There were parts of this book that were quite difficult and that I would probably have to reread a few times to fully appreciate, but overall it was a lot easier to read than most works of philosophy and/or science that deal with the same subject matter. There was a lot to think about here. Dennett may not be correct in his several models of how consciousness works, which he labels with colorful names, such as "multiple drafts" and "pandemonium," but he is honest enough to admit that they are just models. He gives solid reasons why his models or something very much like them could be correct, and he offers ideas for how his models could be tested in controlled experiments. And in any event, I was completely convinced that the intuitive ideas that most of us have about how the mind works, which Dennett labels as the Cartesian Theater, are completely wrong. Our comprehension of the world is not a visual story that plays out in our heads, even though it may sometimes seem that way. And it takes very careful thinking to avoid falling back into that intuitive trap again and again in new and different ways. I avoided reading Dennett for years, but that was a mistake. I'm looking forward to exploring more of his works.

I read this book in several overlapping passes over the years before finally reading it cover-to-cover. Given that the premise of the book is that consciousness is an emergent property based on Multiple Drafts built atop an array of certifiably dumb Reactive Dispositions, I think you should be allowed to read the book any which way you want that helps you get at its message. But read it you really should. Dennett succeeds in gently persuading you to think about a Very Hard Issue (and consciousness ranks high in the set of such issues), even if you find yourself coming up short and frustrated, and even if you don't quite believe his suggestions.

The book is considerably old now in a fast-changing field, and it has taken more than its share of lumps, but for a lay reader, it remains a wonderful, non-dumbed-down introduction to a subject that we're all simultaneously very familiar with (we all have a consciousness that only *we* can experience) and very discombobulated by (we are such a captive audience of our own consciousness that we cannot easily suspect its canny illusions).

Dennett is a patient overexplainer: he isn't afraid to be the Voltairean bore who "tells everything". In this case, I found the overexplanation to be most welcome. I am perhaps being a wee bit unfair about his prolixity: his nerdy humor, his easy access to an armamentarium of analogies, and his willingness to anticipate his reader's objections at every step will eventually shepherd you through this difficult book -- difficult only because the subject is difficult. Just don't expect to read the book in one stretch. Dennett is not quite as poetic (or mythopoetic) as his predecessor in the field, Julian Jaynes, but he has his own virtues as a confident, hard-nosed reductionist who knows his stuff and who inspires confidence in his reader that he will deliver the goods. What he's attempting is nothing less than explaining that consciousness can be and is indeed an edifice built up from basic life instincts, honed merely by the dumb, relentless, and violent logic of evolution. Whew!

One of the criticisms laid at the feet of any explanatory venture of this sort is that a currently trending technological phenomenon is being lazily used (i.e., misused) to explain Deep Stuff. Now that computers and (some forms of) artificial intelligence are unmistakably running our world, the mind is inevitably being viewed by many as software, running on carbon brain rather than silicon chip, and this view is deeply resented by many others as distasteful or blasphemous. (The fact that carbon and silicon are next-door neighbors on the same column in the Periodic Table makes the comparison between brain and computer compelling to some.) But we, or at least our brains, are not at all like computers, critics insist; we have feelings and thoughts, we are able to do things that computers can't, and, even more damningly, we are charmingly *unable* to do some "mindless" things that boring computers easily can, so there.

Dennett is unfazed by this, claiming that the inability to see the kinship between the two is merely a failure of the imagination. (The stakes are high in this battle: We may soon need to contend with the possible consciousness of computer-based systems, and the urge to draw a clear line in the sand is strong. We are already finding machines disquietingly powerful; do we really also want to worry about their being conscious?)

The first task that Dennett sets for himself: How can consciousness of any kind possibly be generated from matter without invoking a miracle? Starting from nothing more than basic "reactive dispositions" -- the dispositions to feed, fight, flee, or mate, aka the 4 F's (page 188) -- that we inherit because we are a species that evolved to survive, Dennett gives a pleasing narrative of how these dispositions can be combined to give multiple drafts of info about the world. With time, some drafts are abandoned, new ones added, and others refined to give more and finer-gradated discriminatory details. The info is not just about the external world coming through our senses, but also about our own rapidly increasing pile of info.

