DNF. It’s interesting, and actually less of a difficult read than a lot of other books in similar areas, but it’s long and I basically just stopped when I realised I still had a lot left to go and didn’t really feel like carrying on. May well come back to it, though.

Does it really matter what the substrate of consciousness is? I mean, consciousness is still going to be there (or do I mean here) whether it's located in mind, brain or silicon - right?

Philosophers seem intent on making simple stuff into complex cognitive conurbations. But hey - why not - it gives our mental teeth something to chew - right?

Daniel Dennett tried, for several hundred pages, to uninstall my mind, reboot and install his own operating system. And I'm there thinking 'how fricking rude - mind your own business dude' - right?

Then there's the tiny, tiny writing, and the long, long words - people should talk with short, big words - right?

Then there's the infuriating way DD has of making sweeping statements like "everybody wants to have their conscious explained." I made that one up, but no-one wants to be told what they want - right?

In a sense, it's interesting to hear what DD has to say about the subject - he's obviously given it way too much thought, and it would be a shame to let all that thought go to waste; but ultimately I don't like to be told what I am, thank you very much.

There are things that you can’t explain and still they work!

I shall give this book 5-star because who am I to judge Dennett. Seriously he’s one hell of a philosopher, and he also looks like one.

However, three years ago, Andrej Karpathy wrote a short story “Forward Pass” that portrayed consciousness in a way that feels more realistic than this long tedious and boring book. Karpathy suggested that consciousness isn't a mysterious phenomenon nor can it be fully understood through simple models like the cartesian theater or even Dennett’s multiple drafts model. Instead, when you give a neural networks an end-to-end problem, consciousness-like phenomena emerge as a byproduct of such a system striving for efficiency and survival in a commercial environment.

This perspective challenges Dennett’s approach by implying that consciousness arises naturally from the complexity of neural networks, without needing a deliberate architectural design like those Dennett describes. The idea of 'explaining' consciousness by drawing block diagrams (you see, here’s the Cartesian Theatre, No, no, sorry - these blocks are the multiple things that Dennent mentioned...) be less relevant in the context of modern computational theories where functionality and survival drive emergent properties. The term 'explained' seems increasingly outmoded when we consider how these advanced systems operate—it’s not something that anyone can explain. Yet, these systems are achieving their goals effectively. We are reaching a point where, rather than dissecting consciousness into diagrams, we should recognize it as an emergent feature of complex adaptive systems, particularly in commercially driven technologies that form the 'survival-of-the-fittest' effect.

I thought I was going to hate this book, because of some reviews I had read, but I found a lot of it very interesting and compelling.

The first thing I liked was that he really got me thinking about what it is to be conscious. Is there a projection room up there in the brain somewhere screening the contents of our consciousness? I have to admit I saw it that way. He calls this the Cartesian Theater, because Descartes had proposed a place in the brain (the pineal gland) where the physical brain processes turned into mental thoughts. Dennett proposes instead a Multiple Drafts model, in which streams of perceptions flow from our sensory processors, and these continually rewrite a flow of narrative. There isn’t some central clearinghouse that waits until all the various streams show up and then “makes up the mind.” Instead we’re constantly rewriting the story of our life. That’s why it’s sometimes hard to remember our first impressions of things and how we can “be of two minds.”

I found the ending fascinating: he postulates that there is no self really, it's just a narrative that we use as a survival tool, similar to the shell a hermit crab inhabits, the dams a beaver builds, or the web a spider spins. "Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others--and ourselves--about who we are." What would this mean if our sense of self was literally nothing more than a protective shell to help us survive in a human-created world of words and memes?

Dennett is a materialist so of course his conclusion is there really is no such thing as consciousness in the way most people think of it. There is no Witness, no Awareness underlying form. I cannot agree with him on this.

Some of the reviews criticized Dennett for his wordiness. I disagree with that appraisal: Dennett is a philosopher and in order to make his point crystal clear he has to ensure there are no loose ends or ambiguities. This book is written for a non-professional audience, and I appreciate the fact that he didn't dumb it down.

