Chapter
Five
The theatre
‘this may help to pin down the location of awareness
in the brain’ (Crick, 1994, p. 174)
‘The range and variety of conscious phenomenology
[.. .] is everyman’s private theatre’ (Edelman and
Tononi, 2000a, p. 20)
‘visual information that is processed in the dorsal
stream does not reach conscious awareness’ (Milner,
2008, p. 195)
‘Once information is conscious, it can enter into a long
series of arbitrary operations’ (Dehaene, 2014, p. 14)
Looking critically at the language people use, do you
find that the concepts of the Cartesian theatre and
Cartesian materialism help you distinguish between
workable and unworkable theories? Or do these
examples make you question the concepts? Maybe
the idea of a finish line or boundary where unconscious
processes turn into consciousness means that if you
try to draw any distinction between conscious and
unconscious you fall into the Cartesian trap, because
there is no fact of the matter about whether you were
conscious until you ask. On the other hand, maybe
there is a way of preserving this intuitive distinction, in
thinking about both the brain and your own experience,
without becoming a Cartesian materialist. Or maybe
you eventually conclude that it is all right to be one.As we have gone along we have suggested various
exercises that may help to loosen up your thinking
about your own consciousness – primarily asking
yourself ‘Am I conscious now?’ as often as possible.
Doing this will help you to assess whether Dennett’s
theory really does deal with subjectivity as he claims.
What is it like being you now? If Dennett is right, this
question itself acts as one of many possible probes
and fixes the content. Does this seem to fit with your
experience?
Of course, multiple drafts theory does not solve all
the problems of consciousness, or create no new
problems in the attempt. If it did, this would be
a book about multiple drafts, not the mystery of
consciousness. Clear-sighted as Dennett can be
in his criticisms of other theories, his own theory
arguably runs into some of the same problems that
he pinpoints in others. These arise partly from the
emphasis on language, which leads to some ques-
tionable claims about what consciousness is like in
the absence of ordinary human language: he dis-
misses the minds of deaf–mutes as ‘terribly stunted’,
for instance (1991, p. 448).
Another issue is the role of the brain in multiple
drafts theory. Dennett rejects the idea that a dis-
embodied brain, or a ‘brain-in-a-vat’, could have
meaningful experiences, not least because con-
sciousness (or the illusion of consciousness) is the
result of probes from outside the brain. Yet Dennett
has not extended this line of thinking to take the embodied or extended mind into
account, and he tends to treat the brain as the entity that does the thinking, the
perceiving, the deciding: ‘the brain’, for example, ‘doesn’t always avail itself of this
option’ (1991, p. 16).
The brain-centric view extends to the issue of representation. The revisions of the
multiple drafts occur at the level of neural representation – by which we may infer
Dennett means patterns of neural activity, or weightings of synapses, assumed to
correlate with particular informational outputs. But he also talks about the phe-
nomenology in representational terms: ‘Our visual phenomenology, the contents
of visual experience, are in a format unlike any other mode of representation’ (p.
54). This can mean that the ‘content’ he talks about slips from being the content of
physical representations to being the content of experiences themselves. Although
he says there is no such thing as ‘the actual phenomenology’ (p. 365), he neverthe-
less equates ‘[o]ur visual phenomenology’ with ‘the contents of visual experience’
(p. 54), and assures us that he doesn’t mean ‘you have no privileged access to the
nature or content of your conscious experience’ (p. 69).
A possible reply from Dennett might be to say that ‘content’ is just a metaphor, and
a highly conventionalised one at that, but this is precisely the kind of metaphor
which leads him to reject alternative theories. Even though sensory discriminations