[MD] Quick one: causation

[craigerb at comcast.net]

Consciousness Explained, or Explained Away? 

When we learn that the only difference between gold and silver is the number of subatomic particles in their atoms, we may feel cheated or angry — those physicists have explained something away: The goldness is gone from gold; they’ve left out the very silveriness of silver that we appreciate. And when they explain the way reflection and absorption of electromagnetic radiation accounts for colors and color vision, they seem to neglect the very thing that matters most. But of course there has to be some “leaving out” — otherwise we wouldn’t have begun to explain. Leaving something out is not a feature of failed explanations, but of successful explanations. 

Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all. If your model of how pain is a product of brain activity still has a box in it labeled “pain,” you haven’t yet begun to explain what pain is, and if your model of consciousness carries along nicely until the magic moment when you have to say “then a miracle occurs” you haven’t begun to explain what consciousness is. 

This leads some people to insist that consciousness can never be explained. But why should consciousness be the only thing that can’t be explained? Solids and liquids and gases can be explained in terms of things that aren’t themselves solids or liquids or gases. Surely life can be explained in terms of things that aren’t themselves alive — and the explanation doesn’t leave living things lifeless. The illusion that consciousness is the exception comes about, I suspect, because of a failure to understand this general feature of successful explanation. Thinking, mistakenly, that the explanation leaves something out, we think to save what otherwise would be lost by putting it back into the observer as a quale — or some other “intrinsically” wonderful property. The psyche becomes the protective skirt under which all these beloved kittens can hide. 
(Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p. 454-455)