daytonm's review against another edition
2.0
An extremely frustrating book. There is a lot of well thought out argument here, much of it worth engaging with even where I disagree, and some of the theory of how the brain works was genuinely compelling. In particular the pandemonium model of language production--and, despite my low rating, I like significant portions of the Multiple Drafts model!
But the author falls into infuriating patterns of thought that lead him to advance ridiculous claims that do not all logically follow from the (often) reasonable assumptions he starts out with. He responds to objections throughout, but objections presented by a rather unsophisticated fictional critic who did not always ask the questions I wanted answered. In fact, at least one stunning, seemingly foundational assertion (that a robot capable of second-order observations of its internal states would "think" it was conscious) is put forward with practically no backup or discussion--what does that even mean?? Other bucks are merely passed down the road (it only *seems* like I experience qualia? even if I concede this, the fact that they "seem" so vivid to me is not a lesser mystery than the one he seeks to deflate by denying qualia are real). It is always possible I am misunderstanding key points and/or that my gut opposition to his thesis is impeding my ability to accept genuine truths (I happily concede that this latter may have happened here or there). But as I glance other reviews, including those by experts, it looks like I am not the only one with similar frustrations and confusions about what exactly he is trying to say.
Dennet, by my diagnosis, adheres to a particular type of scientistic worldview that suggests anything beyond the reach of more or less contemporary science either doesn't matter or doesn't exist. Whatever this view's strengths, I think this book shows some of its weaknesses in both style and content. Still, the book is useful as a scientific theory of the brain, a challenge (often successful) against prevailing ideas about the mind, and a demonstration of the promises and pitfalls of his approach. Despite all my complaints, I would genuinely like to sit down with the author someday and ask him my questions and see what he says.
However, I can't give it three stars because the discussions of nonhuman animals are sloppy, un-rigorous, and riddled with both implicit and explicit human supremacism (e.g. calling species phylogenetically far from humans "lowly," which is of course an un-scientific presentation of evolution). This leads him to somewhat hand-wavey moral conclusions that are all the more egregious because he hasn't backed them up in any meaningful way.
But the author falls into infuriating patterns of thought that lead him to advance ridiculous claims that do not all logically follow from the (often) reasonable assumptions he starts out with. He responds to objections throughout, but objections presented by a rather unsophisticated fictional critic who did not always ask the questions I wanted answered. In fact, at least one stunning, seemingly foundational assertion (that a robot capable of second-order observations of its internal states would "think" it was conscious) is put forward with practically no backup or discussion--what does that even mean?? Other bucks are merely passed down the road (it only *seems* like I experience qualia? even if I concede this, the fact that they "seem" so vivid to me is not a lesser mystery than the one he seeks to deflate by denying qualia are real). It is always possible I am misunderstanding key points and/or that my gut opposition to his thesis is impeding my ability to accept genuine truths (I happily concede that this latter may have happened here or there). But as I glance other reviews, including those by experts, it looks like I am not the only one with similar frustrations and confusions about what exactly he is trying to say.
Dennet, by my diagnosis, adheres to a particular type of scientistic worldview that suggests anything beyond the reach of more or less contemporary science either doesn't matter or doesn't exist. Whatever this view's strengths, I think this book shows some of its weaknesses in both style and content. Still, the book is useful as a scientific theory of the brain, a challenge (often successful) against prevailing ideas about the mind, and a demonstration of the promises and pitfalls of his approach. Despite all my complaints, I would genuinely like to sit down with the author someday and ask him my questions and see what he says.
However, I can't give it three stars because the discussions of nonhuman animals are sloppy, un-rigorous, and riddled with both implicit and explicit human supremacism (e.g. calling species phylogenetically far from humans "lowly," which is of course an un-scientific presentation of evolution). This leads him to somewhat hand-wavey moral conclusions that are all the more egregious because he hasn't backed them up in any meaningful way.
microglyphics's review against another edition
5.0
This is my second favourite book this year—though I wish I had read it 30+ years ago when it had been first published. My number one book is [bc:Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst|31170723|Behave The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst|Robert M. Sapolsky|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1517732866l/31170723._SY75_.jpg|51808259]. Ar least that was published in 2017, and I wish I had prioritised reading that closer to its publication date. In each case, the authors crystalised what I have been wrestling with for decades. I had the ideas, but my grasp was less structured–certainly less concise.
