Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained Plot Summary

Introduction

How does consciousness arise from the physical brain? This question has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries, presenting one of the most challenging problems in understanding human experience. The Multiple Drafts model offers a revolutionary framework that challenges traditional dualistic notions of consciousness, proposing instead that our conscious experience emerges from parallel, distributed processes in the brain without requiring a central "theater" where it all comes together. The theory addresses fundamental questions about the nature of subjective experience: How do neural processes create our sense of self? Why does consciousness seem unified when brain processes are distributed? How do we experience time and space coherently? By reconceptualizing consciousness as multiple parallel drafts constantly being edited rather than a single stream, this model provides a naturalistic explanation for phenomena that have long seemed mysterious, from hallucinations to the sense of self, without resorting to dualistic explanations or "mind stuff."

Chapter 1: The Cartesian Theater Illusion

The Cartesian Theater represents the persistent but misleading intuition that consciousness happens in a special place in the brain where "it all comes together" for an internal observer. This compelling metaphor suggests there must be a central location where sensory information arrives to become conscious experience—a mental stage where the show of consciousness is presented to an internal audience. Named after Descartes, who located this interface at the pineal gland, this model continues to influence our thinking about consciousness even among those who explicitly reject dualism. This theater model creates insurmountable theoretical problems. Most fundamentally, it leads to an infinite regress: if consciousness requires an observer watching neural events, then who or what inside the brain is doing this watching? And what makes that watcher conscious? Furthermore, neuroscience has failed to find any central location where all neural pathways converge to create consciousness. The model also raises the "timing problem": when exactly does information become conscious? If consciousness requires arrival at the theater, we must posit an arbitrary finish line in neural processing. The theater metaphor persists because it aligns with our subjective sense of having a single, unified perspective. When we introspect, it feels as though there is a central "I" observing our experiences. This intuition is so powerful that even scientists who explicitly reject dualism often slip into language and experimental designs that implicitly assume a Cartesian Theater. For example, when researchers debate whether a stimulus was consciously perceived or not, they often frame the question as whether the information "made it into consciousness" before being forgotten. Consider how this illusion affects our everyday thinking. When you have a tip-of-the-tongue experience, you feel you "know" the word but can't "access" it—as if the word exists fully formed somewhere in your mind, just out of reach. This intuition stems from the theater metaphor. Similarly, when you struggle to make a decision, you often feel there must be a "real preference" hidden somewhere in your mind, waiting to be discovered by your internal observer. Recognizing the Cartesian Theater as an illusion is essential for developing a scientifically viable theory of consciousness.

Chapter 2: Multiple Drafts: A Distributed Model of Consciousness

The Multiple Drafts model proposes that consciousness emerges from parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration occurring throughout the brain. Unlike the Cartesian Theater model, it doesn't locate consciousness at any single point in space or time but views it as distributed across neural networks that are constantly revising and updating content. This revolutionary framework aligns with what neuroscience tells us about the brain's distributed, parallel nature, while accounting for the unified, coherent experience we recognize as consciousness. According to this model, information entering the nervous system undergoes continuous "editorial revision." Various specialized neural systems process different aspects of incoming stimuli—color, motion, shape, sound—at different rates and locations in the brain. These distributed content-fixations don't need to be sent to a central location to be "consciously perceived"; once a discrimination has been made in one part of the brain, that information becomes available to influence behavior and other brain processes without requiring further "recognition" by a central observer. The model gets its name from the idea that at any given moment, there are multiple "drafts" of narrative fragments at various stages of editing throughout the brain. Some of these drafts will fade without further effect, while others will persist and influence behavior, including verbal reports about conscious experience. There is no single, definitive "stream of consciousness"—no final draft that constitutes the "real" conscious experience. Instead, probing the system at different times yields different narratives about what was experienced. This approach elegantly explains phenomena that puzzle traditional theories. Consider the color phi illusion, where people report seeing a spot change color in mid-movement between two locations, even though this requires information about the second location to be incorporated before the illusory color change can be experienced. Rather than assuming backward projection in time, the Multiple Drafts model explains that the brain simply constructs the most coherent narrative based on all available information, regardless of when that information arrived. In everyday life, the model explains how we experience conversations. We don't consciously process each phoneme, word, and grammatical structure separately before understanding meaning. Instead, multiple parallel processes extract different aspects of the speech signal simultaneously, with the "winning" interpretation emerging as the most coherent narrative. This explains why we can mishear something initially but "retroactively" correct our perception when more context becomes available. The Multiple Drafts model thus resolves longstanding paradoxes by abandoning the notion that there must be a moment when something "enters consciousness."

