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The Cartesian Theater and "Filling In" the Stream of Consciousness

Daniel C. Dennett

Cartesian Materialism

The idea of a special center in the brain is the most tenacious bad idea bedeviling our attempts to think about consciousness. This idea is so prevalent that I will give it a name: Cartesian Materialism. This is the view you arrive at when you discard Descartes's dualism but fail to discard the imagery of a central (but material) theater in the mind where "it all comes together."

The pineal gland would be one candidate for such a Cartesian Theater, but there are others that have been suggested-the anterior cingulate, the reticular formation, various places in the prefrontal lobes. 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.

Perhaps no one today explicitly endorses Cartesian materialism. Many theorists would insist that they have explicitly rejected such an obviously bad idea. But as we shall see, the persuasive imagery of the Cartesian Theater keeps coming back to haunt us-Iaypeople and scientists alike-even after its ghostly dualism has been denounced and exorcized. And there are a variety of ostensibly compelling reasons for that.

Most important of these is our personal, introspective appreciation of the "unity of consciousness," which impresses on us the distinction between "in here" and "out there." The naive boundary between "me" and "the outside world;' is my skin (and the lenses of my eyes) but, as we learn more and more about the way events in our own bodies can be inaccessible "to us," the great outside encroaches. "In here" I can try to raise ~y arm, but "out there," it has "fallen asleep" or IS. paralyzed, it won't budge; my lines of commumcation from wherever I am to the neural rna-

chinery controlling my arm have been tampered with. And if my optic nerve were somehow severed, I wouldn't expect to go on seeing even though my eyes were still intact. Having visual experiences is something that apparently happens inboard of my eyes, somewhere in between my eyes and my voice when I tell you what I see.

In short, we must stop thinking of the brain as if it had such a single functional summit or central point. This is not an innocuous shortcut; it's a bad habit. In order to break this bad habit of thought, we need to explore some instances of the bad habit in action, but we also need a good image with which to replace it.

Introducing the Multiple Drafts Model

Here is a first version of the replacement, the Multiple Drafts model of consciousness. I expect it will seem quite alien and hard to visualize at first-that's how entrenched the Cartesian Theater idea is. According to the Multiple Drafts model, all varieties of perception-indeed, all varieties of thought or mental activity-are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under continuous "editorial revision."

These editorial processes occur over large fractions of a second, during which time various additions, incorporations, emendations; and overwritings of content can occur, in various orders. We don't directly experience what happens on our retinas, in our ears, on the surface of our skin. What we actually experience is a product of many processes of interpretation-editorial processes, in effect. They take in relatively raw and onesided representations, and yield collated, revised, enhanced representations, and they take place in the streams of activity occurring in various parts of the brain. This much is recognized by virtually

Daniel C. Dennett

Figure 2.1

Descartes had the idea that the brain did have a center: the pineal gland, which served as the gateway to the conscious mind. The pineal gland is the only organ in the brain that is in the midline, rather than paired, with left and right versions. It is marked L in this diagram by the great sixteenth-century anatomist Vesalius. Smaller than a pea, it sits in splendid isolation on its stalk, attached to the rest of the nervous system just about in the middle of the back of the brain. Since its function was quite inscrutable (it is still unclear what the pineal gland does), Descartes proposed a role for it: in order for a person to be conscious of something, traffic from the senses had to arrive at this station, where it thereupon caused a special-indeed, magical-transaction to occur between the person's material brain and immaterial mind. Source: Dennett (1991), p. 104.

all theories of perception, but now we are poised for the novel feature of the Multiple Drafts model: Feature detections or discriminations only have to be made once. That is, once a particular "observation" of some feature has been made, by a specialized, localized portion of the brain, the information content thus fixed does not have to be sent somewhere else to be re-discriminated by

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some "master" discriminator. In other words discrimination does not lead to a re-presentatio~ of the already discriminated feature for the benefit of the audience in the Cartesian Theater-for there is no Cartesian Theater.

These spatially and temporally distributed content-fixations in the brain are precisely locatable in both space and time, but their onsets do not mark the onset of consciousness of their content. It is always an open question whether any particular content thus discriminated will eventually appear as an element in conscious experience, and it is a confusion, as we shall see, to ask when it becomes conscious. These distributed content-discriminations yield, over the course of time, something rather like a narrative stream or sequence, which can be-thought of as subject to continual editing by many processes distributed around in the brain, and continuing indefinitely into the future. This stream of contents is only rather like a narrative because of its multiplicity; at any point in time there are multiple "drafts" of narrative fragments at various stages of editing in various places in the brain.

Probing this stream at different places and times produces different effects, precipitates different narratives from the subjcet. If one delays the probe too long (overnight, say), the result is apt to be no narrative left at all-or else a narrative that has been digested or "rationally reconstructed" until it has no integrity. If one probes "too early," one may gather data on how early a particular discrimination is achieved by the brain, but at the cost of diverting what would otherwise have been the normal progression of the multiple stream.

