Consciousness explained
by Daniel C. Dennett · first published 1991
49% recommend39% neutral13% critical
Why HN recommends it
Lucid materialist account of the mind that rejects a single Cartesian theater and takes apart Searle's Chinese Room and the Mary thought experiment; suits readers into philosophy of mind, AI, or mind uploading.
Common criticism: Some say it explains the mechanisms but not the subjective feeling of consciousness
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
This book revises the traditional view of consciousness by claiming that Cartesianism and Descartes' dualism of mind and body should be replaced with theories from the realms of neuroscience, psychology and artificial intelligence. What people think of as the stream of consciousness is not a single, unified sequence, the author argues, but "multiple drafts" of reality composed by a computer-like "virtual machine". Dennett considers how consciousness could have evolved in human beings and confronts the classic mysteries of consciousness: the nature of introspection, the self or ego and its rela
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I found that Dan Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" really resonated with me. His thesis is (as best I can condense a whole book to fit in an HN comment) that consciousness is essentially an illusion produced by the brain as the best model it can construct…
on “Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness” ↗…and history (it's got your entire genome stored inside!) and complex behaviors (it's a tiny little creature!) that we can't even understand it in isolation. I'm not sure whether to recommend Dennett's Consciousness Explained or to compel the questioner to work through The Molecular Biology of the Cell, followed by (e.g.) Hölldobler and Wilson's Journey to the Ants -- and then keep going -- before trying to dismiss the complexity…
on “Ask HN: Where does consciousness come from?” ↗…had a great pleasure of talking him in person, and he falls into the Platonic trap. The best antidote is to talk with some actual neurobiologists, or read philosophy of mind (e.g. Daniel Dennett with Consciousness Explained). At the same time I recommend reading "How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival" by David Kaiser (http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/) - a general reading on the…
on “Quantum Approaches to Consciousness (2015)” ↗…take another generation or two before the ideas of Dennett, Dawkins, Tegmark, etc. get more widely recognized and consciousness finally goes the way of phlogiston. For references, I recommend Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", and really anything by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins--materialistic explanations of consciousness pervade their work. For a compatible (hah!) physical perspective, I suggest Max Tegmark: https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219
on “The crisis in physics is not only about physics” ↗…consciousness itself are still very mysterious, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it must all be a side effect of processing or information somehow. Daniel Dennett has some good stuff on this (see Consciousness Explained, etc). Its not that he knows the answers, but his point is that consciousness might not be exactly what we think it is, there are lots of thought-traps around it, so we have to carefully unpick some of…
on “Temporal circuit of brain activity supports human consciousness” ↗I was introduced to the "Hard Problem of Consciousness" some 10 years ago in high school philosophy class, and have been mulling over it ever since. Today I am sympathetic to Dennett's argument in Consciousness Explained: there is no single Cartesian theater, there are several processes in the brain which are the same thing (up to the precision of definition of same) as we internally experience, and many properties we…
on “Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger life cycle assessment (2018)” ↗If you want to read about many of these kinds of cases, I would suggest "Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett. In light of that book this kind of thing is not that surprising (though still very interesting). The book highlights many examples that show that being consciously aware of something…
on “Blind Man Sees With Subconscious Eye” ↗- David Marr: "Vision" The foundations of computational neroscience - and lots of practial demonstrations of how your eyes and brain work. - Daniel Dennett "Consciousness Explained" How the mind works? - J.E Gordon: "The new Science of Strog Materials" & " Structures, or why things don't fall down." How is 'stuff' strong/hard? - Steve Grand: "Creation" & "Growing up with Lucy"…
on “Ask HN: Interesting (Non software) books?” ↗…time this topic comes up, which seems to be often, so I'm sorry to sound like a broken record, but y'all need to read 'Freedom Evolves' by Dan Dennett, followed up by his longer more important work, 'Consciousness Explained.' You might not agree with his conclusions, as they're fairly radical, but it answers the question of the original post.
on “Ask HN: How can you be rational and still believe in free will?” ↗Great article man! Love all the philosophy of mind references. During my freshman seminar I had to read Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, ended up switching me from going to the business school to being a philosophy major and 'Learning how to learn.' Now that I've started learning how to program and working building…
on “What I learned bootstrapping a 6-figure business from school” ↗If you want to get into some of the literature around mind uploading, I'd start with some of Daniel Dennett's work such as "Consciousness Explained". If you think that it's possible for a computer program to have its own sense of self, then it's interesting to think about what it would feel like for that program to be stopped, copied to a new computer,…
on “A startup is pitching a mind-uploading service that is “100 percent fatal”” ↗For what it's worth, Daniel Dennett spends considerable time in _Consciousness Explained_ (and his other books) deconstructing both why Searle's Chinese Room argument is misleading, and also why is seems intuitively appealing (he calls it an "intuition pump"). I suspect you would find Dennett's…
on “The Best Books on the Philosophy of Mind” ↗In this case, Koch really needs to read Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained". Even though it does not explains consciousness, it takes it seriously to dispel myths and magical thinking about consciousness.
on “The AI delusion: why humans trump machines” ↗My favorite writings on the topic of consciousness are by the philosopher Daniel Dennett with his books like "Consciousness Explained". He provide such fun thought experiments, and brings together so much science - it's a treat!
on “Mental phenomena don’t map into the brain as expected” ↗My favorite read on this topic is Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett He's a philosopher who has spent a lifetime thinking about this problem, informed by the latest science of the day. Plus he's an excellent, lucid writer. He is a materialist, optimistic…
on “What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?” ↗