In Defense of Dennett

Consciousness is perhaps the most perplexing phenomena left unexplained in the natural world. There is research being done across multiple disciplines – philosophy, psychology, neuroscience etc.– and yet no one theory of consciousness has been agreed upon. While many theoreticians think we are very close to understanding this puzzle, others think it will take a revolutionary shift in the scientific paradigm if we are to ever understand consciousness. Still, others believe we are not sufficiently ‘equipped’ to understand the workings of consciousness in the first place. Whoever is right, one thing is for certain – consciousness is a great mystery that if solved, would inevitably help humans understand their place in nature.

            According to David Chalmers, if we are to come to solve this mystery of consciousness, either we must revise our conception of nature or we must revise our conception of consciousness. I propose it is our conceptual understanding of consciousness that needs revision. For the sake of this paper, I will be defending the eliminativist view of consciousness, namely that the phenomenon of consciousness (as it is commonly understood) is illusory and can be explained in terms of basic, physical, structural and functional processes. I will use Daniel Dennett’s functional analysis of qualia, from his paper “Quining Qualia”, to show that our understanding of the properties of consciousness are greatly misguided, resulting in a conception of consciousness that by its very nature, could never be understood.

            In his paper “Consciousness and its Place in Nature”, Chalmers proposes there are two types of problems one faces in trying to understand consciousness. The so-called ‘easy’ problems of consciousness are the objective issues of consciousness that can be worked out in terms of the underlying physical structure and functional activity. An example of an easy problem of consciousness would be how the human visual system functions perceptually. Importantly, the easy questions can be studied empirically by examining brain activity and other relevant objective data. Science has made great progress in coming to understand many of these structural aspects of consciousness. However, the supposed ‘hard’ problem of consciousness has been largely overlooked or ignored by scientists, while philosophers find it to be the most puzzling. This hard problem of consciousness is how it is that physical matter, when arranged into a particular structure (namely the human brain) can come to have subjective experience. Another way of phrasing this puzzle is that somehow complex arrangements of physical simples can come to have qualitative or phenomenal experiences. It seems that science fails to give an explanation of why subjective experience (the “what it is like to be” something) exists in the natural world. However, the eliminativist holds that the apparent hard problem of consciousness really does not exist, or shall cease to exist once all the soft problems have been settled. 

            Another way of understanding this ‘hard’ problem of consciousness is in terms of what is known by philosophers as the explanatory gap. The explanatory gap states that no matter how far we get in terms of explaining the ‘easy’ questions – the structural and functional issues – there will still be something lacking in our explanation of consciousness, namely the phenomenal character of experience. There is an unexplainable chasm or gap between the physical or biological brain events and the conscious or qualitative experience. This explanatory gap is often used to argue that consciousness is beyond mere physical description and is rather ineffable and mysterious. The explanatory argument goes something like the following:

 

(1)  Physical accounts explain only the structure and function of consciousness.

(2)  Structure and function alone don’t explain the subjective or qualitative feeling.

(3)  There is a gap between the physical accounts of consciousness and the subjective or qualitative properties of consciousness.

(4)  Thus, consciousness must not be wholly physical.

 

The conclusion (4) pushes the epistemological gap to an ontological gap – that is, the limit of our understanding of consciousness necessarily implies consciousness is beyond physical description and thus non-physical. In other words, the explanatory argument concludes that because subjective experience isn’t explainable in physical terms, it must then be irreducible and non-physical. Because knowing all the physical facts of the world apparently isn’t sufficient for knowing subjective experience, experience itself must be fundamentally different than the rest of the physical world.

