So far, I have been talking about fundamentals: basic physical principles, or even metaphysical principles, that would, possibly, form the underlying basis for the kind of universe in which we might find a phenomenon such as consciousness. I have argued that, among these fundamental principles, there must be some way of accounting for scaling up, other than (mere) levels of functional organization. That is, things can be big and complex in some holistic fashion, and not just by virtue of thinking of them as clumped into black boxes interacting over communications channels. I have gestured hopefully at quantum mechanics as occupying the place in our ontology (very, very low level) where we should be looking, as well as exhibiting the kind of (really-there, not just may-be-seen-as) big-but-unified holistic scaling we need. Moreover, quantum indeterminacy allows us, if we squint, some wiggle room out of the oft-cited causal closure of the physical world.
Can we bring this all down to earth a little bit? I am not a neuroscientist. You will not hear much about ion channels or receptors, or even tubulin microtubules from me, even though I am betting on some breakthrough or insight in that space at some point. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to want some kind of rough model of human cognition that incorporates Churchland's "pixie dust in the synapses", even if we don't get all the way down into the wetware itself. How might the mind actually work?
A good starting point is a initially counterintuitive but ultimately compelling conception articulated by Daniel Dennett. Dennett is the self-proclaimed captain of the "A" team, the king of the reductive materialists (he has declared David Chalmers the captain of the "B" team). His manifesto, 1991's Consciousness Explained, is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in this field. It is extremely clearly written, persuasive, and loaded with style, a dry wit, and fascinating facts and findings relating to the study of the human mind. One simply can not discuss philosophy of mind in any useful way without having some response to Daniel Dennett and his arguments. That said, one must occasionally rise above his characterization of his opponents as fearful, reactionary, silly people clinging to their vanities about the human soul.
It should come as no surprise at this point that I think Dennett is wrong, at least in some of his conclusions. It may come as something of a surprise, however, in this sharply divided field of inquiry, that I think that nearly all of what Dennett says in Consciousness Explained is right.
Dennett has no use for qualophiles like myself (this is part I disagree with). But the vast bulk of the book is concerned not with arguments against qualia themselves, but against the idea that there is some central executive in the mind, some special module (either anatomically or functionally defined) that constitutes "my consciousness", such that sensory inputs are distinctly pre-conscious on one side of it, and memories or motor outputs are distinctly post-conscious on the other side of it. Specifically, he takes aim at a naive conception of what is going on when "I" am conscious of "my percepts".
The most certain truth in the world is Descartes' "I think, therefore I am". Descartes was so sure of the existence of some kind of essential self that Dennett coined the term "Cartesian Theater" to describe the sense that we all have of being the audience enjoying the rich play of our experiences. The theater metaphor comes naturally to us. It sure seems as though there is a show going on, and it is plausible that there are lots of maintenance functions and subprocessing that our minds take care of "backstage".
It is natural to carry the subject/object distinction from the real external world into our skulls. We tend to believe in an enduring self, independent of our individual percepts. Sometimes this purported "self" in our mind, the one sitting in the audience of the Cartesian Theater watching our thoughts and percepts, is referred to as a homunculus. This is not necessarily to imply that most of us believe that the self or homunculus is an identifiable region of the brain like the pineal gland, just that at some level of organization, we naturally assume that there is a self that is separate from the stuff that self experiences, remembers, thinks about, etc.
For there to be a Cartesian Theater with a homunculus in the audience, information must come in from our sense organs (or from "outside" ourselves in any event, allowing for brain-in-a-vat type cases), thoughts must be generated and presented in some fashion to the homunculus, who experiences them.
The homunculus, then, has the same Hard Problem relative to this presentation that we do relative to our sense organs. Any distinction we can draw between the homunculus and the percepts, any line between some receptors (however functionally construed) on the homunculus and those aspects of the percepts that these receptors are sensitive to, serves to push the whole problem down one more level, but doesn't solve it. We still have a problem of how the stimuli impinging on the homunculus come together in its "mind" to form the rich qualitative field of consciousness that it has. Perhaps it has a homunculus in its mind too, watching its Cartesian theater, and so on ad infinitem. Dennett points out that under pain of infinite regress, there can be no homunculus in the audience of the Cartesian Theater separate from whatever is going on onstage.
