Consciousness Explained

by Daniel Dennett

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Dennett attacks the 'Cartesian Theater' intuition - the idea that there is a place in the brain where conscious experience is unified for a single observer - and replaces it with his Multiple Drafts model, in which consciousness is a distributed process of parallel content-fixations. He argues that qualia and the unified self are useful illusions generated by the brain's serial virtual machine running on massively parallel hardware.

Published:: 1991
Pages:: 511

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In the Conversation

In this collection, Consciousness Explained references 3 other books.

It draws on The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The Extended Phenotype.

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What This Book Draws On

The books Dennett references and why each one mattered to the argument.

Dennett draws heavily on Dawkins's Selfish Gene, adopting the meme concept to explain how culturally transmitted ideas colonize brains and constitute the virtual machine of human consciousness.

References

The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

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Dennett cites Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker for the cumulative-selection argument he extends from biology to the 'design' of the brain's cognitive architecture.

References

The Blind Watchmaker

by Richard Dawkins

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Dennett engages explicitly with Dawkins's Extended Phenotype, using its boundary-blurring view of the organism to argue that the self extends beyond a crisp biological border.

References

The Extended Phenotype

by Richard Dawkins

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Intellectual Lineage

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Builds on (2 layers deep)

Directly cites

The Selfish Gene

The Blind Watchmaker

The Extended Phenotype

2 steps back

The Origin of Species

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