Is consciousness just an illusion?

by Guest Wed Apr 05, 2017 12:28 pm

The cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett believes our brains are machines, made of billions of tiny "robots" - our neurons, or brain cells. Is the human mind really that special?
In an infamous memo written in 1965, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus stated that humans would always beat computers at chess because machines lacked intuition. Daniel Dennett disagreed.
A few years later, Dreyfus rather embarrassingly found himself in checkmate against a computer.
And in May 1997 the IBM computer, Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
Many who were unhappy with this result then claimed that chess was a boringly logical game. Computers didn't need intuition to win. The goalposts shifted.

Daniel Dennett has always believed our minds are machines. For him the question is not can computers be human? But are humans really that clever?

In an interview with BBC Radio 4's The Life Scientific, Dennett says there's nothing special about intuition. "Intuition is simply knowing something without knowing how you got there".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39482345

by Original Quill Wed Apr 05, 2017 8:10 pm

Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, both cognitive linguists, are on the trail of this thesis in their book, Metaphors We Live By.

It is most poignant when they discuss cause-and-effect metaphors, and get into gestalts...a structure, arrangement, or pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts. We can only prove cause and effect by a series of statistical probabilities...and it remains a way of making sense of something, without actual, material proof.

Is consciousness just an illusion?

Is consciousness just an illusion?

Re: Is consciousness just an illusion?