What would be the use of our "Cartesian theatre", if any?

[Speakpigeon]

What's wrong with the idea that the 'cartesian theatre' is just an immediate-term memory being employed as an input to the next round of decision making? We see longer-term memories 'in our mind's eye' on occasion; And memories become less detailed, less complete, and less accurate over time, but still form a very useful input to prevent repetition of errors or risky choices.

It makes complete sense to me that a highly detailed but very short term memory of the immediate past would have significant value as an input into the next decisions to be made. That could also explain why concentration has an effect on the quality of the experience - we do things on 'autopilot' when the last thing we did was a familiar routine; When a novel situation arises, we become more aware of what just occurred, thereby allowing us to be more effective in our immediate future decisions.

I am not sure how we would go about testing this hypothesis. But it does seem to me to resolve the question 'why have the experience at all' particularly in the light of experimental evidence that the experience occurs after the response has been chosen and enacted by the brain.

Ahhhh, excellent, too!

Yes. I'm also convinced there's a close link between memorisation and subjective experience. And this notion of "immediate-term memory" is exactly what we need!

There are also obvious synergies between memory and awareness, one supporting or feeding the other. And, crucially, we can understand how it could have started small in evolutionary terms and expanded from there, slowly over time, from immediate term to short term to long term, memory capacity expanding to accommodate our fancy model of the world, to keep our memory of it operational, the usefulness of the model justifying this extravagant expenditure in memory, and our real-time model being fed memory data, in a sort of retroactive loop, the past feeding the present and the present interpreting the past.

And we might get to effectively distinguish between basic actions that don't need to be planned within this Cartesian theatre, like the flicking of a finger, and more complex actions that probably have to go through it because that bloody just is the only place to do it.

OK, someone call the labs to do it.

If you know Dennett personally, it may be time for a call.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

What's wrong with the idea that the 'cartesian theatre' is just an immediate-term memory being employed as an input to the next round of decision making? We see longer-term memories 'in our mind's eye' on occasion; And memories become less detailed, less complete, and less accurate over time, but still form a very useful input to prevent repetition of errors or risky choices.

It makes complete sense to me that a highly detailed but very short term memory of the immediate past would have significant value as an input into the next decisions to be made. That could also explain why concentration has an effect on the quality of the experience - we do things on 'autopilot' when the last thing we did was a familiar routine; When a novel situation arises, we become more aware of what just occurred, thereby allowing us to be more effective in our immediate future decisions.

I am not sure how we would go about testing this hypothesis. But it does seem to me to resolve the question 'why have the experience at all' particularly in the light of experimental evidence that the experience occurs after the response has been chosen and enacted by the brain.

Sounds potentially fruitful to me. Ties in with rousseau's point about attention, as you say.

Yes, absolutely.

Our ability to focus our attention shows it's costly to pay attention in terms of brain ressources and energy. And we know we forget ourselves completely when we're busy doing something a bit difficult or crucially vital. It just saves ressources and energy. And we only indulge in running introspective explorations whenever we have really nothing more urgent to do, like going to the loo or something. So, it's all very complex and can only have been selected over a very long period of time by evolution.
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

What's wrong with the idea that the 'cartesian theatre' is just an immediate-term memory being employed as an input to the next round of decision making? We see longer-term memories 'in our mind's eye' on occasion; And memories become less detailed, less complete, and less accurate over time, but still form a very useful input to prevent repetition of errors or risky choices.

It makes complete sense to me that a highly detailed but very short term memory of the immediate past would have significant value as an input into the next decisions to be made. That could also explain why concentration has an effect on the quality of the experience - we do things on 'autopilot' when the last thing we did was a familiar routine; When a novel situation arises, we become more aware of what just occurred, thereby allowing us to be more effective in our immediate future decisions.

I am not sure how we would go about testing this hypothesis. But it does seem to me to resolve the question 'why have the experience at all' particularly in the light of experimental evidence that the experience occurs after the response has been chosen and enacted by the brain.

