he doesn't really talk

6:10about this, but it seems obvious that part of this component has to do with the way in which those multiple drafts are working off of memory. It's not as if all of this is constantly in active motion all the time, but it's also interacting with memory as well. Sure. That's one of those processes. Yeah. Yes. I think the confusion in the way I was presenting this stick thing was that there's a physical fact of the matter, and then there's a way it appears. And then there's a judgment that

6:41you might make in the moment and then a revised judgment, given that, you know, the scientific fact. So the quote I was sort of focusing on, this is page 133. This is in chapter five that we did consider how natural is the phrase. I judged it to be so because that's the way it seemed to me here. We are encouraged to think of two distinct states or events, the seeming a certain way in a subsequent and consequent judging that it is that way. The trouble one may think with the multiple drafts model of color five, for instance, is that even if it includes the phenomenon of the

7:13subjects judging that there was an intervening motion, it does not include it explicitly denies the existence of any event, which might be called the seeming to be intervening motion on which this judgment is based. That's what, right. He's, he's putting it in terms of what a problem somebody might have with his theory, but he's also just stating what his theory does imply. His theory does imply that there is no distinction between in this particular example, maybe not in every example, judging that there was motion or that there was apparent motion

7:44and actually having the experience of the apparent motion, which then could subsequently be judged to be false or something like that. Yeah. Once it's discriminated by one specialized part of the brain or whatever, it doesn't need to be remade or re-discriminated by some homunculus for some homunculus.

Illusions and physical scale reactions

8:03Yes. Yeah. We don't need that part. To me, that just goes right along with the fact that you can have illusions that you have real reactions to. So I'm sitting in my car and someone backs out of the spot beside me. I have had many times experience that I thought I was moving and I felt like I was moving in the sense that in fact, you can go to rides where it's like this, where it's actually not, it's, you can feel like you can have the experience even having the, your stomach drop out, like you're going down a roller coaster

8:35because you have enough of your visual area filled up by the film of a roller coaster. That's the Simpsons ride at universal. Yeah. It's just basically a multi-seat cart that goes, that tilts and slams and does this. And there's a screen in front of you. Um, I got motion sickness at the sphere in Las Vegas. We went to see dead in company and there's a sequence where it kind of like the camera follows from hate or from whatever the, the seven sister street is in San Francisco.

9:07And it goes up into Hedeshbury. It's one of the neighborhoods where there's a famous slanted road with different colored houses or something. Anyway, the camera kind of goes off the ground and you start to recede from the ground as if you're rising up into the atmosphere, you know, and you start to go higher and higher until you get into outer space. And I was just like ill, violently ill. This actually, Dylan, your point goes back to something we, we didn't, I don't think we mentioned in the first part, but that part of Dennis problem with the whole Cartesian, it's not the Cartesian, but the evil brain in a vat, which is the modern take on the

9:42evil demon is that not only would all of the stimuli have to be produced, but the fact that there's this discriminating characteristic in you as to how and what to pick and all that would also somehow have to be stimulated or, or encouraged. You know, he's saying there's, because it's a constructive, discriminating, active parallel process. It's not like we could just create all the stimuli in the absence of, because these things were born to work together, but you would

10:14have to actually direct your attention as well, I think. But you know how we've gone through

Process versus substance ontology in science

10:20numerous iterations of this idea of process versus substance ontology? Sure. Does it not feel in some way that he's kind of captured that kind of dichotomy where you have this two-part constructive system and it's almost like our philosophical analysis of the stimuli tells us substance. It tells us things with properties and characteristics, but our experiences are of process. And we always have this gap, you know, like Zeno's paradox or whatever. We're always

10:50trying to, why is it that the world is material and things with properties and all this, but we have motion and we have all this stuff. And it's like, well, it's because we, that's the way in which we experience the world. That's the way the construct works. It's like that almost like there's a tension there. Both are true in the sense that they're both part of one system. Don't cut that. You're bringing process versus substance to me was, was making me think of our Grant Harmon episode recently on object-oriented ontology, where he talks about all science as undermining or

11:23overmining, right? And doesn't actually talk about the phenomena. And I think that is a criticism he would definitely aim at Dennett, that Dennett wants to explicitly like, look, this is the way science works. You want to explain consciousness in terms that are not involving consciousness. You want to explain it in mechanical patterns. And that's what scientific explanation is. And that's not, that doesn't mean you're, you're denying the initial phenomena or you're explaining it away, or you're reducing it in such a way that we're no longer talking about this thing anymore. Just,

