Chapter
Five
The theatre
It is the view that there is a crucial finish line or
boundary somewhere in the brain, marking a
place where the order of arrival equals the order of
“presentation” in experience because what happens
there is what you are conscious of.
(p. 107)Note that the terms ‘Cartesian Theatre’ (CT) and ‘Cartesian
materialism’ (CM) are Dennett’s and not Descartes’s. The
connection with Descartes is the dualist idea that a specific
region of the brain (in Descartes’s case the pineal gland)
mediates between the conscious and the unconscious – an
idea we might call ‘spatiotemporal pinealism’ (Lloyd, 2000,
p. 175). The two terms are also open to various interpreta-
tions, and Dennett himself uses them in slightly different
ways, which has led to much confusion (Dennett and Kins-
bourne, 1992 [including peer commentaries]; Lloyd, 2000).
Even so, the central idea is that you believe in the CT if you
believe in some kind of literal or metaphorical space or
place or stage within which conscious experiences hap-
pen, and into which the ‘contents of consciousness’ come
and go. You are a Cartesian materialist (rather than being
a true materialist, say, or a self-proclaimed dualist) if you
also believe that consciousness is not separate from the brain and so there must
be some brain basis for this theatre of the mind where ‘ “it all comes together” and
consciousness happens’ (Dennett, 1991, p. 39).
No one wants to be called a Cartesian materialist; Cartesian materialism has
become, as Dennett perhaps intended, a common term of abuse. Nevertheless,
says Dennett, this way of thinking is revealed in the way people talk and write
about consciousness. People may call themselves materalists and vociferously
deny being CMs, but still use phrases that strongly imply the idea of a CT. The CT
is a metaphor, but metaphors matter: they let us make sense of abstract things by
comparing them with more concrete things (like my life with a journey), and they
are one of our most powerful tools for thought (Dennett, 1991, p. 289; Lakoff and
Johnson, 1980/2003). Whichever metaphor we choose, we open up some points
of comparison and close down others – often without realising it.
Examples of CM are everywhere, once you start looking: ‘To locate consciousness
in the flow of synaptic activity in the brain, we must first locate it in the flow of
information processing in the mind’, begins a recent article on the contents of
consciousness (Kemmerer, 2015, p. 10). ‘When adopting a descriptive standpoint,
even the most cursory examination of the brain reveals a contrast between con-
scious and unconscious processes’, declare the authors of a paper on the function
of consciousness in the nervous system (Morsella et al., 2016, p. 2). More generally,
CM is revealed by numerous tell-tale phrases, like saying that a stimulus ‘enters
consciousness’, ‘happens outside of consciousness’, or ‘leaps into conscious-
ness’; that some potential ‘content’ ‘comes together in consciousness’, ‘reaches
consciousness’ or ‘the level of conscious awareness’, ‘achieves consciousness’, or
is ‘unified in awareness’. All these phrases, and many more like them, imply that
there is some criterion for what counts as ‘in’ consciousness at any given time,
‘Cartesian materialism,
the view that nobody
espouses but almost
everybody tends to think
in terms of ’(Dennett, 1991, p. 144)FIGURE 5.1 • Inside the Cartesian Theatre.