So I'm going to speak about a problem that I have and that's that I'm a philosopher. When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say, "I'm a prof

So I'm going to speak about a problem that I have and that's that I'm a philosopher. When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say, "I'm a professor," their eyes glaze over. When I go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around, they ask me what field I'm in and I say, "philosophy" -- their eyes glaze over. When I go to a philosopher's party and they ask me what I work on and I say, "consciousness," their eyes don't glaze over -- their lips curl into a snarl. And I get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they think, "That's impossible! You can't explain consciousness." The very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain consciousness is just out of the question. ... It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness. ... with regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of us seems to think, "I am an expert. Simply by being conscious, I know all about this." And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the way consciousness is! No, you've got it all wrong." And they say this with an amazing confidence. And so what I'm going to try to do today is to shake your confidence. Because I know the feeling -- I can feel it myself. I want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost minds -- that you are, yourselves, authoritative about your own consciousness. That's the order of the day here. From Daniel Dennett's TED talk, 2003 https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_the_illusion_of_consciousness https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_the_illusion_of_consci...