Consciousness Not Explained

From Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained: 

I will explain the various phenomena that compose what we call consciousness, showing how they are all physical effects of the brain's activities, how these activities evolved, and how they give rise to illusions about their own powers and properties. It is very hard to imagine how your mind could be your brain -- but not impossible. [Emphasis added.]

Well, actually it is impossible. The brain is not what we mean when we speak of the mental activities we attribute (metaphorically) to the mind. (Remember, mind is a verb, not a noun.) Seeing cannot be reduced to anything physical. I see a thing, dammit! What am I to make of a philosopher or neuroscientist or physicist who has the gall to tell me I'm not really seeing it, but rather my brain is up to such and such, say, sorting out "sense data"?

Dennett commits what philosopher Gilbert Ryle -- Dennett's teacher! -- called a "category mistake." Any normal human being knows that consciousness -- the variety of activities and experiences we capture with the concept awareness -- cannot be merely a physical manifestation of anything. An experience is an experience (tautologies are worth remembering, Ryle said), not a physical effect, even if brain activity is associated with experience. The fullest description of what goes on in my brain when I look at my computer screen cannot capture the experience qua experience that I call "seeing my computer screen." Yet this is what some highly educated people insist they can do. It takes a lot of education to be so patronizing to the rest of us dopes. (In this regard see how philosopher J. L. Austin, in Sense and Sensibilia, takes on the "sense-data" philosophers who condescendingly ignore that regular people do not use the words look, appear, and seem interchangeably.)

Ryle must be spinning in his grave over what his pupil has been up to. Ryle's The Concept of Mind is the recommended antidote for those who think the only alternative to soul-speak is materialist reductionism. No, we're not ghosts in machines, but we're not machines either. There is a third way: naturalism.