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Daniel Dennett's multiple drafts model (MDM) of consciousness is a physicalist theory of consciousness based upon cognitivism, which views the mind in terms of information processing. The theory is described in depth in his book, Consciousness Explained, published in 1991. As the title states, the book proposes a high-level explanation of consciousness which is consistent with support for the possibility of strong AI.

Dennett describes the theory as first-person operationalism. As he states it:

The Multiple Drafts model makes [the procedure of] "writing it down" in memory criterial for consciousness: that is what it is for the "given" to be "taken" ... There is no reality of conscious experience independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).[1]

The thesis of multiple drafts

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Dennett's thesis is that our modern understanding of consciousness is unduly influenced by the ideas of René Descartes. To show why, he starts with a description of the phi illusion. In this experiment, two different coloured lights, with an angular separation of a few degrees at the eye, are flashed in succession. If the interval between the flashes is less than a second or so, the first light that is flashed appears to move across to the position of the second light. Furthermore, the light seems to change colour as it moves across the visual field. A green light will appear to turn red as it seems to move across to the position of a red light. Dennett asks how we could see the light change colour before the second light is observed.

Dennett claims that conventional explanations of the colour change boil down to either Orwellian or Stalinesque hypotheses, which he says are the result of Descartes' continued influence on our vision of the mind. In an Orwellian hypothesis, the subject comes to one conclusion, then goes back and changes that memory in light of subsequent events. This is akin to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where records of the past are routinely altered. In a Stalinesque hypothesis, the two events would be reconciled prior to entering the subject's consciousness, with the final result presented as fully resolved. This is akin to Joseph Stalin's show trials, where the verdict has been decided in advance and the trial is just a rote presentation.

[W]e can suppose, both theorists have exactly the same theory of what happens in your brain; they agree about just where and when in the brain the mistaken content enters the causal pathways; they just disagree about whether that location is to be deemed pre-experiential or post-experiential. ... [T]hey even agree about how it ought to "feel" to subjects: Subjects should be unable to tell the difference between misbegotten experiences and immediately misremembered experiences. [p. 125, original emphasis.]

Dennett argues that there is no principled basis for picking one of these theories over the other, because they share a common error in supposing that there is a special time and place where unconscious processing becomes consciously experienced, entering into what Dennett calls the "Cartesian theatre". Both theories require us to cleanly divide a sequence of perceptions and reactions into before and after the instant that they reach the seat of consciousness, but he denies that there is any such moment, as it would lead to infinite regress. Instead, he asserts that there is no privileged place in the brain where consciousness happens. Dennett states that, "[t]here does not exist ... a process such as 'recruitment of consciousness' (into what?), nor any place where the 'vehicle's arrival' is recognized (by whom?)"[2]

Cartesian materialism is the view that there is a crucial finish line or boundary somewhere in the brain, marking a place where the order of arrival equals the order of "presentation" in experience because what happens there is what you are conscious of. ... Many theorists would insist that they have explicitly rejected such an obviously bad idea. But ... the persuasive imagery of the Cartesian Theater keeps coming back to haunt us—laypeople and scientists alike—even after its ghostly dualism has been denounced and exorcized. [p. 107, original emphasis.]

With no theatre, there is no screen, hence no reason to re-present data after it has already been analysed. Dennett says that, "the Multiple Drafts model goes on to claim that the brain does not bother 'constructing' any representations that go to the trouble of 'filling in' the blanks. That would be a waste of time and (shall we say?) paint. The judgement is already in so we can get on with other tasks!"

According to the model, there are a variety of sensory inputs from a given event and also a variety of interpretations of these inputs. The sensory inputs arrive in the brain and are interpreted at different times, so a given event can give rise to a succession of discriminations, constituting the equivalent of multiple drafts of a story. As soon as each discrimination is accomplished, it becomes available for eliciting a behaviour; it does not have to wait to be presented at the theatre.

Like a number of other theories, the Multiple Drafts model understands conscious experience as taking time to occur, such that percepts do not instantaneously arise in the mind in their full richness. The distinction is that Dennett's theory denies any clear and unambiguous boundary separating conscious experiences from all other processing. According to Dennett, consciousness is to be found in the actions and flows of information from place to place, rather than some singular view containing our experience. There is no central experiencer who confers a durable stamp of approval on any particular draft.