11:58that's the way science works. And, you know, Harmon's focus was, well, a lot of what philosophy has to do is different than science thus. So he's not just saying there's this just residual remainder of qualia, like that Chalmers seems to think, you know, that we can't talk about scientifically. Actually, there's a whole lot of work to do in the area of the qualia of the phenomena without reducing it to something else, which is exactly just what Dennett doesn't really have any tolerance for that, that he, I think, follows with the Churchlands and these other reductionists to say

12:32that, right, I'm not denying that you have these experiences, right? I mean, that would be absurd to deny the very thing that you're trying to explain in the first place. But if you think they are giving you factual information, if you think that they are revealing anything, you are wrong. We have to figure out why the, right, it's like dreams. You might think that the narrative of a dream is giving you some great picture, but with this picture of the psychoanalytic game that we gave out, no, the dreams are just sort of random firings that are grasping on, it's, you know,

13:03using things that you were concerned with during the day and constructing a story out of it, you know, that's just very different. So that really, it's not a denial of the whole realm of the phenomenal, it's just to say that the realm of the phenomenal has nothing to teach us. Am I overstating that? It's such a weird conclusion to me. Wait, you think he's saying, not denying phenomenal consciousness, but saying that there's no role it can play in our understanding of the world or something like that? Like, there's no, because I thought he was trying to say that the question's incoherent, right? Asking why is any

13:34of this accompanied by a felt experience or quality is not a coherent question. If we understand the brain correctly, if we understand the functional part, the evolutionary question, then that's the whole question. There's nothing else to talk about or something like that. Yeah. And I thought, is it something that I read that it uses the word heterophenomenology? Yeah. That I interpret that notion as, yes, you know, there is a felt experience, and that is also not absent information. In fact, I think on Dennett's account, it actually has a lot of

14:07information because it has a lot of judgments in it, and there are conclusions involving in it. But it's not as if you're going to figure out what the world is based upon only examining your phenomenology.

Heterophenomenology and third person perspective

14:19Right. Heterophenomenology is just to fill this in, it's chapter four, and it is third person phenomenology in that you, yeah, you want to listen to people's first person accounts of their experience, but you don't want to just take it as veridical that he thinks the whole introspective method that was used like by William James and those guys in the early 20th century was fundamentally faulty that people trying to describe their own experience, even if we're doing it in a first person plural way, right? I'm saying, I have this experience. Don't you have this experience too? He thinks that that gives rise to trenchant illusions and that instead we

14:55should be as if we were anthropologists. Hey, tell me about your phenomenology, but don't just take it at face value. Try to figure out what is underneath it. You know, use the person as a third, you know, from a third person point of view, which is what science is supposed to do as a subject of a study and experiment. Well, and that's also, it seems to me that you would turn that on yourself as well, right? You, you, you would be asking. Yes, he does that at the end of the book. Yep. Yeah. Right. So I guess I raised a little thorny issue that we have not resolved and probably won't

15:27be able to resolve today, which is the, is he actually completely denying the existence of first person experience? I don't think he is. Again, that's the thing that you're trying to explain. It would be a self-contradictory enterprise to think this, this was a point explicitly made in the Galen Strassen article that Wes and I just did on close reads about this. If your conclusion, I'm trying to understand consciousness. And the conclusion is that there is no such thing as consciousness. Well, there's, then you have completely undermined your own, but you could

15:57do something that is sort of like that to say consciousness is not the thing that you thought it was. You thought it was revealing an inner space, an inner life, a phenomenal field. And actually there is no such thing. So yeah, I think that'll take us back to some things from chapter five. So just to clarify something for me, again, I don't like the word illusionism and I think it's awful, but, and everything, but it really is, as I read it, it's not a claim about non-existence as much as it's a claim about our phenomenal experience or our experience being mis, it's a misrepresentation. There is a real mechanism. It runs on the brain, but what it depicts

16:34is it doesn't actually have the properties that people think it does the intrinsic property, ineffable property stuff that it doesn't actually have those properties. That's the illusion is yeah. That kind of thing, which is a little bit hard to sort through, I guess, sometimes if we bring it to like real examples, obviously we both, he doesn't want to deny felt experience, right? Like we have like, that would be silly, but what does it mean to say it doesn't have these particular qualities or that we are misunderstanding what exactly is our felt experience over and above like it being a functional essentially. So one example that right with this five phenomena that

