Loved the review—seems like an awesome book. I recall reading it aged 13-14, where he says of chapter 6 that it is very technical and can be skipped; unfortunately I tried anyway and then never finished the book.
The most significant part of it for me was the section you describe this way:
Dennett’s approach is given the mouthful of a name “heterophenomenology” (the study of other peoples’ phenomena), and really means something along the lines of using reports of conscious experience as data to fill in a descriptive model of a reporter, which has room for both accurate and mistaken reports...
...in short, when interpreting text about consciousness, one tries to fit this text into an internally consistent model that is a model of the thing the text is describing.
I remember this being a big insight for me; Dennett had shown that anything that I experienced or thought about, must trace back to some real-world data that I can observe. It was a big shock to me that you could just draw something of an arbitrary line at observable data like “text that people write when we ask them about consciousness”, and then propose hypotheses to explain such data.
(It wasn’t until much later that I realised a good theory of consciousness should go farther and make novel predictions about what people will say in very specific situations, rather than just explaining what you have already seen. But still.)
Loved the review—seems like an awesome book. I recall reading it aged 13-14, where he says of chapter 6 that it is very technical and can be skipped; unfortunately I tried anyway and then never finished the book.
The most significant part of it for me was the section you describe this way:
I remember this being a big insight for me; Dennett had shown that anything that I experienced or thought about, must trace back to some real-world data that I can observe. It was a big shock to me that you could just draw something of an arbitrary line at observable data like “text that people write when we ask them about consciousness”, and then propose hypotheses to explain such data.
(It wasn’t until much later that I realised a good theory of consciousness should go farther and make novel predictions about what people will say in very specific situations, rather than just explaining what you have already seen. But still.)