CONCEPT
Multiple Drafts Model
Daniel Dennett's theory that consciousness is not a single coherent stream but a parallel process of competing neural drafts — one of the most influential post-Cartesian theories of mind.
The Multiple Drafts Model, proposed in Dennett's Consciousness Explained (1991), argues that there is no single place in the brain where conscious experience is assembled ("the Cartesian Theater") and no single chronological order in which experience happens. Instead, multiple parallel neural processes produce competing narrative drafts, and what we call conscious experience is whichever draft achieves influence over behavior and speech at any moment.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Multiple Drafts Model challenges the implicit assumption behind most AI consciousness discussion: that there is a unified "experiencer" to be replicated. If Dennett is right, the question "does this AI have a subjective stream of consciousness?" may be wrongly formed — because subjective streams are not what consciousness actually is.
The Multiple Drafts Model has found an unexpected home in contemporary AI interpretability research. When researchers probe a language model's internal activations, they often find many parallel, partially-incompatible "candidate" continuations, one of which is selected by the sampling process.