Three horsemen and a nutcake?

The brown acid going around really isn't very good.

 

I choose to be a nutcake. It's only fair. As I can't go mad without damage to my brain from without, I take it upon myself to embrace all language, despite any meanings that escape me. I have an extraordinary sense of humour. I find this to be a necessity at the end of the world. As far as we know, it's all we've ever known. I hold that it is possible to stop missing eachother.

 

Better aim.

 

Nothing against braces when it comes down to it. But does it? Ever?

As we're forever showing up, no matter where we happen to be, we're actually in everything, no matter the extent. Everything is the matter with us. There is no lasting metaphysic!

I'm happy to be target practice as long as the ammunition is laughter. There's far worse I could do than to appear foolish, eg. appearing bulletproof.

 

Dennett's unusual views on consciousness may be better understood by looking at his view on personal identity.

In his essay 'Where Am I?' Dennett proposes a thought experiment where his brain is physically removed from his body, but still connected to it via some kind of radio-like transmitters. [The somewhat cheeky backstory is that Dennett must defuse an underground nuclear bomb, but his brain cannot be exposed to the radiation. So, the scientists will drop his body down into this hole where the bomb is while his brain, from a safe distance away, will be able to guide his body through the process of disarming the bomb]

One of the initial questions Dennett raises following the surgery is where exactly is he? "He" is standing in a room looking down at his body, after all, but is he (whatever that is) located where his brain is, or located where his body his? That is, is he the origin of the thought 'Where am I?' or its object.

To a make a long account kind of short (and I'm working up to how this bears upon Dennett's views on consciousness, I swear), the thought experiment goes a bit haywire as thought experiments often do. Dennett's brain loses contact with his body for a bit and when he wakes up he comes to find out that all the while his brain has been separated from his body, a very sophisticated computer has been uploaded with all of Dennett's thoughts and memories leading up to the experiment, and has been running concurrently with the experiment. In fact, this computer itself has even been connected up with another body.

There now look to be two Dennett's walking around. And Dennett himself seems to conclude that "he" is wherever there is a Dennett brain-body couple.

That, I think, goes some way toward explaining his position on consciousness. Consciousness, whatever else it is, is an inherently private phenomenon. I can know I exist and that my consciousness has certain traits or memories, but I cannot know this about anyone else or any other minds (for my part, I certainly believe other humans I encounter are conscious in the same way I am, but I cannot know it in the same way I know it about myself).

In Dennett's thought experiment, however, there are now TWO or more entities that may lay claim to knowing that this singular consciousness is, in fact, manifest. Doesn't that fly in the face of what consciousness is supposed to be and perhaps call it into question? Dennett seems to think so (I, myself disagree).

Perhaps that goes some way toward explaining how Dennett arrived at this unusal position about consciousness. He's not the first to go down this road though. Hume was skeptical that there was such a thing as a self because he could never catch this self without a thought.

 

That's very interesting. I agree with you that it doesn't fly in the face of what I understand consciousness to be: a state of awareness that is my most immediate experience of reality. Whether or not there are a bunch of other Okiefreaks running around with their own aware encounters of reality is an intriguing (or disturbing?) thought but irrelevant to my own experience, nor would I consider them to be my encounters, even if the other Okiefreaks are exact genetic copies of me, since I'm not experiencing those encounters. I still think Dennett is confused in a way that is quintessentially academic. He and his mentors are reacting against Cartesian mind-body dualism, which is fine up to a point, but they've taken it over a cliff--to the point of denying their own minds.

 

I just want to point out that you cannot use Dennet's view on consciousness to reject his views on god. Every idea must be evaluated on its own merits, not on the merits of the person presenting the idea.

 

Of course. Breaking the Spell is a good book, although I don't agree with it. It's at least sane.

 

True enough, from the standpoint of pure logic. However, I'm intuitive, as well as logical, and my street smarts tell me that when a guy is an obvious quack about one thing, you might take other things he says with a grain of salt. I've been reading astrophysicist Bernard Haisch's The God Theory, which advances a concept of God that's compatible with Darwin and the Big Bang. "Hot damn!" I said. "Just what I've been looking for!" And then I read about his activism on behalf of UFOs & ETs, and said "Hmmmmmmm". Now for all I know there are extraterrestrials and flying saucers, as well as the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I'm skeptical. Other examples of brilliant people who walk the fine line between genius and insanity would include Professor Frank Tippler, with joint appointments in mathematics and physics at Tulane, who thinks we're headed for a Matrix style existence after our consciousnesses have been taken over by computer simulations run by robots who will administer eternal rewards or punishment, depending on how naughty or nice we've been; and Nick Herbert, Ph.D. from Stanford, author of Quantum Reality and developer of new xerographic processes, who devised a metaphase typewriter for communicating with disembodied spirits (which unfortunately didn't seem to work).Who am I to question such genius? They could be right, but in my heart I know they're nuts.