Rating: 
Summary: Descartes and computers.
Review: Very slow and far too long book based on a few crucial experiments or diseases: the color-phi-phenomenon of Koler, the experiments of Libet and Multiple Personality Disorder.Half of the book is spent to reject the Cartesian model of an exact location of consciousness in the brain and to replace it by a multiple version model.
The other part is an explanation of consciousness in terms of a self-developing computer programme that organizes the brain's activity.
Language plays, for the author, a great part in the structuring of the human mind. Roger Penrose (The Emperor's New Mind) from a physical point of view and Gerald Edelman (Bright Air, Brilliant Fire) from a biological point of view proved for me convincingly that the brain is not a computer and that its action cannot be compared with a computer programme. Trying to explain the working of the brain or of consciousness in this way is for me a dead end. On the other hand, it is possible that language structures the mind, but before that, the mind had to permit the coming into existence of language (the mind was there before language). There is a reciprocal adaptation.
The all importance of language foreces the author to state that without natural language the mind of the deaf-and-thumb is terribly limited. This is not true, for they can learn to speak with their hands. I agree with the author's definition of the (biological) self and also with his statement that the brain was in the first place developed to do other activities (to choose between fight or flee...) than read and write. Although I still learned a lot by reading this book, I cannot recommend it. N.B. 'L'acte gratuit' is an element of the philosophy of Bergson, not of Sartre or Gide. On the contrary, Gide ridicules it in 'Les Caves du Vatican', where a commuter pushes another commuter out of a running train as an ... 'acte gratuit'.
Rating: 
Summary: Conscious is as conscious does
Review: I believe it was Thomas Wolfe who once remarked with pride that he was a generous literary putter-inner, while minimalists like Ernest Hemingway were stingy leaver-outers. No one who finishes "Consciousness Explained" will doubt that Dennett belongs among the putter-inners. For example, on reaching page 280 the reader is casually told, "I have been coy about consciousness up to now." If only we had known, Daniel, that you've been toying with us through half the book... Dennett does make a coherent case, but the theme is buried in so many asides and diversions that one needs a conceptual GPS to stay oriented. Since he has the whole map in his head, the author naturally tends to forget that others on the tour bus may have lost their bearings two or three turns ago. On the plus side, Dennett's pleasantly conversational tone, clever analogies and colorful terminology (Stalinesque, Multiple Drafts, Witness Protection Program) help to sustain our interest and clarify difficult concepts. The big picture (I think) is that investigations of consciousness have traditionally been hindered by reliance on the concept of a "Cartesian Theater" in the mind where a homunculus (the audience) makes conscious observations. As long as the nature of the theater and the homunculus remain elusive, the whole approach merely begs the questions of what consciousness is and how it happens. Dennett proposes that neither the theater nor the audience exists (i.e. the analogies are empty) and that a massively parallel process he calls Multiple Drafts is more descriptive of what happens in a conscious brain. The thrust of his argument is that understanding consciousness requires no ultimate appeal to mind/brain dualities, souls, spirits, quantum weirdness or other trappings of the "it can't be straightforward" school. This has led disappointed devotees of the ineffable to make dismissive remarks like "Dennett explains everything under the sun EXCEPT consciousness." Don't believe it. Dennett's background in philosophy serves him well in addressing the subtleties of cognition, but the resulting terminology may wear a bit on the reader. Sometimes I thought that if I saw the 22-letter monster "heterophenomenological" one more time, I would scream. On the other hand, Dennett's tale of the imaginary deity Feenoman, based on the root of this word, manages to be both hilarious and instructive. The book is an excellent choice for those who are not merely inclined, but also steadfastly determined, to learn more about the machinery of consciousness.
Rating: 
Summary: Lots of Words to Explain Very Few Ideas
Review: This book contains a great many words. Unfortunately, it contains only a very few ideas. This book could very well be contained in a 15 page white paper. Indeed it has. The same ideas have been published in the paper 'Time and the Observer - The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain' by the author (Dennett) and Kinsbourne. Even in that case the 15 page paper is contained in a 33 page text. To use the cliché, Dennett will not use a paragraph when several chapters will suffice I would advise anyone who wishes to understand the ideas contained in this book to read the paper. You will not have to waste your time in plowing through hundreds of pages of superfluous explanation. The paper is anthologized in 'The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates' that was edited by Block, Flanagan and Gazeldere, which is also available from Amazon. You will get the same ideas as contained in this book plus many many more. Another strategy would be to read one of Gerald Edelman's books which contains many fewer words in much better expositions of a great many more ideas that are much more trenchant and insightful.