Dennett has an alternative to the Cartesian theater metaphor, partly inspired by Marvin Minsky's Society Of Mind idea (Minsky 1985). He proposes what he calls the Multiple Drafts Model, according to which there are lots of modules (or agents, or, more colorfully, demons), lots of versions or portions of versions of sensory inputs, and it never exactly comes together in any one place or at any one time in the brain to constitute "my field of consciousness right now". Dennett often describes the mind as more of a pandemonium (literally, "demons all over") than a bureaucracy or hierarchy. I'll let him take it from here (Dennett 1991):
There is no single, definitive "stream of consciousness" because there is no central headquarters, no Cartesian Theater where "it all comes together" for the perusal of the Central Meaner. Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of "narrative" play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further functional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain. The seriality of this machine (its "von Neumannesque" character) is not a "hard-wired" design feature, but rather the upshot of a succession of coalitions of these specialists.
The basic specialists are part of our animal heritage. They were not developed to perform peculiarly human actions, such as reading and writing, but ducking, predator-avoiding, face-recognizing, grasping, throwing, berry-picking, and other essential tasks. They are often opportunistically enlisted in new roles, for which their native talents more or less suit them. The result is not bedlam only because the trends that are imposed on all this activity are themselves the product of design. Some of this design is innate, shared with other animals. But it is augmented, and sometimes even overwhelmed in importance, by microhabits of thought that are developed in the individual, partly idiosyncratic results of self-exploration and partly the predesigned gifts of culture. Thousands of memes, mostly borne by language, but also by wordless "images" and other data structures, take up residence in an individual brain, shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind.
According to Dennett's hypothesis, among the specialized modules in the brain there is a verbalizer, a narrative spinner (some people call this module or something like it the monkey mind; I think of it as the chatterbox). The chatterbox produces words, and words are very potent or sticky tags in memory. They are not merely easy to grab hold of, they are downright magnetic. They are velcro. The output of this particular module seduces the whole system into thinking that what it does, its narrative, is "what I was thinking" or "what I was experiencing" because when we wonder what we were experiencing or thinking, it leaps to answer. The reports of this chatterbox constitute what we think of as the "self". Dennett says we spin a self as automatically as spiders spin webs or beavers build dams. This very property makes this chatterbox powerful, and gives its narrative strong influence in guiding future action, thought and experience, but it is a mistake to therefore declare it to be the Central Executive.
Dennett likes to say that what we call the "self" is really just a "center of narrative gravity", and as such, merely a useful fiction. In the same way, an automobile engine may have a center of gravity, and that center of gravity may move around within the engine as it runs. The center of gravity of the engine is perfectly real in some sense - one could locate it as precisely as one wanted to - but in another sense it does not really exist. It performs no work. It is what I might call a may-be-seen-as kind of thing, not a really-there kind of thing. Dennett thinks that the self is the center of narrative gravity in exactly this sense.
I tend to agree with Dennett that thought is a lot less linear and single-threaded than we think it is, and that there are a lot of competing/cooperating specialist modules at work. His evocative term "demon" actually hearkens back to the idea of concurrent computer processes, as certain types of these are called "daemons" in the UNIX and Linux operating systems. While there is a lot to like about this conception of the mind from a cognitive point of view, it nevertheless leaves many questions unanswered, even in its own terms.
The remainder of this chapter is necessarily a bit speculative, and not just in the metaphysical sense. I'd like to poke a bit at this Multiple Drafts/Pandemonium idea, riffing a bit, perhaps not to the extent of filling in its gaps definitively, but to raise some questions that it forces upon us. This chapter is not about biting bullets, really, in that I am not asking you to entertain anything much more outlandish than Dennett himself does (well, not too much more at any rate).
Dennett (and Minsky) both like the idea of non-conscious, simple, specialized units whose collective and self-organizing behavior produce a convincing simulation of what we might call a conscious self. I think, however, that Dennett imagines his demons as rather more crisply defined than he explicitly argues for. If the whole pandemonium idea is true at all, I wonder if the demons are a bit more analog and blobby than Dennett seems to think.
Moreover, the Pandemonium image forces us to grapple with a lot of mereological questions that Dennett does not dwell on: parts vs. wholes. How do we carve the mind at the joints? How can we individuate parts, as one might a car engine? An identifiable part contributes to the whole, but in such a way that you could swap it out, perhaps with another part that did the same job but was made of different stuff, or had a different design. Dennett doesn't like the idea of the mind as a monolithic whole, so he posits demons as clearly delineated subunits. Even he, however, hints at some ambiguity as to the enumerability of his subunits when he invokes "a succession of coalitions" of demons. There is some sense that there may be a changing and perhaps indeterminate number of parts doing their work at any given moment.
