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 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 a Stalinesque hypothesis, the two events would be reconciled prior to entering the subject's consciousness, with the final result presented as fully resolved.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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".