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Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (Jean Nicod Lectures)

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This book is essentially a follow-up to the author's previous work Consciousness Explained. Dennett revises and builds upon the ideas he put forward in that book, and addresses some of the criticism that has been leveled against his theory of consciousness in the intervening years. He also reviews some of the development (or lack thereof!) in the study of and debate over the question of consciousness over the past few years.

As always, Daniel Dennett presents his ideas with great precision and eloquence. No other writer I have read does a better job of shedding light on the question of consciousness. As the author repeatedly cautions, much work remains to be done before we have a full understanding of how human consciousness works. But Dennett rejects the "Mysterian" view that consciousness is something special which by its very nature we can never obtain an understanding of using the scientific method. He puts forward a methodology for the systematic study of consciousness, and shows persuasively that it is a phenomenon just as open to scientific inquiry as any other biological function. One of the major themes in both Consciousness Explained and in this postscript to it is idea of "zombies", the subject of an old philosophical thought-experiment. The zombie is a creature indistinguishable from normal people but which has no internal mental life, no consciousness. As Dennett says he addresses the question of zombies reluctantly since it has been the source of so much confusion. He shows very clearly how the concept has little use in clarifying the question of consciousness. He also addresses the inevitable question of artificial intelligence and whether it is possible for "mere machines" to be consciousness. The answer turns out to be yes, since those conscious machines are us!

It would be best to read the author's previous book Consciousness Explained before reading this one.

As the concept of the modular structure of the brain emerged, objections to the idea took the form of "Well, if my brain's made up of computers, somebody in there has to be in charge. It had better be me!" This comment, paraphrased from philosopher Jerry Fodor, typifies what Daniel Dennett has been contending with for many years. Although the "Cartesian theatre" notion, that the body was one aspect of our being and the mind another - "dualism" - has supposedly been supplanted, it has not lost its hold on our view of consciousness. We continue to insist, in some form or other, that "somebody, and it better be me" is inside our minds looking out at the world. Although we can't find that "self" in there, we have a hunch it's there.

When Dennett wrote "Consciousness Explained" in 1991, it seemed the "homunculus" representing our "self" had been laid to rest. This excellent collection of essays and lectures, is an update on that earlier work. As lectures, they have a conversational tone, yet impart many deep insights. Addressing consciousness through four major themes, Dennett shows us the project of eradicating "dualism" remains incomplete. Until that view of "self" is discarded, our understanding of consciousness will remain misleading.

The first theme he addresses is the "zombie". Philosophers have posed the idea that a duplicate person, identical to you in every way but one, is logically possible. The person would act as you act, talk as you do, have the same preferences and distastes. But it would not be conscious. This proposal presumes that something in you could be identified that is lacking in the zombie. For most of us, who still feel our "self" remains somehow separate within us, the logic seems reasonable. Dennett carefully examines the implications of the proposal, and dismisses it as modernised dualism. If a region of the brain holds the key to "self" it remains out of sight and undetectable.

Perhaps the most challenging segment of the book deals with "heterophenomonology". This tongue-twisting phrase refers to the methods used in cognitive science. Because consciousness is "often celebrated as a mystery beyond science" Dennett challenges researchers to take a step back from commonly accepted techniques. Become a "Martian" cognitive scientist to broaden the scope of the work. One facet of this approach relies on understanding what "folk psychology" is, then building from there. We prefer to believe that what we believe is entirely private and unaccessible. Heterophenomonolgy, he contends, will expose aspects of our consciousness we view as a "mystery".

One of those "mysteries" has been wrapped in the idea of "qualia". Probably one of the poorest concepts in philosophy, "qualia" are things said to possess "intrinsic qualities". When you carefully examine those "intrinsic" properties, they begin to fade and vanish. If "qualia" is in an object we see, such as colour, how can it change without our noticing? Tests of "change blindness" indicate we can miss much concerning "qualia". Even the philosophic community, Dennett notes, cannot agree on a definition of "qualia". Yet, like the homunculus in the mind viewing the world, it steadfastly remains in use. The author examines this idea further in relating the story of "Mary", the colour-deprived scientist.

In "Consciousness Explained", Dennett proposed the Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness and cognition. In this collection, he enhances the original concept. With no centre in the brain, consciousness necessarily must be a distributed process. The progress of imaging and other technologies have expanded our view of the brain's functions. Dennett argues that the brain is "fame" not "television". The process is one of competition for dominance, no matter how fleeting. The mind is not a "top-down" or "bottom-up" process, but a "sideways" one. Ideas, experiences and other informational bits jostle for "clout". It's not easy to shed the idea of a special "self" in your mind, but all that's going on in there is still you.