Sounds potentially fruitful to me. Ties in with rousseau's point about attention, as you say.

Yes, absolutely.

Our ability to focus our attention shows it's costly to pay attention in terms of brain ressources and energy. And we know we forget ourselves completely when we're busy doing something a bit difficult or crucially vital. It just saves ressources and energy. And we only indulge in running introspective explorations whenever we have really nothing more urgent to do, like going to the loo or something. So, it's all very complex and can only have been selected over a very long period of time by evolution.
EB

Some of my most vivid memories are of loo visits, actually (which may say something about the mundanity of my life) and often my hommunculus seems to have to concentrate especially hard at such times. But I will spare you the details.

I'm not sure if we would have to say it could only have been selected for over a very long evolutionary time though.

 

[ruby sparks]

...because that bloody just is the only place to do it.

I'm putting £50 on the thalmus. I can get odds of 66:1 at Ladbrokes Betting. Generous odds, but then apparently they made a small fortune from losing bets on the pituitary gland in 1645.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Thanks. I searched dennett Dyson panel discussion. Somehow I missed your naming the discussion part.
Eta: damn. It's 3 hrs. Any idea where in there that interchange might be?

It begins around 1:50:50.

Dennett was asked about whether consciousness could become immortal. He began his talk about reducing the parts of the brain and not finding any "wonder tissue".

Thank you.

So from where you quoted, there's a long discussion about transferring the self from my brain to some other medium. In response to Sach's rather beautiful assertion of the impossibility of transferring a self, It's made abundantly clear at around 1:55.00 that Dennett doesn't, for one moment, think that doing this is practically possible. What he's aiming at, and I quote: "The question is whether the impossibility of that is a monumental practical, technical impossibility or whether it is a possibility in principle. I'm saying that it is a monumental technical impossibility, not an impossibility in principle".

I assume that the difference between a practical impossibility and impossibility in principle is clear to everyone? The only way it would be impossible is if the wonder tissue is a different sort of stuff. In short he's denying property dualism. He's neither denying emergent properties (nor would he given his position on the emergence of intentions) nor quantum effects. In both cases, get the substrate identical and the same emergent properties, quantum or otherwise will emerge. As such, he's merely denying substance dualism and the echoes of substance dualism which he dubs Cartesian materialism. He's extremely clear that this is what he is doing in Consciousness explained which, when this was broadcast in '93, that's twenty five years, had only been out for a couple of years and was still the centre of fevered philosophical activity.

Dyson asserts that he doesn't see how anyone could possibly know. Presumably whether it is impossible in principle or practice. He then says:

"I'd like to come back to this question of wonder tissue. I mean the fact is that in physics, of course, we're dealing with wonder tissue all the time, because ordinary matter behaves in very counter-intuitive ways when you look at it carefully. It's not at all like electronic computers and it probably does things that are of some use to the organism ... it would be strange, in a way, if our central nervous systems didn't in fact make some use of these very strange properties of matter. In that sense I think it's not unreasonable that quantum mechanics has something to do with this, not that anyone yet has a model for a quantum mechanical neuron..."

I'll ignore the fact that he's missed Dennett's point here. Quantum effects are not wonder tissue per se and a properly constituted physical model of me would give rise to the same quantum effects. Dennett's explicitly not just talking about modelling in a computer. He's not a functionalist, so there's no reason he would. So Dyson is talking past Dennett, but as Dennett takes it on the chin and rebuts him in another manner that demonstrates Dyson't ignorance conclusively, I'll follow Dennett's lead.

Dennett responds instantly:

"What about healing and self repair? would you think it would be unlikely that healing and self repair could be explained without bodies making some use of the more startling properties at the quantum level."