Consciousness is not one draft or combination of drafts that gels at any crucial instant, it is an evolving consensus of the drafts with time. Later sets of drafts can have a higher degree of self-reflectivity (because these are later processes than the immediate 4F reactive responses). We therefore typically rate them higher for consciousness, but they're not strictly necessary for us to function ok. We can do many things unreflectively (= unconsciously) if we're good enough at the task and don't need to waste resources monitoring ourselves too closely.

To be sure, the info that is gathered in the drafts is not always infallibly accurate, but it is capable of constantly being added to and fine-tuned. At this point, this is not beyond the capability of plausible, purely technical tools acting loosely together (some components can be in open conflict, with other components logging that conflict). Even generating info about the system's own behavior -- self-monitoring -- doesn't merit the miracle tag. There is no one thing that this info is presented to, however, although that is the powerful User Illusion that we are so prone to. Dennett flogs this horse quite a bit, and rightly, as it's so easy to imagine that an agent inside us is receiving this info and doing far-reaching things with it, until we realize that we are actually trying to deconstruct this agent in terms of simpler processes, not keep bringing him back into the story as an axiom.

The second task is dealing with the dreaded qualia, the "internal flavors", that attend our conscious experiences. It's not just information that's coursing through our brains, surely? It's also the peculiar, ineffable enjoyment and aversion and the various things in between that color (!) that information. It's all very well for the Multiple Drafts to get a self-reflective mechanism into play from nothing but a handful of basic life instincts, but every reader has such intimate knowledge of the quality of their own consciousness, that they find it hard to imagine that even a very cleverly engineered machine could even remotely approximate it, even in principle. Even conceding that the particular qualia are allowed to be different from our own, can a machine have any qualia at all, and if not, can it legitimately be called conscious?

One answer is that, d'oh, we are actually machines ourselves, albeit fashioned by evolution, so the category distinction is false. Thus, if we think we have qualia, so can machines. But Dennett's larger answer, and this is going to strike a lot of people as simply too huge a pill to swallow, is that there are no qualia, at least not in the fundamental way that we seem to think. They're perhaps just the fumes or bristlings set off by our particular "reactive dispositions" which will of course have their counterparts (not the identical ones of course) in the machine. After all, even among humans, we concede that the qualia associated with color perception can be different without affecting the value and merit of the related consciousness.

To recycle the perennial example, it's quite possible, we intuitively feel, that the qualia I feel for red and green respectively are exactly the opposite of what you feel, and yet not only do we *not* use this to question the consciousness of either of us, there is no observable difference in our behavior to cause an issue (beyond perhaps having a color preference?). Indeed, if we consider various kinds of colorblindness, the qualia must, we suspect, be different: If I see red = green and you see red != green, then there is at least one color that's producing a different reaction in us. Again, this comes with no consciousness penalty. (Obviously, these examples invoke individuals that are sighted. There are other perceptions that can be considered similarly for potential qualia differences.)

But is color perception, when and however it happens, just information processing, without having to consider any of the rich internal feeling we instinctively attach to it, even among the colorblind, even if we don't all have the same identical feeling? Yes, says Dennett. Indeed color is our way of distinguishing some light wavelengths, as simple a measuring task as any. It could well have been a plain number. However, since we're operating with the basic reactive dispositions we are saddled with, and since our purpose was to survive, not to be color theorists, we didn't assign numbers as a wavelength-meter in a lab machine might have. Instead, we took our survival reactions to the short light waves of the open sky or bodies of water, the middle-length waves of vegetation, and the long waves of fruits and blood, to fashion our own clumsy but oh-so-dear-to-us tri-cone-based wavelength-meter for the wavelengths that mattered for our survival. Color *was* code to distinguish objects of interest, so the phrase "color coding" would have been a tautology when we were still in the savannah.

