Abstract
While the new mysterians claim we have good reasons to believe that the problem of consciousness will never be solved, others believe that it has not been approached in the right way. This chapter attempts to illustrate how many thinkers believe that the problem of consciousness only seems so hard because we have not thought in the radical new ways that (according to them) its solution requires. The chapter conveys some of the ways through which these radical researchers believe we must rethink the problem of consciousness.
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Notes
- 1.
Our eyes move smoothly, continuously over the visual field, only when we are tracking a moving object, but then all we see in detail is the object we are tracking.
- 2.
Hilary Putnam makes a more thorough critique of behaviorism, also involving Spartans, in his article “Brains and Behavior” (Putnam 1975, p. 332).
- 3.
See the chapter “Folk Psychology” in Churchland and Churchland (1998), the paper “Eliminative Materialism and Propositional Attitudes” in Churchland (1981), and “Could an Electronic Machine Be Conscious” in Churchland (1995) for Paul Churchland’s more detailed account of eliminative materialism and consciousness.
- 4.
See the sections “The Contents and Character of Consciousness: Some First Steps” and “Reconstructing Consciousness in Neurocomputational Terms” in the chapter “The Puzzle of Consciousness” in Churchland (1995).
- 5.
- 6.
See the section “But Is It a Theory of Consciousness” in the chapter “The Architecture of the Human Mind” in Dennett (Dennett 1991), where Dennett attempts to explicate consciousness entirely in terms of virtual machines—that is, abstract information-processing devices.
- 7.
See the section “The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition” in Chapter One of Dennett (2005).
- 8.
- 9.
In the chapter “The Evolution of Consciousness,” Dennett (1991) discusses how software programs installed in the form of memes (see more on these in section “Putting the Stream of Consciousness Together”) “transform the operating system or computational architecture of the human brain” . See also Dennett (1995b, p. 343) from where the above citation comes.
- 10.
See Dennett ’s “Two Steps closer on Consciousness” in Keeley (2006, p. 205) for an analysis of why chimpanzees are not conscious.
- 11.
Dennett (1991, p. 189). Oliver Selfridge (1926–2008) was a pioneering AI researcher.
- 12.
The diagram is adapted from Selfridge (1959).
- 13.
See “A Fantasy Echo Theory of Consciousness” in Dennett (2005, p. 159), where Dennett elaborates on the functionalist character of consciousness.
- 14.
- 15.
Interview with Robert Wright, available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Ss0aCWpNzSM.
- 16.
See Dennett ’s chapter “Quining Qualia” (p. 409) in Marcel and Bisiach (1988).
- 17.
See the chapter “Explaining the ‘Magic’ of Consciousness” in Dennett (2005).
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Hedman, A. (2017). Rethinking Consciousness. In: Consciousness from a Broad Perspective. Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52975-2_7
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