The only other review was so bad that I wrote this

Any additional comments?

Anyone who has read any other work by Dennett knows what to expect. You're in for 15 hours of lucid, thought provoking prose guiding you through some of the deepest questions out there. There is no need to give any credence to the only other review so far which seems to be motivated solely by jealousy.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

60 people found this helpful

How come there is a 'me'?

Consciousness has always been the greatest mystery to me. I fully believe in the idea that human beings are mammals evolved in accordance with the principles of Darwinian natural selection. I’m an atheist and I love the writing of people like Dawkins, Pinker and Hume, who are referred to often in this book.

It seems clear to me that there are also other animals who experience consciousness. By that I don’t mean that they are intelligent, although the ones I’m thinking of do have above average intelligence in the animal kingdom (dogs, cats, seals, dolphins, etc) but that they are aware of their experiences. They see and feel what is happening to them. They feel pain, hunger, fear – there’s more to it than just behaviouristic responses to environmental stimuli. I just don’t understand where this consciousness in humans and other animals came from.

I understand how the presence of the nervous system and painful stimuli will serve the Darwinian purpose of preventing you from doing damage to yourself, but I’ve never understood where the ‘me’ comes from who really feels the pain when I stub my toe. How do you get a ‘me’ from the movement of electricity through the central nervous system? If you built a computer as complicated as the human brain would it develop a ‘me’ and be ‘aware’? – I don’t think so (but I really don’t know that for sure).

This book addresses this question. Does it provide the answer? Sadly, no, not for me. It provides lots of interesting and helpful insights into the evolution of intelligence, but, unless I just didn’t get it, it doesn’t explain for me the emergent property of consciousness.

I’d still highly recommend it. I enjoyed every bit of it. I think I might listen to it again. But it didn’t answer the question for me. Maybe the question is unanswerable. Maybe it is beyond our understanding. Maybe we just have to accept that consciousness is just another of the many emergent properties that we see all around us in the natural and cultural world. I still don’t know.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

47 people found this helpful

Classic Dennett; maybe not for beginners!

If you're a Dennett fan you'll love it. But it's really dense; I had to listen to entire chapters over again before moving on just to make sure I'd "gotten" it. But it was totally worth it and I enjoyed every bit of it.

I wouldn't start out with this book if you're new to Dennett. It makes me want to go back and reread "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" and I think that is a good sort of "prequel" to this, as is "Consciousness Evolves." If you read and enjoy this book and haven't given those a listen, you really should. (I've also read and really loved "Breaking the Spell" and "Freedom Evolves," but they don't connect as much to this one as the others.)

I found it difficult to focus on if I was trying to multitask. It takes a lot of attention. Best for listening to while driving, washing the dishes, or going for a walk.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

24 people found this helpful

Good Noise

Your attention will only catch 10% - maybe it is the rambling speculative nature of the content (though he has a broad grasp of science, so they are at least informed), or the drifting-away tone of the narration, so the question is, is it worth listening to again (and again and again) to try and decipher what he is saying, and the answer is partly (there are some good notions), but mainly no, because the core problem of the book is that it is philosophically clueless (which the reader can vaguely sense), so it is off target in the relevance department, which will cause the reader to tune it out, since most of it is fundamentally garbage. (to clear the garbage up, and to read something that has relevance, read the Philosophy of Broader Survival instead).

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

20 people found this helpful

Nature designs competently

There is intelligent design. It's just not what the creationist think it is. Nature gives us competencies without comprehension. Comprehension means full understanding. Dennett gives the example of how the computer can do arithmetic without understanding as explained by Turing. His holy trinity within this book are Turing, Hume and Darwin. Each thinker provides an inversion to our 'manifest' knowledge by allowing an opening to the window to scientific knowledge. He'll explain in detail how each thinker allowed us to see the world differently but in an 'inverted way'. They all gave us an 'ontology' (his word) of the world for which we live in. Ontologies can be thought of as the furniture that makes up the world, the pieces of the things that we use to explain the world under consideration, the structure, the foundation, the ground, or the first principles.

Dennett is never afraid to talk down to his reader. Pernicious teleology is how we think naturally as humans. We always impute a reason for the way things are. We accidentally assume a 'why' for the way things are, because that's how we think because we always assume meaning. "Teleology is never free" as he says in the book. We use science to redirect us back to the 'how' things are. There is no over all meaning for the way things became the way they are (at least I don't know the reason). Dennett is really big on emphasizing that 'free will' is an illusion in as much as that cause will always precede effect within the human realm (yes, there is an exception at the quantum level, but we don't control that, and it is not at our mercy), and if there was a great Judge in the sky or any where else, he would not be able to judge us knowing that we are the way we are because we were made that way and time and chance determined who we are. And as Dennett goes on to explain in this book, we still must be held accountable for our actions on earth, but, again, a great Judge in the sky can't hold us responsible for our actions because we don't happen in a vacuum we are a result of the world we are thrown into. Dennett doesn't say it but St. Augustine created the concept of free will as to be the analogous power that God had when he freely created the universe and that similarly resides in us in order that God can judge us. Yes, I know Aristotle uses the word 'free will' but he meant something different and closer to Dennett's compatibilitist definition.

