The Brain on Trial

It’s not fair to ask jurors to vote on a death penalty

By Robert Burton

I n his most recent book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has revisited his 1991 observation that consciousness arises out of a selection process in the brain akin to what makes someone or something famous. Consciousness, he writes, can be seen as “fame in the brain, cerebral celebrity, a way in which some contents come to be more influential and memorable than the competition.”