- seCtIon tWo: tHe BRAIn
and the like do not have to be re-presented for the audience in the Cartesian
theatre (p. 113), ‘collated, revised, enhanced representations’ (p. 112) sometimes
seem to be what experiences either contain or are.
Some have suggested that Dennett too reimagines the theatrical show, but dis-
tributed right across the brain: ‘All the work that was dimly imagined to be done
in the Cartesian Theater has to be done somewhere, and no doubt it is distributed
around in the brain’ (Dennett and Kinsbourne, 1992, p. 234). As Dan Lloyd argues,
‘a specialized, localized portion of the brain’ is still required to make ‘observations’
(2000, p. 175; see Dennett, 1991, p. 113); it’s just that ‘the judgmental tasks are
fragmented into many distributed moments’. Lloyd notes that early commen-
tators ‘worried that these distributed, yet discrete, microtakings had the effect
of replacing the Cartesian Theater with the Cartesian cineplex’ (Ross et al., 2000,
p. 176). Can we ever really step outside the theatre, or does it wear too many
disguises?
Baars, B. J. (1997a). In the theatre of consciousness:
Global workspace theory, a rigorous scientific theory
of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4 ,
292–364.
A detailed debate about Baars’s theory.
Blackmore, S. (2005). Conversations on conscious-
ness. New York: Oxford University Press.
Read conversations with any of the researchers dis-
cussed so far – Baars, Block, Chalmers, the Church-
lands, Crick, Dennett, Hameroff, Koch, O’Regan,
Penrose – and others we will meet in later chapters.
This is a chance to see what people say when talking
rather than writing about consciousness.
Dennett, D. C. (1991). [excerpts from several
chapters]. In D. C. Dennett, Consciousness explained
(pp. 101–115, 309–314, and 344–356). Boston, MA:
Little, Brown.
Dennett’s original explanation of the Cartesian Theatre
and alternatives to it.
Hameroff, S., and Penrose, R. (2014). Con-
sciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’
theory. Physics of Life Review, 11 , 39–112.
Students need not read all of the target paper, but
the authors’ replies to the peer commentaries (PLR, 11 ,
READING