A 400+ pages book that tries to combine philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, evolution, AI research.. into a coherent theory of consciousness. Does Dennett succeed? In my opinion not, but he is in good company of other thinkers who tried.

Dennett's main thesis is that there is little viewer in our head who processes all the information linearly (the so-called an appalled 'Cartesian theatre'). Instead Dennett argues for a multiple draft model which states that there is no stream of conscious experience. Like Hofstadter consciousness is assumed to be an emergent property of a system being able to be introspective.

This is a heavy book, crammed with a lot of ideas (some of them not easy to follow). A lot of it is really enjoyable to read, but a definite theory of the mind? I think not.

This is exactly the kind of philosophy book I wish I had read in college. I had always felt philosophers spent so much time imagining what might be happening in the world and almost no time at all testing those theories. I always wanted to say "Just because you imagine it, doesn't mean it's true". And there are plenty of theories (De Carte's Devil, zombies, etc) that have no effect on the observable world. I can appreciate these theories for being a kind of mental exercise, but by focusing on them so completely it gave me the impression that philosophy could have no real impact on our understanding of the world.

Dennett applies some rigor to the philosophy of the mind, casting aside things like dualism and the Cartesian theater which simply can not exist physically. He offers new theories (multiple drafts) and subjects them to testing, even if that testing is somewhat indirect. I suppose people with a dread of science will feel offending by the intrusion of objective verification onto the world of pure reason. I was overjoyed.

Compared to The Selfish Gene and The Fabric of The Cosmos this was rubbish. Couldn't learn much from it partly because it was too difficult, partly because everything took too long to explain, partly because the writer wasn't certain about anything himself either. Couldn't finish it. Don't recommend for ordinary people. It's also not a scientific book, it's more of a philosophy book.

An extremely frustrating book. There is a lot of well thought out argument here, much of it worth engaging with even where I disagree, and some of the theory of how the brain works was genuinely compelling. In particular the pandemonium model of language production--and, despite my low rating, I like significant portions of the Multiple Drafts model!

But the author falls into infuriating patterns of thought that lead him to advance ridiculous claims that do not all logically follow from the (often) reasonable assumptions he starts out with. He responds to objections throughout, but objections presented by a rather unsophisticated fictional critic who did not always ask the questions I wanted answered. In fact, at least one stunning, seemingly foundational assertion (that a robot capable of second-order observations of its internal states would "think" it was conscious) is put forward with practically no backup or discussion--what does that even mean?? Other bucks are merely passed down the road (it only *seems* like I experience qualia? even if I concede this, the fact that they "seem" so vivid to me is not a lesser mystery than the one he seeks to deflate by denying qualia are real). It is always possible I am misunderstanding key points and/or that my gut opposition to his thesis is impeding my ability to accept genuine truths (I happily concede that this latter may have happened here or there). But as I glance other reviews, including those by experts, it looks like I am not the only one with similar frustrations and confusions about what exactly he is trying to say.

Dennet, by my diagnosis, adheres to a particular type of scientistic worldview that suggests anything beyond the reach of more or less contemporary science either doesn't matter or doesn't exist. Whatever this view's strengths, I think this book shows some of its weaknesses in both style and content. Still, the book is useful as a scientific theory of the brain, a challenge (often successful) against prevailing ideas about the mind, and a demonstration of the promises and pitfalls of his approach. Despite all my complaints, I would genuinely like to sit down with the author someday and ask him my questions and see what he says.

However, I can't give it three stars because the discussions of nonhuman animals are sloppy, un-rigorous, and riddled with both implicit and explicit human supremacism (e.g. calling species phylogenetically far from humans "lowly," which is of course an un-scientific presentation of evolution). This leads him to somewhat hand-wavey moral conclusions that are all the more egregious because he hasn't backed them up in any meaningful way.

Dennett makes an audacious claim in the title of this book. I think he delivers. I must agree with the reviewers who suggest that he does so with more packaging than necessary - the book could have made its case in about half the volume. Nevertheless, of the books on consciousness by philosophers that I have read recently, this one comes closest to making me think that the "hard problem" has now been reduced to a series of engineering problems.

The author almost lost me in the opening passages. Dennett seeks to establish that we cannot be that favourite thought-experiment, the brain in a vat. His dismissal does not, to me, hold water, and he rapidly starts providing evidence that he already knows why. Consciousness does not require nearly as much bandwidth as alleged, the impression of continuity being illusory. Dennett leans on this fairly heavily, so the judgement that we could not possibly feed a bottled brain what we can feed the eye with an eye-tracker is somehow anomalous.

