🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep14.013025.26710@sophia.smith.edu> orourke@sophia.smith.edu (Joseph O'Rourke) writes:
>	chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>
>>Not so with consciousness: even when
>>you've told the whole story about behaviour and its physical causation,
>>there still seems to be a vast explanatory gap between that and
>>the phenomenon of consciousness itself.
>
>This "seems to be" is controversial:  Dennett in particular questions
>the vastness of the gap (in "Consciousness Explained").  

Sadly, Dennett's arguments don't come to much.  He invokes an analogy
with "life" that misses the point entirely -- *of course* there is
no further fact with life that needs explanation, as the phenomena
in question all present themselves to us as behavioural facts and
functional capacities, from a third-person point of view.  The
analogy with life can take you as far as "mind from the point of view
of cognitive science" -- i.e. mind as the causation of behaviour --
but it doesn't begin to touch on the unique first-person experience
that's in question.

The remainder of Dennett's arguments come down to the dogma that
once one has explained our behavioural capacities, including
our capacity to discriminate environmental stimuli, and our
capacity to produce verbal reports of our mental states, then
one has explained everything -- there's simply nothing more
that could need explaining.  But this is simply ducking the
big question.  The problem was never to explain our functional
capacities -- those were always a relatively straightforward
problem for cognitive science.  The problem was to explain why
those capacities are accompanied by conscious experience.  The
closest Dennett comes to resolving this problem is in the moments
when he bites the bullets and denies the reality of such experience.
That's an audacious move, but not very satisfactory to one who's
not already in the grip of an ideology.

The book is exemplary, however, in that its attempt to deal
with the problem of consciousness consists in an alternation
between two strategies that are beloved by many materialists;
indeed we've seen both in this discussion, viz:

(a) redefine the problem: instead of explaining the experience
of consciousness, explain various functional capacities;

(b) deny the phenomenon: argue that conscious experience in
fact does not exist, but is a mere illusion.

Unfortunately, when these strategies are seen for what they are,
neither of them is very satisfactory.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."