Skip to main content

problems and opportunities with DD's (Daniel Dennett's) multiple drafts account of consciousness

I haven't a clear idea of his multiple drafts account, but it seems to me that according to DD, we take what we previously cognized and recognize it with some modification.  So instead of having an enduring ego, you have different drafts at different times of what you perceive and the later ones take into account what you perceived in the earlier draft.

I would like to run a bit in a different direction with the draft metaphor by pointing out how drafts involve sentences, which involve words, which involve letters.  Among these components and sub components are elements that are related to each other in a founding/founded manner, with the founded being irreducible to the founding.

Lemmee try to say that again, this time without (probably misusing) Husserlian terms: letters/words and words/sentences are related to each other as are part to whole, with the whole having something to it that is more than the sum of the parts.  This should be recognized in the "draft" metaphor.  But to do so might be anti-reductionistic.  It certainly involves appropriation.

But even supposing one does not recognize the letter/word; word/sentence relation and its appropriateness as a metaphor for the relation among the elements of perception, it is still clear that there's a kind of appropriation in DD's account ( "appropriation" is the metaphor I introduced in my dissertation for the relation of the operation of the sensus communis to the operations of the proper senses).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...
Post a Comment
Read more