The latest addition to my Daniel Dennett collection, Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, is a pretty quick read. It's a collected, collated, edited bag of essays and lectures on the "science of consciousness", serving as a drive-by synopsis of some of the consensus emerging from the various fields studying the mind: the various neuro-/cognitive-prefixed branches of psychology etc. And, of course, Dennett articulates all this in his usual style--easy to read, often conversational, way too easy to believe wholesale (more on that in a moment).
If you're familiar with any of the more recent Cog-Sci stuff (the last 2 decades or so), you probably won't be too surprised by most of his evidence, conclusions, and allusions. The most worthwhile part of the book is his newly-condensed theory of consciousness, the "Fame in the Brain" or "Fantasy Echo" theory. Basically, it's his earlier "Multiple Drafts" model, updated a bit and abbreviated. If you want a quick idea of how a non-centralized, non-Cartesian model of the mind might look, Dennett gives it to you in about 8 pages in the penultimate chapter (the "Fleeting Fame") section. And, for what it's worth, I think he's probably right.
But what is it worth? And that's just my problem with this book, a problem I've had with Dennett elsewhere: he provides just enough information, and with such debonair rhetoric, that I can't help but think he's utterly right. Yet, when I come down to explaining why I think so, I'm not able to present very well-reasoned arguments for agreeing with him: I'm left repeating his conclusions, which are striking, but not enough. His thought-experiments (or "intuition pumps"; nobody encourages Dennett coinages like the man himself) are wonderful, engaging; they encourage new ways of looking at and thinking about old problems. They don't, however, provide much evidence for this Theory of Consciousness, and I feel that, as a reader, I would have liked some more empirical reasons to buy this scientific theory. We're told over and over again that the mind/brain is a system made up of many layers of subsystems, but Dennett doesn't do very much unlayering at all. I don't expect a quick survey to sweep me from the cellular level through myriad intervening stages to the highest level of functioning and experience--but I would feel a little less like a blind Dennett-disciple if he'd provided at least a bit of a sketch on how this stuff actually works--the brain, I mean. Going one layer down, from "unexamined, rather Cartesian experience" to "highly metaphoric Pandemonium Demon/Fame System" is not a terribly informative journey, much though it may provide a radically different underlying conception of our mental reality.
Elsewhere I get the feeling that Dennett has sidestepped or rug-swept the very issue he's confronting, but the liveliness of his prose masks that from the reader for a bit (and perhaps, tangents being one of the many natural enemies of philosophers-in-print, it was masked from Dennett as well). Take for example his attack on the notion of "qualia"--he does quite a good job of taking the wind out of the sails of qualia, showing them to be a hazy notion, one that doesn't stand up nearly as solidly to questioning as we might think, and one that, furthermore, has been a pretty big red herring to philosophers and scientists of consciousness alike. Alright, fine. But when he quotes Wilfred Sellars as admonishing him that "Qualia are what make life worth living", he seems to make a straw man of the word "qualia". I can't speak for Sellars; he may have very narrowly meant the philosophical term "qualia"; which, with Dennett, I am quite willing to accept (at least for the sake of discussion) as a confused and possibly self-contradicting or vacuous notion. Fine. However, I find it very likely that Sellars meant the term to refer, however inaccurate the word may be, to the elements of our subjective experience: colors, sounds, smells, feelings, etc. But Dennett never addresses that sense of Sellars' statement; he focuses solely on exploding the notion of qualia without trying to salvage its referent. It's a bit as though someone said to you, "Walks in green places are good for the soul", and then you launched into an attack on the notion of the soul, citing its ineffability, philosophical uncertainty, history of misuse and religious connotation, etc, instead of reflecting on the point of the utterance--which is that walks in green places are good for "a thing/system that as thinking creatures we have, which sometimes (however inaccurately) goes by the name of the soul". Dennett systematically undermines the notion of qualia as useful term, but never addresses the fact that it tries to name something--our actual experience of the world--that should be a lot more central to a theory of consciousness than relatively "fringe evidence"--optical illusions, odd tricks of memory and the like. The exceptions often prove the rule, and these kinds of things may be the wedge in to theories of the brain--but when a layperson like myself says "Dan, I don't buy the Cartesian Theatre theory of mind, I'd like something a little more realistic"-- nitpicking "qualia" apart doesn't get me a step closer to understanding why I experience the world the way I do.
In the past I've accused Dennett of doing a bit of a 3-card monte with important points like free will. Elbow Room and Consciousness Explained read a bit like this-- Chapters 1-12: Free Will is impossible (with entertaining FACTS). Chapter 13: Glittery Objects! Chapter 14: We have Free Will, stop worrying about it. At a much smaller level, one I'm less emotionally invested in, I get that sense occasionally in Sweet Dreams. His intuition-pump (dammit!) of RoboMary works quite well without, it seems to me, directly addressing the original thought experiment; a robot that has direct access to the programs constituting its consciousness is a bit of a different case than the original, human Mary.
[I don't know if you know this thought experiment; it's a persistent one. Non-color-blind scientist Mary lives her whole life in a colorless environment ( there are different ways to set this up). Mary has a godlike knowledge of the human brain and visual systems, the ultimate intellectual comprehension of the mechanics of light and color and human perception. The argument is that, despite knowing everything there is to know about color in terms of its "third person" characteristics, Mary learns something new the first time she is allowed to see (some colored object). Therefore, there is some extra ingredient to conscious experience that can't be explained by third-person science.
I'm not sure that I'm entirely willing to believe, with Dennett, that the original intuition-pump is a flawed one. But, not believing in any of that magical soul emergence consciousness quantum CRAP, I have a bad gut feeling about the seemingly-inevitable conclusion to the original Mary experiment, so I'm quite willing to hear Dennett out on the subject.]
I don't want to knock this book! It's a good read, and if you're still flying on some pre-post-Cartesian model of the mind (you know what I mean), shame on you, you should read this--the penultimate chapter at least. Actually, if you have the time you should go ahead and read Dennett's Consciousness Explained; it's a bit older but the main theory is fleshed out a lot more. Due to its construction (stitched together from other stuff), there is a certain amount of repetition in here that actually recommends it more to individual chapter reading than as a whole.
Also, in my own graveyard of beliefs, Dennett's book has put the final nail in the coffin of the zombie argument (what he calls the Zombic Hunch). And thank goodness for that.
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