Consciousness Explained
Dennett (Daniel)
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Book Structure

  1. Prelude: How Are Hallucinations Possible?
    → 1. The Brain in the Vat
    → 2. Pranksters in the Brain
    → 3. A Party Game Called Psychoanalysis
    → 4. Preview
    Part I: Problems and Methods
  2. Explaining Consciousness
    → 1. Pandora’s Box: Should Consciousness be Demystified?
    → 2. The Mystery of Consciousness
    → 3. The Attractions of Mind Stuff
    → 4. Why Dualism is Forlorn
    → 5. The Challenge
  3. A Visit to the Phenomenological Garden
    → 1. Welcome to the Phenom
    → 2. Our Experience of the External World
    → 3. Our Experience of the Internal World
    → 4. Affect
  4. A Method for Phenomenology
    → 1. First Person Plural
    → 2. The Third-Person Perspective
    → 3. The Method of Heterophenomenology
    → 4. Fictional Worlds and Heterophenomenological Worlds
    → 5. The Discreet Charm of the Anthropologist
    → 6. Discovering What Someone is Really Talking About
    → 7. Shakey’s Mental Images
    → 8. The Neutrality of Heterophenomenology
    Part II: An Empirical Theory of the Mind
  5. Multiple Drafts Versus the Cartesian Theatre
    → 1. The Point of View of the Observer
    → 2. Introducing the Multiple Drafts Model
    → 3. Orwellian and Stalinesque Revisions
    → 4. The Theatre of Consciousness Revisited
    → 5. The Multiple Drafts Model of Action
  6. Time and Experience
    → 1. Fleeting Moments and Hopping Rabbits
    → 2. How the Brain Represents Time
    → 3. Libet’s Case of “Backwards Referral in Time”
    → 4. Libet’s Claim of Subjective Delay of Consciousness of Intention
    → 5. A Treat: Grey Walter’s Precognitive Carousel
    → 6. Loose Ends
  7. The Evolution of Consciousness
    → 1. Inside the Black Box of Consciousness
    → 2. Early Days
    → → Scene One: The Birth of Boundaries and Reasons
    → → Scene Two: New and Better Ways of Producing Future
    → 3. Evolution in Brains, and the Baldwin Effect
    → 4. Plasticity in the Human Brain: Setting the Stage
    → 5. The Invention of Good and Bad Habits of Autostimulation
    → 6. The Third Evolutionary Process: Memes and Cultural Evolution
    → 7. The Memes of Consciousness: The Virtual Machine to be Installed
  8. How Words Do Things with Us
    → 1. Review: E Pluribus Unum
    → 2. Bureaucracy versus Pandaemonium
    → 3. When Words Want to Get Themselves Said
  9. The Architecture of the Human Mind
    → 1. Where Are We?
    → 2. Orienting Ourselves with the Thumbnail Sketch
    → 3. And Then What Happens
    → 4. The Powers of the Joycean Machine
    → 5. But is this a Theory of Consciousness?
    Part III: The Philosophical Problems of Consciousness
  10. Show and Tell
    → 1. Rotating Images in the Mind’s Eye
    → 2. Words, Pictures, and Thoughts
    → 3. Reporting and Expressing
    → 4. Zombies, Zimboes, and the User Illusion
    → 5. Problems with Folk Psychology
  11. Dismantling the Witness Protection Program
    → 1. Review
    → 2. Blindsight: Partial Zombiehood?
    → 3. Hide the Thimble: An Exercise in Consciousness-Raising
    → 4. Prosthetic Vision: What, Aside from Information, Is Still Missing?
    → 5. “Filling In” versus Finding Out
    → 6. Neglect as a Pathological Loss of Epistemic Appetite
    → 7. Virtual Presence
    → 8. Seeing Is Believing: A Dialogue with Otto
  12. Qualia Disqualified
    → 1. A New Kite String
    → 2. Why Are There Colours?
    → 3. Enjoying Our Experiences
    → 4. A Philosophical Fantasy: Inverted Qualia
    → 5. “Epiphenomenal” Qualia?
    → 6. Getting Back on my Rocker
  13. The Reality of Selves
    → 1. How Human Beings Spin a Self
    → 2. How Many Selves to a Customer?
    → 3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  14. Consciousness Imagined
    → 1. Imagining a Conscious Robot
    → 2. What It Is Like to Be a Bat
    → 3. Minding and Mattering
    → 4. Consciousness Explained, or Explained Away?
    Appendix A (for Philosophers)
    Appendix B (for Scientists)
Book Comment

Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1991


"Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Review of 'Consciousness Explained' by Daniel C. Dennett"

Source: The Review of Metaphysics, pp. 398–99


Full Text
  1. Dennett aims to develop an empirical, scientifically respectable theory of human consciousness — one that demystifies the mind by showing how the various phenomena that compose consciousness "are all physical effects of the brain's activities" (p.16).
  2. The model of consciousness as "Cartesian theater," where "a light-and-sound show is presented to a solitary but powerful audience, the Ego or Central Executive" (p. 227), is to be replaced by a "multiple drafts" model of consciousness. Consciousness is not a single narrative, with an author of record, but rather the gappy product of many processes of interpretation in the brain (p. 94).
  3. Dennett's theory closes in on consciousness from "above" and "below." From above, the theorist begins with a subject's "heterophenomenology." From below, the theorist studies underlying mechanisms in the brain. A subject's heterophenomenological world is the theorist's third-person description of the world as it seems to the subject (the world according to Garp; Sherlock Holmes's London). The theorist relates the objects of the resulting heterophenomenological world to events going on in the subject's brain at the time (p. 407). Whether or not the deliverances of introspection are true is an empirical matter, to be determined by whether or not portrayed objects bear a striking resemblance to the "real goings-on in people's brains" (p. 85). (It is hard to see what in the brain could even count as bearing a striking resemblance to the notion of Santa Claus expressed by "I just can't stop thinking about Santa Claus.")
  4. The multiple drafts model of consciousness is supposed to solve, or dissolve, the traditional philosophical puzzles of consciousness. Dennett acutely sets out the traditional puzzles, and meets some of them head-on: on his model, there is no inner display, no "Boss neuron," no qualia. In other cases, however, it is unclear how Dennett thinks that his view addresses the philosophical problems that he so vividly lays out. For example, an initially compelling reason for dualism he says, is an intuition that nothing in the brain could "hate racism, love someone, be a source of mattering" (p. 33). Yet even if dualism is untenable, I do not see how Dennett's overall argument either shows that the intuition is false or gives a mechanistic account of the intuition itself.
  5. Dennett speaks of events of content-fixation in the brain (p. 365). This is the point at which Dennett's theory of consciousness must be joined with his theory of intentionality, developed elsewhere. Despite Dennett's cryptic remarks, it is not obvious how the pieces are supposed to fit together. Is a person in a "contentful" state in virtue of content-fixing events in his brain, as suggested here, or in virtue of patterns of gross observable behavior, as Dennett's intentional-stance theory implies?
  6. Consciousness Explained is written for a general intellectual audience, not just for specialists in philosophy or the cognitive sciences. (For philosophers and scientists, Dennett provides two extremely short technical appendices, which raise more questions than they answer.) To induce the reader to think about consciousness from an exclusively third-person, materialist1 perspective, Dennet employs surveys of scientific literature, thought experiments2, analogies, "just-so" stories, and other devices. The book brims with provocative suggestions — such as the idea of the self as a "center of narrative gravity" — that others may want to develop (or refute) in detail.
  7. This book is vintage Dennett. On the one hand, it is too swashbuckling for those with a taste for close argument; on the other hand, it is stimulating and suggestive, full of clever turns, and enjoyable to read.

Paper Comment

For the full text, follow this link (Local website only): PDF File3.


"Brown (Curtis) - Dennett, Consciousness Explained: Three Theses"

