The book puts forward a "multiple drafts" model of consciousness. Arguing from research on the brain, it suggests that there is no single central place (a "Cartesian Theater") where conscious experience takes place; instead there are "various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain" (p365). The brain consists of a "bundle of semi-independent agencies" (p260); when "content-fixation" takes place in one of these, its effects may propagate so that it leads to the utterance of one of the sentences that make up the story in which the central character is my "self".

Dennett opposes the parallelism of the brain to the sequentiality of the mind. He shows that there is a distorsion in the conscious serial account of the brain processes.

His philosophical method is heterophenomenology, in which the verbal or written reports of subjects are treated as akin to a theorist's fiction -- the subject's report is not questioned, but it is not assumed to be an incorrigible report about that subject's inner state. This approach allows the reports of the subject to be a datum in psychological research, thus circumventing behaviorism.

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