Consciousness confused

I recently wrote to a friend, criticizing Daniel Dennett. The friend wrote back:

[I see] “the hard problem” of consciousness as pointless word games. “Sure, you have all these components of mentation, but where is THE THING that is consciousness? That must be magic!” – sounds to me like “Sure, you have these pistons and sparks and a combustion chamber, but where is the THING that makes the engine turn!?” Just because your mind can’t transition from your model of the parts to a simple model of the emergent aggregate doesn’t mean you have to introduce extra magical entities.

Whereas Dennett almost single-handedly changed the field, and has been one of the most clear and lucid thinkers on the topic I’ve ever read. His view is getting commonplace, but was revolutionary when he introduced it. It helped me form my own ideas on computation and consciousness. Anyway, I love him, and feel like I have to come to his defense!

I think that's a pretty good quick description of Dennett's take. I do think, though, that it's significant that he so often turns the conversation towards the question of linear thinking (the thesis of his book Consciousness Explained, IIRC, is that consciousness arose from people talking to themselves) and away from what I think is the much thornier question of awareness and experience itself.

Here's why I think the question is still interesting. if we built a large replica of my brain, with little marbles to represent the various hormones and synaptic chemicals, we could in theory perfectly replicate all of the things that happen in my brain as I laugh while looking into my daughter's eyes. If we did this, according to Dennett's argument, there would be no meaningful difference between the experience of all those marbles being shuffled around in the experience I believe I am feeling when I actually share this laugh with my daughter.

Of course, from the outside, the two are indistinguishable. you can ask the marbles, using some text interface, to describe the feeling of laughter. And you can ask me. if the replica is good enough, the answers should be the same. Dennett is right to wonder why on earth you should trust me in my claim that I'm experiencing an ineffable subjective reality, and dismiss the marbles' identical claim. And that's certainly a rhetorically compelling question!

But turn it around: if awareness is only an illusion that results from emergent complexity, are we really ready to say that to whatever extent it feels like something to be me, it will feel just as much like something to be the system of marbles?

I think Dennett's preference in talking about the most human forms of awareness, such as the ability to think through questions in an almost linguistic way, is partially a reflection of how much less challenging that aspect of consciousness is to explain, given awareness itself. This is a line that I have seen Dennett fudge time and time again. I'm not sure what Dennett thinks it's like to be a mouse, but I would guess that a mouse experiences distress and panic in a way I would recognize, without needing to be able to talk itself out of a bad habit; just as I have at times been able to experience and react to pain even while heavily sedated and unable to form reflective thoughts. It's really the mouse's awareness that's the bigger mystery than human reflective thinking, we just don't have many talking mice to interrogate. (And how I'd love to quiz a bacterium!)

and yet, we are close to being able to produce a robot mouse able to perform the sort of pattern recognition and reflex reactions of an animal mouse. It seems that if awareness is a mere byproduct, animals could have evolved without it. why must it feel like hunger to be flooded with hormones that instruct me to seek food? I don't think it feels uncomfortable for air to be compressed in a tank, or that it feels explosive for the complex chemical eddies within a star to swirl their way with maximal efficiency to the surface.

It might not be fair of me to demand that Dennett answer to all of my different scenarios. but he is declaring, in a way, that no boundary exists that distinguishes human experience from any old complex information processing physical system. that's an affirmative description of the world that implicitly posits a huge range of whispers of experience, and to not address these is to not fully back up that affirmative description.

Whereas the "hard problem of consciousness" camp (which I think I'm in) is not putting forth an affirmative description, but merely articulating a sense of confusion and contradiction.

To make a dangerous analogy, I think it's a bit like the Shakespeare authorship question... the traditionalists/Stratfordians like to think of themselves as realists and describe the skeptics as fantasists who are affirmatively constructing ridiculous theories. But I think our default view should be that we are almost entirely ignorant of the creative processes of people who lived 400+ years ago and left little documentation. "Absolutely no one else collaborated significantly on any of the plays or any of the poems attributed to William Shakespeare!" is not a prudent view, it is an almost religious one; and when you dig into the scholarship that claims most intimate knowledge of the creative process behind Shakespeare's writings, you start to see very circular references that create statements like "Shakespeare wanted to explore theme X" out of whole cloth.

What separates me from Shakespeare authorship traditionalists is that they think this discussion is sickeningly indulgent and tired, while I find it fascinating and unsettling. Perhaps I'm a Shakespeare authorship skeptic because I'm infatuated with an illusion -- that's what traditionalists seem to often think. But I don't think they've given me answers that would justify their certainty.

I'm capable of having entire conversations while in what seems to have been an unconscious or semiconscious state. (I joked around with my surgeon, then told him the exact same joke when I gained full consciousness 10 minutes later.) I'm capable of feeling things when I'm having no thoughts at all (which happened when I was knocked out with sedative gas and then given a shot in my hand.). Why do I have awareness sometimes but not others? couldn't I perform many of my functions as a human without consciousness? What do I have in my brain's complexity that a replica wouldn't? what's it like to be a marble-based simulation of Ben's brain? what is it like to be a mouse or a gnat or a worm or a bacterium?

What separates me from Dennett most is that he finds these questions boring, while I find them unsettling, complex, mysterious and fascinating. Perhaps that's because I am immaturely infatuated with my own illusion. But I don't feel that he has given me answers that would justify his certainty.