Dennett - Sweet dreams : philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness

Sweet Dreams

The Jean Nicod Lectures
Franois Recanati, editor

The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics
Jerry A. Fodor (1994)

Naturalizing the Mind
Fred Dretske (1995)

Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior
Jon Elster (1999)

Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness
John Perry (2001)

Varieties of Meaning
Ruth Garrett Millikan (2004)

Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness

Daniel C. Dennett (2005)

Daniel C. Dennett

A Bradford Book

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dennett, Daniel Clement.

Sweet dreams : philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness /
Daniel C. Dennett.

p. cm.(The Jean Nicod lectures)

A Bradford book.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-262-04225-8 (hc : alk. paper)
1. Consciousness. I. Title. II. Series.

B945.D393S94 2005
153dc22

2004048681

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Series Foreword

Preface

1 The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition?

1 The Naturalistic Turn

2 The Reactionaries

3 An Embarrassment of Zombies

4 Broad Functionalism and Minimalism

5 The Future of an Illusion

2 A Third-Person Approach to Consciousness

1 Scientists from Mars

2 Folk Theories and Philosophy

3 Heterophenomenology Revisited

4 David Chalmers as Heterophenomenological Subject

5 The Second-Person Point of View

3 Explaining the Magic of Consciousness

1 The Thankless Task of Explaining Magic

2 Dismantling the Audience

3 The Tuned Deck

4 Are Qualia What Make Life Worth Living?

1 The Quale, An Elusive Quarry

2 Change Blindness and a Question about Qualia

3 Sweet Dreams and the Nightmare of Mr. Clapgras

5 What RoboMary Knows

1 Mary and the Blue Banana

2 Surely Shell Be Surprised

3 You Had to Be There!

4 RoboMary

5 Locked RoboMary

6 Are We Explaining Consciousness Yet?

1 Clawing Our Way toward Consensus

2 Competition for Clout

3 Is There Also a Hard Problem?

4 But What about Qualia?

5 Conclusion

7 A Fantasy Echo Theory of Consciousness

1 Fleeting Fame

2 Instant Replay

8 Consciousness: How Much Is That in Real Money?

References

Index

The Jean Nicod Lectures are delivered annually in Paris by a leading philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist. The 1993 inaugural lectures marked the centenary of the birth of the French philosopher and logician Jean Nicod (1893-1931). The lectures are sponsored by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and are organized in cooperation with the Fondation Maison des Sciences de lHomme (MSH Foundation). The series hosts the texts of the lectures or the monographs they inspire.

Jacques Bouveresse, President of the Jean Nicod Committee Franois Recanati, Secretary of the Jean Nicod Committee and Editor of the Series

Jean Nicod Committee

Mario Borillo

Jean-Pierre Changeux

Jean-Gabriel Ganascia

Andr Holley

Michel Imbert

Pierre Jacob

Jacques Mehler

Elisabeth Pacherie

Philippe de Rouilhan

Dan Sperber

Several years ago, I was invited to write a review surveying the recent theoretical work on consciousness by authors in several fields, ranging from quantum physics and chemistry through neuroscience and psychology to philosophy and literature. A swift survey of the good new books lined up on top of my bookshelf (it numbers 78, today, January 28, 2004, and those are just the books) persuaded me that I should beg off the job. It has been a tumultuous decade, so rambunctious that several people are writing books just about the tumult. I am adding this book to the flood as an exercise in deferred maintenance. The theory I sketched in Consciousness Explained in 1991 is holding up pretty well, I think, in spite of major advances in empirical outlook (on the positive side) and several waves of misconstrual (on the negative). I didnt get it all right the first time, but I didnt get it all wrong either. It is time for some revision and renewal.

I spent much of the early 1990s responding to the criticisms and other reactions my book had provoked before turning my

.

attention to the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution and its philosophical implications. After the publication of Darwins Dangerous Idea in 1995, I spent several more years defending and expanding its claims, while the literature on consciousness burgeoned apace. As the century turned, I knew I had to go back to the issues raised by my 1991 book and refine my positions in response to new waves of empirical results and theoretical proposals and challenges. A series of essays resulted. The first chapter of this book was my Millennial Lecture to the Royal Institute of Philosophy, giving my opinion on the state of play in the philosophy of mind at the turn of the century. It was subsequently published (Dennett 2001b). In November, 2001, I gave the Jean Nicod Lectures at the Institut Nicod in Paris, on philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness, and the following November I presented a revised and expanded version of those lectures as the Daewoo Lectures in Seoul. Chapters two through five of this book are drawn, with further revisions, from those presentations. (A version of one of the Nicod Lectures was incorporated into is a short essay on consciousness forthcoming in Richard Gregorys revised edition of the Oxford Companion to the Mind. There are a few stylistic revisions in the chapters published or forthcoming elsewhere.

The Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness is also a model of my academic life during the last dozen years. Giving several dozen public lectures a year on consciousness to widely different audiences encourages a large amount of adaptation and mutation of previously used material. In this volume I have attempted to freeze time somewhat arbitrarily and compose a best version of all this, trying to minimize repetition while preserving context. That is just what we do, according to my theory, when we tell othersor even our later selvesabout our conscious experience. Further postmillennial essays of mine on consciousness were not included because they either contain earlier versions of the discussions in the present chapters or are responses to specific essays or books and really need to be read in their original context:

Explaining the Magic of Consciousness, in Exploring Consciousness, Humanities, Natural Science, Religion, Proceedings of the International Symposium, Milano, November 19-20, 2001 (published in December, 2002, Fondazione Carlo Erba), pp. 47-58; reprinted in J. Laszlo, T. Bereczkei, C. Pleh, eds.,