What it argues
Consciousness Explained is Daniel Dennett's attempt to replace what he calls the Cartesian Theater — the intuitive picture of consciousness as a single unified stream of experience observed by a self — with a model he calls Multiple Drafts. The book is ambitious in scope and deliberately provocative in title. Dennett does not claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness; he claims to dissolve it by arguing that the hard problem is built on a mistaken picture of what consciousness is.
The Cartesian Theater model assumes there is a central place in the brain where sensory information arrives, gets processed, and is "presented" to the conscious subject. Dennett argues that no such place exists and no such presentation happens. Instead, the brain runs multiple parallel processes that revise and compete with one another. What we experience as a unified, moment-by-moment conscious stream is actually a kind of retroactive narrative the brain constructs. Experiments on visual perception, temporal ordering, and change blindness are used to show that our introspective reports of our own experience are not reliable. We often report experiencing things we could not have experienced at the moment we claim.
What it gets right
- 1.
The Cartesian Theater — the idea of a central neural location where conscious experience is 'presented' — is a myth. No such location exists in the brain.
- 2.
Consciousness is better understood as Multiple Drafts: parallel processes that revise and compete until a narrative is retroactively settled on.
- 3.
Introspection is not reliable. Experiments show we routinely misreport the timing, sequence, and content of our own perceptual experiences.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Daniel C. Dennett is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University, where he co-directs the Center for Cognitive Studies. His other books include Brainstorms, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Kinds of Minds, Freedom Evolves, and From Bacteria to Bach and Back. A committed philosophical naturalist, Dennett has spent his career arguing that all aspects of human experience — mind, consciousness, free will, and culture — can be explained without appeal to the supernatural. He is one of the most widely read philosophers of the last half century.
