Francis Fallon and Andrew Brook4 “Fame in the Brain” and ProbesIn introducing MDM, Dennett describes it as “a first version of the replacement” for the image
of mind suggested by the Cartesian model (1991: 111). Since then, he has not abandoned the
principles of MDM, but he has augmented it with an alternative metaphor. The original MDM
“did not provide... a sufficiently vivid and imagination-friendly antidote to the Cartesian
imagery we have all grown up with, so... I have proposed what I consider to be a more useful
guiding metaphor: ‘fame in the brain’ or ‘cerebral celebrity’” (2005: 136; see 1998, pp. 137–9, for
an early treatment of this metaphor).
The Cartesian model encourages us to think of consciousness as a play (or movie) in the
mind, viewed by an audience in a Cartesian Theater within the brain. The tempting notion of
a single stream of consciousness fits this well: one single series of conscious states, much like the
frames that make up a television show. MDM denies that otherwise unconscious contents travel
to a central processing place, where each finds its place in a queue to form the stream of con-
sciousness. Instead, unconscious contents compete with each other for “fame.” Not all people
can be famous, so the process of becoming famous is competitive. Both fame and consciousness
are “not precisely dateable” (Dennett and Akins 2008; for the classic Dennettian analysis of the
implications of states of consciousness taking time to come into existence, see Dennett and
Kinsbourne 1992). Section 3 above showed why this holds for consciousness, and gaining fame
similarly defies exact chronology, even if it can be assessed at a comparatively macro timescale.
Moreover, each “is only retrospectively determinable since it is constituted by its sequelae”
(Dennett and Akins 2008).
Even if this metaphor does not encourage us to think of consciousness as a medium of
representation, like television or theater, might it accidentally rely on a homunculus to decide
“fame”? Understanding that the nature of the fame in question commits Dennett to no such
fallacy requires returning to a “crucial point” noted in Section 2 above. The privileged status of
consciousness is conferred retroactively upon (even very recent) memories when stimuli prompt
us to attend to them.
Following Dennett, we have been citing instances where attention plays a role in the
generation of consciousness. While this indicates an overlap with attentional theories of
consciousness, Dennett does not seem to require attention per se. The crucial requirement
for conferring consciousness is the involvement of one or more “probes”. A probe can be
“whatever event in the brain happens to boost some aspect of the current content-fixations
into prominence. In the simplest case, a probe is a new stimulus that draws attention...”
(Dennett and Akins 2008, emphasis added). Because Dennett’s examples of probes involve
attention, we will continue to feature it centrally.^4 To return to the chimes case, when some-
one else looked up at the clock, this prompted you to consider the number of chimes – a
case of probing mental contents. This drew attention to just-registered sounds. Without this
attention, they would not have gained any “fame”; they would have registered as tempo-
rary micro-drafts, but without any probing would have remained unnoticed, never rising
to prominence. In this context, it makes sense to quote more completely a passage cited in
Section 2 above:
[A]t any point in time there are multiple drafts of narrative fragments at various stages
of editing in various places in the brain.... Probing...produces different effects, produc-
ing different narratives – and these are narratives: single versions of a portion of ‘the
stream of consciousness’.
(Dennett and Akins 2008)