            Reductive materialists or eliminativists, like Dennett, deny that there is an epistemic gap in the first place, however. Moreover, these materialists believe that the hard problem of consciousness is merely an illusion that will go away when all the soft problems are explained away. Someone like Dennett, who believes that all of the properties of consciousness can be explained physically or functionally, is going to have to deny premise (2) – that structure and function don’t explain qualitative experience. According to the reductionist, qualitative experience just is structure or function, so premise (2) is thus confused and invalid. According to eliminativism, there is nothing special about qualitative experience that moves it beyond the realm of the physical. Dennett thinks it is mistakes like this that lead to an speculative and unfounded view of consciousness as being some mysterious non-physical phenomenon. As a reductive materialist, he wants to show that our common-sense understanding of consciousness is actually an illusion and that the special features we attribute to consciousness can be either be reduced to fully physical terms or shown not to exist at all.

            In his paper “Quining Qualia”, Daniel Dennett sets out to deny our intuitions about specifically about qualia as being a sort of “special property” of consciousness. Qualia are defined as the features of consciousness that are subjective and have a qualitative feeling – namely a feeling of “what it’s like to be like” – for example, what it is like to see red. Dennett does not intend to fully deny conscious experience outright (in this paper; at least); and insofar as everything real has properties – he does not want to deny that consciousness has properties. However, he does want to say that the qualitative features of consciousness – qualia – do not have the special properties philosophers normally attribute to them namely, being ineffable, private, intrinsic, and directly apprehensible through consciousness. Dennett believes that philosophers are intuitively misguided in these assumptions. Commonly, qualia are described as ineffable insofar as we tend to think of our experience as defying expression or description in language. It is largely due to ineffability that qualia are thought to be private. Because we are not able to fully express our phenomenal experience, it becomes impossible for interpersonal comparison. Moreover, it seems that each of us has privileged access to our qualia – a first person perspective that no one else can experience quite like we do. Qualia are believed to be directly apprehensible through consciousness in that we seem to have the power to reflect on our experience, and in doing so – amplify the qualia. And finally, are phenomenal experiences are thought to be intrinsic insofar as they are somehow “atomic”, “simple” or “homogeneous” and therefore unable to get a hold of without direct experience. Dennett wants to show that it isn’t clear that consciousness really has any of these four previous characteristics commonly associated with qualia.

            He believes that many of the supposed mysteries of consciousness are created by dogmatically accepting these intuitions we have about qualia or the “ways things seem to us.” Dennett hopes to shift the burden of proof to those who so complacently appeal to private, subjective experiences as having these special properties. However, Dennett says that to try to eliminate these errors and extrapolate some “lowest common denominator” of qualia – eliminating its ‘special’ characteristics – would be to reify the concept into oblivion. What would be left is a meaningless notion that is “tactically obtuse” and far from what philosophers mean when they use the term qualia. Through a series of thought experiments, or ‘intuition pumps’ Dennett proposes to show that none of the four previously mentioned properties of qualia seem to hold up to scrutiny or analysis. Perhaps most importantly, Dennett wants to deny the existence of qualia because it is often seen as the biggest threat and last defense against functionalism, or more generally materialism, and as he says, any third person objective approach to the world. As a naturalist philosopher, Daniel Dennett wants to explain conscious entirely in terms of the physical and finds that talk of qualia inherently lends itself to unnecessary confusions. And if qualia do exist, then something will have been left out of the functionalist definition of consciousness, rendering it false.

            Through the use of his cleverly constructed intuition pumps, Dennett wants to show that the four properties commonly attributed to qualia are confusions – and in that no such feature of consciousness has all of these properties, there must then be no qualia at all. Dennett attempts to show that upon reflecting on our actual experience, there really is nothing phenomenally concrete as to which we can accurately label qualia. As a functionalist, he wants to say that there are no qualia but rather just the functional roles our experiences play. Of this, he says that we falsely assume that beyond this causal system, there are some qualia to be isolated and compared. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on what seem to me to be the two most compelling intuition pumps, which illustrate that our common ideas of qualia are misguided.

