Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, Part 1

Every few months or so, my local library will have a used book sale. I usually get a pretty good haul, and the books are so cheap I grab anything that looks even vaguely interesting. For this reason, most of the books soon find themselves sitting on my shelves, unread, until they catch my eye and I pick them up again.

Yesterday, I stayed up very late, and when I finally stumbled into bed I couldn't get to sleep, despite being exhausted. So I looked to the bookshelf on my right and there was a big, heavy, boring-looking book--Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett. I am reasonably sure I picked it up only to have it sit impressively on my bookshelf, perhaps half-convincing myself I would read it someday--after which I could, of course, correctly claim that I had in fact read that book, and talk about it with whatever level of pretension I chose.

Speaking of pretension, what a title. Right off that bat, I'm thinking, 'well here's someone with an ego'. Look, I can explain consciousness! No matter that nobody else can! The supposedly legitimizing testimony from The New York Times, quietly set across the top of the front cover--"One of the Ten Best Books of the Year"--did very little to assuage my doubts. However, I was and am confident that this book will be very interesting, if boldly erroneous. Daniel C. Dennett also coauthored The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter, author of my favorite non-fiction book of all time, Godel, Escher, Bach (which, come to think of it, also believes it understands consciousness and can correctly explain it to the unprepared layman). 

The first chapter, "Prelude: How are hallucinations possible?" seems to confirm all these suspicions. Dennett begins harmlessly enough with the famous "brain in a vat" thought experiment. Just a few pages later, he has convinced himself that the scenario is technically impossible, that the world we see must exist on some level, because no computer is powerful enough to fabricate it.

Now, I'm certainly no expert in philosophy, but I know a bit about it, and it seems to me that declaring the scenario "beyond human technology" is a huge cop-out. The problem with Dennett's argument is that all of his evidence relies on science--data humans have obtained from the physical world around us, over generations. Even something as simple as the tactile sensation of your index finger running through sand is "computationally intractable on even the fastest computer". That statement relies on what we know about energy, matter, and logic in our universe. What if a different kind of computer exists in the "outer universe" of which you are not aware, the one in which you are hallucinating your own existence? What if nothing physically exists at all, and you are simply a magical free consciousness, creating a world for itself to live in? Why would a brain in a vat be the only mode of not-existing (in the "real" sense), if there is no guarantee that we even have brains, or anything similar? Furthermore, Dennett argues that a simulation would never be realistic enough to fool us--but how can you know, if you have never experienced the "real" reality?

There is one point I will agree on, however, and that's Descartes' famous declaration: "I think, therefore I am". Clearly something exists with which to do the thinking, doubting and hallucinating--though it might not exist "physically", in our sense of the word; it might not exist on our level of reality. Who says our reality is the "real" one, anyway?

Like I said, I'm no philosopher, so feel free to discuss or correct me in the comments--if you know this stuff, I really appreciate it, and if you don't, well then you have no reason to be intimidated.

Stay tuned for discussion of the following chapters!