Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett (PDF)

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Daniel Dennett’s “brilliant” exploration of human consciousness — named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times — is a masterpiece beloved by both scientific experts and general readers (New York Times Book Review). Consciousness Explained is a full-scale exploration of human consciousness. In this landmark book, Daniel Dennett refutes the traditional, commonsense theory of consciousness and presents a new model, based on a wealth of information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Our current theories about conscious life — of people, animal, even robots — are transformed by the new perspectives found in this book.”Dennett is a witty and gifted scientific raconteur, and the book is full of fascinating information about humans, animals, and machines. The result is highly digestible and a useful tour of the field.” —Wall Street Journal

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett, writes, “Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. . . Consciousness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. . . . With consciousness . . . we are still in a terrible muddle. . .” Neither Dennett’s reductionist approach nor David Chalmers’ non-reductionist approach have thus far provided the pivotal concepts needed to resolve the question of the nature or origin of human consciousness. However, Dennett provides a touchstone for testing Chalmer’s innovative out-of-the-box conjectures.In The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers introduces the notion: qualia – phenomena where subjective processing is accompanied by ineffable aspects of conscious experience (which apprehends the redness of red, the beauty of mathematical forms, love, the selfness experience). Indeed, qualia are in the eye of the beholder: the beholder’s perceptual experience, the beholder’s subjective experience, and the beholder’s conceptualization of esoteric attributes of the experience. Dennett presents an argument against qualia; that the concept is so confused it cannot be put to any use or be understood in empirical ways; that qualia do not constitute a valid extension of physical experience.While refuting qualia, Dennett extols memes which are pregnant ideas and cultural items putatively transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes. Dennett, sees memes as a units of selection, which persist across generations like genes. He posits a neural Darwinism where meme evolution can even account for the origin of morality and explain religious belief and adherence to it (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, also by Dennett)Dennett attributes the seeming transcendence of consciousness beyond its neural network containment as the “tricky illusory theatrics of consciousness.” Dennett’s analyses of consciousness places much faith on what constitutes accepted scientific truth and dogma; on huge collections of reproducible experimental data, but not on imaginative thought about what the data might mean or ultimately signify. There is a large body of accumulated physical and neurophysiological data that virtually cries out for imaginative reinterpretation to break the logjam which is blocking blanket acceptance of the transcendence of human consciousness.In My Universe – A Transcendent Reality Alex Vary offers an imaginative reinterpretation of the empirical data Dennett esteems and contemplates. Vary proposes a paradigmatic framework and some new concepts which can help explain the seemingly transcendent nature of human consciousness. What Vary proposes are akin to ‘tools of thought’ advocated by Dennett in Consciousness Explained and should serve at least for discussion and elucidation purposes.Vary presumes that consciousness is an attribute of a reality that preexists its localized foci in self-aware human or their neural networks. Dennett dismisses the notion of such selfness existing before birth as a fiction, “. . . an organization of information that has structured your body’s control system (or, to put it in its more usual provocative form, if what you are is the program that runs on your brain’s computer), then you could in principle survive the death of your body as intact as a program can survive the destruction of the computer on which it was created and first run.” Dennett characterizes the notion of an automaton’s or a computer’s assumption of transcendent consciousness as a hankering for immortality; as if a computer program could hanker for self-perpetuation, or anything beyond its ken. Dennett shrugs off the dilemma by declaring “as with all the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist – and hope – that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.”

