Daniel Dennett: Consciousness is no miracle. It’s a magic trick.

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.

He didn’t have much patience for parapsychological things like out-of-body experiences or telepathy, but neither did he have much time for the notion of first-personhood. Much of Dennett’s career was spent defanging what David Chalmers would call “the hard problem of consciousness” — how can we explain subjective experience in a world of scientific naturalism?

Dennett was a scientific naturalist, and he didn’t see a problem at all. He spent a portion of his early academic life studying under another great, famous naturalist, Gilbert Ryle, who was renowned for coining the expression “the ghost in the machine.” It’s the idea that there is some kind of supernatural essence to our consciousness that cannot otherwise be explained. Descartes argued that humans are composed of two substances: res extensa (bodily extension) and res cogitans (mind). To Ryle, this was nonsense — a superstitious euphemism to explain something we hadn’t figured out. It was a “ghost in the machine.”

Dennett devoted his res cogitans to undermining the idea of some first-personal, qualia-like, other substance. 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. Mindedness is no more wonderful than the brain it emerges from. But for Dennett, the brain was a source of immense wonder.

Whether or not you agree with him, Dennett is always worth reading, always worth watching, and Big Think is lucky to be one of the last to record his brilliance.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of a Big Think video interview with Dennett, which was recorded in 2012.

What is consciousness?

Most people think consciousness, whatever it is, is just supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. It’s something so wonderful that we have to almost divide the universe in two to make room for it, setting it on one side by itself. I understand why they think that, but I think it’s just wrong. 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. 

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.”

What scares people about this idea?

I think the hidden agenda — or often not so hidden agenda — is a concern about free will. People are worried that if we have a mechanistic theory of consciousness, this will show that, “Oh my gosh, we don’t have free will, and life has no meaning, and so I can’t be responsible for my best or worst deeds.” To me, that doesn’t follow. But people fear that it would. It rattles them. It deflects them from taking this idea seriously because they really don’t want it to be true. 

My approach is to challenge that. Everything you want or should want in the way of free will, you can have in this picture. Sure, there are some traditional notions of free will that turn out to be impossible in this view. That’s tough. But why do you want them? They are not important. They are simply ill-founded desires. You can still have the varieties of free will that are worth wanting, so take a deep breath and relax. Let’s figure out how it’s done. 

Why do you consider this the only freedom that really matters?

For billions of years on this planet, there was life but no free will. The difference is not in physics — it has nothing to do with determinism or indeterminism. It ultimately has to do with biology, particularly evolutionary biology. Over billions of years, increasingly greater competences evolved. The cognitive competence of, say, a dolphin or a chimpanzee is hugely superior to the competence of a lobster or a starfish. But humans dwarf the competence of a dolphin or a chimpanzee. And there’s an entirely naturalistic story to tell about how we reached this competence. It’s this power that sets us apart from every other species. The key to it is that we don’t simply act for reasons. We represent our reasons to ourselves and to others. We can ask somebody, “Why did you do that?” And while the fact that they can answer is a very simple and everyday phenomenon, it is key. It is the key to responsibility.

In fact, the word “responsibility” sort of wears its meaning on its sleeve. We are responsible because we can respond to challenges to our reasons. Why? Because we act for reasons that we consciously represent to ourselves. This is what gives us the power and the obligation to think ahead, to anticipate, to see the consequences of our actions, and to share our wisdom with each other. No other species can do anything like it. And because we can share our wisdom, we have a special responsibility. We have the power, and that’s what gives us the obligation. It is what makes us free in a way that, say, no bird is free.

Check out our full interview with Daniel Dennett below:

This article was updated on August 25, 2025, to more clearly indicate that the second half of this article is a lightly edited transcript of a 2012 Big Think video interview with Daniel Dennett.