Daniel C. Dennett and Marcel Kinsbourne (1992), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15(2), 183–201, a target article with open peer commentary and the authors’ response (the issue’s pages run to 247). Drafted at the Bellagio Study Center in April 1990. Dennett’s copy is in the Tufts Digital Library.
Key takeaways
- Two models (§1.1). Cartesian materialism: discard Descartes’s dualism but keep a central place where the contents of consciousness are presented, so that the timing of arrival there fixes subjective order. Multiple Drafts: discriminations are distributed in space and time, are made only once, and are revised by many processes in parallel; there is “a parallel stream of conflicting and continuously revised contents”, no draft of which is canonical.
- Content and vehicle (§2.1). The time a content is represented is not the time it represents, as a dated letter to Calcutta tells of a truce signed before a battle whose news came first. The brain can infer order by “content-sensitive settling” and need not re-stage events in their represented order for an inner observer.
- Orwell and Stalin (§2.2). A false content can be added before experience (a Stalinesque show trial) or after it (Orwellian revision of memory). At the time scale of colour phi and metacontrast both accounts fit all the data, including the subject’s own, so “there is really only a verbal difference between the two theories”.
- Libet (§3). Backward referral and the subjective delay of intention are re-read as failures to keep the time of representing apart from the time represented. Grey Walter’s “precognitive carousel” shows the same point with a task the brain normally performs.
- Conclusion (§4). “The representation of sequence in the stream of consciousness is a product of the brain’s interpretative processes, not a direct reflection of the sequence of events making up those processes.”
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request for Dennett, as the article form of the Multiple Drafts model. It is the model Chalmers names in a sentence in “Facing Up” (LIT-406, read in NOTE-336) as one more theory of an easy problem.
On the society-of-mind bridge (THEORY-043). The brief asks whether “no central Cartesian theatre” makes consciousness a society-of-agents product in Minsky’s sense, and whether that bears on the anti-nesting question. My reading:
- Not in Minsky’s sense, though in his company. The paper denies a central place, controller or audience, as Minsky’s memo (LIT-399) and Brooks (LIT-436) do. It cites The Society of Mind (LIT-429) once, for the question which “finish line” fixes order when A beats B to one and B beats A to another (cf. Minsky 1985, p. 61). But its units are not agents with competences. They are “content-fixations”, discriminations and “editing” processes, and the paper never calls them agents, a society, or homunculi. What it gives consciousness is not a society’s product but an interpretive product: the narrative the probes elicit.
- It supplies a regress argument that is close in shape to Kammerer’s anti-nesting principle (LIT-409). A central conscious subsystem would be “the first step in an infinite regress of too-powerful homunculi”: its work would be either mysterious or decomposed into subsystems “that begin to duplicate the tasks of the ‘nonconscious’ parts” (§1.1). That forbids a conscious part that re-presents the whole’s contents for the whole. It does not forbid minded parts as such. A citizen is not a Cartesian theatre for a nation. So it is no help in refusing Schwitzgebel’s upward move (LIT-159). The pairing with Kammerer is mine.
- It cuts against the exclusion postulate. The THEORY counts IIT’s exclusion postulate, derived from an axiom that experience has definite borders, as one form of anti-nesting. This paper argues that below a few hundred milliseconds there is no fact about which contents are “in” consciousness at an instant, and that a cortical “mode shift” criterion timed by outside observers is still the Cartesian Theatre if its timing is taken as definitive (§3.2). A definite-borders axiom applied to time is what the paper denies. My inference; the paper predates IIT.
- Its criterion for an observer is organisational. “When a portion of the world comes in this way to compose a skein of narratives, that portion of the world is an observer” (§2.2). Nothing in that definition is restricted to brains. So, on my reading, the paper sides with the functionalist premise the THEORY says both directions share.
On The Emotion Machine (LIT-432, read in NOTE-348). Its “Immanence Illusion” (that no resource can know what another is doing “right now”) quotes Dennett and Kinsbourne. This is the paper it quotes.
On Hofstadter. Douglas Hofstadter is among those thanked for comments on drafts. Nothing in the text connects to GEB (LIT-437) or I Am a Strange Loop (LIT-423).
On Damasio. The paper cites “Damasio 1989a” for there being no single place through which all causal trains pass to deposit their contents “in consciousness”. The reference list was not in the PDF I read, so I cannot say which 1989 Damasio paper that is. The record holds one candidate, the convergence-zone proposal “Time-locked multiregional retroactivation” (LIT-385, filed unread); the identification is unverified.
The book-length version, with the other implications the paper sets aside (“Dennett 1991b”), is Consciousness Explained (LIT-443).
It carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and it does not belong in the anthology.