What is the cartesian theater?

Daniel Dennett, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Daniel Dennett answers

The Cartesian Theater is the mythic place in the brain where it all comes together — where the stream of experience supposedly arrives, gets displayed, and is appreciated by some inner observer.1 The image is seductive precisely because it seems to follow from obvious facts: the eyes and ears are entry points for raw materials, not the sites of conscious experience themselves, so consciousness must happen somewhere in between the eyeball and the mouth, as I put it crudely.2

That "somewhere" is what the tradition has been tempted to reify into a single privileged location. Descartes placed it in the pineal gland — a Cartesian bottleneck or turnstile through which events had to pass in order to reach consciousness.3 Everybody knows that was wrong, but the structure of the mistake persists in subtler forms. Locate the theater anywhere you like in the brain; the problem remains.

If all the important work gets done at a single point, how does the rest of the brain play any role?4 And what could happen there, anyway, once the show is running? Presumably consciousness matters because it makes a difference — pains that never become conscious either aren't pains at all or aren't the kind that cause suffering.5 But that means something must get done because of what happens there, which means the theater can't be the end of the story.

The real lesson is that all the work dimly imagined to happen in the Cartesian Theater has to be done somewhere, and it turns out to be distributed around the brain.6 The Multiple Drafts Model — developed with Marcel Kinsbourne — breaks the single unified "taking" of experience into many distributed moments of micro-taking, fragmented in cerebral space and real time.7

There is no finish line, no privileged moment at which a draft becomes the conscious one. The race-track analogy captures it: if there is no finish line, there is no winner, but the event was still entirely real.8 People resist this because they want to preserve a reality/appearance distinction for consciousness — some place where whatever happened really happened, independent of what gets written into memory and behavior.9

The Multiple Drafts Model says that writing it down in memory just is what it is for the given to be taken; there is no further fact about what was conscious that floats free of those downstream effects.10 The Cartesian Theater is covertly cherished as the place that would rescue that further fact. There is no such place.

Sources

  1. I call this mythic place in the brain where it all comes together (and where the order of arrival determines the order of consciousness) the Cartesian Theater. There is no Cartesian Theater in the brain. That is a fact.
    Brainchildren__essays_on_designing_minds_Page_147, pp. 147–148
  2. The eyes and ears (and other end-organs) are entry points for raw materials of consciousness, not the sites themselves of conscious experiences. So visual consciousness must happen in between the eyeball and the mouth—to put it crudely.
    Brainchildren__essays_on_designing_minds_Page_146, pp. 146–147
  3. Descartes held that for an event to reach consciousness, it had to pass through a special gateway—which we might call the Cartesian bottleneck or turnstile—which Descartes located in the pineal gland or epiphysis.
    Brainchildren__essays_on_designing_minds_Page_146, pp. 146–147
  4. if all the important work gets done at a point (or just within the narrow confines of the pea-sized pineal gland), how does the rest of the brain play a role in it?
    Brainchildren__essays_on_designing_minds_Page_147, pp. 147–148
  5. pains that never become conscious are either not pains at all, or if they are, they are not the sort that cause us suffering
    Brainchildren__essays_on_designing_minds_Page_147, pp. 147–148
  6. All the work that was dimly imagined to be done in the Cartesian Theater has to be done somewhere, and no doubt it is distributed around in the brain.
    Brainchildren__essays_on_designing_minds_Page_147, pp. 147–148
  7. In the Multiple Drafts Model developed by Marcel Kinsbourne and me, this single unified taking is broken up in cerebral space and real time. We suggest that the judgmental tasks are fragmented into many distributed moments of micro-taking.
    Brainchildren__essays_on_designing_minds_Page_147, pp. 147–148
  8. You recount all this to a friend, who asks 'Who won the race?' and you say, well, since there was no finish line, there's no telling... The event you witnessed was not a real race, but it was a real event—not some mere illusion or figment of your imagination.
    Brainchildren__essays_on_designing_minds_Page_146, pp. 146–147
  9. Perhaps because they want to preserve the reality/appearance distinction for consciousness... the Cartesian Theater of consciousness is covertly cherished as the place where whatever happens 'in consciousness' really happens, whether or not it is later correctly remembered.
    Consciousness Explained, p. 160
  10. The Multiple Drafts model makes 'writing it down' in memory criterial for consciousness; that is what it is for the 'given' to be 'taken'—to be taken one way rather than another. There is no reality of conscious experience independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action.
    Consciousness Explained, p. 160