Daniel Clement Dennett

Advances a new theory of consciousness based on insights gleaned from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence, and clears away obsolete myths about the process of thinking in conscious beings

Consciousness Explained

Daniel C. Dennett

This book revises the traditional view of consciousness by claiming that Cartesianism and Descartes' dualism of mind and body should be replaced with theories from the realms of neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence. What people think of as the stream of consciousness is not a single, unified sequence, the author argues, but "multiple drafts" of reality composed by a computer-like "virtual machine". Dennett considers how consciousness could have evolved in human beings and confronts the classic mysteries of consciousness: the nature of introspection, the self or ego and its relation to thoughts and sensations, and the level of consciousness of non-human creatures.

Gavin

Damn: impressed. The title’s supreme arrogance is misleading: his prose is clear, stylish and flowing, he's expert in the relevant experiments, and he’s much less hectoring in book form – he admits his theory’s counter-intuitive and hostile appearance, he flags alternate positions and possibilities, and it’s hard to doubt him when he says he’d change his mind if the science pointed away from his detailed eliminativism. 

I am very resistant to eliminative materialism – in fact I’ve never been able to take it seriously - so that he manages to patch over my failure of imagination is a mark of the book’s power. 

You begin to wonder – for instance when he talks about his work on children with multiple personalities disorder – if he’s cultivating a humane exterior to make his theory more palatable. But it's probably just that our backlash against his loud, cartoon atheism overlooks his humanity. 

The first section, where he admits the wonder and difficulty of studying consciousness, and carefully lays out the method ahead, is a model for modern scientifically engaged philosophy – and at the end he suggests a dozen novel, detailed experiments to test his theory (ante up). Can't ignore him.

Minus a point for being twenty years old on a topic where that matters.

Consciousness Explained

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