There's a template to the story that he's telling within this book that could be found in another book that I've read, "Master Algorithm". My mind kept referring back to that book as I was listening to this book and in the last chapter or so he tells you about that book in detail. I really loved that book but only rated it three stars because of two reasons 1) I didn't like its conclusions and 2) it was concise but overly complex in its presentation. I don't mind complexity in my books but I would not really recommend it to others because it could be very hard to follow. But, all the themes that were in that book are in this book. He called them tribes in the book "Master Algorithm".

One of the tribes was Bayesian statistics. Our expectations based on prior experiences shape how we accept the present. That's what Bayesian statistics do for us. There is a really formal definition but it would involve probability functions, but at the heart that is what it is. Dennett relies on the heuristic to explain this. So I will too. The "Master Algorithm" shows how we are currently taking 'the inverse of the program and using machine learning' to solve complex problems through the aid of the computer. Dennett talks about Google and its language translation program which has done that brilliantly. It's a bottom up approach instead of a top down approach. Our mind and evolution both seem to work from the bottom up also. Cool stuff. But, Dennett only saved this stuff for the last chapter.

Dennett definitely has a mind set that I tended to disagree with in this book. His very long section on the meme and culture over looked the reality of epigenetics and just briefly noted it and that was only to tacitly ignore it. Epigenetics are real. Just read Science News or check up on the Belgium babies born at the very end of WW II (June 1944 to May 1945) under the needlessly cruel Nazi occupation and see the analysis which is explained by epigenetics. Dennett takes TOM (theory of mind) and mirror neurons more seriously than I think should be warranted. He's trying to explain that our consciousness comes about through by the shaping of our environment by our behaviors. It's one way of looking at the problem, but maybe not the best. Popper (logical positivist) and Skinner (behaviorism) are probably not the right way to frame the extremes (imo) as he seems to do within the text. There just seems to be a another story that could be told.

I really love Dennett. I've read four of his other books, and three of them are in my favorites list. I was little bit disappointed in this book because most of it was review for me, and I don't really agree with his behaviorism point of view in the development of consciousness, and I didn't really agree with his development of language as he presented it. Also, one can argue there is no proper ontology to the world (see Wittgenstein for details, e.g.), and embracing Hume (who is my favorite philosopher) leads to 'facon de parler' (Dennets phrase, means 'convenient fiction'), which doesn't bother me, but needs to be reckoned with in the context of the philosophy of science. I don't mind reading some one who I disagree with but I do mind not learning much more than what I've read in other books on the same topic.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

10 people found this helpful

amazing dense and eye opening

this is the first book I actually had to listen to twice back to back before I actually understood what dennet was trying to communicate. darwinism about darwinism? memes as the viruses of culture? darwinian spaces? consciousness and understanding evolving out of competence? all of these things are incredibly confusing the first time around, but then incredibly obvious once it clicks. Dennett's book the second time around really did this for me. truly recommended to read them re read

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

7 people found this helpful

Wordy, wordy, wordy

You’ll need a lot of patience with this book if you’re hoping to learn something. Dennett just goes on and on and on and on, and every few pages mentions a scientific bit. Ugh.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

6 people found this helpful

Interesting but difficult listening

Very interesting subject, views and insights but be prepared for a lot of pausing and rewinding to give yourself time to grasp the special terms and rather deep concepts It is written rather defensively with lots of references to his own and other contemporary work which meant that it took some time to deliver the message. I did enjoy listening to it but feel I need to listen to a lot of it again to be able to better comprehend it.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

6 people found this helpful

Little insight, drawn out and hard to sit through

Dennett has very little interesting to say on a huge wide range of topics that he addresses, but he has lots of vitrole for the positions of people with whom he apparently disagrees, but cannot bother to summarize their opinions. As other reviews note, there is no cogent thesis or clear point to which he is getting. He spends lots and lots of time disparaging creationists and other people he considers not living up to the scientific ideal. But his actual discussion of life and consciousness is mostly just a hodgepodge selection of various academic authors he thinks are sort of interesting with nothing to tie it together and no hard conclusions. He also uses plenty of space in the book to settle academic scores, advertise the work of his buddies, and apologize for times he had previously quoted people out of context. Reading this book is like just sitting down to lunch with him and asking him to pontificate. It must be nice to be so famous that you don't have to try to convince anyone of a thesis, you can just talk about whatever you feel like and turn it into a book.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

6 people found this helpful

Consciousness explained and expanded

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Daniel Dennett has an amazing brain and is a wordsmith of the 1st rank. It is astounding how much of Consciousness Explained's foresight is brought to fruition. Anyone thinking of artificial intelligence and what it might mean for society would do well to read this book. And anybody not thinking of it should.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

1001 words is worth more than a picture. Great line, though his best remains, I think, "he's fighting a strawman and the strawman is winning."

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

6 people found this helpful