            The Sanborne-Chase thought experiment serves to illustrate just how little of a first-person understanding we actually have of qualia. Both Sanborne and Chase are coffee tasters who at one time loved the taste of a particular coffee, but now no longer enjoy the flavor of that same coffee.  Sanborne says that the flavor is the same, but his judgment of it has changed. Chase says the opposite, namely the flavor has changed, but his judgment has remained the same. Clearly only one of the tasters is right, if the coffee itself has remained consistent. There then must be a forced choice, as to whether the quale has changed or the judgment has changed. Neither man can be sure of which is the actual case and insofar as he is unsure, it appears that the theoretical assumption of privileged-access is false. Both of these men, upon reflecting on their experience, seem to be analyzing it objectively rather than introspectively and at best guessing which shift has occurred within him. Dennett believes that at best, when we introspect we are only theorizing about what is going on in experientially. He also points out that often other people seem to have as good access to our own experiences as we do. For example, we are often fooled by our experience while others can ‘see what’s on our mind” by means of our emotions and behavior. Thus it appears there must be no privileged access property of qualia.

            Dennett uses another intuition pump to show that the assumption that qualia are intrinsic is completely unfounded. People often talk about beer as if it were an acquired taste. However, Dennett points out that you don’t actually acquire a liking for the first sip of beer (for if every sip of beer tasted like the first sip, no one would drink beer), but rather the prolonged drinking of beer creates a later enjoyable experience. The very enjoyment of the experiment should guarantee the taste is no longer the same as the first sip, claims Dennett. So it seems that our very liking of the beer has changed its flavor from the first sip to the most recent sip. But insofar as our reaction or experience itself results in a change in quale of beer (namely the flavor), qualia must not be intrinsic, but rather relational. Therefore, there must be no qualia.

            It turns out that upon reflecting on the subjective experience of beer, it is really just the beer itself we are attending to. That is, it is not the experience (being a property of consciousness) of the beer that we have access too, but rather the flavor property of the beer itself. In attempting to reflect on subjective experience of the beer, we end up failing and focusing on the beer itself. Thus the experience of beer is not mysterious and can be explained in terms of its causal roles. Dennett wants to just explain qualia functionally, in terms of the experience’s causal role. The functionalist says that if you reproduced the entire functional structure of the beer drinker’s cognitive system (including memories, beliefs, desires, innate aversions etc.), you would have effectively reproduced all the mental properties as well, including the enjoyment and pleasure the beer produces. Thus we can conclude that there is nothing to consciousness beyond structure and function as so the hard problem of consciousness must be illusory.

            At this point, one (a qualia realist perhaps) might object that while Dennett might have proven that we don’t have the special understanding we may think privileged access provides us (as demonstrated by Chase and Sanborne); surely Dennett cannot deny that we still have some special or privileged access to our own experience that makes it our experience. We surely must have a special access to what it is like to be us. But Dennett points out that it at least does not seem clear that we have the access to our conscious states we commonly think we have. Dennett thinks that the knowledge of ‘what is like is’ in theory objectively accessible. That is, with the correct research and examination, we can understand what it is like to be anyone just as much as what its like to be ourselves. Dennett thinks we only circumstantially know what it is like to be ourselves because it happens we ‘spend the most time with our selves.’ However, people we are close to often know what it is like to be us (and correctly so) in ways we’ve never reflected upon.           

Dennett argues that a large cause of the confusions about qualitative feelings being mysterious is that every person thinks he or she is an expert on consciousness. Insofar as everyone has conscious experience, each person believes to have some profound understanding of the phenomenon and how it works. However, upon genuine introspection and critical examination, it seems that none of the mysterious properties of consciousness hold up. Thus we are not the experts we think we are – but are merely wrapped up in our own experience, fooled by our own minds. By showing that subjective experiences or qualia are not as mysterious as commonly believe, Dennett hopes to show just how we are fooled about our experience. Reductive materialism is extremely controversial and many philosophers brush Dennett’s theory of consciousness off too quickly for being overly simplistic and counter intuitive. However, as Chalmers pointed out – if we are to ever understand such a complex phenomenon, it is going to take radical change in our current philosophical and scientific paradigm. Perhaps Dennett’s theory isn’t fully correct, but it should still serve as a model on how philosophy of consciousness should be done. It seems correct to revise our conception of consciousness rather than revise our concept of the natural world. Instead of simply waiting for some scientific revolution, Dennett has attempted to deny traditional intuitions and set forth a positive account of consciousness that preserves materialism. 

