Yeah, Dennett doesn't have me convinced either, although he's still a fruitful read.
There are definitely qualia centers in the brain, in the sense of areas which generate a sort of "screenplay" of experience. The difficulty seems to be in how they become unitary; how the become invested with self, intention, or whatever special features you believe consciousness is necessarily invested in; and why they're around in the first place (ie. why we weren't zombies).
Neurosci and psychology are still far from decent explanations, but I tend to bias research in their favor. Firstly, there's simply been more people working harder and longer in neurosci and psychology on consciousness and related issues. In neurosci and psychology we don't need "the answer" immediately, but can conduct alot of important research right now relating to isolated features of consciousness; in this way progressing gradually towards an answer, rather than relying on metatheory (the former being more amicable to a scientific approach anyway). Secondly, I give them a sort of primacy rather than equivalency with alternative approaches: I demand that physics findings on consciousness accord with psychological findings, and favor the latter when there is a dispute (simply because psych is a more immediate measure of consciousness than physics is).
The neurosci research I alluded to is basically as follows: we can follow, for instance the visual pathways in the brain, and determine at any given "level" which neurons are correlated with conscious experience and which are not. Any proposed mechanism for consciousnes (eg. some function of microtubules, quantum or otherwise) should be expected to correlate to this "map" of consciousness in the brain - that is, we should expect to find whatever feature that generates consciousness in the consciousness-generating neurons and not in the not-consciousness-generating neurons. Otherwise, there's no link between the proposed mechanism and the actual generation of consciousness.
As far as physics-inspired approaches to consciousness goes, although I find Orch OR fascinating, I'm much more favorable to the models put forth by David Bohm. Admittedly, this pegs me as a bit of a flake. But I got over that long ago.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2003-12-31 02:14 pm (UTC)There are definitely qualia centers in the brain, in the sense of areas which generate a sort of "screenplay" of experience. The difficulty seems to be in how they become unitary; how the become invested with self, intention, or whatever special features you believe consciousness is necessarily invested in; and why they're around in the first place (ie. why we weren't zombies).
Neurosci and psychology are still far from decent explanations, but I tend to bias research in their favor. Firstly, there's simply been more people working harder and longer in neurosci and psychology on consciousness and related issues. In neurosci and psychology we don't need "the answer" immediately, but can conduct alot of important research right now relating to isolated features of consciousness; in this way progressing gradually towards an answer, rather than relying on metatheory (the former being more amicable to a scientific approach anyway). Secondly, I give them a sort of primacy rather than equivalency with alternative approaches: I demand that physics findings on consciousness accord with psychological findings, and favor the latter when there is a dispute (simply because psych is a more immediate measure of consciousness than physics is).
The neurosci research I alluded to is basically as follows: we can follow, for instance the visual pathways in the brain, and determine at any given "level" which neurons are correlated with conscious experience and which are not. Any proposed mechanism for consciousnes (eg. some function of microtubules, quantum or otherwise) should be expected to correlate to this "map" of consciousness in the brain - that is, we should expect to find whatever feature that generates consciousness in the consciousness-generating neurons and not in the not-consciousness-generating neurons. Otherwise, there's no link between the proposed mechanism and the actual generation of consciousness.
As far as physics-inspired approaches to consciousness goes, although I find Orch OR fascinating, I'm much more favorable to the models put forth by David Bohm. Admittedly, this pegs me as a bit of a flake. But I got over that long ago.