Kelime oyunları, nükteler, ironiler, imalar, kültürel temelli atıflar-analojiler, anekdotlar...

Yazarın doğrudan olmayan ifade tarzı, çevirmenin bu tarz karşısındaki çaresizliği ile birleşince okuyucu için ciddi bir meydan okumaya dönüşüyor. Ama kapsamlı ve doyurucu içeriği bu çabaya değiyor.

"Benim argümanlarım dolambaçsızdır" ifadesi şaka gibi. :)

I love love love this book so much that I am hoping that when I die, the crime scene investigators will find it clutched tightly in my hand and will all have to read it very carefully perhaps to get clues about who killed me and then they will forget completely about investigating the crime and start totally getting into this astonishing book instead and will tell all their crime scene investigator buddies who will read it and tell their buddies and then everyone in the world will read it and the whole world will be different for having read it and appreciated it except for like three or four chumbuckets in Duluth or Boise or wherever who don't read books and who will feel so left out and mope around saying things like "oh dear, how come everyone else in the entire world is reading that amazing Dennett book on exactly how consciousness works and all we are doing is just chewing on these lousy grass stems and watching old Flipper reruns and what a crappy life we have, and by the way whatever happened to that guy who died under those mysterious circumstances a while ago, did they ever figure out who killed him or what is up with that?"

I was trying out a new reading methodology for Consciousness Explained, reading the critiques of articles entered in journals alongside the actual text, which allowed me to see both the illegitimacy of some of the criticisms and the serious problems with some of the text. I strongly recommend that methodology. I'll be trying it again at some point soon.

Dennett's text is considered one of the most significant texts in modern philosophy of consciousness, which is odd since there are some major criticisms of it that seem very strong. I strongly recommend the critiques by Ned Block (Journal of Philosophy, 1993) and Colin McGinn (Philosophical Perspectives, 1995), which point out that Dennett actually doesn't construct a theory of consciousness.

The most powerful part of the text, which has largely been accepted and adopted even by many of Dennett's dissenters, is the discussion of the Cartesian Theater.

That said, the rest of the text is kind of hard to read, since it seems fairly weak. Dennett himself is constantly hedging his bets, acting as a pragmatist. He does this extensively in his discussions of heterophenomenology and the Multiple Drafts Model. The problem, though, is that the MDS is not a model of consciousness, but a model of content and the way in which content relates to consciousness.

There are a lot of reviews on here that are critical of Dennett but admit to not having read the entire book. I'm not one of those people. I'm also not going to say that "Dennett reads like Derrida" or something silly like that. The fact is, Dennett has a very unique and engaging writing style, but I think it's worthwhile to remain skeptical of many of his claims, and to try to follow whether the arguments that he paints as in contrast to his own are actually being addressed by the content that follows. It's a worthwhile read for those who are interested in consciousness, and content, but I definitely don't recommend this as a first read. Despite its accessible writing style, the actual content may lead to later confusion, as much of the debate has changed since the writing of the book.

Imagine if a bat was raised in an unbatty room, never watched zombie movies, and only ate black and white Chinese take-out food. Now imagine if the bat only seemed to be a bat, and the zombie movies that it didn’t watch were of zombies acting like humans would act if they were acting like zombies acting like humans. How could we say, or at least acknowledge precognitively to appear to say, that the qualia of the unbattiness of the room coadaptively represented the epiphenomenological non-Chineseness of all anti-food experiences? We couldn’t! But here's the trick; it only seemed to you that you were really imagining this, but you are in fact the zombie that the human-acted-zombie is acting like, and your neuronal excitations are by definition unbatty because you are in the state of acting like a human. It therefore becomes clear that this is the position we must take if we are going to review Consciousness Explained, and yet when you look closely, there is no reviewer, and therefore, there is no review. I give it 3 bats.
-Otto

This book is a difficult read for various reasons: it is outdated, written for at least semi-professional philosophers and excessively focuses on the negation of a theory few who pick up the book are likely believers of.

A large part of the book is about thrashing the mystical Cartesian Dualism. The step by step deconstruction is comprehensive and more but about a theory as arcane as the theory of earth standing on the back of giant turtles. For those who truly believe in an observing self - hidden in some parts of the brain, making sense of all going on and the true decider - are unlikely to ever pick up the book and go through the painstakingly rational refusal. Their first counterattack will begin against the presumed rationality.

Materialism has severe limits when one resorts to it as the basis of a complete explanation of any major phenomenon. Let's expand materialism as something that is not simply a “matter” but also inter-relationships between different “matter”. In scientific terms, it would be both fields and particles.

