Consciousness Explained

After having listened to this book, I will never fall for the make-believe just so stories about consciousness again. There is no reason to have to appeal to fantasy to explain consciousness. This book gives a complete story and forevermore I'll be able to not be sucked into false thought processes concerning the topics about the mind.

Metaphysics, when it's at is best is to fill in the parts that physics (or science) is having a hard time explaining because they don't really understand the object and the terms that describe the object under investigation. Dennett fills in these gaps better than any scientist can. For those who need make-believe and should be sitting at the children's table instead of the adult's table they need to read this book and they can move ahead as I have because of this book.

The best way to think about our self is by realizing we are not an analytical point. Euclid's first definition in his "Elements" is that a point is that which has no breadth. The book doesn't make this analogy, but I do, and state that "the I is that which has breadth", and you know you are listening to a remarkable book when you can go beyond the points the author is making because he educates you so fully.

The author defends this by showing why the self is "a center of narrative gravity", by showing how the mind is not like a Cartesian theater with a homunculus (little human) watching the play as the film unwinds. "There is not anything outside of the text", the text is just the final draft we think out loud. But to get there we first go through Orwellian rewrites and Stalinesque theater before we get the final draft from many rewrites. (Don't worry. The author explains this much better than I can. I'm just trying to whet your appetite in order for you to listen to this book.)

The author steps me through the black box of the mind by first discussing the outputs we measure from our responses to the environment. That was the first eight hours of the book. He called that the analytical approach. That part confused me. I'm not a scientist. The next part he called the synthetic part. How we would build that black box step by step. That's the part where I started listening to every word because it just excited me.

Understanding qualia, our emotional experiences, or what Locke would call our secondary experiences, which lead to things being our 'beliefs' or "seems to", is not how to think about how our mind works. When you can change a "seems to" to the 'is' with no lost of understanding just drop 'seems to' and the phoniness of qualia.

The author uses computers, software, and universal Turing machines and Von Neumann in explaining his thesis. You will walk away with consciousness demystified. You'll be on guard against those who use make-believe arguments to defend a world that doesn't exist.

This book is over 20 years old. I only wished I had discovered it when it first came out. It would have stopped me from wasting my time with people who don't understand that we have ways of thinking about the world that is not dualistic and doesn't need special
make-believe explanations to explain who we are as thinking machines.

I almost never change the speed of the audio. For this book, I did and listened to it at 1.25x speed. Made for a much better listen.

Yes, the title is audacious. Yes, it's not a perfect book. Yes, the subject is extremely complex and really smart people fight about it in prestigious journals, etc.

But Dennett has some fine ideas nonetheless. I go through periods of swinging in one direction and back again when it comes to what I'll just call the "consciousness wars." But lately Dennett's ideas are striking me as more and more correct (and I've always leaned in his and the Churchland's direction since I first began looking into these issues, maybe about two years ago).

For some extremely brief, but exciting (probably more so to people already immersed in the field and the debate) overviews of his position(s) check these short videos out:

1. What is the Mind-Body Problem?

2. Can Brain Explain Mind?

3. Why is Consciousness So Mysterious?

4. How Do Persons Maintain Their Identity?

2016.01.23–2016.02.07

Contents

Dennett DC (1991) (21:39) Consciousness Explained

Preface

01. Prelude: How Are Hallucinations Possible?
01.1. The Brain in the Vat
01.2. Pranksters in the Brain
01.3. A Party Game Called Psychoanalysis
01.4. Preview

Part I: Problems and Methods

02. Explaining Consciousness
02.1. Pandora's Box: Should Consciousness Be Demystified?
02.2. The Mystery of Consciousness
02.3. The Attractions of Mind Stuff
02.4. Why Dualism Is Forlorn
02.5. The Challenge

03. A Visit to the Phenomenological Garden
03.1. Welcome to the Phenom
03.2. Our Experience of the External World
03.3. Our Experience of the Internal World
03.4. Affect

