What Is the Multiple Drafts Model?

Direct Answer

The multiple drafts model is Daniel Dennett's theory of consciousness, presented in Consciousness Explained (1991). It replaces the traditional picture of consciousness as a single stream — a unified sequence of experiences flowing through the mind — with the picture of a massively parallel process in which content is continuously generated, revised, and edited across many parts of the brain, with no single, final version that counts as "the" conscious experience.

The model is an application to consciousness of the "pandemonium" architecture of cognitive science: a society of specialized processes (demons) that produce content in parallel, competing and collaborating without central control. Different fragments of content — what you see, what you feel, what you remember — are drafted at different times in different places. Some drafts influence behavior; some are written over; some persist. Consciousness is not a place where drafts are assembled and displayed; it is the ongoing activity of the drafting itself. "There is no single, definitive 'stream of consciousness,'" Dennett writes, "because there is no central Headquarters, no Cartesian Theater where 'it all comes together' for the perusal of a Central Meaner."

The model's signature claim is that there is no fact of the matter about exactly when a content becomes conscious. Consider the color phi phenomenon: two dots flashed at different locations, milliseconds apart, are experienced as a single moving dot that changes color midway — even though the second stimulus cannot have been processed by the time the color change is experienced. Dennett's analysis: the brain drafts several versions of the event — one in which the dot moves and changes color, one in which it just moves — and no "final" draft exists. It is meaningless to ask whether the color change "really" happened at the midpoint or was "retroactively" added; consciousness is constituted by the multiple drafts themselves and their effects on behavior and memory.

Historical Context

The multiple drafts model was the centerpiece of Dennett's 1991 book, which he subtitled an account of "consciousness as a cerebral celebrity" — the idea that content becomes conscious by winning the competition for influence over behavior, not by being presented to an inner observer. The book synthesized the computational and neuroscientific picture of the mind with the philosophical tradition of Ryle and Wittgenstein. Ryle had already argued in The Concept of Mind (1949) that the inner-spectator picture is a category mistake; Dennett showed how to replace it with a positive, mechanistic account. William James's stream of consciousness, which had seemed to support the theater picture, was reinterpreted: the stream is a real phenomenon, but it is a product of the drafting process, not a presentation to a self.

The model grew out of Dennett's earlier work on the "intentional stance" and the "self as a center of narrative gravity," and it developed alongside his method of heterophenomenology: the practice of treating first-person reports as texts to be interpreted, not as windows onto a private realm. The multiple drafts model is the metaphysical counterpart of this method: if there is no final draft, there is no private show for the reports to be about.

Dennett explicitly connected the model to two contrasting pictures of perceptual revision: the "Orwellian" picture, in which the brain experiences the original and then covers it up with a revised memory, and the "Stalinesque" picture, in which the brain revises the content before it becomes experience, staging a show. Dennett argued that both pictures are mistaken because both presuppose a theater; the multiple drafts model says the two scenarios are empirically indistinguishable and hence not genuinely different — there is only the network of drafts.

Key Arguments & Debates

The argument for the model is that it avoids both the homunculus regress and the false choice between "Orwellian" and "Stalinesque" revision. By denying that there is a single place or time where experience happens, the model escapes the regress of inner observers; by denying that there is a determinate "first" or "final" draft, it dissolves the timing puzzles that seem to force a choice between the two revision pictures. The model also fits the empirical evidence: the brain's processing is massively parallel and decentralized, content is continuously revised, and the "unity" of consciousness is constructed by the dynamics of the drafts, not given in advance.

The objections are intense. Phenomenal conservatives (Chalmers, Searle, Block, Nagel) argue that the model simply leaves out the phenomenon: no matter how many drafts are drawn and revised, the question remains why any of this processing is accompanied by experience — the hard problem is untouched. Dennett's reply is that the hard problem is a myth: once the functions are explained (discrimination, revision, report, control), there is nothing left over; the felt "show" is the illusion the model explains. A second objection: the model seems to imply that there are no determinate facts about experience, but introspection suggests otherwise — there really is a fact about whether you felt a pain. Dennett replies that such "facts" are themselves products of the drafting process and are determinate only relative to behavior and report. A third objection is empirical: some global workspace theorists argue that the brain does have a mechanism of central broadcast that functions as a bottleneck, which looks like the very "Central Meaner" Dennett denies. Dennett responds that even if there is a bottleneck of influence, it is not a theater of presentation.

Contemporary Relevance

The multiple drafts model remains one of the most influential and contested theories of consciousness, and its influence extends to the science of consciousness: the move away from "presentation" models and toward dynamical, distributed, competition-based accounts (of which global workspace theory is a variant) owes much to Dennett's framing. The model also underwrites the modern "illusionist" program: if consciousness is the activity of drafting, then phenomenal consciousness in the strong sense may be an illusion, and the task is to explain why we are so convinced it exists.

For AI, the model has a striking implication: if consciousness is distributed content revision with no central observer, then a machine with the right parallel architecture — even one without a "self" module — could, in principle, be conscious. The question "does the chatbot have an inner experience?" is, on Dennett's view, a bad question; the right question is whether its drafts have the right causal influence. Whether that deflationary answer is liberating or evasive remains the central disagreement of the philosophy of consciousness.

Related Concepts

• The Cartesian theater: the illusion the multiple drafts model is designed to dissolve.
• Phenomenal consciousness: what the model denies we need a further theory of.
• Illusionism: the contemporary view that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion.
• The hard problem vs easy problems: the dispute about whether the model solves or dissolves the problem.
• Global workspace theory: a related but more centralized account.

Further Learning

• Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991).
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Daniel Dennett
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Consciousness
• Daniel Dennett, I Am a Strange Loop (2007).