Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: Weblogs, Consciousness, Connectivism, and Zombies: Stirring It Up with Daniel Dennett

Being Casual Friday and the day before Spring Break here in Gainesville, the following are a number of esoteric thoughts threading through my head after re-reading the first chapter of Daniel Dennett’s  book Sweet Dreams: Philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness.

Blogs and Multiple Drafts

After writing in a weblog for two years, I realize that what I write is often a version of something I’ve written or read before. That echo chamber that is the edu’sphere is merely what Dennett might refer to as a multiple drafts theory of consciousness, a mutation of previously used material being recombined over and over.

We might consider a blog post to be simply a “best of” version of what is being thought aloud, frozen in time. Dennett suggests that this what we do “when we tell others – or even our later selves—about our conscious experience” (p. xi).

Philosophical issues that continue to bewilder

Consider the New Yorker magazine cover below as a representation of consciousness:

What is going on in this person’s brain?

The pointillist rendering of this “conscious man” serves as a salute to modern science and even connectivism.

Each of us is an assemblage, a connection, of trillions of cells of many different flavors all contributing to the whole, the big picture that is our “self.”

We are descendents of sperm and egg that can be traced back through a thousand different lineages and yet, Dennett argues, “not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares” (p. 2).

Dennett proclaims that each cell is “a largely autonomous microrobot, no more conscious than a yeast cell” (p. 2). A hundred kilos of yeast does not care about a Braque painting; yet we do.

Our body, Dennett avers, is simply composed of parts that can be equated to yeast cells “only with different tasks to perform,” insisting that our “interests and values have almost nothing to do with the limited goals that the cells that compose you” (p. 2).

He suggests that many scientists and philosophers have regarded the means by which we manufacture consciousness is actually a product of a “spirit,” an extra-something stationed somehow in our “bodily headquarters.”

This dualistic point of view still makes sense to many. Why is that?

Is it because we like closure, that we want things to make sense whether we can truly grasp what is really happening around us or not? (Perhaps this desire is reflected in notions of economy and efficiency that so many systems are aimed toward.)

To stir matters up more, Dennett offers, “we are each made of mindless robots and nothing else, no nonphysical, nonrobotic ingredients at all” (p. 3). It is nearly impossible to explain in scientific terms what goes on in our heads, the figures, the motions and emotions. We are made up of parts that work together like a machine. When we examine our interior we can see the pieces/parts working together, and yet none of these parts appears to explain consciousness or our perceptions.

This approach begs the question: Can consciousness be a matter of machinery? Or is it something we will never understand? Is an explanation of consciousness beyond our intellectual powers?

Dennett then reminds us of philosophers like Chomsky who assert that consciousness can never be explained, that consciousness is a mystery not a puzzle.

 
Are we there yet?

Cognitive science has pulled us through this relatively recent accounting of consciousness by suggesting that a mechanistic account is not necessarily appropriate.

Is it then possible to look from a third-person perspective rather than a first person account to bring recognizable patterns into focus? Could consciousness be an emergent by-product of the “organization” of these stigmergic cells? Could we, given the appropriate conceptual tools, recognize the woods for the trees?

Dennett believes that an explanation exists outside of the current scientific perspectives that explain actions like metabolism and growth; the phenomena of the mind are quite un-similar to the phenomena of biology. And this is exactly what makes computers such a delicious metaphor for the mind.

Connectivism and network theory

Computers can perform millions of different processes “that call for discrimination, inference, memory, judgment, anticipation: they are generators of new knowledge, finders of patterns” (p. 6) similar to what human minds hope to find. The circuits that make up a computer can serve as a mechanistic interpretation, a simulation, if you will, of how perception works: “The explanations of whatever talents computers exhibit are models of transparency” (p. 7).

As I seek to better understand the theory of learning that is connectivism, it appears to me that connectivism asserts that we create knowledge in a similar way. Here consciousness is a product of network connections that inform discrimination, pattern recognition, judgment, etc. allowing new knowledge to be generated. However, does such a theory of learning reduce learning to a mechanistic interpretation? Is this what connectivism or any theory of learning after?

For many cognitive scientists, computational models are the coin of the realm, providing proof-positive the trillions and trillions of processes that make up consciousness and learning.

What if science could show that neurons contain a tiny dot of consciousness? How would we explain how a composition of trillions of such cells form into a being and can consciously consider works of art like Braque?

Is consciousness more than the sum of its parts?

Computers and zombies

This is Dennett at his mischievous best:

“How can the little box on your desk, whose parts no nothing about chess, beat you at chess with stunning reliability?” (p. 12).

And if our cells were merely made of parts working together in unison, totally mechanistic, unaware, and un-conscious, what’s the difference between a human being and a zombie?

Scientists might argue that what makes a human conscious is that he or she lives in a stream of consciousness-- a zombie lives in a stream of un-consciousness. Why? Because the truth is the truth whether we are conscious of it or not. Right? Well…

Here we might say what differs between consciousness and unconsciousness is intuition itself. As of today, intuition resists mechanistic reduction.

While zombies might also resist logical, physical, and metaphysical explanation, the fact that they are no less conceivable, deserves fractional consideration…. there are no ””fundamental laws” from which one can deduce that zombies are impossible” (p. 16).

So, is intuition irreducible? Are zombies merely cognitive illusions? Are computers brain feasting zombies? Is such thinking representative of lazy fallacious reasoning? Can our wet brain really be replaced by millions of microprocessors?

I’ll end here so we all can soak on this for a while.

In the meantime, here’s 7 minutes from Shaun of The Dead – the First Zombie Encounter (nsfw). Sweet dreams indeed!

Reference: Dennett, D. C. (2006). Sweet dreams: Philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness. Cambridge: The MIT Press.