One of the Ten Best Books of the Year—New York Times CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED DANIEL C. DENNETT Author of Brainstorms and coauthor of The Mind's |What the critics have said about CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED by Daniel Dennett “His sophisticated discourse is as savvy and articulate about good beer or the Boston Celtics as it is about parallel processing, modern cognitive experimentation, neuropathology, echolocation by bats, or Ludwig Wittgenstein. ... A persuasive philosophical work, the best examined in this column for decades. . . . Skeptics, supporters, and the undecided should proceed at once to find and read this good-humored, imaginative, richly instructive book.” — Philip Morrison Scientific American “This extremely ambitious book is the payoff for many years of communing with neurobiologists, cognitive psychologists, and various artificial-intelligence types in a search to understand the mind-brain. The result is the best kind of philosophical writing: accessible, but not trivializing; witty, but serious; well-informed, but not drowning in the facts.” — K. Anthony Appiah Village Voice “How unfair for one man to be blessed with such a torrent of stimulating thoughts. Stimulating is an understatement. Every chapter unleashes so many startling new ideas that in the hands of an ordinary philosopher it would — and probably will — be spun out to fill a whole book.” — Richard Dawkins Author of The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene“He 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.” — Thomas Nagel Wall Street Journal “A remarkable meditation on consciousness — in part deconstruction, in part construction — by one of our most outstanding synthesizers.” — Howard Gardner Author of The Mind’s New Science and The Shattered Mind “What turns a mere piece of matter from being mere matter into an animate being? What gives certain special physical patterns in the universe the mysterious privilege of feeling sensations and having experiences? “Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained is a masterful tapestry of deep insights into this eternal philosophical riddle. Deftly weaving together strands taken from philosophy, neurology, computer science, and philosophy itself, Dennett has written a profound and important book that is also clear, exciting, and witty; Consciousness Explained represents philosophy at its best. “While demolishing all sorts of simple-minded ‘commonsense’ views of consciousness, Dennett builds up a radical rival edifice of great beauty and subtlety. Dennett’s view of consciousness is counterintuitive but compelling; indeed, like any revolutionary theory, its power and its unexpectedness are deeply related. While Consciousness Explained is certainly not the ultimate explanation of consciousness, | believe it will long be remembered as a major step along the way to unraveling its mystery.” — Douglas R. Hofstadter Author of Gédel, Escher, BachCONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED SS DANIEL C. DENNETT Illustrated by Paul Weiner a BACK BAY BOOKS LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON LONDONCopyright © 1991 by Daniel C. Dennett All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no patt of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Group USA 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Visit out Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com First Poperback Edition Permissions to use copyrighted material appear on page 492. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dennett, Daniel Clement, Consciousness explained / Daniel C. Dennett. — 1st ed. Pp. cm, Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-316-18065-8 (hc) ISBN 978-0-316-18066-5 (pb) 1. Consciousness. 2. Mind and body. I. Tite. B105.0477045 1991 126 — de20 91-15614 2019 18 17 16 QeMART Printed in the United Stotes of AmericaFor Nick, Marcel, and RayALSO BY DANIEL C. DENNETT Content and Consciousness Brainstorms The Mind’s | (with Douglas R. Hofstadter) Elbow Room The Intentional StanceCONTENTS Preface Prelude: How Are Hallucinations Possible? 1. The Brain in the Vat 2. Pranksters in the Brain 3. A Party Game Called Psychoanalysis 4. Preview Part! PROBLEMS AND METHODS 2 Explaining Consciousness 1. Pandora’s Box: Should Consciousness Be Demystified? 2. The Mystery of Consciousness 3, The Attractions of Mind Stuff 4. Why Dualism Is Forlorn 5. The Challenge A Visit to the Phenomenological Garden 1. Welcome to the Phenom 2. Our Experience of the External World 3. Our Experience of the Internal World 4. Affect A Method for Phenomenology . First Person Plural . The Third-Person Perspective . The Method of Heterophenomenology . Fictional Worlds and Heterophenomenological Worlds The Discreet Charm of the Anthropologist Discovering What Someone Is Really Talking About Shakey’s Mental Images The Neutrality of Heterophenomenology exouses xi 21 43 66vii. CONTENTS Part Il AN EMPIRICAL THEORY OF THE MIND. 5 Multiple Drafts Versus the Cartesian Theater 101 The Point of View of the Observer Introducing the Multiple Drafts Model Orwellian and Stalinesque Revisions The Theater of Consciousness Revisited ‘The Multiple Drafts Model in Action AkRewH Time and Experience 139 Fleeting Moments and Hopping Rabbits How the Brain Represents Time Libet’s Case of “Backwards Referral in Time” Libet’s Claim of Subjective Delay of Consciousness of Intention A Treat: Grey Walter's Precognitive Carousel Loose Ends eg ek eN pe The Evolution of Consciousness 171 . Inside the Black Box of Consciousness Early Days Scene One: The Birth of Boundaries and Reasons Scene Two: New and Better Ways of Producing Future Evolution in Brains, and the Baldwin Effect Plasticity in the Human Brain: Setting the Stage The Invention of Govd and Bad Habits of Autostimulation The Third Evolutionary Process: Memes and Cultural Evolution The Memes of Consciousness: The Virtual Machine to Be Installed Bg yegae How Words Do Things with Us 227 1. Review: E Pluribus Unum? 2, Bureaucracy versus Pandemonium 3. When Words Want to Get Themselves Said The Architecture of the Human Mind 253 1, Where Are We? 2. Orienting Ourselves with the Thumbnail Sketch 3. And Then What Happens? 4, The Powers of the Joycean Machine 5. But Is This a Theory of Consciousness?CONTENTS ix Part Ill_ THE PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 10 11 12 13 14 Show and Tell 285 1. Rotating Images in the Mind's Eye 2. Words, Pictures, and Thoughts 3. Reporting and Expressing 4. Zombies, Zimboes, and the User Illusion 5. Problems with Folk Psychology Dismantling the Witness Protection Program 321 1. Review Blindsight: Partial Zombiehood? Hide the Thimble: An Exercise in Consciousness-Raising Prosthetic Vision: What, Aside from Information, is Stil] Missing? “Pilling In” versus Finding Out Noglect as a Pathological Loss of Epistemic Appetite Virtual Presence Seeing Is Believing: A Dialogue with Otto s&h SnNan Qualia Disqualified 369 1. A New Kite String 2. Why Are There Colors? 3. Enjoying Our Experiences 4. A Philosophical Fantasy: Inverted Qualia 5. “Epiphenomenal” Qualia? 6. Getting Back on My Rocker The Reality of Selves 412 1. How Human Beings Spin a Self 2. How Many Selves to a Customer? 3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being Consciousness Imagined 431 1. Imagining a Conscious Robot 2. What It Is Like to Be a Bat 3. Minding and Mattering 4. Consciousness Explained, or Explained Away?x CONTENTS Appendix A (for Philosophers) Appendix B (for Scientists) Bibliography Index 457 464 469 493PREFACE My first year in college, I read Descartes’s Meditations and was hooked on the mind-body problem, Now here was a mystery. How on earth could my thoughts and feelings fit in the same world with the nerve cells and molecules that made up my brain? Now, after thirty years of thinking, talking, and writing about this mystery, I think I've made some progress. I think I can sketch an outline of the solution, a theory of consciousness that gives answers (or shows how to find the answers) to the questions that have been just as baffling to philosophers and scientists as to laypeople. I’ve had a lot of help. It’s been my good fortune to be taught, informally, indefatigably, and imperturbably, by some wonderful thinkers, whom you will meet in these pages. For the story I have to tel] is not one of solitary cogitation but of an adyssey through many fields, and the solutions to the puzzles are inextricably woven into a fabric of dialogue and disagreement, where we often learn more from bold mistakes than from cautious equivocation. I'm sure there are still plenty of mistakes in the theory I will offer here, and I hope they are bold ones, for then they will provoke better answers by others. The ideas in this book have been hammered into shape over many years, but the writing was begun in January 1990 and finished just a year later, thanks to the generosity of several fine institutions and the help of many friends, students, and colleagues. The Zentrum fur In- terdisziplinare Forschung in Bielefeld, CREA at the Ecole Polytech- nique in Paris, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio provided ideal conditions for writing and conferring during xixii PREFACE the first five months. My home university, Tufts, has supported my work through the Center for Cognitive Studies, and enabled me to pre- sent the penultimate draft in the fall of 1990 in a seminar that drew on the faculties and students of Tufts and the other fine schools in the greater Boston area. I also want to thank the Kapor Foundation and the Harkness Foundation for supporting our research at the Center for Cog- nitive Studies. Several years ago, Nicholas Humphrey came to work with me at the Center for Cognitive Studies, and he, Ray Jackendoff, Marcel Kins- bourne, and I began meeting regularly to discuss various aspects and problems of consciousness. It would be hard to find four more different approaches to the mind, but our discussions were so fruitful, and so encouraging, that I dedicate this book to these fine friends, with thanks for all they have taught me. Two other longtime colleagues and friends have also played major roles in shaping my thinking, for which I am eternally grateful: Kathleen Akins and Bo Dahlbom. Lalso want to thank the ZIF group in Bielefeld, particularly Peter Bieri, Jaegwon Kim, David Rosenthal, Jay Rosenberg, Eckart Scherer, Bob van Gulick, Hans Flohr, and Lex van der Heiden; the CREA group in Paris, particularly Daniel Andler, Pierre Jacob, Francisco Varela, Dan Sperber, and Deirdre Wilson; and the ‘princes of consciousness” who joined Nick, Marcel, Ray, and me at the Villa Serbelloni for an intensely productive week in March: Edoardo Bisiach, Bill Calvin, Tony Marcel, and Aaron Sloman, Thanks also to Edoardo and the other participants of the workshop on neglect, in Parma in June. Pim Levelt, Odmar Neu- mann, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Selfridge, and Nils Nilsson also provided valuable advice on various chapters. I also want to express my gratitude to Nils for providing the photograph of Shakey, and to Paul Bach-y- Rita for his photographs and advice on prosthetic vision devices. Iam grateful for a bounty of constructive criticism to all the par- ticipants in the seminar last fall, a class I will never forget: David Hilbert, Krista Lawlor, David Joslin, Cynthia Schossberger, Luc Faucher, Steve Weinstein, Oakes Spalding, Mini Jaikumar, Leah Stei berg, Jane Anderson, Jim Beattie, Evan Thompson, Turhan Canli, Mi- chael Anthony, Martina Roepke, Beth Sangree, Ned Block, Jeff McConnell, Bjorn Ramberg, Phi] Holcomb, Steve White, Owen Flana- gan, and Andrew Woodfield. Week after week, this gang held my feet to the fire, in the most constructive way. During the final redrafting, Kathleen Akins, Bo Dahlbom, Doug Hofstadter, and Sue Stafford pro- vided many invaluable suggestions. Paul Weiner turned my crude sketches into the excellent figures and diagrams.PREFACE xiii Kathryn Wynes and later Anne Van Voorhis have done an ex- traordinary job of keeping me, and the Center, from flying apart during the last few hectic years, and without their efficiency and foresight this book would still be years from completion. Last and most important: love and thanks to Susan, Peter, Andrea, Marvin, and Brandon, my family. Tufts University January 1991CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINEDPRELUDE: HOW ARE HALLUCINATIONS POSSIBLE? —_——— en 1. THE BRAIN IN THE VAT Suppose evil scientists removed your brain from your body while you slept, and set it up in a life-support system in a vat. Suppose they then set out to trick you into believing that you were not just a brain ina vat, but still up and about, engaging in a normally embodied round of activities in the real world. This old saw, the brain in the vat, is a favorite thought experiment in the toolkit of many philosophers. It is a modern-day version of Descartes’s (1641) evil demon, an imagined illusionist bent on tricking Descartes about absolutely everything, in- cluding his own existence. But as Descartes observed, even an infinitely powerful evil demon couldn't trick him into thinking he himself existed if he didn’t exist: cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” Philoso- phers today are less concerned with proving one's own existence as a thinking thing (perhaps because they have decided that Descartes set- tled that matter quite satisfactorily) and more concerned about what, in principle, we may conclude from our experience about our nature, and about the nature of the world in which we (apparently) live. Might you be nothing but a brain in a vat? Might you have always been just a brain in a vat? If so, could you even conceive of your predicament (let alone confirm it)? The idea of the brain in the vat is a vivid way of exploring these questions, but I want to put the old saw to another use. I want to use 1, Dates in parentheses refer to works listed in the Bibliography.4 PRELUDE: HOW ARE HALLUCINATIONS POSSIBLE? it to uncover some curious facts about hallucinations, which in turn will lead us to the beginnings of a theory — an empirical, scientifically respectable theory — of human consciousness. In the standard thought experiment, it is obvious that the scientists would have their hands full providing the nerve stumps from all your senses with just the right stimulations to carry off the trickery, but philosophers have assumed for the sake of argument that however technically difficult the task might be, it is “possible in principle.” One should be leery of these possibilities in principle. It is also possible in principle to build a stainless-steel ladder to the moon, and to write out, in alphabetical order, all intelligible English conversations consisting of less than a thousand words. But neither of these are remotely possible in fact and sometimes an impossibility in fact is theatetically more interesting than a possibility in principle, as we shall see. Let’s take a moment to consider, then, just how daunting the task facing the evil scientists would be. We can imagine them building up to the hard tasks from some easy beginnings. They begin with a conveniently comatose brain, kept alive but lacking all input from the optic nerves, the auditory nerves, the somatosensory nerves, and all the other afferent, or input, paths to the brain. It is sometimes assumed that such a ‘‘deafferented” brain would naturally stay in a comatose state forever, needing no morphine to keep it dormant, but there is some empirical evidence to suggest that spontaneous waking might still occur in these dire circumstances. | think we can suppose that were you to awake in such a state, you would find yourself in horrible straits: blind, deaf, completely numb, with no sense of your body’s orientation. Not wanting to horrify you, then, the scientists arrange to wake you up by piping stereo music (suitably encoded as nerve impulses) into your auditory nerves. They also arrange for the signals that would normally come from your vestibular system or inner ear to indicate that you are lying on your back, but otherwise paralyzed, numb, blind. This much should be within the limits of technical virtuosity in the near future — perhaps possible even today. They might then go on to stim- ulate the tracts that used to innervate your epidermis, providing it with the input that would normally have been produced by a gentle, even warmth over the ventral (belly) surface of your body, and (getting fan- cier) they might stimulate the dorsal (back) epidermal nerves in a way that simulated the tingly texture of grains of sand pressing into your back. “Great!” you say to yourself: “Here I am, lying on my back onPRELUDE: HOW ARE HALLUCINATIONS POSSIBLE? 5. the beach, paralyzed and blind, listening to rather nice music, but probably in danger of sunburn. How did I get here, and how can I call for help?” But now suppose the scientists, having accomplished ail this, tackle the more difficult problem of convincing you that you are not a mere beach potato, but an agent capable of engaging in some form of activity in the world. Starting with little steps, they decide to lift part of the “paralysis” of your phantom body and let you wiggle your right index finger in the sand. They permit the sensory experience of moving your finger to occur, which is accomplished by giving you the kines- thetic feedback associated with the relevant volitional or motor signals in the output or efferent part of your nervous system, but they must also arrange to remove the numbness from your phantom finger, and provide the stimulation for the feeling that the motion of the imaginary sand around your finger would provoke. Suddenly, they are faced with a problem that will quickly get out of hand, for just how the sand will feel depends on just how you decide to move your finger. The problem of calculating the proper feedback, generating or composing it, and then presenting it to you in real time is going to be computationally intractable on even the fastest computer, and if the evil scientists decide to solve the real-time problem by pre- calculating and “canning” all the possible responses for playback, they will just trade one insoluble problem for another; there are too many possibilities to store. In short, our evil scientists will be swamped by combinatorial explosion as soon as they give you any genuine explor- atory powers in this imaginary world? It is a familiar wall these scientists have hit; we see its shadow in the boring stereotypes in every video game. The alternatives open 2. The term combinatorial explosion comes from computer science, but the phe- nomenon was recognized long bafore computers, for instance in the fable of the emperor who agrees to reward the peasant who saved his lifo one grain of rice on the first square of the checkerboard, two grains on the second, four on the third, and so forth, doubling the amount for each of the sixty-four squares. He ends up owing the wily peasant millions of billions of grains of rice (2-1 to be exact). Closer to our example is the plight of the French “aleatoric” novelists who set out to write novels in which, after reading chapter 1, the reader flips a coin and then reads chapter 2a or 2b, depending on the outcome, and then reads chapter 3aa, 3ab, aba, or 3bb after that, and so on, flipping 2 coin at the end of every chapter. These novelists soon came to realize that they had better miniraize the number of choice points if they wanted to avoid an explosion of fiction that would prevent anyone from carrying the whole “book” home from the bookstore.6 PRELUDE: HOW ARE HALLUCINATIONS POSSIBLE? for action have to be strictly — and unrealistically — limited to keep the task of the world-representers within feasible bounds. If the sci- entists can do no better than convince you that you are doomed to a lifetime of playing Donkey Kong, they are evil scientists indeed. There is a solution of sorts to this technical problem. It is the solution used, for instance, to ease the computational burden in highly realistic flight simulators: use replicas of the items in the simulated world. Use a real cockpit and push and pull it with hydraulic lifters, instead of trying to simulate all that input to the seat of the pants of the pilot in training. In short, there is only one way for you to store for ready access that much information about an imaginary world to be explored, and that is to use a real (if tiny or artificial or plaster-of-paris) world to store its own information! This is “cheating” if you're the evil demon claiming to have deceived Descartes about the existence of ab- solutely everything, but it’s a way of actually getting the job done with less than infinite resources. Descartes was wise to endow his imagined evil demon with in- finite powers of trickery. Although the task is not, strictly speaking, infinite, the amount of information obtainable in short order by an inquisitive human being is staggeringly large. Engineers measure in- formation flow in bits per second, or speak of the bandwidth of the channels through which the information flows. Television requires a greater bandwidth than radio, and high-definition television has a still greater bandwidth. High-definition smello-feelo television would have a still greater bandwidth, and interactive smelio-teelo television would have an astronomical bandwidth, because it constantly branches into thousands of slightly different trajectories through the (imaginary) world. Throw a skeptic a dubious coin, and in a second or two of hefting, scratching, ringing, tasting, and just plain looking at how the sun glints on its surface, the skeptic will consume more bits of information than a Cray supercomputer can organize in a year. Making a real but coun- terfeit coin is child’s play; making a simulated coin out of nothing but organized nerve stimulations is beyond human technology now and probably forever. 3. The development of “Virtual Reality” systems for recreation and research is currently undergoing 2 boom. The state of the art is impressive: electronically rigged gloves thet provide a convincing interface for “manipulating” virtual objects, and head- mounted visual displays that permit you to explore virtual environments of considerable complexity. The limitations of these systems are apparent, however, and they bear outPRELUDE: HOW ARE HALLUCINATIONS POSSIBLE? 7 One conclusion we can draw from this is that we are not brains in vats — in case you were worried. Another conclusion it seems that we can draw from this is that strong hallucinations are simply impos- sible! By a strong hallucination I mean a hallucination of an apparently concrete and persisting three-dimensional object in the real world — as contrasted to flashes, geometric distortions, auras, afterimages, fleet- ing phantom-limb experiences, and other anomalous sensations, A strong hallucination would be, say, a ghost that talked back, that per- mitted you to touch it, that resisted with a sense of solidity, that cast a shadow, that was visible from any angle so that you might waik around it and see what its back looked like. Hallucinations can be roughly ranked in strength by the number of such features they have. Reports of very strong hallucinations are rare, and we can now see why it is no coincidence that the credibility of such reports seems, intuitively, to be inversely proportional to the strength of the hallucination reported. We are — and should be — par- ticularly skeptical of reports of very strong hallucinations because we don’t believe in ghosts, and we think that only a real ghost could pro- duce a strong hallucination. (It was primarily the telltale strength of the hallucinations reported by Carlos Castafieda in The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge [1968] that first suggested to scientists that the book, in spite of having been a successful Ph.D. thesis in anthropology at UCLA, was fiction, not fact.) But if really strong hallucinations are not known to occur, there can be no doubt that convincing, multimodal hallucinations are fre- quently experienced. The hallucinations that are well attested in the literature of clinical psychology are often detailed fantasies far beyond the generative capacities of current technology. How on earth can a single brain do what teams of scientists and computer animators would find to be almost impossible? If such experiences are not genuine or veridical perceptions of some real thing “‘outside” the mind, they must be produced entirely inside the mind (or the brain), concocted out of whole cloth but lifelike enough to fooi the very mind that concocts them. my point: it is only by various combinations of physical replicas and schematization (a relatively coarse-grained representation) that robust illusions can be sustained. And even. at their best, they ate experiences of virtual surreality, not something that you might mistake for the real thing for more than a moment. If you really want to fool someone into thinking he is in a cage with a gorilla, enlisting the help of an actor in a gorilla suit is going to be your best bet for a long time.8 PRELUDE: HOW ARE HALLUCINATIONS POSSIBLE? 2. PRANKSTERS IN THE BRAIN The standard way of thinking of this is to suppose that halluci- nations occur when there is some sort of freakish autostimulation of the brain, in particular, an entirely internally generated stimulation of some parts or levels of the brain’s perceptual systems. Descartes, in the seventeenth century, saw this prospect quite clearly, in his discussion of phantom limb, the startling but quite normal hallucination in which amputees seem to feel not just the presence of the amputated part, but itches and tingles and pains in it. (It often happens that new amputees, after surgery, simply cannot believe that a leg or foot has been ampu- tated until they see that it is gone, so vivid and realistic are their sensations of its continued presence.} Descartes’s analogy was the bell- pull. Before there were electric bells, intercoms, and walkie-talkies, great houses were equipped with marvelous systems of wires and pul- leys that permitted one to call for a servant from any room in the house. A sharp tug on the velvet sash dangling from a hole in the wall pulled a wire that ran over pulleys all the way to the pantry, where it jangled one of a number of labeled bells, informing the butler that service was required in the master bedroom or the parlor or the billiards room. The systems worked well, but were tailor-made for pranks. Tugging on the parlor wire anywhere along its length would send the butler scurrying to the parlor, under the heartfelt misapprehension that someone had called him from there — a modest little hallucination of sorts. Similarly, Descartes thought, since perceptions are caused by various complicated chains of events in the nervous system that lead eventually to the contro) center of the conscious mind, if one could intervene somewhere along the chain (anywhere on the optic nerve, for instance, between the eyeball and consciousness), tugging just right on the nerves would produce exactly the chain of events that would be caused by a normal, veridical perception of something, and this would produce, at the re- ceiving end in the mind, exactly the effect of such a conscious percep- tion. The brain — or some part of it — inadvertently played a mechan- ical trick on the mind. That was Descartes’s explanation of phantom- limb hallucinations. Phantom-limb hallucinations, while remarkably vivid, are — by our terminology — relatively weak; they consist of un- organized pains and itches, all in one sensory modality. Amputees don’t see or hear or (so far as 1 know) smell their phantom feet. So something like Descartes’s account could be the right way to explain phantom limbs, setting aside for the time being the notorious mysteries about