Dennett

Dennett recognizes that all human minds are shaped not only by natural selection but by enormous cultural influenced which effectively redesign our minds. He invites us to think of the conscious mind as consisting of those mental contents that win in competition against other mental contents in the battle for control of behavior. What we are is the “organization of all the competitive activity between a host of competences” that our bodies have developed. Consciousness is defined by what a mind can do – whether it can concentrate, be distracted, recall earlier events, keep track of a number of things at once etc. Dennett urges us to resist the temptation to imagine animals as accompanying their clever activities with streams of reflective consciousness as we would. We may not know that they do not, but we certainly cannot assume that they do. He notes that the more we learn about clever activities in animals and how they are accomplished, the less the processes in their brains seem to resemble the thoughts we imagined were doing the work.