At Big Think, philosopher Jonny Thomson asks us to ponder anew the ideas of Daniel Dennett (1942–2024), whose biography he introduces. Dennett especially popularized the idea that consciousness is an illusion generated by a material brain.

Thomson makes clear that he is a Dennett fan:

At a time when most philosophers were confined to their offices or lecturing to shrinking pools of students, Daniel Dennett was extraordinary — a rockstar philosopher with a rockstar beard and, perhaps most uniquely, a deep sense of kindness. Known as one of the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” he rose to fame along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens as a leading thinker who sought naturalistic explanations for the supernatural. While his fellow horsemen focused mostly on superstition and organized religion, Dennett was always more concerned with the mind.

“Daniel Dennett: Consciousness is no miracle. It’s a magic trick,” August 20, 2025

Dennett was an eliminative materialist at a time when the idea that consciousness is an illusion sounded cool and daring. It was the era, after all, of the Four Horsemen, of the quest to Darwinize everything, to show that everything could arise from nothing without meaning or purpose. Dennett famously said that Darwin had single best idea anyone ever had. And he was voted second of the 20 most important philosophers after World War II.

It all sounds so easy if you leave out the hard parts:

His work can be well understood as a bridge between evolutionary psychology and modern neuroscience. Dennett argued that consciousness was a byproduct of other cognitive processes that appeared much earlier in our evolutionary story. Basic causal instincts, like a plant turning to the Sun, developed into “rudimentary intentionality,” he wrote, like, for example, when a hawk circles its prey. Give it a few more millennia, and this intentionality will sprout consciousness, he argued. There’s nothing religious about it. There’s nothing panpsychist about it. “It’s a magic trick”

Let’s hope that bridge sees little traffic. Neuroscience has been an immense help in understanding many human brain issues but evolutionary psychology has contributed nothing but fables with a “scientific” veneer.

Image Credit: Jorm Sangsorn - Adobe Stock

More seriously, if billions of years of such evolution did not “sprout consciousness” in the human sense, why should we believe that a few more millennia would suffice? The trick here, of course, is in minimizing, via rhetorical tricks, the significance of the probably unbridgeable gap between human consciousness and hawks circling…

Meanwhile, no one seems to have been thinking clearly about the question of how human consciousness — if it is an illusion — can give us the clear picture of reality that science depends on.

Nothing evidence-based

Looking back on Dennett’s approach and its widespread influence, one is struck by the fact that there is nothing evidence-based about it. Not only is human consciousness unique but the human mind has no history. We see it when we see it, even in remote antiquity. Human technology certainly has a history but that is another story.

Promissory materialism

Thomson’s own view, derived from Dennett, is classic promissory materialism:

Consciousness is wonderful, but it is not a miracle. I like to compare it with magic because stage magic is not “magic.” It’s a bunch of tricks. We’re now learning what those tricks are, how they fit together, and why consciousness seems to be so much more. “It’s a magic trick”

Are we learning that? It was philosopher of mind David Chalmers who won the wager that, after 25 years (1998–2023), no “consciousness circuit” would be found in the brain. His win was a surprise result, not least to his opponent, Allen Institute neuroscientist Christof Koch and his many supporters.

Thomson writes as though he does not understand what time it is:

For many people, the idea that consciousness is a set of tricks is offensive or repugnant. They view it as a kind of assault on their dignity or their specialness. And I think that’s a prime mistake. If you think that way, you’re going to systematically ignore important paths of exploration and research. You’re going to hold out for mystery — for more specialness. Some people just can’t help themselves. They can’t or won’t take seriously the idea that consciousness is an amazing collection of almost mundane tricks in the brain. And they say, “I just can’t imagine it!” I say, “No, you won’t imagine it. You can imagine it. You’re just not trying.” It’s a magic trick”

No, we do not think the idea is offensive or repugnant. We think it is a waste of time.

It is a waste of time to pretend that consciousness is simply an “amazing collection of almost mundane tricks in the brain.” You can spend as much time, money, or energy advancing that view as you can commandeer but — as neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and I make clear in The Immortal Mind: (2025) — you will end up with the fact that human consciousness is a reality, an immaterial reality. No account explains it better than that.

Thomson goes on to say that he thinks his point of view “scares” people because it implies that we do not have free will. He then offers an evolution tale about how “increasingly greater competences evolved.” The tale is an interesting speculation but it is not a contribution to any serious discussion of free will. One doesn’t even come away with any confidence that Thomson takes the question seriously.

Overall, Thomson’s effort to keep Dennett’s eliminative materialism alive unintentionally points up how fragile it has actually become.

You may also wish to read: Daniel Dennett made atheism easy to understand. In the process, he somehow also made it less believable, Dennett may be best remembered for inadvertently helping to reduce the popularity of atheism.