One of the Ten Best Books of the Year—New York Times CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED DANIEL C. DENNETT Author of Brainstorms and coauthor of The Mind's |What the critics have said about CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED by Daniel Dennett “His sophisticated discourse is as savvy and articulate about good beer or the Boston Celtics as it is about parallel processing, modern cognitive experimentation, neuropathology, echolocation by bats, or Ludwig Wittgenstein. ... A persuasive philosophical work, the best examined in this column for decades. . . . Skeptics, supporters, and the undecided should proceed at once to find and read this good-humored, imaginative, richly instructive book.” — Philip Morrison Scientific American “This extremely ambitious book is the payoff for many years of communing with neurobiologists, cognitive psychologists, and various artificial-intelligence types in a search to understand the mind-brain. The result is the best kind of philosophical writing: accessible, but not trivializing; witty, but serious; well-informed, but not drowning in the facts.” — K. Anthony Appiah Village Voice “How unfair for one man to be blessed with such a torrent of stimulating thoughts. Stimulating is an understatement. Every chapter unleashes so many startling new ideas that in the hands of an ordinary philosopher it would — and probably will — be spun out to fill a whole book.” — Richard Dawkins Author of The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene“He 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.” — Thomas Nagel Wall Street Journal “A remarkable meditation on consciousness — in part deconstruction, in part construction — by one of our most outstanding synthesizers.” — Howard Gardner Author of The Mind’s New Science and The Shattered Mind “What turns a mere piece of matter from being mere matter into an animate being? What gives certain special physical patterns in the universe the mysterious privilege of feeling sensations and having experiences? “Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained is a masterful tapestry of deep insights into this eternal philosophical riddle. Deftly weaving together strands taken from philosophy, neurology, computer science, and philosophy itself, Dennett has written a profound and important book that is also clear, exciting, and witty; Consciousness Explained represents philosophy at its best. “While demolishing all sorts of simple-minded ‘commonsense’ views of consciousness, Dennett builds up a radical rival edifice of great beauty and subtlety. Dennett’s view of consciousness is counterintuitive but compelling; indeed, like any revolutionary theory, its power and its unexpectedness are deeply related. While Consciousness Explained is certainly not the ultimate explanation of consciousness, | believe it will long be remembered as a major step along the way to unraveling its mystery.” — Douglas R. Hofstadter Author of Gédel, Escher, BachCONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED SS DANIEL C. DENNETT Illustrated by Paul Weiner a BACK BAY BOOKS LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON LONDONCopyright © 1991 by Daniel C. Dennett All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no patt of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Group USA 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Visit out Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com First Poperback Edition Permissions to use copyrighted material appear on page 492. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dennett, Daniel Clement, Consciousness explained / Daniel C. Dennett. — 1st ed. Pp. cm, Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-316-18065-8 (hc) ISBN 978-0-316-18066-5 (pb) 1. Consciousness. 2. Mind and body. I. Tite. B105.0477045 1991 126 — de20 91-15614 2019 18 17 16 QeMART Printed in the United Stotes of AmericaFor Nick, Marcel, and RayALSO BY DANIEL C. DENNETT Content and Consciousness Brainstorms The Mind’s | (with Douglas R. Hofstadter) Elbow Room The Intentional StanceCONTENTS Preface Prelude: How Are Hallucinations Possible? 1. The Brain in the Vat 2. Pranksters in the Brain 3. A Party Game Called Psychoanalysis 4. Preview Part! PROBLEMS AND METHODS 2 Explaining Consciousness 1. Pandora’s Box: Should Consciousness Be Demystified? 