Daniel Dennett

In short, I am a huge fan of Dan Dennett and I believe his book "consciousness Explained" helped me tremendously in understanding the basics of consciousness, and then later his book "Elbow Room" helped me on my journey toward ethics and morality. I could write a lot about what we should appreciate from him. But for now I want to address a small misunderstanding that I see a lot of people repeating.

Consciousness: Not an Illusion

Very commonly I hear people say:

Daniel Dennett claims that consciousness is just an illusion.

The idea that consciousness isn’t real -- it just feels real.

What we call experience is, in this view, a byproduct of brain activity with no real substance of its own.

That is not what Dennett means. He has never denied that consciousness is real. He believes it is a real phenomenon with real effect on the world. But, he adds that they way that we experience it leads us to think about it incorrectly. The way that we think conscious to be is an illusion. Not that the entire phenomenon is not real, but that our intuition about what is happening is based on an illusion.

Let me explain by way of an analogy. First, when you get a fever you will feel cold. You might even shiver. You experience of being cold is an illusion. You are actually not cold; you are actually hotter than normal, and the shivering is to raise your temperature even more. Why don't you feel hot? We can measure the body temperature, and we know that a fever patient is objectively hot. But they feel cold. The perception of being cold is an illusion.

When we say that you experience an illusion around fever, this is not saying that you don't have a fever. It is not saying that the fever itself is an illusion and does not exist. It is saying only that our perception of what is happening is incorrect. We feel cold, but we are actually hot.

When we delve into matters of the mind, we often find that our perception of things don't actually match what is going on. The language center of the brain is in the left temporal node, but it does not feel like it. The vision center is in the back of the head, but it does not feel like it. Our intuition about the way that things work can be wrong. We have to learn how the mind works not by exploiting intuitive knowledge, but by careful observation. After a traumatic experience, there is a period of denial, then comes anger, etc. When you experience denial, you don't always realize that you are in such a process, but you actually experience it as being 'not really happened' or 'the other person's fault'. Only when you recognize that as an illusion, can you begin to understand what your mind is really doing.

Dennett is saying the same about consciousness: you can not trust your intuition about what it is and how it effects the world.