Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
Is consciousness an illusion? I always thought that’s a very bizarre idea, and there is no good reason to believe it.
Why we believe obvious untruths (and we can hardly do much about it).
Turns out, there is more than one way to destroy democracy. Hitler tried two, and it worked the second time.
How to find meaning in the face of death: community, having goals, coherent self narrative.
If you want to read just one essay on the perils of “political correctness,” this ought to be the one.
Why the free will problem isn’t one.
Making (ancient) Athens great again — the parallels with modern America.
Footnotes to Plato 
According to Nagel:
“In spite of the word “illusion” he [Dennett] doesn’t wish simply to deny the reality of the things that compose the manifest image; the things we see and hear and interact with are “not mere fictions but different versions of what actually exists: real patterns.””
Which suggests that Dennett is indeed using “illusion” in the “not as it seems” sense, not the “not real” sense.
Re: Dan’s article on agency and “free will”.
Dan is, of course, entirely right on everything he says about agency. I don’t, though, agree when he then goes on to dismiss determinism and compatibilism.
Given the account of agency, as explained by Dan, we then then need a way of reconciling that account with other accounts of how things are, namely that we are also machines governed by material causes. Compatibilism is the way of doing that — it is a necessary explanation such that the “physical machines” and the “human agency” accounts can both be true.
One could indeed reject compatibilism if — as I think Dan does — one sees the different accounts as being in such disparate domains that one need not even ask how they fit together, and indeed rejects the very idea of fitting them together, but to me that world view is distinctly weird.
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Some of the comments on Dennett’s use of “illusion” are covered in a review in The New Statesman. For example,
these excerpts:
“In this new book, confusion persists, owing to his reluctance to define his terms. When he says “consciousness” he appears to mean reflective self-consciousness (I am aware that I am aware), whereas many other philosophers use “consciousness” to mean ordinary awareness, or experience. There ensues much sparring with straw men, as when he ridicules thinkers who assume that gorillas, say, have consciousness. They almost certainly don’t in his sense, and they almost certainly do in his opponents’ sense. (A gorilla, we may be pretty confident, has experience in the way that a volcano or a cloud does not.)
“More unnecessary confusion, in which one begins to suspect Dennett takes a polemical delight, arises from his continued use of the term “illusion”. Consciousness, he has long said, is an illusion: we think we have it, but we don’t. But what is it that we are fooled into believing in? It can’t be experience itself: as the philosopher Galen Strawson has pointed out, the claim that I only seem to have experience presupposes that I really am having experience – the experience of there seeming to be something. And throughout this book, Dennett’s language implies that he thinks consciousness is real: he refers to “conscious thinking in H[omo] sapiens”, to people’s “private thoughts and experiences”, to our “proper minds, enculturated minds full of thinking tools”, and to “a ‘rich mental life’ in the sense of a conscious life like ours”.
“The way in which this conscious life is allegedly illusory is finally explained in terms of a “user illusion”, such as the desktop on a computer operating system. We move files around on our screen desktop, but the way the computer works under the hood bears no relation to these pictorial metaphors. Similarly, Dennett writes, we think we are consistent “selves”, able to perceive the world as it is directly, and acting for rational reasons. But by far the bulk of what is going on in the brain is unconscious, low-level processing by neurons, to which we have no access. Therefore we are stuck at an “illusory” level, incapable of experiencing how our brains work.
“This picture of our conscious mind is rather like Freud’s ego, precariously balanced atop a seething unconscious with an entirely different agenda. Dennett explains wonderfully what we now know, or at least compellingly theorise, about how much unconscious guessing, prediction and logical inference is done by our brains to produce even a very simple experience such as seeing a table. Still, to call our normal experience of things an “illusion” is, arguably, to privilege one level of explanation arbitrarily over another.”
The entire review is here:
http://tinyurl.com/jp9xhc5
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If Nagel presents Dennett fairly, and the quotes he cites indicate that he does, then Dennett is assuming a ‘view from nowhere,’ from whence a determination can be made, ‘this is reality, that isn’t.’ I suppose the presumption is, that science warrants this view. But that makes no sense; science is a human activity, and thus is embedded in the ‘manifest image.’ In other words, all views are human views. and enjoy differing functions in differing domains of human experience. If consciousness is an illusion, then science is an illusion.
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Nagel opines:
Now that is a view from nowhere. Notice how he never once provides the slightest support for this entire paragraph. If not mysticism, then what?
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Thomas quotes, from the review:
What, Dennett take a polemical delight? Could it actually be?