As we know well by now that the smallest, complete explanation of almost everything is the stuff itself. If we accept some level of approximation or misspecification, typically we are able to explain a lot of what is going on with much less of everything causing it.

Even if a mind is nothing but all the brain material, and relationships between billions of neurons and their continuously changing status because of the interactions with everything in the environment apart from the existing and previous states, no scientific or quantitative explanation of these can completely explain everything going on internally. An iron bar and its properties of tensility, density, magnetism or shape might be explicable through the quarks and fields of all its constituents, but anyone who claims that the world is nothing but the basic constituents is missing the Eiffel Tower, the Sistine Chappel and even galaxies and black holes.

In other words, everything is matter++. A bevy of complex relationships - even if each individually identifiable but even the most basic collection testing the limits of comprehensibility and predictability (like in the three body problem) - make utility of any purely materialistic view extremely limited. There may not be any mind beyond all the brain material/interrelationships beneath, like there is no Eiffel Tower below all the particles that constitute it along with their arrangements (ignoring all its history, symbollic values, aesthetic value, economic value etc), but how does this view have any utility?

There is more to mind than individual brain components. This could be simply because of the interrelationships of constituents. Any hope that we will be able to unearth all of them is perhaps foolhardy. Brain particles, like every other particles, change every moment and has some unpredictability built in over and above myriads of internal and external influencers like on any quantum particle. For us to make any macro sense of the behaviors they cause, a dualism (and more) are as much needed as macro properties like any matter's density or shape.

There is another way to look at Consciousness. Religious philosophers, or creationists, ascribed to the term God whatever could not be explained in the story of creation through the hard knowledge or science at the time. As scientific knowledge evolved, so did the concept of God. God remained available as an explanation of everything science of the times failed to while completing the tale of why/how we are here. The same way, Consciousness is often the term used to explain human mental states that are left unexplained by the brain science of the time (and the brain science still explain precious little precisely!).

The author's narrative against Consciousness is also troublesome. Consciousness (or awareness or any mental state that is impossible to explain today with science) is partly explained away, despite the scientific incompleteness, as something that will be explained later with more science progress. And it is partly explained away using the analogies of the real life machines in vogue at the point when the book was written. As the author explains, many in the eighteenth century explained brain using the steam engine analogy. In this book, the unexplained is being explained away using the digital computer architectures of 1980s and 1990s. Explosive progress in how brains (neutrons) work ever since, as well as the more complex types of machinery (particularly networks including internet, social networks but also in hardware and architecture) make the arguments in the book appear quite outmoded. Effectively, what consciousness needs to explain now is different from what it was twenty years ago (to a degree at least). And the tools that could be used are also quite different from the serial/parallel processing analogies and baud rate examples used in the book.

Consciousness, and self as a singular entity, have other utilities. Consciousness is not just about infinite regress: I think that I think that I think...Or in self awareness. The holism of consciousness allows us to ascribe intentionality to entities for punishments and rewards. Is a corporate anything more than its assets and stakeholders?

There are long stretches where the author goes in extreme details to refute few would zealously argue for in serious circles these days - for example, an immaterial self, sitting in some part of the brain, making decisions and impacting the material world. The author ignores more nuanced arguments favoring consciousness, of the kind even an amateur like this reviewer would put forward as above.

This book is as revolutionary as it is short-sighted. Dennett tries to find an empirical basis of consciousness. For this purpose he digs deep into the neuroscientific literature, questioning everything he finds from a theoretical point of view. This is interesting, and exceptional. Most scientist spend little time doubting the concepts they use, or what their findings mean in a broader theoretical sense. Dennett does takes this time and comes to unsettling conclusions.

The best, and most necessary part of the book is Dennett's attack on the Cartesian Theater view on consciousness. Dennett explains that due to theoretical difficulties a single brain area of consciousness is impossible. Rather, consciousness is spread out over time and space (in the brain). He comes up with great and memorable analogies, which give great insight into the functioning of the brain.

But as I have said, on the other hand, this book is also short-sighted. Dennett, in the end, comes to deny the existence of 'qualia' (personal, conscious experience). Why does he reach this conclusion? It is because he starts bottom-up. His whole quest is data-driven. His use of the Pandemonium model illustrates this: this model has been criticized in the Psychology for not being able to account for top-down (higher cognitive) influences.

What Dennett ignores is the metaphysical side of the matter. Scientists hate metaphysics, and perhaps for a good reason: it is very hard to make metaphysics sound plausible. However, without metaphysics it is impossible to understand our Dasein, our way of being constituted inside this world. What Dennett has proven is not that there is no consciousness, but rather that consciousness cannot be found by the empirical method. Consciousness seems to be more than matter. This is the conclusion we have to accept, or else we will have to deny the existence of our consciousness. Dennett did not came up with arguments to convince me from this hypothesis.

