Ep. 400: Dennett Rejects Qualia (Part Two)

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

The episode continues a deep dive into Daniel Dennett's 'Consciousness Explained,' specifically focusing on his rebuttal to Thomas Nagel's argument regarding

Key takeaways

• Dennett rejects Nagel's 'what it is like to be a bat' argument by suggesting that once all discriminatory and dispositional states are known, the experience is explained.
• The concept of the 'self' is discussed as a 'narrative center of gravity,' a theoretical construction rather than a fundamental or indubitable datum.
• The speakers examine Dennett's use of Wittgenstein to argue that language-less creatures lack the narrative capacity for complex self-reflection, even if they possess biological agency.
• A debate occurs regarding whether Dennett's reductionism collapses into behaviorism or allows for a 'minimal qualia' based on evolutionary feedback loops.
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Main topics

• Dennett's rejection of qualia
• Nagel's bat argument
• Narrative center of gravity

Notable quotes

A conscious mind is an observer who takes in a limited subset of all the information.

Conclusion

This episode offers a profound exploration of functionalism and its im

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:07) You're listening to The Partially Examined Life, Episode 400, Part 2. Finishing up our discussion of Dan Dennett's Consciousness Explained, we were right in the middle of considering really his response to the Nagel article, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, which was Nagel's proof that there is something, qualia, the subjective experience, that even if you knew... You studied bats, you know all from the outside about their brain chemistry, their physiology, their abilities. How can they echolocate? How far away, how fast can the thing be moving? You could know all that stuff, and yet you would still never know what it is like to be a bat. There is that kernel of qualia that is forever inaccessible, and therefore science can't know everything there is to know. because there's the, you know, the thing that only other bats would understand. Speaker 3 (1:02) Yeah. And Speaker 4 (1:03) so can we sum up what so far, what Dennis' response to that has been? Speaker 3 (1:07) I mean, one, he just flat out rejects it, right? He says, look, there are all sorts of ways we can talk about what it might like to be a bat, especially like negative ways, like saying like, well, we know that they won't have the, I think he used like children's stories as an example. We know they're not going to like be going to school and thinking about their math homework or something like that seems silly, but there are all sorts of things we could immediately eliminate from what a bat. experience might be like. He says, once you have enough information, you can pretty much get there, especially because he thinks all what it's like to be a bat is just whatever discriminant or dispositional states the bat would have. Does that sound right? Speaker 2 (1:40) Yeah. And our access to it is heterophenomenology. He even walks into, I mean, I mean, he refers to von Uxel about, and the notion of umwelt and inwelt, the surround world and inner world, which To me, as soon as you agree that there is such a thing as an inner world of a bat, unless you want to go and take Nagel's point and say, ah, because there's an inner world that's an inner world of a bat, there's a what is like to be a bat that you don't have any access to. And therefore, there is consciousness. And that's the proof of consciousness. That's the part that Dennett won't go for. But the notion that there is a inner world for a bat that isn't a crazy one for Dennett. Speaker 3 (2:20) Yeah, I think that's part of it. I mean, Seth was even talking about selfhood and it's being related to linguistic behavior, I think a little bit too, when we last left off. And that struck me a little bit because I was the one earlier who was saying we want to be careful here about what we mean by self. Because I agree that qualia is just like a confused term and I kind of hate it. But I almost want to make room for a kind of minimal qualia. And I want to make sure that Dennett's okay with that. But I can't tell sometimes. Obviously the... That is a situated, evaluating point of view, like as an organism, right? It's got boundaries between itself, its environment. It has a feedback loop from taking in senses and acting. When he talks about qualia, he wants to say that he doesn't like that it's constituted by it being ineffable, being private, and all these things. And I'm okay with that. But he does also mention he doesn't want to talk about it being subjective. That's one of the criteria he uses as well. And I don't understand that part about why there couldn't still be. an agentive point of view that would have been, I mean, selected for early in animal history, where in which you have this situated evaluating point of view, and it feels like something to be exhausted, to be in pain. Does that make sense? Sometimes I feel like he's okay with this. And sometimes I feel like he wants nothing to do with it. And I can't tell where, I know I've said this before, but relate that to the bat for me, Dylan, like he's okay with all that stuff I just said? So Speaker 2 (3:42) I think he would be. The part that I... 447, I think that we get to something like this. He says, so before this, he's talking about, this is towards the end of the, what is it like to be a bat? And he brings up language. This is after the reference to Van Uxel. And, you know, and he brings up Wittgenstein, you know, he says, quotes Wittgenstein, if a lion could talk, we could not understand him. I think on the contrary, that if a lion could talk, that lion would have a mind so different from the general run of lions' minds that although we could understand him just fine, we would learn very little about ordinary lions. Speaker 1 (4:20) That made me laugh out loud. Speaker 2 (4:22) Yeah. And then he goes on to say, when we imagine what it is like to be a languageless creature. And this, I think, is a really good place to try to be at, right? Because that's what I think you're sort of getting at, Chris, that even if I can't talk to this creature, if they don't have language, even if they don't even have a way of talking to themselves, there is a way for them to be that is experienced by them. And so what he says is we start naturally from our own experience and most of what then springs to mind has to be adjusted mainly downward. The sort of consciousness such animals enjoy is dramatically truncated compared to ours. A bat, for instance, not only can't wonder whether it's Friday, it can't even wonder whether it's a bat. There's no role for wondering to play in its cognitive structure. While a bat, even like the lolly lobster, has a biological self, it has no selfie self to speak of, no center of narrative gravity, or at most a negligible one. No words on the tip of its tongue, but also no regrets, no complex yearnings, no nostalgic reminiscences, no grand schemes, no reflections on what it is like to be a cat or even on what it was