Is that a spandrel, or is it intrinsic to him?
#LetThatBeDennett’sLastPetard
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Saphism, your comment reminds me of that fact that many Americans still have not come to grips with — if they’re aware of — the fact that America contains 325 million people now. Folks, you’re not going to be that special.
Beyond that, if not from an explicitly religious angle, in modern America, the emphasis on “meaning” often comes from New Agers or similar.
Folks, do yourself a favor of sorts. Walk outside some night, and embrace the empty starlit sky. That’s philosophy, and Albert Camus would tip his hat, were he still alive.
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Michael Fugate,
One doesn’t have to buy Nagel’s offered alternative to admit the cogency of his criticisms of Dennett. Or to criticize Dennett’s position on its rather weak foundations. And the paragraph you quote doesn’t espouse a view from nowhere, since it isn’t asserting an ultimate reality beyond human experience. Nagel may do that elsewhere, and I would disagree with him when he does; but not in that paragraph.
But to assume (with Dennett) that the manifest image is “It’s the world according to us,” but the scientific image is reality – no! the scientific image is also the world according to us. There is only a world – or worlds, in different domains – according to us.
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Nagel has no alternative. None, zero, zilch. To abandon methods that have gotten us this far because we don’t currently understand is mysticism plain and simple.
Did I say I agreed with Dennett – I don’t remember that….
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A bit off topic, but not too much, I hope? RIP Derek Walcott, if you’ve not yet heard. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/books/derek-walcott-dead-nobel-prize-literature.html?_r=1&mtrref=t.co&gwh=3AAC88B3DB3C37443CD5A79053C03E82&gwt=pay
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I had read the review of Dennett’s book by Nagel in the NYRB a while back and at the time thought that the use of the word ‘illusion’ to describe aspects of consciousness, is extremely unfortunate. The word brings up all kinds of negative images of confusion or even delusion; there is nothing when we think there is something. In truth, consciousness is an extraordinarily accurate modality by which we can ascertain reality around and with in us. It is far from perfect but there is nothing else that comes even close to our knowledge. For instance, our eyes have three different proteins to detect the color of light waves. From this we are able to distinguish approximately 200,000 different shades of color!
This is immense and incredible but nevertheless it is what it is. However, this may be the reason why it is so difficult for many to accept the idea that material processes are thoroughly responsible for the ineffable subjective experience of consciousness. Granted, we are just beginning to scratch the surface in understanding the processes involved, and so it is to be expected that there will be much misunderstanding and confusion.
E.g. Nagel seems to say that Dennett believes that trees and bacteria also experience manifest images. This seems to be completely impossible since these creatures do not have a central processing organ for signal integration. The very idea of an image arising in these organisms would therefore seem to be impossible. Neurons (or neuron-like parts of a cell) would seem to be the very minimum that would be required for the creation and experience of minimal images. Brains would seem to be required to create manifest images similar to ours. Human culture is the final ingredient in order to enable the final product of our theatrical conscious experience.
A far preferable word to describe our sensations would be representations, rather than illusions. We should also remember that the process of creating consciousness is far more complicated than what we can even imagine at this time.
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Hi Massimo,
I think a good heuristic is that if an idea seems too bizarre or incoherent for any sane and reasonably intelligent person to believe it, and if sane and reasonable people appear to believe it without finding it bizarre, then you probably don’t understand the idea very well. To assume the problem is not with your understanding is to be disrespectful to people who believe in that idea — that’s fine if you intend to be disrespectful. As such, I would always be inclined to put a greater weight on the interpretation of someone who agrees with the idea than someone who deems the idea to be bizarre. That doesn’t mean you ought to accept the idea yourself, it just means you should favour the interpretation and explanation of those who do.
So while I’m not trying to relitigate the whole consciousness debate with you again, I wish you wouldn’t refer to it as bizarre unless you’re going to make more of an effort to understand Dennett’s point of view, which might start by accepting the explanations of someone who agrees with him.
Well, I would say pain doesn’t exist in anything like the way it appears to exist either. You more or less said this yourself. Pain appears to have an ineffable quality — an associated qualia of intrinsic badness which cannot be communicated in words and of which it seems impossible to make sense of from the objective perspective. It seems that pain has to be more the firing of C-fibres and the functional roles these play in our nervous system. It seems that our feeling this pain cannot be simply the firing of neurons in the brain. I say that’s all wrong. That pain is just the funcitonal role it plays, and part of that functional role is to cause me to shout in pain and go quite far out of my way to avoid it. So no, I’m not going to drop a hammer on my toe!