04. A Method for Phenomenology
04.1. First Person Plural
04.2. The Third-Person Perspective
04.3. The Method of Heterophenomenology
04.4. Fictional Worlds and Heterophenomenological Worlds
04.5. The Discreet Charm of the Anthropologist
04.6. Discovering What Someone Is Really Talking About
04.7. Shakey's Mental Images
04.8. The Neutrality of Heterophenomenology

Part II: An Empirical Theory of Mind

05. Multiple Drafts Versus the Cartesian Theater
05.1. The Point of View of the Observer
05.2. Introducing the Multiple Drafts Model
05.3. Orwellian and Stalinesque Revisions
05.4. The Theater of Consciousness Revisited
05.5. The Multiple Drafts Model in Action

06. Time and Experience
06.1. Fleeting Moments and Hopping Rabbits
06.2. How the Brain Represents Time
06.3. Libet's Case of "Backwards Referral in Time"
06.4. Libet's Claim of Subjective Delay of Consciousness of Intention
06.5. A Treat: Grey Walter's Precognitive Carousel
06.6. Loose Ends

07. The Evolution of Consciousness
07.1. Inside the Black Box of Consciousness
07.2. Early Days
07.2.1. Scene One: The Birth of Boundaries and Reasons
07.2.2. Scene Two: New and Better Ways of Producing Future
07.3. Evolution in Brains, and the Baldwin Effect
07.4. Plasticity in the Human Brain: Setting the Stage
07.5. The Invention of Good and Bad Habits of Autostimulation
07.6. The Third Evolutionary Process: Memes and Cultural Evolution
07.7. The Memes of Consciousness: The Virtual Machine to Be Installed

08. How Words Do Things with Us
08.1. Review: E Pluribus Unum?
08.2. Bureaucracy versus Pandemonium
08.3. When Words Want to Get Themselves Said

09. The Architecture of the Human Mind
09.1. Where Are We?
09.2. Orienting Ourselves with the Thumbnail Sketch
09.3. And Then What Happens?
09.4. The Powers of the Joycean Machine
09.5. But Is This a Theory of Consciousness?

Part III: The Philosophical Problems of Consciousness

10. Show and Tell
10.1. Rotating Images in the Mind's Eye
10.2. Words, Pictures, and Thoughts
10.3. Reporting and Expressing
10.4. Zombies, Zimboes, and the User Illusion
10.5. Problems with Folk Psychology

11. Dismantling the Witness Protection Program
11.1. Review
11.2. Blindsight: Partial Zombiehood?
11.3. Hide the Thimble: An Exercise in Consciousness-Raising
11.4. Prosthetic Vision: What, Aside from Information, Is Still Missing?
11.5. "Filling In" versus Finding Out
11.6. Neglect as a Pathological Loss of Epistemic Appetite
11.7. Virtual Presence
11.8. Seeing Is Believing: A Dialogue with Otto

12. Qualia Disqualified
12.1. A New Kite String
12.2. Why Are There Colors?
12.3. Enjoying Our Experiences
12.4. A Philosophical Fantasy: Inverted Qualia
12.5. "Epiphenomenal" Qualia?
12.6. Getting Back on My Rocker

13. The Reality of Selves
13.1. How Human Beings Spin a Self
13.2. How Many Selves to a Customer?
13.3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being

14. Consciousness Imagined
14.1. Imagining a Conscious Robot
14.2. What It Is Like to Be a Bat
14.3. Minding and Mattering
14.4. Consciousness Explained, or Explained Away?

