The theatre of the mind

Abstract

The metaphor of mind as a theatre is common and alluring, but might it lead us astray? Dennett criticises those who imagine a ‘Cartesian theatre’: a mythical place in which consciousness happens and its contents come and go. This cannot exist because the brain is a massively parallel system with no centre, place, or process where the ‘audience of one’ could be. Those who believe in it he calls ‘Cartesian materialists’. This chapter explores the value and pitfalls of the theatre metaphor. Experiments on mental rotation, and similarities between imagery and visual processing, are reviewed. The ‘great imagery debate’ between pictorialist and propositionalist (language-like) theories is explored, along with challenges to both positions from enactivist and sensorimotor theories. Several theories of consciousness explicitly entail theatres, especially global workspace theory (GWT) and neuronal GWT. Others dispense with theatres, including the deeply counter-intuitive ‘multiple drafts theory’, which does away with any distinction between things that are ‘in’ or ‘out’ of consciousness. ‘Integrated information theory’ and some quantum theories also avoid theatres but raise other difficulties. For each theory we ask whether it entails a Cartesian theatre, explains subjective experience, and accounts for (or rejects) the difference between conscious and unconscious processes.