Different parts of the neural processing assert more or less control at different times. For something to reach consciousness is akin to becoming famous, in that it must leave behind consequences by which it is remembered. To put it another way, consciousness is the property of having enough influence to affect what the mouth will say and the hands will do. Which inputs are "edited" into our drafts is not an exogenous act of supervision, but part of the self-organizing functioning of the network, and at the same level as the circuitry that conveys information bottom-up.

The conscious self is taken to exist as an abstraction visible at the level of the intentional stance, akin to a body of mass having a "centre of gravity". Analogously, Dennett refers to the self as the "centre of narrative gravity", a story we tell ourselves about our experiences. Consciousness exists, but not independently of behaviour and behavioural disposition, which can be studied through heterophenomenology.

The origin of this operationalist approach can be found in Dennett's immediately preceding work. Dennett (1988) explains consciousness in terms of access consciousness alone, denying the independent existence of what Ned Block has labeled phenomenal consciousness.[3] He argues that "Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties". Having related all consciousness to properties, he concludes that they cannot be meaningfully distinguished from our judgements about them. He writes:

The infallibilist line on qualia treats them as properties of one's experience one cannot in principle misdiscover, and this is a mysterious doctrine (at least as mysterious as papal infallibility) unless we shift the emphasis a little and treat qualia as logical constructs out of subjects' qualia-judgments: a subject's experience has the quale F if and only if the subject judges his experience to have quale F. We can then treat such judgings as constitutive acts, in effect, bringing the quale into existence by the same sort of license as novelists have to determine the hair color of their characters by fiat. We do not ask how Dostoevski knows that Raskolnikov's hair is light brown.[4]

In other words, once we've explained a perception fully in terms of how it affects us, there is nothing left to explain. In particular, there is no such thing as a perception which may be considered in and of itself (a quale). Instead, the subject's honest reports of how things seem to them are inherently authoritative on how things seem to them, but not on the matter of how things actually are.

So when we look one last time at our original characterization of qualia, as ineffable, intrinsic, private, directly apprehensible properties of experience, we find that there is nothing to fill the bill. In their place are relatively or practically ineffable public properties we can refer to indirectly via reference to our private property-detectors—private only in the sense of idiosyncratic. And insofar as we wish to cling to our subjective authority about the occurrence within us of states of certain types or with certain properties, we can have some authority—not infallibility or incorrigibility, but something better than sheer guessing—but only if we restrict ourselves to relational, extrinsic properties like the power of certain internal states of ours to provoke acts of apparent re-identification. So contrary to what seems obvious at first blush, there simply are no qualia at all.[4]

The key to the multiple drafts model is that, after removing qualia, explaining consciousness boils down to explaining the behaviour we recognise as conscious. Consciousness is as consciousness does.

Critical responses

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Psychobiologist John Staddon contrasts a simple "new behaviorism" interpretation of color phi with Dennett and Kinsbourne's account. The basic idea is that because of well-known processes such as lateral inhibition, the internal states created by the two stimuli are identical, hence are so reported.[5] Bogen (1992) points out that the brain is bilaterally symmetrical. That being the case, if Cartesian materialism is true, there might be two Cartesian theatres, so arguments against only one are flawed.[6] Velmans (1992) argues that the phi effect and the cutaneous rabbit illusion demonstrate that there is a delay whilst modelling occurs and that this delay was discovered by Benjamin Libet.[7]

It has also been claimed that the argument in the multiple drafts model does not support its conclusion.[8]

"Straw man"

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Much of the criticism asserts that Dennett's theory attacks the wrong target, failing to explain what it claims to. Chalmers (1996) maintains that Dennett has produced no more than a theory of how subjects report events.[9] Some even parody the title of the book as "Consciousness Explained Away", accusing him of greedy reductionism.[10] Another line of criticism disputes the accuracy of Dennett's characterisations of existing theories:

