Miscellaneous Chatter > Philosophy & Science
Bakker's Blind Brain Theory
H:
--- Quote from: TPB ---In the old proverb of the three blind Indian gurus and the elephant, one grabs the tail and says the elephant is a rope, the other grabs a leg and says the elephant is a tree, while the third grabs the trunk and says the elephant is a snake. In each case, the gurus mistake the part for a whole. This is the Blind Brain Thesis (which I simultaneously can’t stop arguing and can’t bring myself to believe): the thalamocortical system is the guru and the greater brain is the elephant. Intentional concepts such as belief, desire, good, perception, volition, action–all the furniture of conscious life–are simply ropes and trees and snakes. Misapprehensions. According to BBT, there are literally no such things.
The reason they function is simply that they are systematically related to the elephant, who does the brunt of the work. They have to count as ‘insight’ or ‘understanding’ simply because they are literally the only game in town.
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--- Quote from: TPB ---Enter what I call Encapsulation, the strange mereological inflation that characterizes consciousness. Mistaking parts for wholes, I want to argue, is constitutive of experience. Dennett wants to say we are actually experiencing the elephant. But as a matter of empirical fact, the thalamocortical system only has access to a fraction of the information processed by the brain, a fraction it cannot but mistake for wholes. We are experiencing elephant parts as opposed to the elephant, and we’re experiencing them as wholes, something they are not.
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--- Quote from: TPB ---As magicians well know, the brain makes default identity mistakes all the time: In “The Mark of Gideon,” Captain Kirk unknowingly beams into a perfect replica of the Enterprise, and so assumes that the transporter has malfunctioned and that his entire crew has been abducted. His inability to discriminate between the real Enterprise and the replica leads to their thoughtless conflation. The BBT suggests that experience seems to unfold across a substrate of self-identity simply because its margins, those points where the absence of information are expressed, must always remain the same.
By marking the limit of differentiation they endow us with the illusion of a soul.
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--- Quote from: TPB ---We are the elephant in such a way that we are a rope, tree, and snake. Anything but an elephant.
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I think it's odd we don't have a thread about Bakker's BBT. It definitely has influenced his fiction, so here's a thread for us to maybe try to piece together some of it.
Wilshire:
So the crux
--- Quote ---Intentional concepts such as belief, desire, good, perception, volition, action–all the furniture of conscious life–are simply ropes and trees and snakes. Misapprehensions. According to BBT, there are literally no such things.
--- End quote ---
But I'm still uncertain: what, then, is the Elephant? What is the whole that we cannot comprehend?
H:
Well, if I understand correctly, the Elephant is the "whole thing" in the sense that it's what moves it all, so to speak. I guess to use a Bakker-ism, it's the darkness the comes before...
Wilshire:
Is he/BBT suggesting that we dont/cant know what the whole is, or just that most people don't and need to be enlightened?
H:
--- Quote from: Wilshire on July 15, 2015, 07:20:21 pm ---Is he/BBT suggesting that we dont/cant know what the whole is, or just that most people don't and need to be enlightened?
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I think it's more about acknowledging that we are poorly/wrongly approximating the whole.
I think it's also fear of what happens if we can apprehend the whole (Semantic Apocalypse, etc.).
I admit I need to read a lot more to get a better grasp on it's full implications, right now my monkey brain can't extrapolate...
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