Kant-Dennett: part one

a somewhat Kantian review of Dennett's Consciousness explained

Intro

Before I entered the Substack space I hadn’t even heard of Daniel Dennett (1942-2024), that’s how ancient-oriented I am. Although influences of his work probably trickled down to various popularized writings scattered over mentions of experiments, views on consciousness, neuroscience and so on. So while I’m not at all seriously into the latest findings in neuroscience, some of his ideas, probably found their way into essays of contemporary thinkers who have consciousness in any shape or form on their radar. On Substack however, when somewhat focusing on philosophy and consciousness, you will notice he is all over the place and sooner or later you will be confronted with some form of caricature of Dennett’s ideas in respect to which it is easy and tempting to take a position. Of course one assumes it can’t all be that straight forward as it seems, especially given the fact that engaging with people who value Dennett’s ideas turns out to be interesting and rewarding. The idea grew on me that from the perspective of a Kantian framework, there’s probably a lot to unpack in Dennett’s work on consciousness. I saw a lot of agreement, a lot of disagreement and more importantly, a lot of misconception from both directions.

Given all this I decided to read Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991) with the hopes that it would be worth while and fun to put some work in evaluating it and confronting it with Kant’s ideas as formulated in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and his other critical works. It surely turned out to be indeed worth while and much of Dennett’s ideas touch on the very heart of Kantian thought.

One could say that confronting one work of Dennett with a complete framework of Kantian thinking is a bit unfair and in a way it of course is. I only read one work of Dennett and didn’t evaluate his whole body of work. On the other hand the title of that work is Consciousness Explained, such a bold claim in the title of your work can hardly be seen as anything other than an open invitation to be confronted with any arsenal of the best cherrypicked frameworks in the history of philosophy. So my attempt here should be seen as a modest and honest evaluation through the lens of my interpretation of Kant’s Critical Idealism. I would even say that where I find agreement with Dennett (which is mostly not with his bold claims but rather in his side-thoughts), my fairness easily exceeds that of most Dennett-detractors, who in most cases are incredibly nit-picky and beside the point.

1. Consciousness explained – in short

First of all it should be clear that I highly recommend reading Consciousness Explained. I think it’s well written and besides numerous bold philosophical claims, it contains a lot of thought provoking side thought and provides an impressive overview of incredibly interesting neuroscientific experiments, interpreted with lots of nuance. So even if one doesn’t agree with Dennett’s claims or models, there’s still a lot of value in the way he interprets and connects these experiments separated from his claims. As a general rule I would say that the less bold a certain claim or formulated thought of his happens to be, the more it breathes the spirit of Kantian thinking, which of course, isn’t that surprising. Furthermore the models and principles he proposes are incredibly well conceptualized and explained with great clarity.

The main point in Dennett’s work is the proposal or defense of his explanatory model of consciousness which he calls his Multiple Drafts Model of consciousness. In short this model emphasizes and substantiates the multiplicity of certain brain activities that are corelated with conscious experiences which are perceived by the subject as rather singular events. From this idea he further develops a more general model and the eventual metaphor he uses is what he calls a Virtual Machine. Maybe one could see his Virtual Machine as the main model he ends up with and Multiple Drafts rather one of the principles that lead up to that model but that’s just a rough evaluation of mine. His Virtual Machine is an intricate model that borrows a lot of interesting ideas from computer science which he connects in subtle and ingenious ways and evaluates step by step by means of the outcomes of various neuroscientific experiments. Big part of his work can be seen as a detailed account and interpretation of empirical neuroscience at its core, connected with the important questions of philosophy of mind. For the layman reader that I am the models he proposes seem convincing and useful at face value but of course evaluating the value and usefulness of these models is a task for empirical science as a whole (even maybe for human society, depending on your concept of empirical science) so that is obviously not my intention here. My intention and focus are his philosophical claims and his way of thinking.

The second important point he makes throughout the book is that he constantly contrasts his own model with the famous model of the so called Cartesian Theater (and Cartesian Materialism) which he considers a preposterous model of consciousness that even today (1991) in neuroscience is still, in his own words, exerting a tenacious pull on our imagination and still continues to attract crowds of theorists transfixed by an illusion. It’s the idea that consciousness is this single physical place or “center” where it all comes together and for which Descartes (1596-1650) even suggested a physical candidate in the brain, namely the pineal gland. In a broader sense, it’s the idea that consciousness is this fixed singular point from which the world is witnessed as in a theater. In a somewhat lesser extent also the concept of “qualia” or in short the idea of irreducible qualities of appearances and also the principle of “dualism” are in Dennett’s view redundant and useless, at least from a scientific viewpoint.