In Consciousness Explained, Dennett dismisses that Consciousness is anything more than some emergent property. As he's stated elsewhere, 'Consciousness to the brain is like wet to water'. Effectively, there is no 'there' there. He also dispels notions of qualia—metaphysical vestiges.
He weaves together many narratives and perspectives, both posing challenges and deconstructing them to reveal the man behind the curtain—rather the absence of Cartesian theatre.
In Consciousness Explained, Dennett dismisses that Consciousness is anything more than some emergent property. As he's stated elsewhere, 'Consciousness to the brain is like wet to water'. Effectively, there is no 'there' there. He also dispels notions of qualia—metaphysical vestiges.
He weaves together many narratives and perspectives, both posing challenges and deconstructing them to reveal the man behind the curtain—rather the absence of Cartesian theatre.
socraticgadfly's review against another edition
2.0
When Dennett first started jumping the shark
I may be a bit harsh in only giving him two stars, but ... maybe not.
Wags have often said the title of this book should be, "Dennett's Idea of Consciousness Explained." And, that's about right.
Dennett is at his best in challenging traditional folk psychology ideas -- and how they have influenced traditional cognitive philosophy -- about what consciousness is and shows how this is wanting.
Where I do find fault is that, assuming Dennett's idea of consciousness is correct, or largely so (and I myself believe that he is at least on the right track, and that modern neuroscience is giving at least partial empirical support to that), he **only** deals in depth with consciousness.
Admittedly, the limitations of heterophenomenology prevent us from delving deep into unconscousness of others from a narrative point of view. And even from the neuroscientific point of view, although an fMRI can study brain processes, we still rely on a person's own **conscious** narrative to describe what it was like **for them** during "brain scan period X."
Dennett stays in cognitive philosophy, and unlike someone such as a Ramachandran, doesn't get on the cognitive science or neuroscience side of this issue very much, and so fails to ask just how much can we learn, or infer, about the unconscious.
Beyond that, he fails to -- as best as can be done today -- to ask just what percentage of our thought processes are conscious, vs. unconscious.
If, as it would appear, a fairly high percentage is unconscious, then to have explained consciousness is not necessarily to have explained a lot.
There's other problems, too. Many of them appear in more degree after this book.
One is that, Dennett starts recycling his material, a little bit here, but more later.
The bigger problem is in what he doesn't recycle.
He doesn't fully state his claim that that evolution is algorithmic until "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," but I think I see it already lurking a bit here.
And, also, whether in this book or 15 years later, he **flat-out refuses** to take the logical next step and reject a "Cartesian free willer" as well as a "Cartesian meaner."
I may be a bit harsh in only giving him two stars, but ... maybe not.
Wags have often said the title of this book should be, "Dennett's Idea of Consciousness Explained." And, that's about right.
Dennett is at his best in challenging traditional folk psychology ideas -- and how they have influenced traditional cognitive philosophy -- about what consciousness is and shows how this is wanting.
Where I do find fault is that, assuming Dennett's idea of consciousness is correct, or largely so (and I myself believe that he is at least on the right track, and that modern neuroscience is giving at least partial empirical support to that), he **only** deals in depth with consciousness.
Admittedly, the limitations of heterophenomenology prevent us from delving deep into unconscousness of others from a narrative point of view. And even from the neuroscientific point of view, although an fMRI can study brain processes, we still rely on a person's own **conscious** narrative to describe what it was like **for them** during "brain scan period X."
Dennett stays in cognitive philosophy, and unlike someone such as a Ramachandran, doesn't get on the cognitive science or neuroscience side of this issue very much, and so fails to ask just how much can we learn, or infer, about the unconscious.
Beyond that, he fails to -- as best as can be done today -- to ask just what percentage of our thought processes are conscious, vs. unconscious.
If, as it would appear, a fairly high percentage is unconscious, then to have explained consciousness is not necessarily to have explained a lot.
