The Cartesian Theater
(This page last updated 4 October, 2004.)

Theater as Metaphor for Consciousness
- Fundamental distinction involving awareness
- Unconscious mechanisms analyze perceptual input and
prepare experience.
- Prepared experience presented to conscious
mechanisms.
- Example: Baars' Global Workspace Theory
- Consciousness illuminates representations in working
memory.
- Makes them available to many other subsystems.
- As other subsystems produce outputs, they can be put
into awareness.
- Consciousness as general communication medium for many
mental processes.
Potential Problems with the Mental Theater
- Who is in the audience?
- Why should one part of the mind go to so much effort to
produce a show in the theater?
- Once the show is finished, another part of the mind has to
re-interpret it.
- When is the theater just a place for a homunculus?
- Simply puts off difficult explanations to another
level.
- How can experiences be revised?
- Revision necessary to explain some experimental
results.
- Libet's brain stimulation experiment
- Metacontrast masking
- Dennett offers two alternatives
- Orwellian
- Stalinesque
- Both are difficult to accept.
- "Cartesian Theater"
- Dennett's way of pointing out that theater models try to
maintain one aspect of dualism.
- Even though they are materialist theories, they still
have a sharp border between what is in awareness and what is
not.
Dennett's Alternative to the Theater: Multiple Drafts
- No theater of experience.
- Sensory events are not re-enacted to be
experienced.
- Multiple systems working independently.
- Cannot assign specific time to an experience, because
different parts of it will occur at different times in different
brain regions.
Theater Theories and the Multiple Drafts Theory provide very
different explanations for perceptual filling in.
Next class: Perceptual Experience

Psych 391D:
Consciousness
Kyle Cave
Psychology Dept.
U.
Mass.