The Distributed Lock: Dennett's Multiple Drafts and the Narrative Center That Cannot Be Narrated

Description

Abstract (English)

Daniel Dennett’s "Consciousness Explained" (1991) and subsequent works attempt to dissolve the mystery of consciousness into distributed, parallel processes without a central "theater" or narrating self. This paper demonstrates through metalogical analysis that Dennett’s multiple drafts model and "center of narrative gravity" systematically presuppose what they deny: the Primordial Identity Lock. We prove that Dennett’s framework covertly relies on this Lock in three dimensions: (1) as the stable comparator among competing drafts, (2) as the unified narrative stance that distributes multiplicity, and (3) as the performative author of his own explanatory narrative. Dennett’s achievement is paradoxical: he distributed the Lock across drafts while performatively enacting its indivisible unity. The Ur-Matrix resolves this by making the Lock explicit as radiant source of both unity and multiplicity.

The Primordial Identity Lock employed in the following analysis is not a theoretical posit introduced to counter Dennett’s account. Its necessity and primordial status have been established independently in the Ur-Matrix framework (Meister 2025), where self-identity (A=A) is shown to be pre-operational, unnegatable, and logically prior to any form of narration, computation, or phenomenological attribution. The present paper does not argue for the Lock; it examines the consequences of its unavoidable presupposition within Dennett’s multiple drafts model.

Key Insight: Even the most sophisticated distributionist accounts of consciousness, including Dennett’s multiple drafts model, presuppose an unnegatable metalogical unity—the Primordial Identity Lock—which the Ur-Matrix makes explicit, showing that multiplicity emerges coherently only from a radiant, indivisible source .