Dennett invited us to reconsider fundamental aspects of human experience. Seems fitting post landmark intro session - will need a re-read later on.

Ultimately, it opens up new ways of thinking about memory, decision-making, and the nature of self. If our conscious experience is a constantly edited narrative, what does this mean for our sense of free will, or our understanding of personal identity?

In short:
- In the 17th century, René Descartes proposed that the mind and body were separate entities, with the pineal gland serving as their connection. This concept of a central control point in the brain persisted, stopping our understanding for centuries. As neuroscience progressed, researchers eagerly sought this seat of consciousness, expecting to find a specific region where our experiences come together and decisions are made. But a curious thing happened. The more we learned about the brain, the more this idea of a central consciousness hub began to crumble. Different aspects of our experience—sight, sound, emotion, memory— seemed to be processed in various parts of the brain, often simultaneously.
- In other words, there was no single centre of consciousness to be found.

Notes:
- From Descartes' mind-body problem to modern neuroscience, the question of consciousness has long been shrouded in mystery.
- what if consciousness, the very essence of being, is just an elaborate illusion?
- Instead, he proposed that our experience of consciousness is more like a constantly edited, crowdsourced conglomeration than a unified self.
- The Multiple Drafts Model This theory challenged the notion of a singular, coherent stream of consciousness, in which humans had long believed, in favour of a chaotic inner turbulence of competing realities or interpretations of events.
- These drafts aren't neatly ordered or centrally coordinated either. Instead, they compete for dominance, with the winning draft becoming our conscious experience. This process happens continuously, and so rapidly that it gives the illusion of a smooth, unified consciousness.
- Rather than faithfully recording events as they happen, our brain constructs a coherent narrative after the fact, filling in details retroactively. This model had profound implications. It suggested that there's no single moment when something enters our consciousness. Instead, consciousness emerges from the ongoing process of narrative creation and revision in our brains.
- He proposed that language wasn't just a tool for expressing thoughts, but a fundamental shaper of consciousness itself.
- While animals might have rich sensory experiences, Dennett proposed that without language, they lack the kind of reflective narrative consciousness that humans possess. It challenged us to reconsider the nature of thought, self, and the very essence of what it means to be consciously aware.

Developed by philosophers like Edmund Husserl and later Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology is the study of conscious experience from the first-person point of view. It aims to describe what it's like to have certain experiences, focusing on the subjective, lived reality of consciousness. However, this introspective method faced a significant challenge from the start.
The experience of consciousness is as personal and subjective as consciousness itself. Enter Dennett's innovative solution, heterophenomenology. Heterophenomenology, which means the phenomenology of another, was Dennett's attempt to bridge the gap between subjective experience and objective science.

Heterophenomenology had far-reaching implications. It suggested that our intuitions about our own consciousness might be flawed or incomplete. Just as we can be mistaken about the causes of our behaviour, we might be mistaken about the very nature of our conscious experiences.

Dennett compared our sense of free will to a benign illusion, like the impression that the sun moves across the sky instead of the earth turning, as the sun remains stationary.

Dennett saw the self as a convenient fiction our brains construct to make sense of our experiences. Imagine writing your autobiography.

If our decisions emerge from complex brain processes rather than a central, controlling self, how does this affect our concepts of moral responsibility?

“Ufuk açıcı yeni fikirlerle dolu…“
—tRichard Dawkins

“Bilinç hakkında gündelik düşünceleri yıkarken, Dennett meseleye radikal bir bakış açısı getiriyor. Bilinç Açıklanıyor’un uzun yıllar boyunca okunacağına inanıyorum.”
— Douglas R. Hofstadter

“Çok başarılı bir bilimsel yaklaşım. İnsanlar, hayvanlar ve makinelerle ilgili olağanüstü bilgiler içeriyor.”
—tThomas Nagel

“Bilinç üzerine harika bir meditasyon.”
—tHoward Gardner

“Dennett’in açıklaması, tek kelimeyle dahiyane, hem profesyonel hem de genel okuyucuyu hedefleyen bir bilim kitabı, gördüklerim arasında en iyi örnek.“
—tGeorge Johnson, New York Times

Este no es un libro fácil de leer, -o más bien fácil de entender- por lo menos para aquellos que no somos filósofos y/o científicos de profesión. Si es cierto que si logre cierto nivel de comprensión es gracias a su maravilloso uso de analogías que ayudan a clarificar su esbozo de teoría -tal como el autor la llama-.