The now standard response to Dennett's project is that he has picked a fight with a straw man. Cartesian materialism, it is alleged, is an impossibly naive account of phenomenal consciousness held by no one currently working in cognitive science or the philosophy of mind. Consequently, whatever the effectiveness of Dennett's demolition job, it is fundamentally misdirected (see, e.g., Block, 1993, 1995; Shoemaker, 1993; and Tye, 1993).[11]

Unoriginality

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Multiple drafts is also attacked for making a claim to novelty. It may be the case, however, that such attacks mistake which features Dennett is claiming as novel. Korb states that, "I believe that the central thesis will be relatively uncontentious for most cognitive scientists, but that its use as a cleaning solvent for messy puzzles will be viewed less happily in most quarters." (Korb 1993) In this way, Dennett uses uncontroversial ideas towards more controversial ends, leaving him open to claims of unoriginality when uncontroversial parts are focused upon.

Even the notion of consciousness as drafts is not unique to Dennett. According to Hankins, Dieter Teichert suggests that Paul Ricoeur's theories agree with Dennett's on the notion that "the self is basically a narrative entity, and that any attempt to give it a free-floating independent status is misguided." [Hankins] Others see Derrida's (1982) representationalism as consistent with the notion of a mind that has perceptually changing content without a definitive present instant.[12]

To those who believe that consciousness entails something more than behaving in all ways conscious, Dennett's view is seen as eliminativist, since it denies the existence of qualia and the possibility of philosophical zombies. However, Dennett is not denying the existence of the mind or of consciousness, only what he considers a naive view of them. The point of contention is whether Dennett's own definitions are indeed more accurate: whether what we think of when we speak of perceptions and consciousness can be understood in terms of nothing more than their effect on behaviour.

Information processing and consciousness

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The role of information processing in consciousness has been criticised by John Searle who, in his Chinese room argument,[13] states that he cannot find anything that could be recognised as conscious experience in a system that relies solely on motions of things from place to place. Dennett sees this argument as misleading, arguing that consciousness is not to be found in a specific part of the system, but in the actions of the whole. In essence, he denies that consciousness requires something in addition to capacity for behaviour, saying that philosophers such as Searle, "just can't imagine how understanding could be a property that emerges from lots of distributed quasi-understanding in a large system".[14]

See also

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References

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Bibliography

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Further reading

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Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Multiple drafts model

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The Multiple Drafts model is a of developed by philosopher , proposing that conscious mental states emerge from the brain's distributed, parallel processing of sensory inputs, where multiple overlapping "drafts" of narrative content are continuously generated, edited, and revised across various neural circuits without requiring a central, unified "theater" for . Introduced in Dennett's 1991 book , the model challenges traditional views of as a singular, serial stream by emphasizing ongoing interpretive processes that integrate information over time, allowing for the illusion of a coherent, present-tense . At its core, the model describes as a dynamic, decentralized : sensory discriminations occur rapidly and in parallel throughout the , producing provisional contents that are subject to perpetual revision based on subsequent inputs and contextual integration, rather than being fixed at a precise moment of "." This contrasts sharply with the "" metaphor, which posits a central stage where experiences are broadcast to a unified observer; Dennett argues that such a notion leads to paradoxes, like the or subjective timing illusions, and is unnecessary given from and . Instead, the Multiple Drafts model aligns with findings on neural competition and , where no single draft achieves finality—instead, contents compete for dominance in guiding behavior and formation, with "fame in the brain" arising from processes that amplify salient narratives. Key examples illustrate the model's explanatory power, such as the color , where observers perceive a moving spot changing color mid-path despite the actual stimuli being two stationary, briefly flashing lights of different colors separated by darkness; this illusion results from the brain's retrospective filling-in of color information after the motion has been discriminated, demonstrating how drafts are edited post hoc to create a seamless perceptual story. Similarly, phenomena like or delayed conscious report of stimuli underscore that lacks a privileged "now," as multiple drafts allow for flexible reconstruction of events without or a fixed observer. The model's implications extend to , suggesting that and are not mysterious inner lights but emergent properties of these competitive, narrative-building processes, influencing debates in on how the brain produces the feeling of subjectivity.

