- Length
- 528 pagesLittle, Brown, 1991; Penguin paperback 1993
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Consciousness Explained
Five hundred pages arguing that the last piece of Descartes has to go: not the immaterial soul, which nobody defends, but the inner stage where it used to sit. Dennett's title has been called the most over-promising in modern philosophy, and he has said he meant it as a provocation.
- Date
- 1991
- Author
- Daniel Dennett
- Region
- Tufts, United States
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 5 years
- Years back to what it answers
- 350 years
Immediately influential, immediately attacked, and the book that made consciousness a respectable subject for philosophers and scientists to argue about together.
What the book says
A book arguing that almost everyone, including scientists who have rejected dualism, still thinks about the mind as if there were a place inside where everything comes together and is presented to someone. Dennett calls this the Cartesian Theatre and spends the first half showing that no such place exists in the brain and that assuming one generates false questions. His evidence is largely experimental: cases where the timing of a conscious experience cannot be pinned down, where the brain apparently revises the past, where subjects report seeing things that were never presented. If there were a screen and an audience, these results would demand an answer about what was on the screen and when; without one, the question dissolves. In its place he offers the multiple drafts model. Perception and thought consist of many parallel processes, each producing partial interpretations, continuously revised, with no master version and no moment at which something becomes conscious. What we call consciousness is not a further stage but the ongoing product of whichever drafts happen to influence memory, speech and action - and the sense of a unified inner observer is itself one of the things the brain produces.
What it argues
That consciousness is not a thing that happens in a place but a pattern in what the brain does, and that looking for the moment or the location at which something becomes conscious is looking for something that does not exist. The multiple drafts model replaces the single stream: many partial narratives are produced in parallel, edited and overwritten, and which of them counts as what the subject experienced depends on what gets probed and when. Dennett's method for handling first-person reports is deliberately careful - he takes what a subject sincerely says as data about their beliefs about their experience, without assuming those beliefs are accurate, since on his account the brain has no privileged access to its own processing either. The self follows the same treatment: not an inner witness but a centre of narrative gravity, a useful abstraction rather than a thing.
What it answered
Meditations on First Philosophy 1641René Descartes
Descartes, at three and a half centuries, and the residual Cartesianism he sees in contemporary cognitive science - in talk of where information becomes available to consciousness, in theories that posit a stage in processing at which experience happens. He is also answering the philosophers who take conscious experience to be the one thing a physical account cannot reach, and the book's tone toward them is impatient in a way that has coloured the reception.
What answered it
The Conscious Mind 1996David Chalmers
Chalmers, five years later and decisively for the shape of the field. The two positions have organised philosophy of mind ever since: on one side the claim that a complete functional account leaves nothing out, on the other that it leaves out the only thing that made the problem interesting. Searle attacked from a third direction, and the philosopher Ned Block's distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness gave the dispute its standard vocabulary.
How it argues
By dismantling intuitions with cases, at length and with a great deal of humour. Dennett's characteristic move is to take a phenomenon that seems to require the theatre - the apparent continuity of vision, the timing of judgements, filling in of the blind spot - and show that the brain need not produce what it seems to produce, only the judgement that it has. The prose is conversational and the book is long; readers divide sharply on whether the accumulation of examples constitutes an argument or postpones one.
The moment
The early 1990s, when consciousness had just become scientifically respectable again after decades in which serious researchers avoided it. Dennett had studied under Ryle at Oxford and worked with cognitive scientists throughout his career; the book is written for both audiences at once and uses experimental results, computer analogies and philosophical argument in the same paragraph, which is why it reached a general readership and why specialists in each field complain about the treatment of the others.
How it travelled
Into the sciences as much as into philosophy. Heterophenomenology became a standard methodological reference in consciousness research; the multiple drafts model is discussed in cognitive neuroscience alongside rival global-workspace theories; and the book is one of very few works of academic philosophy that general readers have actually read. Its title is routinely used against it, and Dennett's opponents have proposed alternatives more than once.
The strongest objection
Chalmers', and it can be stated in a sentence: everything in the book is an account of what the brain does, and the question was why doing it feels like anything. Dennett can explain discrimination, integration, report and the sense of having a unified experience - and a system could in principle do all of that with nothing going on inside, so the account seems compatible with the absence of the thing to be explained. His answer is that the residue is an artefact of the picture he has spent the book dismantling and that anyone who feels something is left out has not finished the argument. This is not evasion, but it is unfalsifiable in the same way as the position it opposes, and neither side has produced a consideration the other must accept.
Why read it
Because it is genuinely enjoyable, requires no background, and will make you notice how much of your picture of your own mind you have never examined. The chapters on the Cartesian Theatre and on the timing experiments are the core. Read Chalmers afterwards; the pair is the argument.
- First printed
- 1991
- First in English
- 1991
- Digitised
- No
The book grew out of a graduate seminar and Dennett credits the participants in the preface; its heterophenomenological method - taking subjects' reports as data about what they believe rather than about what is happening - is set out in the middle chapters and has had a life of its own.
Written in English and translated widely. In copyright.
Where it stands
Live and one of the two poles of a continuing argument. Illusionism about consciousness, of which this book is the founding statement, has serious contemporary defenders and is a minority position; the field has not resolved the question and shows no sign of doing so.
On quoting this book
In copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Dennett denies the existence of conscious experience or redescribes it is disputed and he objects to the first characterisation vigorously. Whether heterophenomenology is a neutral method or one that builds in his conclusions is argued. Whether the multiple drafts model is a genuine empirical theory or a philosophical stance is questioned by scientists. And the book's treatment of the timing experiments has been contested on the experimental details as well as on the interpretation.