Binary Brain

I finally finished Dennett’s book, Consciousness Explained, and am stricken by the thought that he’s so right that he can’t possibly be wrong.  I graduated with my BA in Philosophy many years ago and I remember a friend asking me what I find to have been the most important learning experience I’d pass along to others.  Knowing you don’t know shit. I’m well aware of how vulgar that may seem, but that is what you learn in philosophy.  Every semester, I had a new series of classes; a new onslaught of ideas and each of those topics, those philosophers, those coherent arguments were so very right!  Only after having 10 epiphanies was it that I started to realize that nuance does not mean correctness and infallible argument does not imply probable premises.

But, this time, with Dennett, it feels so right.  Essentially Dennett rewrites the book (for me) on conscious experiences as an entity separate from my biological consciousness.  Instead of a man behind the curtain (or puppet, whichever you wish), the man is a chaotic semblance of the strongest smell wins.  The mind and consciousness is nothing but a series of gates that has evolved to introspection and self referentialism.  I don’t want to demean or diminish Dan’s arguments (may I call him Dan?), but in essence, our consciousness is a culmination of all of the internal conversations we’ve had with ourselves since we were born.  It is the structure of our experience and predilections.

My god.  That’s so damn easy!  (And, I don’t wish to do Dan any injustice in implying it was easy to arrive at that conclusion or that he thinks it is any less of a miracle than we know consciousness to be.  Ahem… not magical miracle, but this-is-so-friggin-unlikely-from-a-mathematical-perspective-that-I’m-amazed-it-exists-at-all.)  If we could all just agree to start with that premise – i.e. whatever consciousness is, it isn’t in the ether and it is certainly not some spiritual globule that we can neither understand nor study – it would likely lead to so many radical discoveries that we may, indeed, learn to fly.  Without planes.

In the next few weeks, I’m hoping to actually do a bit of a summary of what I’ve read so that I can put onto paper what I’ve learned.  I’ve read Consciousness Explained before, but I’ve never read it with this type of interest nor understanding.  I don’t think Dan would state he’s discovered “it” and I think there’s a lot to be dissected and maybe changed, but he has got me on the right path.  We’ll see where it leads from here.