The phi phenomenon and stereo soundscapes

17:08we've been discussing, right? One interpretation that he rejects is that the mind fills in the intervening places where the dot was. So the dot starts as a green dot on the left side of the screen. It ends up on a blue dot on the right side of the screen. We interpolate, we judge if they're shown in the right sequence, we judge that one dot has transformed into the other. Strangely, we didn't bring this up before. The color change is not gradual in the way that movement changes. The color change is sudden and in the middle. So there's a moment of transformation

17:39in a location, in a spatial location that that dot never was in the physical world. So if you want to understand that's one way of saying is there's something like a mind space, right? He also gives the example of a stereo illusions, you know, where the, a really well mixed, you know, your favorite band. Oh, well that means the drummer sounds like he's in front of you, you know, 12 feet, 12 degrees to the left. And the guitar sounds like he's 18 degrees to the right. And, you know, they have this

18:09very scientific way, but of course they're not physically, you know, you're not, when you're listening in a room with this nice stereo speakers, you don't really think the drummer is there or nothing happens to that physical space. So what is happening? Is there a phenomenal space in which, oh, the drummer is in that phenomenal space or the intervening, you know, transforming dot is in that phenomenal space. And that's the thing that like, this is an analogy you can use, but certainly there is no physical place in the brain. Like, it's not like the brain creates a space between your right

18:42and your left ear and puts the thought of the drummer in, you know, that part of the brain. It's not physically laid out like that and it's not laid out anywhere else. So it is merely a way of speaking about it. We were really just judging that the drummer is in this location, that the dot was transforming in this location, but there is no such space in the mind. Yeah. What you just said is so obvious to me. I don't understand what the, I don't understand what the, what other possible conclusion you could have. Right. I mean, I hear you the way you're articulating it. And I'm like,

19:14well, of course you can recreate the soundscape of the drummer being at 18 degrees from a live show, right. In your headphones. Okay. You can do that. Why can you do that? Because you can have a drummer. I mean, so. Cause that's where it was when the mics were set up or you could do it with fancy mixing ways. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And I guess where this gets, I'm just trying to understand. Well, I mean the colored dot might be better, right? I mean, the colored dot example is there's

19:44no, we didn't have some person that we recorded that was actually in whatever space. And now we're creating an illusion. They're in a space with the colored dot. There really is just this seemingly non-existent green dot now in the middle. And where, where is that? It's, it would be weird. Some people want to say, well, it's, it's in your mind or there's a mind space where it is or something, which, you know, you could see where someone would say, look, I saw it or, or I experienced it or something. And they might want to say that it's in my experience or something like that, which would be phenomenal. Yeah. But why would we do? So I feel like it's perfectly

20:15sensible for me to say that what I experienced was the red dot moving across the page over and becoming a blue dot. That's what I experienced in that illusion. I don't see anything contradictory about that. It's just like, you know, I'm watching it from what I understand. Then it's saying it's not in your experience. It's not your, there's no where it is. It's not in anywhere particular. Okay. It's a narrative. Is the word experienced papering over? Did I have the phenomenal feel of it versus I judged it to be right? That's the thing that I'm saying

20:45that the word experience jams those together. Okay. So maybe this is the nub that I should not find so strange. So the problem with it is that I would say, well, I can buy my experience. If I say that that's an illusion and I want to say, well, I experienced the dot going from red to blue and traveling across the page. The reason I want to deny that that's an experience is because that's not what quote unquote really happened. It was an illusion. That conclusion, I just find really weird. If I see a mirage, why is that not an experience of it? Even though

21:23the conclusions about what it was might be different than my immediate experience, right? Yes. There's a whole bunch of judgments involved. Right. So the immediate experience involved the judgment that there was water there. So the question is for him, is there a difference between the appearance of the illusory water and the judgment that there is water there? I follow his critics in thinking that it sounds like those are different for exactly the reason you said, because you would judge ultimately that there is not water there

21:53because you know what mirages look like. Yes, you will ultimately do that depending upon the particular, the rest of the context of the experience. All seems to me that in the, I mean, in the end, one of the main things that Dennis is saying that all experience is really judgments. Okay. And that those judgments involve a, that this is the multiple drafts model that then when you begin to call an experience, you bring it together into a judgment about something. Okay. And that, that judgment is in a, it seems to me plainly straightforward way. It comes with assumptions