Appendix A (for Philosophers)
Appendix B (for Scientists)
Bibliography
Index

A hard book to plough through and one that is so careful and meticulous that it never reaches an interesting or clear-cut conlusion. Dennett takes hundreds of pages to refute the idea of consciousness as a sentient observer sitting inside man's brain (a concept known as "the Cartesian Theatre"). I could have agreed about that being untrue in half a page. When Dennett has finally finished explaining what consciousness is not, he disappointingly admits that he does not have a good alternative either. Ok, he tentatively puts forward an image of primitive man starting to utter noises to himself as a possible early start of conscious reflection. But that theory is hardly more impressive then the Cartesian Theatre that the rest of the book wanted to prove wrong. "Consciousness Explained" is an academical book that is totally useless, since it doesn't deliver any of the promises contained in the title.

To be rewritten.

A more accurate title here would be “Consciousness Explained Away,” as greater wits than I have pointed out. This re-titling itself gives the gist of the work's true project, which is to see just how far the explaining-away of our first-person starting point as conscious existents can proceed before self-contradiction ensues. A big part of the problem is Dennett's disingenuous attempt to masquerade explaining-away for explanation which makes it difficult to assess the true value of his contribution to the problem. A more minor annoyance was Dennett's penchant for rhetorical pyrotechnic displays, through which he expresses his sustained assurance that, should the reader fail to accept the terms of his reductive mode of explanation, it must simply be because s/he is a rank, blinkered dogmatist given to retrograde mythifying! Yet it turns out that, like a photo negative, even an attempt to explain-away can indirectly illumine the object. When Dennett's angle of approach leads him to self-contradiction, or else to smuggle in ever subtler computational and mechanomorphic anthropomorphisms in order to fill the explanatory gaps that are (inevitably) left over, we can discern the areas in which his eliminative materialist starting point fails us and where we need to pay the phenomenology of lived experience its dues.

Introspection reveals a distinction between two ways that a thing can be a locus in the world: perspective and physical location. Whereas the latter can be defined geometrically, as a point held in a web of relations in space and time, the latter, as a qualitative locus, seems to leave us with an unexplained phenomenal remainder when we consider it from a purely physicalist framework. The criteria by which we conceive the identity of our first-person being and those that we use to conceive the identity of physical objects thus seem to diverge at this point, hence the so-called hard-problem of consciousness.

Dennett's is an effort to explain in purely third-person terms the most characteristic features of our conscious life, most notably, the persistent conviction we have of being selves, loci of perspective, and unitary ontic centers in our own right. This is the persisting intuition we have of the irreducibility of our first-person stance, which discloses the world as experience. Unfortunately, explanation by third-person principles falls short of describing the integrity and consistency of the phenomenal domain, and Dennett is left throughout trying to (rather awkwardly) explain away all the phenomena that can't fit on the procrustean bed of his eliminativist methodology. In the process, reified computational metaphors are smuggled in to fill the explanatory void left once reference to the phenomena themselves has been suppressed.

The central thesis in Dennett's work is that the self, far from being some ultimate ontological reference point, as it has been since at least the Cogito, is an epiphenomenal construct. To understand the significance of this move, you have to consider the foundational function the notion of the substantival self has played in philosophy. Now, we infer a substantial, ontic center to the psyche, much as we once inferred an ontic center to the natural order, via the concept of God. The reasoning in both cases is the same: if there's an orderly web (to borrow Dennett's own image) to be seen, there must be a center to the web, whether that web be experience or the cosmos itself. Losing reference to that center, we lose our last basis for grounding explanation itself in some kind of reality, even the restricted reality of the self, to which Kant clung for rational grounding.

The placeholder for the center in an ontology is the sign of signs, because it is the organizer of all other signs. The self is perhaps the last refuge of substance ontology in the post-Kantian worldview. Phenomenology has since replaced ontology as rational grounding, and as substance was evacuated from the cosmos, it was pushed inwards, into the domain of “lived experience.” Now we find the last remainder of substance ontology in the notion of the supposed irreduibility of the “qualia” characterizing the first person stance.
Kant posited the empirically unknowable central subject as a necessary presupposition for explaining the order and regularity that emerge in our otherwise scattered stream of experience. The Kantian transcendental argument for postulating a unitary subject that underlies and grounds the systematicity of experience can be summed up as follows: “If there is no central self, then there can be no regularity in experience. If there is no regularity in experience, then no explanation is possible, scientific or otherwise. But scientific explanation is, manifestly, possible. So there must be a unitary self grounding the experience from which scientific explanations are gleaned.” Dennett's radical claim, against Kant, is that we can have regularity, and therefore explanation, without postulating a substantial, central self stocked with qualia. Such a postulate, to him, is merely a reified abstraction from underlying, neural-computational processes.

