Consciousness Explained

Daniel C. Dennett
BackBay Books, 1991

1

Prelude: How are Hallucinations Possible?
3. A Party Game Called Psychoanalysis, p 12

It is widely held that human vision, for instance, cannot be explained as an entirely "data-driven" or "bottom-up" process, but needs, at its highest levels, to be supplemented by a few "expectation-driven" rounds of hypothesis testing.

Part One - Problems and Methods

2

Explaining Consciousness
1. Pandora's box: Should Consciousness be Demystified? p 21

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. [...] There have been other great mysteries: the mystery of the origin of the universe, the mystery of life and reproduction, the mystery of the design to be found in nature, the mysteries of time, space, and gravity. [...] The mysteries have not vanished bu they have been tamed. They no longer overwhelm our efforts to think about the phenomena.

p 24

If everyone forgot what money was, there wouldn't be any money anymore.

4. Why Dualism is Forlorn, p 39

Theorists tend to think of perceptual systems as providing "input" to some central thinking arena, which in turn provides "control" or "direction" to some relatively peripheral systems governing bodily motion. [..] But the very idea that there are important theoretical divisions between such presumed subsystems as "long-term memory" and "reasoning" is more an artifact of the divide-and-conquer strategy than anything found in nature.

4

A Method for Phenomenology
1. First Person Plural, p 68

We tend to think we are much more immune to error than we are.

Part Two - An Empirical Theory of the Mind

5

Multiple Drafts versus the Cartesian Theater
2. Introducing the Multiple Drafts Model, p 113

The Multiple Drafts model avoids the tempting mistake of supposing that there must be a single narrative (the "final" or "published" draft, you might say) that is canonical.

6

Time and Experience
2. How the Brain Represents Time, p 145

Ballistic acts are unguided missiles; once they are triggered, their trajectories are not adjustable.

3. Evolution in Brains, and the Baldwin Effect, p 184

6. The Third Evolutionary Process: Memes and Cultural Evolution, p 208

All Three Media --genetic evolution, phenotypic plasticity, and memetic evolution-- have contributed to the design of human consciousness, each in turn, and at increasing rates of speed.

7. The Memes of Consciousness: the Virtual Machine to Be Installed, p 214

[Mind is] the stream of consciousness, the meandering sequence of conscious mental contents [...] The architecture of the brain, in contrast, is massively parallel.

p 218

Conscious human minds are more-or-less serial virtual machines implemented --inefficiently-- on the parallel hardware that evolution has provided for us.

Part Three -- The Philosophical Problems of Consciouness

12

Qualia Disqualified
2. Why are there colors? p 378

Why is the sky blue? Because apples are red and grape is purple, not the other way around.

Appendix A (for philosophers), p 460

Are pains real? They are as real as haircuts and dollars and opportunities and persons, and centers of gravity, but how real is this?