Background and Thesis

Origins and Development

The multiple drafts model of consciousness was first systematically proposed by philosopher in his 1991 book , where it served as a key component of his critique against traditional, centralized accounts of the mind, such as those positing a singular "" for conscious . In this work, Dennett drew on principles of —the view that mental states are ultimately physical processes—and cognitivism, which models the mind as an information-processing system akin to computational architectures, to argue for a distributed, non-hierarchical function without a fixed locus of awareness. Dennett's ideas built on his earlier explorations in Brainstorms (1978), a collection of essays that introduced functionalist approaches to and mental content, laying foundational concepts for understanding as emergent from neural computations rather than a mysterious inner light. This groundwork was further developed through his 1992 collaboration with neuroscientist Marcel Kinsbourne, in which they examined temporal aspects of brain processing and subjective experience, emphasizing how arises from parallel, overlapping neural activities rather than sequential staging. Their target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences provoked extensive commentary, highlighting the model's implications for resolving paradoxes in perceived timing and attention. The model evolved in Dennett's subsequent writings, with refinements in 1996 that shifted emphasis toward distributed "fame in the brain"—a competitive where neural contents gain influence through widespread rather than centralized editing—and further clarifications in 1998 addressing transduction myths in . These developments underscored the model's commitment to parallel processing in cognitive architectures. Initially received in 1990s philosophy of circles as a provocative alternative to dualist and qualia-centered theories, it sparked debates in journals like Behavioral and Brain Sciences and influenced discussions on and .

Core Thesis

The multiple drafts model, proposed by philosopher Daniel Dennett, posits that consciousness arises from a distributed, parallel processing of neural representations across the brain, rather than from a centralized locus of awareness. In this view, sensory inputs and cognitive activities generate numerous competing "drafts" of narrative content—temporary, editable interpretations of experience—that evolve asynchronously in various brain regions without converging on a single, unified representation. This framework serves as a physicalist alternative to traditional models of consciousness, emphasizing the brain's inherent parallelism over any notion of a singular observer or final edit. A key for this is that of a bustling or house, where multiple reporters and editors work simultaneously on competing versions of a story, revising and influencing one another without a central dictating the "official" narrative. These drafts compete for dominance through ongoing interactions, but no particular version achieves a privileged status as the "conscious" one at any precise moment; instead, what becomes conscious is determined retrospectively by the draft's influence on subsequent and . As Dennett describes, "There is a in the ... in which multiple (and often incompatible) streams of content fixation... take place simultaneously (and asynchronously). These are the multiple drafts..." This model distinctly contrasts with serial processing accounts of consciousness, which assume a linear of events culminating in a fixed, privileged content stream presented to a central ". By rejecting such , the multiple drafts approach highlights the brain's capacity for distributed , where consciousness emerges as an ongoing, competitive selection among drafts rather than a discrete output from a unified mechanism. There is no fact of the matter about an exact onset of for any experience, underscoring the model's commitment to avoiding illusory commitments to precise phenomenal moments.

Key Concepts

Rejection of the Cartesian Theater

The represents an intuitive yet flawed metaphor for consciousness, envisioning a central stage within the mind where sensory inputs and experiences are projected for observation by an internal audience, often likened to a or central viewer. This idea traces back to , who identified the as the principal seat of the soul, the point where immaterial mind and material body interact to unify thoughts, sensations, and volitions into a coherent experience. Daniel Dennett, in developing the Multiple Drafts model, explicitly critiques and rejects the Cartesian Theater as a remnant of Cartesian materialism that misrepresents how consciousness arises. He argues that positing such a central locus inevitably triggers an infinite regress, known as the homunculus problem, wherein the observing entity itself demands explanation by yet another observer, leading to an unending chain without resolution. Moreover, the model fails to capture the brain's distributed processing, as there is no anatomical or functional "keystone" cell or region serving as a centralized hub for conscious content; instead, Dennett posits that consciousness emerges without any such singular point of projection. Evidence from bolsters this rejection by demonstrating the brain's reliance on modular, parallel processes rather than centralized integration. , for example, involves distinct processing streams—such as the ventral pathway for form and color identification and the dorsal pathway for motion and spatial relations—that operate concurrently across cortical areas without converging on a single theater-like site. Phenomena like the color phi illusion further illustrate this, where apparent motion and color attribution span approximately 200 milliseconds of neural revision, revealing no fixed, centralized "presentation" but rather ongoing, distributed interpretation. By dispensing with the Cartesian Theater, the Multiple Drafts model carries significant philosophical implications, as it undermines the assumption of a unified subjective "now" or inner stage where and experiences must be explained. This avoidance eliminates artificial puzzles, such as the between physical processes and phenomenal consciousness, by framing awareness as a dynamic, edited narrative arising from parallel neural competitions rather than a mysterious central display.

