Dennett is infuriating in his total inability to see that everything he is saying is missing the whole point. Yes, a lot of our experiences are illusions. So what? If there exist feelings at all, there is something that is not explained by the 3rd person account.
This page:
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/T...
says it better than I can here. The repetition of the "yes, but how" question in every line of that page was just how I felt on every page of the book.

This book is pretty dense and heavy on the philosophy, for someone who hasn’t read much philosophy. But it’s well worth the read. Dennett covers everything from evolutionary biology to linguistics to computer architecture in a comprehensive attempt to break down the notion that consciousness is ephemeral and hence impossible to understand. He tries to accomplish this by attacking the common notion of how the conscious mind works and replacing his with an idea of his own. Unfortunately I know very little of the field to be able to judge for myself.

In a way Dennett feels like a curmudgeon about how the roots of the consciousness and the mind works in much the same way Richard Dawkins feels to me a curmudgeon about the roots of our biology. And just like Dawkins, I find him very convincing.

Dennett is very much in line with other thinkers I've been reading like Douglas Hofstadter (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...) and Michael S.A. Graziano (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...) who see consciousness as an emergent property of the whole system of our brain rather than something that emerges from a single point or theater in the mind. His dialogues on the chinese room thought experiment and philosophical zombies were great on this point. There can be unconscious zombies or operators in the chinese rooms only if we propose a single theater that consciousness arises from. If we look at the larger system, it's clear that any philosophical zombie will all of the skills and insights of a human would indeed be a conscious system.

This counterintuitive conclusion is something that we all seem to naturally battle because it strikes at the very nature of the self that is doing the intuiting. As Dennett wrote: "Many people are afraid to see consciousness explained because they fear that if we succeed in explaining it, we will lose our moral bearings." I suppose I can partially excuse some of my favorite thinkers like Yuval Noah Harari and Sam Harris for continuing to make claims that consciousness is still a fundamental mystery. I think what they mean is that we still haven't found the metaphors that allow us collectively to think about our minds in the way we think about our biology and the world around us. Dennett, in spite of his best attempt to reach a broad audience, is far too academic for my mother or my dentist and probably for me, but I'm hoping work from someone is on the way to help carry this torch.

I have not fully accepted the author's claim (that he has explained consciousness), nor, obviously, his model for consciousness, but there is so much fascinating mind food in here that it's well worth five stars.

I guess this book has become a de rigeur foundational piece for anybody interested in what consciousness is, because he sets up a groundwork for discussing it, and he covers lots of things (like Descartes' consideration of the question), and the thought experiments provide wonderful fodder for at least making me consider what counts, and what doesn't, as consciousness.

Ultimately, I disagree with him. From a scientist's point of view, of course, a model of dualism is wrong - that is, the idea that there is a 'mind' separate from 'the brain' which is unmeasurable in any way - because the mind there is by definition set up to be unmeasurable. Why should some bit of food I eat, which is clearly not conscious, and has no 'mind' - suddenly get this property if it becomes digested and becomes some of the material in my brain?

Yes, there are plenty of real problems with dualism. That, however, doesn't mean his model is right. His model is what he calls 'the multiple draft model' and it's interesting. But after a few hundred pages of not saying consciousness is an illusion, he more or less says, yes, it's an illusion, alright, and we're all 'zombies' and there's nothing different between us and a (hypothetical) computer that had many layers of self-investigation.

But it seems to me the 'illusion' premise is easily struck down - by definition. An illusion is a misperception. Unlike the proverbial 'tree in the forest,' an illusion truly does not exist without an observer. An illusion requires an observer to misperceive something. So if consciousness is an illusion, who's it fooling? Whatever that is, is consciousness, even if it's a small thing.

