display all the ideas for this combination of texts
8 ideas
| 7393 | We can't draw a clear line between conscious and unconscious [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Even in our own case, we cannot draw the line separating our conscious mental states from our unconscious mental states. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 14.2) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being a simple and self-evident truth, which anyone working on the brain takes for granted, but an awful lot of philosophers (stuck somewhere in the seventeenth century) can't seem to grasp. |
| 7367 | Perhaps the brain doesn't 'fill in' gaps in consciousness if no one is looking. [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps the brain doesn't actually have to go to the trouble of "filling in" anything with "construction" - for no one is looking. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: This a very nice point, because claims that the mind fills in in various psychological visual tests always has the presupposition of a person (or homunculus?) which is overseeing the visual experiences. |
| 7394 | Conscious events can only be explained in terms of unconscious events [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 14.4) | |
| A reaction: This sounds undeniable, so it seems to force a choice between reductive physicalism and mysterianism. Personally I think there must be an explanation in terms of non-conscious events, even if humans are too thick to understand it. |
| 7391 | We can know a lot of what it is like to be a bat, and nothing important is unknown [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: There is at least a lot that we can know about what it is like to be a bat, and Nagel has not given us a reason to believe there is anything interesting or theoretically important that is inaccessible to us. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 14.2) | |
| A reaction: I agree. If you really wanted to identify with the phenomenology of bathood, you could spend a lot of time in underground caves whistling with your torch turned off. I can't, of course, be a bat, but then I can't be my self of yesterday. |
| 7387 | "Qualia" can be replaced by complex dispositional brain states [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: "Qualia" can be replaced by complex dispositional states of the brain. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 14.1) | |
| A reaction: 'Dispositional' reveals Dennett's behaviourist roots (he was a pupil of Ryle). Fodor is right that physicalism cannot just hide behind the word "complexity". That said, the combination of complexity and speed might add up to physical 'qualia'. |
| 7376 | We can't assume that dispositions will remain normal when qualia have been inverted [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: The goal of the experiment was to describe a case in which it was obvious that the qualia would be inverted while the reactive dispositions would be normalized. But the assumption that one could just tell is question-begging. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 12.4) | |
| A reaction: It certainly seems simple and plausible that if we inverted our experience of traffic light colours, no difference in driver behaviour would be seen. However, my example, of a conversation in a gallery of abstract art, seems more problematic. |
| 7372 | In peripheral vision we see objects without their details, so blindsight is not that special [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: If a playing card is held in peripheral vision, we can see the card without being able to identify its colours or its shapes. That's normal sight, not blindsight, so we should be reluctant on those grounds to deny visual experience to blindsight subjects. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 11.4) | |
| A reaction: This is an important point in Dennett's war against the traditional all-or-nothing view of mental events. Nevertheless, blindsight subjects deny all mental experience, while picking up information, and peripheral vision never seems like that. |
| 7373 | Blindsight subjects glean very paltry information [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Discussions of blindsight have tended to ignore just how paltry the information is that blindsight subjects glean from their blind fields. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 11.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a bit unfair, because blindsight has mainly pointed to interesting speculations (e.g. Idea 2953). Nevertheless, if blindsight with very high information content is actually totally impossible, the speculations ought to be curtailed. |