Andrew's Reviews > Consciousness Explained

While Dennett is probably better known to most readers as a grumbly professional atheist, I really don't need any help in that regard, so I went straight to his book on philosophy of mind. I can see why he's a public figure-- he's downright chatty and personable for a chilly analytic philosopher, and at the same time clear and rigorous in his presentation of ideas.

As for the ideas themselves... OK, the multiple-drafts notion of consciousness is something I can certainly get behind, and his attack on the "Cartesian theater" notion, while it seems obvious, is something that really needs to be done every once in a while to clean philosophical house.

But as to how we arrive at that multiple-drafts state, he relies on an excessively inductive understanding of evolution and the brain-as-computer metaphor that seems to cripple cognitive research. I tend to agree far more with people like Searle, Dreyfus, Putnam, and Merleau-Ponty, whom Dennett explicitly rejects.