As usual, Dennett has challenged successfully the "established" views of consciousness. Clearly, he argues, consciousness is neither an arcane "mystery" nor beyond serious and definitive investigation. The mind-set erecting barricades using the bricks of "qualia" and the mortar of the "Cartesian theatre" can, and must be, overcome for serious investigation to proceed. Delicacy and care must be employed, but the prize is understanding. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

I read this book after reading Consciousness Explained and The Mind's I. I'm giving the book 4 stars because it's still a good book, but compared to Consciousness Explained it's just a little small and has way less information in it. You can see they had problems filling this book, there is much line spacing and some passages appear twice. The advantage of this is that it's easier to read.
If you want to spend months reading a book and learning very very much, read Consciousness Explained. If you want to spend weeks reading a book and get a general (and more actual) impression of Dennett's viewpoints, read Sweet Dreams. And of course, if you're a Dennett fan like me, read both :).

(Although i don't agree with him on some points... e.g. i don't like he says consciousness is no mystery, he seems to think that he has almost solved the problem, i still see many problems)

My hope was that this series of lectures, which were partially reworked for the text, would present a more cohesive, sequential,less redundant, discourse on the issues. Examples are used, and reused, using identical text, which does nothing to advance or deepen understanding on the issues. Little reference is made to other major experts and their work in the field, except as a means for for highlighting the author's own views, and there is definitely an ego at work here.

I feel like this work is a summation and a review of Dennett's work. It's not readily available to those who are not already familiar with common problems in the philosophy of consciousness--problems like zombies and qualia. But if you are familiar with these problems, the book reads like a definitive statement. Here is Daniel Dennett, perhaps nearing the end of a career, putting his foot down. And thank goodness (not God--this is Dennett after all) for that. As Dennett has always been one of my favorite philosophers, one of the men whose intuitions I have been always willing to follow, sometimes without the necessary evidence, it is good to see him come down firmly on one or another side of these issues. Without question, in this work, he is at his lightest (I've laughed out loud several times reading it). But he still asks the hard questions of Searle, Tye and Chalmers. Gut instincts and feelings of "Surely" and what is "obvious" tell us nothing about consciousness since common cognitive science has taught us that so much of what we "know" is often an illusion. There is more to functionalism than people are willing to admit yet, and this book is clearly ahead of the curve. Thank goodness for Daniel Dennett. We may yet come to understand ourselves. (As an aside, you can get an interesting taste for this book by watching Dennett's lecture on TED:[...]

This was certainly not his best book - a rather imperfectly thrown-together collection of material, and in need of some editing. But Dennet is truly one of the greats, and always worth reading. If you are a fan, you will certinly want to read this one, and probably own it too. On the other hand, if you haven't read his 'Breaking the Spell' yet, DEFINITELY buy and read that first - it is 10 times more exciting.

In these incredibly readable and lucid essays and lectures, Dennett follows up on the ideas he put forth in his seminal work "Consciousness Explained" The intervening years have allowed Dennett to hone his thoughts to laser-precision and it is simply a joy to watch him walk the reader through the logic of his arguments.

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Dennett came as a huge and surprising disappointment to me. For years I had thought (and feared...) he would be THE great challenger to spiritualist views concerning the philosophy of the mind. I was so shocked when I finally read Consciousness Explained (zero stars) that I simply had to check out how his views might have evolved during the ensueing 15 years or so till the present day (from 1991 to 2005, and then to try to imagine how it might be now, in 2009). The answer is: failure is still alive... How it can be that so much attention and serious consideration is given to Dennett's views is something that I simply cannot grasp. But it is certainly not due to the quality or to the depth of his reasonings on these matters of philosophy/science of cognition.

Some "improvements" seem to have happened (though, since they were not explicitly acknowledged, I cannot really tell if, instead, I am just being delusional in these perceptions of mine). Dennett's "heterophenomenology" now seems to have lost almost completely all of its emphasis on the "conclusion" that the "subject's report is merely an illusion, a fiction like any other fiction and nothing more than it (like Sherlock Holms and Harry Potter)." It was almost a hundred percent clear (i.e. present) in Consciousness Explained (1991) that the subject's report was merely an illusion; and this view is almost a hundred percent absent now in Sweet Dreams (2005). Quite a change... Another absence that I noticed is his previous ill-conceived idea that it is impossible that we are slaves living in The Matrix (he actually put it as "we cannot be brains-in-vats surrounded by illusory reality created by aliens"). Obviously I don't think we are slaves in The Matrix, or brains-in-vats either. But to claim that this is IMPOSSIBLE (like Dennett did in 1991) is simply nuts. He seems to have grasped it at last, fortunately. (My hunch is that he got overwhelmed by the very movies The Matrix 1, 2, and 3 plus the various computer software available nowadays). Another welcome absence is his previous unreasonable notion that the brain does not fill in for the background color in the eye blackspot experiment (picture on page 324, Consciousness Explained - Performing the experiment myself on me, I found it quite surprising that this "not filling in" was red when the background was red, was blue when the background was blue, and so on. I could never have dreamed of a "not-filling-in" that actually was... coloured!).