Rating:
Summary: Utter arrogance with moments of awe
Review: Dennett's book mainly serves to present his theory of consciousness, the Multiple Drafts Model. It should be called "The Multiple Drafts Model, and footnotes" rather than "Consciousness Explained." It is worth noting that his model is not based on empirical evidence. It is also worth noting that the majority of modern cognitive scientists do not think it is correct. The good:
I am an aspiring cognitive scientist, and the first chapter brought tears to my eyes. It considers the issue of "Should consciousness be studied?" in a pleasing way. The book is generally well written and hidden in it are interesting thought experiments and scientific gems. The bad and the ugly:
Dennett would lead you to think the ideas presented in this book are his own, considering the tiny number of times he mentions other researchers or groups in his text. This is the worst kind of arrogance! Other times, he states results and ideas with such firmness that you would think they are facts, when they aren't. For instance, he rejects the idea of "strong hallucinations" by saying there's no evidence for them. Some people would think this isn't true, for instance, atropine based chemicals are known to cause what some would say are "strong hallucinations." His treatment of blindsight is atrocious, for skewing the facts in the face of the layperson, and ignoring the literature in the face of the scientist. Finally, the book is ENORMOUS and consciousness is not "explained." Don't waste your time. Read the first chapter to get the warm fuzzies, skim chapter five to understand his Multiple Drafts model, and ignore the rest. The rest is a deceptively one sided presentation of results which is too arrogant and too long and doesn't give any credit where credit is due. Dennett must have some friends at the New York Times if this book made their top ten list for the year. For an overview of the current status of consciousness studies, see David Chalmer's Online Papers on Consciousness at university of arizona (google search it). You will discover more than a thousand articles. And Dennett thinks he can solve it in a book...
Rating: 
Summary: A monumental attempt.
Review: Dennett is one of the formemost philosophers of our day. This is, arguably, one of the most important books on consciousness written. It has been a bit more than 10 years from its publication, and Dennetts theory is still making an impact. This does not mean that many agree with him, or that he has explained consciousness. But just look at the literature and count how many times he is quoted, refered to, but more often than not, refuted, or merely sayng ''well, this guy seems to just say that there is no consciousness at all, or something like that''. The book is a monumental attempt to understand consciousness, not to explain it completely, as Dennett himself admits. He thus starts from the start. There is the cartesian theather background that one has to realize simply does not work. There is no place in the brain where it al comes together into consciousness. Dualism, mysterianism, all that is just philosophical unwanted baggage. Finally, Dennett stresses the need, althoug in a peculiar way, to take phenomenology seriously. So far so good. But then come the philosophical nitty-gritty. The empirical theory of consciousness that Dennett lays out is quite simple, really. There are various drafts of neither stalinesque nor orwellian processes, that compete with each other, played by a virtual machine (program) run in the hardware of the brain. Now usually, here many would begin to attack dennett. Is the mind just a program, like windows on my computer?
Dennett does not say this at all. He just says that the brain processes information and that some of this procesing is consciousness, and that is a much less strong claim. Dennet discusses the effect that happens when one looks at two lights flashing in sucession, close to each other. One sees a light moving from to and fro, changinc collors evem (if the lights are different colors). Now Dennett mantains that there is no fact of the matter on wether one sees the lights as separate, but then interprets the whole thing as a¿one light moving, or if there is a top down effect on perception so that from the beggining one experiences the result. Ths is where the confusing things seem to arrive. Dennett has to discuss qualia, then. This is where he lost most readers, and most potential allies as well. In short, Dennett claims that there are no qualia at all, but simply a group of dispositions in the subject in question. So if someone who cannot see at all, but for some reason (I will avoid mentioning blindsight)responds like everyone else at stimuli, acts towards them, comments on them, etc., well then there is nothing missing. That responding, commenting on, andacting towards, is what qualia is. Dennett thus denies that zombies are possible, because a zombie has no experience, but acts normally in every other way since for Dennett, acting normally in evry way is what qualia is. (Dennett jokingly says that then zombies are possible, scince that is what we are, in the sense described above, of course).