It turns out that the color recognition system is good enough so we're seeing color everywhere, and we can create our own information using it, and we've been using it to enhance and degrade our lives ever since. (Indeed, with the advances in chemistry from the late 19th century on, we are inundated with color info, some of it useful, most of it just drug, in a way that our ancestors never were. Even within my individual history of using computer text editors for writing programs and text, I originally perforce used monochrome colors and thought nothing of it. Now syntax highlighting (i.e., color for distinguishing things that I was already distinguishing just fine) has taken over. It happened gradually enough that I never noticed the drug being jacked into my system, and now it's an effort to go back to monochrome editing.)

Would we be taking advantage of color this way if our perception was more numeric instead of this fruit/blood/foliage/water/sky mishmash, with red simply marking a higher number on some internal linear monitoring dial compared to violet? Perhaps, but also perhaps not. And would the latter necessitate a revision to our status as conscious beings in any meaningful way? Dennett strongly implies no.

Regardless of the persuasiveness of his content, some people may take a visceral dislike to the style of Dennett's writing. He is an earnest, unabashed materialist-reductionist, which rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but he does make a splendid case that seemingly incredible emergent properties can be explained by reductionism. The disadvantage of seeing precious emergent properties this way is of course that they won't be permanent, and will go away when the substructure falls apart. This is bad news for the soul, whether individual (it's a mortal construct) or universal (even if it exists, it by definition cannot be experienced by its individual cogs, such as us). Even if the loss of potential immortality is not a concern, this kind of reductionism can be a depressing gateway, for those who need rules to be compassionate, to a- and even im-morality, which may explain the animus to philosophers of Dennett's stripe. Dennett does bring up the ethics question, although he valiantly tries to put a positive spin on devising new ways to avoid the possible moral abyss opened up by our tasting of the Tree of Knowledge, and the possible casual devaluing of humans and our fellow lifeforms. I think he rather misses the point, perhaps wishfully so, that the nice folks willing to come up with these strategies are not the problem. Anyway, this is not the strong part of the book, but I'm willing to give it a pass because it's really outside the scope of the topic, which is plenty engaging enough.

Circling back to the critique that the author is using an arguably fashionable tech trend as metaphor instead of offering a presumably "genuine" explanation, I am not persuaded this is bad at all. Metaphors are the stock-in-trade of language (some would say they're identical), and unless we're thinking of an extralinguistic device that is ipso facto indescribable, there is no other real option. Computers and AI are proving to be quite a defensible source of metaphors for narratives about emergent properties. Indeed, software was arguably modeled on human behavior anyway. Expert systems, for example, have been around for many decades now, and offer a good analogy for how multiple small deciders can be combined to give a convincing impression of true expertise: by having facts triggering rules which produce further facts that trigger more rules, etc., they rinse, lather, and repeat their way to advanced discriminatory knowledge and have proven their worth in fields as far-ranging as medical diagnosis, finance, and circuit-fault analysis.

The trouble is they may seem too stodgily reliable and not quirky enough to compare to our mercurial human brains. While computers can take off like a bat out of hell on tangents because of the speed advantage they have over us in some facets of computation, this does suggest that, by the same token, our own expertise in *our* preferred areas may be considerable without needing to be miraculous. We spent all our time trying to survive, to eat without being eaten, and that has given us some core expertise and of course our own peculiar "reactive dispositions" that the computer is not going to share unless specifically and rather pointlessly programmed to do so. (Somewhat like the herculean efforts to make meatless burgers be just like meaty ones, instead of being their own glorious thing.)

While Dennett does push the software metaphor for the sequential nature of consciousness as a von Neumann machine jury-rigged atop a crowd of small-scale reactive agents, the Multiple Drafts metaphor he uses for consciousness actually seems quaintly medieval: 15th-century publishing rather than late-20th-century software! It reminds me rather of the pamphlet wars set off by the invention of the printing press, which led to various hard-fought local optima in both religious and scientific practice. Perhaps he means the Multiple Drafts of his own book writing, in which case he is clearly repurposing something from his personal workflow, and could be rightly critiqued for doing a bit of an analogy reach.

