The mind-brain identity reduction is also not an option for us. Dennett’s narrative (From Bacteria to Bach and Back, 2017) asks to believe that it is very obvious: Under certain chemical and environmental conditions, life will emerge in time and develop organisms with large brains, and these organisms will of necessity be social organisms.
Exactly how this happens, how physical causality is transformed magically into phenomenal awareness, is never clear. In his narrative, something again happens, and there is language, which according to Dennett, was very useful, and therefore emerged naturally under the pressure of the social need to communicate, out of meaningless sounds and gestures. It is never clear as to whose needs is being fulfilled by blind nature?
In his narrative, the conscious mind constitutes a special dilemma, since this so called modern picture of evolution of life and consciousness through natural selection was produced by excluding all mental properties from physical nature. This theorising and narrative is however built up by employing the very mental properties that are being denied.
As discussed above, there is the enigma of consciousness itself, and of the qualia (direct subjective impressions, such as color or tone) that inhabit it. There is no causal narrative capable of uniting the phenomenologically discontinuous regions of “third-person” electrochemical brain events and “first-person” experiences.
Then there is the irreducible unity of apprehension, without which there could be no coherent perception of anything at all, not even disjunctions within experience. For example, without an unitive consciousness inking waking, dreaming, and sleeping states of existence, there cannot be an unitive experience of self across these states. It is a unity that cannot be reduced to some executive material faculty of the brain, as this would itself be a composite reality in need of unification by some still-more-original faculty, and so on forever. And whatever lay at the “end” of that infinite regress would have to possess an inexplicable prior understanding of the diversity of experience that it organizes. This is the problem of understanding and organising the discrete brain events to an analog narrative, and primarily the awareness of “I am” woven through all our experiences.
Again, how to explain the mental intentionality — the mind’s pure directed-ness, its interpretation of sense experience under determinate aspects and meanings, its movement toward particular ends, its power to act according to rationales that would appear nowhere within any inventory of antecedent physical causes.
Dennett mindlessly attempts to explain away the absolute qualitative difference, between third-person physical events and first-person consciousness, by positing an indefinite number of minute quantitative steps, genetic or structural, to span the interval. In history phylogenic and neurological magic happened, leading to within us an inversion of mindless, physical causality into illusion of unified intentional consciousness.
The key point of Dennett’s narrative is the idea of “uncomprehending competences,” molded by natural selection into the intricate machinery of mental existence. As a model of the mind, this poses a problem. What are those competences that are not dependent for their existence upon the very mental functions they supposedly compose?
An example of how illogical the whole proposal is, is Dennett’s idea that language is simply the cumulative product of countless physical ingredients. This is blatantly false as there is no trace in nature even of primitive or protolanguages; all languages possess a full hierarchy of grammatical constraints. Dennett claims that words are like ‘meme’ that reproduce virus like, as if ‘meme’ are real objects that have concrete causal and intentional forces. It is a joke. In order to deny that ‘intention’ is a product of conscious agents, the intentionality is ascribed to a vapid idea called ‘meme’. it is bizarre to think of intentionality as the product of forces that would themselves be, if they existed at all, nothing but acts of intentionality. What could memes be other than mental conventions of conscious agents?
Dennett claims that the brain is “a kind of computer,” and mind merely a kind of “interface” between that computer and its “user.” Unlike AI fans, Dennett however grants that computers only appear to be conscious agents and the same is true of us. That vast abyss between objective physical events and subjective qualitative experience actually does not exist. Hence, that seemingly magical transition from the one to the other — whether a genetic or a structural shift — need not be explained, because it has never actually occurred. Dennett rejects the very datum that he is claiming to explain.
Dennett also truly seems confused and fanatic. While discussing zombies he actually equates humans to zombies by claiming humans too do not have real consciousness with qualia. First, how he knows this is beyond me. He too must be a zombie? Is he equipped with divine understanding? Second, a zombie could not ever imagine anything, since it would possess no consciousness at all, let alone reflective consciousness; that is the whole point of the metaphoric exercise of David Chalmer. The very fact that we can imagine, correctly or illusively, is the very sign of consciousness that Dennet vehemently denies. Dennet again and again mistakes the question of the existence of subjective experience for the entirely irrelevant question of the objective accuracy of subjective perceptions.
The funniest part, in my opinion, is that that eliminative materialists rely on third party data of an object — the brain (which itself has to be a representational product/image generated due to works of whatever forces that engender consciousness) to reject direct irrefutable subjective experience/s. In other words, why the third party records can be accepted as such when all observations must be representational? And why reject the direct experience data as illusion?
The materialism is the real illusion, called mAyA in Hinduism and Buddhism. Reading the accounts of eliminative materialism, I am now more convinced that consciousness is the non-dual substratum and space-time-objects and temporal conscious agents are experience machines that evolve and devolve within. If, a narrative proposes, as apparently Dennett ’s does, that brain processes entail consciousness and intentionality then that narrative is a mystic spiritual narrative already.
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