creators_name: Mangan, Bruce B. creators_id: mangan@cogsci.berkeley.edu type: journalp datestamp: 2011-08-30 04:22:41 lastmod: 2011-08-30 04:22:41 metadata_visibility: show title: Dennett, Consciousness, and the Sorrows of Functionalism ispublished: pub subjects: phil-mind full_text_status: public keywords: Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett, Functionalism, Medium Hypothesis, Meta Cognition, Multiple Drafts abstract: Little is gained, and much lost, by casting an empirical theory of previous consciousness in a "functionalist" philosophical mold. Consciousness Explained is an instructive failure. It resurrects various behaviorist dogmas; it denies consciousness any distinct cognitive ontology; it obliquely adopts many long-standing research positions relating parallel and sequential processing to consciousness, yet denies the core assumption which produced this research; it takes parallel processing ("Multiple Drafts") to be incompatible with educated common-sense views of consciousness (the "Cartesian Theater"), while in fact parallel processing is compatible with some Cartesian Theater views. Contrary to Dennett, the Cartesian Theater does not necessarily imply that contents must fully "arrive" in consciousness at a single, specifiable instant; criticism of the Cartesian Theater based on this attribution is thus without force. And if consciousness is a distinct information-bearing medium, functionalist attempts to "explain" consciousness are inherently inadequate. date: 1993 date_type: published publication: Consciousness and Cognition volume: 2 number: 1 pagerange: 1-17 refereed: TRUE citation: Mangan, Dr. Bruce B. (1993) Dennett, Consciousness, and the Sorrows of Functionalism. [Journal (Paginated)] document_url: http://cogprints.org/7588/1/Mangan_1993_DennettConsciousnessAndTheSorrowsOfFunctionalism_ConsciousnessAndCognition.pdf