Daniel Dennett

• Dennett's Qualia-denial
• Reactions to Daniel Dennett's views on consciousness(Not by me)
• "Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett's Qualia-Denial

Dan replies that I have misunderstood his position - he doesn't deny that conscious experiences exist. Conscious experiences just don't have the first-person phenomenal properties that they are commonly thought to have and, in his view, science remains neutral about the nature of such properties."

"And, if one removes all the phenomenal content from what one takes consciousness to be, doesn't this amount to a denial of the existence of "consciousness" in any ordinary sense of this term? Dan's reply likens beliefs in phenomenal properties to the belief in evil spirits causing disease. He has no doubts that diseases such as whooping cough and tuberculosis are real, but this doesn't require him to believe in evil spirits. And, what's left, once one removes phenomenal properties, is what a zombie and a so-called conscious person have in common: a given set of functional properties that enable them to carry out the tasks we normally think of as conscious".

"Ryle saw (brilliantly, intuitively, but not systematically) that in order to escape the mysteries, we had to turn the mind inside out, in a certain way, and forsake the quest for golden nuggets of content or phenomenality (or something like that) hidden in secret places amongst the machinery."

Is this truly neutral, or does it bias our investigation of consciousness by stopping one step short? Shouldn't our data include not just subject’s subjective beliefs about their experiences, but the experiences themselves? Levine, a first-string member of the B Team, insists

"that conscious experiences themselves, not merely our verbal judgments about them, are the primary data to which a theory must answer." (Levine, 1994)

This is an appealing idea, but it is simply a mistake.

The same point needs to be appreciated about consciousness, for this is where theorists' imaginations are often led astray: it is a mistake to go looking for an extra will-of-the-wisp property of consciousness that might be enjoyed by some events in the brain in spite of their not enjoying the fruits of fame in the brain. Just such a quest is attempted by Block, who tries to isolate "phenomenality" as something distinct from fame ("global accessibility") but still worthy of being called a variety of consciousness. "Phenomenality is experience," he announces, but what does this mean? He recognizes that in order to keep phenomenality distinct from global accessibility, he needs to postulate, and find evidence for, what he calls "phenomenality without reflexivity"-experiences that you don't know you're having.

If we want to use brain imaging to find the neural correlates of phenomenality, we have to pin down the phenomenal side of the equation and to do that we must make a decision on whether the subjects who say they don't see anything do or do not have phenomenal experiences.

But what then is left of the claim that phenomenality is experience? What is experiential (as contrasted with what?) about a discrimination that is not globally accessible? As the convolutions of Block's odyssey reveal, there is always the simpler hypothesis to fend off: there is potential fame in the brain (analogous to the dispositional status of poor Jim, the novelist) and then there is fame in the brain, and these two categories suffice to handle the variety of phenomena we encounter. Fame in the brain is enough.

Philosophers have adopted various names for the things in the beholder (or properties of the beholder) that have been supposed to provide a safe home for the colors and the rest of the properties that have been banished from the "external" world by the triumphs of physics: "raw feels", "sensa", "phenomenal qualities" "intrinsic properties of conscious experiences" "the qualitative content of mental states" and, of course, "qualia," the term I will use. There are subtle differences in how these terms have been defined, but I'm going to ride roughshod over them. I deny that there are any such properties. But I agree wholeheartedly that there seem to be.

I want to make it just as uncomfortable for anyone to talk of qualia--or "raw feels" or "phenomenal properties" or "subjective and intrinsic properties" or "the qualitative character" of experience-- with the standard presumption that they, and everyone else, knows what on earth they are talking about.

What impresses me about my own consciousness, as I know it so intimately, is my delight in some features and dismay over others, my distraction and concentration, my unnamable sinking feelings of foreboding and my blithe disregard of some perceptual details, my obsessions and oversights, my ability to conjure up fantasies, my inability to hold more than a few items in consciousness at a time, my ability to be moved to tears by a vivid recollection of the death of a loved one, my inability to catch myself in the act of framing the words I sometimes say to myself, and so forth. These are all "merely" the "performance of functions" or the manifestation of various complex dispositions to perform functions. In the course of making an introspective catalogue of evidence, I wouldn't know what I was thinking about if I couldn't identify them for myself by these functional differentia. Subtract them away, and nothing is left beyond a weird conviction (in some people) that there is some ineffable residue of "qualitative content" bereft of all powers to move us, delight us, annoy us, remind us of anything."

Reactions to Daniel Dennett's views on consciousness(Not by me)

Varela clarifies that *panic* as a behavioralist or practical approach of 3rd-person investigation here:

"He [Dennett] says those minds can be useful only if you treat them as overt behavior, as an anthropologist does with a foreign culture. You take them at face value. If you tell me you're in pain, I believe you. Then I note it down in my book. Then I consider it as overt behavior. That's what he calls heterophenomenology or, more classically, the intentional stance. He treats you as if you're something capable of intentionality. I find that far too weak to support a theory of consciousness, because it's just one leg. The other leg, which is the real phenomenology that is, the 'as is,' firsthand, direct account of the quality of experience, is irreducible."

Steven Pinker had this to say about Dennett's qualophobia:

"I enjoyed, but disagree in some ways with, Dan's discussion of consciousness in 'Consciousness Explained'. I like it because Dan challenges us to come up with an argument for why we should believe that there exist some kind of raw feelings, or qualia, or subjective experience. He argues that there isn't any substance to the idea: a person with what we think of as consciousness and a zombie who behaved in the same way would be indistinguishable, as far as science is concerned.

