Source
Dennett (1992), “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity”, in Kessel, Cole and Johnson (eds.), Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, LIT-442, read in full in NOTE-364. The text read was a copy-edited transcription, not the Erlbaum printing, so no pages are given and the quotations below should be checked against Dennett’s own wording before they are relied on.
What was actually shown
The centre of gravity. It has “no mass; it has no color; it has no physical properties at all, except for spatio-temporal location”, yet it figures in explanations that “appear to be causal” (“Why doesn’t the lamp tip over?”). If its path matched one iron atom’s, identifying the two “would be a category mistake”. The essay assumes Reichenbach’s line between abstracta, theorists’ fictions, and illata, inferred entities.
The fictional character. Readers learn more about a character than the author states, by implication. Beyond that, fictional worlds are indeterminate: of Holmes’s mole on his left shoulder blade, “There is simply no fact of the matter.” Bivalence fails for fictional objects and holds for historical persons.
Gilbert. A novel-writing computer prints “Call me Gilbert”, and Gilbert “is a product of a design or invention process in which there aren’t any selves at all”. Given wheels and a camera, the story turns out to have “a truth-preserving interpretation”: hit the robot and Gilbert is hit. The robot “doesn’t know what it’s doing”, and neither does your brain. That a mindless machine could write a passable novel is stipulated; the doubter is asked “to show why you think this must be so”.
Determinacy and revision. A new Updike novel about the young Rabbit would make the character more determinate by a creative step, and “That is the way we treat each other; that is the way we are.” Self-interpretation can rewrite one’s past in the same way.
Counting. After Gazzaniga, the normal mind is a bundle of partly autonomous systems that make themselves cohere in one story, “enhanced by an illusion of greater unity”. An inconsistent sequel is resolved by splitting the character. Two selves in one body need only that the story “coheres much better” around two points than one. “The chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography is one’s self.”
What could have come out otherwise. A search of the brain could have ended at “that cell … that’s the self!” The essay predicts it will not, since selves have only grossly defined location. That is a prediction from the account, not a finding the essay reports.
What this does not say
- That the self is an illusion or nothing. It is a theorist’s fiction of the respectable kind, like a centre of gravity. Shanahan (LIT-466) cites the essay for a no-self conclusion; the filing readings call that a reading, not Dennett’s view.
- That the analogy has been shown to hold. The essay names the shared features and does not show they are the ones that matter. A reader who thinks a self has a first-person point of view or a stake in its future is not answered.
- Anything about consciousness. Gilbert is stipulated “not a conscious machine”. On the essay’s own terms a self-narrative is no evidence of experience, so it does not bear on THEORY-023’s question.
- What a person is owed or what makes one persist. The essay does not take up persistence, which is the question Locke, Parfit and Lewis answer (THEORY-417 separates them).
- That self-talk evolved as the essay says. The account, after Jaynes, is labelled speculative.
- That the clinical cases are evidence here. The split-brain and multiple-personality material is reported from Gazzaniga and the clinical literature, with their readings.
- Anything about groups. Counting a group self wherever the best interpretation of a group coheres around one point is NOTE-364’s extension, not the essay’s.
Connections
- Strawson (THEORY-684) places Dennett at ”[+D +F +S +R]”, committed to falsifying revision. NOTE-383 and NOTE-364 read the essay otherwise: the Updike case makes the self more determinate, it does not falsify facts. The two accounts disagree about whether people in general narrate themselves, and about what follows if they do not.
- Gallagher (THEORY-458) objects that a single point cannot hold conflict and self-deception, and proposes the self as “the sum total of its narratives”. Dennett meets the same cases by splitting the character into two selves; Gallagher keeps one self with the conflict inside it.
- Hume (THEORY-681). The essay closes on Hume’s failure to find a self. The fiction Hume blames on the imagination is here the brain’s autobiography.
- Shanahan (THEORY-490). A role-played simulacrum has a fictional character’s structure: indeterminate beyond the conversation, made more determinate as it goes on. Dennett would count such a coherent character a self; the role-play paper counts it as “no-one at home”. The pairing is NOTE-370’s.
- “Real Patterns” (LIT-220, NOTE-190) uses the centre of gravity as the model of a good abstract object; this essay applies it to the self. Minsky’s Single-Self (LIT-432, NOTE-348) is also a useful fiction, but many models switched among rather than one posited point.
- THEORY-043. The essay’s selves are produced by parts that know nothing of them, so it sits on the decomposition side, and its counting rule is interpretive, not architectural.
Note of 2026-10-29: what holds it back
Kept Proposed by the sixteenth status review. NOTE-364 read the essay in full, from a transcription whose quotations are unchecked against the printing. Neither promote_when result is in the record: no argument that the features a self shares with a centre of gravity are the ones that matter, against the reader who credits a self with a first-person point of view, and no built case of a process with no self in it authoring a self- narrative with a true interpretation; Gilbert is stipulated.