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On “Are We Explaining Consciousness Yet?” (2001), which was published along with various papers by psychologists, neurologists, and other researchers to discuss the “growing consensus” about the architecture of the mind, which Dennett takes to be concordant with his view as stated a decade earlier in Consciousness Explained: Distributed processing whereby any discrimination made by a local system that becomes globally available to the organism is thereby considered conscious.
So, for example, your brain makes a color discrimination; only if that discrimination is made available to speech and other actions would we want to say you were conscious of it; there are plenty of times where you “notice” it in some way and perhaps act on it, but don’t retain, contemplate, focus on, or otherwise act further on it. Dennett wants to stress that it’s not just that this widespread availability (or “fame in the brain,” as he calls it) enables consciousness, but that this is the whole of what consciousness is.
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