On page 1 (! nice start, ain't it?), we find a bad factual mistake. He says "Most of the cells that compose your body are descendants of the egg and sperm whose union started you (there are also millions of hitchhikers from thousands of different lineages stowed away in your body)." Actually, we have about 10 trillion human cells in our body (zygote descendant), and ten times as much hitchhikers... (bacteria mostly). Also faulty is Dennett's description of the experiment with the deck cards in the peripheral vision: actually you can identify indeed the color and even the number of the deck card far away from the center of your vision; provided it is only some seven centimeters away from your eye! (in Consciousness Explained he described this experiment faithfully, though; if you hold out your arm, then it gets very hard to do this task, as Dennett correctly put it back in 1991).

Key points where he failed miserably (despite my fellow reviewers' disagreement...) were, 1-the zombies issue, 2-the qualia issue, and, 3-the locked Mary issue. Looking closer on these:

1- On page 92, Dennett sets out to destroy the zombie hunch. He says: "I doubt that anybody who gets the idea of a zombie, an agent without qualia, in its full implications, can fail to recognize that it is an irreparably incoherent idea. To bring out the covert contradictions in the very idea of a zombie... ...I want to explore..." What stuns me is that some people simply do not realize that Dennett ended up not showing absolutely any contradiction/incoherence in the idea of a zombie whatsoever in the following ten pages up to the end of that chapter! I was so shocked at it that I had to read it three times to triple check it. I challenge anyone who thinks otherwise (Dennett included - we now have a comment section in Amazon reviews). As a matter of fact, I think philosophers are too light on the defence of the idea of zombies. Zombies - according to the correct materialist interpretation of our knowledge of physics and biology - are not a possibility: they are an inevitability! They do not make sense in a spiritualist or dualist view of reality. But in a materialist view, they are the necessary conclusion. If you put together what we know about physics and biology, especially about neo-darwinism and natural selection, plus what we really know about consciousness, then we must conclude that most of the people around us are zombies. What we need, then (if we want to stick to materialism), are better materialist theories. And Dennett has provided none.

2- Regarding qualia, Dennett is correct in pointing out people's (non philosophers and even philosophers, especially when drinking in bars with Dennett...) misunderstandings regarding the use and the very notion of this term. In fact, Dennett himself is rather poor in his "handling" (understanding) of this notion (I could make a big list of instances of his feebleness on that). But the fact is that subjective experience exists, no matter what you call it (qualia, Hard Problem, whatever). If you read his book carefully, you will notice that the answer "no," on page 85 of Sweet Dreams (to a specific question Dennett challenges the reader with), actually survives unharmed to Dennett's scrutiny. And "no" has always been my answer. (Oh My, checking it right now, even the answer "yes" goes unharmed. What a fiasco! Only the answer "don't know" would be problematic).

3- I agree with Dennett that the hypothetical cognitive scientist Mary, who knows all that there is to be known about colors but that has never seen colors for herself, would, when shown true colors for the first time, come to know absolutely nothing new. She wouldn't be surprised and actually she, IMO, would already have had the subjective experience of the colors. But Dennett goes to bizarre lengths in defending his idea on this. He makes Mary create in her own mind a replica of herself that would have subjective experience (he does this with "Locked RoboMary," on page 126). This is quite bizarre coming from the man who would so dogmatically deny that we can be brains-in-vats (or slaves in The Matrix) back in 1991. Incoherence and lack of rational thinking remains... (just check out on page 118 for the same reasoning, but coming from dreams inducing subjective experience).

Getting to the core of Dennett, the "Heart of Darkness" (i.e. of his theory), we see that he has fallen in love with the Global Neuronal Workspace Model. On page 132, he presents a summary of it (after Dehaene and Naccahe, 2001): "At any given time, many modular cerebral networks are active in parallel and process information in an unconscious manner. An information becomes conscious, however, if the neural population that represents it is mobilized by top-down attentional amplification into a brain-scale state of coherent activity that involves many neurons distributed throughout the brain. The long distance connectivity of these 'workplace neurons' can, when they are active for a minimal duration, make the information available to a variety of processes including perceptual categorization, long-term memorization, evaluation, and intentional action. We postulate that this global availability of information through the workplace is what we subjectively experience as a conscious state." And Dennett adds on page 171 (coincidently, my "home country's number" for deceit... ;-) ), "I have ventured the empirical hypothesis that our capacity to relive and rekindle contentful events is the most important feature of consciousness - indeed, as close to a defining feature of consciousness as we will ever find; and the empirical hypothesis that this echoic capacity is due in large part to habits of self-stimulation that we pick up from human culture, that the Joycean machine" (i.e. a computer software that "thinks" about itself - reviewer's note) "in our brains is a virtual machine made of memes." Also, on page 136, ..."it is the specialist demons' accessibility to each other... ...that could... ...explain the dramatic increases in cognitive competence that we associate with consciousness"