Source: Trinity University (Texas) Website


Full Text

Dennett has various targets in his book; they all seem to get lumped together, but in fact some seem distinct from others. Here are three that it might be useful to distinguish.
  1. Special Place in the Brain: Many of Dennett's arguments are focussed on "Cartesian materialism" or the "Cartesian theater," the idea that there's a place in the brain where brain states become conscious. Well, in principle there could be. Why does Dennett think there isn't?
    • A. Partly because of a kind of a priori argument that if consciousness makes a difference to behavior, it would be very inefficient to have to funnel all information through a particular place in the brain before it had an effect on behavior. Given that it takes time for signals to move from one part of the brain to another, we'd react to things more slowly if all signals had to make it to a particular spot before they had their behavioral effects. Since that would be an inefficient way for the brain to work, it's unlikely that this is the kind of brain evolutionary pressures have produced.
      Interestingly, as far as I can see, this argument loses its force if consciousness is epiphenomenal (in the good scientific sense, not the bad philosophical one). If consciousness is just a by-product of the brain processes that produce behavior, then the brain could go ahead and produce behavior right away, while consciousness of the state that produced the behavior could wait until the signals got to the right place.
    • B. In addition to the a priori argument, there are more empirical arguments to the effect that no particular part of the brain looks like a good candidate for the place where consciousness takes place.
  2. Time of Occurrence of Conscious States: The special-place-in-the-brain view is closely connected with the view that there is a determinate time at which brain events become conscious. Why does Dennett think that?
    • A. Since it takes time for information to move from one part of the brain to another, we can't give a determinate figure for how long it takes inputs to become conscious unless we can identify a place in the brain at which they become conscious. So arguments against a precise location for conscious experience become also arguments against a precise time for conscious experience.
      (There seems to be an assumption here that as far as I can see isn't necessarily true, though it certainly could be, namely that consciousness couldn't occur, so to speak, in different parts of the brain at different times. At one moment I have a conscious state in one place, at the next moment I have a conscious state in a different place. Two problems about this possibility:
      … 1. Then what makes some states conscious and others not?
      … 2. If states in different places can be conscious at different times, why not at the same time?
      But then we'd lose the serial or "von Neumanesque" aspect of consciousness.)
    • B. There is also Dennett's verificationist argument that since in certain cases involving very short time intervals, we can't have evidence that will decide whether states at certain times are conscious or not, therefore there can't be a fact of the matter about whether those states at those times are conscious or not. I'm worried about the verificationism here; it seems perfectly coherent to me that I could make judgments about my own (prior) conscious experiences which are determinately true or false even though I can't (now) determine whether they are true or false.
  3. No Phenomenology, Only Heterophenomenology: One of the most puzzling things about the book is that many of the detailed arguments apply only to very small distances and very short time intervals. Suppose we agreed with Dennett that there's no Cartesian Theater inside the brain, and that over very short intervals there's no fact of the matter about precisely when states become conscious. So far that still leaves open the possibility that there is a bigger place where consciousness takes place, namely the brain as a whole, and that there are determinate facts about when conscious experiences occur provided that we don't try to achieve levels of precision down to tens of nanoseconds. But for Dennett the Cartesian theater attacks and the attacks on the Orwellian / Stalinesque distinction are just the thin edge of the wedge; the ultimate goal is to convince us that in a sense there are no facts at all about conscious experience, that there is no phenomenology: there is only heterophenomenology and brain stuff, no genuine phenomenology in between. Why does he think that?
    • A. Argument from scientific method. All the evidence we have about phenomenology is evidence about our heterophenomenological interpretation of verbal reports. Therefore we can't ever discover the facts about real phenomenology, only the facts about heterophenomenology. Therefore there are no facts about real phenomenology. Both "therefores" look problematic to me. Why can't we learn about real phenomenology by gathering heterophenomenological evidence and subjecting it to critical scrutiny? And even if we can't, the second "therefore" seems to involve verificationism again.
    • B. Argument from avoidance of skepticism. Rosenthal has formalized the common-sense view of consciousness. But on Rosenthal's view it looks like we can make all sorts of mistakes about our conscious experience. We can't. So Rosenthal's view is mistaken. So common sense is mistaken. So there's no such thing as consciousness. (Or something like that. A million questionable steps here!)

Paper Comment

Discussion of "Dennett (Daniel) - Consciousness Explained"; Link (Defunct).


"Newman (Benjamin) - Dennett's Consciousness Explained: Its Critics, And The Controversy Over The “True Nature” Of Consciousness"

Source: Stanford Website

Paper Comment


"Dennett (Daniel) - Prelude: How Are Hallucinations Possible?"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, Chapter 1, pp. 3-20


Sections
  1. The Brain in the Vat
  2. Pranksters in the Brain
  3. A Party Game Called Psychoanalysis
  4. Preview


"Dennett (Daniel) - Explaining Consciousness"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, Chapter 2, pp. 21-42


Sections
  1. Pandora’s Box: Should Consciousness be Demystified?
  2. The Mystery of Consciousness
  3. The Attractions of Mind Stuff
  4. Why Dualism is Forlorn
  5. The Challenge


"Dennett (Daniel) - A Visit to the Phenomenological Garden"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, Chapter 3, pp. 43-65


Sections
  1. Welcome to the Phenom
  2. Our Experience of the External World
  3. Our Experience of the Internal World
  4. Affect