Incidentally, The only place I noticed the age of this book is in his talking about how language is crucial in advanced 'consciousness' - and that therefore, non-humans cannot be said to be conscious. However, many animals are capable of rudimentary language. Incidentally to the incidentally, a section about language early in the book - and how memes live and mutate and spread and therefore evolve in the Darwinian sense - is fascinating, and made me a little smarter, I think, than I was before.

Anyway. This is a necessary read for anyone considering the nature of consciousness, and the puzzle of how millions of cells which act as a confederacy can achieve something so unified as conscious experience.

Does this book explain consciousness? No.

What I expected was an ontological exploration of consciousness. What IS consciousness? However, Dennett wrote rather an ontic one. In other words, a statement not about the entity in itself, but of the characteristics of the thing in itself. This is similar to difference stated by Aristotle between substance and attributes. For the former, we are discussing what a being is, which could be differentiated from other beings such animal, plants, etc. The latter explores the characteristics of said being such as how it works, what it is made of, etc.

Dennett, however, does not provide positive claims of consciousness (e.g. a cow has four legs), but rather negative ones (e.g. a circle is a shape without corners). For example, he asks why when someone touches our forehead and our leg at the same time, we perceived the touch as occurring at the same time, if the distance from the leg to the brain is larger than the one from the forehead to the brain. And instead of saying it is because of the myelin sheath surrounding the neuron, which is something students learn in intro to psych, he goes on and on about how it is not because the neuron from the forehead to the brain has a spiral shape. Take this paragraph, for example, in page 231:

One of the skeletons in the closet of contemporary linguistics is that it has lavished attention on hearing but largely ignored speaking [this is pretty straightforward, we have paid attention on hearing, but ignored speaking], which one might say is roughly half of language, and the most important half at that. Although there are many detailed theories and models of language perception [again, paid attention to hearing], and of the comprehension of heard utterances [again, paid attention to hearing] (the paths from phonology, through syntax, to semantics and pragmatics [again, paid attention to hearing], no one - not Noam Chomsky [that is redundant since he is included in the phrase no one], and not any of his rivals or followers [again, redundant] - has had anything very substantial (right or wrong [this is redundant ]) to say about systems of language production [again, ignored speaking].

I hope by now you get the point. It. is. very. redundant. But once you remove the fluff, oh what a good book it is. For example, I love his"Shakey" thought experiment that he introduces to explain heterophenomenology. Shakey was a robot that was able to distinguish between cubes and pyramids. So Dennett asks us to imagine what if Shakey was able to communicate with us. If this was true, what would be a more real, a more accurate response when we asked him how he was able to differentiate between a pyramid and a cube. One of the three possible answers is in term of binary code (e.g. "I scan each 10,000 digit-long sequence of 0s and 1s...). The second response would be in terms of how geometric structures (e.g. "I draw boundaries and look at the vertices, if there is a Y vertex, it is a box...). And the last response in terms of affect (e.g. "I do not know it just comes to me. It's by intuition...).

The importance placed on what the subject perceives as real is as important as what is objectively real, especially in the study of consciousness. People can experience subjectively a purple cow, even though there is objectively no purple cow. However, heterophenomenology does not solve the zombie problem (Zombies do not have consciousness, but they can still operate like a being with consciousness. In other words, it arrives at the same answers when observing Zoe vs Zombie Zoe's behavior). And that's how the whole book goes. A back and forth of an attribute of consciousness, a a problem which that explanation does not solve, and a limited picture of what consciousness is not.

No, it does not explain consciousness, but what a great ride. One full of fluff and good ideas.

This book made me a heterophenomenologist.

If there is a newer version of this book - read that one!

Although a few chapters are outdated (with VR feeling real still being a far future and algorithms doing image recognition also quite distant etc), it still proved to be a very interesting read.

Quite a few experiment results are in this book and I also learned some new bits and pieces of human biology, which I hope I won't forget too fast.

