Ep. 400: Dennett Rejects Qualia (Part One)

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

In this episode of The Partially Examined Life, the hosts delve into Dan Dennett's final chapters of 'Consciousness Explained,' focusing on his rejection of qualia and the

Key takeaways

• Dennett argues that qualia are a relic of outdated philosophical ideas like secondary qualities and the Cartesian theater.
• Consciousness is not an intrinsic property but emerges from global information availability in the brain's multiple drafts model.

Main topics

• Dennett's rejection of qualia
• Phenomenal vs. access consciousness

Notable quotes

"If information is globally accessible to the organism, then it is conscious in the full sense."

Conclusion

Dennett maintains that conscious experience does not require irreducible qualia; instead, it arises

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:07) You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 400 is something like, is there a subject of our experiences? And we are continuing to read portions of Daniel C. Dennett's Consciousness Explained from 1991. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see PartiallyExaminedLife.com. This is Mark Linton Meyer, private and ineffable in Speaker 1 (0:32) Madison, Wisconsin. This is Seth Peskin, wondering where the color is. in Austin, Texas. Speaker 2 (0:38) This is Dylan Casey copying to being an urbane verificationist in Madison, Wisconsin. And Speaker 3 (0:45) this is Christopher Heath having no experience at all except for my discriminative states in North Hollywood. Speaker 4 (0:52) And this is the absence of Wes Alwyn. He was going to come back and spice up this second conversation of Dennett for us. But, you know, actually he told me he first Dennett, when he got into it, was just as annoying to him as he remembered. So it's not a fun experience. And second, he's just gotten really deep into doing some Claude AI stuff. So all the episodes on our site now have transcripts in the posts themselves. If it's not there yet, it'll be up there pretty quick. So that is something thanks to him and his working on it. So he's vibe coding. Yeah, I think that's a good exchange to not have him in this because we still have you here, Chris. Thank you for coming back. I'm still here. Speaker 3 (1:32) Yeah, I'll try to be as contentious as Wes was for sure. Or would be. Speaker 2 (1:36) Honestly, I'm kind of disappointed he's not here because Dennett's effectively arguing an emergent property effectively. Emergent-like kind of thing. And I would have expected Wes to be all over it. But maybe he just finds it too annoying. Speaker 3 (1:52) See, I already have a problem with that characterization. But I, so yeah, maybe we'll have to get into it. Speaker 2 (1:56) Well, it's interpretive at the end and Dennett might not even agree with it. Yeah. Speaker 4 (2:01) So we read the end of the book. Some of us had read chapter 12 for last time and could not help but presaging some of the things that we'll now treat in some more detail here. But when we're adding that, like, well, let's add 13, which is the reality of selves. Like, okay, well, that, you know, qualia and selves. And then Chris was just asking, like, are we reading 12 through 14? And I'm like, well, you know, 14 is actually pretty good, pretty relevant too. And then I ended up finding some stuff in 10 and 11 that I, you know, basically I just wanted to cover, you know, as much as we feel the need to, all the various group of thought experiments, famous articles, things, you know, saying that there's something wrong with scientism in the area of philosophy of mind, that there's something you can't quite capture and it is consciousness, right? The thing, the very thing that Dennett thinks he's explaining, well, is he actually explaining it or is he somehow? missing the point. He's explaining something else. One of his interlocutors, Ned Block, calls it phenomenal consciousness. He says access consciousness, right? The organism knows things, can emit verbal behavior about it, can use it to drive other kinds of behaviors, can recall it later. That's, you know, you're definitely conscious of something. You have access conscious. But is that the same as the lights being on? Is that you have that special phenomenal conscious and the actual experience of something. So you can imagine, you know, creating a machine that has visual sensors and is conscious of the stuff in its surrounding area. And you could even give it the ability to report on its own conscious states. And this is how much I was seeing today. And this is. You know, maybe the site was more acute today than yesterday because, you know, I'm running low on battery. It could have all this sort of self-conscious, Speaker 2 (3:50) I say in quotes. I'm just going to interrupt you right there. No one would ever call that consciousness. Right. That characterization by Block, no one would ever, and Dennett wouldn't call that consciousness. Right. He wouldn't call what Mark was just describing. I've not read the Block. But I'm a computer and I'm going to report on my sensory states about whether or not my battery is low. That is not what Dennett is talking about. And that's not what anybody would ever recognize as consciousness. And so Ned Block, if that's what he's characterizing it as, would say, well, this is manifestly not consciousness. And we say, yes, of course it's not consciousness. But that's not what someone like Dennett is talking about. Not even close. So I don't know what to... Well, Speaker 4 (4:30) do you think like... A snake. Well, so the very thermostat, that's the simplest possible one. You could say that it is in a metaphorical sense, conscious of the temperature in that it registers the temperature. So in that sense, it is conscious, even though, yes. Speaker 2 (4:46) So this kind of reductionism of what you mean by consciousness to literally delta states on physically able measurements is not sufficient to talk about what consciousness is. And Dennett would also agree with that. Correct. Okay. And so to try to say that a thermometer is by your definition of a functional distinction, a conscious entity, and therefore you're crazy because it's not conscious. It's just a poor understanding of the reduction. It's a false reduction. Speaker 4 (5:19) But Dan is going to say consciousness is something that comes in degrees. So the thermostat is conscious in the lowest possible degree. And forget about thermostats. Talk about cockroaches. You know, just anything that has sensors. Maybe a Venus flytrap reacts. But for Dennett, when you add in... the self-looping, the self-stimulation, you get something that's complex enough, it's still made of these dumb little conscious homunculi, conscious in the dumb sense, that adds up to full consciousness. Whereas for Block, well, no, that's all still access consciousness. In other words, information is available. But for Dennett puts his as, well, if information is globally accessible to the organism, then it is conscious in the full sense. And that's