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

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

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...
6 comments
Read more

interesting article by Jimmy Akin on death before the Fall

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/ Akin below: Aquinas.... writes: In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some. Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals  [ Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2 ].  Aquinas thus holds that it was not  all  death that entered the world through man's sin, but human  death.
Post a Comment
Read more