When Daniel Dennett visited Indiana University last year, one of his talks included frequent references to magic. Not the “real magic” that doesn’t really exist (e.g., truly making something materialize out of thin air), he said, but the only kind of magic that really does exist: conjuring tricks that make us believe what isn’t so. His point was that just as a magician doesn’t really have to make objects materialize out of the air, or whatever, but simply to make us think it happened, the human brain doesn’t really have to do anything all that mysterious to create consciousness. My notes say (and I’m guessing this is a paraphrase of what Dennett was saying): “The ‘magic of consciousness’, like stage magic, defies explanation only so long as we take it as face value. Once we appreciate all the non-mysterious ways in which the brain can create benign ‘user illusions’, we can begin to imagine how the brain creates consciousness.” In this view, neuroscience is the effort to reverse-engineer the magic show that is consciousness.
Whether you agree with Dennett or not, you might find this article from the New York Times interesting. It’s about a symposium called The Magic of Consciousness that was held recently in that hub of illusion and home of the ersatz, Las Vegas. The article discusses identity, consciousness, reality, and some of the connections and disjuncts between objective reality and human experience. There are quotes from several noted scholars in the field of consciousness studies, including Dennett. I liked his idea about how we use words to try to fix in memory our otherwise fleeting sensory experiences–that words are “like sheepdogs herding ideas.”
