Dan Dennett is a professor at Tufts University. His specialty area is philosophy of mind. Unlike many philosophers, Dennett pays as much attention to science and psychology as to philosophy. He has been analyzing the “relationship between our vision of ourselves as responsible, free, rational agents, and our vision of ourselves as complex parts of the physical world of science.” (Dennett, Brainstorms, p. x.) He posits that there is a more reasonable middle ground between materialist and spiritual theories of human nature.
Dennett, D. C. Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA: 1996).
Dennett’s Theory:
Each human being makes a self. “Out of its brain it spins a web of words and deeds, and, like the other creatures, it doesn’t have to know what it is doing; it just does it.” (P. 409) Boundaries are created to distinguish oneself from others. Human beings need to represent themselves to others. Language, story telling and construction, helps us create narratives of self, which we use to represent ourselves to the rest of the world. These narratives create our consciousness and narrative selfhood.
We have a natural tendency to look for essential characteristics of a person (an unchangeable essence of who that person is). This need (or tendency) is fulfilled through narrative, reason, language, and interaction with others. These tools allow us to create the abstract concept of a center of narrative gravity. (Pp. 410-411.) This makes it easier for us to interact with others and deal with ourselves.
Dennett’s theory of self allows for the possibility of several “selves” (“centers of narrative gravity”) existing within the same body, or even more than one body sharing the same “self.”
This is because the self is an abstract created by our body’s ability and instinct to create it in response to a need.
The basic “blip” of self-representation is our sense of self. But it is not our self. It is a representation of self that we use to help organize our self narratives and any other information collected which refers (or purports to refer) to oneself. This blip is a representation for your true self, which is your center of narrative gravity.
The best hope for responsibility and freedom lie in understanding how “brains grow self-representations.” With this understanding, we can encourage the growth of self-representations which govern their bodies well.
Dennett claims that his theory has the potential for allowing for immortality, survival of the self after the death of the body (much like a computer file can survive the “death” of the computer). He argues that his theory allows for greater freedom of possibilities than spiritual and materialistic theories.
Loptson, P. Readings on Human Nature, Broadview Press (Ontario, Canada: 1998).