[1] Dennett puts forward a "multiple drafts" model of consciousness, suggesting that there is no single central place (a "Cartesian theater") where conscious experience occurs; instead there are "various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain".

[2] The brain consists of a "bundle of semi-independent agencies";[3] when "content-fixation" takes place in one of these, its effects may propagate so that it leads to the utterance of one of the sentences that make up the story in which the central character is one's "self".

Dennett's view of consciousness is that it is the apparently serial account for the brain's underlying process in which multiple calculations are happening at once (that is, parallelism).

Rather, we log what has changed and assume the rest has stayed the same, with the result that we miss some details, as demonstrated in various experiments and illusions, some of which Dennett outlines.

A year after Consciousness Explained was published, Dennett noted "I wish in retrospect that I'd been more daring, since the effects are stronger than I claimed".

This approach allows the reports of the subject to be a datum in psychological research, thus circumventing the limits of classical behaviorism.

[page needed] The New York Times designated Consciousness Explained as one of the ten best books of the year.

[10][11] John Searle argues[12] that Dennett, who insists that discussing subjectivity is nonsense because it is unscientific and science presupposes objectivity, is making a category error.

In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ("background") criterion for mountain height, like "the summit is so many meters above sea level".

[14][15] Neuroscientists such as Gerald Edelman, Antonio Damasio, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch and Rodolfo Llinás argue that qualia exist and that the desire to eliminate them is based on an erroneous interpretation on the part of some philosophers regarding what constitutes science.