(Weakly) Emergent Consciousness: Daniel Dennett’s Account of Consciousness Through the Lens of Complex Systems Science

Many of the diverse attempts to solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness rely on emergentism. Those who adopt a strong version of emergentism usually argue that consciousness is ontologically irreducible to its underlying physical processes. In contrast, those who adopt a weak version of emergentism usually argue that consciousness is explanatorily irreducible to its underlying physical processes — whether due to epistemic or pragmatic limitations. In this context, the central argument of this paper is that Daniel Dennett’s account of consciousness can be understood as adopting a weak form of emergentism. His Multiple Drafts Model aligns neatly with a nuanced form of weak emergence, grounded both in circumstantial constraints and in the limits of our understanding. Although Dennett spoke rarely and cautiously about emergence, and despite his commitment to qualia-eliminativism (as a consequence of his Heterophenomenology), his account of consciousness nonetheless satisfies the central hallmark of weak emergentism: consciousness is, indeed, a phenomenon irreducible to its subphenomena — but only in practice, not in principle.