like to be a bat. This list of dismissals would be cheap skepticism if we didn't have a positive empirical theory on which to base it. Speaker 3 (5:37) But... Even that to me feels like you're talking about its metacognitive abilities, right? Its ability to take itself as an object. I agree bats don't do this. There's some animals that do, elephants, apes, but that doesn't imply that it doesn't have a valence point of view, an experience of a center, a sort of nexus of causal powers where in which it's able to act on the world, take in information and be a subjectivity itself. Like, is he like, I think there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why you would have subjects. develop alongside with agency. Yeah. Speaker 2 (6:08) I don't see him just denying that. In fact, the way you just said it, which is the way in which Tomasello would say it as well, is that that agency is really in sort of co-linear with the development of self. Speaker 3 (6:24) Oh, wait. So let me read this. He says here, does this mean that language-less animals are not conscious at all, as Descartes insisted? This question always arises as this moment as a sort of incredulous challenge, but we shouldn't feel obliged to answer it as it stands. Notice that it presupposes something we have worked hard to escape, the assumption that consciousness is a special all-or-nothing property that sunders the universe into two vastly different categories, the things that have it, things like something to be, and things that lack it. It's unclear to me that that necessarily splits the world into mental and physical. I don't think there's anything over and above the physical processes that are going on. I just think, The physical processes, what it feels like from the inside to be that organizing system is a thing, is a real biological phenomenon. That's subjectivity. Speaker 2 (7:08) And do you think that is denying that? Speaker 3 (7:10) I don't, I can't, I can't quite tell. Speaker 4 (7:13) Well, it is a thing to be explained at least. Sure. We claim that we have, but is the claiming the same as the analogy of the center of gravity that we say we don't? So if you're Hume. There is no real self. The self is a construction exactly the way. But it seems like Hume still isn't going to deny the basic Cartesian picture of there are appearances in front of, quote unquote, me. I don't know what the me is. So Hume just shakes his head like, I don't know. The me is I can't say it's a thinking thing. I can't make any of those positive. But there's still the phenomena of stuff is seeming to me that I then have to interpret. And it seems like there is no way for anybody that is at all likes phenomenology, likes introspection, likes the first person point of view. But Dennis seems to think that that is, it is data to be explained. It is not itself the scientific image of the world. Yeah, Speaker 3 (8:13) I Speaker 4 (8:13) don't think it's over and above the physical. Speaker 3 (8:15) I don't want to give it quality of that quality, if you will. I'm okay with it. Speaker 4 (8:19) So there's... matter and then there's points of view on the matter. That would be a form of dualism, a property dualism. That's explicitly what Chalmers' view is. But I don't want to Speaker 3 (8:29) have that view is what I'm saying. The mode of being a point of view is perfectly, that's why I want to deny the hard problem. I think that's perfectly explainable. I mean, you can give a kind of biological and evolutionary explanation for why agency and subjectivity sort of co-evolve together. I think that that's perfectly reasonable to think you could come to that, that you could. slowly chip away at the problem of why there are subjectivities or why there's felt experience or something like that. Sometimes I think Dennett's okay with this and he's just not talking to me. That he's talking to the tradition, understanding qualia, again, is ineffable and private and not explainable by the physical and all that stuff. I agree with him when it comes to philosophical zombies, right? That yes, if you had something that was identical, you would get the subjectivity. I don't think it makes any sense to talk about those things. I think you can imagine them as separate. But I don't actually think that makes any sense. But sometimes I think Dennett's saying, well, actually, there is no phenomenal quality that goes along with the processes as well. It's just the process. And you are a philosophical zombie. And I don't know how to take that sometimes. I'm just looking at the term point of view, doing a search. I think he even says, qualifies it, but says something about us. We are philosophical zombies. And mind you, Speaker 4 (9:39) he Speaker 3 (9:39) doesn't want to eat. He purposely says don't take it out of context, but I want to know what he means exactly like that. So Speaker 4 (9:44) chapter five, right? This is the multiple drafts versus the Cartesian theater. Whenever there is a conscious mind, there is a point of view. This is one of the most fun ideas we have about minds or about consciousness. A conscious mind is an observer who takes in a limited subset of all the information. For most practical purposes, we can consider the point of view of a particular conscious subject to be just that, a point moving through space-time. What happens when we try to close in on the observer and try to locate the observer's point of view more precisely as a point within the individual. So in other words, a point of view is exactly the kind of thing like a self, like the center of gravity, that is a theoretical construction, that it is not a fundamental datum given indubitably by experience, right? For Descartes, it is. I exist. I am here having. these potentially delusionary, wrongheaded thoughts, but I'm having the thoughts that is just absolutely central. But Dan, it seems to think that we can eventually get beyond that to say that, yeah, okay, that is part of our, the social baggage that comes with creatures like us. And it is something that we'll report, that we will say that we have, but it is merely a seeming. Speaker 1 (11:00) Okay. I could be high on the butyrol right now, but I'm floored that it's taken me. I mean, I wouldn't have appreciated this book if I had read it in the nineties. Speaker 2 (11:12) Yeah, me neither. Speaker 1 (11:13) And I doubt if it was written by anybody other than Dennett, like if it was written by a young up and coming philosopher, it probably would never made the scene because people would, they had to take him seriously. There's something I have been. thinking about this very, you guys have heard me talk about self-consciousness and consciousness and this, you know, Chris, you haven't been privy to my march through the history of genocide and, you know, trying to explain why human beings are so destructive and, you know, what I've laid on these guys before. But there's something fundamentally powerful about this idea that Dennett's pushing, which is that the seeming the feeling as if, the feeling to me, right? This is essentially a linguistic or a narrative layer that is laid on top of the physical phenomena. So he's not going to deny that there's actual things happening in a