But in another way his metaphor is modern, or rather prescient, since the technology it mimics was neither available nor trendy at the time of his writing (1991). I mean of course the multiple drafts underlying the current big trend in software engineering, viz., distributed version control systems! In particular: Git! At least for now, it's the users that create the multiple commits (= drafts) of a Git repository, and not the repo itself. Still, the way a program takes shape, over time, with multiple competing inputs, with multiple commits, and manages to maintain a continuous identity while accommodating wide-ranging updates and changes to itself, is probably not totally dissimilar to how consciousness itself operates. I don't know how much one can run with this without hurting oneself, so this is a good place for this rambling review to stop at this draft.

I can't remember that last time I outright disliked a book, but Consciousness Explained was a struggle to get through. A professional academic philosopher, Dennett sets out to sketch a plausible theory of consciousness, providing a framework for experimental psychologists and neuroscientists to flesh out and verify. Both the craftsmanship of the book and the ideas within left me cold. I'll treat each separately.

Craftsmanship

Following an unfortunate trend in science writing, Consciousness Explained is aimed at both academics and the broader public. Both potential readers suffer as a result. This book is probably far too dense and technical for a layperson to enjoy, unless learning about cognitive science is a serious hobby. Nevertheless, in an attempt to appeal to a larger audience, the ideas in this book are camaflouged in metaphor and lose their precision.

This lack of clarity is not helped at all by the book's length. Entire chapters are tangential, and, to paraphrase another reviewer, Dennett will never settle for a 1 paragraph explanation when 5 pages will do.

The tone was also, frankly, insufferable. As the title of the book suggests, Dennett is cocksure and a bit in love with his own ideas. This introduces a subtle undercurrent of intellectual intimidation into the book. Dennett frequently reminds us that if his ideas seem strange, that it is because they are revolutionary and he is introducing us into an entirely new way of thinking. The implication is that if you disagree with Dennett, it is not because he is wrong, it is because you lack imagination!

Ideas

Consciousness Explained suffers from a severe lack of focus, stemming from the fact that 'consciousness' is never clearly and explicitly defined. Dennett presents four ideas that each take turns being a major point of argument:

1. There is no brain region or regions where information 'crosses' a threshold into consciousness. As such, there is no definitive stream of consciousness.

2. There is no 'central meaner' in the brain who reviews sensory inputs and authorizes behavioral outputs. Rather, parallel neural circuits throughout the brain discriminate sensory information and prepare responses, creating a 'self' as an emergent phenomenon, much in the same way as colony of thousands of ants can demonstrate complex behavior.

3. Consciousness is a virtual turing machine running on the parallel hardware of the human brain.

4. Qualia (e.g. the subjective experience of the color red) are an illusion, and simply correspond to 'reactive dispositions').

I should preface the following comments with the caveat that this book was written over 20 years ago. We've learned an incredible amount about the brain since then, and this book had been written today undoubtedly it would be more sophisticated. But I must review the book I read. I'll take each point in turn.

1. Dennett's adversary is the 'Cartesian Theatre', the notion that brain activity must be presented on a stage in the brain somewhere for the benefit of an observer in order to become conscious. This idea obviously runs into the problem of infinite regress, and Dennett rightly draws our attention to its dangers. However, Dennett goes to far in throwing out the stage along with the internal audience. If we assume that consciousness is real and produced by the brain, it doesn't seem so radical for their to be moment-to-moment correlates of subjective experience in the brain. We can keep the stage while still throwing out the observer.

2. The idea that there is no 'central meaner' in the brain is now a cornerstone of cognitive neuroscience, and one of the most laudable aspects of this book is that Dennett argued forcibly for this view over 20 years ago. However, this issue is tangentially related to consciousness. This framework describes how the brain processes inputs and outputs, and not how the brain could produce subjective experience. The issue is ultimately that Dennett doesn't believe in subjective experience, so his theory of consciousness ultimately devolves into a more general theory of 'how the brain works'.

3. One of the most intriguing ideas ideas in the book, but fleshed out in relatively little detail.

4. The notion that qualia simply correspond to 'reactive dispositions' is the most polarizing claim in the book, and the most difficult to interpret. At times it seems that Dennett is outright denying that individuals have conscious experience. At other times, it seems that he is simply claiming that we don't have as accurate an impression of our own conscious experience as we think we do; as a result, trying to study the correlates of the contents of consciousness that we identify (based on our own erroneous impression of our experience) is a fool's errand.