(NYU year 2 Consciousness)

Quining Qualia – Daniel Dennett

              In his paper “Quining Qualia”, Daniel Dennett sets out to deny our intuitions about qualia as being a sort of “special property” of consciousness. Dennett does not intend to fully deny conscious experience outright; and insofar as everything real has properties – he does not want to deny that consciousness has properties. However, Dennett does want to say that qualia itself does not have the special properties philosophers normally attribute to it: namely, being ineffable, private, intrinsic, and directly apprehensible through consciousness. He believes that philosophers are intuitively misguided in these assumptions. Commonly, qualia are described as ineffable insofar as we tend to think of our experience as defying expression or description in language. It is largely due to ineffability that qualia are thought to be private. Because we are not able to fully express our phenomenal experience, it becomes impossible for interpersonal comparison. Moreover, it seems that each of us has privileged access to our qualia – a first person perspective that no one else can experience quite like we do. Qualia are believed to be directly apprehensible through consciousness in that we seem to have the power to reflect on our experience, and in doing so – amplify the qualia. And finally, are phenomenal experiences are thought to be intrinsic insofar as they are somehow “atomic”, “simple” or “homogeneous” and therefore unable to get a hold of without direct experience. Dennett wants to show that it isn’t clear that consciousness really has any of these four previous characteristics commonly associated with qualia.

            He believes that many of the supposed mysteries of consciousness are created by dogmatically accepting these intuitions we have about qualia or the “ways things seem to us.” Dennett hopes to shift the burden of proof to those who so complacently appeal to private, subjective experiences as having these special properties. However, Dennett says that to try to eliminate these confusions and extrapolate some “lowest common denominator” of qualia – eliminating its ‘special’ characteristics – would be to reify the concept into oblivion. What would be left is a meaningless notion that is “tactically obtuse” and far from what philosophers mean when they use the term qualia. Through a series of thought experiments, or ‘intuition pumps’ Dennett proposes to show that none of the four previously mentioned properties of qualia seem to hold up to scrutiny or analysis. Perhaps most importantly, Dennett wants to deny the existence of qualia because it is often seen as the biggest threat and last defense against functionalism, or more generally materialism, and as he says, any third person objective approach to the world. As a naturalist philosopher, Daniel Dennett wants to explain conscious entirely in terms of the physical and finds that talk of qualia inherently lends itself to unnecessary confusions

            Dennett uses a serious of intuition pumps in hopes to show that our theories about qualia are misguided. Specifically, he wants to show that the four properties he attributes to qualia are confusions – and in that no such feature of consciousness has all of these properties, there must then be no qualia at all. Dennett attempts to show that upon reflecting on our actual experience, there really is nothing phenomenally concrete as to which we can accurately label qualia. As a functionalist, he wants to say that there are no qualia but rather just the functional roles our experiences play. Of this, he says that we falsely assume that beyond this causal system, there are some qualia to be isolated and compared. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on what seems to me to be the two most compelling intuition pumps, which illustrate that our common ideas of qualia are confusions.

            Dennett uses the Sanborne-Chase intuition pump to illustrate just how little first-person understanding we actually have of qualia. Both Sanborne and Chase are coffee tasters who at one time loved the taste of a particular coffee, but now no longer enjoy the flavor of that same coffee.  Sanborne says that the flavor is the same, but his judgment of it has changed. Chase says the opposite, namely the flavor has changed, but his judgment has remained the same. Clearly only one of the tasters is right, if the coffee itself has remained consistent. There then must be a forced choice, as to whether the quale has changed or the judgment has changed. Neither man can be sure of which is the actual case and insofar as he is unsure, it appears that the theoretical assumption of privileged-access is false. Both of these men, upon reflecting on their experience, seem to be analyzing it objectively rather than introspectively and at best guessing which shift has occurred within him. Thus, there must be no qualia.

