Consciousness.

I went for a walk today, part of my increasing effort to get fit and preferably not die (at all). While I was walking I listened to a podcast. Bless ipods. You can find it here: Thought and Experience . I listened to Daniel Dennett, famous modern philosopher talking about consciousness. Old Daniel says quite a few startling things. I just want to concentrate on one.


You are a 'you', right? You are a self, a unified entity of consciousness. You have a 'stream of consciousness' as exemplified in  'Ulysses' by Joyce. You can contemplate your 'self'. Dennett says that this is not innate but rather produced by human society, almost a loading of software into your pliant young brain. Perhaps this is why hardly anyone can remember their birth and first year. 'You' are just not there yet to organize those memories coherently.


As if that is not enough, Dennett says animals don't have this quality. If we ask what it is it like (as an internal experience) to be a dog, Dennett replies 'What's it like to be a brace of oxen?' We naturally say, well, you can't be a brace of oxen in the same way you can be 'us'. Consider ants. Ant colonies behave in cohesive ways, they work to common goals and son on. Can you imagine 'being' an ant colony? No. Can you imagine being an ant? Dennet says if you can you're mistaken because the brain of an ant is the same kind of entity as the colony in that it serves a purpose but is a competing and cooperating matrix of drives and impulses with no unifying entity present. Maybe, you admit, but surely mammals are more like us and hence have a self. Dennett says the science is against you.


Here is a remarkable experiment. You take a rabbit and cover its left eye and train it to be afraid of a visual stimulus. You then uncover the left eye and and cover the right and expose it to the same stimulus. The rabbit is unmoved! If we ask 'What's it like to be a rabbit?' are we asking about the left-eyed rabbit or the right-eyed one?

A Dangerous Word

There is a dangerous word. Actually there are lots of dangerous words. Language has the capacity to sneak up on you, limit your thinking, steer you subtly in directions you don't notice. We can only think about what we can name. How we name things is fraught with assumptions. The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.

Nevertheless, there is a dangerous word, that dismissive, nasty word: MERELY.

You have heard it said: This is MERELY that. Life is MERELY the random play of molecules. The Mind is MERELY a subjective experience of the brain. Morality is MERELY evolutionary imperative. And on, and on.

Here, MERELY is taken to mean 'only this and no more', 'no need to look any further, folks, it's all explained'. MERELY is a tyrant of a word. It says that my view is the only view, all other thoughts are without merit. MERELY is a devaluing word. It says 'this is worth little, don't look here'.

Like all tyrants, MERELY wants to rewrite history and the present. Like all tyrants, MERELY needs to be overthrown.

An apple tree is MERELY a seed. An apple is MERELY a combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen just so.

MERELY is a dangerous word