Well, I get the feeling (from the above extracts) that Dennett et al have put in the place of The Homunculus a House of Mirrors, where it is the screen (or screens) itself that is conscious (rather than the audience) whenever anything "looks" at it. Also, a lion's (or your mother's) moment of pain, when briefly stung by a thorn (or by a needle), is not to be considered consciousness... (not echoic enough, as it seems). Surely something seems to be amiss. Now add to it this quote from Dennett, on page 102, "Is there anything it is like to be a tree? Most of us, I suppose, will be inclined to answer in the negative, but if we then cast about for a reason for our judgement, there will be little to present." Well, now we just end up stunned and lost. What the hell does Dennett think?

The key point, nonetheless, is this: nowhere in Dennett's writings is one to find just any explanation whatsoever of How and Why consciousness emerges, and What For (that is, what is the benefit it brings). Those are the keystones of materialistic explanatory protocol. And Dennett's house is one made out of empty stones.

I repeat what I have said in my recent review of Consciousness Explained: consciousness is an Almighty Anomaly in light of our materialitic interpretation of our physical and biological knowledge of the universe. It brings down altogether the Huge Cathedral of Materialism. This does not mean that materialism IS wrong (and this does not mean that we will survive our deaths). It just means that, presently, materialism cannot account for the emergence of consciousness (dualism can; panpsychism can; solipsism can; but it does not mean necessarily that any of these views IS correct). Maybe one day it will. But then it will take true theoretical breakthroughs, and not Albus DumbleDennett's Hocus Pocuses & Wand Wavings. We should expect and demand more from philosophers and scientists. They are in on a public endeavour. And they must always bear that in mind.

As for Dennett himself, he definetely needs to learn more about subjective experiences, ordinary and anomolous. His previous clumsly knowledge regarding dreams (in 1991) led him astray into remarks that he now forswears (the impossibility of The Matrix - Wake up, Dennett; There is No Spoon! :-) ). And he needs to make a choice as to whether he is going to deal with these matters following his political/anti-religious agenda or if he is going to try to bring to us true advances in the philosophy and science of cognition. Both paths are precious. But only once an honest and true choice is made...

When, at last, Dennett has chosen, then he may be able to overcome his simplemindedness in regards to issues like "illusions", "miracles", "magic", "mechanics", and "causation." I will be most eagerly looking forward to witnessing this day come...

Julio Siqueira
site: Criticizing Skepticism
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The author fancies himself a Copernicus, by, similarly to the reversal of the notion that the sun revolves around the earth, rendering the notion of consciousness an "illusion" (last word, p.178). His ego is indeed enormous, my knowing of no other author quoting (p.45) and incessantly citing his own writing.

The notion of the sun revolving is an inference, from observing its change of position relative to the earth, and motion indeed is considered relative. But consciousness is not an inference. It is the most immediate phenomenon by which everything we know, or imagine, is manifested. Dennett persistently investigates distinctions in our brains, from dispositions to memories, often couching them in esoteric or otherwise unfamiliar terms, while sidestepping the simple fact that whatever the detailed particulars, all is presented to us through the medium of consciousness.

He puts great emphasis on the third-person approach, like questioning a subject about his perceptions, so as to discover misunderstandings about the inner workings of the mind, forgetting that all of these, whether actual perceptions or beliefs or else, are ingredients of consciousness. This his "scientific method", compared to first-person introspection, is the only approved one.

It is shared by others. Like Patricia Churchland, he has contempt for "folk" psychology, pitting it against favored "academic" (p.35). They also share a derogatory attitude toward dissenters, regarding them as reactionaries (p.8) or naysayers. The views are admittedly materialist, holding Cartesian dualism of mind and body "bankrupt" or a "disaster", as does John Searle.

Why? Descartes is not in line with their assumed all-inclusive scientific method, embraced also by philosophers, who traditionally delved deeper into issues of knowledge. I do so newly in my book and here wish to note that however physical inquiry progresses, consciousness, via which the inquiry is made, remains a distinct phenomenon.