Daniel Dennett - How are Brains Conscious?

My favorite thing about Dennett is he never says what I think he will (what my argument would be), then defying the expectation of a bumbling professor, and phrasing it not quite in a way you've heard before. Love it.

One day when I'm a grandpa, I'm gonna have an epic beard like Dennet!

I would summarize Dennett's position as follows: "Fame in the brain" is what we usually call consciousness. There's no real difference between pre-conscious and post-conscious thoughts for everything in the brain is like a stream of "drafts" constantly being re-written. Consciousness happens in memory, namely, the emergence of a momentarily winner among so many competing neural stimuli that strive to gain the whole brain. Now, this explanation says nothing about how it is the case that there is an "I" who is conscious about that "emergent winner." I mean, there are many other instances of competing signals in nature and we do not speak of consciousness regarding them. Think of the particular photons coming from a distant star.

well there is still a HARD PROBLEM about this phenomenon of "pay attention to me!" How does it emerges from matter?...

I feel like hes describing how conciousness works not and not answering the original question, how are brains conscious? I feel like this is his more cognitive scientist side of things coming out and answering this.

He said interesting things but i don't think they match the title which is a much more interesting question .

I don't understand what this guy is saying.  How does constant stream of information and things processing things allocating important things into certain areas in the brain translate into a personality or into what we feel? How do electrons and neurons translate into a feeling? What is a feeling, some group of neurons being affected by a release of a certain chemical and other neurons processing what happens in that section of the brain....wait, if little bits of brain were removed and replaced atom by atom until full brain was replaced, what would happen? Would we stay who we are, I think so, logically.  That means we are constant pulsating energy of information regardless of what matter it pulsates in? That means we could replicate or transfer into a biological computer one day and live forever or until atoms decay? No this can't be, i think there is something in the brain that dictates everything which makes you you or me me but where, maybe DNA or the quantum field?  What the hell am I smoking?

I'm not so averse to Dennett's description of what consciousness is as I am to the fact that he clearly has not answered the question

This is beautifully said AND can be enhanced by adding the dimension of psychology. Our life experience shapes how we select and respond to sensory input AND internal autonomic system activity. We each fabricate our own reality by the selections we make. It is little wonder that we have so much difficulty coming to agreement about anything since we are each driven by our own view of reality.

I quite liked when he talked about 'fixed' things and how there's no finish line in consciousness. Don't we all feel ourselves as a unitary self that in our perceptions, that things really are fixed and there is a finish line? Of course, this was an illusion, but for many of us, we don't typically realize it. I've always been curious on how we can perhaps cultivate experience that correlates the data and neuroscience on the mind. Right now, the only answer is low-level nonduality experiences, to see that there's no fixed "you" in control, to see how things are largely differentiated in nature but separate and isolate. Unfortunately that discipline has been hijacked as New Age woolshit because the high level claims they make are not provable, like how consciousness is infinite and how it makes the universe what it is. How many people say the universe is one, which is true, but then make a claim that there's a hivemind behind it all, which is not true? These people are fucking everywhere. Consider for a moment that neurology can definitively say that consciousness is selfless, and the only disciplines that even focus on this as experience are Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, philosophical schools of experience largely discredited because they're offshoots from religions, but they are themselves not a religion. Many of us are missing the big picture to absorb the data here, and that's experience. Dan's friend Sam Harris is a wonderful advocate here, for he's a very skeptical person, and he's inquired into the mind both as data and experience.

Hmm, the question he tries to answer seems to be more akin to 'how and why do we experience reality like we do?'.

But why Daniel? Why does matter experience? How do we approach that experience?

I loved Dr. Daniel Dennett, very sad to hear about his passing, I've would have loved to meet him, he was my absolute favorite, an intellectual giant, a legend, true sage, heard he was also very kind gentle person, huge loss to civilization, I will watch tons of his lectures in the next few days in his memory

Then people who don't have sight and other senses don't have enough consciousness as a person who is getting more sensory data?

I really enjoyed this from Dennett. I have had issues with this series as being concerned with religion but of course Dennett is a horseman of the apocalypse. I will say that I found his claims very compelling. This is not a field I am particularly interested in however I would have characterised myself of closer to a dualist. I must say that the materialist functionalist account is compelling when we consider the chaotic competition for attention and survival of the fittest idea - the fame in the brain also makes a lot of sense when we consider trauma. Finally the idea that there is no executive function, no top of the pyramid (now that I accept the claim as plausible after it was so eloquently put out for us) is liberating, frightening and makes the current era make much more sense. We can make our own.

I wonder if these ideas include essentially denying that there is any specific threshold where a traveling sensation suddenly magically changes into a perception, but instead affirming that they are both the same type of thing.

Despite contrary comments, I find Daniel's explanation the clearest yet of what consciousness is even after reading "How to build a mind" by Kurzweil and watching many Marvin Minsky videos. A flock of birds appears as a moving pattern through time as observed from a distance, so too is our experience, even if we are thinking about our experience. There is no meta "us" that escapes this.

He is talking about self reflexive mind means awareness of self awareness not consciousness. It is a memory of the previous self aware state. He mix things. Self awareness is common among animals. Consciousnesses is a totally different concept equal to reality

Can someone answer this question for me? I want an example of the difference between the two theories Dennett described in this video. How would you describe consciousness during Libet's free will experiments; first according to the "Cartesian Theater" Model and second, according to the "Multiple Drafts / Fame in the Brain" theories? The illusion of conscious decision making makes sense to me, so we all probably understand the "Cartesian Theater" explanation, but what exactly would Dennett say happens in the brain/mind during these kind of experiments?

Could consciousness be an awareness that there is no specific or unique "I." In other words, could consciousness be the realization that that everyone is part of an impermanent, ever changing universe. There is nothing more and nothing less.