Content Fixation and Probes

In the multiple drafts model, content fixation refers to discrete events in which neural activity stabilizes into interpretable content across various regions, occurring in without a centralized . These fixations represent specific discriminations of sensory inputs, such as detecting features like color or motion, and are precisely locatable in both space and time within the brain's distributed networks. Unlike traditional models positing a single point of conscious realization, these fixations do not inherently produce a unified "final draft" but instead contribute to an ongoing stream of potential contents available for further processing. Probes play a crucial role in eliciting and influencing these fixed contents, functioning as external or internal queries—such as questions, stimuli, or behavioral demands—that access and amplify specific drafts. By probing the brain's activity at different locations and times, these interventions precipitate observable effects, such as verbal reports or actions, that reveal particular narratives from the distributed fixations. For instance, the timing and nature of a probe can determine which contents become influential, effectively selecting from the parallel drafts without altering their underlying fixations. The model distinguishes between personal-level consciousness, which involves recollectable contents boosted into awareness through probing, and subpersonal processes that operate below the threshold of reportability. At the personal level, probed fixations integrate into a coherent subjective , enabling phenomena like or memory recall, while subpersonal fixations remain as modular, non-conscious discriminations that modulate without entering explicit . This distinction underscores that is not a fixed property of contents but emerges relationally through interaction with probes. A representative example occurs in , where multiple content fixations—such as those for shape, color, and motion—arise concurrently from sensory inputs, but only those probed by attentional or verbal demands enter the . In the , for instance, viewers perceive a spot changing color mid-motion despite brief, disjoint stimuli; the probe of retrospective judgment fixes a unified motion content, overriding the subpersonal discrepancies without a central . This illustrates how probes shape the experiential timeline from competing fixations.

Processes and Mechanisms

Fame in the Brain

In Daniel Dennett's elaboration of the multiple drafts model, is conceptualized through the metaphor of "fame in the brain," where conscious content emerges not as a binary state or localized event but as a matter of degree, reflecting the extent to which particular neural representations influence multiple brain systems and behaviors over time. This fame is analogous to celebrity status in society: it lacks a precise onset, arising gradually through cascading effects rather than a singular moment of illumination, much like how becoming famous involves accumulating influence without a fixed date. Unlike traditional views positing a central "theater" for , this process distributes prominence across the brain's parallel activities, emphasizing functional impact on memory, action, and verbal reportability. The competitive dynamics underlying this fame involve ongoing propagation and rivalry among sensory and cognitive drafts for neural resources, with no central judge arbitrating outcomes. Drafts—transient neural interpretations of stimuli—spread through reverberating loops of amplification, where those gaining sufficient "clout" via and dominate, influencing downstream processes like and recollection, while less competitive ones dissipate without lasting effects. This anarchic competition, akin to a political arena within the , ensures that "famous" contents achieve global accessibility, enabling coordinated behavior without requiring a unified observer; for instance, a visual percept might propagate to motor and linguistic systems only if it outcompetes distractions. Success is retrospective, determined by the sequelae of influence rather than an intrinsic property. Consequently, there is no singular neural correlate of (NCC) identifiable as a fixed "spot" in the ; instead, correlates are distributed and context-dependent, varying by the thresholds of fame required for different tasks or environments. -scale patterns of coherent activity, such as those involving thalamocortical loops, facilitate this distributed fame, but no one region or moment defines universally. This view challenges searches for a monolithic NCC, proposing instead that correlates with the dynamic, variable prominence of contents across networks. Regarding qualia—the subjective qualities of experience—this model implies they are not intrinsic, private properties but emerge from the functional roles of famous contents within the brain's global workspace. Qualia thus represent dispositional effects of competitive success, such as the informational superabundance that a prominent draft exerts on perception and report, rather than ineffable essences independent of neural competition. For example, the "redness" of seeing a rose arises not from a special qualic transduction but from how that content's fame integrates sensory details into broader cognitive influence, avoiding the need for mysterious intrinsics.