He's clearly being sarcastic about Dyson's stated position which is this:

“I think that consciousness is not just a passive epiphenomenon carried along by the chemical events on our brains, but is an active agent forcing the molecular complexes to make choices between one quantum state and another. In other words, mind is already inherent in every electron, and the process of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the process of choice between quantum states which we call ‘chance’ when they are made by an electron.”

This, of course, is a variety of panpsychism that Dennett has quite rightly ridiculed elsewhere. When Dennett talks about startling properties, he's well aware that Dyson is a devout Christian who, in his '85 Gifford lectures to the University of Aberdeen, proposed this position as a handy gap to park God in. Here is Dyson summarising his Gifford position:

Here is a brief summary of my thinking. The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. The first level is elementary physical processes, as we see them when we study atoms in the laboratory. The second level is our direct human experience of our own consciousness. The third level is the universe as a whole. Atoms in the laboratory are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus. Our minds may receive inputs equally from atoms and from God. This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is compatible with the active nature of atoms as revealed in the experiments of modern physics. I don't say that this personal theology is supported or proved by scientific evidence. I only say that it is consistent with scientific evidence.

In other words, Dyson is a God botherer trying to sneak God in by the back door. As he puts it:

To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension.

Dennett is well aware of this, hence the trace of sarcasm in the word startling. You have to to remember that all of these players meet regularly at conferences and the such like. They are all familiar with each other's work and positions. What you are watching here has the same sort of relation to philosophy as WWE has to real wrestling. They are just going through the motions politely for the audience. It's the price they pay to get their ideas out there.

Too late, Dyson spots the obvious problem: repair isn't a conscious phenomenon. However, he misses the deeper problem of repair in the brain where choice would be critical (and entirely non-conscious). In doing so, he sleepwalks straight into Dennett's trap and argues that:

"Oh, I don't think that would be difficult at all".

Dennett, rather cruelly, pins him to his assertion:

"so...You don't think what would be difficult?"

Dyson, presumably realising his fatal error, is flustered:

"Healing and self repair, I means that's a dif... That's an entirely... As if... I would think... A much more... Mechanical, in the old fashioned sense, process."

Dennett, slams the door:

"I wonder, I mean it's a non trivial..."

Dyson interrupts, trying to row back on what he's just said, presumably realising that for repair decisions to happen non consciously blows a hole in his theory. He still hasn't realised just how complex the sort of repair Dennett has in mind would be:

"Of course, in biology, everything is non trivial".

He in turn is interrupted by Gould who rubs his nose mercilessly in how complex repair can be

"While you say wounding and repair are relatively trivial, I would see this in most circumstances, but if one were talking about neurological tissue, I assume that even though it would be physical it comes in each human being... this gets back to one of Oliver's points, so conditioned by thirty or forty, how old the person is at the time, years, of absolutely personal and irrecoverable history that, unless you happen to have mapped every last atom of it before the injury, you never could recover it. You might implant new tissue, that would allow the person to hear again if it was hearing, but how, you could never recover the person surely?"

This isn't actually remotely Dennett's point, but it is enough to cow Dyson, who, I assume, has realised that Dennett has him over a barrel if repair involves choice at the cellular level but isn't conscious and thus backs down, saying:

"You may very well be right, I don't know anything about the process of neurological repair..."

He's rescued by the host who swiftly changes the subject.

So that's my reading of it, backed by the transposed text of the interchange. So let's go back to your original claim:

I remember an exchange between Dennett and the great physicist Freeman Dyson years ago.

Not very well, it transpires.

Dennett pontificates on and on as he does talking about reducing the functional components of the brain to smaller and smaller units. Then he proclaims dogmatically, and nowhere will you find any "wonder tissue" looking smug and self-satisfied.

That's not remotely what happens. The argument about reduction was earlier. Dennett's argument is reductionist, but not functionalist - he's quite clear he's talking about grounding it in neurons. The conversation moves on and sometime later Dennett is asked if selves can be transferred. Dyson brings up 'wonder tissue' in this context.