            Dennett uses another intuition pump to show that the assumption that qualia are intrinsic is completely unfounded. People often talk about beer as if it were an acquired taste. However, Dennett points out that you don’t actually acquire a liking for the first sip of beer (for if every sip of beer tasted like the first sip, no one would drink beer), but rather the prolonged drinking of beer creates a later enjoyable experience. The very enjoyment of the experiment should guarantee the taste is no longer the same as the first sip, claims Dennett. So it seems that our very liking of the beer has changed its flavor from the first sip to the most recent sip. But insofar as our reaction or experience itself results in a change in quale of beer (namely the flavor), qualia must not be intrinsic, but rather relational. Therefore, there must be no qualia.

          Dennett claims to appeal to gustatory experience because he says color-vision is extremely complex and delicate. Where color experience depends on hue, saturation, and brightness of the perceived object; taste is wholly dependent on an object’s basic chemistry. We are also more comfortable with interpersonal comparisons in flavor, where as it becomes more confusing in comparing our visual experiences. People often compare their likes or dislikes of foods with others, but rarely compare their color experiences. Also, we often notice intrapersonal shifts in our gustatory experience. That is, we can remember times we disliked food we now love, and vice versa (such as in the Sanborne-Chase example). If there are intrapersonal changes in our color experience, it is far more gradual and nearly imperceptible for most people.

            Dennett, perhaps less explicitly, chooses to discuss flavor experience because it preserves his functional approach to qualia more intuitively than color. Dennett wants to say that there is no intrinsic property of qualia. Qualia, as it were, are merely experiences that play a particular functional role, generating some behavioral output as a response to some input. So if one reacts aversely to the taste of cauliflower he once enjoyed, the taste/qualia must be different insofar as it is playing a different functional role. Thus, cauliflower-quale have no intrinsic flavor. This point is not as easily demonstrated (if at all) with color experience – making flavor a better choice for Dennett. The question is whether the functionalist can then extend his claims about qualia based on taste to color experience.

      Dennett claims that the evidential power of neurophysiology is vastly limited in examining subjective experience. We can imagine in the case of an inverted spectrum, that it is not clear whether the invert’s qualia are genuinely inverted or rather his reaction, or remembrances of qualia are inverted. Obviously the invert will not know which is the case. Dennett says that the physiological tests, despite of how well developed, will fail to distinguish on which side of memory the qualia lay. The brain does not function in a clearly linear way that makes it possible to pinpoint where any such inversion may take place. The neurophysiologists may have reason for preferring one alternative to the other (qualia inversion to memory inversion), but this will only be to support their own theoretical claims about qualia. Dennett should want to say that this confusion is due to conceiving qualia as having some special, intrinsic nature that can be isolated from our behavioral dispositions.

      It seems to me that Dennett has made some philosophical progress, at least in showing that qualia do not pose a serious threat for the materialist advocates of consciousness. That is, he’s taken a phenomena that is thought to be mysterious and beyond physical explanation, and shown that this conception is merely an illusion based on misunderstanding. In actuality, there are no such qualia that have these “special” properties as Dennett calls them. However, while Dennett has defended functionalism, he has not succeeded in his second goal of proposing computational functionalism is valid. The biological functionalist, who approaches most of consciousness from functionalism, should not be convinced that functionalism is the correct approach to qualia. While Dennett has shown that qualia are not quite the special properties they were once thought to be, it still is not clear that qualia can be reduced entirely to their functional roles (and thus realized on any functionally similar system). The biological functionalist should want to say that conscious experience, namely the experience of qualia, is dependent on our biological structures (our brain system). 

(NYU year 2 Minds and Machines)