Consciousness and Daniel Dennett

 How do zillions of chemical reactions in your brain produce what we experience as vision, emotions, memories — musings about consciousness? 

What is consciousness? If I try to take the whole question at once, I get into a muddle. Daniel Dennett’s insight into a way to look at part of the question was helpful.

When I was a student, I wondered what processes went on inside the brains of other animals and what we could say about their minds.

The usual answer was a rhetorical question: How could we ever know what’s in the minds of animals, since they lack language?

Dennett was the kind of philosopher who tried to challenge every rhetorical question. In the case of the minds of other animals, we have some clues.

If you invite a bunch of people to gather in a lecture hall for a talk on how consciousness works, they will gather peacefully to consider the question. If you try to collect a bunch of chimpanzees, our close biological relatives, into the same lecture hall, there will be anxiety, fear and bloodshed.

Human and chimpanzee brains are similar. If they were computers, the key differences would involve the ability of the human brain to run some apps that allow us to trust each other, to meet in the same lecture hall without being overcome by fear and to restrain ourselves from reacting violently.

That self-control is a kind of freedom. It allows us, rather than reacting mindlessly to our emotions, to build a sense of trust and to cooperate in discussing ways to solve common problems mindfully. That ability to inquire about problems and even solve some of them would be impossible without that underlying trust.

If I were to try to define consciousness, I might start with the formula: humans – chimpanzees = consciousness. When we are talking about brains, we are talking about the hardware used by chimpanzees and humans. When we are talking about minds, we aren’t talking about social apps that allow us to get beyond the stimulus and response of seeing others, becoming fearful and reacting violently. Our ability to inquire into questions together is an important part of being human. That’s the part of cognition that interests me and I think it’s the part that I’m talking about when we talk of consciousness.

Incidentally, Dennett points out that our joint inquiries, particularly our ability to investigate questions scientifically, is based on the capacity to trust each other. I wish we humans had a better understanding of the importance of that public trust and could see that people who work relentlessly to undermine it are dangerous.