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Consciousness Explained
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This website uses cookies. Please read our cookie policy for more information. Philosophy of Mind Online. But it shows that they could be brain states. Well, Dennett is more wary of identifying mental states with brain states. But he doubts that our everyday talk of mental states will map neatly onto scientific talk about brain states — that for every mental state a person has there will be a discrete brain state that causes all the associated behaviour.
So his view is closer to that of Ryle, with whom he studied in the early s. In the years after Armstrong wrote, the idea that mental states are brain states became widely accepted, though it was tweaked in various ways. This view is known as property dualism as opposed to substance, or Cartesian, dualism, which holds that the mind is a non-physical thing.
Nerve impulses from your retinas travel to your brain and produce a certain brain state, which in turn produces certain effects it produces the belief that the sky is blue, disposes you to say that the sky is blue, and so on. This is the familiar story from Armstrong. And in principle a neuroscientist could identify that brain state and tell you all about it.
The same goes for all other sense experiences. Now if you think about consciousness this way, then it seems incredibly mysterious. This is what David Chalmers has called the hard problem of consciousness. Not an answer to the hard problem exactly. Dennett thinks that that picture is a relic of Cartesian dualism, and he calls the supposed inner theatre the Cartesian Theatre.
We used to think there really was an inner observer — the immaterial soul. Descartes thought that signals from the sense organs were channelled to the pineal gland in the centre of the brain, from where they were somehow transmitted to the soul. Once we give up Cartesian dualism and accept that mental processes are just hugely complex patterns of neural activity, then we must give up the picture of consciousness that went with it.
How then does Dennett explain consciousness? Because that just sounds like a machine. And Dennett thinks that one of the effects of those brain systems is to create in us the sense that we have this inner world. It seems to us when we reflect on our experiences that there is an inner show, but that is an illusion. By a thought experiment, you mean an imaginary situation used to clarify our thinking?
You see a woman jog past. She is not wearing glasses, but she reminds you of someone who does, and that memory immediately contaminates your memory of the running woman so that you become convinced she was wearing glasses.
Mind–body problem
Now Dennett asks how this memory contamination affected your conscious experience. Did the contamination happen post-consciousness, so that you had a conscious experience of the woman without glasses, and then the memory of this experience was wiped and replaced with a false memory of her with glasses? Or did it happen pre-consciousness, so that your brain constructed a false conscious experience of her as having glasses?
If there were a Cartesian Theatre, then there should be a fact of the matter: Suppose we were monitoring your brain as the women passed and found that your brain detected the presence of a women without glasses before it activated the memory of the other woman with glasses. Nor would asking you have settled it. Suppose that as the women passed we had asked you whether she was wearing glasses. Which report would have caught the content of your consciousness? All we — or you — can really be sure of is what you sincerely think you saw, and that depends on the precise timing of the question.
The book is packed with thought experiments like this, all designed to undermine the intuitive but misleading picture of the Cartesian Theatre. He is trying to explain away consciousness in that sense. He thinks that that conception of consciousness is confused and unhelpful, and his aim is to persuade us to adopt a different one. The brain is continually constructing multiple interpretations of sensory stimuli woman without glasses, women with glasses , like multiple drafts of an essay, which circulate and compete for control of speech and other behaviour.
Which version we report will depend on exactly when we are questioned — on which version has most influence at that moment. In a later book Dennett speaks of consciousness as fame in the brain. The idea is that those interpretations that are conscious are those that get a lot of influence over other brain processes — that become neurally famous.
We actively stimulate our own cognitive systems, mainly by talking to ourselves in inner speech. This creates what Dennett calls the Joycean Machine — a sort of program running on the biological brain, which has all kinds of useful effects. Is it just whichever gives the best explanation? Dennett thinks there are both conceptual and empirical reasons for preferring the Multiple Drafts view.
But he also cites a lot of scientific evidence in support of the Multiple Drafts view — for example, concerning how the brain represents time. And he certainly thinks his offers a better explanation of our behaviour, including our intuitions about consciousness. For example, I was just thinking about my car, thinking that it is parked outside.
Philosophers call this property of aboutness intentionality , and they say that what a mental state is about is its intentional content. Like consciousness, intentionality poses a problem for materialist theories. If mental states are brain states, how do they come to have intentional content? How can a brain state be about something, and how can it be true or false?
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Many materialists think the answer involves positing mental representations. Then the next question is how brain states can be representations. A lot of work in contemporary philosophy of mind has been devoted to this task of building a theory of mental representation. There are many books on this topic I could have chosen — by Fred Dretske, for example, or Jerry Fodor. Is this the same as meaning? How do mental representations of some kind acquire meaning for us? Yes, the problem is how mental representations come to mean, or signify, or stand for, things.
As the title indicates, Millikan thinks there are many varieties of meaning.
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To begin with, she argues that there is a natural form of meaning which is the foundation of it all. We say that dark clouds mean rain, that tracks on the ground mean that pheasants have been there, that geese flying south mean that winter is coming, and so on. There is a reliable connection, or mapping, between occurrences of the two things, which makes the first a sign of the second.
You can get information about the second from the first. Millikan calls these natural signs. So this is one basic form of meaning, but it is limited. One thing is a sign of another — carries information about it — only if the other thing really is there. Clouds mean rain only if rain is actually coming. Tracks means pheasants only if they were made by pheasants, and so on. So natural signs, unlike our thoughts and perceptions, cannot be false, cannot misrepresent.
Yes, they are what Millikan calls intentional signs. But normally they are natural signs too. Take a sentence of English, rather than a mental representation. Sentences of human language are also intentional signs, as are animal calls. We say this with the purpose of alerting someone to the fact that rain is coming, and we can do this successfully only if rain is coming. So if we succeed in our purpose, the sentence we produce will be a natural sign that rain is coming, just as dark clouds are.
However, it will still be an intentional sign that rain is coming in virtue of the fact that we used it with the purpose of signifying to someone that rain is coming. Millikan argues that intentional signs are always designed for some recipient or consumer.
Philosophy of Mind (Online)
Roughly, then, an intentional sign of something is a sign whose purpose is to be a natural sign of it. But how then can mental representations have meaning? No, but our brains do. Millikan has a thoroughly evolutionary approach to the mind. Evolution has built biological mechanisms to do certain things — to have certain purposes or functions.
And the idea is that the mind is composed of a vast array of systems designed to perform specific tasks — detecting features of the world, interpreting them, reacting to them, and selecting actions to perform. These systems pass information to each other using representations which are designed to serve as natural signs of certain things — and which are thus intentional signs of those things. In very general terms, then, the view is that mental representations derive their meaning from the purposes with which they are used.
This sort of view is called a teleological theory of meaning. As I said, Millikan takes an evolutionary approach to the mind.
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She thinks that in order to understand how our minds represent things we need to look at the evolution of mental representation, and she devotes a whole section of the book to this, with lots of information about animal psychology and fascinating observations of animal behaviour. Millikan thinks that the basic kind of intentional signs are what she calls pushmi-pullyu signs, which simultaneously represent what is happening and how to react to it.
An example is the rabbit-thump. When a rabbit thumps its hind foot, this signals to other rabbits both that danger is present and that they should take cover. The sign is both descriptive and directive, and if used successfully, it will be a natural sign both of what is happening now and of what will happen next.