I accept that there could be lots of demons in my mind, perhaps that
entirely make up my mind. It is certainly a great metaphor. But
it stays at the level of evocative metaphor, along with that of the
raucous parliament (remember those coalitions) until we specify it a bit more.
We still need to ask how these demons
might not be like individual, you know, demons, or
anything subject to the constraints that actual biological beings might
live and die under.
How many demons are there? What delineates a demon? How do new ones come into existence, and do they ever die? To what extent do they compete, and what happens to the losers? To what extent do they cooperate? Some people use terminology that suggests that the mind is a "Darwinian memosphere". Does natural selection work on demons in the same way that it does on species? Can demons mate and produce offspring? Or can they simply merge together like Voltron? Do individual demons change over time, or adapt?
After allying themselves to accomplish something, do Dennett's coalitions fall apart into exactly the same set of individual demons that went into them, or does the Voltron/coalition demon get to stick around, added to the menagerie along with its component demons? Perhaps a demon can sort of will itself to have new powers, unlike biological beings. Maybe they reproduce in a way that is more like mitosis than sexual reproduction. To what extent do patterns of relations between demons harden and become new demons themselves?
What do demons want? To the extent that they compete, what resources are they competing for? How, if at all, do they stack, or nest, or apply themselves to one another? What are the channels of interaction between them? Do they all have mutual visibility, as if they are sitting in a huge stadium watching each other? Does any one demon, or coherent coalition, hold the floor at any given time? It may well be the case that the channels of communication are not instantaneous, and not all global, and that the longer a given signal sticks around, the more broadly it gets propagated. Are the signals themselves between the demons just more demons? If not, how should we think about those communications channels? Or is it really more like a jungle, in which demons happen across one another from time to time, interacting sporadically?
I like the idea of active demons, even if most of them live in the shadows most of the time, rather than the mind as some kind of executive presiding over a mountain of static data. The mind is clearly great at parallel processing, but even that understates the situation, I think (as does Dennett).
When we are given a fact, say, that contradicts something we know, even somewhat indirectly, it is remarkable how quickly we notice. If we learn something new and surprising about cars, it is hardly plausible that we serially run through all the thoughts and memories involving cars (individual cars as well as general car knowledge) in our minds and adjust each of them accordingly. Facts, memories, are recalled as needed, as if by magic. It's as if an old fact jumps up, as if offended, to take on the newcomer. Old thoughts are less like dead data waiting to be accessed, searched, sorted, or applied, than like little sparks of mind themselves, capable of asserting themselves.
I suspect that demons can jump on and apply themselves to any detail of a new or developing stimulus (thought or percept) that catches their fancy. In this way, they get to flesh out the "focused-upon" detail more fully. However, over-eager demons get smacked down. Demons can jump on the stage, applying themselves whenever they want, but there is a cost. If they are just spamming, applying themselves when they have nothing to contribute, they may strengthen a counter-demon response and get tuned out extra in the future (more on this in a moment), or they may get corrupted or diluted somehow. In order to survive intact over the long term, demons must tiptoe through the minefield of existing demons without stepping on anyone else's tail or hoof.
I speculate that different demons have different niches in the memosphere. Some are swaggering alphas, that apply themselves broadly and promiscuously to whatever processing that needs doing, while some are rarely seen, and just stay in their tiny niche, with very specific criteria for activation. According to this notion, a swaggering alpha's identity may be so smeared out and indeterminate that it hardly has an identity left, just the barest shape of one, a tone or coloring it can impart. (The notions of causation or object permanence might be such demons.)
While at the other end of the spectrum, the den-dwelling, seldom-seen demons get to keep their specificity in sharp detail (like specific episodic memories, or particular skills). Perhaps the alphas are more appropriately seen as eager beavers, willing to trade quality and specificity for sheer quantity and frequency, whereas the den-dwellers make the opposite call. As in nature, different demons employ different strategies and make different evolutionary tradeoffs, until just about every conceivable niche is filled.
Just as it may weaken or corrupt a demon to apply itself overly broadly, demons may be similarly insulted by allowing other, incompatible demons to contribute to a developing thought. There may be, for instance, a demon that enforces or embodies what we think of as a valid chain of logical inference, and it will not tolerate another demon that violates its criteria for a valid chain of inference to activate itself. To allow such a thing would be to make it less likely that the valid-inference demon would be allowed to apply itself in the future. In this way, demons collectively constitute rules or constraints on each other. A truth I am certain of, or perhaps a symbol I know how to interpret may be a rock-solid demon that will simply always win competitions with other demons.
