Güzeldere I 397f
Consciousness of mental states: "perceptual-like": Locke, Armstrong, Paul and Patricia Churchland, Lycan
"Thought-like": Rosenthal, Carruthers, Dennett, also Descartes.
Güzeldere I 404
Awareness/Locke/Churchland/Armstrong/Lycan: speaking of "scanning" or "monitoring".
Question: What is perceived, the content, or the state itself?
Güzeldere I 411
Consciousness/Churchland: introspective awareness is a subspecies of perception.
Thesis: In the language of a mature neuroscience, there might be a more differentiated representation of "human subjective consciousness".
E.g. Dopamine level could be interpreted as Gm7 chords in music.
We need to learn this conceptual system and practice its application. (Davidson's conceptual scheme).
Güzeldere: Churchland is thus not only convinced that mental states are identical with brain states, but also that their properties are identical.
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Churchland II 475
Consciousness/Dennett: is a virtual machine. Thesis: People become aware of the extent to which they acquire language and learn to talk about themselves. In this transition, a parallel machine (the neural networks in the brain) simulates a serial machine (which performs the operations step by step on the basis of rules that can be recursive).
Dennett: Consciousness behaves like the flight simulator to the processes within the computer.
II 476
ChurchlandVsDennett:
1. The assumption of the language dependence of consciousness denies children and animals consciousness.
II 477
2. It has been known for some time that recurrent neural networks can produce temporal sequencing.
3. No virtual machine is required, a particular class of operations can be the output of a single, if heavily distributed, network.
Dennett could be quite right, but not on this way.