Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained
Author(s)	Daniel C. Dennett
Subject(s)	Consciousness
Genre(s)	Science, philosophy
Publisher	Little, Brown and Co.
Publication date	1991
Pages	511
ISBN	0316180653
OCLC Number	23648691
Dewey Decimal	126 20
LC Classification	B105.C477 D45 1991
Preceded by	The Intentional Stance
Followed by	Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Consciousness Explained is a 1991 book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett which offers an account of how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain.

Synopsis

The book puts forward a "multiple drafts" model of consciousness, suggesting that there is no single central place (a "Cartesian Theater") where conscious experience occurs; instead there are "various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain".^[1] The brain consists of a "bundle of semi-independent agencies";^[2] when "content-fixation" takes place in one of these, its effects may propagate so that it leads to the utterance of one of the sentences that make up the story in which the central character is one's "self". Dennett's view of consciousness is that it is the apparently serial account for the brain's underlying parallelism.

One of the book's more controversial claims is that qualia do not (and cannot) exist. Dennett's main argument is that the various properties attributed to qualia by philosophers—qualia are supposed to be incorrigible, ineffable, private, directly accessible and so on—are incompatible, so the notion of qualia is incoherent. The non-existence of qualia would mean that there is no hard problem of consciousness, and "philosophical zombies", which are supposed to act like a human in every way while somehow lacking qualia, cannot exist. So, as Dennett wryly notes, he is committed to the belief that we are all zombies—adding that his remark is very much open to misinterpretation.^[3]

Dennett claims that our brains hold only a few salient details about the world, and that this is the only reason we are able to function at all. Thus, we don't store elaborate pictures in short-term memory, as this is not necessary and would consume valuable computing power. Rather, we log what has changed and assume the rest has stayed the same, with the result that we miss some details, as demonstrated in various experiments and illusions, some of which Dennett outlines.^[4][5] Research subsequent to Dennett's book indicates that some of his postulations were more conservative than expected. A year after Consciousness Explained was published, Dennett noted "I wish in retrospect that I'd been more daring, since the effects are stronger than I claimed". And since then examples continue to accumulate of the illusory nature of our visual world.^[6]

A key philosophical method is heterophenomenology, in which the verbal or written reports of subjects are treated as akin to a theorist's fiction—the subject's report is not questioned, but it is not assumed to be an incorrigible report about that subject's inner state. This approach allows the reports of the subject to be a datum in psychological research, thus circumventing the limits of classical behaviorism.

Also Dennett says that only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all: «To explain is to explain away».

Reactions

Critics of Dennett's approach, such as David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel, argue that Dennett's argument misses the point of the inquiry by merely re-defining consciousness as an external property and ignoring the subjective aspect completely. This has led detractors to nickname the book Consciousness Ignored and Consciousness Explained Away.^[7][8] Dennett and his supporters, however, respond that the aforementioned "subjective aspect" as commonly used is non-existent and unscientific, and that his "re-definition" is the only coherent description of consciousness.

However, John Searle argues^[9] that Dennett, who insists that discussing subjectivity is nonsense because it is unscientific and science presupposes objectivity, is making a category error. Searle argues that the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but are not necessarily ontologically objective. Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is epistemically subjective, whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is epistemically objective. In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness. Searle says that in Dennett's view, there is no consciousness in addition to the computational features, because that is all that consciousness amounts to for him: mere effects of a von Neumann(esque) virtual machine implemented in a parallel architecture and therefore implies that conscious states are illusory, but Searle points out: "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality."

See also

• Change blindness
• Homunculus argument

Notes

1. ^ Dennett 1991, p. 365
2. ^ Dennett 1991, p. 260
3. ^ Dennett 1991, p. 406. In a footnote Dennett states: "It would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context!"
4. ^ Spinney 2000
5. ^ Dennett 1991. See e.g. chapter 5 on "Orwellian and Stalinesque Revisions". Memory is central to much of Dennett's book, with reference found throughout.
6. ^ Spinney 2000, p.30
7. ^ Barash 2003
8. ^ Carruthers 2005, p. 32
9. ^ Searle, J R: The Mystery of Consciousness (1997) p. 95–131

References

• Barash, David P. (March 22, 2003), "Dennett and the Darwinizing of Free Will", Human Nature Review 3: 222–225, http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/dcdennett.html 
• Carruthers, Peter (2005), Consciousness: Essays from a Higher-order Perspective, Oxford University Press, p. 247, ISBN 9780199277353 
• Dennett, Daniel (1991), Allen Lane, ed., Consciousness Explained, The Penguin Press, ISBN 0-7139-9037-6 (UK Hardcover edition, 1992) 
• Spinney, Laura (November 18, 2000), "Blind to change", New Scientist (No.2265): 29–32 

External links

• Dennett, Daniel (1988). Quining Qualia.
• Lormand, E. Qualia! (Now Showing at a Theater near You)
• de Leon, D. The Qualities of Qualia