– Select Quotes
If there is something it is like to be for an animal (or computer; or baby) then that animal (or computer; or baby) is conscious. Otherwise it is not.
Is consciousness an extra ingredient added to our ability to perceive, think, or is it inseparable from being able to perceive, think and feel?
Perhaps you think we need consciousness to make decisions, but neuroscience shows us how the brain makes decision and it does not seem to need an extra, added force to do so. Artificial systems are making increasingly complex decisions without needing a consciousness module.
The more we learn about the brain the less room there is for consciousness to play a role.
…any creature that can see, feel, think, fall in love, and appreciate a fine wine will inevitably end up believing they are conscious, imagining zombies are possible, and thinking that consciousness does things.
…the brain is a parallel, distributed processing system with no central headquarters and no place in which “I” could sit.
The somatosensory cortex at the top of the brain deals with touch, and stimulating any part of it causes a sensation as though the corresponding part of the body is being touched.
How could this awful, tow-curling, horrible, unwanted feeling in the side of my head actually be the firing of my C-fibers?
…deciding to act doesn’t feel like neurons firing.
You need to accumulate lots of later words before the beginning of the sentence makes sense..
There is nothing more to being famous than being widely known; likewise there is nothing more to bring conscious than being widely available to further thought or action.
It becomes clear that there are always lots of threads going on at once, and none is really “in” consciousness until it is grasped.
…seeing is not a process of building up a picture-like copy of the world for an inner self to look at; it is more like making guesses or predictions about what is there.
We get the vivid impression that all that detail is inside our heads, when really it remains out there in the world.
We imagine that as we look around a scene we are taking in more and more of the picture with each glance until we have a rich impression of it all inside our head. This is how seeing feels, and this is how we imagine it must work…the power of change blindness suggests that there must be something wrong with this natural theory of vision.
…vision is action: so seeing, attending, and acting are all fundamentally alike.
Scientists building robots have found that giving robots detailed and complex internal representations is an inefficient and even impossible way of getting them to move around in the real world. Instead, it is better to let them play with the world, make mistakes, and learn for themselves how to interact with it.
Our brains consist of lots of partly independent modules, and the verbal part does not have access to everything that goes on, yet it frequently supplies convincing reasons for our action. How many of these are plausible confabulation rather than true reasons, and can we tell?
…you will have just the same illusion of an inner self as you had before. If you still don’t want to press the button, you must be clinging onto the idea that it won’t really be “you” who arrives. In other words, you still believe in an inner self.
Thought which rejects some of the contents of the stream of consciousness but appropriates others, pulling them together and calling them “mine”. The next moment another such Thought come along, taking over the previous one and binding them to itself, creating a sense of unity.
The self…does not exist in the way that a physical object (or even a brain process) exists. Like a center of gravity in physics, it is a useful abstraction. Indeed, he (Dennett) calls it a “center of narrative gravity”.
Selves are…”phenomenal self-models”: representations that cannot be recognized as such by the system that created them…we confuse the model with what it represents.”