Most important, the Multiple Drafts model avoids the tempting mistake of supposing that there must be a single narrative (the "final" or "published" draft, you might say) that is canonical-that is the actual stream of consciousness of the subject, whether or not the experimenter (or even the subject) can gain access to it. Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try,

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The Cartesian Theater and "Filling In" the Stream of Consciousness

in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go.

Thumbnail Sketch

Let me now recapitulate the Multiple Drafts model of consciousness in a Thumbnail Sketch. Here is my theory so far:

There is no single, definitive "stream of consciousness," because there is no central Headquarters, no Cartesian Theater where "it all comes together" for the perusal of a Central Meaner. Instead of such a single stream (however wide), there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go. Most of these fragmentary drafts of "narrative" play short-lived roles in the modulation of current activity but some get promoted to further functional roles, in swift succession, by the activity of a virtual machine in the brain. The seriality of this machine (its "von Neumannesque" character) is not a "hard-wired" design feature, but rather the upshot of a succession of coalitions of these specialists.

While everyone agrees that there is no single point in the brain, reminiscent of Descartes's pineal gland, the implications of this have not been recognized, and are occasionally egregiously overlooked. For instance, incautious formulations of "the binding problem" in current neuroscientific research often presuppose that there must be some single representational space in the brain (smaller than the whole brain) where the :esults of all the various discriminations are put Into registration with each other-marrying the sO~d track to the film, coloring in the shapes, filhng in the blank parts. There are some careful fo:mulations of the binding problem(s) that avoid this e:ror, but the niceties often get overlooked.

This tendency to think of consciousness as the end of the line is indeed one of the occupational hazards of neuroscience. It is like forgetting that the end prodUct of apple trees is not apples-it's

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more-apple trees. Here, for instance, is a hypothesis hazarded by Francis Crick and Christof Koch:

We have suggested that one of the functions of consciousness is to present the result of various underlying computations and that this involves an attentional mechanism that temporarily binds the relevant neurons together by synchronizing their spikes in 40 hz oscillations. (Crick and Koch, 1990, p. 272)

So a function of consciousness is to present the results of underlying computations-but to whom? The Queen? Crick and Koch do not go on to ask themselves the Hard Question: And then what happens? ("And then a miracle occurs?") Once their theory has shepherded something into . what they consider to be the charmed circle of consciousness, it stops. It doesn't confront the problem about the tricky path from (presumed) consciousness to behavior, including, especially, introspective reports.

Filling In

There is yet another tenacious idea that emerges as a byproduct of the implicit commitment to the Cartesian Theater model: the idea of filling in. This idea is based on the misguided assumption that after the brain has arrived at a discrimination or judgment, it re-presents the material on which its judgment is based, for the enjoyment of the audience in the Cartesian Theater, filling in the missing details.

The question of whether the brain "fills in" in one way or another is not a question on which introspection by itself can bear, for introspection provides us-the subject as well as the "outside" experimenter-only with the content of representation, not with the features of the representational medium itself. For evidence about the medium, we need to conduct further experiments.!

Consider how the brain must deal with wallpaper, for instance. Suppose you walk into a

Daniel C. Dennett

Figure 2.2

A closely related phenomenon of interest is that of "subjective contours." Look at the two shapes in this figure. Do you see a white circle with a circumventing ring around it on the left, and a white triangle superimposed on an inverted triangle with black borders on the right? This is a familiar illusion. There are no white figures on your retinal image, in addition to the black lines. This phenomenon, too, involves no "IDling in" by the brain to produce the seemings of the white figures. It simply results from a brain circuit specializing in shape being misled to distinguish particular bounded regions: the two shapes with their "subjective contours." Source:

Dennett (1991), p. 351.

room and notice that the wallpaper is a regular array of hundreds of identical sailboats, or-let's pay homage to Andy Warhol-identical photographic portraits of Marilyn Monroe. In order to identify a picture as a portrait of Marilyn Monroe, you have to foveate the picture: the image has to fall on the high-resolution foveae of your eyes. But it is well known that human parafoveal vision (served by the rest of the retina) does not have very good resolution; you can't even identify a jack of diamonds held at arm's length. Yet we know that if you were to enter a room whose walls were papered with identical photos of Marilyn Monroe, you would "instantly" see that this was the case. You would see in a fraction of a second that there were "lots and lots of identical detailed, focused portraits of Marilyn Mo~roe.':

Since your eyes saccade four or five times a second at most, you could foveate only one or two Marilyns in the time it takes you to jump to the conclusion and thereupon to see hundreds of identical Marilyns. We know that parafoveal vision could not distinguish Marilyn from various Marilyn-shaped blobs, but nevertheless, what you

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see is not wallpaper of Marilyn-in-the-middle surrounded by various indistinct Marilyn-shaped

blobs. .

