Information Processing Illusion?

I’m reading this recent (2021) paper by Dan Dennett -“The User Illusion of Consciousness” because it’s the one where he makes very positive reference to the work of Mark Solms.

Or rather, I’m reading it today because I have again been struggling elsewhere with arguments from people who dismiss Dennett as a determinist/compatibilist who sees consciousness (and free-will) as illusory. In this paper he’s right up-front with his “user-illusion of consciousness”. My take is not that he’s saying that our consciousness and our free-will are not real, he’s saying our subjective experience of that reality is literally an illusion – a subjective impression, not an objective thing (see Solms’ Rubicon). But the original reason above is why I happen to have the paper linked on my desktop these last few weeks.

In that vein, he says:

“Cognitive scientists in general agree that the brain is a sort of computer; it isn’t a radiator for cooling the blood and it isn’t a dynamo. It is an information processing system of tremendous power that accomplishes its primary task — controlling the body in ways that enhance its chances of surviving to produce offspring — by extracting patterns from the torrent of ‘input’ signals it receives from transducers, patterns that can guide its ‘output’, which is another torrent of signals, effector or trigger signals, that can contract muscles or release hundreds of different chemical modulators, including many that create recursive cycles that refine the information available and the uses to which it is put. Is it a digital computer? Nobody knows, but even if it is, at some level, a digital computer, its architecture, and the parts it is
made of, are profoundly unlike the architectures and parts of the digital computers we understand so well. This is what opens the door to romantic surmises about how the brain might — or must — escape
the explanatory net of functionalism. Solms and I want to close that
door, not by fiat, but by showing how the brain harnesses affect to get
the many jobs done.”

And he goes on to quote more of the passages from Solms as I have about where consciousness lies in that architecture. But the key things are here:

Affect is central and architecture is everything.

And even if I might make the metaphysical claim that “all” information processing is indeed digital (or quantum, or “atomic”) all the way down to the fundaments of physics, it’s all kinds of complex categorical information through the layers of the architecture that matter here. I’ve always liked his “sorta” operator which he uses to great effect early in that quote above. We might argue exactly what we mean by information processing – but anyone who doesn’t see brains/minds as somehow processing information, gets the “so what is it doing?” question. Definitions are conclusions, not pre-conditions.

(Need to read further to get to what he is really saying
about the “user-illusion”. Ho hum
.)

=====

Post Note: And I did follow-up a couple of times, culminating in this

Is Dennett and Illusionist? – No (June 2023)

and this

Under No Illusion – Dennett my Hero (December 2022)

=====

 

13 thoughts on “Information Processing Illusion?”

  1. Interesting. Only last night, while reading Richard Rorty’s book _Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity_ — which contains references to Dennett’s views on consciousness — did I look again for some readily accessible work by Dennett explaining them. I’ll certainly read the paper, and thanks for posting the link.

    As to his notion — I won’t even call it an idea –that the brain might be a digital computer: assuming it’s a computer at all (recognizing that we always try to understand ourselves in terms of the latest technology, and we used to think in terms of clockwork, or valves and pressures), its operation is clearly analogue — assuming we allow that anything at all is analogue. You seem willing to entertain the idea of a digital reality at the quantum level; but for quantum theory, the idea of that anything is definitely “here” or “there” has become moot, complicating prospects for such an interpretation.

  2. Ha. Which part of “profoundly unlike” are you missing?
    He’s entertaining the question in order to answer it emphatically “No”.

    It (brains / minds / consciousness) has absolutely nothing to do with the artificial technology of human devices – pipes & valves, clockworks, “computers”, even if some “analogies” may once have been attractive to some. (And moot? – sure, as I said my potential metaphysical claim is irrelevant to this.)

    Funny that you miss the points (of mine) that are on the other hand explicitly highlighted as most relevant.
    * “Something like” information processing?
    * Affect?
    * Architecture?

    I find the responses to “information processing systems” – FASCINATING – yours and McGilchrist’s … it’s a layers and levels thing – systems architecture.

  3. Nothing new under the sun? Sure.
    What someone says/believes today can be quite different to what they’ve said believed before, but both have been said before by someone.

    Prickly?
    I am losing patience with dialogue that gets in the way of deeper writing, but I am genuinely fascinated in cases where points being made seem not to address the points I’m making as opposed to others that may be suggested by the topic. (That whole para that starts “And even if I …”) – almost like there’s a fear – in this case – of even entertaining “information processing”? Frustrating though it is, it still points to things that need expressing better 🙂

  4. So much to say, so little time, and so many distractions! I’m having the same problem. I’d planned to write about epistemic doubt in the context of Rorty’s “liberal ironist,” but after reading the Introduction to his 1989 book, I have ideas for another post about his ideas on imagination and narrative. Meanwhile, SoundEagle has brought up object-oriented ontology in a recent comment on my blog, giving me a third topic. All of them relate to things I’ve been talking about over the past couple of years. And now you’ve given me a solid lead for a fourth topic about Dennett’s views on consciousness! I just try to be grateful for the serendipity.

