h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Also known as 'Consciousness Explained Away'...which is fair enough, I think.

Have you heard the Reith Lectures by Villayanur Ramachandran?http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lectures.shtml

I hope he does explain away consciousness. This whole silly mind business has always been a splinter in my eye.

...and thanks for the link! I'm gonna stick 'em on my mp3 player.

'Consciousness Explained Away' is what some neuroscientists call Dennet's views.

I think Ramachandran does back that up, sort of. I think he's suggesting that there's no one thing called 'consciousness'. Rather, it's a collection of 'epiphenomena' - a perceptual illusion caused by the cross-connections between neural processes.

Anyway...enjoy the mp3s. Apart from anything else, he has the most *marvellous* radio voice.

Hi guys! Mind if I join in?

I have to say I enjoyed "Consciousness Explained" and I can see why other philosophers were offended by his hubris at pretending to have penetrated what was for them in effect a holy mystery.

A friend described to me a philosophical conference at which Dennett was present. One speaker had a gizmo made up from a hair-dryer with a red light attached instead of a heating coil. He called it a "consciousness sensor" or something, and the patter went something like "Wouldn't it be helpful if we had a consciousness sensor, so we could tell whether a particular subject were conscious or not? Well I happen to have one here that I got a friend to fix up --"

He then pointed the hirdryer at himself and other memebers of the panel and audience, secretly pushing a button and making it shine its red light whenever it pointed at a person. It lit up for everybody, but strangely stayed turned off when pointed at Daniel Dennett. Great laughs.

Dennet has a knew book, does he not? And there was something in the paper about an angry exchange of e-mails with another philosopher. And I recently discovered that he's Bright: http://www.the-brights.net/

I think all this 'Consciousness Explained Away' stuff is truly revolutionary. We, as biological machines, no more have an entity called consciousness than a computer is conscious of the things done with its hardware and software. We can't detect it, we don't know where to look for it, it doesn't explain things anything better than the reductionist neurophysiological model...so why talk about it?

btw I've just finished 'Saturday' by Ian McEwan, which is (loosely) concerned with consciousness. A fantastic, rich read. I'd shied away from McEwan previously, out of prejudice against the BritLit clique.

Haven't read any McEwan; I have a stack (literally) of books lining up for my attention, among them Dennett's "Kinds of Minds".

The sticky part of D's "multiple drafts" theory of consciousness is that the choices (between which of many possible drafts will be accepted as the official account of what's going on) are pre-conscious, automatic.

Problems arise in ethics; nobody is therefore responsible for their actions?

This problem is very well treated in Robert Wright's "The Moral Animal".

Hmm. I shall have to research ethics further. I'm intersted in the non-religious basis for ethics, and I've been trying to touch on it in my Atheist Fundamentalism thread (ibid), but without takers.

I'm leaning towards a combination of biological determinism (we are compelled to do the things which make us happiest) and social pragmatism (some of the things we might choose would, if tolerated by others, lead to a society which we would all find uncomfortable).

No...not (ibid) - (q.v.)

Just had a look at the enthusiastic Brights: they include three of the authors I respect most, Pinker, Dennett, and Dawkins, on the first page.