This is probably my favorite non-fiction book that I have ever read. I read it for the first time when I was 15 or so, and have probably read it a dozen times since. When I was a dumb highschooler with a passing interest in science who loved pop science books? Loved it. When I was getting my degree in computational neuroscience and looking for pioneers in the field? Loved it. Now, with a glass of red wine and a desire to wax philosophical with my friends? Love it.

In fact, I like it so much that I can scarcely tell whether it is really the best book ever, or whether Daniel C. Dennett's mind is organized so much like my own that it is just the best book ever...for me. And then I read it again and I DON'T EVEN CARE. Fifteen thousand stars.

I feel like I just ran a marathon: one I was woefully unprepared for. This huge book required a huge amount of mental effort from me, and I'm afraid I was unable to meet much of it even halfway. Parts of it were explicable to me, and I found them to be incredibly interesting. I just don't have enough grasp of philosophical basics to take on a work like this. I read the entire thing, diligently, but much of it was inexplicable to me. Not because it made no sense-Dennett is a very sharp thinker and a clear writer. It was simply because I, having enjoyed prior works by Dennett, jumped into this masterful, all-encompassing work of advanced philosophy without really knowing what I was getting myself into.

I found it to be very thought-provoking, and as I say many of the segments dealt with things like neuroscience and the like which made more sense to me. I look forward to re-reading this one day when I have the proper background in less advanced works on this topic to fully appreciate the thought Dennett put into this masterful work.

I am in no position to review this book.

I have met Dennett and talked with him, it has shaken my world, ravaged my ego and what it means to be myself. After all this time i'm glad to be done.

A brilliant book with new ideas. It's a struggle to read and understand it all but well worth the effort. As Dennett explains up front, all the discussion and explanation of various theories and refutations are necessary to understand his proposal. There were many eye opening moments as well as the need to reread, sometimes several times, his explanations to understand ideas that go against the grain. The book is impactful and I no longer see my thought processes as a logical plan and can see myself as a narrative center of gravity. Amazing my homunculi are writing this.

In a way I wish the book had been named Dennett’s Theory of Consciousness, Explained–although, I’m not sure I would have read a book of that title (who wants to read yet another person’s theory?). Indeed the book’s audacious title does its job well in terms of marketing: I purchased and began reading the book with great gusto. But, obviously, since the book was published in 1992 and we here in 2016 still cannot agree that consciousness has been explained, we know that Dennett doesn’t deliver on what we perceive as his initial promise to give us “…an empirical, scientifically respectable theory—of human consciousness” (4). Sure, while there is an abundance of scientific experimentation used in the argument of this book, we ultimately get what Dennett calls “a family of metaphors” (455). So, despite the anticlimactic ending, Dennett does give us an explanation, and I cannot say the journey wasn’t worth it.

Review: http://www.chrisviabookreviews.com/20...

A better title for this book would be "Consciousness Provisionally Explained, At Great Length", but that probably wouldn't have fit on the book jacket. In five-hundred or so pages, Dennett outlines most of his complete theory of the mind. The big idea is straightforward: there is no "Cartesian theater" where sense-data or memories or anything else is played for an internal observer or decision maker. Instead, consciousness is a stream produced by the activities of countless loosely joined agents in the brain. But the details can be difficult to understand, even if you have done some reading in this area before (I'd read Dennett and Hofstadter's Mind's I.) Dennett loves to digress, focus on details, and use a lot of five-dollar words. And he builds his theory up very slowly, and it's not until three or four hundred pages in that he's even able to articulate it fully- the subject may demand that much caution, but it also demands a lot from the reader. Overall judgment: you'll learn a lot about the subject, but you'll also end up with a headache.

I always enjoy reading Dennett. I like the way he combines examples from psychological research and computing with philosophical argument. I am fairly rationally convinced by his arguments in this book--about, maybe not the illusory nature of consciousness itself, but let's say the illusory nature of the apparent unity and integrity of conscious experience. The concept of consciousness as software running on our neurological hardware makes sense to me, and I was interested in Dennett's ideas about the "hacks" that enable consciousness (for example, communicating with ourselves as we communicate with others by making sounds with our mouths that we perceive through our ears.

However, it's a very difficult illusion to "unsee"!

My feeling of the book is similar to Dennett's own assessment, in the final chapter: My explanation of consciousness is far from complete. One might even say that it was just a beginning, but it is a beginning, because it breaks the spell of the enchanted circle of ideas that made explaining consciousness seem impossible.

The book has its flaws: it spends its early chapters claiming that some questions are unanswerable in principle, when later researchers have figured out ways of testing those questions in practice (see Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts for some of such work). At times it also felt like rather dry and wordy reading, even though I generally enjoy reading academic writing for pleasure. It may also be faulted for not always being entirely clear on what exactly it is that it does claim - for all the time that it spends criticizing naive views of consciousness, its offered alternative models often feel sketchy and speculative.