2. Unintentionally deceptive: Phenomena-noumena VS phenomenology-noemata

Dennett mentions Kant two times in his book and quotes him once. These references on their own are not at all problematic and neither are they very important for the book, he doesn’t really engage with Kant’s ideas in any explicit way. But his first mention, although not wrong in itself, can easily be wrongly interpreted for those not familiar with Kant.

In the eighteenth century, Kant distinguished “phenomena,” things as they appear, from “noumena”, things as they are in themselves, and during the development of the natural or physical sciences in the nineteenth century, the term phenomenology came to refer to the merely descriptive study of any subject matter…

(Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Penguin books, 1993, p44)

and further on that same page:

Alluding to this division between acute observation and theoretical explanation, the philosophical school or movement known as Phenomenology (with a capital P) grew up early in the twentieth century around the work of Edmund Husserl. Its aim was to find a new foundation for all philosophy (indeed, for all knowledge) based on a special technique of introspection, in which the outer world and all its implications and presuppositions were supposed to be “bracketed” in a particular act of mind known as the epoché. The net result was an investigative state of mind in which the Phenomenologist was supposed to become acquainted with the pure objects of conscious experience, called noemata untainted by the usual distortions and amendments of theory and practice.

So in this brief historical sketch we have in one breath and seemingly in one and the same straight lineage of philosophical thought Kant’s distinction between “phenomena” and “noumena” followed by “Phenomenology” (in the same sentence) and the concept of “noemata”, as if the latter two concepts are a straight derivation of the former two. Even for someone who is only slightly acquainted with Kant, it should be obvious that Kant’s concepts of “phenomena” and “noumena” couldn’t be further away from the practice of Phenomenology. The concept of “noumena” could even be seen as quite the opposite of “noemata”. Now, Dennett doesn’t explicitly claim here that Phenomenology rests in any meaningful way on Kant’s philosophy but the way he presents it here certainly makes it seem like that. In my discussions with thinkers who defend Dennett’s ideas there’s often quite some misunderstanding and I think a lot has to do with Dennett’s strange way of making this short historical sketch, which is at least unintentionally deceptive.

3. Intentionally deceptive: Cartesian Theater as the last accomplishment of theoretical philosophy since Descartes, now finally corrected by Dennett.

The above title is of course a bit of a caricature of a caricature because Dennett himself is more nuanced at places, I would even say appropriately nuanced on rare occasions. But still you can’t help but look at this book and notice on the one hand the cartoonish way Dennett portrays Descartes’s views on consciousness and on the other hand frames everything as if this cartoonish view was the only thing theoretical philosophy had to offer until Dennett came to save the day. Dennett often points at the damaging influence of The Cartesian Theater on the progress of empirical science (-of mind) and of course I, as a layman, have absolutely no idea whether that was indeed the case in 1991 and I will simply have to trust Dennett on his word. Another possible reason for Dennett’s caricatural way of presenting the idea of the Cartesian Theater is that it offers a clear picture to contrast his own model with. And this function it serves very well.

Empirical science is one thing, philosophy another, at least depending on how you view both “disciplines” and it seems that Dennett himself is no stranger to that distinction for he aspires to do both. So the purpose of this essay is to check if maybe Dennett might have missed a thing or two in reading Kant, especially since he somewhat presents him as the instigator of the rightfully dreaded practice of “Phenomenology” yet he quite often seems to formulate ideas and side-thoughts that either are very much in agreement with Kant or are very suited to be answered, (not necessarily “solved”) confronted or corrected with Kantian ideas.

4. Cartesian Theatre already invalidated a-priori.

Once Dennett has clear focus on his target he is quite straight forward about what he is claiming to offer as a replacement for the faulty and preposterous model of the Cartesian Theater:

The ground rules for my project are straightforward: (1) No Wonder Tissue allowed. I will try to explain every puzzling feature of human consciousness within the framework of contemporary physical science; at no point will I make an appeal to inexplicable or unknown forces, substances, or organic powers. In other words, I intend to see what can be done within the conservative limits of standard science…

(Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p40)

We must stop thinking of the brain as if it had such a single functional summit or central point. This is not an innocuous shortcut; it’s a bad habit. In order to break this bad habit of thought, we need to explore some instances of the bad habit in action, but we also need a good image with which to replace it.

(Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p111)

Dennett is going to use empirical evidence and good thinking to replace the idea that there must be a functional summit or central point in the brain. And he also seems to deliver that evidence, abundantly and convincingly. There is indeed no physical center point (for those who would seriously ask for that) and not even any empirical evidence that points to some kind of finish line, physical nor transcendental. But we already knew that didn’t we? And if we didn’t it would be very hard to imagine how on earth empirical evidence for such a center point or finish line would look like. Why is it that we can know beforehand that there is no empirical evidence to be expected for a unity of thinking? It’s a question that gets answered throughout the whole of Kant’s critical work but Kant somwewhat formulates it concisely as follows in Critique of Pure Reason (my emphasis in bold):

Now I cannot have the least representation of a thinking being through an external experience, but only through self-consciousness. Thus such objects are nothing further than the transference of this consciousness of mine to other things, which can be represented as thinking beings only in this way. The proposition “I think” is, however, taken here only problematically; not insofar as it may contain a perception of an existence (the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum), but only in its mere possibility, in order to see which properties might flow from so simple a proposition as this for its subject (whether or not such a thing might now exist).

If more than the cogito were the ground of our pure rational cognition of thinking beings in general; if we also made use of observations about the play of our thoughts and the natural laws of the thinking self created from them: then an empirical psychology would arise, which would be a species of the physiology of inner sense, which would perhaps explain the appearances of inner sense, but could never serve to reveal such properties as do not belong to possible experience at all (as properties of the simple), nor could it serve to teach apodictically about thinking beings in general something touching on their nature;
thus it would be no rational psychology.

(Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by P. Guyer and A.W. Wood, Cambridge University Press 1998. A347)

From all this one sees that rational psychology has its origin in a mere misunderstanding. The unity of consciousness, which grounds the categories, is here taken for an intuition of the subject as an object, and the category of substance is applied to it. But this unity is only the unity of thinking, through which no object is given; and thus the category of substance, which always presupposes a given intuition, cannot be applied to it, and hence this subject cannot be cognized at all. Thus the subject of the categories cannot, by thinking them, obtain a concept of itself as an object of the categories; for in order to think them, it must take its pure self-consciousness, which is just what is to be explained, as its ground. Likewise, the subject, in which the representation of time originally has its ground, cannot thereby determine its own existence in time, and if the latter cannot be, then the former as a determination of its self (as a thinking being in general) through categories can also not take place.

(Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason B421-422)

see also (Prolegomena §48)

For Kant even the idea that a unity of any kind (let alone a unity of consciousness) can be an object of experience as a unity is faulty beforehand. An object of experience can only ever be synthetic unity, which is not at all empirical unity as such. So from that analysis of our thinking it follows that empirical evidence of any kind is always evidence against a unity of any kind. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the empirical findings and models Dennett presents are faulty or not productive at all. But the idea that the empirical evidence he presents can serve as a refutation of the unity of consciousness is, from a Kantian perspective, to put it frank, quite preposterous, because we can’t even imagine empirical evidence that would demonstrate a unity of consciousness. So it should also be clear that for the Kantian it is impossible to distinguish the zombie from the not-zombie. The zombie, for that matter, will also have to defend his claims of accountability the same way the non-zombie has to. Apart from Dennett’s self-deception that he provided empirical evidence to refute the unity of consciousness, the somewhat functionalist position he takes in respect to that unity is not that different from Kant. I would even say Kant sometimes competes with Dennett when it comes to being not too ontologically absolutist in respect to that function of consciousness. Depending on context, Dennett sometimes even outperforms Kant when it comes to affirming consciousness.

The synthetic proposition that every different empirical consciousness must be combined into a single self-consciousness is the absolutely first and synthetic principle of our thinking in general. But it should not go unnoticed that the mere repre­sentation I in relation to all others (the collective unity of which it makes possible) is the transcendental consciousness. Now it does not matter here whether this representation be clear (empirical consciousness) or obscure, even whether it be actual; but the possibility of the logical form of all cognition necessarily rests on the relationship to this apperception as a faculty.

(Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A117-footnote)

and Dennett:

There is still one puzzle, however. How do I get to know all about this? How come I can tell you all about what was going on in my head? The answer to the puzzle is simple: Because that is what I am. Because a knower and reporter of such things in such terms is what is me. My existence is explained by the fact that there are these capacities in this body.

(Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p410)

Whatever the similarities are between Kant and Dennett, I think we should be clear from the start about what distinguishes their approach. For Kant we could say consciousness is explained when its logical function (not even its purpose), products and limitations are explained and for Dennett consciousness is explained when the material conditions that lead up to that function are explained. They almost completely complement each other regarding the things they abstract from. Kant entirely abstracts from what physically could be happening in the brain. Dennett entirely abstracts from what the mind can establish AS a unity of consciousness and mainly focuses on what is happening in the physical brain.