En cuanto al formato o estructura argumental me hizo acordar mucho a la manera de argumentar de Lawrence Lessig, ya que arma su argumento intentando acorralar al lector -y a sus detractores- para que sea difícil refutar sus razonamientos. De hecho incluye en el libro a Otto un personaje que critica sus exposiciones.

Lo que más me gustó del libro es lo ecléctico de la colección de teorías que utiliza para esbozar la suya, además el uso creativo de analogías y la gran amplitud del manejo de diversos temas con el que te pasea desde biología, hasta informática pasando por filosofía, y un conjunto amplio de disciplinas...

Lo que no me gusto tanto es que da muchas vueltas y eso hace que te pierdas para explicar un tema luego de postular una cuestión es muy usual que “primero revise otros temas” que al aclararlos permiten comprender su postura, eso si bien hace sólido su argumento dificulta el seguirlo. El mismo dice que tuvo que escribir lo primeros nueve capítulos para tratar los estados y procesos del cerebro para recién ahí esbozar su teoría en los cinco capítulos restantes...

Recomiendo este libro a todos los que quieran comprender una manera diferente de encarar el estudio de la conciencia. En base a analogías informáticas, a redes complejas, a física cuántica y ese tipo de cositas...

He doesn’t explain it.

A massive compilation of Dennett's best 20th-century theories of consciousness. A stunning conglomerate that both invites new discussions of consciousness and squashes lazy, seemingly sensical popular arguments of consciousness.

Dennett discusses a range of topics not limited to phenomenology, time in the brain, the evolution of consciousness, neuroplasticity, speech production, homunculi, consciousness in the visual field, qualia (discredits), and the idea of a self.

Ultimately, Dennett focuses on the idea that consciousness can indeed be explained, providing empirical perspectives and readily followable logic that breaks down certain aspects of consciousness into discernable parts. With this, he fights the specter of the "Cartesian Theater", the idea that there is a sensory finish line in the brain where all data comes to rest, a control room, a central meaner. With his Multiple Drafts Theory, Dennett thinks of consciousness as many simultaneous ongoing processes happening as the brain navigates through its sensory world.

"Once we take a serious look backstage, we discover that we didn't actually see what we thought we saw onstage. The huge gap between phenomenology and physiology shrinks a bit; we see that some of the “obvious” features of phenomenology are not real at all: There is no filling in with figment; there are no intrinsic qualia; there is no central fount of meaning and action; there is no magic place where the understanding happens. In fact, there is no Cartesian Theater; the very distinction between onstage experiences and backstage processes loses its appeal."
pg 434

This is one great book. To a large extent it's about what consciousness (and the self) isn't rather than what it is, but it's a start.

There are large swaths of this book where I believe the author could have conveyed his point both more quickly and more effectively. For similar reasons, I was less than satisfied with the final summary of his theory of consciousness. But, I'll concede that the failure may be on the part of my understanding.

Despite all that, I found a great deal within this book and the author's theory that was well worth reading and pondering and ultimately I believe that if you are really interested in exploring the mystery of consciousness it will be well worth your time to read this book.

Como su nombre lo indica, trata de explicar cómo surge el fenómeno que llamamos “consciencia” en un cerebro humano. Para ello echa mano de diversas disciplinas, como las neurociencias, las ciencias cognitivas, la psicología evolutiva, la inteligencia artificial y la filosofía de la mente. El resultado es un libro de ésos que se dedican a romperte la cabeza.

