Chapter
Five
The theatre
for the audience to see. If you do so, you are falling for what Dennett calls the
‘myth of double transduction’ (Dennett, 1998a) – the showing-again for the ben-
efit of consciousness. This is precisely where Dennett’s model differs from Car-
tesian materialism, for on the multiple drafts theory discriminations only have
to be made once. There is no master discriminator, or self, who has some of the
experiences. There is no ‘central meaner’ who understands them. There are only
multiple drafts all being edited at once. The sense that there is a narrative stream
or sequence comes about when the parallel stream is probed in some way, such
as by asking a question or requiring some kind of response. For example, some
of the drafts are used in controlling actions or producing speech, and some are
encoded as memory traces, while most just fade away.
A segment-like piece has been cut out of the back of his head. The
whole world looks in with the sun. It makes him nervous, it distracts
him from his work, and he is also irritated that he of all people
should be shut out of the performance.
(Franz Kafka, diaries, 10 January 1920, our translation; for
discussion see also Troscianko, 2014, pp. 106–107)Let’s suppose that you just saw a bird fly past the window. Your judgement that
you consciously saw the bird is a result of probing the stream of multiple drafts at
one of many possible points. There is a judgement all right, and something about
the event may become accessible for future memory retrievals, but there is not
also the actual experience of seeing the bird fly past. According to Dennett, con-
tents arise, get revised, affect behaviour, and leave traces in memory, which then
get overlaid by other traces, and so on. All this produces various narratives which
are single versions of a portion of the stream of consciousness, but ‘we must not
make the mistake of supposing that there are facts – unrecoverable but actual
facts – about just which contents were conscious and which were not at the time’
(1991, p. 407). In other words, if you ask, ‘what was I actually experiencing at the
time the bird flew past?’, there is no right answer because there is no show and no
theatre in which the ‘actual’ experiences happen. What we come to think of as ‘the
fact of the matter’ is the result of posthoc confabulation (see Chapter 6).
What, then, of the audience? Dennett argues that when a portion of the world
(most obviously, a person, but also perhaps a computer or robot) comes to com-
pose a skein of narratives, that portion of the world is the observer. The observer
is a ‘Center of Narrative Gravity’ (1991, p. 410; and see Chapter 16). As contents
are fixed by probing the stream at various points, as we make judgements, and as
we speak about what we are doing or what we have experienced, so the benign
illusion is created of there being an author. In this sense, the observer in the Car-
tesian theatre, real and powerful as it feels, is an illusion, even if a very special kind
of illusion.
How does this theory deal with our red traffic light? If you are a Cartesian materi-
alist, you will insist that there is some fact of the matter about whether you were
or were not conscious of the light at the time. But according to the multiple drafts
model, ‘there are no fixed facts about the stream of consciousness independent of
particular probes’ (1991, p. 138), so it all depends on the way the parallel stream
was probed. Had you been asked during the drive what was happening, you would