5. Let’s discard dualism because of its mysterious vibe.

In the preceding section, I noted that if dualism is the best we can do, then we can’t understand human consciousness. Some people are convinced that we in any case. Such defeatism, today, in the midst of a cornucopia of scientific advances reads’ to be exploited, strikes me as ludicrous, even pathetic, but I suppose it could be the sad truth.

(Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p111)

This fundamentally antiscientific stance of dualism is, to my mind, its most disqualifying features and is the reason why in this book I adopt the apparently dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs. It is not that I think I can give a knock-down proof that dualism, in all its forms, is false or incoherent, but that, given the way dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up.

There is widespread agreement about this, but it is as shallow as it is wide, papering over some troublesome cracks in the materialist wall. Scientists and philosophers may have achieved a consensus of sorts in favor of materialism but as we shall see, getting rid of the old dualistic visions is harder than contemporary materialists have thought. Finding suitable replacements for the traditional dualistic images will require some rather startling adjustments to our habitual ways of thinking, adjustments that will be just as counterintuitive at first to scientists as to laypeople.

(Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p37)

For some, dualism is inevitably connected with the way Descartes was looking at the pineal gland and thus with the search for a substance in which to localize the singular nature (or even the complete nature) of consciousness. Towards Descartes’s endeavor one could say exist two possible positions. The first one would be to look inside the brain (physically with a scalpel or otherwise) and try to look for that singular place, in which case I guess you’re some kind of crude substance dualist, although it’s really hard for me to wrap my head around what that would exactly entail conceptually (see previous chapter). The second one would be to discard that endeavor as redundant beforehand, in which case you’ve established an even stronger case for dualism, albeit a different kind of dualism. That being said it would bring us nowhere to start nitpicking about what dualism really is or to give a complete list of all the kinds of dualisms there are to be distinguished in the history of philosophy. So I’m just going to try to point out where Kant en Dennett are somewhat similar and that in my view Dennett’s way of thinking is more or less in accordance with Kant’s dualism. The antiscientific stance Dennett wants to avoid at all costs is exactly what Kant also wants to avoid at all costs. The only difference of course is that Kant knows exactly what to avoid and why to avoid it while Dennett just wants to avoid a vibe while not even really succeeding in it.

The idea of mind as distinct in this way from the brain, composed not of ordinary matter but of some other, special kind of stuff, is dualism, and it is deservedly in disrepute today, in spite of the persuasive themes just canvassed.

(Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p33)

This quote should somewhat give us a clear picture of what Dennett (and many others with him) means with dualism. Its rejection in short comes down to the simple thought that if that “special kind of stuff” is distinct from matter and yet has a causal connection to it, than there is no reason or ground for making that distinction and the “special kind of stuff” should just be called matter. And of course there’s not really much to oppose to that. It seems that indeed our concept of “matter” doesn’t allow this bold move, and indeed it doesn’t. But how do we know that? Did we learn it from experience (how?) or did we know this beforehand? And does this whole struggle with dualism teaches us something about “matter” itself or rather something about how we should think about matter? And what is the best explanatory model (of mind) for the fact that we know beforehand that we should think about matter that way, that we can firmly reject substance dualism? Any way, these are a lot of questions for now but I think it’s fair to say that indeed this crude kind of Cartesian “substance dualism” is a faulty or at least too simplistic way to look at things. But does that mean we should discard any dualistic principle or is there maybe room for a point of view that we still can legitimately call dualism that at the same time accounts for the firm rejection of the first kind of dualism? Whatever we want to call it, I think we can definitely point at some principles that allow Dennett, the good empirical thinker that he is, to on the one hand reject dualism, and on the other hand posit seemingly contradictory things like:

The trouble with centers of gravity is that they aren’t real; they’re theorists’ fictions. That’s not the trouble with centers of gravity; it’s their glory. They are magnificent fictions, fictions anyone would be proud to have created.

(Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p429)

But don’t I exist? Of course you do. There you are, sitting in the chair, reading my book raising challenges. And curiously enough, your current embodiment, though a necessary precondition for your creation, is not necessarily a requirement for your existence to be prolonged indefinitely. ………

If you think of yourself as a center of narrative gravity, on the other hand, your existence depends on the persistence of that narrative …….., which could theoretically survive indefinitely many switches of medium, …

(Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p430)

Once our brains have built the entrance and exit pathways for the vehicles of language, they swiftly become parasitized (and I mean that literally, as we shall see) by entities that have evolved to thrive in just such a niche: memes.

(Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p430)

Dennett’s warning for a fundamentally antiscientific stance is of course completely justified but does he really bother to find out or express what exactly is antiscientific about it or are we just dealing with someone who simply has that scientific feel? Throughout his book Dennett doesn’t shy away from positing all kinds of realities and entities, attributing them with all kinds of gradations of realness. Are they really real, are they really preposterous? Let’s give a short overview of some of the “entities” Dennett posits and how he evaluates their reality:

-Cartesian Theater: not real, preposterous

-centers of gravity: not real, magnificent fiction though, anyone would be proud to have created

-my existence as a center of narrative gravity: kinda real in a way, of course exists

-brains: real

-memes: entities that literally can parasitize brains

At first glance Dennett seems to contradict himself quite a lot and allows himself at places to be somewhat vague in respect to the reality of these entities and in other places be very affirmative/negative with respect to their reality. For some nitpickers that is the biggest bone of contention when critiquing Dennett. And indeed, he seems to allow himself a lot of liberties, especially given his own cartoonish depiction of the Cartesian Theater. But for me Dennett’s abundance of seemingly contradictory and metaphorical language isn’t even the big issue and not at all antiscientific. The big issue is that in his philosophy there is a complete disregard for how on earth it is even possible to keep track of all this metaphorical language while at the same time being very clear about the materialistic principle that he holds to be a very scientific one. Regardless of any of the widespread notions of dualism one can’t help but point to the dualistic nature of Dennett’s language. Either one assumes a firm non-dualistic stance but in that case I don’t see how Dennett’s discourse can be interpreted any other than rife with contradiction or one assumes a kind of Kantian transcendental dualism and things start to make sense again. Taken from that perspective one can even look at Dennett as someone who is able to formulate brilliantly the dualistic principle I refer to:

Every event in your brain has a definite spatio-temporal location, but asking “Exactly when do you become conscious of the stimulus?” assumes that some one of these vents is, or amounts to, your becoming conscious of the stimulus. This is like asking “Exactly when did the British Empire become informed of the truce in the War of1812?” Sometime between December 24, 1814, and mid- January, 1815—that much is definite, but there simply is no fact of the mater if we try to pin it down to a day and hour. Even if we can give precise times for the various moments at which various officials of the Empire became informed, no one of these moments can be singled out as the time the Empire itself was informed. The signing of the truce was one official, intentional act of the Empire, but the participation by the British forces in the Battle of New Orleans was another, and it was an act performed under the assumption that no truce had yet ben signed.

(Dennett, Consciousness Explained, p168)

I think this quote illustrates perfectly Dennett’s strongest point as well as his weakest point and also where Dennett and Kant meet. In a generous mood I would almost say it could serve as a nice synthesis of Kant’s Critical Idealism. It illustrates exactly why we’re not in complete confusion when assuming all these entities. We have no problem acknowledging that the truce is real, in its determinate conceptual nature, we even have to acknowledge that it has a causal connection with the physical world. But if we want to find its material evidence, we must also acknowledge that that evidence is not exactly locatable in a definite place or time. In that same quote, Dennett posits that every event in your brain has a definite spatio-temporal location but that it nevertheless would be nonsense to ask for the exact moment you becoming aware of it. His biggest flaw here is that he posits an absolute reality of which it is impossible to be aware of and doesn’t really address this peculiarity of his thinking, or thinking in general. So he alludes that the world is full of “truce-like” things but at the same time he posits things with definite spatio temporal locations, that are in some sense different and more “real” or “material” than the “truce-like” things. The question that gets somewhat swept under the rug here is what legitimizes a dictinction between the “truce-like” things and these other things. How can something even be anything other than “truce-like”? Or is it possible to have knowledge of things with definite spatio-temporal locations that are fundamental for all these “truce-like” things?

In part two I will be addressing among others:

-Dennet’s and Kant’s judgements

-Kant’s antinomy of simple vs composite

-Kant’s antinomy of mechanical vs teleological

-Dennett’s concept of time vs Kant’s concept of time

-qualia (I will limit this to the bare minimum, that’s a promise)

Also I will have a further look into the peculiarities of our thinking, Dennett’s thinking, thinking in general and what explanatory model could account for it and how that model can prevent us from expecting to find the impossible.

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©Mathias Mas, 2025.

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