Dyson pipes in and says that physicists deal with "wonder tissue" all the time, that ordinary matter behaves in very unintuitive ways.

Actually, he's responding to the distinction between it being practically or actually impossible to transfer a self. I assume you were unaware that Dyson believes that:

we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus.

In other words, he really does believe in wonder tissue - quantum effects are just the latest gap he can hide his God in.

Dennet had no response but at least his stupid grin had disappeared.

Is the purest bullshit. Just watch 1:55.44 through to 1:58.38 Dennett literally interrupts him with an aggressive question. Dyson becomes visibly flustered, talks nonsense and gets schooled by Gould before backing down and being rescued by the chair, who changed the subject.


As predicted, once again, you completely either misunderstand, misremember of make up what actually happened.

 

[Subsymbolic]

And... so... what would be the use of our "Cartesian theatre", if any?
EB

How about if the Cartesian Theatre was just a very useful prejudice for a system that had to bind a lot of information from a lot of sources in a way that allowed a very distributed system to control a body in real time. Then along comes language, intentions and all that and the possibility to turbocharge that illusion to allow the system to make strategic decisions that jootsed the traditional learning strategies of the brain by predicting our own behaviour as we predicted the behaviour of others and acting on that prediction.

Yes. Exactly. Thanks!

Basically, the Cartesian theatre is a simplified and largely symbolic representation of those features of our immediate environment, and of the world at large, that were essentially selected according to their usefulness to our survival. It's just a model. It's fast, convenient, can take minimal brain space whenever it becomes vital, and very effective. It's also universal and therefore completely versatile, i.e. it's useful for just every possible kind of problem humans may have to face.

What's somewhat confusing and freaky to us is that we should feature in it, and so prominently. And that, too, seems inevitable to me because so bloody useful.

And what really good about this is that we can understand how this complex system we now have would have been built up over a very long time by evolution, functional bit by functional bit.

OK, excellent, that at least explains the logic of it, and to some extent the reliance on qualia to make up the symbols we need to represent the world. Even that would have been a long slog, bit by bit.

What would remain to explain is the subjective experience and qualia in themselves.

Also, as basic training, can you explain why we should feature personally so prominently within our own representation of the world? What's the usefulness of that?
EB

I think that comes later with language use, intentional language use, stories and society. Dennett is wrong about qualia but I think he's spot on about intentions and narrative. Once you have a lot of individuals, it helps to recognise and prioritise yourself as yourself, even if that's just an illusion. Once you are doing that, using the illusion of self for strategic planning, learning skills and so on gets quite handy. This only comes with societies and culture though.

 

[ruby sparks]

In what way do you think he's wrong about qualia?

I'm not saying he's right or wrong. I'm not even sure I would know, or if I have a strong opinion. Just curious.

 

[Speakpigeon]

...because that bloody just is the only place to do it.

I'm putting £50 on the thalmus. I can get odds of 66:1 at Ladbrokes Betting. Generous odds, but then apparently they made a small fortune from losing bets on the pituitary gland in 1645.

You need some perspective on this.

You would need to understand what Descartes did through a different angle.

Anybody did better at the time?

He was the first to suggest a precise localisation for a brain function. He invented the concept of it. He was way ahead.

At a time where you couldn't possibly get any anatomical support for what you said! No heavy and costly machinerie to probe brains.

He's the one who opened the way for Broca, who came only in the middle of the 19th century, and for all those who followed, who used very heavy and costly machinerie, and only work within complex organisations and societies. Descartes was really on his own at the time.
EB

Paul Broca
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Broca

Pierre Paul Broca (28 June 1824 – 9 July 1880) was a French physician, anatomist and anthropologist. He was born in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, Gironde. He is best known for his research on Broca's area, a region of the frontal lobe that has been named after him. Broca's area is involved with language. His work revealed that the brains of patients suffering from aphasia contained lesions in a particular part of the cortex, in the left frontal region. This was the first anatomical proof of localization of brain function. Broca's work also contributed to the development of physical anthropology, advancing the science of anthropometry.