2. The Mystery of Consciousness 3, The Attractions of Mind Stuff 4. Why Dualism Is Forlorn 5. The Challenge A Visit to the Phenomenological Garden 1. Welcome to the Phenom 2. Our Experience of the External World 3. Our Experience of the Internal World 4. Affect A Method for Phenomenology . First Person Plural . The Third-Person Perspective . The Method of Heterophenomenology . Fictional Worlds and Heterophenomenological Worlds The Discreet Charm of the Anthropologist Discovering What Someone Is Really Talking About Shakey’s Mental Images The Neutrality of Heterophenomenology exouses xi 21 43 66vii. CONTENTS Part Il AN EMPIRICAL THEORY OF THE MIND. 5 Multiple Drafts Versus the Cartesian Theater 101 The Point of View of the Observer Introducing the Multiple Drafts Model Orwellian and Stalinesque Revisions The Theater of Consciousness Revisited ‘The Multiple Drafts Model in Action AkRewH Time and Experience 139 Fleeting Moments and Hopping Rabbits How the Brain Represents Time Libet’s Case of “Backwards Referral in Time” Libet’s Claim of Subjective Delay of Consciousness of Intention A Treat: Grey Walter's Precognitive Carousel Loose Ends eg ek eN pe The Evolution of Consciousness 171 . Inside the Black Box of Consciousness Early Days Scene One: The Birth of Boundaries and Reasons Scene Two: New and Better Ways of Producing Future Evolution in Brains, and the Baldwin Effect Plasticity in the Human Brain: Setting the Stage The Invention of Govd and Bad Habits of Autostimulation The Third Evolutionary Process: Memes and Cultural Evolution The Memes of Consciousness: The Virtual Machine to Be Installed Bg yegae How Words Do Things with Us 227 1. Review: E Pluribus Unum? 2, Bureaucracy versus Pandemonium 3. When Words Want to Get Themselves Said The Architecture of the Human Mind 253 1, Where Are We? 2. Orienting Ourselves with the Thumbnail Sketch 3. And Then What Happens? 4, The Powers of the Joycean Machine 5. But Is This a Theory of Consciousness?CONTENTS ix Part Ill_ THE PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 10 11 12 13 14 Show and Tell 285 1. Rotating Images in the Mind's Eye 2. Words, Pictures, and Thoughts 3. Reporting and Expressing 4. Zombies, Zimboes, and the User Illusion 5. Problems with Folk Psychology Dismantling the Witness Protection Program 321 1. Review Blindsight: Partial Zombiehood? Hide the Thimble: An Exercise in Consciousness-Raising Prosthetic Vision: What, Aside from Information, is Stil] Missing? “Pilling In” versus Finding Out Noglect as a Pathological Loss of Epistemic Appetite Virtual Presence Seeing Is Believing: A Dialogue with Otto s&h SnNan Qualia Disqualified 369 1. A New Kite String 2. Why Are There Colors? 3. Enjoying Our Experiences 4. A Philosophical Fantasy: Inverted Qualia 5. “Epiphenomenal” Qualia? 6. Getting Back on My Rocker The Reality of Selves 412 1. How Human Beings Spin a Self 2. How Many Selves to a Customer? 3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being Consciousness Imagined 431 1. Imagining a Conscious Robot 2. What It Is Like to Be a Bat 3. Minding and Mattering 4. Consciousness Explained, or Explained Away?x CONTENTS Appendix A (for Philosophers) Appendix B (for Scientists) Bibliography Index 457 464 469 493PREFACE My first year in college, I read Descartes’s Meditations and was hooked on the mind-body problem, Now here was a mystery. How on earth could my thoughts and feelings fit in the same world with the nerve cells and molecules that made up my brain? Now, after thirty years of thinking, talking, and writing about this mystery, I think I've made some progress. I think I can sketch an outline of the solution, a theory of consciousness that gives answers (or shows how to find the answers) to the questions that have been just as baffling to philosophers and scientists as to laypeople. I’ve had a lot of help. It’s been my good fortune to be taught, informally, indefatigably, and imperturbably, by some wonderful thinkers, whom you will meet in these pages. For the story I have to tel] is not one of solitary cogitation but of an adyssey through many fields, and the solutions to the puzzles are inextricably woven into a fabric of dialogue and disagreement, where we often learn more from bold mistakes than from cautious equivocation. I'm sure there are still plenty of mistakes in the theory I will offer here, and I hope they are bold ones, for then they will provoke better answers by others. The ideas in this book have been hammered into shape over many years, but the writing was begun in January 1990 and finished just a year later, thanks to the generosity of several fine institutions and the help of many friends, students, and colleagues. The Zentrum fur In- terdisziplinare Forschung in Bielefeld, CREA at the Ecole Polytech- nique in Paris, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio provided ideal conditions for writing and conferring during xi