Pain is very real. But the feeling of pain is an illusion because what pain actually is is nothing like what it seems to be. That’s not a contradiction in terms. It is a real illusion just like any other illusion. A rainbow appears to be a structure hanging in the sky and so it is an illusion. But just because it isn’t an illusion doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Rainbows exist. They are a real optical phenomenon. Similarly, consicousness is real, and what it is is an illusion or set of illusions.
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DM: You don’t really think that everyone agrees on who is “sane” and “reasonably intelligent” do you?
I think the view is worse than bizarre. And I’ll call it what I like, thank you very much.
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Hi Dan,
No, which is why I said it’s fair to call it bizarre if you intend to be disrespectful. If you want to call Dennett crazy or stupid, go right ahead and call his ideas worse than bizarre.
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Dan Dennett’s ideas are worse than bizarre.
Actually, let’s take this a step further. Dan Dennett hasn’t had a new idea in 20 years. The last time he DID have a new idea, the claim that biological evolution was algorithmic and that this algorithm could transfer to other cases of evolution, he engaged in scientism, and per Feynman, was not even wrong.
There you go, DM! 😉
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DM: Lol. Coel thinks my worldview is “weird.”
Needless to say, I don’t accept your conception of what constitutes rudeness or disrespectfulness either.
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Dennett’s last interesting book was Brainstorms. Since then he’s become largely a popularizer and someone primarily interested in self-promotion. (Especially since he teamed up with the Harris/Dawkins brigade.) Philosophically speaking, all of his serious work is decades old already.
Socratic: Better watch out with that language!
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Dan,
Coel said that, to him, your world view is distinctly weird.
Maybe I’m being unfair here, but when I read that, what I get is a sense that Coel does not understand your world view and it feels weird to him such that he doesn’t get how it makes sense to you. I don’t get that he’s saying you’re crazy. There is a sense of humility there — that maybe he would not find it weird if he understood it better. I feel he would be open to further discussion to help him understand it better.
But when you and Massimo say that Dennett’s view is bizarre, and you resist attempts to explain the apparent bizarreness, it seems like you are satisfied you understand it perfectly well and it’s just crazy.
I’m open to correction on either interpretation from Coel or you, respectively.
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DM: Lol. Amazing … you even want to argue about this. I don’t. Life is too short.
We don’t agree on what counts as being disrespectful. Let’s just leave it at that. If you want to keep chopping it, you’ll have to do it with someone else.
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Hi DM,,
Well not quite. I think I do — to an extent — understand Dan’s point of view, and I can see how it makes sense to him. It’s just a way of thinking that is sufficiently different from the way of thinking I’m used to (and, I suggest, that of typical scientists) that it seems “weird” to me.
“Weird” here means “strange because it is different”, in the same way that if you go to Australia the local fauna hops instead of walking, and the sun is in the North not the South, which is rather disconcerting.
For clarification. Dan’s world view — as it seems to me, I am of course open to correction — sees different domains of knowledge as discrete and disparate, such that it is not necessarily sensible to ask how they join together, and if they don’t then that is not a problem, it’s just how things are.
My world view, in contrast, sees all different domains of knowledge as part of a unified whole, such that they do need to join together compatibly, and indeed many of the most interesting questions are about how they do join together compatibly.
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Per Dan, I’m not even sure I think Brainstorms is that great, with years of reflection. Since I reject determinism, and reject the tautological version of labeling scientific naturalism as “determinism” when it comes to issues of will and volition, I’m not a compatibilist and have no reason to be, unlike Dennett — even though he claims not to be one.
I still find the idea of subselves and related issues to be of some value, but, Dennett hasn’t really done much with it in years and years.
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Hi DM,
Agreed. As a good rule-of-thumb, the person most in sympathy with someone’s point of view is the one most likely to be interpreting their intent correctly. People who disagree with someone very often misinterpret someone’s intent, an dthey nearly always do so in the direction of making that opinion easier to dismiss (which is not a suggestion that they are doing it intentionally, it’s just another human foible; this is partly why it is good practice to consciously try to make a charitable interpretation of someone you disagree with).
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The Political Correctness article:
Those poor straight white Christian males – so oppressed. I love the disclaimer – always a sure indication that one is trying to justify the unjustifiable. Call me unimpressed.
