A review by ksotala
Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett
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.