What sorts of current thoughts create a hospitable niche for subsequent thoughts? I suspect that the answer is far from deterministic, or rather, that it is chaotic: you never know what details or seemingly unimportant aspects of a thought or percept will grab hold of a demon's fancy and take you in a whole new direction. In particular, it is not necessarily the overall big idea or perceived direction a current thought is going in that subsequent thoughts hook into but those aforementioned distractions, even if most of the distractions do not go anywhere interesting and wind up being dead ends. Moreover, I think that demons do not necessarily have a preference for high-level deployment as opposed to low-level filling out the detail of some thought or percept - they just like a good fit.
So: the demons that are maximally compatible with all the existing demons are allowed to apply themselves relatively unchallenged. Each new moment of consciousness is new and unique, however. So it is not the case that old demons simply get to relive their glory days in the spotlight. More likely they get to inform the creation of a new demon - they get to be the primary parent, or chief architect. Each incumbent demon is like a craftsman, or a specialized muscle that shapes a new demon. When I drive down my street and see an object in my field of vision that ultimately resolves to "house", it is probably not the case that my "house" demon simply grabs the spotlight; more likely it helps spawn a new moment of consciousness, a new, yet distinctly housey demon.
Although some are more like specific memories, some are more like general facts or general strategies. Some are more algorithmic/prescriptive, and others more data/descriptive, on a sliding scale. Each has a bit of "what is it like?" and each has a bit of "what does it do?". Indeed, it is hard to separate the two aspects.
The pandemonium image blurs the distinction between immediate sensations and memory, which to my way of thinking is one of its virtues. Memory is smarter and more active than is generally supposed. Memories are not in cold storage, off in a file cabinet, but right in your mind now, pressing on your consciousness.
We often speak of our minds containing models: models of reality, models of self, models of my cat, etc. What sense can we make of such talk if our minds are constituted by demons? Are there models at all, if each new moment of consciousness is whipped up on the fly dynamically? I feel comfortable saying yes. Any model is a black box with an interface. You ask certain questions in the right way, and the model gives you consistent answers. A model may be implemented by a static table of bits or a database, with a relatively mechanical query engine, or it may be implemented by a raucous parliament. Our "models" may not be as model-like as we suppose.
So what are the selection criteria for letting demons on the stage? Which demons do get promoted to the inner circle? Whoa - what inner circle? Alright, yes, there is no Cartesian Theater, not exactly, but even Dennett acknowledges that there is something like a consensus that forms (pretty quickly at that) about what the narrative center of gravity is (or was) at any moment in my mind. This may be an artifact of the narrative-spinner demon, the chatterbox, and may not mean as much as it seems with regard to what "I" am thinking, but there is something to the notion that I thought about Fluffy today, but had not in the week before today. There is something like a spotlight of attention on certain trains of thought, even though (as I suspect) there are lots and lots of other trains of thought going on at the same time.
Attention is created, not shifted. While I am here, I should just say that the proverbial spotlight of attention is a bad metaphor, even though I just used it. Attention is actively created, not passively observed. The spotlight metaphor wrongly implies that the thing attended to in the mind already exists, in all its detail, in the dark before the spotlight is shone upon it. In a way, the image of a spotlight of attention is a continuation of the Cartesian Theater. Where was the last time you saw a spotlight, drawing your attention? Probably the theater.
Rather than imagining that all of our thoughts, percepts, memories, etc. are all there, fully realized, but in the dark until their moment in the spotlight, it is more likely the case that we function as a sort of just-in-time mental reality generator, creating things on the fly as we "turn our attention to" them. That said, it is hard to stop using this image, just as with the Cartesian Theater itself, for the same reason. There is some sense in which "I was thinking this" or "I was not aware of that, but I am now, for purely internal reasons."
The idea of demons having to pay a price for inappropriate activation may help improve the "spotlight of attention" metaphor. As a demon, you get to create the spotlight any time you want, making other demons conform to you, just as any loser can pull a fire alarm. Seizing attention is really a way of corralling or bullying other demons into trying to apply themselves to you, even at a cost to themselves of less-than-appropriate activation. Depending on the situation, seizing attention is like issuing an "all hands on deck" with more or less urgency.
Attention, then, isn't some spotlight being shone on a particular demon, but is the collective combinations of lots of demons, perhaps with one at the center as a ringleader or catalyst. Things like pain or a threat tend to focus the attention. This may be a way of having one imperative light a fire under all of the demons, in effect shouting at them, "I don't care if this doesn't fit your criteria of applicability! Find a way to apply yourselves to this situation, however suboptimally to yourselves!"