22:29and contingencies associated with it. So in the five phenomenon, right? Maybe it'll say, well, did the red dot really move across and turn into a blue dot? Or was that just an illusion? The best you could say is, well, it looked like to me that it was moved across and transformed from a red dot to a blue dot. That's what it looked like to me. And you could come up with an account for, well, what must be true if that was the case? Now, one element of that account could be, well, you know, if I know, if I start learning some about how my brain works and how I process things, you can say, well,

23:03I would begin to use the language of, well, it only appears to me. It's an illusion. Is it where because of the way in which I process this kind of visual stimuli and the way in which I bring assumptions about how things move in the world that I then make the conclusion that it was moving across the page. I guess what I'm finding, I'm losing the thread of why the conclusion that our experience is really a sequence or all sorts of judgments going on is so strange.

23:40What is that denying or what is that running aground with? Just because phenomenally, it feels like a judgment is different than a seeming. Yeah. It's missing the quality. It's missing the seeming part. Yeah. It's hard to not use all the language that he doesn't like, but I mean, you're already sort of operating with his multiple drafts model. I mean, you're saying, yes, it's just a series of, you know, when you have the visual, you got, you got the location, shape, color, the object recognition, and all of that is separate parallel running processes and they're all discriminating. And there's no where or place

24:10where there is consciousness happening. It's just some of these different discriminations leave traces on your memory or, or they affect your behavior or they become reportable in some sense. But like, there's this quality of it happening to you that people want to point to. I think that it seems like, yeah, I guess what Mark said, it seems like multiple judgments and discriminations doesn't seem to capture having the experience, I guess. I don't know how else to put it, but does that make sense to you at all, Dylan? No, it doesn't make any sense to me that there's a distinction between the feeling of being conscious

24:44and the act of judging. Yeah. Okay. To me, it makes utter complete sense that the experience of consciousness is experience of me. It's just a living being that's making judgments and decisions and conclusions about the world. And that's the experience of being conscious. That's what consciousness is. It's an action. It's a doing to you. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Not a movie.

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Epiphenomena and the question of qualia

26:20slash PEL. I have a hard time thinking about this in this abstract way, like, you know, but when he started, so this may be chapter 12, I can't remember, but when he talks about it being an epiphenomena. So more importantly, we can even forget introducing new terminology. So Dennett asked the very simple question, what does the introduction of this seeming qualia, this, what

26:50is it like to be a Seth? What does it do for you above and beyond the multiple parallel processing judgment model that Dylan just said, what do you get out of that? That doesn't come from. And he says, well, let's talk about what epiphenomena are, right? You know, they're accidental, they're properties of things that have no function. Like he says, you know, you build the steam engine and then it has, it makes a sound, right? The sound is just an artifact. It's not functionally part of what that thing does or is, but it does have an effect in the world. And he says,

27:23but you also then have the idea of an epiphenomena that is not functionally part of the thing, but also has no effect or possibly has no effect. And so he's saying, he kind of puts the ball back in the other court and says, just explain to me why you need this concept. And his answer is you need the concept because you're tied to this idea that you're in this movie theater of your mind having this experience in this way. But if you can drop that metaphorical construct, then the need for qualia goes away. But Jesus is compelling. I mean, who hasn't read Nagel's article and been,

28:01you can't just not react to that thing. It's pretty, we do think that there is something, what it's like to be something that there's an experiential aspect that somehow supervenes on top of just the basic processes. Right. Can I bring up? So when we just read Charles Sanders Peirce, this reminded me, you know, Peirce was, his emphasis was that what you think is an experience is just momentary. And as soon as you want to say what it is, you're connecting it to other experiences. You're bringing in memory. And so Dennett is relying on that here, that if you want to say,

28:36well, there's a way that it's like to be a bat. Well, what do you mean exactly? Is it the experience that the bat is having right now? Like, is there really a qualitative thing for an instant? For there to be a quality, you have to hook it to other things. You have to bring in memory. So a qualia to give you information, even like the sensual feel of an orange or something like that. Well, if you want to, you know, we, as Peirce was saying, we construct this by feeling along the

29:06different spots of the orange. Otherwise we wouldn't get the idea that it's an orange at all, that it has a texture, that it's round, that it's bumpy. So we're inevitably already, you know, the qualia, the moment is gone. So either a qualia is a substantial thing, like the taste of this wine, and I can go back the next day and have the same taste of this wine. And I like the taste of that wine. That is like a concept. Or it can be something momentary that is, no, it's the taste of the wine this time for that half of a second. So yes, we do experience qualia of the short kind.