 

[ruby sparks]

Well done him. And I don't mean to criticise your ancestors. But he was wrong, it seems.

As would I probably be, because it's almost certainly not the thalmus. There's a good chance it's not anywhere in particular in your brain, which, if true, seems to increase the possibility that there are illusory aspects to it. I do realise that's only tangentally relevant to the thread question of what use (if there is one) the impression is, nonetheless.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Also, as basic training, can you explain why we should feature personally so prominently within our own representation of the world? What's the usefulness of that?
EB

I think that comes later with language use, intentional language use, stories and society. Dennett is wrong about qualia but I think he's spot on about intentions and narrative. Once you have a lot of individuals, it helps to recognise and prioritise yourself as yourself, even if that's just an illusion. Once you are doing that, using the illusion of self for strategic planning, learning skills and so on gets quite handy. This only comes with societies and culture though.

Yes, I agree with that. We're social animals but we've developed, over a long time, a model where there's now a very fluid social organisation where the possibility of individual roles is really essential.

I think this aspect has been spreading from the top down within social organisations over time, from the lone individual king of the past to the generalised individualist mentality we have now, ending up today with our much more liberal model for the whole social contract than it was even a few years back.

And, yes, language and it's progressive sophistication over historical time must have been essential in our ability both to develop a social organisation that's complex and fluid, and our ability to produce new concepts, and in particular about ourselves, both as a social body and as individual organisms within it. So, language mediated this evolution between the social and individual levels.

And so we're fucked.

Each of us can freely avail himself of unprecedented mental capabilities, which have unlimited versatility due to the linguistic nature of our rational mind. There's really no limit to that.

We're effectively free to invent the concept of God.

Or that of infinity.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

There's a good chance it's not anywhere in particular in your brain, which, if true, seems to increase the possibility that there are illusory aspects to it.

Me, I would certainly expect it's in the brain.

And somewhere not everywhere in the brain.

The cortex is indeed a particular place in the brain.

The cortex seems a good bet to start with.

So, the whole or part of the cortex would be my best-informed Cartesian bet.



And this 'immediate-term memory' thing should help us here. Do we know it's adobe exactly?
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

The cortex is probably a better bet.

That said, I have a feeling that it's not necessarily the place either. But I would consider evidence. Perhaps sub can chip in here.

Note that the human cortex is, I think, one of our most recent developments, at least in terms of its amount, so that might point back to what we were wondering about when the phenomenon first appeared in the minds of our ancestors. Even before Descartes I mean.

 

[Subsymbolic]

You need some perspective on this.

You would need to understand what Descartes did through a different angle.

Anybody did better at the time?

How about Francis Bacon? He's earlier, and the fact is that empiricism turned out to be the better bet than rationalism. Bacon was undeniably the father of empiricism while Descartes really inherited, ironically, rationalism from the Jesuits. Descartes greatest hits in this area: global scepticism and dualism have both proven to be profoundly unhelpful and both the discourse and the meditations are generally accepted to be flat wrong. The same could not be said of Bacon's Organum.

He was the first to suggest a precise localisation for a brain function. He invented the concept of it. He was way ahead.

Well, he suggested a precise location for the connection to the soul, but I'm not sure that counts as a brain function.

Bacon on the other hand was getting down to the practicalities of not fooling yourself and was quite methodically working through the congnitive biases so that natural philosophy could be alert to them. For example:

For the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced. For this purpose, let us consider the false appearances that are imposed upon us by the general nature of the mind, beholding them in an example or two; as first, in that instance which is the root of all superstition, namely, that to the nature of the mind of all men it is consonant for the affirmative or active to affect more than the negative or privative. So that a few times hitting or presence countervails ofttimes failing or absence, as was well answered by Diagoras to him that showed him in Neptune’s temple the great number of pictures of such as had escaped shipwreck, and had paid their vows to Neptune, saying, “Advise now, you that think it folly to invocate Neptune in tempest.” “Yea, but,” saith Diagoras, “where are they painted that are drowned?

