Daniel C. Dennett: 'Consciousness Explained'

I've been reading Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained this weekend and I agree with his statement that 'We’re just very, very complicated, evolved machines made of organic molecules instead of metal and silicon, and we are conscious...' (p.431-432). He certainly challenges the notion that our thoughts, belief systems, etc are 'hard-wired', instead is arguing that brain neuroplasticity enables us not only to learn - make new neural connections, but also to re-learn old behaviours (I think that cognitive behavioral therapy is part of this kind of thinking). If you believe that we have a 'self' (and of course we do - even if it is illusory or hallucinatory) you might be challenged by the notion that the 'self' is just a convenient word we use to separate our self or create a boundary between our body and the world (maybe for identification, recognition or protection - an evolutionary thing according to Dennett).

I'm thinking here of Douglas Hofstadter statement ‘Mind is a pattern perceived by a mind…’ a strange loop that folds back on itself in reflection and paradox, which suggests that the self is just a way that the mind has figured some of its processes. But does it really matter whether we have a self, think we have a self, or don't have one at all? Maybe all of this is only important to those who want to create an artificial intelligence a kind of 'zombie' individual that is in many ways cognitively similar to the human animal, but who does not experience the subjective quality of experience (qualia), such as the very personal experience of pain, the taste of wine, aesthetics, but who recoils if poked and who behaves in a way a human would behave under similar circumstances. Dennett disqualifies qualia maintaining that all experience is just electrical signals in the brain, so I suppose in some ways he supports the notion that we are all zombies.

Since qualia cannot be articulated through current language usage to another person, thus making it quite difficult to explain the nuances of our inner personal experiences are we not like the zombie body that also cannot explain its inner workings? If a zombie or android construct that could process information at the same rate of humans did also have a sensory outer skin that could generate information to its internal processing unit and that outer skin was pierced, would the experience of this event be of the same order as that generated in the human if its skin is cut, torn or severed from its body? We would say NO primarily because we would be able to empathise with the damaged person, whereas we cannot empathize with the experience of the non-human. We know what it's like to be flesh and blood and be hurt; we do not imagine that some artificially constructed body COULD experience anything equally disturbing!

See information about p-zombie at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

I'm also interested in the fact that Dennett proposes the idea that the mind makes multiple drafts (in other words, actually constructs the experience - filters, discriminates, reorders, reconfigures, maybe distorts, exaggerates, mutates) before it actually presents an idea or event to us and of course this is done in a billionth of a second. Being a writer I get that! Well, I'll keep reading and if I come across anything really interesting I'll blog it, in the meantime, this mind is going to keep processing...