I’ll be honest that I didn’t retain this book the way I retain a novel, it’s the kind you read in twenty minute chunks with a highlighter and still walk away only holding maybe sixty percent of the argument, which tracks with a review I found admitting the same thing, bits and pieces of the dense ideas got through and the rest stayed slippery. What did land, and land hard, is Dennett’s idea of culture as an evolutionary crane, something that speeds up a process that would otherwise take millions of years of genetic tinkering, language and memes doing in centuries what natural selection alone couldn’t do in eons.
The consciousness gradient question is the one I keep turning over since finishing it, where exactly does experience start, is a dog conscious, is an earthworm, what about something as simple as krill, and Dennett doesn’t give you a clean line because there probably isn’t one, which is either an honest admission or a dodge depending on your patience for that kind of answer. I was more patient with it than I expected to be. His prose has a confidence that carries you past sections you don’t fully follow, right up until it doesn’t, and there are stretches in the middle third where I lost the thread of the actual argument for pages at a time.
Not a book I’d hand a casual reader, and not one I finished feeling like an expert either, more like someone who attended a really good but overpacked lecture series. Worth it for the crane metaphor alone, honestly, and for making me actually think hard about what my dog experiences when he’s dreaming, which is more than most philosophy of mind manages to make you do at home on a Tuesday.