Sat, Nov 22 · 2:00 PM CST
On October 25, 2025, six of us finished our examination of Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back, where the last two chapters ask, “How do we start thinking about consciousness?” Patients who have suffered a stroke have cerebrovascular accidents that damage a portion of their brains, losing whatever function is controlled by that neural circuit. This suggests there are a myriad of other neural circuits in our brains. When we are of two minds, is our indecision a result of competing neural circuits? When served a slice of cake, are we confronted with a choice of satisfying a desire for something sweet and worrying about damaging our bodies with high blood sugar? Can someone be meek and courteous as a pedestrian but become prone to road rage when driving a car? Could patients with multiple personality disorder be suffering from the fragmentation of their integrity?
Is consciousness a user illusion created by our brains, and is it made by talking to ourselves? John Hughing Jackson, a neurologist, said, “We speak, not only to tell others what we think but to tell ourselves what we think,” and E. M. Forster’s "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?" Both hint at the linguistic nature of consciousness. A first-person narrative tells a story where someone recounts events from their own viewpoint, providing a subjective account of what they have experienced. Writers create a narrative using sentences that express thoughts, and a complete sentence, a foundational grammatical concept, is a complete thought distinguished from figments that are sentence fragments. It is a group of words that are tightly written to be clear, concise, and use only the necessary words to convey a message. Language is a thinking tool, one of the many memes that infected our brains.
Descartes was limited by the metaphors available at his time to use to describe consciousness, particularly the theater or pipeline metaphor, which implies a central location for his separate, thinking substance controlling the body. Our understanding of the brain is also limited by the metaphors that are currently available. The early 20th-century home medical reference books frequently depicted the brain as a complex telephone switchboard, replacing Descartes's mechanical and hydraulic metaphors to explain the brain's function to a lay audience. Artificial Intelligence (AI) large language model provides another metaphor.
In his 1962 essay, "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," philosopher Wilfrid Sellars introduced the concept of the manifest image to describe the world as we perceive and experience it in everyday life. The manifest image is the foundation of the scientific image, but it goes further by constructing theoretical entities, derived from the principles of science, that describe reality in terms of particles, fields, forces, and even neural circuits. We share the conceptual framework that makes the manifest image that is continually updated. Does it matter that an AI creates parts of those frameworks? For that matter, are Plato’s Forms and Kant’s a priori principles constructs of these images? Nevertheless, symbolic communication requires a manifest image, a shared understanding of the world, and is the fundamental feature of human or artificial cognition. According to Dennett, the hard problem of consciousness can eventually be solved by aligning the mental states of the manifest image with the neural events observed by the scientific image.
One consequence of the manifest image is civilization, providing the framework that makes civilization possible. Could the manifest image with its norms, intentions, and personhood provide a way for moral evaluation? Without civilization, we return to Hobbes’ state of nature, where we are at war with each other, and life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." The name of our species is Homo Sapiens, and sapiens is a Latin word meaning wise or intelligent. If we embrace the sapiens part of our nature, we will not only survive but even thrive. Humans evolved from bacteria, eventually gifting us Bach. Without the better angels of our nature guiding our lives, the complexity of life on Earth could return to its simplest form, bacteria.
We invite you to find out about free will and moral responsibility in our discussion of Ursula K. Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," available as a PDF or an audiobook on YouTube in the link below, on November 22, 2025, from 2 PM to 4 PM.
