- seCtIon tWo: tHe BRAIn
INSIDE THE MENTAL THEATRE
What does it feel like being you now? Take a minute to find out.
Although everyone’s answer must be slightly different, many people feel they are
somewhere inside their head, looking out through their eyes at the world. Indeed,
most people adopt a single place inside their body where they feel ‘I’ am located,
and are quite consistent about where this is (Mitson et al., 1976; Limanowski and
Hecht, 2011). In one study, participants were asked to explore their sense of self
in structured interviews, and 83% confidently located ‘the I-that-perceives’ in
their head, midway between the eyes. This was true for both Chinese and Italians,
sighted or blind (Bertossa et al., 2008), and, with different methods, both adults
and children (Starmans and Bloom, 2012). In general, research suggests that the
most common locations of ‘myself ’ are the upper head or upper torso, with a
preference for the head (Alsmith and Longo, 2014) – or, to put it another way,
people live either in their brain or in their heart (Limanowski, 2014).
What else do you experience? Does it feel something like this?
I can feel my hands on the book and the position of my body,
and I can hear the sounds happening around me, which come
into my consciousness whenever I attend to them. If I shut my
eyes I can imagine things in my mind, as though looking at
images hovering somewhere in a mental space in front of or
maybe behind my eyes. Thoughts and feelings come into my
consciousness and pass away again.
If your experience feels something like this, you may be con-
juring up what Dennett (1991) calls the Cartesian Theatre. We
seem to imagine that there is some place inside ‘my’ mind or
brain where ‘I’ am. This place has something like a mental cin-
ema screen or theatrical stage on which images are presented
for viewing by my mind’s eye. In this special place, everything
that we are conscious of at a given moment is present together,
and consciousness happens. The ideas, images, and feelings
that are in this place are in consciousness, and all the rest are
unconscious. The show in the Cartesian Theatre is the stream of
consciousness, and the audience is me.
Certainly it may feel like this – but, says Daniel Dennett, the
Cartesian Theatre and the audience of one inside it do not
exist.
Like most scientists and philosophers today, Dennett entirely
rejects Cartesian dualism. However, he argues that many who
claim to be materialists still implicitly believe in something like
a ‘centered locus in the brain’ where consciousness happens
and someone to whom it happens. In other words, there is a
kind of dualism still lurking in their view of consciousness. He
calls such a belief Cartesian materialism (CM): ‘the view you
arrive at when you discard Descartes’ dualism but fail to dis-
card the imagery of a central (but material) Theatre where “it all
comes together” ’ (1991, p. 107).PRoFILe 5.1
Daniel C. Dennett (b. 1942)
Dan Dennett, Director of the Center
for Cognitive Studies at Tufts Uni-
versity in Massachusetts, studied
for his DPhil with Gilbert Ryle at
Oxford, and is one of the best-
known of contemporary philoso-phers. Among his many books are Elbow Room (1984)
and Freedom Evolves (2003) about free will; Darwin’s
Dangerous Idea (1996) and From Bacteria to Bach
and Back (2017) about the evolution of minds; and his
challenging Consciousness Explained (1991), which de-
molishes what he calls the Cartesian theatre to replace
it with the theory of multiple drafts. He argues for the
method of heterophenomenology, rejects zombies as a
waste of time, and claims we are all zimboes or conscious
robots. He works closely with psychologists and comput-
er engineers, and has long been fascinated by artificial
intelligence and robots. He has spent many summers on
his farm in Maine, repairing the house, carving wood,
making cider, and thinking about consciousness while
mowing the hay. Some critics accuse him of explaining
consciousness away, but he insists that his really is a
theory of consciousness and that, like all good theories, it
works like a crane, not a skyhook.