But, coming back to the quote at the beginning of my review, these are flaws characteristic of the beginning of an explanation. If people have a mistaken view of a thing, then explaining why that is a mistaken view is a necessary first step to get them to think about alternatives. While many of Dennett's explanations feel sketchy, they are nonetheless useful for starting to sketch out an alternative and more sophisticated way of thinking about consciousness. The naive folk-psychological view of consciousness isn't particularly developed either; Dennett takes us much closer to something like an understanding, even if the distance to a full understanding still remains even longer than the distance traveled.

A nice and thorough look at consciousness. I'm intrigued by the topic but so much speculation about it does little to inform based on evidence and proper reasoning. Dennett takes an issues often shrouded in mystery and said to be beyond the reaches of science and analyses it in a very scientific way. His conclusions seem sound and are given a thorough justification.

I note that he doesn't exactly explain consciousness, but he does explain aspects of it. Much of the book gets in to what expectations we have about consciousness are wrong and the rest sort of teases a bit at what consciousness is. Just because we don't have the whole story however doesn't mean there isn't a lot of value in these pages.

A reader's enjoyment of Consciousness Explained will depend to a large degree on his or her existing perspective on these subjects, as well as prior exposure to the ideas presented in this book. I can totally imagine cases where Dennett's long and meandering argument treads the perfect path in just the right mind - firstly by spectacularly collapsing long held notions of dualism and the inviolability of the self, and then in the bare and fertile soil thus created, plants and grows the seeds of a profound, earth-shattering new perspective on the consciousness and the mind. This is a perfectly valid experience, and it explains the five-star reviews.

But this was not my own experience. This book is now 25 years old, and having read later works by Dennett as well as others on this subject, the ideas were not ground-breaking for me. A large segment of the book is devoted to dispelling dualism and what Dennett calls the Cartesian Theatre, as well as other commonly held beliefs about the mind. This rather long section I suppose is necessary to lay the groundwork for what comes later, but the attack was so prolonged it felt to me like he was attacking a straw-man, knocking it to the ground and then repeatedly laying into it with a baseball bat.

The main thrust of the book is Dennett's "many drafts" model of consciousness. This in itself is compelling enough, and I largely agree with the broad strokes of the argument, but the literary metaphor points to what I find so unsatisfying about philosophy in general. There is this pervasive reliance on metaphor, linguistic tricks, semantics, imprecise and loose terms, lack of logically sound and demonstrated arguments, and indeed lack of a strong connection with experimental data. The end product is an interesting and defensible general philosophy, but to what extent can it be said to have explanatory power, as would a scientific model? Dennett loves to coin or co-opt extraneous terms like "Stalinesque" or "intuition pump"- terms that have some explanatory value but whose primary purpose seems to be to add colour to the writing and make it approachable (he seems absolutely desperate to coin a memorable phrase). But my concern is that using these terms also (in a nontrivial way) serves to obfuscate or oversimplify the underlying phenomena. When someone is talking about whether such and such memory recollection is Orwellian or Joycean or Stalinesque, I fear that they have strayed far from the path of scientific analysis and are instead reveling in their aptitude for witty observation, and generalisation at the expense of scientific accuracy. I can't help but think that if there were a comprehensive scientific theory of consciousness, it would sound nothing like this.

All that being said, these criticisms may be a little harsh, and Consciousness Explained does contain a lot of food for thought. There is little in here that is too egregious, although there is plenty that one can point to as being a bit of a stretch. It sets out to explain consciousness, but it doesn't really get there, and ends up being a bit of a grab-bag of philosophy, neuroscience and tidbits of trivia and anecdotes thrown in. Flawed, but interesting nonetheless.

I happened to see Dennett & Dawkins give a talk last month while I was still trying my best to wade through this unceasingly over-complicated book ... that certainly didn't provide the motivation I thought it might. Regardless, I trudged on and even though I left about 20% of the book uncovered, I don't feel entirely uncomfortable in writing that Dennett has a knack for obfuscation. Searle would call it obscurantism (as he did of Derrida's work). Dennett introduces the term heterophenomenology (he's a fanatic neologist) as a means of standardizing a subject's phenomenology and promises to show how this solves all our qualia problems. Similar to his arguments about why the Hard Problem of Consciousness is not hard, I remain unconvinced of the simplicity he imposes on both topics. I really like reading continental philosophy, but not the kind that pretends its analytic.

While Dennett is probably better known to most readers as a grumbly professional atheist, I really don't need any help in that regard, so I went straight to his book on philosophy of mind. I can see why he's a public figure-- he's downright chatty and personable for a chilly analytic philosopher, and at the same time clear and rigorous in his presentation of ideas.

As for the ideas themselves... OK, the multiple-drafts notion of consciousness is something I can certainly get behind, and his attack on the "Cartesian theater" notion, while it seems obvious, is something that really needs to be done every once in a while to clean philosophical house.

But as to how we arrive at that multiple-drafts state, he relies on an excessively inductive understanding of evolution and the brain-as-computer metaphor that seems to cripple cognitive research. I tend to agree far more with people like Searle, Dreyfus, Putnam, and Merleau-Ponty, whom Dennett explicitly rejects.