Ep. 399: Dan Dennett's Model of Mind (Part Two)
episode
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
51 min
4 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 15 hours ago
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What is Dennett’s “multiple drafts” model and how does it challenge the Cartesian theater?
You're listening to The Partially Examined Life, episode 399, part two. We've been discussing Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained. And we had gotten into chapter five on the multiple drafts versus the Cartesian theater. Talked about the five phenomena. I guess one of the points you ended with dylan was just the bent stick and to sort of get i think this might be illicitly tugging on some things from that chapter 12 that we're not supposed to talk about so do you think that if you know dylan that the stick right so a normal glass of water you put a stick in it or you put a pencil in it and you know the rules so do you actually see the stick the pencil as bent
I make the distinction between what I see and what I think this... So if you ask me, is the stick bent? I would say no.
Right. Okay. So one of the things that I was claiming in the first half here, that might've been an overstatement, but it's definitely something that he plays with is, at least in some circumstances, is there a difference between... experiencing something and gaining a fact about something. And I was saying, at least in the Phi example, he thinks there is no distinction between merely gaining what you take to be a fact, right? It's actually not a fact that the first dot that flashed on the screen moved and transformed into the second dot. Did you experience it or did you, do you know that it happened? And he thinks that there actually is no difference between those things. Although even just the way I put it, like, no, actually, you know, because you've had this explained to you in a book, that it didn't happen.
You know that one dot did not transform into the other one. So the same way the stick, you know that the stick is straight, but it looks straight. So...
Have I just disproved? This is where I think that at some point he talks about the fact that what's really going on in your consciousness is basically your experience of it is judgments. So the closest thing that you have to what we would call the wholeness of our conscious experience is the fact that we have a bunch of judgments that we've made. And that what's going on with the bent stick or with the dots is that you have a set of judgments that you've made. And then those judgments are up to be revised based upon whether or not you get more experience, you get more information about it. So the bent stick one is, is to me fairly easy because you have the Extra experience of pulling the stick out and seeing that it's not bent.
And in fact, you could mess around with somebody, right? Where you have a stick that's bent in such a way that when you stick it in the water, it looks like it's straight.
Right?
You know, this is what illusions are about, right? Illusions may become illusions. You call them illusions because there is a fact of the matter that it doesn't look like. So you make a judgment that is contrary to the fact of the matter where that fact involves something that you can probe more deeply to say that this is what was really going on. So you have a refined judgment of the situation. And the fact is that you could totally get fooled again by the conclusion that you come up with, the judgment that you come up with ends up, it's undermined by some other new facts of the matter that are really are judgments that you made about what was really going on.
I find this particular example problematic. It's almost like the way that Dennett describes the colorblind color scientist or the whatever it is. Problematic. Mary's room or whatever. Mary's room. I think that's problematic the way he described it. So the illusion in this case is a straight stick looks bent. Now, in order for that illusion to work... you have to already know that it's straight or have had the experience of it being straight and the expectation that when you look at it, it will be straight. And then in this context, you look at it and instead of being straight, it's bent. But that expectation only comes up when after habituation through many types of experience where you learn that this is an effect of water, et cetera, et cetera.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Dennett’s “multiple drafts” model and how does it challenge the Cartesian theater?
0:07–7:33
2
How does the bent‑stick illusion illustrate the difference between appearance and judgment?
7:33–14:48
3
Why does Dennett claim there is no distinction between experiencing apparent motion and knowing it happened?
14:48–20:44
4
What role do memory and revision play in forming our conscious judgments?
20:44–27:20
5
How do the “Stalinist vs. Orwellian” memory examples test the stream‑of‑consciousness hypothesis?
27:20–33:30
6
Why does Dennett reject qualia as a separate ontological entity?
33:30–40:00
7
How does the discussion of qualia as fleeting versus sustained experiences affect the illusion debate?
40:00–46:42
8
What are the implications of a distributed, non‑centralized brain process for measuring consciousness?
46:42–51:38
Speakers
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