There is one more wrinkle that I want to add to the pandemonium model now. On one hand, there is this idea that parts of my mental processing are performed by somewhat autonomous demons. On the other hand, there is a strong sense that there is some kind of "what I was/am thinking", even if we jettison the homunculus in favor of a "center of narrative gravity". Dennett puts this on a sliding scale, speaking of "fame in the brain". Once enough demons are bought in to a particular thought or interpretation of something, some version of the narrative becomes relatively "famous". As we construct our thoughts and percepts, how does their development coincide with this kind of fame?
As I am taking in a complex percept, I have to synthesize perceptual fragments into some kind of whole. Different sense modalities get bound. As I discriminate edges, light and shadow, colors, then shapes, tables, chairs, pine-scented air fresheners get recognized as such individually as well as belonging in the larger context. There is no naive perception, so along the way, I (or my demons) do all kinds of scrubbing, smoothing, guessing, extrapolating, etc. I am convinced that even pretty simple perception is more creative than it is generally given credit for.
We get a lot of messy, noisy, patchy data from our senses, and various demons (or Dennett's coalitions of demons) take a stab at cobbling different parts of it together into larger coherent (to them) chunks, discarding outliers, making inspired guesses. Eventually, they synthesize a whole bunch of data into a single, unified percept, complete with tendrils of association and valence, framing and background knowledge: ah, that gray blob is a veterans' memorial. On the way to that unambiguous, stable, solid interpretation, however, there was a lot of thrashing around.
Whatever they come up with as a single interpretation, that final, unified percept, is only a first pass. This recalls Dennett's Multiple Drafts idea, although he is a bit vague about how rough drafts get edited. I imagine that as soon as anything like a draft emerges, it gets attacked, more or less. Other demons try to break it back down again, along fault lines that they choose, not necessarily into the original components it was synthesized from. This becomes an iterative loop, with the same percept being built up and broken down, with possible subloops happening along the way. Stability (the "final" draft) happens when the result of the synthesis phase of the process no longer differs in successive loops - a consensus has been reached.
For unambiguous input, there are few iterations, little demonic controversy, and the processing is more or less automatic and unconscious. It is the more ambiguous, complex cases that take longer to stabilize, that end up engaging more and more demons. This is a slightly different take than Dennett's fame in the brain, in that it's the real battles that get famous.
Have you ever been listening to an oldies station, and heard a song that you have not heard in years or decades, but had the distinct sense that the very same song was going through your head sometime in the past week? Of course you have. I have had this sense suspiciously often. Often enough, in fact, that I have a hard time believing that I actually just happened to be replaying all those songs consciously in my memory in the few days before I heard them on the radio.
As I go about through my life, I have a sense that my mind is not monolithic, that there are parts of it working away offline. Not only do results of these offline computations pop into my main stream of consciousness (however you might construe that term), but there is a definite sense, in me anyway, of a whole train of thought, in all of its what-its-like-to-see-red glory, being plugged into whatever else I was thinking about or experiencing. Such trains of thought come complete with a sense that they didn't just come into existence at the moment "I" became aware of them, but that they had been developing on their own for some time.
Now of course this sense could be an illusion. As with deja vu, I could be misremembering, mis(re)constructing my own mental history. But let's go with this for a moment. This palpable sense of past mental history that gets retroactively grafted onto your "main" consciousness makes a lot of sense if your consciousness is made of semiautonomous demons. I think that all of my song memories are possibly playing all the time, but "I" am not aware of them. And if song memories work this way, what other memories are on hot standby? Is there a "Dancing In The Moonlight" demon, who just sings that song all the time, forever until you die? I can't rule it out. It may be that all of our old moments of consciousness are still in there, as some kind of standing waves.
How do you ever get a thought in edgewise, with all these demons singing? Not to mention the ones thinking, remembering, and sensing your shoes through the soles of your feet. I suspect that you (or perhaps I should go with the scare quotes, "you") tune them out. Like the jackhammer outside your window that you don't realize is deafening until it stops, it's not as if the demons go away or stop, but after a short while they just don't impinge upon "you" anymore, unless it would be a good idea for them to do so. I am legion and I contain multitudes. I know that some consciousness happens, but I don't necessarily know how much more consciousness happens that "I" don't (need to) know about. At one time it took a lot of concentration for me to tie my shoes, but now I could almost do it in my sleep. I constructed a tying-shoes demon, and when I tie my shoes, somewhere in my mind, it is hard at work, concentrating like mad (although I can willfully focus my attention on the act of shoe tying and make it more globally conscious). There may be lots and lots of willful and creative consciousness in my mind that "I" don't know about.
