A Sense or Usage of the phrase "Becoming conscious"

So to recap once again this saga began with The Ramblings of a Rutgers Philosophy Student. . . In that post I looked back at a Philosophy of Psychology class I had back in 1990, and a Meetup I recently encountered  in New York focused on Analytical Philosophy. That group or Meetup was reading a paper written by  David Chalmers reviewing the literature regarding theories of consciousness. The paper and that Meetup, which I never made it to, brought me back to that class and the lessons I missed back in 1990. In short, the meetup and paper brought me to some ideas of my own on the matter, and likewise to the writings of Daniel Dennett. He is an author who has been on the periphery of my thought for sometime now.

I continued this theme in, From One Story To The Next. In that post I quickly summarized Chalmer's paper and at the end offer a hint of my own thoughts on the topic of consciousness. In this post I want to continue on that project, hopefully elaborating on that last paragraph of the above post and likewise, connect those thoughts to what I see in Daniel Dennett's work. Specifically, in his book Consciousness Explained.

In that last post, I suggest that one becomes conscious the moment something does not go according to plan. To borrow from AI, the mind is like a computer in that it has a range of scripts and programs allowing us to get through the day and much of that is performed unconsciously. It is not until the heart stops beating, or we do not see the taxi as we cross the street until it is too late, or the one that most intrigues me, the fact that we navigate through a crowd place such as Grand Central during rush hour not thinking, until we do almost walk into somebody.  It is not until the near-miss or in fact the collision that our attention is focused. It is at such moments that we become conscious of something.

Way back when I took Philosophy 101 with a Professor Gerri Jones at Somerset County College, he introduced to us the concept of a 'sense', of how a word was used or made sense in a sentence versus its meaning. I later was introduced to Wittgenstein and Austin, and Frege. I am not sure where or who Professor Jones was coming from in his exploration of the sentence. I know the class spent its time analyzing the sentence, "The sun rises in the east". Regardless, his focus on how a word is used, it's sense is useful here. My offering regarding consciousness is focused on "being or becoming conscious" in a particular situation or moment, a particular usage of the word "conscious".

Before I return to that, I also want to highlight a second point I touched upon in that earlier post. That second point is regarding my question of how far removed is life as a bat? I suggest that there is as much of a gap between a bat as between our fellow man or woman. It seems we ultimately do or we do not know as much about their internal lives as we do the bat. We can infer about each but in the end we do not know with certainty what any of them truly think, feel, or experience. We do know enough about each to inform us and allow us to live with them and ideally thrive with them.

This question of what we know of the internal lives of others, bats and humans, however, brings me to ask what is required of knowledge in our lives versus the what is required in epistemology to be classified as knowledge. In short, philosophy offers one view of knowledge, our daily lives another, and the methodologies of our various sciences both hard and soft offer yet other variations. In short, it is largely in philosophy that we have an issue of qualia. And this issue is more an issue of epistemology, of what we know and what is sufficient to say that we know. That topic, I want to deal with in my posts embracing the terminology of Beavis and Butthead. (Not my finest work no doubt. . .)

So let us return to the first issue, the sense of being or becoming conscious. Those moments where we recognize an issue or problem and ideally correct it. That for me is the key to consciousness. Not qualia, which I want to classify as an epistemic issue. Consciousness is our ability to override a routine or stop doing something and experiment or try something different - that is what consciousness is. It is the perception of difference, and with that the adaptation of new or old routines.

I have in these posts relied on two or three examples or cases. The situation where you are walking across the street, not paying attention to the fact that there is taxi coming right at you, until you do realize it, until you become conscious of it and freeze in your tracks, or take a step back or get hit. The other that I use is the bear in the woods. Again you are not conscious of it, and then you are conscious of it. And then you run like hell or are mauled. In both of these, there are solutions available assuming you have a moment and ultimately choose wisely.

