CSE 719:  Computational Theories of Consciousness, Fall 2009

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Dennett (1992) quotes (for bib info, see online bibliography)
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1. Sect 1.1, para 10ff:
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"...the Multiple Drafts model:
All perceptual operations, and indeed all operations of thought and
action, are accomplished by multi-track processes of interpretation and
elaboration that occur over hundreds of milliseconds, during which time
various additions, incorporations, emendations, and overwritings of
content can occur, in various orders. Feature-detections or
discriminations *only have to be made once*. That is, once a localized,
specialized 'observation' has been made, the information content thus
fixed does not have to be sent somewhere else to be *re*discriminated by
some 'master' discriminator. In other words, it does not lead to a
*re-presentation* of the already discriminated feature for the benefit of
the audience in the Cartesian Theater. ...  Drafts of experience can be
revised at a great rate, and no one is more correct than another. Each
reflects the situation at the time it is generated....  These spatially
and temporally distributed content-fixations are themselves precisely
locatable in both space and time, but their onsets do *not* mark the
onset of awareness of their content. It is always an open question
whether any particular content thus discriminated will eventually
appear as an element in conscious experience. These distributed
content-discriminations yield, over the course of time, something
*rather like* a narrative stream or sequence, subject to continual
editing by many processes distributed around in the brain, and
continuing indefinitely into the future....  This stream of contents is
only rather like a narrative because of its multiplicity; at any point
in time there are multiple 'drafts' of narrative fragments at various
stages of 'editing' in various places in the brain. Probing this stream
at different intervals produces different effects, elicits different
narrative accounts from the subject. If one delays the probe too long
(overnight, say) the result is apt to be no narrative left at all--or
else a narrative that has been digested or 'rationally reconstructed' to
the point that it has minimal integrity. If one probes 'too early', one
may gather data on how early a particular discrimination is achieved in
the stream, but at the cost of disrupting the normal progression of the
stream. Most importantly, the Multiple Drafts model avoids the tempting
mistake of supposing that there must be a single narrative (the 'final'
or 'published' draft) that is canonical--that represents the *actual*
stream of consciousness of the subject, whether or not the experimenter
(or even the subject) can gain access to it."

2. Sect. 2.2, para 13
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"Consider, first, a Stalinesque mechanism [for the color phi phenomenon]
 in the brain's editing room, located before consciousness, there is a
delay, a loop of slack like the 'tape delay' used in broadcasts of
'live' programs which gives the censors in the control room a few
seconds to bleep out obscenities before broadcasting the signal. *In
the editing room,* first frame A, of the red spot, arrives, and then,
when frame B, of the green spot, arrives, some interstitial frames (C
and D) can be created and then spliced into the film (in the order
A,C,D,B) on its way to projection in the theater of consciousness. By
the time the 'finished product' arrives at consciousness, it already
has its illusory insertion."

3. para 14
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"Alternatively, there is the hypothesis of an Orwellian mechanism:
shortly after the awareness of the first spot *and* the second spot (with
no illusion of apparent motion at all), a revisionist historian of
sorts, in the brain's memory-library receiving station, notices that the
unvarnished history of this incident doesn't make enough sense, so he
'interprets' the brute events, red-followed-by-green, by making up a
narrative about the intervening passage, complete with midcourse color
change, and installs this history, incorporating his glosses, frames C
and D..., in the memory library for all future reference. Since he works
fast, within a fraction of a second--the amount of time it takes to
frame (but not utter) a verbal report of what you have experienced--the
record you rely on, stored in the library of memory, is already
contaminated. You say and believe that you saw the illusory motion and
color change, but that is really a memory hallucination, not an accurate
recollection of your original awareness."

4. para 19
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"Where the Stalinesque theory postulates a button-pushing reaction to an
unconscious detection of a red spot, the Orwellian theory postulates a
*conscious* experience of a red spot that is immediately obliterated from
memory by its sequel. So here is the rub: we have two different models
of what happens in the phi phenomenon: one posits a Stalinesque 'filling
in' on the upward, pre-experiential path, and the other posits an
Orwellian 'memory revision' on the downward, post-experiential path, and
*both* of them are consistent with *whatever* the subject says or thinks or
remembers. Note that the inability to distinguish these two
possibilities does not just apply to the *outside observers* who might be
supposed to lack some private data to which the subject had 'privileged
access'. You, as a subject in a phi phenomenon experiment, *could not*
discover anything in the experience from your own first-person
perspective that would favor one theory over the other; the experience
would 'feel the same' on either account."

5. para 21
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"Both the Orwellian and the Stalinesque version of the Cartesian Theater
model can deftly account for all the data--not just the data we already
have, but the data we can imagine getting in the future. They both
account for the verbal reports: one theory says they are innocently
mistaken while the other says they are accurate reports of experienced
'mistakes'."