Now, is it possible that the brain takes one of its high-resolution foveal views of Marilyn and reproduces: it, as if by photocopying, across an internal mapping of the expanse of wall? That is the only way the high-resolution details you used to identify Marilyn could "get into the background'; at all, since parafoveal vision is not sharp enough to provide it by itself. I suppose it is possible in principle, but the brain almost certainly does not go to the trouble of doing that filling in! Having identified a single Marilyn, and having received no information to the effect that the other blobs are not Marilyns, it jumps to the conclusion that the rest are Marilyns, and labels the whole region "more Marilyns" without any

further rendering of Marilyn at all. .

Of course it does not seem that way to you. It seems to you as if you are actually seeing hundreds of identical Marilyns. And in one sense you are: there are, indeed, hundreds of identical Marilyns out there on the wall, and you're seeing them. What is not the case, however, is that there are hundreds of identical Marilyns represented in your brain. Your brain just somehow represents that there are hundreds of identical Marilyns, and no matter how vivid your impression is that you see all that detail, the detail is in the world, not in your head.

Why don't we normally see the blind spot? The brain doesn't have to "fill in" for the blind spot, since the region in which the blind spot falls is already labeled (e.g., "plaid" or "Marilyns" or just "more of the same"). If the brain received contradictory evidence from some region, it would abandon or adjust its generalization,but not getting any evidence from the blind spot region is not the same as getting contradictory evidence. The absence of confirming evidence from the blind spot region is no problem for the brain; since the brain has no precedent of getting information from that gap of the retina, it has not developed any epistemically hungry agencies demanding to

The Cartesian Theater and "Filling In" the Stream of Consciousness

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Figure 2.3

What is it like to have a scotoma, a blind spot in one's visual field? It might seem that this is already familiar to all of us, for we all have blind spots in our visual fields corresponding to the places on our retinas where there are no rods or cones because the optic nerve exits the eyeball there. A normal blind spot, or optic disk, is not small: it blanks out a circle with a diameter of about 6 degrees of visual angle. Close one eye and look at the cross, holding the page about six inches from your eyes. One of the "blind spot" disks should disappear. (It may take some adjustment of the distance from the page to make the effect happen. Keep looking straight at the cross.) Why don't you normally notice this gap in your visual field? In part because you have two eyes, and one eye covers for the other; their blind spots do not overlap. But even with one eye closed, Y9"!l won't notice your blind spot under most conditions: Why not? Since your brain has never had to deal with input from this area of your retina, it has devoted no resources to dealing with it. There are no homunculi responsible for receiving reports from this area, so when no reports arrive, there is no one to complain. An absence of in formation is not the same as information about an absence. In order for you to see a hole, something in your brain would have to respond to a contrast: either between the inside and outside edge-and your brain has no machinery for doing that at this location-or between before and after: now you see the disk, now you don't. (That's how the disappearing black disk alerts you to your blind spot.) Source: From Dennett (1991), p. 324.

be fed from that region. Among all the homunculi of vision, not a single one has the role of coordinating information from that region of the eye, so When no information arrives from those sources, no one complains. The area is simply neglected. ~ other words, all normally sighted people

suffer" from a tiny bit of "anosognosia.t'f We are unaware of our "deficit" -of the fact that we are receiving no visual information from our

blind spots. .

The blind spot is a spatial hole, but there can be temporal holes as well. The smallest are the gaps

that . .

occur while our eyes dart about during sac-

cades. We don't notice these gaps, but they don't have to be filled in because we're designed not to notice them. The temporal analogues of scotomata might be the "absences" that occur during petit mal epileptic seizures. These are noticeable by the sufferer, but only by inference: they can't "see the edges" any more than you can see the edges of your blind spot, but they can be struck, retrospectively, by discontinuities in the events they have experienced.

The fundamental flaw in the idea of "filling in" is that it suggests that the brain is providing something when in fact the brain is ignoring something. And this leads even very sophisticated thinkers to make crashing mistakes, perfectly epitomized by Edelman: "One of the most striking features of consciousness is its continuity" (Edelman 1989, p. 119). This is utterly wrong. One of the most striking features of consciousness is its discontinuity-as revealed in the blind spot, and saccadic gaps, to take the simplest examples. The discontinuity of consciousness is striking because of the apparent continuity of consciousness. Neumann (1990) points out that consciousness may in general be a gappy phenomenon, and as long as the temporal edges of the gaps are not positively perceived, there will be no sense of the gappiness of the "stream" of consciousness. As Minsky puts it, "Nothing can seem jerky except what is represented as jerky. Paradoxically, our sense of continuity comes from our marvelous insensitivity to most kinds of changes rather than from any genuine perceptiveness" (Minsky 1985, p.257).

Notes

This essay is put together based on various excerpts from Dennett (1991) by Gtiven Guzeldere. Thanks to Amy Friedman for secretarial assistance.

1. For instance, Roger Shepard's initial experiments with the mental rotation of cube diagrams showed that it certainly seemed to subjects that they harbored roughly continuously rotating representations of the shapes they were imagining, but it took further experiments,