⭐As expected from a Dennett book, once you commence you better pack your intellectual suitcase and prepare for a journey. It’s a difficult read, and at best I hope that my review can you (the hopefully interested reader) to see and possibly recognize a lot of the topics discussed as I simply lay them out.In the book, the author sets out to, as he put it on page 16, explain consciousness and the various phenomena that compose to what we call consciousness by showing how they are physical effects in the brain. He claims that he will provide relevant scientific facts, series of stories, analogies, thought experiments, etc.I’ll briefly explain what kind of things where talked about in each PART (not chapter). Note this this is not inclusive because this book is very comprehensive and intricate. This is just a subjectively-motivated outline of [objective] topics I found interesting.Prelude: How are hallucinations possible?- Thought experiments like the “brain in a vat” and “a party game called psychoanalysis”Part 1: Problems And Methods- Elucidates the mystery behind consciousness- The appeal to mystification in conjunction to it- Dualism and it’s unreliability- Challenges of explaining such phenomena- Introduction to phenomenology as well as heterophenomenology-Methods and perspectives of phenomenology and heterophenomenology- Shakey robot discussedPart 2: An Empirical Theory of The Mind- The inception of terms; The Multiple Drafts Theory and The Cartesian Theater- Why the Cartesian Theater is the wrong view of consciousness- Introduction to the Stalinesque (pre-experimental) and Orwellian(post-experimental) theories of conscious mending.- Time and experience- Evolution in relation to consciousness- Memes- Joycean MachinePart 3: The Philosophical Problems of Consciousness- Zombies- Blindsight: The discussion of and understand of it- Hide the thimble thought experiment- Prosthetic vision- DIALOGS WITH OTTO. The reason I capitalized this is because it is found throughout the book. Otto is a fiction character and contrarian that Dennett imputes as a way to propose and then dismantle many opposing claims (that the author made up, because of course in the process of writing the book and introducing new ideas there obviously weren’t any critics to consider). This is a good author with a proposal at his best.- Qualia (the intangible “stuff”)- Epiphenomenal Qualia (this was very interesting).- The clever disqualification of both ^^- The reality of selves and multiple personality disorder- Imaging a conscious robot- Analyzing Searle’s Chinese Room experiment- How to be moral with a materialistic view of consciousness, absent of mythology. Why we don’t need myth to appreciate things like dead bodies of loved ones more than broken robots. Here I’m going to throw in a quote of his: “Myths about the sanctity of life, or of consciousness, cut both ways. They may be useful in erecting barriers (against euthanasia, against capital punishment, against abortion, against eating meat) to impress the unimaginative, but at the price of offensive hypocrisy or ridiculous self-deception among the more enlightened.”- The possibility of understanding consciousnessDennett doesn’t claim to solve the problem of consciousness, he rather concedes that his explanation is far from complete. Instead he wants to give us a better understanding, approach, and view of consciousness that distills the fear of many that claim that such a vision is impossible. I fall in the category of readers that didn’t find it very difficult to imagine perceived consciousness as being an amalgamation of disparate, “non-conscious”, comprehensive and complicated workings of the brain. Nevertheless, I found much of what was discussed to be intellectually stimulating, and enlightening; these don’t always need to go hand-in-hand. Dennett’s vigor and tone congenially complement the difficult read. 4.5/5.

⭐Gave up after 50 pages as I found the level of meandering to get to the point incredibly frustrating. Its probably ok if you like long stories and being persuaded, but not if you want succinct facts and a logical structure.Shame as I enjoyed listening to the author talk on a Radio 4 documentary but this book was hard work for all the wrong reasons. Not because it was too technical – I wish it were.

⭐Very hard going. Lots of complex terminology. I’ve a science background (Physics degree) but I found this challenging and need to read it again with a dictionary handy to get the best out of it. The insights I gained were interesting, but I’m sure I’ll benefit from re-reading it more slowly and carefully.

⭐Conciousness not explained.

⭐Dennet has written one of the most interesting, infomative and compelling books I’ve read in years. Be careful though, you need to be alert when reading this as Dennet doesn’t kid gloves the text. His sxentence structure and style of writing is both complex and brilliant.A fascinating read.

⭐This rather long and sometimes rambling book achieves at least two thirds of what I expected. Dennett completely demolishes the Cartesian Dualism model, showing through anecdote and experiment that ideas of a separate mind and body are completely out of touch with reality.A large portion of the book is dedicated to dismantling ideas that are built on this model, I found the non-linear, revisionist perception of time to be one of the most powerful and thought provoking revelations.Drawing from many fields of science (computing, psychology, neurology and evolutionary biology to name a few) he then goes on to describe his alternative model for consciousness. His multiple drafts theory is empirical, making falsifiable scientific predictions and I believe his description to be an accurate one.The book is sometimes quite difficult to follow, philosophy is rarely an easy read but I’ve come to expect popular science writers to speak plainly, where Dawkins coins snappy and self-explanatory words such as “meme” or “concestor” Dennett’s “heterophenomenology” is a nine syllable monster. Also it is not a riveting read, it has taken me almost a year to finally finish this book. I enjoyed the experiments, anecdotes, evolutionary biology and computer science much more than the reams of prelude and philosophical reasoning. In my opinion it would have been better as two books, one a highly technical exploration of the philosophy of mind and another popular science for the layman. I would have enjoyed the latter much more.Finally I think that the title is misleading, it did transform my understanding of human consciousness but it raised as many new questions as it answered. I am no closer to understanding what consciousness is, what it means to be, or whether consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe or an emergent pattern in matter. Perhaps “Consciousness Described” would have been a more fitting title.

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