Retrospective Timing of Consciousness

In the Multiple Drafts Model, there is no precise moment at which a mental content transitions from unconscious to conscious processing; instead, the subjective timing of conscious experiences is assigned , determined by the subsequent influences and interpretations of those contents across distributed processes. This retrospective assignment arises because conscious emerges from the ongoing and revision of multiple neural drafts, where the "when" of an experience is not fixed at its initial sensory input but shaped by later neural activity that amplifies or contextualizes it. Dennett draws an analogy to biological speciation to illustrate this fuzzy and retrospective nature of conscious onsets, noting that just as species boundaries lack a sharp demarcation and are only identifiable through retrospective analysis of their aftereffects or "sequelae," the of a conscious state is similarly determined by its enduring impacts rather than an exact starting point. In this view, the does not maintain a central clock for timestamping experiences; instead, temporal features are inferred post-hoc from the patterns of neural influence, much like how evolutionary lineages are retroactively categorized. This retrospective timing explains perceptual illusions such as the , where viewers perceive smooth motion and color change between two distant spots despite the inferring the color shift mid-trajectory only after the second spot appears, effectively filling in the timeline without direct observation. Similarly, in , individuals fail to notice major scene alterations during saccades or brief interruptions, as the retrospectively constructs a coherent by overwriting or simplifying prior drafts, bypassing any need for a unified temporal register. These examples highlight how subjective time is an approximate reconstruction, with fame—served as a measure of a draft's competitive influence—contributing to which temporal attributions gain prominence in one sentence. The model also challenges experiments like those of Libet (1985), which purported to show that readiness potentials precede conscious intentions by 350–400 milliseconds, suggesting unconscious initiation of action; Dennett argues that such studies do not capture true onsets but rather probe subjects' retrospective verbal reports, which are themselves products of later interpretive drafts rather than direct evidence of a fixed transition to consciousness. Libet's findings, interpreted through the Multiple Drafts lens, reveal methodological assumptions of a singular conscious moment that the model rejects, emphasizing instead the distributed and revisable nature of temporal judgments.

Criticisms and Debates

Straw Man Objections

Critics of the multiple drafts model have frequently accused of committing a fallacy by targeting an exaggerated or outdated of opposing views on , particularly the notion of the , while sidestepping more sophisticated alternatives in of mind and . This critique posits that Dennett constructs the as a simplistic model positing a single, central locus in the where conscious is unified and presented to an inner observer, a view that few, if any, serious theorists explicitly endorse, thereby allowing him to dismiss dualism and intuitionist accounts without engaging their nuanced physicalist variants. In early 1990s reviews and responses to (1991), philosophers such as , Sydney Shoemaker, and Michael Tye argued that Dennett's assault on the misrepresents representationalist and , which do not require a literal "theater" but rather distributed processes of phenomenal representation. Similarly, , in a 1995 exchange, contended that Dennett's model evades the by dismissing —the subjective, first-person aspects of experience—as illusory or non-existent, without directly confronting biological naturalism's emphasis on intrinsic subjectivity as a causally efficacious feature of processes. Searle further charged that this approach "explains away" consciousness rather than explaining it, reducing it to third-person behavioral descriptions and ignoring the undeniable reality of felt experience. Dennett rebutted these accusations by maintaining that the Cartesian Theater is not merely a deliberate theory held by academics but a pervasive folk embedded in everyday conceptions of the mind, which perpetuates Cartesian dualism and obstructs a fully physicalist understanding of . He argued that rejecting this , even if it appears exaggerated, clears conceptual ground for the multiple drafts model, where emerges from parallel, distributed processes without a privileged center, and that critics' denials of a central theater often amount to "vague handwaving" without specifying how phenomenal content is fixed without some form of prioritization. In post-1991 debates, including his exchanges with Searle, Dennett emphasized that his critique targets the intuitive appeal of the theater model, which subtly influences even sophisticated theories, thereby justifying its dismantlement to advance empirical over armchair phenomenology.