Chapter 3: Qualia as Complex Discriminations

Qualia—the subjective, qualitative aspects of experience like the redness of red or the painfulness of pain—have long been considered the most resistant aspects of consciousness to scientific explanation. Traditional views treat qualia as intrinsic, atomic properties that are directly apprehended in consciousness, creating an explanatory gap between physical processes and subjective experience. The Multiple Drafts model offers a novel approach to understanding these seemingly ineffable properties by reconceptualizing them not as simple, atomic properties but as complex, relational features that emerge from the brain's discriminatory capacities. What makes the redness of red seem ineffable is not that it possesses some mysterious non-physical property, but that our discriminatory mechanisms operate without giving us access to their internal workings. We can discriminate red from green without knowing how we do it, creating the impression that we're directly acquainted with some intrinsic property. But this seeming simplicity masks tremendous complexity in the underlying neural processes. The "redness" you experience when looking at a tomato consists of a vast collection of discriminatory capacities and reactive dispositions—your ability to distinguish this color from others, your readiness to categorize it with other red things, your associations with other red objects, perhaps emotional responses conditioned by past experiences with red things. This approach explains why qualia seem to have the properties they do. Their apparent privacy stems from the fact that discriminatory capacities are implemented in individual brains. Their seeming ineffability results from the inaccessibility of the mechanisms that produce them. Their apparent intrinsicality is an artifact of our limited introspective access to relational properties that connect our experiences to the world and to each other. We can't precisely communicate what red looks like to someone who has never seen it because we can't transfer a complex pattern of brain-based dispositions through language alone. Consider the experience of pain. What makes pain painful is not some mysterious quale but its complex functional role—its connections to avoidance behavior, emotional responses, memory, and verbal reports. A "pain" that had none of these functional properties would not be recognizable as pain at all. This doesn't mean that pain is "nothing but" its functional role, but rather that its subjective character emerges from this complex set of relations. Similarly, the taste of beer or coffee changes as you become accustomed to it—what seemed bitter and unpleasant becomes enjoyable. This makes perfect sense if qualia are dispositional states that can be reshaped through experience, but is mysterious if qualia are intrinsic properties. This reconceptualization doesn't eliminate qualia but naturalizes them, showing how seemingly mysterious properties of experience can emerge from physical processes without requiring dualism or mysterianism. The apparent gap between physical processes and subjective experience shrinks when we recognize that our intuitions about the nature of experience are themselves products of the very systems we're trying to explain.

Chapter 4: Language and the Construction of Experience

Language doesn't merely report pre-existing conscious experiences—it actively shapes and sometimes creates them. The Multiple Drafts model proposes that language is a powerful tool that transforms the human mind by providing new ways to discriminate, remember, and manipulate mental contents. Rather than simply describing inner states, language helps construct the very experiences we report, serving as a technology that extends and transforms human consciousness. When we acquire language, we don't just gain labels for pre-existing concepts and experiences. Instead, language introduces new distinctions and categories that reshape our cognitive landscape. Learning color terms, for instance, influences how we perceive and remember colors. Cultures with different color vocabularies show different patterns of color discrimination and memory. This doesn't mean language creates color perception from nothing, but it does suggest that linguistic categories influence how perceptual information is processed and stored. Through language, we gain access to distinctions that would otherwise remain implicit or unnoticed. The role of language becomes particularly evident in our ability to report subtle aspects of experience. When wine connoisseurs describe the "notes of blackberry with hints of oak" in a wine, they're not simply putting pre-existing experiences into words. Through training and exposure to wine vocabulary, they've developed new discriminative capacities that allow them to notice aspects of the experience that novices cannot access. The language doesn't just describe the experience—it helps create the structured experience that is then reported. Similarly, learning the vocabulary of emotions allows us to distinguish between closely related feelings like anxiety, dread, and nervousness. Language also enables a uniquely human form of consciousness through inner speech—the silent conversation we have with ourselves. This internal dialogue allows us to reflect on our own thoughts, plan future actions, rehearse social interactions, and construct narratives about our experiences. When we engage in inner speech, we're not simply expressing pre-existing thoughts but actively creating and structuring our thinking. This self-stimulation allows us to focus attention, remember complex sequences, and consider hypothetical scenarios—all crucial aspects of human consciousness. Consider how we think about our own thoughts and feelings. The ability to report "I'm feeling anxious about tomorrow's presentation" depends on having acquired the concept of anxiety and learned to apply it to certain patterns of bodily sensation, thought, and behavior. Without this conceptual framework provided by language, the experience would still exist in some form, but not as the clearly delineated emotional state we can identify and report. Our inner lives are shaped by the narrative resources our culture provides, allowing us to create increasingly sophisticated models of our own mental states and those of others.