Wrap up

A book only for individuals seriously interested in the scientific study consciousness, and even then it is a struggle. For those looking for a good philosophy of science book, I highly recommend Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (read too long ago for me to review properly). It provides a striking contrast to Consciousness Explained: Kuhn proposes one clearly delineated, intriguing theory and earnestly spends the rest book providing copious evidence for his idea and exploring its implications in clearly organized chapters. And he writes with an earnest style of an academic who is seeking to prove an idea to himself as well as others.

Consciousness explained? Well, no, not exactly. But a brilliant book nonetheless, despite the audaciousness of the title (though I must admit that Dennett concedes that his "explanation" is far from complete and that cognitive theory is really still in its infancy--or at least it was when this book was written). I only read it recently, and perhaps it is a bit outdated for a book about the ever-changing fields of cognitive theory, neuroscience, and psychology, but, if anything, this book does a really good job of refuting the farcical traditional theories of consciousness (goodbye Dualism, Cartesian Theater, Ghost in the Machine) and presents a workable alternative theory: the Multiple Drafts Model. I won't attempt to explain this model here in just a few short sentences; you'll have to read it for yourself. Suffice it to say that not only does this book illuminate some of the darker aspects of our conception of the mind/self/consciousness, it is also well-written, entertaining, and really not that difficult a read for such an esoteric, slippery thing as consciousness.

it's an ambitious project, I give him that. But a few points, which are the down fall of Dennet in his illusionism approach:
1. He is too sure of himself, and increasingly intellectually not-humble.
2. Point (1) leads to him becoming more and more condescending.
3. Point (1) also leads him to not to be able to understand opposing sides.
4. Point (3) leads him to make strawmen of his opponents' theories.
5. Point (4) leads him to end up defending and explaining something else (mind) as opposed to consciousness (or phenomenal properties of consciousness).
6. point (6) led him to write a book and a few papers, in which could have been awesome for theoretical foundation of "mind" but rather mute about consciousness, yet his book's name is consciousness explained.

"I deny that we have privileged access to our own minds, and I deny that introspection is a kind of direct perception."

This highly acclaimed book promised to unravel the enigma of consciousness and shed light on one of the most complex and perplexing aspects of human existence. I must say, it did not disappoint. The book is divided into multiple chapters, each delving deeper into different aspects of consciousness, and presenting a thought-provoking blend of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science.

Key Highlights

1. One of the standout aspects of "Consciousness Explained" is Dennett's ability to challenge conventional beliefs about consciousness. He boldly questions the idea of a central "Cartesian theater" where consciousness resides, proposing instead a more distributed and dynamic model. He argues that consciousness is not a single entity but a collection of various mental processes that work together to create our subjective experience.

2.Dennett critically examines various schools of thought, including dualism, behaviorism, and materialism, offering his own insightful critiques and proposing his own theory, known as "multiple drafts model." This model posits that consciousness is an ongoing process that emerges from the continuous interaction of different mental states.

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When comparing "Consciousness Explained" to other books on the topic, such as Thomas Nagel's "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" and David Chalmers' "The Conscious Mind," I found Dennett's approach to be refreshingly pragmatic. While Nagel and Chalmers delve deeply into the subjective experience of consciousness and the so-called "hard problem," Dennett takes a more comprehensive and scientific stance. He aims to demystify consciousness by examining it from a multidisciplinary perspective, which I really liked.

It took me days to complete this book, it does require certain level of commitment, considering the dense topic that has been covered. Nevertheless, Dennett's meticulous research, clear explanations, and innovative theories make this book a must-read for anyone interested in the mysteries of consciousness.

