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Originally Posted by mszlazak  |
I haven't read the article, but it begins:
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The multiple drafts model of consciousness (Dennett, 1991, 1996, 1998, Dennett and Kinsbourne, 1992) was developed as an alternative to the perennially attractive, but incoherent, model of conscious experience Dennett calls Cartesian materialism, the idea that after early unconscious processing occurs in various relatively peripheral brain structures "everything comes together" in some privileged central place in the brain–which Dennett calls the Cartesian Theater --for "presentation" to the inner self or homunculus.
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Do you think there's a lot of us here who subscribe to cartesian materialism? Materialists cannot believe in a self. So I agree with Dennett that cartesian materialism is incoherent, although perhaps not for the same reasons.
BTW I disapprove of using either of the words homunculus or "inner self". Let's suppose all of our perceptions and conscious experiences are experienced as a whole via a little man (homunculus). But how does this little man do it? Why there is another little man in his skull in turn which does all the work! And ad infinitum.
Replace the concept of a little man in us by a self -- a
non-physical self. Then we don't get any such absurdity, we just have a two-term relationship. Of course proposing such a self means it lies outside the scope of science, but that has always been my precise position.
BTW I have to say I'm not remotely interested in what Dennett says about consciousness since he denies its existence.