Dennett clearly takes an impish delight in his self-promotion as myth-buster extraordinaire. He takes great pains to show how the higher order unities of aesthetic enjoyment, responsible ethical agency and rational understanding that structure our experience at its highest are nothing more than the by-products of the collective behaviour of “stupid machines” in the brain. According to his multiple-drafts theory of consciousness, the sense of our being grounded in a unitary center of subjectivity at any given time – that feeling that underlies all experience, that we can give words to and call “I here, now” - is a mere abstraction edited out of a confluence of “parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration” that are inaccessible to introspection. The “I” that seems attached to every datum of my experience, making it “mine,” turns out to be a linguistically reified narrative construct. It represents the draft that momentarily trumps all others, the one that best streamlines the cacophony of parallel inner processes of endless revision into some kind of provisionally coordinated, working whole. There is no “central meaner” that corresponds to the linguistic sign, “I,” nor anything remotely akin to a causal agent in the brain. Unitary, centralized consciousness is a pragmatic “user illusion.” “Consciousness Imagined,” indeed. If anybody thought that the last vestige of Substance ontology that we find in the Kantian Transcendental Subject could hide here, in the fictive “Cartesian Theater” of phenomenology, Dennett would disabuse us of this notion.

In his chapter, “The Reality of Selves,” he describes the self as a narrative and pragmatic “principle of organization.” It is not much of a stretch to say that, according to his theory, we story ourselves into existence, much as we are storied by others. “Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are.”

He describes how making a self has to do with boundary creation, first via biological, then via cultural means. Boundary production starts with fencing off one's turf in physical space, as a cell forms a semi-permeable lipid membrane around itself. It culminates with fencing off one's turf in symbolic-linguistic space via the narrative identity-kits with which we shape our experience into a whole that bears the mark of our historic, cultural, and social backgrounds. Our narratives are thus our most powerful tools, as a species. The way that a spider spins webs to gain power over its environment in shaping it, so do humans gain control by reshaping their cultural environment via their posited narratives. Remember, consciousness to Dennett -just is- the epiphenomenal glow that attends a powerful, winning narrative structure. Persistent identity is persistent narrative. The boundaries of consciousness are the boundaries supplied by given patterns of narrative formation. Enter Foucault's analysis of the relation between narrative patterns and entrenched power structures.

“And where is the thing your self-representation is about? It is wherever you are. And what is this thing? It is nothing more than, and nothing less than, your center of narrative gravity.” Far from being a necessary ontological postulate of reason, a “thing” or a “place” where you find your standing in the world, consciousness turns out to be a fiction that is successively neurally re-instantiated according to variable cultural patterns of stimulus-selection. The only “center” that we in fact have is an imaginative construct, a “center of narrative gravity.” There is no agency, no you, involved in this ceaseless editorial process. “You” are quite simply storied into being by your brain's underlying computational processes. The core schema of “you” emerges as a means of simplifying the discordant mess of neural processes so as to produce a coherent map of reality that your brain can use to orient itself in the world.

So how do you get rational integration and unified conscious experience out of the collective behaviour of irreducibly plural interpretive strands of neuro-computation? To explain that, Dennett introduces the metaphorical device of a piece of neural “software” that, much like a serial computer, creates a step-by-step narrative thread out of the multiplex cacophony of conflicting reality-takes. Whether and how reason can mysteriously emerge from such a clamour of “stupid” computational “processes” is unclear. The metaphor does all the argumentative work here by painting a picture, and assures us that somehow, it just all hangs together like-so.

