I recently finished reading Daniel Dennett’s book “Consciousness Explained”. It was a significant read, full of detailed arguments and illustrations. Although there were some provocative ideas in it, most of them seemed a bit dated, probably because the book is now nearly 30 years old. In addition, the tone of the writing was a little off-putting, with Dennet apparently very confident in his model, even to the point of often deprecating other possibilities in a cringy manner.

The thing is, it seems this sort of writing often shows up when the author is making a point that seems strained, not totally convincing, and it’s as if the writer knows that and feels the need to resort to emotional manipulation. Of course, it may just be the writer’s personality, but it does seem that if a writer feels the need to resort to emotional manipulation, one can’t help but imagine that this is done because even they don’t feel that the rational arguments are sufficient.

For example, a major part of Dennett’s model seems to rest on the idea that all we can know about the mind’s operation, all that we should concern ourselves with, was empirically determined information. This includes verbal statements by test subjects, but only so far as they indicate what the subject believed they had experienced without giving any weight to their interpretation. This essentially rejects introspection as a valid source of information.

Obviously, this is a challenging position to anyone who has attempted to peer within one’s own mind to understand what’s going on. While it’s true that there are many errors that the mind makes when trying to understand its own operation, it’s not at all clear that there is zero validity to the various impressions – Dennett’s perspective seems to throw the baby out with the bath water.

In fact, this perspective doesn’t seem to be very widely held in the fields of philosophy of mind and consciousness research. While reading the book, it surprisingly appeared to be out of line with the general way researchers think of these things.

In fact, Dennett himself essentially verified this at the end of the book with his admission to being a “verificationist”, although he claims the title of “Urbane verificationist” rather than the more common “Village verificationist”. Not sure what difference he was using those terms to describe, though, since he simply pointed to an older paper for the discussion.

When reading this part, I had to look up “verificationism”, and it turns out that it’s a central part of a philosophical position known as “logical positivism”, that was an attempt in the 1920s to unify philosophy and science. By the middle of last century, however, these perspectives were abandoned by the intellectual community. Today, the vast majority of subject matter experts reject these perspectives.

This is one reason, when reading Dennett’s book, it seemed so different from the perspective I’ve been forming by exploring these concepts more broadly. Not different in a “Wow, that’s a brilliant new idea” way, but rather in a “This seems to be missing something” way. Of course, it was written three decades ago, and we’ve learned a lot since then.

It turns out that the number of theories about consciousness is still growing and diversifying. That’s why interesting and often radical new ideas are common, typical with new scientific endeavors, but rehashing long-rejected ideas is typically less valuable. It’s a little surprising that Dennett’s book is still listed as one of the important ones to read about consciousness, but that’s probably because it does have some interesting ideas, worth keeping in mind as long as the field is still evolving, and his reputation is well-established.

Interestingly, the combination of arrogant, dismissive writing style with a rejection of the broad range of other subject matter experts, revisiting old ideas with little new ones, is similar to some examples of misinformation. For example, Young Earth Creationism (YEC) is a belief that the Earth is only about 4-5 thousand years old, based on a specific interpretation of the Bible’s creation narratives.

Although many Christians still believe in YEC, many others do not, and the vast majority of experts in the relevant scientific fields reject it. Not only that, but when I did a deep dive on the topic a number of years ago, one of the things that immediately stood out to me was the arrogant, dismissive tone of much YEC writing. It was as if, since there was little to no scientific support, they also chose to use emotional appeals to convince people of their views.

It’s interesting that both a strident atheist and dogmatic Christians exhibit the same type of emotional appeals and the same rejection of broad expert consensus. This pattern tends to suggest to me that the real driving force behind the arguments is ideology rather than thoughtful consideration.

Unfortunately, we need more thoughtful consideration today in both matters, and across the board in general.