The Theater of the Mind

Chapter 5: The Theater of the Mind

"The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations." (p.64)
"The comparison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are are successive perceptions only, constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, nor of the material of which it is composed." (1739, Sect. 4)

Dennett's characterization of the "Cartesian theatre": "We seem to imagine that there is some place inside "my" mind or brain where "I" am. This place has something like a mental screen or stage on which images are presented for viewing by my mind's eye. In this special place everything that we are conscious of at a given moment comes together and consciousness happens. The ideas and feelings that are in this place are in consciousness, and all the rest are unconscious. The show in the Cartesian theater is the stream of consciousness, and the audience is me." (65)

field of consciousness = the panoply of images or qualia occurring at any moment
stream of consciousness (James was the first to use this expression) = the sequence of these fields

Dennett -- however much it may seem like this, it's a misleading picture: the Cartesian theater and its audience of one do not exist
Cartesian Materialism (Dennett's term)

reject dualism
yet "still believe in something like a central place where consciousness happens and someone to whom it happens" (65)
Commonplace phrases embedding something like the CT picture: when they speak of something being "in" (or "out of" or coming "into" (or "leaving" consciousness

One version of CM implies that there must be a time and a place at which neural processing all comes together to produce a conscious experience." (66)
"But in terms of brain activity there is no center" (67), "no group of cells in the brain of such anatomical or functional pre-eminence as to appear to be the keystone or center of gravity of the whole system. (67)
Another picture leading us astray

there's perceptual input
there's motoric output
so we are led to think has to me a middle -- a point where it turns around and the incoming messages go into the out box (as it were).
"In fact there is not a single stream of neural activity coming into a middle and sending a new stream out; there is massive parallel processing. There are feedback loops, complex cell assemblies forming and dissolving, mutual interactions between distant areas, and so on." (67)
"Similarly there is no special time at which consciousness must happen. ... no magic moment at which input turns into output and consciousness happens." (67)

Certainly inventing a central place in which subjectivity happens is not a viable answer [to the hard problem]". (68)

subjects were asked questions about shapes that the time required to answer questions about shapes seemed to vary just as you would expect if the subjects were rotating the shapes "in their minds eye" to compare them.

"do show that there is something measurable going on when people have private imaginings"

"do not show either that consciousness does the imagining or that there must be a mental screen on which the images are projected" (69)

"such mental rotations can happen unconsciously, and indeed do all the time." (69)
MRI evidence: "When we mentally scan a visual image similar areas of the visual cortex are activated as when we look at a similar object (Kosslyn 1988)." (69)

The homunculus regress: "If you are a conscious entity looking at the screen, then the classic homunculus problem arises. The inner 'you' must have inner eyes and a brain, with another screen looked at by another inner you and so on -- to an infinite regress." (69)
Concerning color experience: "The central mystery is what makes this experience of mine feel so undeniably blue? We cannot solve it by positing a mental screen covered with color figments and looked at by an inner self." (70)

"[W]hat makes some events conscious and others unconscious, some in consciousness and some outside of consciousness. (70)

SB: "So, considering the red light, what makes the difference between its being in consciousness and out of consciousness?" (71)

"Baars describes conscious events as happening 'in the theatre of consciousness' or on 'the screen of consciousness' (1988: 31)." (71)
GWT

"In this view the brain is structured in such a way that just a few items at a time are dealt with in a global workspace -- similar to the 7 [+ or minus] 2 items conventionally held in short term memory."
"The theater has numerous inputs from the senses and from the overall context and connections to unconscious resources such as language, autobiographical memory and learned skills." (72)
"With this theory what makes an event conscious is that it is being processed within the global workspace and is made available, or is broadcast, to the rest of the (unconscious) system. (72)
"Rather than worrying about the hard problem we should get on with the task of finding out what makes events more or less conscious" (73) is Baars' attitude.
"As for subjectivity, GWT posits that global availability, or being broadcast to the whole system, explains consciousness. In other words, accessibility is used to explain subjectivity." (73)

Crick's "astonishing hypothesis 'that "you," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of an assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.' (1994: 3)" (73)
"As for subjectivity, Crick suggests that we are only groping our way toward a theory of consciousness and that the best way to proceed is through studying the neural correlates of consciousness," (74)

"According to the multiple drafts model there are no fixed facts about the stream of consciousness independent of particular probes, so it all depends on the way the particular stream was probed." (76)
"Dennett is able to say, 'What about the actual phenomenology? There is no such thing.' (1991: 65)." (76)

"Critics complain that Dennett has not explained consciousness but explained it away." (76)