Chapter 5: The Self as Center of Narrative Gravity

The self represents the culmination of the Multiple Drafts model—the ultimate product of the brain's narrative construction processes. Rather than being a substantial entity or homuncular observer, the self emerges as what might be called a "center of narrative gravity"—an abstract organizing principle around which experiences are structured. This narrative self isn't a concrete thing or spiritual essence but a remarkably useful fiction that allows us to organize our understanding of ourselves and others. The self is not located at any particular point in the brain, nor is it identical with any particular neural process. Instead, it's a theoretical construct that helps organize and interpret the multiple narrative streams produced by the brain. Just as the center of gravity of a physical object is an abstraction that helps predict its behavior without corresponding to any particular part of the object, the self is an abstraction that helps organize experience without corresponding to any particular part of the brain. It's as real as centers of gravity in physics, but not a concrete entity that could be found with brain imaging. This narrative self emerges gradually through development as children learn to tell stories about themselves and their experiences. Language plays a crucial role in this process, providing the medium through which narratives are constructed and refined. Through social interaction, children learn to interpret their own behavior and experiences in terms of beliefs, desires, and other intentional states, gradually constructing a self-model that becomes increasingly elaborate and refined. Parents ask "What did you do at school today?" and children learn to construct coherent narratives linking events across time. These storytelling practices gradually become internalized, creating an ongoing internal autobiography. The narrative nature of self explains many of its peculiar features. The sense of continuity over time emerges from the stories we tell connecting past, present, and future. The feeling of agency stems from narratives that interpret some neural events as actions rather than mere happenings. Even the sense of unity—the feeling that there is a single "I" behind all our experiences—results from the narrative convention that stories have protagonists. Consider how we experience our own decisions: we rarely consciously deliberate about every action we take, yet we readily construct narratives explaining our behavior as if it resulted from explicit reasoning. This approach also explains pathologies of self-experience. Conditions like dissociative identity disorder involve disruptions in the normal processes of narrative integration, resulting in multiple centers of narrative gravity rather than a single unified self. Rather than positing mysterious metaphysical entities, we can understand these as cases where trauma has disrupted the normal process of narrative integration, leading to the construction of multiple self-models. Less dramatic but more common experiences of self-alienation—feeling "not myself" or acting "out of character"—reflect temporary disruptions in narrative coherence.

Chapter 6: Evolution and the Architecture of Mind

Evolution provides the essential framework for understanding why consciousness exists and how its mechanisms developed. Rather than viewing consciousness as a mysterious force or spiritual essence, an evolutionary perspective reveals it as a biological phenomenon that emerged through natural selection, serving specific adaptive functions for organisms navigating complex environments. This evolutionary history explains both the powers and limitations of human consciousness, showing how it emerged from simpler forms through a series of adaptations. The evolutionary story begins with the most fundamental distinction any organism must make: self versus non-self. Even single-celled organisms must distinguish their boundaries from the external world to survive. As organisms became more complex, this basic discrimination evolved into increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for representing both the environment and the organism's relationship to it. Early replicators developed specialized circuits for detecting and responding to specific environmental features—predator detection, food recognition, mate selection. These specialized circuits weren't designed with consciousness in mind but formed the foundation upon which consciousness would later be built. The brain's architecture reflects this evolutionary history. Rather than having a central control system that directs all mental operations, the mind consists of multiple specialized subsystems that interact in a dynamic, sometimes competitive fashion. These specialized systems operate largely in parallel, processing different aspects of information simultaneously. They weren't designed for the distinctly human activities we now use them for, such as reading or mathematics, but have been repurposed and connected in new ways to support these more recent capabilities. This explains why consciousness seems unified despite being implemented in distributed neural systems. A crucial evolutionary development was the emergence of phenotypic plasticity—the ability of individual organisms to learn and adapt during their lifetimes. This created a new medium for evolution to occur within individual brains. Through trial and error, organisms could discover beneficial behaviors without waiting for genetic evolution to hardwire them. This process, accelerated by what's called the Baldwin Effect, allowed good tricks discovered by individuals to eventually become genetically encoded, as organisms with brains predisposed to discover these tricks gained survival advantages. The most recent and revolutionary development in the evolution of consciousness was the emergence of language and culture. Language allowed individuals to share their discoveries and insights, creating a new form of evolution—cultural evolution through memes. The human brain, already equipped with specialized circuits and learning capabilities, became host to thousands of memes that restructured its functioning, creating what can be described as a "Joycean machine"—a virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of the brain. This virtual machine operates serially, focusing on one thing at a time, unlike the parallel processing of the underlying brain architecture.