After that, it's all uphill. Drawing on evidence from information technology, evolutionary biology, neurology and philosophy, Dennett shows that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing proposition; that consciousness is not a unitary phenomenon, continuum or plenum; that its illusion of continuousness is just that; that it cannot be a philosopher's epiphenomenon; that qualia are not the hurdle philosophers like to think and may not even exist as they think, being instead merely the associations that accompany commonalities in experience; that robots almost certainly can and soon will dream of electric sheep; that consciousness most certainly does supervene on physical brain states; and that, ultimately, "you" as such don't really exist. This latter will disappoint both religious fundamentalists and many materialist rationalists, but it's not really arguable when you set Dennett's case in the context of Oliver Sacks' neurology. We are a committee of daemons that only on average talk and communicate with one another.

The central drive of this book is aimed at crushing the Cartesian Theatre beneath his wheels, and a lot of space and effort goes into shattering the illusions that it creates. He uses the neat term of a "virtus dormitiva" to show why the idea is neither sustainable nor philosophically coherent. A man is not a conscious man because he a has a conscious homunculus in his head looking at the projection screen of the brain. This leads to instant infinite regress; it solves nothing.

No, the homunculi of the mind are subsystems etching drafts of fragments of selective glimpses of the phenomenal and ideal. "You" arise out of the chatter between them as drafts are pulled up, stitched together and discarded; a mnemonic habit of talking to oneself that one day became a mental voice instead of a real one. In this way, the conscious can be reduced to components of the unconscious. And that, as Dennett says in closing, is what it means to explain something.

This book is a nearly perfect refutation of the view of human consciousness and memory as a sort of "Cartesian Theater" , with its implications of infinite regression. Dennett is always a lucid writer.

The trick to solving many philosophical problems often comes down to figuring out how to unask bad questions and Dennett mostly succeeds in that aim by offering hypotheses that arguably deal with all the pertinent phenomena without appealing to outdated beliefs (the cartesian theater, dualism and central processing among others which have led to many a bad question).

But this was certainly an oversized mixed bag. One problem I had with CE was that in a number of places Dennett ambiguously fluctuates between simply demonstrating that their are other workable hypotheses which don't appeal to folk psych and providing purportedly veridical explanations. This is quite tricky because if you are not very clear on what he's trying to do in certain places he can be read as question-begging. Yet if you take this into account his arguments can come across as superfluous to the functionalist choir. Despite this bit of trickiness, I really enjoyed the exposure to outside research that's provided here and even some of the novel takes on old case studies and thought experiments (blindsight for instance).

Much has happened in phil mind since this was published and perhaps that should be taken into account. But to avoid hand-waving where good empirical support is available I would recommend mostly avoiding the chapter on qualia and reading the article, a sensorimotor account of vision instead. And not to be cheeky, but one can find a better argued and articulated theory of self that brings together functionalism and something very close to the multiple drafts and pandemonium models in Nietzsche's work.

No le doy 7 estrellas porque esto no me deja. Es uno de los mejores libros que leí en una carrera de 5 años llena de libros increíbles.

Daniel Denett es un filósofo y neurocientífico que se adentra en el problema de más alto nivel al que se enfrenta la psicología, que es responder la pregunta de "¿Qué es la conciencia?" entendida como el yo, el sentimiento de identidad, no la culpa ni chorradas de esas. Y lo hace desde un punto de vista científico, brillante si bien a veces algo denso, con una enorme profusión de argumentos y experimentos para ilustrar su punto de vista.

No es un libro fácil. Pero es una enorme recompensa.

Daniel C. Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" redefines our understanding of the mind and consciousness, challenging long-standing beliefs about the nature of human awareness. Dennett tackles the enigma of consciousness with a radical perspective, suggesting that what we perceive as a coherent, singular experience of consciousness may be an intricate illusion crafted by the brain. His insights stem from the historical debate surrounding the mind-body problem, a philosophical issue that has perplexed thinkers from Descartes to modern neuroscientists. The book fundamentally reframes our perception of the self and our place in the universe by proposing that consciousness is not a central experience but an ongoing process of construction by the brain.

One of the most significant ideas Dennett introduces is the dismantling of the "Cartesian Theatre"—a concept rooted in Descartes' dualism, which posits a central control point or viewer in the brain where consciousness resides. Dennett argues that such a singular entity does not exist, instead proposing that consciousness is the result of multiple processes occurring simultaneously across different parts of the brain. These processes function in parallel, with no singular “you” making decisions or having experiences in real time. This challenges the intuitive, comforting notion that there is a unified self overseeing our thoughts and actions. Instead, Dennett likens consciousness to a “crowdsourced” system, where various brain functions collaborate to create the illusion of a seamless stream of consciousness.