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Michael Fugate: I don’t know if you teach in the university, by I have been for over 20 years and the article is spot-on. The situation on campus has gotten to the point that the very capacity to teach the humanities is now threatened by the new culture.
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There are some legitimate issues concerning conservatives not being able to properly speak their opinion. I mean sure, there are some of the fanatic right wingers who are complaining because they just want to be openly vulgar than any genuine concern for open political dialogue, but a lot of conservatives are not like that. And it probably was one factor that lead to Trump’s election, because now all of a sudden it’s acceptable to express yourself since no one can judge you inside the election booth.
What the article didn’t mention is that there’s a far greater threat to pro-Palestine activism in universities who face an actual threat to their First Amendment Rights. Being Pro-Israel has always been the mainstream position of acceptability. Not really going to expound on it in detail here, it could easily be looked up what’s happening. (just a quick google search revealed these)
https://theintercept.com/2016/06/23/students-in-california-might-face-criminal-investigation-for-protesting-film-on-israeli-army/
https://theintercept.com/2015/12/09/gw-palestinian-flag/
https://theintercept.com/2016/07/28/critics-fear-crackdown-on-palestinian-free-speech-as-israel-takes-aim-at-facebook/
So whatever the merits of some of the points in here, the author looks to me pretty fanatic & pretty delusional, and I probably disagree with Massimo that it ought to be the essay we need to read if we only need one on political correctness.
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Also the discussion here on Dennett is pretty disappointing…..Opinionated Comments is part of the internet community discourse but none of the criticism here was productive and was just dismissive without actual content. I agree with Dennett on some things, disagree with him on a lot of others. Why bring it up if you didn’t want to properly discuss it?
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Two thoughts on consciousness(no pun intended);
I see being conscious and that which we are conscious of, as distinct. Specifically consciousness segues from one perception to the next, while these thoughts/feelings/perceptions come and go. As I’ve argued elsewhere, consciousness goes past to future, as thought goes future to past.
Consider consciousness as the medium and thought as the message. What Dennett seems to be suggesting sounds like mathematical platonism. That the thoughts(mathematical patterns) are real and consciousness(reality) is an emergent effect of this experience. I would see it logically being the other way around, that thoughts are an emergent effect of being sentient and interacting with an external environment.
What the source of sentience is, I don’t know and am willing to admit it is a mystery, rather than dismiss it as inconvenient to the frame one wants to use.
As for the relationship between consciousness and the sub-conscious, consider the alternative. If you were aware of every aspect of your being, it would a be a total whiteout. Does this mean the rest of the functioning of your body is not also sentient? Consider trying to think of someone’s name or some word that is slipping your mind; Now compare it to someone else, trying to get your attention and failing to do so. Presumably they are conscious, but not the same consciousness as yours. Might it be other parts of the mind are equally conscious, but not the focus of attention. Sort of like stars during the day.
Much of what we think of as consciousness is better referred to as concentration. That focusing of the awareness on some specific point of interest. Yet often our best thinking comes when we are not concentrating, but just letting our minds float. Then the various impulses, thoughts, etc. in our minds start making connections on their own, without the explicit bias our attention seeks to generate.
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Meaning is often a cultural device, to get people engaged in some larger activity. It works quite well, if they believe in the larger goals. Once that bubble of trust starts to tear, people’s search for meaning is going to drift off, likely to coalesce around what they feel gives them support in return.
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saphsin: Because “consciousness is an illusion” isn’t a serious position, any more than “shopping malls are an illusion” or “people are an illusion.” And its not something that anyone actually believes, as is evinced in peoples’ ordinary behavior and speech. It is rather a pose, adopted for the purpose of generating interest and controversy, which means it really isn’t worth much by way of serious discussion. A lot of us are not going to fall for the marketing gimmick.
Now that’s not all the book is about, of course, so if people are interested in those subjects, perhaps some of us who have no patience for this one will chime in. And its not as if Dennett doesn’t have his defenders, here, so I don’t see the problem.
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Saphsin: A. Massimo posts links on Friday for discussion. B. What Daniel said about Dennett’s defenders. And, when I first saw that link on 3 Quarks Daily and posted here (it was still paywalled them), and commented on 3QD, oh, yes, I ran into Dennett defenders too.
Even more than consciousness is an illusion, they’re also vociferous about the realness of memes, when Dawkins has backed pretty much away and Susan Blackmore totally away.
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Maybe, per one of Dennett’s favored intuition pumps, we could download his mind and implant it into Goldstein’s brain??? Or vice versa? And both would blow out circuits?
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