"....I read Dan as saying that we've been misled into thinking there's a real question there. According to Dan, there isn't. That's where I disagree: I suspect there's a real question and that it's not just an error in the way we conceptualize the problem. Perhaps our minds are simply not designed to be able to formulate or grasp the answer a suggestion of Chomsky's that I know Dan hates.

"But the intuition that qualia exist is real, and as yet irreducible and inexplicable. For one thing, all our intuitions about ethics crucially presuppose the distinction between a sentient being and a numb zombie. Putting a sentient being's thumb in a thumbscrew is unethical, but putting a robot's thumb in a thumbscrew is something else. And this isn't just a thought experiment; the debates over animal rights, euthanasia, and the use of anesthetics in infant surgery depend on it."

Finally, Nicholas Humphrey has chimes in on his perspective of Dennett/qualia:

"Dan's book 'Consciousness Explained' is tremendously original, and it's already having a huge impact on cognitive psychology. He's produced the best account yet a brilliant, funny, beautifully written description of the inner processes underlying thought. But while it's so good on the question of thinking, it's much less good on the question of feeling.

"If you're going to explain 'consciousness,' you have to come to grips with the kind of consciousness that really counts with ordinary people. What do people want to have explained? What do they mean by consciousness? Or rather since they may mean different things at different times what is it they really care about? If you listen to the kinds of questions people ask about consciousness 'Are babies conscious?' 'Will I be conscious during the operation?' 'How does my consciousness compare with yours?' and so on you find again and again that the central issue isn't thinking but feeling.

"What concerns people is not so much the stream of thoughts that may or may not be running through their heads as the sense they have of being alive in the first place: alive, that is, as embodied beings interacting with an external world at their own body surfaces and subject to a spectrum of sensations pain in their feet, taste on their tongue, color at their eyes. What matters in particular is the subjective quality of these sensations: the peculiar painfulness of a thorn, the saltiness of an anchovy, the redness of an apple, the 'What it's like' for us when the stimuli from these external objects meet our bodies and we respond. Thoughts may come and thoughts may go. A person can be conscious without thinking anything. But a person simply cannot be conscious without feeling.

"Here's the paradox, though. What figures so strongly in ordinary people's conception of what matters about consciousness figures hardly at all in Dan's account of it. 'In Consciousness Explained', there's hardly anything about sensory phenomenology. Once when I said that in print, Dan pointed out to me in no uncertain terms that I'd ignored the several passages in the book where he does talk about sensations. Well, O.K., it's there if you look for it. There are some passages where he talks about sensations and feelings as complex behavioral dispositions (which is, I think, on the right lines, provided you allow that their complexity may mean that they're qualitatively in a different league from anything else.) But my point is that for Dan, the question of sensory phenomenology is no more than a side issue, never the central mystery it is for me."

"Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett

Dennett's strategy often ivolves attacking a question from several sides at once -- he rarely has a single knock-down argument.

One candidate is the Cartesian theater: D. claims the idea of a central scrutiniser to whom things are presented has been the dominant, if often rather implicit, model of consc. Of course it is all rather non-explanatory -- what makes the audience, the inner homunculus, conscious ?

D. wants to replace this with a "multiple drafts" model, in which there is no single definitive version of events. D. provides many ingenious arguments in favour of this theory, and it is probably correct; however it cannot bear the burden he places on it. He often writes as though disposing of the Cartesian Theatre disposes of the Hard Problems of consciousness in general.

Question begging physicalism: Dennett's elminativist arguments often procede, not by arguing directly agaisnt the existence of something, but by arguing that it is not a suitable case for scientific treatement. (Often that it cannot be sharply defined, although few things can in psychology). Like so much of Dennett's argumentation, this relies on the reader having strongly physicalist and reductionist instincts. The die-hard anti-physicalist will just respond: "of course qualia cannot be precisely defined -- they are non-physical!".

Dispositions: part of Dennetts reduction of qualia is to characterise them as dispositions. Qualia are certainly connected with dispositions. If you are in pain, you are certainly idsposed to behave differently. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that qualia are just dispotions. We can have behavioural dispositions that aren't accomapnied by qualia, such as innstinctive reactions that we perform before we are awre of them. We can don't always (obviously) prodcue the same reactions is response to qualia.

Dennett sometimes argues that qualia do not correspond to (are not to be reduced to) behaviours on a one-to-one basis, but rather a complex mass of dispositions as a whole (thus accounting also for the ineffability of qualia, which is supposedly a matter of the shear comopelxity of this mass of dispositons). This holistic approach would have the implication that our qualia change constantly, because our dispositions do.

Double inversions.

Heterophenomenology

Intentional Stance

It seems to me that Dennett's rather original response to the Mary argument -- Mary *would* understand what red looks liike, people who think she wouldn't just aren't trying hard enough to imagine what it is like to know every single physical detail about the brain -- is modelled on an evolutionary argument. People who cannot see how a fish can become a man are not trying hard enough to imagine all the vast epochs of time and many intermediate stages.

(This reminds me in turn that the idea that every species is connected to every other by a chain of intermediate steps existed in philosophy for centuries before it became part of evolutionary theory (as explained in the classic Great Chain of Being by A.O Lovejoy).