When I walk into a room I may not consciously notice each of the fire sprinkler heads mounted on the ceiling. Do I see them? Even after a good look around, I would likely flunk if quizzed about their exact number or arrangement, even though I feel as though I have seen the whole room, in all its detail. Dennett says that this feeling is illusory. I choose to say that the sprinkler heads do not intrude, as it were, on my consciousness because insofar as I care, there is nothing about them that should surprise, interest, or concern me. I've noticed them - if I had never seen or heard of a sprinkler head before, within a very few seconds upon entering the room they would command my full attention - but as it is I've written them off at a relatively low level of perception. At some point in my life, I've noticed them, thought about them, stared at them during dull staff meetings, convinced myself that I more or less understand them. In effect, I have constructed a demon - a sprinkler head recognition agent. When I enter and scan a room, this agent is awake, active, but quiescent. Nevertheless, it contributes in some admittedly poorly understood way (by me at least) to where I'm at, consciously.
I have an overall sense that I see and comprehend the room. If I had the mind of a dog, I might still have some sense that I see and comprehend the room, even though the sprinkler heads never registered at all, much beyond the firings of the rods and cones on my actual retina. My dog mind has no sprinkler head recognition agents, nor does it have any particular curiosity about details it does not recognize. (no epistemically hungry agencies, to use Dennett's term). My human sense that I see the room and my satisfaction that I understand it are quite different than the dog-mind's sense, even though in the end we are both satisfied that we see and understand it. I see and understand insofar as I care, have ever cared, or could imagine caring about whatever it is I am looking at.
Active percepts, not just past memories, are demons. You tune out the actual shapes of the trees on the side of the road as you drive to work each day, the colors of the houses on your street, etc. Your eyes pick up all these details (that is, the corresponding photons do actually strike your retinas), and somewhere there is a perceptual demon who, according to this way of thinking, is exquisitely conscious of all that stuff, but "you" aren't aware of it, unless there is a conscious effort at attention to such details.
You know how sometimes you remember an event from the distant past, and you are not sure if you are actually remembering the event or remembering your subsequent remembering of it on other occasions? Your memorable recalling of it in the past has effectively jammed the original memory. Any toehold or reference tag that would have triggered the original memory will also now trigger the memory of the memory. The original has been masked. Was Fluffy yellow? I always thought of him as yellow. But Mom has a photo and he's black. Oops. Demons who cry wolf get ignored later (or countered more vigilantly).
I have a strong suspicion that a great deal of the mind's activity is inhibitory. We spend an awful lot of effort shutting down streams of information, channeling activity, blocking and constraining. It strikes me that, to borrow an image from the memeticists, the mind is like an organism under constant assault by viral memes (demons). We tune out the singing demons by quickly developing antibodies to them. If the "Dancing In The Moonlight" demon sings the same song in the same way for too long, we jam the signal by installing a counter-signal, a counter demon. We handicap; we compensate. It doesn't stop, but we accommodate it by adjusting for its constant presence. And of course, even though I speak of singing demons, this goes for the remembering-my-childhood-cat-Fluffy demon as well, and the demons that notice the trees along the highway. The demon and its meme-jamming anti-demon are locked in a self-canceling embrace forever, leaving the mind as an intricate balance of tensions, like a bicycle wheel.
This idea of demons/antidemons (or memes and antimemes) respects a couple of ideas. First, as mentioned above, it helps make sense of what Ned Block calls perceptual overflow, those conscious-but-not-conscious scenarios people have devised over the years: the ticking clock you are not aware of until it stops, the pattern of the design on the carpet, the sensation of your socks against your ankles. Your "peripheral" awareness of such things is in there, and part of your overall conscious field, but neutralized by an antimeme.
Most importantly, this idea of demons and antidemons respects a sense of holism in the mind. The mind, according to this conception of it, really is one unified thing, with a balance of tensions keeping much of it more or less inert at any given time. All the "parts" (demons, sensations, memories, whatever) are always right there, as part of your all-at-once now, but tuned out, or counterbalanced. Each one is not off somewhere in its own soundproof room, dormant or disconnected until needed. They are all there, all the time, fully patched in. We actively exert ourselves to cancel them out, jamming them with an antisignal, and this exertion is a collective exertion, performed by other demons: the mind as a self-policing pandemonium, but a whole thing. As you know by now, I think holism is important, and I will come back to this theme shortly.
