ABSTRACT
Since the publication of Consciousness Explained (Dennett, 1991) several years ago, there has been an enormous amount of confusion about Dennett's the ory of consciousness, the Multiple Drafts Model. For the neophyte, it has been a challenge simply to separate the central tenets of the model from the various conclusions Dennett wishes to draw from them-the starting point from the proverbial finish line, as Dennett would say. For the seasoned phil osopher, the problem has been somewhat different. The theory itself seems to be a simple one. It has six central tenets, each one a largely empirical, speculative hypothesis about some aspect of neural function. These six tenets are as follows:
Tl. 'All varieties of perception-indeed all varieties of thought or mental
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activity-are accomplished by parallel, multi-track processes of interpret ation and elaboration of sensory inputs/ (p. I l l ) T2. The spatially and temporally distributed content-fixations in the brain are precisely locatable in both space and tim e/ (p. 113) T3. 'Feature detections or discriminations only have to be made once/ (p. 113) T4. 'Distributed content-discriminations yield, over the course of time, some thing rather like a narrative stream or sequence, which can be thought of as subject to continual editing by many processes distributed around in the brain, and continuing indefinitely into the future/ (p. 135) T5. 'Probing this stream at various intervals produces different effects, preci pitating different narratives-and these are narratives/ (p. 135) T6. 'Any narrative . . . that does get precipitated provides a "time line", a subjective sequence of events from the point of view of an observer/ (p. 136)
Most people, I suspect, would find the above tenets somewhat vague; cer tainly a good deal of elaboration and explication would be needed to make each one clear. Moreover, qua hypotheses in a nascent science, none of these premises seems very likely to be true. Still, whether or not one finds these tenets informative or intuitively plausible, there is nothing 'mysterious' or 'peculiar' or 'bizarre' about them. They are pretty much what one would expect for a speculative, quasi-empirical theory of consciousness. In contrast, the conclusions Dennett draws from these premises-what he takes to be their deductive consequences-are radical. Six such conclusions are as fol lows:
C l. There is no distinction either in content or in phenomenal experience between the representations of perceptual events and our inferences/judgments about them.1 C2. There are no 'fixed facts' about the events and contents of conscious experience other than facts about probes (and bindings).2 C3. On a small time scale, there is no distinction, in principle, between a revision of perceptual input and a revision of memory.3 C4. On a small time scale, there is no distinction, in principle, between
Dennett's Multiple Drafts Theory of Consciousness 3
'Stalinesque' and 'Orwellian' accounts of certain phenomena-there is no possible evidence, either from the subject's point of view or from the thirdperson perspective of science, that could decide between two explanations of certain illusions, one in terms of memory revision and the other in terms of perceptual tampering.4 C5. There is no determinate time of occurrence for conscious events.5 C6. There is no 'seem s/is' distinction for conscious experience, between 'how things seem' and 'how things are'.6
