Daniel C. Dennett - What is Consciousness?

Consciousness is what we can know best and explain least. It is the inner subjective experience of what it feels like to see red or smell garlic or hear Beethoven. Consciousness has intrigued and baffled philosophers. To begin, we must define and describe consciousness. What to include in a complete definition and description of consciousness?



Daniel Clement Dennett III is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist and is currently the Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and Professor at Tufts University.


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[BugRib]

Definition of "qualia": Everything _I_ experience.

And while "experience" may be hard to define _in words, _ it doesn't matter because we all know _exactly_ what "experience" means.

[samvirtuel]

It's when I meditate that I am most aware, in other words, it is when my brain no longer processes speech, thought, vision, etc.
Therefore Dennett does not deal with awareness but with the complex processes that our brain goes through to think, speak, see, move, etc...

the problem is not our intellect, it's awareness itself.

[marcosgalvao]

Consciousness is not a ilusion, even a ilusion needs the reality of consciousness to exists .

[mikedziuba]

I agree with what he says. But some people would say that he is a philosophical heretic. Because he says that empirical science is what people should rely on for studying consciousness. Philosophy by itself isn't good enough.

This is heresy alright. But all existing sciences used used to be a part of philosophy, before they left philosophy and became sciences in their own right. Perhaps now is the time for the study of consciousness to do the same. It doesn't belong in philosophy. It belongs in the realm of science.

[borderlands]

Dennett's position is there is no means by which unconscious matter can give rise to consciousness, therefor consciousness must be illusory. The problem is he asserts this epiphenomenal position by assuming his own and other people's conscious awareness is sufficiently real, to contemplate its own unreality. The level of nuance and plurality required to uphold this, is not suggestive of any known biological process.

[daledheyalef]

Q: What is consciousness?
A: Something that Daniel Dennett doesn’t understand

[delq]

But who is seeing the competing neural networks. What he is talking about is awareness which is merely another tool which can be similarly observed like thoughts etc. The problem is how a conscious perspective is developed which becomes the observer

[wioswitchtoswitchdigitalpi]

Q: What is consciousness?
A: For people, consciousness refers to people’s subjective awareness. It may refer to a person's subjective cognition or a person's cognitive state.

[Sam-hhry]

"He had them write down the qualities they associate with the scale tones." Uh, that is not qualia. Qualia is simply what it’s like to hear a scale tone. No, no one is able to reduce what it’s like to hear a scale tone to physical parameters. No one has solved the hard problem.

[zcydssh]

DD talks about scales of music. But why does one person prefer Bach to say Beethoven, or Beethoven to Mozart? Why does one person enjoy flavours and foods which others find insipid or repulsive? How do describe the experience of eating a banana to someone who has never tasted anything like it, so that they understand what it is like? His dislike of the term qualia seems to be rooted in his (correct) assessment that it remains mysterious.

[rammani]

It’s funny how some materialists can claim that consciousness is an illusion while not realising that they themselves are only trying to build a simple model which explains only what they experience which is only a subset of consciousness. It’s a fundamental contradiction.

[Rakscha-Sun]

„Consciousness is a variety of different THINGS“ - One surefire way to tell that somebody is not knowing what he is talking about is using the word „thing“.

[Sam-hhry]

That we don’t have a scientific definition for qualia does not imply that they don’t exist. That is a huge leap in logic. All scientific definitions are derived from qualia. The reason qualia itself can’t be defined in that way is because science models the relative differences between qualia. For example, the experience of the color green can be modeled in terms of its difference in wavelength from other colors, or by the relative difference between different brain states corresponding to different perceptions.

Dennett rejects the ground of all scientific knowledge, qualitative sensory perceptions, in favor of the abstractions we draw from it. This puts him on epistemically weak ground. It’s a clear example of embracing theory over reality so things fit in with your personal prejudices.

[RogerBays]

The way I like to think of qualia is this: When I see a red bus it is visual qualia. When I listen to music it is auditory qualia. When I taste food . . . etc etc. If Daniel thinks qualia is non-functional, this could be tested by walking across the road in front of a red qualia bus! Test works for green busses too!

And if indirect realism is true, we have no access to the hypothesised 'real world, ' so we cannot verify if the hypothesis is true because we are locked in the indirect world. As for us being conscious, we have to accept that it is a guess based on the unverified hypothesis of indirect realism. But what we can say is that there are qualia e.g. red busses. The problem is we have no idea what a red qualia bus really is.

[leonbrenner]

Consciousness is the observer of thinking. Not the thinker.

[nagabhushanjoshi]

One of the best philosophers of modern times, wish we had such people in India

[KP_Oz]

Clear as mud. Lost me in the first 2 minutes. After 50 years of research?

[ramithuday]

Conciousness is an experience of the field itself..where the observer and observed meet..where the wave and particle meet. Where you are neither a wave nor a particle..

[luamfernandez]

The question is something like this, How could there be an obsever?what's needed to observe? How does observing happen?

[kallianpublico]

He's a scientist. His path is through relations that are observable but which can be communicated. The linguistic mind is the source of reason and partakes of consciousness. It is not a complete partaker of consciousness..but it is the only one we can talk about. Consciousness also involves direct experience which may be accessible to memory but not to the linguistic mind. Something which can be experienced but may not be talked about rationally.
Dreams are part of consciousness. We will get close to linguistic understanding of consciousness when we get close to understanding dreams. I think it all has to do with eating.