"Dennett (Daniel) - A Method for Phenomenology"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, Chapter 4, pp. 66-100


Sections
  1. First Person Plural
  2. The Third-Person Perspective
  3. The Method of Heterophenomenology
  4. Fictional Worlds and Heterophenomenological Worlds
  5. The Discreet Charm of the Anthropologist
  6. Discovering What Someone is Really Talking About
  7. Shakey’s Mental Images
  8. The Neutrality of Heterophenomenology


"Dennett (Daniel) - Multiple Drafts Versus the Cartesian Theatre"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, Chapter 5, pp. 101-138


Sections
  1. The Point of View of the Observer
  2. Introducing the Multiple Drafts Model
  3. Orwellian and Stalinesque Revisions
  4. The Theatre of Consciousness Revisited
  5. The Multiple Drafts Model of Action


"Dennett (Daniel) - Time and Experience"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, Chapter 6, pp. 139-170


Sections
  1. Fleeting Moments and Hopping Rabbits
  2. How the Brain Represents Time
  3. Libet’s Case of “Backwards Referral in Time”
  4. Libet’s Claim of Subjective Delay of Consciousness of Intention
  5. A Treat: Grey Walter’s Precognitive Carousel
  6. Loose Ends


"Dennett (Daniel) - The Evolution of Consciousness"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, Chapter 7, pp. 171-226


Sections
  1. Inside the Black Box of Consciousness
  2. Early Days
    … Scene One: The Birth of Boundaries and Reasons
    … Scene Two: New and Better Ways of Producing Future
  3. Evolution in Brains, and the Baldwin Effect
  4. Plasticity in the Human Brain: Setting the Stage
  5. The Invention of Good and Bad Habits of Autostimulation
  6. The Third Evolutionary Process: Memes and Cultural Evolution
  7. The Memes of Consciousness: The Virtual Machine to be Installed


"Dennett (Daniel) - How Words Do Things with Us"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, Chapter 8, pp. 227-252


Sections
  1. Review: E Pluribus Unum
  2. Bureaucracy versus Pandaemonium
  3. When Words Want to Get Themselves Said


"Dennett (Daniel) - The Architecture of the Human Mind"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, Chapter 9, pp. 253-284


Sections
  1. Where Are We?
  2. Orienting Ourselves with the Thumbnail Sketch
  3. And Then What Happens
  4. The Powers of the Joycean Machine
  5. But is this a Theory of Consciousness?


"Dennett (Daniel) - Show and Tell"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, Chapter 10, pp. 285-320


Sections
  1. Rotating Images in the Mind’s Eye
  2. Words, Pictures, and Thoughts
  3. Reporting and Expressing
  4. Zombies, Zimboes, and the User Illusion
  5. Problems with Folk Psychology


"Dennett (Daniel) - Dismantling the Witness Protection Program"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, Chapter 11, pp. 321-368


Sections
  1. Review
  2. Blindsight: Partial Zombiehood?
  3. Hide the Thimble: An Exercise in Consciousness-Raising
  4. Prosthetic Vision: What, Aside from Information, Is Still Missing?
  5. “Filling In” versus Finding Out
  6. Neglect as a Pathological Loss of Epistemic Appetite
  7. Virtual Presence
  8. Seeing Is Believing: A Dialogue with Otto


"Dennett (Daniel) - Qualia Disqualified"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, Chapter 12, pp. 369-411


Sections
  1. A New Kite String
  2. Why Are There Colours?
  3. Enjoying Our Experiences
  4. A Philosophical Fantasy: Inverted Qualia
  5. “Epiphenomenal” Qualia?
  6. Getting Back on my Rocker


"Dennett (Daniel) - The Reality of Selves"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, Chapter 13, pp. 412-430


Sections
  1. How Human Beings Spin a Self
  2. How Many Selves to a Customer?
  3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being


"Dennett (Daniel) - Consciousness Imagined"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, Chapter 14, 431-456


Sections
  1. Imagining a Conscious Robot
  2. What It Is Like to Be a Bat
  3. Minding and Mattering
  4. Consciousness Explained, or Explained Away?


"Dennett (Daniel) - Consciousness Explained: Appendix A (for Philosophers)"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, pp. 457-463


"Dennett (Daniel) - Consciousness Explained: Appendix B (for Scientists)"

Source: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1991, pp. 464-468


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  2. Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)


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