All this is well. But can one really swallow it. I mean, regardless of what Dennett says, and how many times he says that this is no argument, the qualia are still there when I see a rose, and it does not seem like a disposition. Dennett claims that, well then, it seems there are qualia but there are not. How can something that does not exist seem like anything at all to anybody? So qualia, as they seem do not exist, even in the seeming itself, which is needless to say confusing. Dennett discusses many issues, of which qualia is the most debated. I only wanted to let out some thoughts on the matter. His theory of the self is also a bit unsatisfactory, but besides the hard philsophy, Dennet makes a lot of sense, in many things, evolution, phenomenology, language, the denial of the cartesian theather...so this book must be read, pretty much by anyone who has thought about the mind.
Rating:
Summary: A new type of reading
Review: I have read a few books on consciousness and cognitive science, and find it incredibly interesting, but this book was the first, and probably the best I have ever read on the topic, for one simple reason: You do experiments on yourself. Instead of describing a concept and leaving it up to you to apply it and proof it, Dennett demonstrates, using the readers own mind, his ideas on consciousness. I had never encountered a writer like that, and I haven't since, and for this reason, Consciousness Explained is a captivating book.
Rating:
Summary: Grossly Overrated
Review: Since this book has received such a proportionally large amount of attention, I assumed it would be well-argued and solidly constructed.
The argumentation is weak and sloppy, and the book is ultimately trying to explain away - rather than explain - consciousness. We are never really told how, in fact, the 'Joycean machine' that is "the stream-of-consciousness virtual machine"(p. 276) (which is the main reason most of us bought this book) works! Halfway through the book, he says (p. 275) "...if my theory of the Joycean machine is going to shed light on consciousness at all, there had better be something remarkable about some if not all of the activities of this machine, for there is no denying that consciousness is, intuitively, something special." In the remaining 200+ pages of the book, he mentions (not explains) the phrase 'Joycean machine' on only 7 additional pages. Read John Searle's book "Mystery of Consciousness" instead. There Searle reviews many authors including Dennett. As do I, Searle also consider's Dennett "imprecise and evasive" (p.115), and as he says "I regard Dennett's denial of the existence of consciousness not as a new discovery or even a serious possibility but rather a form of intellectual pathology."(p.112)
Rating:
Summary: Not an easy read, but an important one
Review: A complex, information-rich tome of mephistopholean hubris, in my view Consciousness Explained is the best example of philosophy in its role as "handmaiden to science" in decades, and probably the best example ever in the area of philosophy of mind. This book is a great contribution to cognitive science; nevertheless, it is difficult to formulate a précis of its central hypothesis. To brutally summarize, Dennett's great insight is that consciousness is essentially an illusion of continuity generated by brain to make a coherent narrative out of temporally gappy or overlapping brain events processing sensory impressions, generating decisions, etc. This is, however, a hard book for a lay reader to get through, and for that reason I recommend it only to the serious student of the cognitive sciences or of philosophy of mind.
Rating:
Summary: the best book ever
Review: among other things, it amazes me how well dennett has predicted objections to his position, even as they are raised on this page. most people object that he didn't "really" explain consciousness, because he doesn't explain how it is possible for something that they claim exists to exist. and sure enough, he didn't explain that, as the damn thing doesn't exist at all. but he masterfully explained why we (i am no more in that camp) think it does, and how it is possible for such illusion to arise and be sustained. yes, the book is in some sense redundant, but that is necessary when you are going against so much intuition, it takes time for the new metaphor to sink in.
on a more personal side: i myself was totally taken over by the book: i find dialogues with otto to be hilarious; i am thrilled when i think about his arguments on failure of imagination, intuition pumps; i agree that we can only benefit (in a sense of increased pleasure) if we explain consciousness (although i haven't thought of his argument on that point before). i read some of his other books before, they are not nearly as good as this one (e.g. the elbow room is very poorly structured) but for some time now i feel that this the best book that i have read in my life.
Rating: 
Summary: A totally unconscious mind expained
Review: What a joke! A desperate attempt at making the mind a computer and fitting everything into the known --- by those arragant main stream unconscious academic mind --- which is explained very clearly by this book (for which I gave it 3 stars).
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