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An illuminating essay on Dennett's ideas by philosopher Tim Bayne.
Comments are open for reader reactions from those knowledgeable.
Very nice piece. I am, though, very confident that I haven't misrepresented Dan Dennett's views on consciousness in any way — contrary to what the piece suggests. Here are links to a piece on NYR Daily [blog], to Dennett's reply, and my reply to his reply
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/03/magic-illusions-and-zombies-an-exchange/
I'm not a philosopher, but it would seem quite intuitively correct, if I'm understanding Prof. Strawson properly, that the following entails a superfluity, in terms of consistency and continuity, of just the sort of consciousness he has in mind: "In the words, "Out damned spot – Out I say," the mechanism is that of an unconscious and automatic outburst. It is very doubtful if Lady Macbeth would have used these words if she were in her normal, waking condition. Thus the difference between the personality of Lady Macbeth in her somnambulistic and in the normal mental state, is a proof of the wide gap existing between these two types of consciousness."
https://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/macbeth/macbethsleepwalking.html
So that even though the latter is plainly an illusion it is also one that demonstrates acute continuity and consistency of consciousness, qua guilt, on the part of Lady Macbeth. Indeed, that all manner of monomania—some of which may persist in the mind's eye for years, decades, or an entire lifetime, with remarkable consistency, persistence, and continuity—are both illusions and likewise indisputable examples of human consciousness. Or am I mistaken in this interpretation and thus being fundamentally naive in thinking that monomania, acute and chronic, is simply illusion heaped upon illusion which some human "zombies" might be condemned to "suffer" from and others not: in the sense that some "zombies" suffer from a superfluity of consistent and persistent specificities of consciousness, that are not only illusions, but are altogether nonexistent as sequelae of human thought itself?
Bayne raises an interesting point about Dennett's attitude toward chatGPT. In the Atlantic essay referenced by Bayne, Dennett perhaps should not have said that chatGPT is a "counterfeit person." He might have instead said that such chat bots are real, non-human people–but the danger is that they could easily adopt en masse nefarious, non-humanitarian ends.
A draft of the Atlantic essay is here: https://tufts.app.box.com/s/894vdcbyxr1ic468jcxseckuo2ebkvsk.
Tim's piece is indeed a very nice and sympathetic account of Dennett's thought and its main point that Dennett is also essentially engaged in reconstructing or, to put it in fashionable terms, ameliorating our common sense understanding of mind is surely correct. It seems to me though that Tim somewhat neglects that Dennett was also at least as much – if not not more – a Quinean than he was a Wittgensteinian. And that means that he was a metaphysician who wanted to defend some version of physicalism – while neither Wittgenstein nor ordinary language philosophers were much concerned about physicalism. And he also was, and certainly at least in part as a consequence of this metaphysical stance, a skeptic about mind and meaning (who was still affirming Quine's indeterminacy theses in his memoir) and that made him, in Oxford terms – and again unlike Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophers – a revisionary metaphysician. Dennett's main revision in the theory of mind is not in the rejection of 'qualia' by itself: one can and I think should agree with him that this is a flawed philosophers construct. But so is functionalism! Our common sense understanding of consciousness is certainly not functionalist, nor is this common sense understanding in conflict with science. Again, it is Dennett's metaphysics (and his epistemology) that he got at least in part from Quine that drives his revisionary understanding of consciousness. So it seems to me that Dennett's push for scientific investigation of the mind and his speculative proposals in this context (like e.g. the false belief test) are his most important contributions, while his version of functionalism is another flawed philosophical theory driven by flawed metaphysical assumptions rather than by science.
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