Mental imagery is where we'd be most tempted to posit some kind of substance to experience, in the form of qualia. It is precisely this domain that he surveys at some length, although from what I've read elsewhere (Evan Thompson's Mind in Life has a great chapter surveying the current state of imagery research), the imagery research so critical to his philosophical argument is far from being conclusive. Mental images, he argues, are what most supply us with the illusion that there is what he calls “figment” or “plenitude” to experience. Above all, it is images that give the feeling of continuity. But it's computation all the way down, if you look at experience (of colour, for instance) from a neural processing perspective. Because he characterizes experience as a “theoretical, narrative construct,” there is no “hard problem of consciousness” for him to contend with. The problem, he hopes, vanishes through redescription via the reigning computational metaphor.

And what about our nagging sense that experience comes as a sort of system, a perceptibly integrated whole, in short? “What we actually experience is the product of many processes of interpretation – editorial processes in effect.” In Dennett's view, it is this ongoing selectivity, simplification and editing out of surplus information so that it comes to fit a manageable pattern that can guide the organism's responses at the time. Moreover, “paradoxically, our sense of continuity comes from our marvelous insensitivity to most kinds of changes rather than from any genuine perceptiveness.” The “unity” that we take to be the measure of conscious realization is thus, ironically, a measure of blindness. This abstractive process of simplification that gives the semblance of consistency, integrity and texture to our stream of consciousness exists because of its great adaptive value, helping reduce noise in favour of survival-relevant information. Underlying the official editorial revision that glosses unity, our experience is, in fact, a cacophonous din.

Nor is there any canonical version of experience that you could poke a stick at and claim to be the real, true, “authentic” version of your experience. There is only an endless proliferation of versions, of drafts, of angles and perspectival takes. This is not only too bad for the poor self striving for autonomy, but also for the whole endeavour of philosophy and science to produce a complete explanation of anything. A Kantian quest for monolithic, universal principles of perspective-taking (which could provide the basis for explanation) was a neurally unrealizable fantasy. There just is no rationally unified perspective in the brain.

Since the interpretive pattern that constitutes “consciousness” is configured according to parameters learnt via cultural indoctrination, “pure” phenomenology turns out to be an exercise in cultural description. Far from offering any privileged access to my mind, it turns out to offer no access at all, since all that swims up to the top from this preconscious swarm is cultural script. Dennett's ontological commitment to a mechanistic-computational metaphor ultimately compels him to devalue first person evidence by claiming its reducibility to a “heterophenomenological” approach that a priori assumes that verbal reports give us sufficient purchase on lived experience. Every dimension of experience that doesn't fit into the constraints of his methodological presuppositions falls through the cracks as so much fictive dross.

That experience is to a large extent a formal construct is an insight at least as old as Kant. However, what Kant and most of his successors had and what Dennett wants to do away with is the residual ontic substrate that was held to necessarily underlie the construct. Dennet would slice away even this and in its place substitute a free-floating tissue of narrative monologue, supported only by distributed parallel processing.

Dennett's overriding motive is, I think, at bottom noble. He is troubled by the proliferation, in past attempts to explain mind, of homuncular, anthropomorphic, perpetually-unopenable, and intuitively-pleasing black-boxes which are supposed to designate the terminus of explanation. Where scientific analysis fails, a suitable homuncular resting point – a pseudo-explanatory myth or fiction – can be inserted. However, his solution to the problem substitutes one mode of pseudo-explanation for another.

