Consciousness explained
This book revises the traditional view of consciousness by claiming that Cartesianism and Descartes' dualism of mind and body should be replaced with theories from the realms of neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence. What people think of as the stream of consciousness is not a single, unified sequence, the author argues, but "multiple drafts" of reality composed by a computer-like "virtual machine". Dennett considers how consciousness could have evolved in human beings and confronts the classic mysteries of consciousness: the nature of introspection, the self or ego and its relation to thoughts and sensations, and the level of consciousness of non-human creatures.
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35recommend
106mentions
72people
2008–2026years
43% recommend46% neutral10% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The paper makes a huge assumption that only thermodynamic constitutions can produce consciousness. The assumptions seems completely unsubstantiated given that thermodynamics are just states and states are replicable. The whole Chinese Room idea is pure sophistry as well. Both Dennett and Hofstadter address it quite well in Consciousness Explained and I am a Strange Loop respectively.
- Daniel Dennet had a good few paragraphs about this in Consciousness Explained - the Turing Test is supposed to be challenging/adversarial. The example Dennett gave was telling the AI a joke and then asking it to reflect on and explain the joke and come up with some alternative punchlines (I note that contemporary LLMs would still be good at that, but when the book was written in 1991 that sortof interaction with an AI was unthinkable)
- >you could construct a synthetic reality for that brain that it would not be able to distinguish from its previous brain-in-a-body experiences.
No. I'd recommend reading Dennett's Consciousness Explained for a longer treatment of this, but if you want to have an experience just like you, you need a body and an environment just like you. Sure it could be synthetic in the sense of it being artificially constructed, you could have artificial limbs, but it can be no different from the one you have, it cannot be a vat. There is no "Cartesian Theater" in the brain, your experience is already distributed throughout both your brain and body. Your experience isn't something being "fed into you" (the brain) from the outside, the entire perception emerges in the first place through being embodied in the world. The concept of the thought experiment itself would not even make sense without implicitly assuming an embodied reality beforehand setting it up.
Just like there is no philosophical zombie that's somehow materially identical but without sentience, the reverse doesn't exist either. There is no disembodied computer with the experiences of an organic being because they function in entirely different ways.
- Dennett’s Consciousness Explained would be a good resource if you want more worked out theory and explanation.
- Penrose has no fucking clue. Sorry for the language, but direct speech is required here. It’s about as physically realistic as “intelligent design” is as an alternative to Darwinism. And similarly motivated.
I would recommend Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained” if you want a more serious take on the subject.
- My favorite is Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett
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