Densmore and Dennett on Virtual Machines and Consciousness

In the preceding article, Densmore and Dennett (hereafter, D&D) urge me to note the parallels, and the potentially complementary fit, between Dennett's views on consciousness and my own. They are correct in arguing that I had not fully appreciated the parallels. I am pleased and honored by every one of them. Still, it will be more illuminating to press the remaining differences between us. They are several and they are important, quite aside from the question of which of our views is correct. Like good functionalists, D&D's first and almost unrestrained impulse is to see the mechanism of a recurrent PDP network as a (welcome and perhaps correct) story of how the abstract cognitive organization of humans and animals gets implemented in the physical brain. The familiar metaphors of "virtual machines" and "explanatory levels" are once again confidently deployed, and the mind is assimilated to "a software Program that is installed upon the parallel network of the brain." D&D are of course aware that these metaphors now need (at least) an additional layer of cautionary commentary, and, just as Dennett did in Consciousness Explained (CE), they do not hesitate to offer it. But the commentary still seems to me to be self-deceptive and uncomprehending. Those metaphors do not need to be qualified, they need to be junked. Though we have all grown up on them, they should be ushered swiftly into our history, at least where talk of minds is concerned. Those metaphors derive their primary meanings from a perfectly sensible theory, a theory that is perfectly adequate to classical computational procedures and to classical computing machines (and, let us add, to classical functionalism in philosophy). But that well-polished theory, according to some of us, has turned out to be entirely the wrong model for the cognitive activity of biological brains. It is wrong in its story of our basic computational mechanisms, it is wrong in its account of how occurrent information is coded and manipulated, it is wrong in its account of how skills are embodied and how "regular" behavior