Daniel Dennet, Marvin Minsky and Consciousness

Two of my favorite thinkers are Daniel Dennet, and Marvin Minsky, mainly because of their great ideas about consciousness as expressed, for example, in the books [1] and [2].

How life appeared on Earth is not exactly known, but we have a reasonable pretty good general idea, provided by chemistry. Existence also has some explanations, based, for example on Barrow and Carter’s Anthropic Principle or on the multiverse theory of Tegmark. On the other hand, consciousness remains as deep mystery. Marvin Minsky and Daniel Dennet have given some light on the subject. According to Dennet, our powerful subjective impression that we are conscious of sensory perceptions in real time is actually an illusion. We don’t take the world in at a glance and keep a copy of it to compare to the next glance. We take in just a very limited amount of material, so things are not as they seem. For example, it is known that the order in which we perceive things is not always the order in which the sensory data arrives in the brain. We are not conscious of anything at precisely the time we imagine. What we experience is generated a little after the fact, as a result of a competition among multiple patterns of mental activity propagating within the brain. Awareness comprises a small fraction of those mental events whose influence will persist and so alters beliefs about what just happened. According to this view,

• Consciousness is the product of a virtual machine running in the brain.


• Consciousness and will are wholly due to material, which is designed by evolution (or people) to serve useful functions.

So, Dennet introduced what it seems to be a very useful concept: intentional stance. The key to understand behavior, human and otherwise, is adopting the “intentional stance”. Just as the best way of predicting a chess-playing computer next move is to – rather than try to study its circuitry – assume it “intends” to win, so the best way to predict the behavior of an animal is to suppose that it has beliefs and desires. Organisms can be understood as natural selection’s solutions to evolutionary problems.

[1] Daniel Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Simon &Schuster, 1995.

[2] Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind, Simon & Schuster, 1988.