Chapter 7: Challenging Traditional Thought Experiments

Philosophical thought experiments about consciousness often rely on intuitions that seem compelling but may actually mislead us. By examining these thought experiments critically, we can identify hidden assumptions and develop a more accurate understanding of consciousness. The Multiple Drafts model provides new perspectives on these classic philosophical puzzles, showing how many seemingly intractable problems dissolve when we abandon the Cartesian Theater metaphor. The "zombie" thought experiment asks us to imagine beings physically identical to humans but lacking consciousness. The apparent conceivability of such zombies is taken to suggest that consciousness cannot be reduced to physical processes. However, this argument assumes we can genuinely imagine all the physical details of a human brain while simultaneously imagining the absence of consciousness. The Multiple Drafts model suggests this is incoherent—if all the discriminative and reactive capacities are in place, along with the ability to construct and report narratives about one's own experience, there would be nothing left to add to create "consciousness." The zombie thought experiment confuses us by tacitly assuming the Cartesian Theater model where consciousness is something extra beyond all these capacities. Similarly, the "inverted spectrum" thought experiment asks whether someone might experience colors in a way inverted from our own—seeing what we call "red" when looking at grass, for instance. This seems conceivable, suggesting that conscious experiences have a subjective quality beyond their functional role. But if qualia are complex patterns of discrimination and disposition rather than intrinsic properties, this question becomes incoherent. If all your reactions, associations, and discriminations regarding colors match mine, there would be no "extra" intrinsic quality that could still be inverted. Mary the color scientist, who knows everything physical about color but has never seen colors, represents another influential thought experiment. When Mary finally sees red, she supposedly learns something new, suggesting that conscious experiences involve non-physical facts. The Multiple Drafts model suggests that what Mary gains is not new factual knowledge but new discriminative capacities—she becomes able to recognize red directly rather than through description. This is a change in her abilities, not the acquisition of mysterious non-physical knowledge. The "Chinese Room" thought experiment involves a person following rules to manipulate Chinese symbols without understanding Chinese, supposedly showing that computational processes cannot generate understanding. However, this argument confuses the understanding of the system as a whole with the understanding of its parts. The person in the room is just one component of a larger system that may indeed understand Chinese, even if no individual component does. This aligns with the Multiple Drafts model's view that consciousness emerges from distributed processes rather than residing in a central observer. These thought experiments often rely on intuitions shaped by the very misconceptions about consciousness that a scientific theory aims to correct. By examining them carefully through the lens of the Multiple Drafts model, we can see how many seemingly profound philosophical puzzles arise from the mistaken assumption that consciousness requires a Cartesian Theater where experiences are presented to an internal observer.

Summary

The Multiple Drafts model transforms our understanding of consciousness by replacing the Cartesian Theater with a distributed, process-based account that explains how consciousness emerges from neural activity without requiring mysterious non-physical properties or a central observer. By recognizing consciousness as multiple parallel drafts constantly being edited rather than a single stream presented to an inner audience, we can resolve longstanding paradoxes while remaining firmly within the naturalistic framework of modern science. This reconceptualization has profound implications beyond academic debates. It suggests that our sense of having a unified self experiencing a continuous stream of consciousness is a useful fiction—but one with tremendous practical value. By understanding consciousness as multiple drafts competing for dominance rather than a mysterious inner theater, we gain a more accurate picture of our own nature while losing nothing of importance. The model shows how consciousness can be a natural phenomenon, emerging from biological processes shaped by evolution, without reducing its richness or significance in human life. In doing so, it bridges the explanatory gap between the physical and phenomenal, not by magical solutions but by revealing how the questions themselves were often misconceived.

About Author

Loading...

Daniel C. Dennett

Read more