29:44Qualia of the long kind are not purely phenomenal things. They are involving concepts. They are things that we are constructing. And so the idea of a qualia as something repeatable is a theoretic mistake. There is no, the taste of that wine that you could then return to many times. Did you actually, it's a lot of different tasting experiences that you are connecting together. Yes. Just like your life. And so, yes. What is it like to be a bat? Well, it's a lot of things.

30:15Yes. But there is a, what it's like is a felt. Yeah, of course. So I don't see why the question or the consideration, what is it like to be is somehow dismissed or rendered moot by this way of talking at all. It seems to me it completely perseveres. In fact, it makes more sense. Yeah. This is where I think some, maybe he gets misinterpreted a lot or, or I don't know, sometimes his language would suggest otherwise to me, but I mean, ultimately I agree with you that he thinks there's a story to be told about the evolution of subjects of why you would have this

30:46discriminatory multifactorial process going on in the brain. And, but I mean, there is a, there's a subject that we all have the feeling of being separate from our environment and separate from other organisms, or even just thinking about feeling exhausted. I think these are better examples than like the feeling of the qualia of seeing red or something like that, but like, but you're right. I don't know if Denny would say, sure, that's all perfectly plausible under my sort of picture, multi-draft model picture of where it's just a bunch of processes and discriminations going on. But I mean, yeah, I mean, I don't know. Is it, I mean, you're feeling exhausted. Like how do we translate that into his multi-draft model exactly?

31:20So this is so fascinating. Denny's complaint here about qualia is something like, treats qualia like, why do you need to introduce another ontological element into the equation? Why do you need another thing? And in a weird way, the structure that he's built up and, you know, this is chapter 12 again, I apologize, but this idea that we have this evolutionarily complex, dynamic, discriminatory, constructive kind of relationship with our environment.

31:51And that's how we build ourselves. The quote unquote, what is it like to be Seth is not a thing, like another thing I have to put into the ontology on top of the characteristics. It's the aggregate, not just of the constructed experience here in this particular moment in time, but that relationship to my body, to my memory. In other words, what is it like to be Seth is Seth. It is the Seth. It is the thing that I call Seth. Myself is just, that is the qualia. And so in essence,

32:24you know, this series of narrative constructions and activity and building that we do constantly forms a tapestry that is somehow held together in present consciousness and somehow tied to our memory and still tied to our physical body and various other things. And the combination of all those things at any given moment, what is it like to be Seth? Well, that might involve feeling flushed or being constipated, right? You know? Oh, I do know what it's like to be Seth. It's feeling flushed.

32:55If you've ever sat on a toilet, you know what it's like to be Seth. And so, which gives us another path, not just out of consciousness, but to start talking about identity and self, that it's just essentially whatever that experience of all of these things working together simultaneously is. And it doesn't necessarily have to be treated as a thing, a race. You don't have to reify it. I'm thinking rather than yield to, because we only have another 10, 15 minutes, yield to the gravity of

Memory contamination and Orwellian revision

33:23chapter 12. Let's bring up one more example from chapter five, which is page 117, 118. There's some nice pictures in the book. Suppose you're standing on a corner and a long-haired woman dashes by. About one second after this, a subterranean memory of some earlier woman, a short-haired woman with eyeglasses contaminates the memory of what you've just seen. When asked a minute later, so I guess he's already introduced this example earlier. The thing is that you see a woman and then you're asked about her and you say she had glasses, but actually she didn't have glasses

33:54because you remembered a different woman that looked similar to that woman that did have glasses. So you just immediately, just one minute after you saw this woman, you're asked about her and you say, oh yeah, she had glasses. You wrongly say that. Okay. So this is going to be another, like, is it Stalin-esque or is it Orwellian? That would be the Orwellian one, right? The fact that you post having seen it, remember it, you edit it post-experience or your brain does. Yeah. Okay. So yes, he's giving this account about one second after you see it, a subterranean memory of

34:25some earlier woman contaminates the memory of what you've just seen. When asked a minute later for details, you report sincerely but erroneously her eyeglasses. An Orwellian revision has happened. There was a fleeting instant before the memory contamination took place when it didn't seem to you she had glasses. The second understanding is the Stalinist one where you just see her as having glasses in the first place. And this is just like the five phenomenon going to be a case where he says there actually is no difference. Because if you want to say there was a second where you saw her as not having glasses, but then you immediately report that she had glasses,

