Source: Facebook

—“I think Daniel Dennet regards consciousness as purely illusory which I have not in the past found comprehensible.”– A Friend

I think Dennett’s literary (platonic) explanation of consciousness is a pseudoscientific interpretation of the information we have at our disposal, but that I can interpret what he’s saying as simply primitive or romantic, or platonic narration of what is better explained in engineering terms.

To say consciousness illusory makes no sense if Dennett means false. I don’t know what he means unless he is using a definition or standard that is nonsensical – and I think that’s the case.

The experience we refer to as consciousness exists as experience that we can recall. But, instead of reforming philosophy and defining the term scientifically, he’s not reforming the term as it’s used in philosophy and therefor saying it’s illusory.

I do the opposite and reform the term in philosophy as an error, and define it operationally (scientifically). In P what we do is reform all terms in all disciplines so that they are universally commensurable across all disciplines – or falsified.

Operationally, predictions of fragments compete for attention and those that persist (aren’t falsified) cohere (survive) into what we consider experience.

As far as I know we know the physical structure of the brain, how information is processed across, how coherence is produced by it, how memories are formed by it, and how attention is directed to control it, and what motivates(causes) our attention – at least at sufficiently to explain it in terms that are understandable as a mechanical process. the only difficult concept to explain is how our experience is coalesced into a stream of experience and momentary recursive comparison of changes in that memory – really, really, fast in real time. It’s so wonderful that it works that it’s terrifying.

I think one of the aspects of mental existence we have no name for yet that we need to is the degree to which we grant precedence to sense(intuition), imagination(self), empathy (others, social), or reason (the analytic) – and whether we can even switch between them.

Or put another way – the degree to which people are able to distinguish between an imaginary and non-correspondent perception of existence, and a predictive and correspondent perception of existence, and the priority we give to the sensory-emotional, physical, social, operational, or empirical experience of the world.

It is very hard for me to imagine the world of hindus and muslims and not at all difficult the chinese or africans – even africans who still believe in magic. The degree of illusion created by mythologies somewhat amazes me and the addiction to these mythologies is something I have finally come to understand – it’s a very high cost to correct them. this is why theological abrahamism must never take root.