Dennett tries to traverse a lot of space in this book, which he writes ‘summarizes 50 years of [my] thinking’. Although he clearly attempts to make it accessible to the general reader, and does manage to do so at times, I was left feeling lost at the rapid-fire of references to Turing, Hume, Pinker, Dawkins, to name but a few.
I think this book would serve far better as an intermediate stepping stone having dipped a toe into some of the earlier works that Dennett has influenced or even himself written.
Having said that, he poses some fascinating ideas that on the brim sound nothing less than batshit crazy. My favourite analogy was that of a computer to a communist politburo. However these analogies are not for sensationalism, he does have genuine and thought out reasoning behind them.
Overall, a worthwhile read for the nuggets of curiosity it inspires. I only wish I knew a little bit more, to know if it was me or Dennett that fail to deliver an overall coherent arc to his thinking.