Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained is a 1991 book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author offers an account of how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain. Dennett describes consciousness as an account of the various calculations occurring in the brain at close to the same time. He compares consciousness to an academic paper that is being developed or edited in the hands of several people at once, the "multiple drafts" theory of consciousness. In this analogy, "the paper" exists even though there is no single, unified paper. When people report on their inner experiences, Dennett considers their reports to be more like theorizing than like describing. These reports may be informative, he says, but a psychologist is not to take them at face value. Dennett describes several phenomena that show that perception is more limited and less reliable than we perceive it to be. Dennett's views set out in Consciousness Explained put him at odds with thinkers who say that consciousness can be described only with reference to "qualia," i.e., the raw content of experience. Critics of the book have said that Dennett is denying the existence of subjective conscious states, while giving the appearance of giving a scientific explanation of them.