Dennett never tires of mocking any theory of consciousness that insists on making
the experiencing self some kind of "nugget of specialness" ("Why would you think any
more of yourself if you turned out to be a sort of mind-pearl in a brain-oyster?"116). In a
full-blown dualist theory, this insistence is about identifying a precise time and place of
interaction. In a materialist account, this insistence takes the much more seductive form
of gradually pushing consciousness further into the mysterious inner realms o f the brain,
a s more is understood about the outer realms but nothing is found that seems to qualify as
genuine experience. Dennett, and to a large extent Clark, try to stop this trend before it
starts. For them the mind is not cut off from the world and its details, trying to keep up
with what's going on out there by viewing the brain's frantically constructed representations. The structure of the world is part of a perception, something the brain is
actively engaged with, not merely having an impression of.
[....]
The corollary of the "interpolation" hypothesis, that an interpretation could not
itself he the "filling in," but must instead be the result of filling in, is not well supported
by the observation that we don't have free imaginative control over these experiences.
The intuition that a "mere decision" would somehow have to be rendered into something
"perceptual, not conceptual" to explain either the fact that we cannot help what we see, or
fact that we see it is just that: an intuition. There is really no reason why we should
expect to have imaginative control if Dennett's view were correct, and in light of how
little conscious access a brain has to its own workings, we probably should expect no
more freedom to imagine that a "filling in" interpretation made somewhere in the visual
cortex is wrong than we have freedom to imagine that a foveated detail of a well lit scene
is other than it seems to be. And so it is strange that Ramachandran and Churchland want
to ask subjects "Does it actually look that way to you, or do you just believe it looks that
way to you?" They take people's reports ("I don't believe I just believe it looks that
way. ..") at face value, even though it is perfectly clear that on Dennett's account there
would be no way - indeed, no one - to distinguish between the two possibilities. This
appears to be just obstinate. It doesn't settle the issue one way or the other unless people
are presumed to be infallible regarding the contents of their own minds, and
Ramachandran and Churchland are the last people who would presume this.
The intuition that seems to be the real root of the interpolation hypothesis is
suggested by Ramachandran's endorsement of "qualia," in which he bestows
consciousness on "intermediate" processing'09- far enough away from either sensory or
motor processing to seem plausible. This is the line in the sand, as it were. For Dennett,
"'what it is like' is a matter of how things are judged to be.""' In some ways, the filling
in debate could never be settled without settling the qualia debate, and it is no accident
that in Consciousness Expluined, Dennett's no-compromise, sustained attack on the
notion of qualia immediately follows his comments on filling in.'" Covering this debate
would call for a very long digression, but here we can at least see the terms of the
impasse
difference between what the brain does that is conscious, and what the brain does that is unconscious?