At a time where you couldn't possibly get any anatomical support for what you said! No heavy and costly machinerie to probe brains.

He'd have needed a soul detector to find what he was looking for.

He's the one who opened the way for Broca, who came only in the middle of the 19th century, and for all those who followed, who used very heavy and costly machinerie, and only work within complex organisations and societies. Descartes was really on his own at the time.

Without Bacon's work on natural philosophy, or science as we now call it, I'm not sure about that. Bacon was all for getting out there and finding out. Descartes locked himself in his shed and thought hard.


Bacon was earlier, more influential and didn't make any dreadful errors like dualism or global scepticism. I'm not saying Descartes wasn't important but most of the following philosophers were knocking down his errors. Those following Bacon were building on his successes. Descartes was the father of modern philosophy. Bacon was the father of modern science. There's no denying that we need both, but I know who Ruby will be cheering for and I'm afraid I agree with him.

 

[Subsymbolic]

Also, as basic training, can you explain why we should feature personally so prominently within our own representation of the world? What's the usefulness of that?
EB

I think that comes later with language use, intentional language use, stories and society. Dennett is wrong about qualia but I think he's spot on about intentions and narrative. Once you have a lot of individuals, it helps to recognise and prioritise yourself as yourself, even if that's just an illusion. Once you are doing that, using the illusion of self for strategic planning, learning skills and so on gets quite handy. This only comes with societies and culture though.

Yes, I agree with that. We're social animals but we've developed, over a long time, a model where there's now a very fluid social organisation where the possibility of individual roles is really essential.

I think this aspect has been spreading from the top down within social organisations over time, from the lone individual king of the past to the generalised individualist mentality we have now, ending up today with our much more liberal model for the whole social contract than it was even a few years back.

And, yes, language and it's progressive sophistication over historical time must have been essential in our ability both to develop a social organisation that's complex and fluid, and our ability to produce new concepts, and in particular about ourselves, both as a social body and as individual organisms within it. So, language mediated this evolution between the social and individual levels.

And so we're fucked.

Each of us can freely avail himself of unprecedented mental capabilities, which have unlimited versatility due to the linguistic nature of our rational mind. There's really no limit to that.

We're effectively free to invent the concept of God.

Or that of infinity.
EB

That's nicely put. While we disagree about plenty of other things. It's nice to see a very unexpected core of agreement at the centre of our disagreement. Don't tell Ruby, but this might have something to do with the influence of the slightly Continental Paul Ricoeur on my usually rigidly cognitive/analytical approach, when I come to look at how language evolves.

Not only are we free to invent it, but the very inventing it makes it so!

 

[Subsymbolic]

The cortex is probably a better bet.

That said, I have a feeling that it's not necessarily the place either. But I would consider evidence. Perhaps sub can chip in here.

Note that the human cortex is, I think, one of our most recent developments, at least in terms of its amount, so that might point back to what we were wondering about when the phenomenon first appeared in the minds of our ancestors. Even before Descartes I mean.

I think you are both wrongish. Here's why. It's an old argument that I honestly never expected to deploy:

A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks 'But' where is the University? I have seen where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the members of your University.' It has then to be explained to him that the University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their co-ordination is understood, the University has been seen. His mistake lay in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the University, to speak, that is, as if `the University' stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members. He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong.

But when we are talking about the Cartesian theatre, it suddenly seems terribly appropriate. Much to my surprise.

 

[Speakpigeon]

And... so... what would be the use of our "Cartesian theatre", if any?
EB

I don't know if you've read Jaynes. On the one hand he's a fine example of how thing the line between genius and madness is. On the other hand... Apart from his early work on IST, I think this

http://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-archeology.pdf

short review is one of the most profound things Dennett ever wrote.