6. Dennett, in Consciousness Explained (1991: 210)
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"Human consciousness is *itself* a huge complex of memes (or more
exactly, meme-effects in brains)	
	[A MEME IS "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of
	*imitation*" (Dawkins) THAT CAN EVOLVE EXACTLY AS GENES DO]	
that can best be understood as the operation of a *'von Neumannesque'*
virtual machine *implemented* in the *parallel architecture* of a brain
that was not designed for any such activities."      [CF. POLLOCK 2008]

7. Dennett, in Searle 1997: 117ff
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"...my candidate for the fatally false intuition...is...the conviction
that we know what we're talking about when we talk about *that feeling*
...of pain that is the effect of the stimulus and the cause of
the dispositions to react--the quale, the 'intrinsic' content of the
subjective state.  How could anyone deny that!?  Just watch--but you
have to pay close attention.  I develop my destructive arguments against
this intuition by showing how an objective science of consciousness is
possible....[t]he objective scientific method I describe (under the
alarming name of heterophenomenology) is...exactly the method tacitly
endorsed and relied upon by every scientist working on consciousness...
Edelman has insisted to me, correctly, that his robot exhibits
intentionality as real as any on the planet--it's just artificial
intentionalty, and none the worse for that."

8. Dennett on qualia (in his 1977)
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a)
"Witnesses 
	[I.E., THE AUDIENCE IN THE CARTESIAN THEATER]
need raw materials on which to base their judgments.  These raw materials,
whether they are called 'sense data' or 'sensations' or 'raw feels' or
'phenomenal properties of experience',
	[I.E., QUALIA]
are props without which a Witness makes no sense."
	[HE THEN GOES ON TO ARGUE THAT THE "PROPS" DON'T EXIST,
	SO, THERE IS NO "WITNESS"] (p. 322)

b)
"Just what are 'phenomenal qualities' or qualia?...They seem terribly
obvious at first--they're the way things look, smell, feel, sound to
us--but they have a way of changing their status or vanishing under
scrutiny." (p. 338).

c)
[IMAGINE A BLIND PERSON WHO HAS DEVELOPED BLINDSIGHT TO THE DEGREE
THAT HE OR SHE CAN GET AROUND AS IF SIGHTED OR WHO USES A PROSTHESIS SO
THAT HE OR SHE CAN GET AROUND AS IF SIGHTED.]
"...we may...imagine our subject saying that something is missing:
'Qualia.  My perceptual states do have qualia, of course, because they
are conscious states, but back before I lost my sight, they used to have
*visual* qualia, and now they don't, in spite of all my training.'  It may
seem obvious to you that this makes sense.  If so, the rest of the
chapter is...designed to shake that conviction." (pp. 343f)

d)
"...[a] scenario for the 'missing visual qualia' of our imagined
blindsight virtuoso[:]  ...it is possible that if he complains of the
absence of qualia, he *might* simply be noticing the relative paucity of
information he now gets from his vision and misdescribing it.  ...[One]
way of closing the...gap would be simply to lower his epistemic hunger,
or obtund [!] his visual curiosity in some way. ...Would anything be
missing in such a person?" (pp. 358f)

e)
"I *am* denying that there are any such properties [AS QUALIA].
But...I agree that there **seem to be** qualia...because it really does
seem as if science has shown us that ...colors can't be out there, and
hence must be in here....[BUT] What science has actually shown us is
just that the light-reflecting properties of objects cause creatures to
go into various discriminative states, scattered about in their brains,
and underlying a host of innate dispositions...." (p. 372)

f)
"Don't our internal discriminative states *also* have some special
'intrinsic' properties, the subjective, private, ineffable properties
that constitute *the way things look to us*...?  Those additional
properties would be the qualia...[W]e will try to remove the motivation
for believing in these properties ...by finding alternative explanations
for the phenomena that seem to demand them." (p. 373)

g)
"According to this alternative view, colors *are* properties 'out there'
after all.  In place of Locke's [INTERNAL] 'ideas of red' [I.E., QUALIA]
we have ... discriminative states that **have the content** [??!] *red*.

[DENNETT GOES ON TO SAY THAT, IF YOU THINK YOU ARE COMPARING COLOR QUALIA
WHEN ASKED WHETHER THE RED OF SANTA'S SUIT IS DARKER OR LIGHTER THAN THE
RED OF THE AMERICAN FLAG, YOU ARE WRONG, BECAUSE A COMPUTER WITH A
CAMERA, WHICH COMPARED THOSE TWO ITEMS FOR THAT PURPOSE, WOULD DO IT BY
COMPARING, SAY, THE FLAG'S RED#163 WITH SANTA'S RED#172, AND DOING A
COMPUTATION (SAY, SUBTRACTING 172 - 163).

h) 
"It is obvious that the [computer] doesn't use [qualia], *but neither do
we*.  The [computer] probably doesn't know how it compares the
colors...*and neither do we*.  ...The [computer] *certainly* doesn't
have any qualia..., so it does indeed follow ...that we don't have
qualia either.  There is no ... difference [between the computer and any
human].  There just seems to be." (pp. 374f)

i)
The qualophile says: "'Consider...the way the pink ring seems to me
right now, at this very moment, in isolation from all my dispositions
past associations and future activities.  *That*, the purified, isolated
*way it is with me* in regards to color at this moment--that is my pink
quale.'  ...this is the big mistake, the source of all the paradoxes
about qualia...." (p. 386)

j)
"When you say '*This* is my quale', what you are singling out, or
referring to, *whether you realize it or not*, is your idiosyncratic
complex of dispositions  You *seem* to be referring to a private,
ineffable something-or-other in your mind's eye...but this is just how it
seems to you, not how it is.  That 'quale of yours is a character in
good standing in the fictional world of your heterophenomenology, but what
it turns out to be in the *real* world in your brain is just a complex
of dispositions." (p. 389) 


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obtund = dull the sensitivity of