Consciousness Explained (published 1991) is a
bookA book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of paper, parchment, or other material, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf, and each side of a leaf is called a page...
by the
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
philosopher
Daniel DennettDaniel Clement Dennett is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the co-director of the Center for Cognitive...
which offers an account of how
consciousnessConsciousness is subjective experience or awareness or wakefulness or the executive control system of the mind. It is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental phenomena...
arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the
brainThe brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate, and most invertebrate, animals. Some primitive animals such as jellyfish and starfish have a decentralized nervous system without a brain, while sponges lack any nervous system at all...
.
The book puts forward a "
multiple draftsDaniel Dennett's Multiple Drafts Model of Consciousness is a physicalist theory of consciousness based upon cognitivism, which views the mind in terms of information processing. The theory is described in depth in his book, Consciousness Explained, published in 1991...
" model of consciousness, suggesting that there is no single central place (a "
Cartesian TheaterThe Cartesian theater is a derisive term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett to pointedly refer to a defining aspect of what he calls Cartesian materialism, which he considers to be the often unacknowledged remnants of Cartesian dualism in modern materialistic theories of the mind.Descartes...
") where conscious experience occurs; instead there are "various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain".
Consciousness Explained (published 1991) is a
bookA book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of paper, parchment, or other material, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf, and each side of a leaf is called a page...
by the
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
philosopher
Daniel DennettDaniel Clement Dennett is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the co-director of the Center for Cognitive...
which offers an account of how
consciousnessConsciousness is subjective experience or awareness or wakefulness or the executive control system of the mind. It is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental phenomena...
arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the
brainThe brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate, and most invertebrate, animals. Some primitive animals such as jellyfish and starfish have a decentralized nervous system without a brain, while sponges lack any nervous system at all...
.
The book puts forward a "
multiple draftsDaniel Dennett's Multiple Drafts Model of Consciousness is a physicalist theory of consciousness based upon cognitivism, which views the mind in terms of information processing. The theory is described in depth in his book, Consciousness Explained, published in 1991...
" model of consciousness, suggesting that there is no single central place (a "
Cartesian TheaterThe Cartesian theater is a derisive term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett to pointedly refer to a defining aspect of what he calls Cartesian materialism, which he considers to be the often unacknowledged remnants of Cartesian dualism in modern materialistic theories of the mind.Descartes...
") where conscious experience occurs; instead there are "various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain". The brain consists of a "bundle of semi-independent agencies"; 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
parallelismParallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently . There are several different forms of parallel computing: bit-level,...
.
One of the book's more controversial claims is that
qualia"Qualia" , singular "quale" , from the Latin for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to describe the subjective quality of conscious experience. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the redness of an evening sky...
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 consciousnessThe term hard problem of consciousness, coined by David Chalmers, refers to the difficult problem of explaining why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences. Chalmers contrasts this with the "easy problems" of explaining the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states,...
, and "
philosophical zombieA philosophical zombie, p-zombie or p-zed is a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience. When a zombie is poked with a sharp object, for example, it does not feel any pain...
s", 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
heterophenomenologyHeterophenomenology , is a term coined by Daniel Dennett to describe an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena...
, 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
behaviorismBehaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded as behaviors...
.
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 ChalmersDavid John Chalmers is an Australian philosopher specializing in the area of philosophy of mind. He is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University.-Background:...
and
Thomas NagelThomas Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics...
, 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. 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.
External links