Daniel Dennett in his book latches on to I believe the same theme. He is, however, after much more. He wants to provide a materialist story eliminating the need for any homunculi watching or monitoring the scripts and programs I suggest. All is automated for him. There is in his story no system operator insuring that the proper script is embraced or applied. He was in 1991 providing a solution or a direction for neuroscience and AI to perhaps embrace. I offer you his hypothesis, which his book defends:

Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes (or more exactly, meme-effects in brains) that can be best understood as the operation of a "von Neumannesque" virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain that was not designed for any such activities. The powers of this virtual machine vastly enhance the underlying powers of the organic hardware on which it runs. but at the same time many of its most curious features., and especially its limitations, can be explained as the byproducts of the kludges that make possible this curious but effective reuse of an existing organ for novel purposes. (p. 210, Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett, 1991)

In short, my offering is but just a part of the picture Dennett paints of consciousness in a brain using the AI / computer science to support and facilitate the story. My one sense or use of "being conscious" requires much of his mechanics. What intrigues me with his account is not only that he provides a story of consciousness eliminating the homunculi in the control room, but, and for me this is the more interesting part, he explains the higher level processes - those moments when we deviate from the usual scripts and processes, those moments when we are in my sense conscious. Even in his brief hypothesis he ends talking of how such a system results in novel thought and behavior, how it reinvents and reuses existing processing techniques and tools. We dodge the crazy cabby or we in fact hail it. 

Why Dumbass?

My last post was titled, "Some dumbass thoughts on Paris and ISIS. . .". No doubt a silly title but there was a point. The post simply asked some questions regarding ISIS. In a nutshell, the post asks whether ISIS is self-interested, and if it is, how or why would it initiate an attack on Paris.

That was what that post was about. The title, "Some dumbass thoughts. . . " however alludes to something else. For myself and probably for most, dumbass traces back to Beavis and Butthead. It was Butthead's refrain to the often nonsensical stuff coming out of Beavis' mouth. In hindsight, maybe Beavis was not always offering nonsense, but that is a whole different discussion. Going back to my post, and to borrow from Butthead, the title does point to something perhaps nonsensical.

There is, however, a disconnect here, as there is really nothing too nonsensical in my post. The post simply asks what is ISIS thinking, considering that such attacks as Paris will only reinforce and confirm the wests need to engage and destroy them - to eliminate the threat. I may not have the specifics right but in general it seems to be a legitimate question.

So why do I refer to my post as a collection of dumbass thoughts? I have already given above one hint regarding the specifics. I did not go into who the attackers were, where they in fact originated from, and what their actual relationship to ISIS was. So the neglect of details is a problem. That, however, is just part of it. The larger issue is our general willingness to espouse a position without full knowledge of the subject. I might have chosen to not go into such details, but one would hope that if you discuss a topic you have some understanding of it.

In this case, I know little about ISIS, or the events that took place in Paris. I know no more than the rest of us who sat stunned and saddened by what we saw on the TV and web during that time. That, however, is where dumbass thoughts come from - a willingness to talk about and make assertions about things we perhaps know little if anything about.

Today, it feels like, and this post might again be more of the same, but it does feel like we allow for, encourage and accept much that is really not known. The sources are easy to name. The web with all its dark corners and alleyways is of course loaded with all kinds of information, much true, a lot that is blatantly false, and good amount that is a mixed bag. On top of that, we have cable and talk radio, which focus on the political realm. And then you have of course the ongoing Presidential election and the resulting soundbites from Donald Trump and others. Another domain where you see this is regarding science, and pseudo-science. Just look at our discussions of global warming or vaccines.

So today, with the demise and shrinkage of local papers and print, we have turned to the web and to cable TV. With that, we do have a diversity of views and opinions-much of which I might term dumbass. The question becomes are these various views and positions dumbass? Are they knowledge? Do we or should we care?

So that is largely what I alluded to in using the term dumbass. That said, I do think the term does raise several issues regarding much of what we consider fact or knowledge, of how we treat or neglect the information available to us today. It is often joked that philosophy offers little to its students, but an appeal here to epistemology, the study of what it is to know, of what is required to claim knowledge, might just be appropriate. It could at the very least further broaden our understanding of what it is to be a dumbass.

To be continued. . .