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Connecting up: On making up one’s mind
Published in Derek Steinberg, Consciousness Reconnected, 2018
Daniel Dennett, philosopher, provides in numerous publications a most engaging, important and impressive account of Mind, minds and a mind, but not, I feel in my bones, the mind. He too has enjoyed a prolonged disputation with Searle (1997). His conceptual model is essentially drawn from computational neuroscience, and he seems to doubt the true existence of qualia (subjective perceptions and feelings about them) and consciousness itself, by which I presume he means that his model doesn’t account for them. What I want to draw out from Dennett’s model is his key concept of multiple drafts, which he contrasts with the ‘Cartesian Theatre’, a supposed arena in the brain or mind where all kinds of memories and perceptions come together and where consciousness is forged. The Multiple Drafts Model proposes that ‘all varieties of thought or mental activity are accomplished by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs’ (Dennett 1991) all under continuous ‘editorial revision’, and happening all over the brain. Dennett doesn’t deny the phenomenon of narrative, but it is a constantly edited, re-edited narrative. There is no single, final narrative, which Dennett dismisses, dismissing the stream of consciousness, which would be a coterminous phenomenon, along with it. I think Dennett’s model takes us along a useful route, away from the ‘Cartesian Theatre’ (which reminded me of the ‘homunculus’ notion, of an observer sitting inside the brain, and which only pushes the mystery back a notch), but perhaps in the direction of my own model, the Cinema: all of it, best boys, gaffers, accountants, technologists, projectionists, scriptwriters, stars, audiences, advertising, myths and all, and especially the myths.
Hey Wait! I Just Thought of Something Else! Advaita and Clinical Hypnosis
Published in American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 2018
Jon K. Amundson, Marc W. Ross, Debra Campbell
This idea of a mind without a unified self is further echoed in the naturalistic philosophy of Daniel Dennett. In his philosophy of consciousness, he makes note of the appearance of self because of a “multiple drafts” model of neuro/cognitive function (Dennett, 1991, pp. 101–138). Stated simply, patterns of thought exist and are activated, worked and reworked based upon biological sub-strata and accumulated experience. Each experience contributes (like the “agent” above) to each next experience, limiting or expanding upon “drafts” or mental representations. These contribute to a “sense” of self as configuration emerges out of the drafts or agents. It is a “self” called forth or created based upon biopsychosocial interdependence: the self is simply a ‘centre of narrative gravity’—just as the centre of gravity in a physical object is not a part of that object, but a useful concept we use to understand the relationship between that object and its environment (Jennings, 2017; Sheldon, Ryan, Rawsthorne & Ilardie, 1997).