For all the reasons laid out in this book so far, you can't get consciousness from the causal interactions of functionally construed subunits, whatever you call them: agents, black boxes, or demons. Dennett has proposed a convincing solution (or at least a good image that suggests a solution) to Chalmers's "easy problems", but it leaves the Hard Problem untouched. At this point, Dennett would get exasperated, and insist that no, once you have solved the easy problems at this level, there is no Hard Problem. Moreover, I think Dennett would claim that any talk of qualia implicitly entails the existence of a homunculus sitting in the audience of the Cartesian Theater, and we've already dismissed that image with its infinite regress.
My own speculation is that the demons (the epistemically hungry agencies) are conscious, in the full-blown Hard Problem qualophilic sense. The sprinkler head recognition agent feels quite clever, that it has made a really creative leap. It has never seen these particular sprinkler heads, in this light, from this angle, in this context, yet it declared them to be sprinkler heads. It is always thinking about sprinkler heads, and always looking for them, always trying to see them.
When I look at my living room, I seem to have a certain sense that I see it before me in all its colorful, varied entirety. What is the connection between this "certain sense" and actually seeing it? My sense of seeing it is not an opaque ability to answer questions. I don't feed demands for information into a black box and get information back. It may well be, as Dennett says, that a pandemonium of demons (couch demon, rug demon, lots of other, more abstract demons concerned with context and associations) in some way contribute to my overall comprehension. Moreover, it may well be the case that this "overall comprehension" just is the pandemonium itself, not some master demon, or some Central Meaner.
Maybe later, if asked what was going through my mind, the "I was comprehending my living room" demon may be overruled by the "I was worrying about my property taxes" demon. Maybe I was comprehending the living room, but come to think if it, I was paying special attention to the drapes. Or was I? Maybe any of the demons could make a good case that they were the whole point, the where-it-all-comes-together. From each demon's point of view, it is right. We have lots of seats of consciousness in our minds.
If all of the demons are conscious to some degree or another, if that term is to have any meaning at all, then there are some consciousnesses that never manifest themselves distinctly in any kind of a master narrative of "what was going through my mind". Perhaps some of them are evolutionary dead ends in the pandemonic Darwinian jungle that is my mind. Maybe some of them don't even nudge any of the others above the level of random noise or jitter, even though, for their possibly quite brief existence, they were conscious. There was something it was like to be them.
At one point (pp. 132-133) Dennett speaks about the impossibility of phenomenal consciousness that "you" aren't conscious of:
We might classify the Multiple Drafts model, then, as first-person operationalism, for it brusquely denies the possibility in principle of consciousness of a stimulus in the absence of the subject's belief in that consciousness.
Opposition to this operationalism appeals, as usual, to possible facts beyond the ken of the operationalist's test, but now the operationalist is the subject himself, so the objection backfires: "Just because you can't tell, by your preferred ways, whether or not you were conscious of x, that doesn't mean you weren't. Maybe you were conscious of x but just can't find any evidence for it!" Does anyone, on reflection, really want to say that? Putative facts about consciousness that swim out of reach of both "outside" and "inside" observers are strange facts indeed.
Yes, yes they are, but there it is. We know that qualia exist, in the true blue maximalist sense. Moreover, the self is an unreliable narrator. If some qualia exist that we definitely know about and have cognitive access to, and figure into our ongoing selfy narrative, it is not crazy at all to think that there may well be other qualia that we don't know about, at least not insofar as they are patched through to that chatterbox narrative-spinner. There are, in fact, consciousnesses within my skull that swim out of reach of any demon or collection of demons that might generate utterances or typings about what "I" am or were conscious of at any particular time.
This should not seem odd, frankly, even to someone like Daniel Dennett. However you define consciousness, assuming you find any use for the term whatsoever, why is it impossible, or even unlikely, that the submodules and sub-submodules that comprise my mind might themselves individually qualify as conscious? And if they do qualify as conscious, they might not all necessarily be patched into any larger consciousness, or feed into any higher level of consciousness (or perhaps, not each one is in the winning coalition in every election or debate). Of course the ones that do are probably more interesting to us, and how exactly they feed in is a subject for further speculation. And perhaps some of them spin off on their own until asked a certain way, or until the right kind of slot opens up for them to contribute their bit (recall Dennett's constantly shifting coalitions of demons). So it should not seem silly or bizarre that, in some sense, I was conscious of a stimulus but didn't know it. Or perhaps the "I" that reports on such things did not know it, or know it in the right way.
