Dear Diary Moment 9/27/2020:
In my present immersion in Rorty’s Truth and Progress (my walk about and experiment), I came across something that is rare in a my philosophical process: an article in which I was mostly familiar with the deferred matrixes of meaning involving the work of other thinkers –something essential to understand the philosophical text you are reading. In this case, it was Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. And maybe my peers can help me out with this.
And what it brought to my attention was a conflict (or maybe even oversight (in Dennett’s” multiple drafts” theory of consciousness and his dismissal of a “Cartesian Theater”. His multiple drafts theory involves the mind passing data around to various units of the brain until a unified image of the external experience is achieved. And in this, he sees the emergence of consciousness.
(And I would note here the similarity of Dennett’s model to Deleuze and Guattari’s 3 syntheses of the unconscious: the connective, the disjunctive (to a lesser degree), and the conjunctive in which consciousness is formed.)
And I actually find Dennett’s model useful. The problem for me starts with his “Cartesian Theater”. If I understand the history of philosophy right, the main departure that Husserl and phenomenology engaged in with Descartes was the “thinking substance” that, if you think about it, seems very similar to Dennett’s multiple drafts theory. It’s like the subject and object are so intimately intertwined, there is no distinguishing between the two. So I have to question the whole notion of the Cartesian Theater –or rather Dennett’s use of it.
Furthermore, I would note that what Husserl and phenomenology (via intentionality: the recognition that consciousness is always consciousness of something (took from their criticism of Descartes’ thinking substance was the recognition that underneath all that thinking there had to be something bearing witness to it: a perceiving thing or “ultimate ego” as Husserl referred to it. And it seems to me that Dennett’s multiple drafts model would be equally vulnerable to that criticism and thereby render his concept of the Cartesian Theater invalid. Or maybe it’s just that Dennett attributed something to Descartes that wasn’t actually there.
Or am I just as confused as I must seem here?