I'm fascinated by the topic of consciousness, and this book appealed to me because I thought it was going to give me a better understanding of what consciousness really is at its core. Well, it doesn't. Unfortunately, it doesn't explain consciousness like the title claims. That's fine though, because I'm pretty sure it's something nobody's ever explained or understood. What sets this apart from Descartes and the 19th century books I've read about this topic is that it brings modern science into the equation (or at least, 1991 science). He refutes Cartesian Dualism and uses Darwinism and neuroscience to try to explain what consciousness is. Science is great, but it doesn't explain consciousness. He claims consciousness comes from the brain, and I think that's probably true, but he far from proves it. And nobody has ever disproved Dualism to my satisfaction. I'd suggest you check out Nietzsche's and Schopenhauer's theories of consciousness because although they aren't as scientific, they're very substantive. This review sounds like I'm bashing Dennett and I'm really not. I respect him as a philosopher and liked the book. It just doesn't explain consciousness. Perhaps From Bacteria to Bach and Back will come closer to explaining it.

2091: one hundred years ago philosophers wrote books using words like "consciousness," "qualia," "functionalism," "materialism," and "zombie," words which have since been banned for the sake of the public good. You see philosophers, without actually asking themselves what these words meant, used to debate with each other by filling the blanks in arguments with these words and moving them around like rebus tiles, inventing more and more recondite scenarios for their use and claiming to refute their opponents with sheer tour de force applications of logic. I think you can see why someone had to put a stop to this.

More seriously, it does seem uncontroversial to me that the neurons underlying color perception and other sensations can be affected by further causal relations to judgments and object perceptions (it has been known for more than 100 years!). Does this mean sensations are simply a network of discriminatory judgments and their concreteness an illusion of being embedded in a network of such judgments? No because they are realized by the effective physical powers expressed in the sensations. It is probably true that a space of colors could be simulated in a machine or even a computer program. For example if a machine were charged with navigating a space of numbered points and could carry out rotations, translations etc. on these points and if the machine had a way of specifying its own position in the manifold and representations of the other points and distances and directions, it would make sense to say the machine carries an internal representation that would "seem to it like living in a space." Why not? But the physical realization would matter too. It isn't just the structure that matters but the stuff too. If the color space were navigated by a color observer then certainly I could buy the idea that the representation would seem to it like sensing (its own) colors. But the same colors as those expressed by the physics of the human brain? Doubtful, unless the relevant physical realization was exactly duplicated, by electrical -chemical signals for example. The idea that the sensations are nothing but an artifact of being in a certain representation regardless of how it is realized, this seems to ignore the fact that the physical realization must matter too. Proof: take two such realizations and let them interact in one big representation. Because the causal roles of the materials are different those differences also have further causal roles in relation to each other and would be manifested as such, so the non-identity would be revealed immediately. Dennett claims that if discriminatory judgments are divorced from their qualitative appearance this leads to absurdity, but how can these roles be separated at all if sensations are also physical and if their qualitative appearance is a result of their configured causal powers? By separating them you are leaving out some of their causal roles and the thought experiment is impossible. He doesn't even consider any of this. I'm not impartial to this discussion (see my Realistic Empiricism) but the concrete physical reality of sensation seems hard to deny if it is there in the cells.

I found this an extremely tiresome, boring and dull book. It's truly amazing how you can write a book of 500+ pages, use a pompous (and misleading) title, and present it as the philosophical magnum opus that will enlighten every curious soul (pun intended).....only to come up with THIS.

Granted, the subject matter is tough to grapple with. Granted, this is a book written more than 25 years ago. Granted, he's a philosopher. But come on...

Dennett tries to develop his case by first breaking the dualistic misconceptions of consciousness, and after this by slowly building up his own theory of consciousness (the 'multiple drafts' model). But he explains every step along the way in such redundant way, that by the time you get to page 200 you feel like you have already read 200 volumes (just 300 more to go!). In no way does he present his case in a concise and accessible way, which is really a flaw.

Bottom line: if you need 500+ pages to present your theory and even after this it didn't come across in an intelligible way, the only conclusion can be you've written a bad book. Period.