Terrence Deacon, in his “Incomplete Nature,” called the eliminativist pattern of pseudo-explanation a species of explanation by “golems.” “Golem” accounts are attempts to describe the phenomenon of mind by dissecting it into mechanistic/computational parts. Dennett's view of mind as an information-processing device constituted by the joint functioning of myriad mini “stupid machines” in the brain is clearly a golem. Deacon shows how attempts such as Dennett's to purge anthropomorphic black-boxes, or homunculi, out of scientific explanation only end up being forced to pay their dues to the qualitative loci for which homunculi are “place-holders” by bringing ever-more “cryptic homunculi” into the picture, usually in the form of “golems,” which are “fractionated homunculi.” Deacon offered an elegant argument showing that explanation by golems is a cure worse than the homunculus disease, because it proceeds by presupposing ever subtler homuncular properties (such as informational, representational, and functional properties) at lower levels, without explaining them. Thus, the impersonal computational machines projected into the brain are treated by Dennett as ultimate loci of representation and information, without explaining how these representational and informational relations emerge.

Deacon showed how such a view takes informational relations out of the larger dynamic context which makes them possible and which grounds their real-world reference. It relies on an abstract, engineering definition of information which presupposes extrinsically-imposed reference – a human interpreter who can fix the representational relationship, or specify what the information is about. In contrast, he shows how information in living organisms is intrinsically interpreted, by virtue of the role it plays in the self-organizing dynamics of life. Thus, Dennett's reductionist approach cannot explain end-directed phenomena such as information, and representation, even as it presupposes these by inserting them, as “cryptic computational homunculi,”to make its eliminativist explanation work.

I would agree with Deacon that Dennett's hand-waving pseudo-explanatory insertions, at crucial parts of his argument, of golem metaphors can't be seen, as Dennett claims, as just descriptive glosses to be replaced by the more complex neuro-computational explanation that is supposed to be forthcoming. Rather, they must be seen as the places at which efforts to explain away phenomenology break down.

Lastly, the Kantian challenge of grounding explanation without the postulate of a unitary self remains. What is the epistemic status of Dennett's theory, if correct? If correct, and multiple drafts are all there are, then Dennett undercuts his own theory's rational basis. The whole truth of the theory is predicated on Dennett's (and our) capacity to hold together a synoptic, rational perspective on our minds that is more than just a momentary coalescence of distributive parallelism and interpretive pluralism. Otherwise, truth claims – even Dennett's – would be merely pragmatic fictional simplifications which are also inescapably distortions of the facts. An empirical theory that “explains away” the unity of conscious experience as an epiphenomenon undercuts its own rational basis.

The theory, as such, can't even be coherently articulated. In articulating it, you refute it, because you presuppose the first-person unitary subject that you attempt to explain away. More troubling still, it doesn't seem to be capable of informing any possible perspective that we can take on the world.

An empirical, homunculus-free explanation of consciousness need not be a reductive golem. Such an account is provided by such thinkers as Damasio, Deacon, Thompson, and Lakoff, whose physicalist theories of mind are nonetheless developed in dialogue with first-person accounts of lived experience.

Ultimately, as Thompson points out, experience is, inescapably, our original guide, since the content of any of the concepts that frame a theory of mind can only come from our intuitive, first-person experience of our own minds:

“To deny the truth of our own experience in the scientific study of ourselves is not only unsatisfactory; it is to render the scientific study of ourselves without a subject matter. But to suppose that science cannot contribute to an understanding

A bold book from my favorite philosopher-scientist that aims to build a framework for tackling perhaps the hardest question humanity has ever asked - "what is this conscious experience?" As in his other books, Dennett is adept at weaving the "soft" thought experiments of philosophy with the "harder" experiments of the scientific community. Some of his most triumphant points don't have the impact they may once have carried, as much of his material has been accepted (or disproved) in the last two decades of the rapidly evolving field of neuroscience. Despite its age, this book is a stellar introduction to anyone trying to approach consciousness.

Dennett's thought experiments and suggested activities for readers shed light on some fascinating phenomena of consciousness, including sensory dislocation & extension of self to tools and blind spots & the overly assuming nature of vision. This second investigation I found to be a powerful metaphor for much of the simulation that the brain performs in crafting our sensory experience. The discontinuity of consciousness is so striking particularly because of its apparent continuity. The brain doesn't so much "fill in" the blanks as it ignores their presence. Dennett makes the important point that this absence of representation (ignorance) is not the same as the representation of absence ("filling in").