There's other problems, too. Many of them appear in more degree after this book.
One is that, Dennett starts recycling his material, a little bit here, but more later.
The bigger problem is in what he doesn't recycle.
He doesn't fully state his claim that that evolution is algorithmic until "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," but I think I see it already lurking a bit here.
And, also, whether in this book or 15 years later, he **flat-out refuses** to take the logical next step and reject a "Cartesian free willer" as well as a "Cartesian meaner."
markfeltskog's review against another edition
As I blithely leave a three-star review for this book, it occurs to me that I ought to explain my reasons for doing so. Over the years, I inferred that this is a book for the common reader; when it comes to the broad and frequently abstruse topic the book explores, I am most certainly a common reader. Unfortunately, this book appears to be addressed to people who have some background in its topic. It is not necessarily a book for specialists, but I could see how this would be an appropriate text for a survey course in a number of undergraduate courses on the science of the human mind. I confess that I didn't understand much of the book, but stuck with it anyway. which leads to my highly subjective, arguably erroneous assessment of it. If nothing else, Mr. Dennett is an engaging stylist with a gift for rendering complex ideas in relatively basic similes without trivializing them. What I endeavor to say, I guess, is that I am not really qualified to comment on this apparently well-regarded book.
evolvemind's review against another edition
3.0
Dense, challenging read, but worth the effort for anyone seeking a well-informed perspective on the nature of human consciousness and self-consciousness.
mikusa's review against another edition
3.0
Imagine if a bat was raised in an unbatty room, never watched zombie movies, and only ate black and white Chinese take-out food. Now imagine if the bat only seemed to be a bat, and the zombie movies that it didn’t watch were of zombies acting like humans would act if they were acting like zombies acting like humans. How could we say, or at least acknowledge precognitively to appear to say, that the qualia of the unbattiness of the room coadaptively represented the epiphenomenological non-Chineseness of all anti-food experiences? We couldn’t! But here's the trick; it only seemed to you that you were really imagining this, but you are in fact the zombie that the human-acted-zombie is acting like, and your neuronal excitations are by definition unbatty because you are in the state of acting like a human. It therefore becomes clear that this is the position we must take if we are going to review Consciousness Explained, and yet when you look closely, there is no reviewer, and therefore, there is no review. I give it 3 bats.
-Otto
-Otto
cmiller0401's review against another edition
ksotala's review against another edition
4.0
My feeling of the book is similar to Dennett's own assessment, in the final chapter: My explanation of consciousness is far from complete. One might even say that it was just a beginning, but it is a beginning, because it breaks the spell of the enchanted circle of ideas that made explaining consciousness seem impossible.
The book has its flaws: it spends its early chapters claiming that some questions are unanswerable in principle, when later researchers have figured out ways of testing those questions in practice (see [b:Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts|18079692|Consciousness and the Brain Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts|Stanislas Dehaene|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1375064245l/18079692._SY75_.jpg|25386984] for some of such work). At times it also felt like rather dry and wordy reading, even though I generally enjoy reading academic writing for pleasure. It may also be faulted for not always being entirely clear on what exactly it is that it does claim - for all the time that it spends criticizing naive views of consciousness, its offered alternative models often feel sketchy and speculative.
But, coming back to the quote at the beginning of my review, these are flaws characteristic of the beginning of an explanation. If people have a mistaken view of a thing, then explaining why that is a mistaken view is a necessary first step to get them to think about alternatives. While many of Dennett's explanations feel sketchy, they are nonetheless useful for starting to sketch out an alternative and more sophisticated way of thinking about consciousness. The naive folk-psychological view of consciousness isn't particularly developed either; Dennett takes us much closer to something like an understanding, even if the distance to a full understanding still remains even longer than the distance traveled.
The book has its flaws: it spends its early chapters claiming that some questions are unanswerable in principle, when later researchers have figured out ways of testing those questions in practice (see [b:Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts|18079692|Consciousness and the Brain Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts|Stanislas Dehaene|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1375064245l/18079692._SY75_.jpg|25386984] for some of such work). At times it also felt like rather dry and wordy reading, even though I generally enjoy reading academic writing for pleasure. It may also be faulted for not always being entirely clear on what exactly it is that it does claim - for all the time that it spends criticizing naive views of consciousness, its offered alternative models often feel sketchy and speculative.
