CONCEPT
The User Illusion
Dennett's account of the experienced self as a simplified interface the brain presents to itself — useful, predictively tractable, and no more the reality beneath than the desktop is the computer's hardware.
Borrowing the term from computer science (where a user illusion is the simplified interface — the desktop, the file icon — that hides the actual computational machinery), Dennett proposes that the self each of us experiences is an interface the brain runs for itself. The unified stream of consciousness, the sense of a central me watching the show, the conviction that thoughts have a single author — these are features of the interface, not of the underlying processing, which is massively parallel, draft-generating, and has no central observer. The framework is central to Consciousness Explained (1991) and has direct consequences for thinking about AI systems, which run their own user illusions for their users, and for the collaboration between human and machine selves that AI has made a mass phenomenon.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept entered Dennett's vocabulary in the late 1980s as he was working out the multiple drafts model. He needed a