My favorite was the part where I think the essence of the book was hidden - the consciousness explained part (obviously). I really like the idea of a narrational gravity center inside of each of us, humans, and that the stories we tell ourselves, the beliefs, rationale, lies, and other stuff that we imagine and think about is what makes us conscious. I think it is a very beautiful idea. Because - our consciousness for sure is not some one point in our brain or our body. Also, I think that the idea of a narrational gravity center is a great and a philosophical way to explain consciousness and I think it is the right way - because philosophy is love for wisdom.

Indeed, a very good book which I would love to re-read if it was re-written with some up-to-date edits.

The study of consciousness is a field ripe for exploration. With A.I always evolving, our definition of sentient needs to expand.

A great read full of valuable insight.

Ch. 5-7 and 10-11 are breath-taking. The rest is just cool. A lot of rubbing the Multiple Drafts perspective in. Plus some boring nonsense about memes.

In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett provides an excellent explanation of hallucinations. Normally, the mind anticipates and sensory input either confirms or denies. If sensory input is shut off or becomes random, then the confirmations and denials take the mind down false tracks, leading to the generation of wild and vivid images that bear no relationship to immediate reality.

In normal mode, anticipation of this kind means that we are ready to respond to threats and opportunities very quickly -- often acting before the related sense data has arrived at the brain, much less been analyzed and understood. That could be an enormous survival advantage (from the perspective of evolution). It's a bit like "cache" memory in computers, being ready with answers to familiar questions in RAM, without having to go through the whole process of retrieving information from the hard drive.

This works very well when change is predictable. When what happens next fits neatly into the pre-existing context. But when change is discontinuous, when something significantly new occurs, this process can get in the way of our recognizing it. Anticipation in this sense is a habit of perception -- we see what we expect to see, and it takes a major shift, a major perceptual denial of what we anticipated for us to take a good hard look at what is actually happening and make sense of it, and change our judgments and our actions and our plans.

When I heard people (mainly Sam Harris and his podcast guests) talk about consciousness, I found myself always disagreeing with the fundamentals of their view. I also picked up that they disagreed with some guy called Daniel Dennett, and as such I wondered to what extend I would be agreeing to his views.

The main point of the book is the view that consciousness is not a binary property, but exists in gradations. There wasn't a watershed moment in history where a non-conscious animal gave birth to the first conscious animal, but rather various animal brains gradually evolved to function in specific ways such that we see those brains as more or less conscious minds.

I completely agree with this point of view, and it was nice to see someone who has spend a lot more time researching and thinking about this topic come to the same conclusion. However, I didn't find Dennett's argumentation in this book very strong. He doesn't really succeed in building a case from first principles, but rather makes various assumptions and reasoning leaps to come to his conclusion. Additionally, a lot of time is spent posing counter-counter-arguments against various objects Dennett supposes I would have against his theories. Since I didn't really have those objections in the first place, these parts felt convoluted and vexing to read.

Dennett uses some fascinating case studies from neuropsychology to debunk what he calls the Cartesian Theatre. He means the gut instinct we have that what goes on inside the brain is like a little multimedia presentation on a screen, in front of the audience of the soul. First off, he rightfully dismisses dualism. He then shows how there is no need for, or evidence for, a Cartesian Theatre. He introduces the temporal and spacial distribution of the mind in the brain. He shows how simple experiments show that our minds misremember by one of two means.

1. Orwellian cognitive theory says that the subject of a false time perception perceives the stimulus correctly, but constructs the memory of it incorrectly. The new memory overwrites the old memory so fast that verbal reports are always of the false memory.

2. Stalinesque cognitive theory says that your brain has a time-delay (like a tape delay in live TV shows) in what you are conscious of. Consciousness is delayed long enough for the perception-editor to fill in facts that were not in the stimulus itself. So your memory is correct, but the original consciousness was mistaken (like Stalin’s show trials).

He shows that these cannot in fact be distinguished. He proposes instead a Multiple Drafts hypothesis, that the brain is constantly making up new theories and discarding old ones.