p.2 not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you
are, or cares.
p.4-5 Noam Chomsky, Thomas Nagel, and Colin McGinn (among others) have all
surmised, or speculated, or claimed, that consciousness is beyond all human understanding, a mystery not a puzzle, to use
Chomsky's proposed distinction.
6. Computers are mindlike in ways that no earlier artifacts were:
they can control processes that perform tasks that call for discrimination, inference, memory, judgment, anticipation; they
are generators of new knowledge, finders of patterns... that heretofore only human beings could even hope to find.
p.9 We have a lot of mathematical equations describing the behavior
of matter, but we don’t really know anything more about its intrinsic nature. The only other
clue that we have about its intrinsic nature, in fact, is that when you arrange it in the way that it is arranged
in things like brains, you get consciousness.
p.12 How can the little box on your desk, whose parts
know nothing at all about chess, beat you at chess with such stunning reliability?
p.21 Minds will turn out not to be simple computers, and their
computational resources will be seen to reach down into the subcellular molecular resources available only to organic brains
p.34 In most sciences, there are few findings more prized than a counterintuitive
result. It shows something surprising and forces us to reconsider our often tacit assumptions.
p.57 It seems to many people that consciousness is a mystery, the most wonderful
magic show imaginable, an unending series of special effects that defy explanation. I think that they are mistaken: consciousness
is a physical, biological phenomenon - like metabolism or reproduction or self-repair - that is exquisitely ingenious in its
operation, but not miraculous or even, in the end, mysterious... The task of explaining stage magic is in
some regards a thankless task; the person who tells people how an effect is achieved is often resented, considered
a spoilsport, a party pooper. I often get the impression that my attempts to explain some aspects of consciousness
provoke similar resistance. Isn't it nicer if we all are allowed to wallow in the magical mysteriousness
of it all?
p.58 By real magic people mean miracles... and supernatural powers...
Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually
be done, is not real magic... It can't be real if it's explicable as a phenomenon achieved by a bag of ordinary
tricks - cheap tricks, you might say.
p.59-60 If some people sincerely believe that they have
seen the trick performed, doesn't that settle it? What else is a magic trick but the creation of sincerely held false
beliefs about having witnessed one marvelous event or another? The magician doesn't really saw the lady
in half; he only makes you think you saw him do it!
p.70 A good theory of consciousness should make
a conscious mind look like an abandoned factory (recall Leibniz’s mill), full of humming machinery and nobody
home to supervise it, or enjoy it, or witness it.
Some people hate this idea.
p.71 In a proper theory of consciousness, the Emperor is not just deposed,
but exposed, shown to be nothing other than a cunning conspiracy of lesser operatives whose activities jointly account for
the “miraculous” powers of the Emperor.
p.74 And so it would go, for dozens of repetitions, with [magician Ralph]
Hull staying one step ahead of his hypothesis-testers, exploiting his realization that he could always do some trick or
other from the pool of tricks they all knew, and concealing the fact that he was doing a grab bag of different tricks
p.74-75 Is there really a Hard Problem? Or is what appears to be
the Hard Problem simply the large bag of tricks that constitute what Chalmers calls the Easy Problems of Consciousness?These
all have mundane explanations, requiring no revolutions in physics, no emergent novelties. They succumb, with much effort,
to the standard methods of cognitive science.
p.132 At any given time, many modular (1) cerebral networks are active in
parallel and process information in an unconscious manner. An information (2) becomes conscious, however, if the neural population
that represents it is mobilized by top-down (3) 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, when they are active for a minimal duration (4), 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 (5) what we subjectively experience as a conscious state.
p.135 I would like to speak briefly about some of the advantages of the
pandemonium model as an actual model of conscious behaviour. In observing a brain, one should make a distinction between that
aspect of the behaviour which is available consciously, and those behaviours, no doubt equally important, but which proceed
unconsciously. If one conceives of the brain as a pandemonium—a collection of demons—perhaps what is going on
within the demons can be regarded as the unconscious part of thought, and what the demons are publicly shouting for each other
to hear, as the conscious part of thought. (McCarthy 1959, p. 147)
p.154 it has been proven by computer scientists that any function that can
be computed by one specific computational architecture can also be computed (perhaps much less efficiently) by another architecture.
p.175 There is a time for chocolate and a time for cheese, a time for blue
and a time for yellow. [JLJ - Dennett occasionally malfunctions]