Central to Dennett's model is the "Multiple Drafts Model", which further challenges the traditional view of consciousness. He argues that instead of a single coherent experience, the brain generates multiple drafts or interpretations of events, competing for dominance. Our conscious experience is merely the result of the most successful draft, which creates the illusion of a smooth, continuous awareness. This process is akin to a newsroom where multiple stories are being worked on simultaneously, but only one is selected for publication. Through this metaphor, Dennett suggests that what we perceive as our singular, unified self is actually a constantly shifting narrative.

The implications of this model are profound. Dennett uses visual phenomena, such as the phi effect, to illustrate how the brain constructs and retroactively edits our experiences. The phi effect, in which two dots appear in quick succession but are perceived as one moving dot, demonstrates how our brain fills in the gaps of our perception after the fact. This concept revolutionizes how we think about memory, decision-making, and the nature of self, suggesting that our conscious experience is not as immediate or direct as we might believe.

Dennett also addresses the "Hard Problem of Consciousness", a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers to describe the challenge of explaining why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences. While many scholars approach this issue as an intractable mystery, Dennett dismisses the Hard Problem altogether. He contends that consciousness is best understood by focusing on its functional aspects, such as how the brain processes information and generates behavior, rather than seeking an elusive "essence" of subjective experience. According to Dennett, our perception of consciousness as mysterious stems from our lack of access to the cognitive processes that produce it. He compares consciousness to a magic trick, where the illusion is convincing, but the underlying mechanisms are explainable.

A key aspect of Dennett’s theory is the role of language in shaping consciousness. He argues that language is not just a tool for expressing thoughts, but a fundamental driver of higher-order thinking and self-awareness. Dennett introduces the concept of the "Joycean Machine," named after the stream-of-consciousness literary style of James Joyce, which he believes represents an upgrade in human cognition made possible by language. According to this view, our sense of self and conscious experience is largely a product of our ability to narrate and conceptualize our thoughts through language. Without language, Dennett suggests, humans would not possess the same level of reflective consciousness. This theory extends to animal consciousness, where Dennett posits that non-human animals may have sensory experiences but lack the complex, narrative-based consciousness that language affords humans.

To bridge the gap between subjective experience and objective science, Dennett introduces "heterophenomenology", a method for studying consciousness scientifically without relying on introspective accounts as infallible truths. By treating verbal reports of experiences as data to be interpreted, rather than as direct reflections of reality, researchers can build a third-person perspective on consciousness. This approach allows for a more objective study of the mind, focusing on observable behavior and linguistic reports rather than subjective interpretations.

Finally, Dennett explores the nature of the self and free will. He argues that our sense of self is not a fixed entity but a constantly evolving narrative constructed by our brains. Like a center of gravity in physics, the self is an abstract concept rather than a concrete point in the brain. Dennett likens personal identity to an ongoing autobiography, where we continuously weave together memories and experiences to create the illusion of a stable, coherent self. This has implications for our understanding of free will, as Dennett suggests that decisions emerge from the complex interplay of competing drafts in our brain, rather than from a central controlling self. However, this does not diminish the reality of our choices, but rather reframes the process by which they are made.

In "Consciousness Explained", Dennett pushes readers to reconsider deeply held beliefs about the nature of the mind, self, and free will. By challenging traditional notions of consciousness and offering a scientifically grounded alternative, Dennett provides a thought-provoking framework for understanding one of the most complex aspects of human experience.

Consciousness was, unfortunately, NOT explained.

Zeker een interesant boek, maar man dat is niet perse gemakkelijk om u door te worstelen.

Damn: impressed. The title’s supreme arrogance is misleading: his prose is clear, stylish and flowing, he's expert in the relevant experiments, and he’s much less hectoring in book form – he admits his theory’s counter-intuitive and hostile appearance, he flags alternate positions and possibilities, and it’s hard to doubt him when he says he’d change his mind if the science pointed away from his detailed eliminativism.

I am very resistant to eliminative materialism – in fact I’ve never been able to take it seriously - so that he manages to patch over my failure of imagination is a mark of the book’s power.

You begin to wonder – for instance when he talks about his work on children with multiple personalities disorder – if he’s cultivating a humane exterior to make his theory more palatable. But it's probably just that our backlash against his loud, cartoon atheism overlooks his humanity.

The first section, where he admits the wonder and difficulty of studying consciousness, and carefully lays out the method ahead, is a model for modern scientifically engaged philosophy – and at the end he suggests a dozen novel, detailed experiments to test his theory (ante up). Can't ignore him.

Minus a point for being twenty years old on a topic where that matters.