The three themes of Dennett's that resonated most with me were the relationship between time & consciousness, information sharing and information barriers in the brain, and consciousness as cultural software.

1) Noticing the varying speeds of sensory signal propagation outside of the body (light vs. sound vs. chemicals) and the varying speeds of neural signal propagation in the brain, Dennett points out that the "present" for us is really more of a "smear" in time rather than a "point". He presents his Multiple Drafts Theory of Consciousness to show that in such a situation, different parts of the brain must act on different sets of information and, therefore, there is no single conscious experience. This is perhaps one of the most profound points that Dennett explores and he does so frequently throughout the book. Dennett also points out that temporal order outside the mind need not coincide exactly with temporal order as represented in the mind, though the two are correlated.

2) With so many specialized areas developing at different periods in human evolution, information sharing in the brain can be quite haphazard and arbitrary. The recognition that information may be present in one area of the brain but entirely unaccessible to another area is essential to understanding many functions and quirks of the brain. This is evident in many popular accounts of language disorders but Dennett also explores what this suggests for the evolution of consciousness. He imagines that early man armed with protospeech might have used "vocal autostimulation" (thinking out loud) as a means of bridging missing connections in his thought processes. In other words, if there's no path from A to B in the brain, there might have been one from A to speech to hearing to B! This clever circuit could then have evolved into silent thought for more privacy and eventually developed into the "mind's eye" visual experience of modern man. Even within the brain, there are likely many inefficient intermediary representations developed to bridge the internal "communication problem." Beyond evolutionary explanations, this idea is also highly suggestive of neuroscientific approaches to creativity. Speaking out loud, doodling, and gesturing to oneself may be more than just nervous ticks or distracting habits; they may instead be integral yet inefficient attempts to circumvent the missing information pathways in the brain!

Dennett also includes a list of "primordial facts" that he claims any theory on the evolution of consciousness must explain. I found them insightful and important enough for any neuroscientist that I've included them here verbatim:
n  
n   There are reasons to recognize.
n   Where there are reasons, there are points of view from which to recognize or evaluate them.
n   Any agent must distinguish "here inside" from "the external world."
n   All recognition must ultimately be accomplished by myriad "blind, mechanical" routines.
n   Inside the defended boundary, there need not always be a Higher Executive or General Headquarters.
n   In nature, handsome is as handsome does; origins don't matter.
n   In nature, elements often play multiple functions within the economy of a single organism.
n

3) As for the development of consciousness, Dennett proposes that viewing consciousness as cultural software provides an instructive and productive framework. His evidence includes the relatively recent development of consciousness (and therefore the reduced possibility that it is hard-coded). So why does consciousness still seem to be similar across cultures? Hardware biasing - we're all still working with roughly the same base. Some interesting results of this hypothesis are that some humans may not experience consciousness, particularly babies and special cases of children who developed with very little social contact.

Just as evolution is a difficult topic to write on given that our language is peppered with words conveying "intent", consciousness often has Dennett tripping over his own words. He fares far better than most, but be forewarned - books on consciousness can't help but be clumsy.

In addition to being an excellent introduction for me to many theories on consciousness, this book has piqued my interest in the consciousness and cognitive development of children and the general AI framework known as SOAR.