At times I enjoyed this, but other times it was so frustrating! It's not clear at all, and is pretty much a jumble of ideas, with some good ones thrown in. Dennet says its on purpose though, because if he was clear then people would nitpick unimportant points. Ok. That's actually kind of cool. It's still pretty hard to understand what he's talking about.

Another problem is that I constantly felt like I'm way ahead of the author in terms of having a sharper understanding of what feelings I'm having, and what my brain misses, ignores, and rationalizes. It might be a product of the book being 25 years old now, and me reading lots of psychology and Less Wrong.

I found myself being like "NO AGG, understanding is the emotional feeling of satisfaction you get when you can generate coherent responses that don't raise any inconsistency flags!"

I didn't understand the no-qualia part. Sure I can buy that qualia are of smaller size than people expect, but not existing? Uh.... no. I don't buy that.

The best part was the discussion of the self and other people as centers of narratives.

I wish the book was clearer about when it was talking about actual consciousness stuff, and when it was talking about the things that make up our consciousness. (It's not a known thing. But it is worthwhile to categorize things better)

Enjoyable, but I feel like most of what I got out from it was my own imaginings about consciousness and attention and stories, rather than understanding anything that the author said.

At times enlightening, at others confusing or even straining. I enjoyed reading it for a great part because of all the information it narrates that was both highly remarkable and to me unknown - little anecdotes such as the robot 'shakey', but also Libet's experiment during neurosurgery before his well-known experiment on free-will or even the compulsive behavior of Australian bower birds that collect blue things to impress the ladies - but I was in the end far from being convinced by his stance on consciousness.

I don't think it gives a good shot at explaining it. But it does give great insights about certain infamous but impressive psychological phenomena.

Consciousness is a tough concept to grasp, but this book is a fairly amiable guide. I'm not sure I understood his Multiple Drafts model of consciousness well, but Dennett did make a well-argued point that consciousness does not necessarily need to be forever beyond our grasp, nor is it a given that the conscious self must itself be formed of "conscious" constituents or some immaterial, metaphysical entities. After all, liquids and gases are themselves not made of "liquid" or "gaseous" particles, why should consciousness be any different?

The title of the book is a bit misleading though. Dennett himself confessed at the end of the book that this is just the beginning of the explanation, not *the* explanation.

This is a dense boi, I didn’t follow all of it, but from what I could gather it was a pretty interesting thesis that runs counter to what you might intuitively think of consciousness. Probably worth the read

Dennett is just obscenely verbose. It's more useful to read the Wikipedia page on this book than the book itself, it's just too long and filled with endless metaphors.

Dennett provides a thorough critique of the intuitive idea that there is some part of our consciousness that's a central viewer of inputs and maker of decisions, arguing that this "Cartesian Theater" is just another form of dualism. Instead he proposes a "Many Drafts" model of the mind in which many activities take place in parallel, without any centralised decisions. This is pretty old now (1990) so it would be interesting to read a more contemporary theory of mind book. Next up - Steven Pinker.

I skimmed this book. I felt like he brought up interesting topics but I disagree with almost everything he wrote. Not sure I followed his framing of everything but here is my summary...

I think he locates consciousness in the act of combining various ongoing interpretations of sensory input. For example, auditory input is interpreted as phonemes and then interpreted as meaning. Taste, smell, and vision are also interpreted. He calls this the “multiple drafts” theory of consciousness.

Dennett sets up this definition of consciousness in opposition to Descartes and all prior empirical, skeptical, and phenomenological philosophers. Dennett claims that these philosophers have been describing their own internal experience while assuming the same is experienced by all people. Sometimes, he comes down harshly on philosophers. For example, in his chapter on “qualia,” he depicts philosophers as akin to medieval scholastics, who play word games with paradoxes.

Dennett says it is possible and preferable to start from objective external scientific measurements and arrive at his “multiple drafts” theory. He cites Behaviorist psychology as the basic approach. He ends his argument by giving examples of how our senses deceive us by presenting illusory sensations, and claims that this explains our apparent identities as conscious selves.

E' decisamente interessante.
Fino ad un certo punto comprensibile e offre argomenti di riflessione.
Poi però non lo capisco più, colpa mia senza dubbio.