Unoriginality Claims

Critics have argued that Dennett's multiple drafts model (MDM) largely repackages ideas from earlier theories without introducing substantial new predictions. For instance, it shares significant overlaps with Bernard Baars' (GWT), proposed in 1988, which posits as arising from the broadcasting of information across a global workspace amid parallel unconscious processes. One analysis describes MDM as "virtually the same" as GWT, differing primarily in its rejection of a metaphorical "theater" stage for conscious content, while both emphasize distributed, functional processes over a centralized locus of . Similarly, elements of MDM echo the parallel distributed processing (PDP) framework developed by Rumelhart and McClelland in 1986, which models cognition as emergent from interconnected neural-like units handling information in parallel without a singular executive control. Specific claims of unoriginality highlight MDM's perceived lack of unique testable hypotheses, portraying it as overly derivative of and . Detractors contend that by denying a fixed "moment" of and focusing on observable behavioral outputs, MDM revives behaviorist dogmas that sideline in favor of functional descriptions, much like mid-20th-century approaches that reduced mental states to stimulus-response patterns. It is also criticized for drawing heavily from connectionist architectures, such as those in PDP, to explain content competition without advancing novel empirical predictions beyond what these paradigms already offered. In defense, Dennett acknowledged influences from these traditions but maintained that MDM innovates by uniquely integrating the concepts of "fame in the brain"—where content gains influence through competitive processes—and retrospective attribution of conscious timing, thereby dissolving longstanding paradoxes like the without invoking a central integrator. This synthesis, he argued, provides a non-theatrical framework that resolves illusions of simultaneity in more parsimoniously than predecessors. Debates over these unoriginality claims intensified post-1991, particularly in academic journals like Behavioral and Brain Sciences, where Dennett and Kinsbourne's target article on temporal aspects of elicited commentaries highlighting overlaps with GWT and while underscoring MDM's distinctive anti-theater emphasis. These exchanges, spanning and , often emphasized shared functionalist roots but debated whether MDM's contributions justified its prominence as a standalone model.

Challenges from Information Processing Views

Critics from and argue that the multiple drafts model's emphasis on distributed, parallel processing resists the identification of specific (NCC), which many researchers seek as localized mechanisms underlying conscious experience. For instance, and Christof Koch's framework posits that consciousness arises from competition among synchronized neuronal assemblies in specific brain regions, such as the prefrontal and parietal cortices, conflicting with the model's rejection of any central or privileged site for content fixation. This distributed approach is seen as undermining efforts to pinpoint NCC through targeted experiments, as it disperses conscious content across multiple brain areas without a unifying locus. The model also faces questions regarding information processing, particularly whether parallel drafts can adequately account for the —the integration of disparate features like color, shape, and motion into a coherent perceptual whole—or the subjective sense of unified experience. Kathleen Akins contends that Dennett's probe-based mechanism for selecting and editing drafts fails to specify how conflicting modular outputs, such as those in the color phi where motion attribution shifts between stimuli, resolve into a single without central integration. Without a clear process for temporal and spatial , the model struggles to explain why conscious feels seamless and integrated rather than fragmented. Empirically, the multiple drafts model is criticized for its incompatibility with neuroimaging data showing synchronized neural activity as a hallmark of conscious processing, as revealed by fMRI and EEG studies of perceptual awareness. Akins highlights that the model's parallel, non-serial nature makes it difficult to test predictions about the timing or location of content fixation, rendering distinctions like pre-conscious versus conscious revisions empirically indistinguishable and the theory overly vague for falsification. This vagueness limits its alignment with evidence of oscillatory synchrony in the gamma band during unified percepts, which suggests more coordinated integration than the model's distributed drafts imply. In response, Dennett maintains that is a functional property emerging from distributed computations, not requiring precise neural localization or synchronization for its explanation, much like software running on parallel hardware without a single "executive" processor. He argues that the search for NCC misguidedly assumes a centralized "theater" for , whereas the multiple drafts framework, with its emphasis on fame in the and probe accessibility, better fits a paradigm where arises from competitive, ongoing processes rather than fixed correlates.
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