You have probably experienced the phenomenon of driving for miles while engrossed in conversation (or in silent soliloquy) and then discovering that you have utterly no memory of the road, the traffic, your car-driving activities. It is as if someone else had been driving. Many theorists (myself included, I admit) have cherished this as a favorite case of “unconscious perception and intelligent action.” But were you really unconscious of all those passing cars, stop lights, bends in the road at the time? You were paying attention to other things, but surely if you had been probed about what you had just seen at various moments on the drive, you would have had at least some sketchy details to report.
Dan Dennett
What, then is Dennett’s alternative picture of consciousness? He calls it the multiple drafts model, and what it is is a wholehearted embracing of the distributed nature of human minds. If you probe someone’s consciousness different ways, like asking them to press a button now versus report what they remember later, you can sometimes get different answers, because the state of someone’s mind is distributed throughout their brain, and different probes can access different facts about that state. It’s like the thing that gets probed, which gets fixated into consciousness when we direct attention to it, has multiple drafts of itself available to different systems of the brain, and these drafts get passed around and edited as time passes.
Dan Dennett
Me summarizing Dan Dennett