No, I wasn't aware of Jaynes. But Dennett I think puts it in a nutshell in the document you linked:

What you want to do is design the software in such a way that the system has a certain set of concepts. If you manage to endow the system with the right sort of concepts, you create one of those logical spaces that Jaynes talks about.

As I see it, this is really a more pointed expression of our general beliefs about the world, namely that there are such things as information, information processing, and logic. We tend to believe these things really exist, in some form, in the world.

Personally, I make a sharp distinction between three things: subjective experience, qualia and what I would call broadly 'logic', within which I include information and information processing. We all usually assume that there is a real physical world beyond our qualia. Reasonable people further assume that this physical world works in a way which is logically consistent. Most people also believe our own bodies to be part of that physical world and therefore to follow the same rules. Personally, I also believe that the whole of whatever information processing is going on is somehow done in the physical word, and so this applies to what our minds do in this respect. To keep my distinction sharp, I therefore put qualia on one side and the mind on the other, i.e. on the physical side. Not that I would insist to resurrect Dualism, but to keep my concepts sharp. And that's a lesson I took from Descartes. Consequently, whatever a mind does, and for that matter whatever a computer does, however smart it may seem to us, won't be anything that's not in the physical world.

Now, given this, I may still have to explain a few things, but I'm confident it should make explaining much easier. One thing for example is easy to explain. Our mind can represent the world because it follows the same rules, and it follows the same rules because it's part of it. So, we have "concepts" to represent things in the world, and we reason on them, or try to reason, logically. This should give results consistent with whatever is going on in the world, at least as long as our concepts are good enough. That's broadly a materialist, or physicalist, view.

I keep the distinction sharp between qualia and this "physical" mind just because I don't have a clue as to the exact relationship between the two. And of course, nobody does. But everything beside qualia, and their relationship with the physical, seems to fit nicely within my physicalist view. All I have to accept beyond this is that whatever logic qualia seem to follow is the logic of this physical mind, not something they would work out between themselves. The vivid spectacle provided by qualia is just a representation of something possibly going on elsewhere.

So, yes, one defining property of minds is to produce concepts and to follow logical rules, and in so doing to produce a virtual world, virtual world within which minds can represent the real, "physical" world all they want, and even beyond. But I don't take minds to feature anything that's not ipso facto in the real physical world itself, because I take minds to be nothing but a part of that physical world.

And the same for computers. So, I understand Jaynes' idea as a straightforward reflection of the fact that computers can do tricks like minds do. And obviously, minds are quite sensitive to that! They are able to appreciate the tour-de-force and see all the potential in it, just like minds can appreciate the value of other minds, to the point of reifying them and ending up with the concept of God. Yet, it's all concepts and logic, and nothing more. And all of that is already entirely within the physical world, which is also the reason that computers can do the same tricks as what "physical" minds do.
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

The cortex is probably a better bet.

That said, I have a feeling that it's not necessarily the place either. But I would consider evidence. Perhaps sub can chip in here.

Note that the human cortex is, I think, one of our most recent developments, at least in terms of its amount, so that might point back to what we were wondering about when the phenomenon first appeared in the minds of our ancestors. Even before Descartes I mean.

I think you are both wrongish. Here's why. It's an old argument that I honestly never expected to deploy:

A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks 'But' where is the University? I have seen where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the members of your University.' It has then to be explained to him that the University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their co-ordination is understood, the University has been seen. His mistake lay in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the University, to speak, that is, as if `the University' stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members. He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong.

But when we are talking about the Cartesian theatre, it suddenly seems terribly appropriate. Much to my surprise.

To be honest, that's probably the way I would have tended to think about it, a la Dennett saying that consciousness is smeared across the brain. On the other hand, I do still wonder if there isn't a department somewhere, perhaps in the cortex complex of the university, which has acquired a bit of kit (subsystem) which facilitates, or at least greatly enhances, a particular computation, even if it's a subsystem that all the other departments can and do plug into.

