Book review: Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett) (part II: A party game called psychoanalysis)

I continue here my review started earlier.

This book is well worthreading can be obtained here.

  

3. A party game called psychoanalysis

Here, Dennett introduces us to a funny party game and argues that perception mights have the structure of this game.

The game works as follow:

1. Explain to the group that one person (the victim) will have to leave the group while another person (the dreamer) will have to explain his last dream to the rest of the group. Upon his return the dreamer will have to ask questions to guess what was the dream and who was the dreamer
2. Ask the victim to leave the room,
3. To the others, explain that the dreamer will have to answer all questions of the victim only by yes or no and according to a pre-defined scheme; for instance, the dreamer should answer "yes" if the question finishes with a vowel and "no" if it finishes with a consonent (or any other such arbitrary rule). Introduce also a rule, overruling the first one, imposing that the dreamer may not contradict himself,
4. Ask the victim to come back in the group and let him start asking his questions,
5. Once the victim "found" the dream (e.g. the dream was about a jaleous elephant with PZ Myers on its back entering the bedroom of the dreamer while he was playing monopoly with god) and guessed who had the dream, explain him how the dream was generated and explain him that said dream was actually purely the product of his (the victim) own brain and of a random process. Hence, joke that it is actually the reflection of the victim's own subconscient.

Dennett proposes the following parrallel between this game and the brain:

A part of the brain asks questions and these questions are answered on the basis of the data collected (by the eye for instance). By going back and forth in this process, the perception is refined, objects are identified, recognized, categorized.

For an hallucination to happen, all we need is to have the question asking part of the mind performing normally and to have a random or disorder or arbitrary sequence of yes and no as answers.

In the game, the questions asked by the victim's mind was supposed to reflect his current expectations, obsessions, worries,... Hallucinations are usually related in their content to the current concerns of the victim.

Hallucinations are the normal result of prolonged sensory deprivation. Indeed, the mind keep asking questions to the senses but get no answers, no input above the usual threshold for a nerve signal to be considered a valid input. As a result, the mind starts to lower the treshold until he gets some inputs. However, since there is no input at all but only the background noise, the mind need to lower the treshold so much that he ends up receiving said background noise. Hence, the brain recieves random answers to his questions.

These hallucinations start weak and grow stronger. This could also explain the origin of dreams...

What Freud´s theory of dreams says is that “something” in our mind is composing a dream for the benefits of our ego but disguises the true meaning of it. This, according to Dennett (and to me) is pure bullshit.

Book review: Consciousness Explained (Daniel C. Dennett) (part I: The brain in the vat)

Daniel C. Dennett is a proponent of consilience. He is trained as a philosopher and is the director of the center for cognitive studies at Tufts University. He is an interesting fellow because he is very knowledgable in sciences like biology or computer sciences and he applies his scientific knowledge and methods to the unraveling of the deepest mysteries such as ...in this book...consciouness. Not less!

I am only half through the book but I think that it can only do me good to summarize what I thought interesting so far.




Prelude: How are hallucinations possible?
1.The brain in the vat and 2. pranksters in the brain

If you have seen "The matrix", you know what is meant by "brain in the vat". Some philosophers have argued that it is not possible to tell whether we are really out there interacting with the real world or if we are just brains in a bocal filled with nutritive fluid and fed with inputs simulating a world.

Dennet expresses the view that we could be brains in a vat only if we were not given exploratory power. Give us exploratory power, even very limited, and the number of possible worlds that the vat master must generate for us to still believe in the illusion of a real life becomes enormous. Literally, it is a combinatorial explosion. In a nutshell, to get the feeling of the real world, you NEED the real world if you have exploratory power.

à we are not brains in vats

àstrong hallucinations are impossible (they are similar also simulations of a world we really believe in).

The credibility of an hallucination is inversely proportional to the strength of an hallucination.

Nevertheless, convincing, multimodal hallucinations are frequently experienced.

Dennet goes on to explain that triggering the optic nerve anywhere between the eyeball and the brain could produce an hallucination and that people having an hallucination are often very passive in the face of the hallucination.

To give the person the illusion of being active, the "illusionist" (e.g. the vat master) must know in advance the exploratory intentions and decisions of the victim or induce them.

Here stop my review of the beginning of Dennett's book. The following interesting guy seems to think that strong hallucinations are commonplace: