Dennett’s Multiple Drafts Model

In his intellectual memoirs, I've Been Thinking, philosopher Daniel Dennett highlights two fundamental questions on which his career is founded—the two related philosophical problems he set himself to solve. “First, how can it be that some complicated clumps of molecules can be properly described as having states or events that are about something, that have meaning or content. And second, how can it be that at least some of these complicated clumps of molecules are conscious—that is, aware that they are gifted with states or events that are about something?” (Dennett, 2023a, 2023b).

In dealing with these questions, Dennett realized, way back in his PhD dissertation in 1965, that “the best—and only—way of making sense of the mind and consciousness is through evolution by natural selection on many levels.” Dennett's core insight subsuming biological evolution in general and the development of mind in particular is concise: reasons without a reasoner, design without a designer, and competence without comprehension (Dennett, 2007).

Multiple Drafts and Consciousness

Dennett's theory of consciousness is distinguished by four ideas: (i) there is no “Cartesian Theater,” no inner witness viewing the consciousness show; (ii) different brain regions or modules develop different kinds of content, which Dennett calls “multiple drafts”; (iii) the multiple drafts compete with one another for attention, the winner of the winner-take-all competition occupying the entirety of the conscious moment, which Dennett calls “fame in the brain”; and (iv) the collection of all these conscious moments coalesces into a kind of life story, the emergence of a sense of “self,” which Dennett describes as a “center of narrative gravity.”

In Consciousness Explained, Dennett presents his multiple drafts model of consciousness (Dennett, 1992). He states that all varieties of perception, thought, or mental activity are processed in the brain via parallel, multitrack interpretations and elaborations, subject to continuous "editorial revision.” These “yield, over the course of time, something rather like a narrative stream or sequence, the product of continual editing by many processes distributed around the brain.” Dennett has the brain consisting of a "bundle of semi-independent agencies," and his metaphor “fame in the brain” tells us what it takes for competing ideas to determine the content of consciousness at any given moment.

In supporting his theory, Dennett needs to undermine what we take to be common sense. He challenges the verisimilitude of inner experience, which he calls more like theorizing than like describing. He rejects the notion of a single central location (his "Cartesian theater") where conscious experience can be 'viewed.' “There is no single, definitive ‘stream of consciousness,’ because there is no central Headquarters” Dennett (1992).

Dennett dissolves the idea of the 'self' as the central character of stories made up by content fixation and propagation in the brain. Moreover, he argues that the properties of qualia are incompatible and therefore incoherent, thus obviating the need to solve Chalmers's hard problem.^[1] Dennett needs all four of these counterintuitive yet deeply probative assertions; the package is admirably coherent, but buying it is a tall order.

Qualia and User Illusions

Of Dennett's four assertions, his desired demolition of qualia is perhaps his most critical move. Here is how he defends it. “Qualia are user-illusions, ways of being informed about things that matter to us in the world (our affordances) because of the way we and the environment we live in (microphysically) are. They are perfectly real illusions! They just aren't what they seem to be; they are not intrinsic, unanalyzable properties of mental states; they are highly structured and complex activated neural networks that dispose us to do all sorts of things in response—such as declare that we're seeing something blue. The key move is to recognize that we have underprivileged access to the source or cause of our convictions about what we experience” (Rosenberg & Dennett, 2020).

Ironically, while Dennett calls as evidence “user illusions” in his case to deflate consciousness and support materialism, cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman calls as evidence “user illusions” in his case to inflate consciousness and deny materialism. This contrasting interpretation of precisely the same data by two first-rate thinkers is fascinating, perhaps telling.

Dennett is not shy in asserting that people still underestimate by a wide margin the challenges that the brain-in-vat thought experiment raises for views of consciousness other than Dennett's own. The key fact is that “you don't know anything ‘privileged’ about the causation of your own thoughts. You cannot know ‘from the inside‘ what events cause you to think you see something as red or green, for instance, or cause you to push button A instead of button B.” In short, to truly understand consciousness, Dennett says “you need to go outside yourself and adopt the ‘third-person point of view’ of science” (Dennett, 2023a, 2023b).

Heterophenomenology and Critiques

Dennett stresses the importance of treating subjects' beliefs about their own consciousness as “data to be explained, not necessarily as true accounts of mental reality.” He states, “This is the major fault line in philosophy of mind today, with John Searle, Tom Nagel, David Chalmers, Galen Strawson, and Philip Goff [all represented in this paper], among others, thinking they can just insist they know better. They don't. Those who object, who hold out for some sort of ‘first-person science of consciousness,’ have yet to describe any experiments or results that are trustworthy but unobtainable by heterophenomenology” (the term Dennett coined for the third-person method, the phenomenology of other minds, which is standard procedure in cognitive science). Dennett says his meeting with leading scientific researchers on consciousness enabled him “to begin to form at least vague ideas of how mechanisms of the brain might do all the work,” but only, he insists, “if we deflated some of the overconfident pronouncements of introspectors about the marvels of the phenomena” (Dennett, 2023a, 2023b).

In describing his early book, Content and Consciousness, where he puts content before consciousness, Dennett differentiates himself from John Searle, who puts consciousness before content. Although Searle and Dennett are both biological naturalists and both, for example, eschew panpsychism, Dennett believes that by prioritizing content, the mystery of consciousness is mitigated.

Dennett has had a long, friendly, though surely adversarial relationship with Chalmers. “Even expert scientists have been fooled by Chalmers' ‘the Hard Problem’ into thinking that there's one big mysterious fact that needs explaining, when in fact there are hundreds of lesser problems that can be solved without any scientific revolutions, and when they are all solved, the so-called Hard Problem will evaporate” (Dennett, 2023a, 2023b).

It is worth noting the more general case of a multiple module way of thinking, which posits separate if not independent cognitive components of the mind rooted in the brain (though not needing to correspond to identifiable brain structures).

Footnote

[1]. Two witticisms exchanged by Dan Dennett and Dave Chalmers at the 2014 “Toward a Science of Consciousness” conference in Tucson, organized and managed by Stuart Hameroff and co-organized in some years by Chalmers. Dan: “I now know what it feels like to be a policeman at Woodstock.” Dave: “Everyone has a crazy theory about the ‘hard problem’—even Dan, who says there is no ‘hard problem.’”