    Having now read the 2021 article, I’m not sure how much Dennett’s views have changed since 1989. At the time, Rorty wrote, “[Donald} Davidson’s doubt that there is any such entity [as language] parallels Gilbert Ryle’s and Daniel Dennett’s doubts about whether there is anything called ‘the mind’ or ‘consciousness.’. . . This line about language [quoting Donald Davidson’s italicized statement, ‘There is no such thing as language’] is analogous to the Ryle-Dennett view that when we use a mentalistic terminology we are simply using an efficient vocabulary–the vocabulary characteristic of what Dennett calls ‘the intentional stance’–to predict what an organism is likely to do or say under various sets of circumstances.” (But in a footnote, Rorty mentions “Dennett’s doubts about my interpretation of his views” in his “Comments on Rorty.”)

    This seems consistent with Dennett’s position in 2021 (p. 8) that “What one is motivated to do by the occurrence of these states [dispositional structures activated by the detection of glucose] is what explains their ‘phenomenality’ and we have no privileged access to the machinery that thus motivates us.”

    Regarding my response to your post, I apologize if I seem to be pulling you off-topic. My intention is to bring related ideas to the table, and even contentious ones if it seems warranted. Affect and architecture are core to Solm’s account, and they mesh with your interest in systems, information processing, and consciousness, no doubt in context of your metaphysics of information.

    I have to note (with a certain smug satisfaction) that Dennett shares my concerns about Solms’ insistence that feeling, or affect, is always conscious, an insistence with a curious lack of psychological nuance and with unintended panpsychist implications. He seems fully on board, however, with Solms’ ideas about an input-output architecture explaining consciousness. (He seems unaware of the distinction between an operating system, which is a layer of commands for use by an operator, and a BIOS, where the input-output responsiveness of the computer is implemented, but we can let that pass.) Both Dennett and Solms find “consciousness” at this input-output nexus. But I daresay Dennett would stop short of “crossing the Rubicon” and joining Solm’s appeal to the reader’s inner life as inductive evidence that the mid-brain is the source of consciousness. When he ridicules the notion of “a kind of super-duper smello-television with ‘phenomenal’ properties being appreciated by the audience, the inner witness,” he dusts his hands of any appeal to the inner witness of the reader. I’m surprised he doesn’t bring up the Rubicon explicitly, but I think he is registering his objections on the second half of page 9, when he discusses Solms’ remark about what a thing “feels like.” For what it’s worth, Dennett here aligns himself with Rorty’s critique of “the mirror of nature,” the idea that there is a witness apart from the witnessing; this idea he characterizes as the “user-illusion” .

    I hope this helps somehow, and I’m sorry if it’s actively unhelpful. But don’t be surprised if a lot of it shows up in one of my blog posts. One halfway down, three to go!

  5. Hi AJ,
    I still find it fascinating that people spend so much time looking for disagreement.
    Like between Dennett and [name your current favourite thinker] 🙂

    BUT this final point of yours:
    “I’m surprised he doesn’t bring up the Rubicon explicitly, but I think he is registering his objections on the second half of page 9, when he discusses Solms’ remark about what a thing “feels like.” For what it’s worth, Dennett here aligns himself with Rorty’s critique of “the mirror of nature,” the idea that there is a witness apart from the witnessing; this idea he characterizes as the “user-illusion” .

    Very perceptive. (I hadn’t actually read on to find that “illusion” reference, yet.)
    BUT, that I see as agreement between me, you, Solms and Dennett 🙂
    That the experience (pattern / thing) is not distinct from the experiencer (pattern / thing) – Absolutely!
    So, it’s not about “crossing” that Rubicon, but venturing onto the bridge where object meets subject.
    “Subject experiences object” is one thing / pattern – now where have we heard that before.

    Thanks.
    Ian

  6. Surely you don’t mean that _everybody_ disagrees with Dennett? 🙂 Anyway, I don’t go looking for disagreements; I just notice them, and then I feel compelled to explore them.

    Are you familiar with _The Demon in the Machine: How hidden webs of information are solving the mysteries of life_, by Paul Davies (2019)? It seems like it might interest you. I’m waiting for a copy through my local library.

  7. Ha and yet again, you comment on my flippant remark, but ignore my substantive suggestion of our agreement that:

    QUOTE
    “That the experience (pattern / thing) is not distinct from the experiencer (pattern / thing) – Absolutely!
    So, it’s not about “crossing” that Rubicon, but venturing onto the bridge where object meets subject.
    “Subject experiences object” is one thing / pattern – now where have we heard that before.
    UNQUOTE

    AND you make another reading suggestion – I’ll add to my reading list.
    He does interest me, I’ve seen and heard him speak, and at least two people I follow closely he was their PhD supervisor. But so far I’ve made a conscious choice not to read him – the library of unread books ‘n’all that – reading every book that might be relevant is an impossible task 🙂

  8. I had nothing to add, except perhaps that Solms’ Rubicon makes him the outlier in the list of agreements. Persig’s views on “subject experiences object” — for I presume that’s the reference — were. . . contaminated, I guess. . . in ZMM by his instrumentalism, with its inherent focus on objects, as I elaborated in my review long ago. But I saw no need to bring this up again.

  9. Ha, to labour the point (my point) 🙂

    You “saw no need” to acknowledge or even notice convergence on agreement.
    Solms is “an outlier” by about half the span of that bridge – we’re / they’re all on the same bridge 🙂

    Your “Surely you don’t mean that _everybody_ disagrees with Dennett?”
    No, I mean the prevailing meme of all discourse is disagreement (with _everybody_) rather than agreement seeking.
    Pretty much my whole agenda.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.