Dennettian Panpsychism: Multiple Drafts, All of Them Conscious

I explore some surprising convergences between apparently opposite theories of consciousness—panpsychism (specifically constitutive panpsychism) and eliminativism (specifically Dennett’s multiple drafts model). I outline what a ‘Dennettian panpsychism’ might look like, and consider some of the challenging but fertile questions it raises about determinacy, holism, and subjecthood.

What unites constitutive panpsychism and the multiple drafts model is that both present the unitary consciousness we can report as resting atop a multiplicity of independent processes; both reject as misguided the search for a definite threshold between processing that is truly conscious and that which is merely preconscious. What divides them is that Dennett regards it as unreasonable to posit inaccessible consciousness, but reasonable to doubt or deny the existence of consciousness, while panpsychists think the opposite.