I had never read anything by Daniel Dennett before, and I had a hard time reading this one. Now that it’s over, I have mixed feelings about it. Reading it is like reading a draft of Kant’s writings. There is lots of cool stuff which is presented poorly. Although many philosophers tend to overcomplicate issues and favour rhyme over clarity, this book is more about science than philosophy; thus, such things have no place in this content. Even Nietzsche let go of his philosophical allure in letters to his sister. You read a passage and, most of the time, have to go back and reread it and finally understand what he meant, but you are frustrated by his narrative and word choice. I planned to read Breaking the Spell later on, but after this one, I have cold feet.
The first and second sections, which address scientific studies on consciousness and the physiological functions of the mind, might have been more clearly presented with more straightforward explanations. Having said that, it was incredibly intriguing and informative to look into the various empirical theories and the thought experiments offered in Chapter Two, particularly Orwellian and Stalinesque Revisions and Multiple Drafts. The Baldwin effect, which states that when organisms acquire new behaviours during their lifetime, these learned traits can eventually become part of their genetic makeup and be passed down to future generations., was the most engaging portion of the first section for me.
The third section's contents are laid out with refined and more straightforward explanations of the philosophical problem of consciousness. I suppose it's because Dennett, as a philosopher, could speak more intelligently about his field of expertise. Or possibly his writing style is the same across the entire book. Perhaps failing to understand philosophical concepts is far easier to admit than falling short of understanding scientific concepts. Oh, cognitive bias again!

It is hard to know what to say about this book. It contains a lot of interesting information and is very readable but it is also deeply confused. Dennett is clearly fascinated by the brain and keen to find a theory to explain how it works. As I am not an expert in this area, it is hard for me to assess whether what he puts forward is either new or interesting. What is most striking (and annoying) for me, however, is Dennett's philosophical naivety and lack of sensitivity to philosophical issues. Much of the book is driven by the attempt to locate consciousness and he often writes as if we might actually have found this in the brain. Rather than recognising that the question "where is consciousness located in the brain?" is confused, he suggests that we need to give up our naive view of consciousness and recognise that all there is are the things he can actually find in the brain. I imagine that if Dennett were interested in mathematics, he would be in favour of ambitious rocket missions to discover the Platonic realm in which there are shapes that perfectly obey the rules of geometry and that if these missions fail, he would argue that we have to give up geometry or adapt it to the realities of the shapes we actually enter in the physical world. Dennett claims to have learnt a lot from Wittgenstein but he persists in seeing introspection as consisting of accurate or inaccurate reports on inner events. He then thinks that scientific research can give us a fuller and more accurate account than introspection. But this is confused. Take the example of dreams. When I tell you my dream, what is interesting for me (and possibly for you) is my account of my dream. If scientists could strap something to my head and give a totally different narrative account of what went on in my head during REM sleep that might also be interesting, but the accounts are different rather than in competition. If I am puzzled as to why I saw you in my dream, the scientist's claim that actually I saw my father may raise new puzzles but it does not help me with my initial puzzlement or necessarily eliminate my wish to reflect on why I dreamed of you. If someone gives the scientist the power to forbid me to use the word "dreamed" in relation to my account, then I will have to say "I quasi-dreamed of you" and when I wake in the morning I will have to try to remember to say: "I had a strange quasi-dream last night", so that the confusion between the language-game I am playing and the language-game the scientist is playing is harder to fall into. Another general confusion that pervades Dennetts' book is the failure to recognise the difference between conceptual issues and empirical issues. Faced with a philosophical problem, Dennett hopes that a mass of empirical research can resolve the issue, but if we don't know our way around our concepts, then trying to apply the concepts in all sorts of unusual situations is only likely to make matters worse. If you are lost, the solution is not to try to move more quickly, but to stop and try to make sense of where you are and where you came from. So perhaps Dennett has produced an interesting theory of the brain, but he is certainly deeply confused about consciousness and all the related issues he mentions (such as the nature of the self). He may be a good purveyor of scientific research, but he has little to contribute on philosophical or conceptual issues where he seems to lack both aptitude and interest.

I must say, The reason I'm giving such a low score is because I expected much much more from this book. Instead I faced with explanations of phenomena that could have been explained much clearer. And the lack of answer to my question being: How neurons give rise to consciousness. (To be perfectly clear, I do not mean how the mind works or how mind and brain are related. Rather, what gives rise to a cultivated sense, a feeling, a qualia.) And I expected a physical theory, instead, he apparently skipped the whole problem altogether.