Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

the most mysterious feature of our minds. On the one hand, what could be more certain ormanifest to each of us that that he or she is a subject of experience, an enjoyer ofperceptions and sensations, a sufferer of pain, and entertainer of ideas, and a consciousdeliberator? On the other hand, what in the world can consciousness be? How can livingphysical bodies in the physical world produce such a phenomenon? Science has revealedthe secrets of many initially mysterious natural phenomena – magnetism, orphotosynthesis or digestion are in principle equally accessible to any observer with theright apparatus, but any particular case of consciousness seems to have a favored orprivileged observer, whose access of any others – no matter what apparatus they mayhave. For his reason and others, so far there is no good theory of consciousness. There isnot even agreement about what a theory of consciousness would be like. Some have goneso far as to deny that there is any real thing for the term “consciousness” to name.The mere fact that such a familiar feature of our lives has resisted for so long allattempts to characterize it suggests that our conception of it is at fault. What is needed isnot just more evidence, more experimental and clinical data, but a careful rethinking ofthe assumptions that lead us to suppose there is a single and familiar phenomenon,consciousness, answering to all the descriptions licensed by our everyday sense of theterm. Consider the baffling questions that are inevitably raised whenever one turns one’sattention to consciousness. Are other animals conscious? Are they conscious in the sameway we are? Could a computer or a robot be conscious? Can a person have unconsciousthoughts? Unconscious pains or sensations or perceptions? Is a baby conscious at orbefore birth? Are we conscious when we dream? Might a human being harbour more thanone conscious subject or ego or agent within one brain? Good answers to these questionscertainly will depend heavily on empirical discoveries about the behavioural capacitiesand internal circumstances of the various problematic candidates for consciousness, butabout every such empirical finding we can ask: what is its bearing on the question ofconsciousness and why? These are not directly empirical questions but rather conceptualones, which we may be able to answer with the help of thought experiments.Our ordinary concept of consciousness seems to be anchored to two separable setsof considerations that can be captured roughly by the phrases “from the inside” and “fromthe outside.” From the inside, our