34:58was there an experience there for a second that you can no longer access? So if you really believe that there is a stream of consciousness, there is a stream of experience, and that memory is something sort of outside that, you know, it's just a memory is a thing you bring up in experience. Then you would have T1, you're experiencing woman without glasses, and then T2, you are bringing up a an altered memory, that is the woman with glasses, then that is, you know, okay, I believe in the stream of consciousness, that's what's happened. He wants

35:30to say that there actually is right, there is no difference between just judging a minute later that she had glasses. I don't know, what do you think? It seems intuitively, you can make sense of the difference between the two pictures. If Cartesian materialism were true, I think even says, like, if it's true that there's a singular stream, then we could make sense of these two as being distinct. But he wants to reject that whole idea, in which case, this just becomes a nonsensical, incoherent question to him. Yeah, and this is the streams aspect of it as being also gets back to the fact of the matter

36:02question, and the notion that our consciousness has at its root accesses the fact of the matter. And there's a separate activity of interpreting that happens, so that, you know, the sense experience can be, if you go, you can make the distinction between the Stalinist interpretation, the Stalinist or the Orwellian interpretation of the woman with the glasses, because you can establish, oh, well, the stream of the experience, that is the things that actually happened in the

36:35world that impinged on my consciousness. I can dissect those and then be able to say what the fact of the matter was. And that stream, that fact of the matter doesn't exist. Only what exists are the judgments. Yeah, I mean, there's the facts in the world, right? But the fact of what it seemed like, that that's what he's denying, that there was a fact of, did it seem like she had glasses or not? We know that there was some, so the question is, at some point in the processing, the glasses were

37:06added. Does it happen pre-experientially? So that would be the Stalin-esque show trial that, you know, you just, your experience is lying to you because your eyes, before the signal came from your eyes to your consciousness, this thing got in the way. Or was it Orwellian that you experienced it correctly? It's just that when you remember it, something after experience came in. And so it seems like that is a legitimate, like, yes, some things can happen with the processing. If I put on glasses, green glasses, then things look green to me clearly on the way in, right? It's the glasses

37:41are pre, but if I somehow, you know, it's harder to think about what the mental stuff, but you know, memories fade over time. And so things get bunched together. And so of course we, we know that there can be a difference between, you know, an eyewitness testimony when you, you know, interview them a minute after the thing happened versus a day later where all this other crap intervenes. So we understand in the macro scale, how things could be before or after consciousness. He just thinks in the micro scale, as in these couple of examples, the phi example, and this woman with the

38:14glasses example, there is no difference pre or post-processing, which means there is no strict dividing line of this is where consciousness happens. We get information in, it hits the screen that is where consciousness happens. And then after that memory does its work. No, it's just the information gets in the brain somehow. And it is different processing happens in parallel all over the place. End of story. Until somebody asks you a question about it, or you have to write it down,

38:47or you have to an experimental setting, push the button. When you see the second dot flash, whatever the thing is, you know, there has to be some probe and the probe can get at any wonder of the number of drafts, right? Because they could be different. One could have the lady. If you actually, when the lady is right there, you say, wait a second, look at that lady. Then you will clearly see and have a memory later that she doesn't have glasses. But if you don't do the probe at that point, then, you know, there was no, at least he's claiming there was no experience because it was

39:17something that we weren't focused on, right? Unless you're really focusing on it, unless your attention is focused on it, it doesn't count as experience. I think, right, that's the background foreground thing we need to bring back as our concluding point to, you know, I think that's where all of this impinges on. It's really hard to think if you're really focusing on something that there's not a stream of consciousness. There is a stream of things you are focusing on. Well, and we can't downplay the role of, I could say, habituation or acculturation to that. You know, he talks about, he uses that example of a noise that you don't hear, but when it's not

39:51there, you notice, you know, like a background hum that you don't hear it, you never pay attention to it. That really resonated with me because I'm that dude. Like, I know how my house sounds. I can tell when water's being used and, you know, like, I just, it freaks me, you know, and like, I'm like, wait a second, something's wrong. Like it just, and I'm not listening. I'm not consciously attentive trying to find things wrong. I could just tell because I'm in tune with whatever's going on there. But I wonder how much of this, you know, he starts off the book. It's like, how is it even possible to be mistaken? How is it even

