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Consciousness Explained Paperback – October 20, 1992
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Consciousness Explained is a full-scale exploration of human consciousness. In this landmark book, Daniel Dennett refutes the traditional, commonsense theory of consciousness and presents a new model, based on a wealth of information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Our current theories about conscious life — of people, animal, even robots — are transformed by the new perspectives found in this book.
"Dennett 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." —Wall Street Journal
- Print length528 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBack Bay Books
- Publication dateOctober 20, 1992
- Dimensions5.55 x 1.55 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100316180661
- ISBN-13978-0316180665
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Dennett's writing, while always serious, is never solemn; who would have thought that combining philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience could be such fun? Not every reader will be convinced that Dennett has succeeded in explaining consciousness; many will feel that his account fails to capture essential features of conscious experience. But none will want to deny that the attempt was well worth making. --Glenn Branch
Product details
- Publisher : Back Bay Books; 1st edition (October 20, 1992)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 528 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0316180661
- ISBN-13 : 978-0316180665
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.55 x 1.55 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #24,130 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #41 in Consciousness & Thought Philosophy
- #105 in Biology (Books)
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In the book, the author sets out to, as he put it on page 16, explain consciousness and the various phenomena that compose to what we call consciousness by showing how they are physical effects in the brain. He claims that he will provide relevant scientific facts, series of stories, analogies, thought experiments, etc.
I'll briefly explain what kind of things where talked about in each PART (not chapter). Note this this is not inclusive because this book is very comprehensive and intricate. This is just a subjectively-motivated outline of [objective] topics I found interesting.
Prelude: How are hallucinations possible?
- Thought experiments like the "brain in a vat" and "a party game called psychoanalysis"
Part 1: Problems And Methods
- Elucidates the mystery behind consciousness
- The appeal to mystification in conjunction to it
- Dualism and it's unreliability
- Challenges of explaining such phenomena
- Introduction to phenomenology as well as heterophenomenology
-Methods and perspectives of phenomenology and heterophenomenology
- Shakey robot discussed
Part 2: An Empirical Theory of The Mind
- The inception of terms; The Multiple Drafts Theory and The Cartesian Theater
- Why the Cartesian Theater is the wrong view of consciousness
- Introduction to the Stalinesque (pre-experimental) and Orwellian(post-experimental) theories of conscious mending.
- Time and experience
- Evolution in relation to consciousness
- Memes
- Joycean Machine
Part 3: The Philosophical Problems of Consciousness
- Zombies
- Blindsight: The discussion of and understand of it
- Hide the thimble thought experiment
- Prosthetic vision
- DIALOGS WITH OTTO. The reason I capitalized this is because it is found throughout the book. Otto is a fiction character and contrarian that Dennett imputes as a way to propose and then dismantle many opposing claims (that the author made up, because of course in the process of writing the book and introducing new ideas there obviously weren't any critics to consider). This is a good author with a proposal at his best.
- Qualia (the intangible "stuff")
- Epiphenomenal Qualia (this was very interesting).
- The clever disqualification of both ^^
- The reality of selves and multiple personality disorder
- Imaging a conscious robot
- Analyzing Searle's Chinese Room experiment
- How to be moral with a materialistic view of consciousness, absent of mythology. Why we don't need myth to appreciate things like dead bodies of loved ones more than broken robots. Here I'm going to throw in a quote of his: "Myths about the sanctity of life, or of consciousness, cut both ways. They may be useful in erecting barriers (against euthanasia, against capital punishment, against abortion, against eating meat) to impress the unimaginative, but at the price of offensive hypocrisy or ridiculous self-deception among the more enlightened."
- The possibility of understanding consciousness
Dennett doesn't claim to solve the problem of consciousness, he rather concedes that his explanation is far from complete. Instead he wants to give us a better understanding, approach, and view of consciousness that distills the fear of many that claim that such a vision is impossible. I fall in the category of readers that didn't find it very difficult to imagine perceived consciousness as being an amalgamation of disparate, "non-conscious", comprehensive and complicated workings of the brain. Nevertheless, I found much of what was discussed to be intellectually stimulating, and enlightening; these don't always need to go hand-in-hand. Dennett's vigor and tone congenially complement the difficult read. 4.5/5.
If you wish to read an earlier, more overtly technical work by one of today’s premier philosophers in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science, then Consciousness Explained is just your cup of tea. But understand that at places it is something of a hard slog, e.g., his ‘Orwellian’ vs. ‘Stalinist’ versions of the origin of mental contents when discussing Libet’s famous reaction-time study (in the early chapter titled ‘Time and Experience’), or his comparison of the brain’s activity to a Universal Turing Machine (in the middle chapter titled ‘The Architecture of the Human Mind’), or his analysis of the psychological phenomena of ‘temporal anomalies’ and 'blindsight’ in other chapters, etc. Even so, it’s well worth the effort to push through any sections that seem to require too much technical background in philosophy to Dennett’s concluding chapter aptly titled ‘Consciousness Imagined.’ A helpful supplemental work that is much shorter and substantially less technical is Dennett's Kinds of Minds (1996), subtitled "Toward an Understanding of Consciousness," in the Science Masters Series, written for the science-minded general public.