The Mental Sunrise- Dennett's View

- From General Science written in 1912 in Philly!

Last time I wrote about consciousness, I was ruminating on how a near flip of a coin separates the wheat from the chaff, or in this case, the baby from the placenta. All cell's in a blastocyst have the potential to create consciousness, but only some are the progenitors of it.

When a cell is chosen for glory, that glory does not yet arrive. Consciousness is still down the road. But how far? When is an embryo sufficiently wired up with efficient neurons and synaptic density to make the transition from mere brain activity to consciousness?

Whatever consciousness is. So that's kind of a big bite to try and chew. Thankfully, lots of smart folks have been ruminating on this and are here to help.

Obviously there is a let-a hundred-flowers-bloom diversity of views on this. I'll focus on Prof Daniel Dennett's view now, and we'll get to differing views down the road a bit.

Professor Daniel Dennett of Tufts has been at the heart of an inquiring community developing a philosophical and biological theory of consciousness. A substantial number of smart people think Dennett's theory of consciousness is likely spot-on. This is his summary of his computational model -

At any given time, many modular cerebral networks are active in parallel and process information in an unconscious manner.

An information becomes conscious, however, if the neural population that represents it is mobilized by top-down attentional amplification into a brain-scale state of coherent activity that involves many neurons distributed throughout the brain. The long distance connectivity of these "workplace neurons" can... make the information available to a variety of processes including perceptual categorization, long-term memorization, evaluation, and intentional action.

We postulate that this global availability of information through the workplace is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state.

A lifetime of Dennett's work can be summarized deformed this way: until some bit of information is accessed simultaneously by many different parts of the brain, you are naught but a glorified flower, dumbly growing toward the light.

Dennett theorizes that individual parts of the brain ("modular cerebral networks") are not conscious. As we've seen, different networks of the brain wire up at different times. Some are fully formed relatively early in the womb and many others don't stop forming new synapses until death. Dennett says that only when "information [is] available to a variety of processes" could there be an experience of consciousness.

How many processes are enough to transform disparate, mental activities into consciousness. When does it happen? Is it before birth? Before 24 weeks of gestation, when I am writing this?


In other words, when does the proto-human become a human? Is it when consciousness arises? If so, what is my little proto-human before that mental sunrise, when the potential is there but unachieved?

Is my kid my kid yet? If not, who or what are they?

I'm trying to arrange a chat with Mr Dennett to find out what he thinks.