I suppose I tend to guess that many other living things are conscious, but that they don't necessarily have a robust sense of self, so while their consciousness might indeed be smeared, at the same time some physiological difference might be required to obtain the SoS.

I'm roughly equating a sense of self with the homunculus in the cartesian theatre in this case, and perhaps also with what we call the 1st person perspective.

Would it be reasonable to ask if the cortex is at least the 'centre of gravity' of these? That being only slightly more specific that saying the brain is the centre of gravity of them.

 

[Subsymbolic]

I think you are both wrongish. Here's why. It's an old argument that I honestly never expected to deploy:



But when we are talking about the Cartesian theatre, it suddenly seems terribly appropriate. Much to my surprise.

To be honest, that's probably the way I would have tended to think about it, a la Dennett saying that consciousness is smeared across the brain. On the other hand, I do still wonder if there isn't a department somewhere, perhaps in the cortex complex of the university, which has acquired a bit of kit (subsystem) which facilitates, or at least greatly enhances, a particular computation, even if it's a subsystem that all the other departments can and do plug into.

I suppose I tend to guess that many other living things are conscious, but that they don't necessarily have a robust sense of self, so while their consciousness might indeed be smeared, at the same time some physiological difference might be required to obtain the SoS.

I'm roughly equating a sense of self with the homunculus in the cartesian theatre in this case, and perhaps also with what we call the 1st person perspective.

Would it be reasonable to ask if the cortex is at least the 'centre of gravity' of these? That being only slightly more specific that saying the brain is the centre of gravity of them.

Given that it's clearly language that really pulls it all together, I'd say that your suspects are Broca's and Wernicke's areas as these clearly do the heavy lifting of establishing a serial (computer like) virtual machine in the damp parallel environment of the brain. That said I think that the pulling together is more likely not a place but a synchronising, a neural harmony if you like. Remember that fine article about the effect of hallucinogens - rather than looking for a where look for a when, or more precisely a shared moment.

I guess I'm saying that this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaUVSwK1OKI

is the best possible metaphor for my Cartesian theatre.

Yours, of course, would look more like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPs80PrkyZU

And, I'm only guessing but:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Uh249iQyj0

Given my externalist leanings this also explains the rather interesting expansion of self and sense of connection involved in playing or listening to music in a group...

 

[bilby]

I don't think it's at all clear that language that pulls it all together.

You could as well look at a computer and say that "it's clearly the monitor that pulls it all together", so that's the place to look for decision making.

Using consciousness to examine consciousness, and concluding that consciousness it therefore most important (or is important at all) seems pretty foolish to me. The same goes for using language as a proxy for consciousness or attention.

 

[Subsymbolic]

I don't think it's at all clear that language that pulls it all together.

You could as well look at a computer and say that "it's clearly the monitor that pulls it all together", so that's the place to look for decision making.

Using consciousness to examine consciousness, and concluding that consciousness it therefore most important (or is important at all) seems pretty foolish to me. The same goes for using language as a proxy for consciousness or attention.

Sorry Bilby, you are quite right. I was really talking to Ruby there and we have been tossing this one back and forth for years.

My position, a little more formally is that there are fundamentally three binding problems. I'll only deal with two of them here though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem

The two that matter here are the non conceptualised binding problem - my slightly tongue in cheek videos of people dancing in time are a nod to the most popular theory that it is shared neural spiking frequencies that allow binding. The article about hallucinogens pointed out that these undermine this process and also cause people's sense of bound self to erode. The next binding problem is conceptualised and is about how we draw together things like personal history, future plans, bodily position, feelings and so on. That I think has to be language.

I hold a bicameral theory of mind, usually I'm careful to be clear which side of it I'm talking about. Here I wasn't, so you were quite right to pull me up on it.