Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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68 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Conscious is as conscious does, September 2, 2002
I believe it was Thomas Wolfe who once remarked with pride that he was a generous literary putter-inner, while minimalists like Ernest Hemingway were stingy leaver-outers. No one who finishes "Consciousness Explained" will doubt that Dennett belongs among the putter-inners. For example, on reaching page 280 the reader is casually told, "I have been coy about consciousness up to now." If only we had known, Daniel, that you've been toying with us through half the book...Dennett does make a coherent case, but the theme is buried in so many asides and diversions that one needs a conceptual GPS to stay oriented. Since he has the whole map in his head, the author naturally tends to forget that others on the tour bus may have lost their bearings two or three turns ago. On the plus side, Dennett's pleasantly conversational tone, clever analogies and colorful terminology (Stalinesque, Multiple Drafts, Witness Protection Program) help to sustain our interest and clarify difficult concepts. The big picture (I think) is that investigations of consciousness have traditionally been hindered by reliance on the concept of a "Cartesian Theater" in the mind where a homunculus (the audience) makes conscious observations. As long as the nature of the theater and the homunculus remain elusive, the whole approach merely begs the questions of what consciousness is and how it happens. Dennett proposes that neither the theater nor the audience exists (i.e. the analogies are empty) and that a massively parallel process he calls Multiple Drafts is more descriptive of what happens in a conscious brain. The thrust of his argument is that understanding consciousness requires no ultimate appeal to mind/brain dualities, souls, spirits, quantum weirdness or other trappings of the "it can't be straightforward" school. This has led disappointed devotees of the ineffable to make dismissive remarks like "Dennett explains everything under the sun EXCEPT consciousness." Don't believe it. Dennett's background in philosophy serves him well in addressing the subtleties of cognition, but the resulting terminology may wear a bit on the reader. Sometimes I thought that if I saw the 22-letter monster "heterophenomenological" one more time, I would scream. On the other hand, Dennett's tale of the imaginary deity Feenoman, based on the root of this word, manages to be both hilarious and instructive. The book is an excellent choice for those who are not merely inclined, but also steadfastly determined, to learn more about the machinery of consciousness.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best Book on Consciousness I've Seen So Far, April 15, 2007
This book's great drawback is that it is probably overly long. I'm sure the basic ideas could have been laid out more succinctly with much greater verbal economy. That said, however, it is probably the case that there are few books out there which do a better job of deconstructing the idea of consciousness. This is a big debate, particularly among some philosophers, no doubt reflecting the tendency to want to believe in the specialness of consciousness. But it's Dennett's contention that consciousness is not so special after all, that it is a natural result of evolutionary forces and that it can be adequately explained in mechanistic terms, thus discarding the misleading "ghost in the machine" notion which seems to infect our thinking about mind at every turn.
Dennett's major antagonist in this debate has been John Searle whose Chinese Room argument has been deployed again and again to deny the possibility which Dennett is here asserting, that consciousness is basically a natural phenomenon (Searle agrees, by the way that consciousness is natural, while arguing against a genuinely naturalistic description). Dennett spends a lot of time exploring side paths and building alternative models for understanding consciousness as he works to get his reader to jettison old notions about the mind as an entity uniquely set apart from the things it attends to, what he calls the "central meaner" or the audience in the Cartesian theater (alluding to Descarte's insight that our mental life is qualitatively different from the physical world we encounter). Dennet builds his case by exploring recent research on brains and human behavior as well as by sketching out an evolutionary picture about how consciousness may have come to be. But he does not get around to dealing with Searle's Chinese Room argument until the book's end and then it is almost as though it were an afterthought.
It's the great strength of Dennett's book that, in fact, Searle's argument seems, by the time he comes to it, to be worth no more than that. Dennett rightly shows that Searle's argument fails because Searle insufficiently depicts the level of computer functionality required to generate and sustain a conscious mind. Where Searle, in his argument, notes that the simple mechanism of a look up table could not possibly constitute a program capable of creating mental life, Dennett rightly points out that this fails to address the problem since it is not a simple look up table that is at the heart of the claim of the AI people. If Searle's Chinese Room argument, constituted as Searle constitutes it, is inadequate for the purpose, this is yet to say nothing about the sort of system that would be required and is theoretically available. It is not a Chinese Room on the Searlean model that must be considered but, perhaps, using the same metaphor, a Chinese Building or a Chinese City. The capacity for sustaining consciousness would necessarily require a vast complex of systems and, as Dennett notes, it is this complex of systems itself, the full system, that would have to do the trick. Searle's argument says nothing about THAT model and so misses the point.
Dennett patiently explains how the systems would need to overlay one another and how this accords with the evolutionary evidence in the biological world as well as with the model of programs on computers which he likens to virtual machines on a platform of real machines. He carefully lays out the the way computers developed, as serial machines and proposes that since the brain is not a serial machine but a parallel processor, there would probably be the need to use the new parallel computing technologies coming on line as the platform, with virtual serial machines (their programs) running on them.
This is not a popular view in some quarters since the notion that we are merely machines is troubling to many. But Dennett does his best to defuse the notion while pointing out how the philosophical ideas of zombiehood and qualia really carry no water. He doesn't offer arguments so much as a debunking of these quaint notions with an eye toward opening us up toward the mechanistic model, dispelling our natural fear of embracing such a view. In the end he tells us there are no souls and no afterlife but that there's no reason this need scare us. And he gives us a basis for retaining a belief in a moral point of view despite this loss.
In all, this is a longish but excellent exposition of his profoundly materialistic ideas. One thing did strike me though and that was his overly clever swipes at political conservatism and the Reagan administration (he was writing this book during that era). At one point relatively early on he makes a somewhat snide backhand strike at what he obviously thinks is the low level of intellect to be found in the administration of that era, and punctures their seemingly foolish notion that cutting taxes will increase revenue. The Laffer Curve, which predicts just this result, is a hunk of hooey he suggests. Only one problem. The empirical evidence since those years is against his view. In fact government revenues did surge because the economy improved as a result of the Reagan tax cuts and they surged again when Bush II cut taxes early in his first term and again in 2003. Combined with the evidence of tax revenue jumps after the tax cuts of the JFK years, we are now 3 for 3 in terms of this argument. It just goes to show you that even smart guys like Dennett, who clearly has a strong handle on the idea of consciousness, are driven at times by their own biases and pre-existing beliefs.
SWM
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39 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Break from Decartes, January 29, 2000
Contrary to other reviewers, I believe Dennett has a very powerful definition of Consciousness. Having studied this subject for over 12 years I found this book to be truly original. It was a breakthrough - even for Dennett himself (having read many of his other works).His theory is that there is NO central meaner. No homunculus sitting in our heads that "understands" us or exists separate from our body. We are all narratives of our own existence. No more or less real than a character in a story, and like a story our experience is drafted - the blanks are filled in with the most reasonable explanation. Self is the center of narrative gravity of a body. Not something separate from it. Dennett goes to great length to discredit other theories before presenting his own. Thus Dennett holds out from explaining his theory until the end of the book. This may cause many readers to loose interest. If you enjoy reading philosophy you will enjoy this book. IMHO - There is a good chance that 100 years from now Dennett's view of Consciousness will be widely held.
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