Daniel Dennett Essay

Daniel Dennett’s projects over time may have varied, but ever since he was at Oxford he has continuously come back to the philosophy of the mind. His work, especially Consciousness Explained, has become widely known and suddenly controversial when he claimed that free will is only an illusion of the mind and that it is actually the result of the physical processes in the brain. He says that what we call consciousness isn’t actually consciousness. Dennett dives right into the mind-body debate. He says that Darwin’s idea of natural selection cannot explain the connection between mind and body. What is the relationship between consciousness and the physical body? This question continues to come up again and again philosophy and even Psychology. Also, how do …show more content…
They only believe in things that can be physically touched and examined, so the idea of a mind is not something that can be exactly located. The opposite of this theory is called Monism, which is the idea that the mind and the body are all one thing. There are many different ideas about this subject, but there doesn’t seem to be a universally accepted idea. Dennett created a theory called Multiple Drafts, also known as Fame in the Brain, in which consciousness isn’t a singular thing but a multifaceted one. The term “drafts” comes from the idea that it is much like the many drafts a novelist may go through before finishing a book. Adding to this idea, Dennett says, "These yield, over the course of time, something rather like a narrative stream or sequence, which can be thought of as subject to continual editing by many processes distributed around the brain" (Sweet Dreams 135). However, within these drafts, Dennett says there is no order and no centralized area within the brain where this is located. There simply cannot be a center to this stream of