Ghosts in the Virtual Machine

Abstract

Dennett is an excellent communicator of complex ideas, and his book of some 500 pages provides a useful conspectus of the current state of cognitive science, including a number of areas of controversy. Many highly specialized disciplines are involved and Dennett rightly makes it a virtue that he has tried, ‘with unabashed eclecticism’, to build a coherent theory, looking across the whole field. To summarize, his model of the mind is built from the bottom up, beginning with content-fixations. These are discriminations, otherwise patterns or integrations of the nerve impulses that provide the ones and zeroes of the parallel processing computer which is the brain, within this computer the mind is represented by a virtual machine, in effect another computer with a ‘von Neumannesque’ structure. The basic language of the virtual machine, a set of rules or transition regularities, is supplemented by the further constraints of natural language, functioning as a higher-level programming language. Under these constraints a serial stream of consciousness is generated, with some gaps, out of a sort of parallel pandemonium in which words, phrases, images, grammatical constructions and narrative fragments jostle together, as ‘multiple drafts’, competing to be part of the ‘message’. The seriality is not ‘hard-wired’, but is the effect of a succession of coalitions of ‘specialist circuits’ operative in the multiple channels of the parallel-processing computer. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.