Somewhere in the first third of Consciousness Explained, DD proposes that neurons or clusters thereof can do the operations proper to other (neurons or clusters). I need to find out where he seems to say this as well as what he really does say there, because.... it sounds like the Aristotelian concept of appropriation (the last term is my name for what De sensu has the sensus communis doing vis-à-vis the proper senses, comparing the former to a craftsman using instruments).
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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