Consciousness Explained

A book-length theory of consciousness that draws on psychology, neuroscience and computing. Dennett's target is the Cartesian Theatre, the picture of a central place in the brain where everything comes together and is presented to an inner observer. He argues there is no such place and no single moment at which a content becomes conscious. In its place he proposes the Multiple Drafts model: many parallel processes edit and revise interpretations of input, and there is no fact about which draft was the 'real' experience. He tests this against puzzles about timing, such as the colour phi illusion, where a moving spot seems to change colour before the second spot appears. His method, heterophenomenology, takes people's reports seriously as data without assuming they are infallible. Later chapters describe the mind as a virtual machine running on the brain, treat the self as a centre of narrative gravity, and argue that qualia, as philosophers define them, do not exist. Critics say the book explains consciousness away rather than explaining it.

It is the most developed case that consciousness can be understood scientifically without any inner observer or private glow, and its thought experiments are vivid and memorable.