Consciousness Explained

By: Daniel C. Dennett

Narrated by: Paul Mantell

Length: 21 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

The national bestseller chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 1991 is now available as an audiobook. The author of Brainstorms, Daniel C. Dennett replaces our traditional vision of consciousness with a new model based on a wealth of fact and theory from the latest scientific research.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©1991 Daniel C. Dennett (P)2013 Audible Inc.

If you like Dennett, you will love this book.

First, the narrator is fantastic. This is a pretty dense subject and Dennett can certainly meander at times, but he brings life to Dennett's words.
As to the content, It was a great attempt at wrapping our minds around a true mystery. I do think he did a better job at the setup, why this is so hard, and all of the dead bodies (theories) that have come before. And I do think he teed up the way to approach the problem really well. I do think he falls short in the details, and he could have made this book a game-changer if he had infused a bit more science into the discussion.
He is first and foremost a philosopher, and this is definitely much more a philosophical treaty, rather than a scientific one.

Fascinating ideas, too laboriously written

Not sure audiobook is the best format.
Dennet is brilliant yet cumbersome at times, which makes some passages very hard to understand.

All science.

Full of very amazing stuff. I managed to get through it, however I'm no scientist and probably actually understood 10% of it. That being said it did give me some things to think about. I only gave a low score because of the complexity of the material. Someone who better understands it might give higher marks.

Dennett makes you THINK!

No philosopher, I nevertheless enjoy Dennett's work.

He makes me THINK. That's healthy, horizon expanding, illuminating.

You needn't agree with everything Dennett says; you might have the gut sense that, at times, Dennett is purposefully leading the reader around by the nose; you might wonder if the succession of "I'll address that in a chapter 2 chapters from now" might end in "I'll address that in the next book I've not yet writing.

But you will think. And think again. And be grateful for it.

All that said, Paul Mantell's narration doesn't seem to fit the material. At the beginning, he's snarky. I had the sense he, not Dennett, thought that anyone who didn't agree with what he was reading was an idiot.

The narration gets less snarky as the chapters flow under the bridge, but it never seems to give true voice to the voice to the words read and--more importantly--the ideas contained within the words.

Now... to listen to another Dennett book... got several good ones to choose from!

interesting but long winded

long and thorough explanation expressed sometimes in long-winded metaphors and asides. thought-provoking ideas meticulously explained

The I (self) is that which has breadth

After having listened to this book, I will never fall for the make-believe just so stories about consciousness again. There is no reason to have to appeal to fantasy to explain consciousness. This book gives a complete story and forevermore I'll be able to not be sucked into false thought processes concerning the topics about the mind.

Metaphysics, when it's at is best is to fill in the parts that physics (or science) is having a hard time explaining because they don't really understand the object and the terms that describe the object under investigation. Dennett fills in these gaps better than any scientist can. For those who need make-believe and should be sitting at the children's table instead of the adult's table they need to read this book and they can move ahead as I have because of this book.

The best way to think about our self is by realizing we are not an analytical point. Euclid's first definition in his "Elements" is that a point is that which has no breadth. The book doesn't make this analogy, but I do, and state that "the I is that which has breadth", and you know you are listening to a remarkable book when you can go beyond the points the author is making because he educates you so fully.

The author defends this by showing why the self is "a center of narrative gravity", by showing how the mind is not like a Cartesian theater with a homunculus (little human) watching the play as the film unwinds. "There is not anything outside of the text", the text is just the final draft we think out loud. But to get there we first go through Orwellian rewrites and Stalinesque theater before we get the final draft from many rewrites. (Don't worry. The author explains this much better than I can. I'm just trying to whet your appetite in order for you to listen to this book.)

The author steps me through the black box of the mind by first discussing the outputs we measure from our responses to the environment. That was the first eight hours of the book. He called that the analytical approach. That part confused me. I'm not a scientist. The next part he called the synthetic part. How we would build that black box step by step. That's the part where I started listening to every word because it just excited me.

Understanding qualia, our emotional experiences, or what Locke would call our secondary experiences, which lead to things being our 'beliefs' or "seems to", is not how to think about how our mind works. When you can change a "seems to" to the 'is' with no lost of understanding just drop 'seems to' and the phoniness of qualia.

The author uses computers, software, and universal Turing machines and Von Neumann in explaining his thesis. You will walk away with consciousness demystified. You'll be on guard against those who use make-believe arguments to defend a world that doesn't exist.

This book is over 20 years old. I only wished I had discovered it when it first came out. It would have stopped me from wasting my time with people who don't understand that we have ways of thinking about the world that is not dualistic and doesn't need special
make-believe explanations to explain who we are as thinking machines.

I almost never change the speed of the audio. For this book, I did and listened to it at 1.25x speed. Made for a much better listen.

Excellent

Excellent perspectives and knowledge. I will enjoy this book many times. highly recommend reading for anyone.

Not for the faint of heart

While a fascinating read, this book is deep. It goes into your brain layer after layer after layer. While I can safely say I really understood only 20% of the real meaning of this book, the other 80% was clearly well researched and added validity to the 20%. A tough read for sure.

Heavy book

Brain stretching but very fulfilling. I feel the book did a good job explaining the authors expertise in consciousness. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to reach into their own mind a bit more.

Excellent

This is an excellent and difficult book- lots of information to take away to refine your understanding of your own mind. I wouldn't say it's sufficient to BASE your understanding of consciousness on it, since there's so much nuance to appreciating the nature of consciousness. But, it's great at saying "nope, you can't think about it this way because XYZ. Here is a better way to think about this phenomenon." Really formative and helpful for how I see myself.