Solid foundation for thinking on consciousness

This brilliant book by Dennett, one of the best philosophers of our age, will recreate the way you think about consciousness and build a strong foundation for a scientific, rational explanation of it, inspired by a perfect blend of neuroscience, computer science, psychology and linguistics.
Most of us think of the conscious-self as a decision-maker, a driver of the train of thought. This image is shattered by convincing the reader that there is not a single line of continuous "train" of thought and there is no central point where "it all comes together" . There are multiple inputs, little particles of quasi-narratives, coming from different parts of the brain with different agendas and competing with each other to make their agenda "win", being written and rewritten over and over again in the process.
This theory (hastily summarized here by me) may seem counter-intuitive and maybe even outrageous at first, but the author does his best in slowly chipping away at the established beliefs about consciousness such as the Cartesian Theater and convincing the reader at least to have a new, more rational perspective.
I was also delighted to see that my own recent theories on consciousness are endorsed here. So I may actually be a bit biased in giving this book a perfect 5-star rating. But it deserves absolutely nothing less than a 4 out of 5 for anyone interested in explaining consciousness.

Dennett has conducted a wonderful investigation into the nature of consciousness. Not being satisfied to treat consciousness as something ontologically and fundamentally "special", he dismisses some misguided notions of the workings of consciousness which makes it seem as though there has to be some sort of "center or awareness" in which it all comes together along with the related notion of conscious experience as something which has further unexplainable phenomena, qualia, as its building blocks. Dennett insist on treating consciousness as just another biological phenomenon, needing an explanation in terms of more fundamental, unconscious, building blocks thereby dismissing the idea of qualia as ungrounded (unless understood as something further analyzable in terms of phenomena that do not exhibit qualia. These two intellectually unmotivated notions are related in that they both suppose that in order to explain consciousness, we need to find something fundamental which is itself like that which it is there to explain. Need to understand conscious experiences? Postulate the existence of basic states of conscious awareness which can not be "explained away": qualia. Need to understand the nature of a conscious person experiencing the world? Postulate the "Cartesian theater" at "the center of the mind" in which all the processing of the brain comes together to yield the final experience. Both these approaches to these questions are highly misguided: to explain the nature of conscious states, we need an explanation of their constituent parts in the brain, how the processes of the brain amount to experiential states, we do not need there to be, in addition to the purely physical processes of the brain, an accompanying unanalyzable state of conscious experience of the processing; to explain the nature of the conscious agent having these experiences, we do not need to find a further, smaller agent inside the mind, taking in all the results of the processes and experiencing their end result. Being predisposed to naturalistic explanation, as any thinking person should be, Dennett rightly concludes that these other explanations, being grounded in myths and mystery, will not do to explain what consciousness is and are often at odds with experimental results (which is, of course, enough to dispel them). Dennett does not have a detailed account of exactly how the processes of the brain amount to conscious experience (and it would be too early to attempt such an explanation), but goes a long way towards showing how scientific discoveries show us the way to asking the right questions. This is, it seems to me, both his usual approach and the right one. Upon suggesting that the mind and consciousness works a certain way, he accompanies the claim with scientific sources conducting experiments on the issue and sometimes suggest future experiments of his own that would test his thesis.

In the end, Dennett is unclear about exactly it means for someone to be conscious of something other than that it consists in the person being in a state where his or her brain currently processes information regarding the thing of which he or she is currently conscious. This might seem unsatisfactory, and this is perhaps necessarily so considering the current state of our scientific understanding of the mind. In any case, he does not dismiss consciousness, is not a complete eliminativist regarding it (as some seem to think he is), but rather seeks to demystify it, explain how it is that we are conscious beings and trying to convince the readers that we can keep our conscious minds without clinging on to unwarranted convictions of the special nature of the conscious mind. It's all very clear headed and Dennett seems to say almost exactly as much as should be said about the subject: there is no center of the mind in which experience and intentions arise (no Cartesian theater, no central meaner), there are no basic building blocks of conscious experience such that they can not be further explained in naturalistic terms (no qualia), there is no serious possibility of there coming into being creatures with all the behavioral complexity of conscious human beings who are nonetheless not conscious (no zombies) and the mind and all its workings, consciousness included, needs to be analyzed as a naturalistic phenomenon with no prejudices concerning the "special nature" of subjective experience (phenomenology) that is not explained in terms of objective phenomena (the scientific method).