40:23possible to have a hallucination? How would that even work? And, you know, you think about when you have the same experience over and over and over again, where a certain arrangement of things happens or places themselves in front of you at the same time, were that to change under some circumstances that would, if depending on how noticeable that thing was to you, that might really, or not noticeable, it might really register with you. But it's also possible that in other circumstances, even if it changed, you may not notice the change because you may just fill in the gap with what's perfectly normal

40:58to you. And Mark, you mentioned the gorilla basketball bouncing thing, which is a freak out, you know, back in, was it 15 years ago or whatever, when the meme came out. It's like, yeah. And, you know, all of this, of course, is just a point to the fact that we were so, you know, that the mechanism is not passive, right? That they were constructive. But I think if you just examine your own experience and start thinking carefully about, not thinking carefully, don't think, just put this framework in your mind and then start going out and experiencing your

41:30world and start noticing, it becomes profoundly disturbing. Well, maybe not disturbing is not the right word. It's shocking how he's right, that we just, we have this idea about how we are in the world and who we are and what we do and how we do it, that is just totally at odds with all of the mechanisms that we're, that we understand and learn about. So in other words, and maybe that's ultimately what qualia is. Qualia is the subjective experience that's completely fucking

42:01at odds with and wrong compared to mechanically and, and chemically and biologically and all that stuff, what actually happens in the world. Our experience of ourselves is completely different from what actually happens if you, you look at it, at the mechanics of how it actually happens. That's what qualia is. It's the way we fool ourselves.

Felt experience and distributed processing

42:24Dylan, I'm guessing you're not satisfied with that. I just don't understand why. There's something funny about this characteristic of philosophical discussion that I've, I find bizarre, which is that when you say that your felt experience experience is something that is a conclusion that's made up by your active combination of your memories and your active thinking about the world. And that's distinct from the flow of chemicals

42:55and electrical pulses that are through your body that somehow it's not merely explained by, and therefore it's an illusion. That conclusion I just find totally bizarre. Why isn't it that we say, oh wow, that's pretty amazing that we actually have felt experience that is rises out of these chemical electrical processes that are coalesced into this carbon-based fleshy entity that I call

43:26myself. And I have this experience of being me and that that's a real experience of being me. I think some of it might come from the way in which our imagination works, right? I think then it even talks about this a little bit, but the way in which you it's, we can imagine a body without a mind, right? And we can imagine a mind without a body. And some people think that that's sufficient enough to ask the question, why is, does it feel like there's something on the inside rather than all of this occurring in the dark, so to speak? So they think that's a serious concern.

43:57Like why, why shouldn't this all just be, if you will, in the dark? And I think you're saying something like, it's similar to asking like, why does liquidity at all come along with the H2O and the chemicals involved, the chemical process? Like, why would you, and some people would say, well, you can't imagine water without liquid. And you seem to be saying something like, you can't imagine the kind of process that goes on our brain and the natural selection sort of story we told without a felt experience coming along with it, which that some people think that they're separable. I mean, like, do you think it's, do you think the question, why does any of this feel like

44:28something, why is, cause really I agree with you, the process, the neurochemical processes that are going on in our brain, we are just what it feels like from the inside of that. Right. But so you would say you would reject the idea that all of this could be occurring without the subjective experience. You think that's just nonsensical. Yeah. Yeah. Some people think that, I know it sounds silly, but I think a lot of people, I mean, some of it is just the philosophical history that goes along with Descartes imagining a mind without a body, but it seems sensible to some people that you could imagine having this mind without the body, vice versa. And so that is where they sort of feel like, well,

45:03no, you have to do the further job of explaining why their subjectivity comes along with these brain processes. And I'm more sympathetic to your side that I think that they, you know, cohabitate like agency and subjectivity sort of bring each other along. So I don't, I guess, like I said, I, you know, can I imagine that such a thing is such a thing is true. Sure. I can imagine, but then, and I am a causalist, right? So I think that there's going to have to be someplace, something that the thing is in. So the whole objection to zeroth order Cartesian dualism that there is, you know, the problem of how

45:34does the mind interact with the body and vice versa is utterly persuasive, right? There, you have to have something that it's in. All right. So clearly there are many more discussions that we can and should have in this area to give my conclusion to what we've just read. I really like the idea of the multiple drafts model. And he gives an analogy to this with just the way academic publishing has changed, right? That there used to be like your article would come out in the journal and that is its

