The self is a centre of narrative gravity

Dennett describes the latter as “mysterians” – that is, people who believe that beyond scientific explanation there are something called “qualia”, namely, introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives.

We are not brains in vats but essentially embodied.

But there is no cinema, no screen and no self for Dennett: rather our brains and bodies are machines that process information and the self is not a locatable entity but what he calls “a centre of narrative gravity”, a story we tell ourselves about our experiences. Or rather, stories: we continually revise our narratives about our experiences as more data is processed.

I’ve Been Thinking by Daniel C Dennett – an engaging, vexing memoir with a humility bypass

The veteran US philosopher renowned for his theories of consciousness is an intriguing figure but too prone to ‘professorial preening’

Review by Stuart Jeffries

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They struggle with different versions of it and they end up with something like a theory, not of consciousness but of television, where there's a little screen in the head where the movie plays and they're quite content that that's going to be all material. But it's the place in your brain where it all comes together and all the content is displayed for an inner witness of sorts. I call that the Cartesian theater. And its material, they're very clear they don't want to be dualists. But they still think they can have the theater and that's a mistake too and it has lots of further implications that tie people in knots like qualia, the so-called intrinsic properties, Qualia are the intrinsic properties of what you see in the Cartesian theater. No, no, no. There's no Cartesian theater and since there's no Cartesian theater, there's no room for qualia. You just think there's room for qualia. That is you think that you are directly apprehending special ineffable properties. The smell of the rose, the pain in your leg, and that these are very special things that defy science and functionalism in particular, and we may have to have a revolution in physics to make sense of it and that's just an advanced case of still wanting to have the ghost in the machine. 

But amazingly to me, I was just thinking about this today. Somebody who unlocked the door on this many, many years ago was Jack Smart, JJC Smart, Australian philosopher of mind. He pointed out that it's easy, relatively, to make a machine, a mechanism that will say, sort oranges or sort things that are shaped like a cube or you can make automatic sorters that key on some factor. 

And the point is, the machine doesn't have to know what it's sorting or why. It's just has to be a good sorter. And what we have in our brains is lots and lots and lots of good sorters. And we think we know, what they're sorting. All the blue things, all red things, all the painful things. All the things that smell like coffee. But we don't know what's actually going on in those sorters to put it sort of comically, we have underprivileged access to the properties of our own mental states. We know their content but we don't know their properties. We have no privilege access to where all of this has happened. If some evil scientist were to remove your brain and put it in your chest and stuff your heart and your kidneys up in your between your ears. Still think you were thinking with your mind, which is up behind your eyes and between your ears. You don't know where your brain is except by hearsay. You don't know where your thoughts are. So we're remarkably unknowledgeable about the machinery that makes our consciousness possible. But that doesn't stop us from being bold theorists about what's going on. And boy, do people make mistakes. They think they have much more direct and irrefutable knowledge of what's going on in their heads than they do. They know what they think. But they don't know what that thinking is constituted of. They aren't even completely authoritative about what they think. Descartes was wrong about that too. 

Free will, consciousness and AI: a conversation with Daniel Dennett: Radio national at the ABC. You're in the philosopher zone where we have a discussion this week between journalist, Dan Faulk, and philosopher. Daniel Dennett, who's the author of a long string of books including his latest, which is a memoir titled, I've Been Thinking.