Philosophy of Mind

Consciousness Explained

♡+

Daniel Dennett

1991

Consciousness Explained is Dennett's most ambitious work: a sustained attempt to account for subjective experience, qualia, and the sense of a unified self entirely within a materialist, evolutionary framework — without residue. Dennett's central target is what he calls the Cartesian Theater: the intuitive picture of a central place in the brain where "it all comes together" for a unified observer. He argues that this picture is not merely wrong but incoherent. In its place he proposes the Multiple Drafts model: the brain runs many parallel processes simultaneously, each editing and revising a "draft" of what is happening; what we call conscious experience is the result of these drafts competing and being selected, not a unified stream surveyed by a homunculus. Qualia — the felt quality of experience, "what it is like" — are not mysterious non-physical properties but represent the brain's functional discriminations. The book generated enormous controversy and remains the most challenging and systematic attempt to explain consciousness without invoking anything beyond the physical.