Consciousness Explained
Consciousness Explained (published 1991) is a controversial book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett which offers an account of how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain.
The book puts forward a "multiple drafts" model of consciousness, suggesting that there is no single central place (a "Cartesian Theater") where conscious experience occurs; instead there are "various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain" (p365). The brain consists of a "bundle of semi-independent agencies" (p260); when "content-fixation" takes place in one of these, its effects may propagate so that it leads to the utterance of one of the sentences that make up the story in which the central character is one's "self". Dennett's view of consciousness is that it is the apparently serial account for the brain's underlying parallelism.
One of Dennett's more controversial ([1], [2]) claims, which he has argued extensively for before and makes a centerpiece of this book, is that qualia do not (and cannot) exist. Dennett's main argument is that the various properties attributed to qualia by philosophers—qualia are supposed to be incorrigible, ineffable, private, directly accessible and so on—are incompatible, so the notion of qualia is incoherent. The non-existence of qualia would mean that there is no hard problem of consciousness, and "philosophical zombies", which are supposed to act human in every way while somehow lacking qualia, cannot exist. So, as Dennett wryly notes, he is committed to the belief that we are all zombies—adding that his remark is very much open to misinterpretation.
A key philosophical method is heterophenomenology, in which the verbal or written reports of subjects are treated as akin to a theorist's fiction–the subject's report is not questioned, but it is not assumed to be an incorrigible report about that subject's inner state. This approach allows the reports of the subject to be a datum in psychological research, thus circumventing the limits of classical behaviorism.
Also Dennett says that only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all.
There is disagreement about the validity of Dennett's arguments. Critics of Dennett's approach, such as David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel, argue that Dennett's argument misses the point of the inquiry by merely re-defining consciousness as an external property and ignoring the subjective aspect completely. This has led detractors to nickname the book "Consciousness Ignored" and "Consciousness Explained Away". (Barash 2003). Dennett and his supporters, however, respond that the aforementioned "subjective aspect" as commonly used is non-existent, and that his "re-definition" is the only coherent description of consciousness. Dennett himself actually used "Consciousness Explained Away" as a heading inside the book.
Notes
References
- Dennett, Daniel (1991), Allen Lane, ed., Consciousness Explained, The Penguin Press, ISBN 0-7139-9037-6 (UK Hardcover edition, 1992).
- Barash (2003), "Dennett and the Darwinizing of Free Will", Human Nature Review 3: 222-225.
External Links
- Dennett, Daniel (1988). Quining Qualia.
- Lormand, E. Qualia! (Now Showing at a Theater near You)
- de Leon, D. The Qualities of Qualia
See also
| Daniel Dennett | ||
|---|---|---|
| Concepts | Greedy reductionism · Heterophenomenology · Intentional stance · Intuition pump · Multiple Drafts Model |  |
| Selected works | Brainstorms · The Mind's I · Elbow Room · Consciousness Explained · Darwin's Dangerous Idea · Freedom Evolves · Breaking the Spell | |
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