where, right, Block would still say, no, that's only access consciousness. You need the light going on, something beyond that. Speaker 2 (6:19) So I just want to play foul on this. We didn't read any Block. We read him years ago. I did not think about Block at all. So I don't want to try to understand access consciousness, the distinction. All right. We can pursue it along and try to make this distinction so that it makes a difference with it. The name doesn't matter to me. So what is the distinction that you're trying to make that pertains, that bears exactly on what Dennett is saying? Block calls it axis consciousness. I don't understand what that is, but tell me what the thing that is missing. Qualia. Speaker 3 (6:54) Yes. Speaker 2 (6:55) Okay. Speaker 3 (6:56) Phenomenal consciousness. Why Speaker 2 (6:58) don't we get to qualia and talk about why Dennett says that qualia are a distinction that doesn't make a difference. Speaker 1 (7:04) So, I mean, basically what Dennett. In order to introduce what the concept of qualia and to try to, as Dennett says, he's not going to try to untangle it because it's become this decades long debate in philosophy. But he starts with talking about primary and secondary qualities. So, you know, he says, basically, qualia in some sense have a legacy here in primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities being size, shape, motion, number, right? Things that could be in some meaningful sense, I guess, attributed to objects in the world. And then his secondary qualities are things which involve, obviously involve objects with primary qualities, but ultimately we would say are located in the subjective experience of those objects. So those would be things like color, smell. or aroma's taste, and so on. And we can go through the argument in more detail, but in essence, what Dennett says is that if you dig yourself out from underneath all of the stuff about qualia, it's ultimately just a recapitulation of the idea of secondary qualities, and that there are a number of things that are challenging about that particular concept, secondary qualities. He's ultimately not just going to accept some of the objections to secondary qualities, but also say that ultimately the whole concept of a secondary quality or a qualia requires this Cartesian theater thing that he set up, which we talked about in the last episode. Speaker 2 (8:47) Yeah. And that's the money shot for him, right? Is that he links up secondary qualities with having to include the Cartesian theater. Speaker 4 (8:57) Right. So the color is not out there in the world. What's out there in the world are really just shapes and light bouncing off shapes. And so what makes it, you know, if we want to say, you know, that Locke who came up with this idea, in a sense, you could say, yes, this physical object is this color. But what does that mean? Well, it means that normally, if you're looking at it in normal lighting and you have a typical visual system with the typical ways. that people can decode colors, then you will Speaker 2 (9:30) see that as red. Yeah, your typical set of receptors, you have the, so basically you put all the qualifications in that in a particular kind of environment that takes care of all the external factors and a particular configuration of receptors that take care of all of the receiving portions, then you will all agree on the same color. And I think basically that would. Dennett is saying is the multiple drafts model and the account that I've given of how multiple drafts models is provides a simpler and more straightforward explanation of the experience and the phenomenology of color and the way in which it works amongst us as both human beings as well as our account for how it works amongst other creatures. Speaker 1 (10:16) Yes, that's ultimately where he's going to get. There are a couple of steps and One, I think, so I'm going to try to recite this. I don't have specific notes on this, but I'll recite it and you can tell me if I remember it correctly or not. So he's kind of setting up this idea of qualia the way it's used as this. It is supposed to give you something more than a so-called materialist or quote-unquote scientific explanation, right? Like so to explain my experience of red, you can't explain my experience of red by just saying, oh, light frequency wavelength, blah-da-dee-blah, bouncing off of surface, yadda-dee-yah, and hitting. None of that captures what the experience, I'm using scare quotes for listeners in the audio section here, to explain or capture or describe, it's unclear to me, but the experience of seeing red, you have to add something to the mechanics of what biologically, physically is actually happening when you see red. Speaker 2 (11:24) So who would say that? Speaker 1 (11:26) He's saying the qualia people would say that. The qualia people would say that. That they would Speaker 3 (11:29) say there's something else to over and above the sort of discriminatory state that he wants to point to. That they would say qualia is supposed to be this ineffable, private, almost extra piece of – that you experience of red. That's what they want to like hang on to that notion. And he understands why, right? Even in the beginning, he says like, it makes sense they might start from this point of view, right? We seem to, illusionism here, we seem to have those kinds of ineffable private experiences. And it makes total sense why philosophers would start there, but he wants to sort of therapeutically massage us out of that thinking. Yeah. Speaker 4 (12:02) Drink lots of water after reading this book. And I think last time I was trying to describe qualia as merely a technical term that maybe involved something over time. But he makes it clear on page 372, philosophers have adopted various names for the things in the beholder or the 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 experience, the qualitative content of mental states. or qualia. There are subtle differences in how these terms have been defined, but I don't care about any of them. So he's not trying to use a technical term. He's trying to just capture the sense that we all have, that there is a way that things appear to me. Yeah. They all imply the Cartesian theater. Speaker 3 (12:55) That's for sure what connects them all. Yeah. Speaker 2 (12:57) Yeah. And that's in his understanding, the downfall of them. And at the end of what you just read, Mark, he says he is denying that they exist, but he wholeheartedly agrees that there seems to be qualia. Because it really does seem as if science has shown us that the colors can't be out there and hence must be in here. So he's sort of turning, part of this is him turning and saying, well, look, the reason why people talk about qualia is it seems manifest by our experience that we perceive color, but science seems to undermine the notion that color exists. And so how do I get to there being something agreement between what feels like my manifest experience and my scientific account? And the qualia people, he would say, add it as a feature of our intrinsic capabilities,