Creo que no hay forma más honesta de empezar esta reseña que reconociéndolo: hallé este libro muy complejo para mí. Tampoco es que no lo haya entendido para nada; por suerte acababa de leer “How the Mind Works” de Steven Pinker, y en años anteriores había leído algunas cosas de neurociencias y ciencias cognitivas. También me ayudaron mis lecturas de filosofía. Pero definitivamente tengo que aprender algunas cosas más de inteligencia artificial y volver a este libro más preparado.

La mayor parte está dedicada a derrumbar nuestras nociones comunes sobre la consciencia. Estamos acostumbrados a pensar que existe un “yo” indivisible, un actor central que recibe información de los sentidos y toma decisiones sobre las acciones voluntarias del cuerpo. Pero no hay forma de aceptar esta premisa sin caer en el viejo dualismo cuerpo-alma, el “fantasma en la máquina” de Descartes.

Incluso quienes no creen en un alma espiritual tienen problemas para concebir la mente en términos distintos; son algo así como “materialistas cartesianos”. Debe haber un centro de control, una neurona de oro, un homúnculo dentro de nosotros que percibe lo que los sentidos le presentan en un “teatro cartesiano”. Pero esas creencias sólo aplazan enfrentarse al problema: ¿Cómo piensa este homúnculo? ¿Cómo ve este homúnculo? ¿Hay una mente dentro de la mente? ¿Hay sentidos para percibir lo que perciben los sentidos?

Si algo me quedó claro al leer este libro, es que un montón de cosas que damos por sentadas sobre el funcionamiento de la mente humana en realidad son desconcertantes. Nuestro sentido común al respecto carece, valga la paradoja, de sentido. No puede existir un teatro cartesiano, no puede existir un yo central.

Más difícil se vuelve concebir qué sí existe. La teoría empírica de la mente de Dennett, el “multiple drafts model”, propone que la consciencia es resultado de la interacción de muchísimos procesos informáticos. Si el cerebro es el hardware, la mente es el software. Más aun, los programas que utiliza un usuario (digamos, el procesador de texto con el que escribo esto), no son más que ilusiones creadas para su beneficio (lo que hay “en realidad” son unos y ceros; ni siquiera, lo que hay son impulsos eléctricos y la ausencia de los mismos). Así, las diferentes facetas de la mente son como esos programas… con la diferencia de que no existe un usuario.

¿Complejo? Sí, mucho. Por eso decía que tendré que volver a este libro en un par de años. Lo que aprendí es que la realidad de la consciencia humana resultará ser más contraintuitiva de lo que nos imaginábamos. También aprendí sobre cómo se hace filosofía en la actualidad, no con chaquetas mentales construidas sobre el vacío, sino con una rigurosa interacción con la ciencia. Estoy decidido a aprender más al respecto.

So many pages and no real conclusion to speak of.

Dennett tackles the consciousness question from a common-sense/philosopical point of view, if such a thing is possible. It's an intriguing, if not entirely convincing theory. It feels like a good attempt to figure something out that won't be figured out for another twenty years.

The old joke is that it should be called "Consciousness Not Explained." Dennett has some interesting ideas, most of which he's pillaged from his pals at the robotics lab at MIT (Minsky, Brooks), but the breathtaking hubris and ego and constant belittling of other philosophers is quite unnecessary.

I really enjoyed this book for these reasons:
- It is long, yet almost always engaging. The author only rarely trailed off in discussions that were meaningless for me.
- It is well structured and well-worded
- I encountered many concepts that I already had in my mind, but would have been unable to put into words, especially so succinctly
- I found a great mix of reasoning, research and anecdotes.
- It has philosophical and scientific depth, but a lot of examples from everyday life.
I feel like a gap in my knowledge has been filled and I am better equipped for philosophical reasoning and discussions.