Twenty-four views of the mind

Thinkers

Each page sets out one view, the argument that drives it, an interactive figure, and where it meets and parts from Dennett. The map shows roughly how far each stands from him.

The allies

Thinkers who share Dennett's view that consciousness can be explained by what the brain does, and who developed it in their own directions.

• Keith Frankishcontemporary

  Illusionism named and defended: introspection misrepresents brain states as having phenomenal properties they lack.

• Nicholas Humphreyborn 1943

  Sensation as a private bodily response that has folded back on itself, and consciousness as a magical show the brain stages for itself.

• Michael Grazianocontemporary

  The attention schema: the brain builds a simplified model of its own attention, and that model is what we call awareness.

• Douglas Hofstadterborn 1945

  The self as a strange loop: a pattern that represents itself. Dennett's co-editor on The Mind's I.

• Joscha Bachcontemporary

  The brain simulates a world and a person within it; only the simulated person is conscious. Consciousness is real, but virtual.

• Paul and Patricia Churchlandborn 1942 and 1943

  Neurophilosophy and eliminative materialism: folk psychology is a theory, and neuroscience may replace it.

The long history

Two and a half thousand years of argument about what a mind is, in order. Dennett's view grows out of some of these thinkers and is a reply to others.

• Aristotle384–322 BC

  The soul is the form of a living body: what it does, not a separate thing inside it. If an axe were alive, cutting would be its soul.

• René Descartes1596–1650

  Mind and body are two different substances, meeting in the pineal gland. The origin of the Cartesian Theatre.

• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz1646–1716

  Walk inside a thinking machine as you would a mill, and you will find only parts pushing parts, never a perception.

• David Hume1711–1776

  Look inside for the self and you find only perceptions. The self is a bundle, and the mind a kind of theatre with no stage.

• Thomas Henry Huxley1825–1895

  Consciousness is the steam whistle on the locomotive: produced by the machine, but with no effect on how it runs.

• Gilbert Ryle1900–1976

  The ghost in the machine is a category mistake. Dennett's teacher at Oxford.

• Alan Turing1912–1954

  Replace "Can machines think?" with a game: if a machine's answers can't be told from a person's, what more could you ask?

• U. T. Place and J. J. C. Smart1956, 1959

  Sensations are brain processes, as lightning is an electrical discharge. The identity theory, and the start of illusionism.

• Hilary Putnam1926–2016

  Pain is a functional state that could be realised in neurons, silicon or an octopus. The founding statement of functionalism.

• Thomas Nagelborn 1937

  There is something it is like to be a bat, and no amount of physical science seems able to capture it.

• John Searleborn 1932

  A man in a room shuffles Chinese symbols by rule and understands nothing. So running a program is not enough for a mind.

• Frank Jacksonborn 1943

  Mary knows every physical fact about colour, but learns something new when she first sees red. Or does she?

• Ned Blockborn 1942

  The nation of China, organised like a brain, would not feel pain. And access consciousness is not phenomenal consciousness.

The far side

Contemporary thinkers who reject Dennett's picture, in increasing measure. For them, something about experience escapes any account of what the brain does.

• Anil Sethborn 1972

  Perception is controlled hallucination, rooted in a living body. Experience is real, and the job is to explain its features, not deny it.

• David Chalmersborn 1966

  The hard problem and the zombie argument: a being physically like you, with no experience at all, seems possible.

• Philip Goffcontemporary

  Panpsychism: consciousness is a fundamental feature of matter, and Galileo's decision to leave it out of physics was the original error.

The critical rationalists

Two thinkers who see minds above all as creators of knowledge, growing by conjecture and criticism. They agree with each other about science and part company over the mind, one far from Dennett and one near the middle.

• Karl Popper1902–1994

  Three worlds: physical things, minds, and the theories minds create. Theories change the world only through minds, so minds must be real and effective.

• David Deutschborn 1953

  People are universal explainers. Since any universal computer can run any program, artificial minds are possible; what is missing is a theory of creativity.