A rare gem that taught me a few new concepts.

Consciousness was not explained.

Yet another book which magically escaped my attention, though reading it would have promoted my understanding of so much. Better late than never, eh?

And as always, there was no program to my finding it. An old re-met friend rather, who must have been remembering me as I once was well over 30 years ago, lent it to me. He thought the book had my name written all over it.

Indeed! Nor do I wish to lay claim to that identity I would name for myself, acknowledging readily that most of what I call myself is at best character-based response to happenstance. As to the enactor of my conjectured character, we may forget him as readily as that creature which eats its brains once they've served the purpose of lodging it.

I can find nothing with which to disagree here. Astonishingly to me, I also find that consciousness has indeed been explained. I have no further questions, or rather the questions can be left aside and the work turned to more interesting matters.

Such as, for a quick instance, how is it that we can rid our minds of those harmful parasitic memes which would harness our apparently hard-wired self-aggrandizement compulsions. What political arrangements might make us act otherwise than to incorporate any and all techniques for manipulation of the symbolic discourse of money toward our maximal individual corporeal advantage at the expense of any cultured ground?

For so long as the Big Questions remain unanswered, there will always be some convenient jog to excuse whatever local pleasure or convenience we can buy at some discount from ever-attenuating meanings for value. Profit extensible to infinity on misdirection alone such as would cause P.T. Barnum to blush. Let me sell you self-confidence with that logo.

Quite simply, whatever consciousness is, it will not outlast our physical implicated being which is continuous with the Earth together with whom we have evolved to this point. My mind extends - there are no bounds - into all of that stuff which can be understood in principle, but also into that which cannot be comprehended. Chance will forever exceed my grasp, else what's a meta for?

It is the stuff of chance we will destroy for so long as answers remain deferred. There will be no end to our manipulations of words, of money, of tools of every sort because, as with a siren pitching ever higher, we will not stop. There is no ending, and so enthusiasm for ever-more is the only forever.

Enough! I mean honestly. Just as it sets out to do, this book defines the question and along the way discards those questions which still compel so many among us to defer our very responsibility because it is so pleasurable to imagine more perfect unions.

If, in other words, there were to come about some critical mass of readers who have mastered this work, we could finally begin engagement in those discourses which might wrest humanity from the degeneration which is attendant upon inhabitation by those memes in whose thrall our brains now labor.

And in that sense, this must be the most important book I, for one, have ever read. By limiting the field for proper questioning it has in fact already answered that which by its end remains, its author claims, conjecture. Will enough of us learn to read it before it's become too late? It makes a nice dream that enough of us shall, which finally will not only explain consciousness but create it.

Nice work!!

I was already aware of the bad fame of this book, and every time I saw it being referenced, I saw it as being referenced as a failure. As the typical saying goes "consciousness explained away". Nevertheless, I decided to give it a shot. I figured the bad reputation of the book was because it failed its goal and stated purpose, which was way too ambitious. But I figured I could still have a lot of value and insight into consciousness.

But I was wrong. While it explained some characteristics of thought and consciousness, it didn't explain consciousness as such. I gave up and stopped reading briefly before halfway. I very rarely leave books unfinished, but I truly felt like it was a waste of time. Not only it didn't explain very much, but the writing itself is rather boring, and Dennett often shifts too laterally. While I usually appreciate this, I found it pointless and dull.

I felt he often confused the validity of the experience of consciousness as phenomenology itself. The fact that your phenomenology leads you to a flawed assumption and you don't quite understand the mechanisms, doesn't in any way solve the actual problem of experiencing it, which is exactly the point. Coming up with heterophenomenology to make it more "objective" doesn't help very much. If it's accurate or not is almost irrelevant. Calling it a simple projection feels an equal cheap escape.

This is my 2nd book from Dennett, the first being Breaking the Spell, which was similarly disappointing. I had a good impression of Dennet from a few his lectures that I watched, and after the disappointment of the first book I figured I'd give it another try, but looks like I'm fighting for a lost cause.

I'm sure there are some good arguments and ideas in the book, I found the categorization of consciousness as being Orwelling or Stalinesque quite witty and useful for example, and the refutation of the Cartesian Theatre is solid, although it was beaten to death. But overall, I personally felt it wasn't worth the grinding.

Always remember this: "You only get evolution, on the edge of chaos, in the regions of possible law that form the hybrid zone between stifling order and destructive chaos"

This book was awful. There was no reason to make it this long. The author sounds like a dick. 5 hours 22 min left.