But, coming back to the quote at the beginning of my review, these are flaws characteristic of the beginning of an explanation. If people have a mistaken view of a thing, then explaining why that is a mistaken view is a necessary first step to get them to think about alternatives. While many of Dennett's explanations feel sketchy, they are nonetheless useful for starting to sketch out an alternative and more sophisticated way of thinking about consciousness. The naive folk-psychological view of consciousness isn't particularly developed either; Dennett takes us much closer to something like an understanding, even if the distance to a full understanding still remains even longer than the distance traveled.
stelepami's review against another edition
4.0
It took me almost a year to finish this book because it required concentration and a critical eye and I frequently found myself turning to a novel for light escapism instead. When I did buckle down and work at it, I was captivated by -- but not captive to -- the ideas Dennett presented. I try to read about philosophy and science with an open but skeptical mind, looking for holes in the logic which leads to the conclusions. This book is twenty years old and quite dated in some aspects (including -- to my untrained eye -- the font choice and typesetting), but it makes me wish to find out what has changed in the field since it was written.
One of the reviews on the back cover of the paperback claims that it is "as audacious as its title," and I think the adjective is fitting. Dennett does not shrink from making bold claims, and as I read I was not always sure that he presented solid arguments to back them up. I am not certain I subscribe completely to his Multiple Drafts model of consciousness, but I admire his challenge to the Cartesian Theater and the fact that he presents an alternative.
I certainly agree with Dennett (and Hofstadter in [b:I Am a Strange Loop|123471|I Am a Strange Loop|Douglas R. Hofstadter|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171853665s/123471.jpg|2691404] -- if I'm remembering my reading of that book correctly) that a centralized stream of consciousness is a convenient fiction for our everyday lives. I appreciate a theory which allows me to function on that level on a daily basis without denying the science which shows that the complexity of our brains (and thus mental lives) is composed of very simple interactions at a much more basic level. I almost cheered on page 406 as Dennett very prettily summed up my beliefs about consciousness and the exact thing I find so frustrating about religion in one go:
"We're all zombies. Nobody is conscious -- not in the systematically mysterious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism! I can't prove that no such sort of consciousness exists. I also cannot prove that gremlins don't exist. The best I can do is show that there is no respectable motivation for believing in it."
I find the idea that what I am is a center of narrative gravity rather charming, although I recognize that I am not satisfied to swallow that idea whole without challenging it.
This book made me think. That is one of the highest praises I can award. Furthermore, it made me want to think more.
One of the reviews on the back cover of the paperback claims that it is "as audacious as its title," and I think the adjective is fitting. Dennett does not shrink from making bold claims, and as I read I was not always sure that he presented solid arguments to back them up. I am not certain I subscribe completely to his Multiple Drafts model of consciousness, but I admire his challenge to the Cartesian Theater and the fact that he presents an alternative.
I certainly agree with Dennett (and Hofstadter in [b:I Am a Strange Loop|123471|I Am a Strange Loop|Douglas R. Hofstadter|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171853665s/123471.jpg|2691404] -- if I'm remembering my reading of that book correctly) that a centralized stream of consciousness is a convenient fiction for our everyday lives. I appreciate a theory which allows me to function on that level on a daily basis without denying the science which shows that the complexity of our brains (and thus mental lives) is composed of very simple interactions at a much more basic level. I almost cheered on page 406 as Dennett very prettily summed up my beliefs about consciousness and the exact thing I find so frustrating about religion in one go:
"We're all zombies. Nobody is conscious -- not in the systematically mysterious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism! I can't prove that no such sort of consciousness exists. I also cannot prove that gremlins don't exist. The best I can do is show that there is no respectable motivation for believing in it."
I find the idea that what I am is a center of narrative gravity rather charming, although I recognize that I am not satisfied to swallow that idea whole without challenging it.
This book made me think. That is one of the highest praises I can award. Furthermore, it made me want to think more.