At this point, I want to pull back a bit. I mentioned mereology above, and I think that the specter that lurks over this chapter is that of compositionality. Dennett would say that demons don't have to compose. They just do what they do individually, and any notion of anything "coming together" is an clever evolutionarily-derived illusion. He would say that any talk of qualitative experiences that implies an experiencer falls prey to the infinite regress of the homunculus in the Cartesian Theater.
I agree that there is no distinct homunculus. So what is the explanandum here, the percepts or the perceiver? I'm with William James on this: the thoughts themselves are the thinkers. The memories are the rememberers, the experiences are the experiencers. While this must be true, when I see a red apple, the thought is not of a red apple; it is of an observer seeing a red apple. The thoughts are the thinkers, the percepts are the perceivers, as William James said. But the thought is not of a red apple; it is of a perceiver perceiving a red apple. The self of which we are aware when we claim to be self-aware is a simulation, constructed as part of our perceptual and cognitive apparatus, built into the percepts. The actors on the stage are the audience. I am the scene on the stage of the Cartesian theater. James also suggested that instead of saying, "I am thinking" it might be more appropriate to say, "it is thinking", using "it" in the same sense that we use it when we say "it is raining." I might add to James's suggestion that in particular, it is thinking you. The sense of this is summed up in a quote by Johann Gottlieb Fichtes that I found on page 93 of Strawson (2009):
The self posits itself, and by virtue of this mere self-assertion it exists; and conversely, the self exists and posits its own existence by virtue of merely existing. It is at once the agent and the product of action; the active, and what the activity brings about; action and deed are one the same, and hence the "I am" expresses an act.
I realize that throughout this book, it can seem a little unclear just what I take the explanandum to be. I started by talking about the redness of red, and sometimes it seems that I am interested in exploring the qualitative properties of experience, but sometimes it seems that I am interested in the act of experiencing itself, and at still other times I am interested in the self doing the experiencing. I have a pretty big-tent notion of qualia, and I am sceptical of the distinction between those three things. We know, with Cartesian certainty, that there are events of qualitative consciousness. So my answer to the question of which of those I think is the central mystery is "yes!"
Sometimes I imagine the perceiver/self as a gelatinous pseudopod like thing, assuming the shape of whatever different thoughts that it has. This notion of the unity of perceiver and percept also explains, to some extent, the troublesome second-orderliness of consciousness: to see red is to know that you are seeing red. In general, it seems mysterious that experiencing is inseparable from knowing that you are experiencing, that you can't see the apple without also having a sense of yourself as an experiencing self. This mystery goes away if the self is a construct created specifically to bring about exactly this effect. We call the self into being precisely to be the subject of our experiencings, to give them an anchor, a point of view, to make sense of them.
My thoughts and percepts are one thing. I am sure of this, however fuzzy the edges may be in any individual case. If there are demons, they do stack, they compose, in some way to produce a…thing. A real, really-there thing, not just a may-be-seen-as thing. Somehow, the "self", if we can even call it that, does not sit apart from the performance on the stage of the Cartesian Theater, but incorporates it, in all its detail, in addition to the comprehension of those details in terms of a "big picture". There is holism at work in minds, and there is some kind of fundamental e pluribus unum separate-yet-part-of-the-whole stuff going on.
Dennett hates this idea. He once said,
"When everything is held to merge with everything else, when there are no
clean joints at which to carve nature, science tends to wind down to a
lazy halt: holism as the heat death of science."
When everything is held to merge with everything else,
when there are no clean joints at which to carve nature, science tends to wind down to a
lazy halt: holism as the heat death of science.
-Daniel Dennett
I sympathize, I really do.
Holism can be a "get out of jail free" card. You just wave a magic wand and
say "holism" and you can explain anything you want by declaring your
intention not to explain it at all. The whole point of inquiry, scientific
or philosophical, as Sellars said, is to "to understand how things in the broadest
possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term."
This necessarily means analyzing things, breaking them down, figuring out how
to describe some things in terms of other things, and thereby gaining insight.
None of that happens as soon as we invoke holism, as we do when we see a big,
seemingly complicated block of (something) in front of us, and we gesture at
it and say, like a laid-back frat bro, "It is what it is, dude."
As I've said before, the problem with this (often justified) antipathy for holism is that it leaves you unable to accommodate a scenario in which the world just happens to exhibit genuine holism. In the case of consciousness, that is exactly what we have staring us in the face. We may have to sharpen our conception of how we have these really-there, all-at-once experiences in the absence of a Central Meaner or a homunculus, but I think we can and must do that.