46:05publication date. And now there are literal drafts that you'll be sending around and they might be on the internet and there'll be different versions of it. And it's just not clear which one is the article, the definitive article. It's kind of arbitrary. And likewise, there are different discriminations that happen different places in the brain. And if you're trying to figure out, did the person detect at what exact moment did they detect the appearance of the dot? You're going to get different responses depending on how you ask the question, right? So if you say,

46:35push the button, as soon as you see the dot, then they're going to push it. Or if, you know, tell me as soon as you feel the dot, it's actually going to come later. So that, you know, this was a conclusion from that was like, Oh, maybe we're, you know, the whole thing is happening unconsciously that, but, and when you tell that's when it's open for your consciousness, but I agree with Dennett, it might be a little right. We don't actually have a way of measuring, like, when does it actually hit consciousness? We only have when we're doing science, various outputs. So you might at least question, is there any principled reason to say, Oh, it definitely didn't

47:09become conscious until the person says it or, you know, right before somewhere before when they push the button and when they said it, you know, so we'll just draw a line that, that there is something very arbitrary about that. And I also find it, you know, utterly persuasive that there's no central place in the brain. And I did sort of ask the AI, like, is his idea of distributed processing the widely accepted view in neuroscience now? And it is, yeah, there's no thought that, you know, it's the pineal gland that is there receiving all the information and making all the decisions or something like Descartes would say. So I buy this as far as it goes, but this chapter

47:4412 stuff that, you know, deserves more investigation and Wes deserves the opportunity to weigh in on it. So I will save that till next time. I don't know that he deserves it.

47:59All right. Well, if any other closing thoughts from anybody, I would like to say one thing just and quickly I'll say that I want to reemphasize Dennett's branding issue. I'm mostly in agreement with a lot of this, but I do sometimes just, I agree with him that there are a lot of ways in which we've been misled by archaic language and the history of philosophy and the sort of persistent tenacious need to report our experience as being unified and stuff like that. So I think that he's right that we should point out all of these ways in which we've been misled. I just wish he used different language sometimes. I really hate illusionism as a phrase, but that's all I wanted

48:33to say just to reemphasize. I think it was a cultural thing too, because a lot of the Searle and some of these guys, they're just kind of nasty and sarcastic sometimes when it's unnecessary. Yes. Well, I mean, that's how I was interpreting how, what Seth and Dylan, what you were saying, you know, Seth was like, oh, this whole thing is an illusion. And Dylan's like, no, it's not an illusion. It's just, it's a creation. It's an emergent creation. Like, well, I mean, it's just understand how we're using the word illusion, right? It's just like social construction. The fact that we construct sexuality, does that mean it's an illusion? Well, no, it's rooted in this blah,

49:04blah, blah. And we actually did it, right? Is money, money is a social construction. Is money an illusion? Well, no, you can pay for things with money. It's real. So the question is, is consciousness constructed in that way? Or is the idea of an inner life constructed in that way? Because we do, it is very handy. And then it has a whole book called The Intentional Stance to think about like, well, what are this person's plans and perceptions? And you're building the theory of mind, as we called it in our Dr. Drew episode, our first one with him, that people get this idea

49:37that other people have minds. And right, right. So it's, that's part of folk psychology is part of in a limitable part of the way we treat each other and ourselves. And there's no, you know, no reason we should think that my luxuriating in the fresh air and whatever other quality, like there's no undermining of that by trying to give these kinds of explanations. So yeah, we're just not sure if we're getting caught up in just people using offensive language. Are you calling what that, that, that wonderful experience? I just have somehow illusory that my is, and it's

50:11comparable, you know, we, we didn't have a lot of problem with Parfit claiming there is no continuity of self in the way you thought. So why can't we agree with Dennett that there is no continuity, qualia as a substantial thing, that there is no stream of consciousness in the way that William James described that that is an illusion. Like it's a stream when we're looking at it, when we're paying attention at that moment, but we're really so all over the place that the idea of a stream is a fiction. I think that's what Dennett comes down to.

50:41You should let us know what in this area and other areas you want us to talk about. Email us at PEL at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Interact with us on the various social media platforms. Comment on the blog post at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Thanks everybody. Thanks Chris again, being a special guest. Two episodes in a row. Thanks Chris. Anytime. Thank you, Chris. Night, everybody. Thank you guys. Night, guys. Night.