Daniel Dennett on Deflating Consciousness

This is an excerpt from an episode of "Big Thinkers" which was a half-hour long documentary program on ZDTV (later TechTV). Recently the user "onetirednumbers" has been uploading many of the episodes to YouTube, and I just couldnt help myself from mirroring this clip. Also, he is criminally undersubscribed, and so if you like this clip please subscribe to him.

OneTiredNumbers' Channel:
http://www.youtube.com/onetirednumbers

All three parts of this program:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0wetQwH9nY
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y82d06KURA4
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MisXHBUjnbo

More info on Daniel Dennett:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Daniel Dennett
• Consciousness Explained
• Neurophilosophy
• Consciousness
• Eliminative Materialism
• Change Blindness
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Big Thinkers
• Artificial Intelligence

[HomuncuIus]

Daniel Dennett is a philosophical zombie

[S1N6UL4R1TY]

someone give this man a very high dose of DMT. We'll see if "it's just not there!" anymore...

[mphello]

@Kruezoraxe It's great and wonderful that Dennett has (pardon the phrase) "expanded my consciousness" with these visual experiments. No doubt something similar works for the other senses. But, I don't see how he goes from that to the implication that consciousness is purely "mechanized".

It may very well be "mechanized", but I don't see the limitation of what we think we perceive to be evidence of that.

[mphello]

Funny - in most documentaries on experiments done on the brain,

MORE conscious and non-conscious brain activity is usually revealed that we had been unaware of before, rather than less. Yet, Dennett makes the opposite point.

[mphello]

I am not one of those persons who wants to believe (or feels the need to believe)

that my consciousness is "beyond measure". I am perfectly happy believing my consciousness is finite.

[Hanahleia]

"A, B, A, B, A, B..." I immediately noticed the sidewalk in the foreground being replaced with grass, and vice versa.

[Vincentaneous]

@HomuncuIus Because the ultimate purpose of consciousness is the survival of the individual body. The mind has to produce a "self" that is separate from the rest of the world in order to perform this function.

[pasqualebrow1230]

Your video is a favorite on PortVila

[hasenj]

@HomuncuIus "Why is your consciousness yours specifically?" I've been thinking the same thing and struggling to put it into words!! Thanks!

[Kaschelott]

@S1N6UL4R1TY By simply confusing 1) the refusal that something poses a problem with 2) the refusal that selfsame something itself exists, you're not getting him, as isn't Homunculus. Mr Dennett surely doesn't deny the existence of qualitative experience (qualia) as such, but their problematic status. For him, there's just no 'hard problem', and thus no explanatory gap, at least not in the sense of something that could never, and not even in principle be explained purely physically.

[zadeh79]

@Kruezoraxe How does attention, working memory, and perception agree with Dennett. They are related to the 'easy problem' of consciousness, which Dennett has confused with the 'hard problem'.