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Dennett on Qualia and Consciousness: A Critique1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Bredo Johnsen
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Extract

Introduction

It is at least a bit embarrassing, perhaps even scandalous, that debate should still rage over the sheer existence of qualia, but they continue to find able defenders after decades of being attacked as relics of ghostly substances, epiphenomenal non-entities, nomological danglers and the like; the intensity of the current confrontation is captured vividly by Daniel Dennett:

What are qualia, exactly? This obstreperous query is dismissed by one author (“only half in jest”) by invoking Louis Armstrong's legendary reply when asked what jazz was: “If you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna get to know.” … If I succeed in my task, this move … will look as quaint and insupportable as a jocular appeal to the ludicrousness of a living thing-a living thing, mind you! -doubting the existence of elan vital.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , March 1997 , pp. 47 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1997

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References

2 Dennett, D. ‘Quining Qualia,’ in Marcel, A.J. and Bisiach, E. eds., Consciousness in Contemporary Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988) 42–77, at 43Google Scholar. Dennett's quotation is from Block, Ned ‘Troubles with Functionalism,’ in Savage, C.W. ed., Perception and Cognition: Issues in the Foundations of Psychology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1978) 261-326, at 281.Google Scholar

3 ‘Quining Qualia’; also, ‘Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain’ (with Kinsboume, Marcel), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (1992) 183–247Google Scholar, and Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown 1991). When two of these works are cited in a parenthetical page reference, the first identifies the locus of the quoted passage, the second that of a parallel discussion in one of the other works.

4 For a classic statement of this view, see Nagel, Thomas ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ Philosophical Review 83 (1974) 435–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 See, e.g., Burge, Tyler ‘Philosophy of Language and Mind,’ Philosophical Review 101 (1992) 3–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tye, Michael ‘Naturalism and the Mental,’ Mind 101 (1992) 421–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See, e.g., Horgan, Terence ‘Supervenient Qualia,’ Philosophical Review 91 (1987) 491–520CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Yablo, Stephen ‘Mental Causation,’ Philosophical Review 101 (1992) 245–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where he defends the remarkable thesis that in some cases ‘a mental event emerges as better qualified than its physical basis for the role of cause [of behavior].’

7 See Lewis's, ‘Mad Pain and Martian Pain’ in Block, Ned ed., Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1980), 216–22Google Scholar, reprinted with a postscript in his Philosophical Papers Volume I (New York: Oxford University Press 1983), 122-32, along with references to his earlier work cited therein, and my ‘Mental States as Mental,’ Philosophia 23 (1994) 223-45.

8 Goodman, Nelson Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1965)Google Scholar

9 Lewis, David Counterfactuals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1973), 88Google Scholar

10 It should perhaps be noted that, following Wittgenstein, in On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1969)Google Scholar, one might hold that all of our judgments are in principle revisable, but that those judgments are made against the background of a kind of certainty that is not a matter of regarding any judgments as certain.

11 Dennett, Daniel ‘Why You Can't Make a Computer That Feels Pain,’ in Brainstorms (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books 1978), 190–229, esp. 216-29Google Scholar

12 Shoemaker, Sydney ‘The Inverted Spectrum,’ Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982) 357–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Goodman, Nelson The Structure of Appearance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1951)Google Scholar, Chapter IV, Section 4: ‘Physicalistic and Phenomenalistic Systems.’

14 Welch, Robert W. Perceptual Modification (New York: Academic Press 1978)Google Scholar, Chapter 5, ‘Adaptation to Visual Transposition,’ 118

15 If, in cases of ‘complete adaptation,’ subjects were to resist answering the question, one intriguing possibility would be that the brain had made an ‘incommensurability judgment’ — ‘the present world’ is ‘constructed’ from an entirely new set of materials, so that direct comparison with ‘the former world’ is somehow impossible.

16 Damasio, A. et al., ‘Central Achromotopsia: Behavioral, Anatomic, and Physiological Aspects,’ Neurology 30 (1980) 1064–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Geschwind, N. and Fusillo, M. ‘Color-Naming Defects in Association with Alexia,’ Archives of Neurology 15 (1966) 137–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Although the general argument offered here is related to the charge of ‘nomological danglerhood,’ the demand that quale theory have some bearing on specific anomalies is, I think, new. A similarly flawed argument against such ‘folk psychological’ concepts as belief and desire has been put forward by Churchland, Paul in Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1984), 73Google Scholar; for discussion, see Horgan, T. and Woodward, J. ‘Folk Psychology is Here to Stay,’ The Philosophical Review 94 (1985) 197–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 See, e.g., his ‘Do-It-Yourself Understanding,’ publication CC5-90-4 of the Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, 9-10.

20 See his ‘Mad Pain and Martian Pain,’ cited above in note 6.

21 Quale theory per se is simply the view that perception normally gives rise to particular, personal, subjective sensory (phenomenal) qualities. Thus far, it is not incompatible with views to the effect that qualia are reducible to, or identifiable with, e.g., physical or functional properties, or that they supervene on such properties. See my ‘Mental Sates as Mental’ cited above in note 6, and Stephen Yablo's paper cited in note 5.

22 Though Dennett talks here as though the identity conditions of pips might be found at the finest-grained neurological level, he might on reflection choose to characterize them, as he does beliefs, in terms of patterns of brain activity, and to suggest that ‘the multidimensional complexities of the underlying processes are projected through linguistic behavior, which creates an appearance of definiteness and precision, thanks to the discreteness of words.’ See his ‘Real Patterns,’ The Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991) 27-51, at 45.

23 For a recent defense of privacy in a strong sense, see my ‘The Intelligibility of Spectrum Inversion,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 23 (1993) 631-6.

24 One significant matter which Dennett takes up lacks the relevance he attributes to it ‘Kripke, [in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1982)Google Scholar) comes close [to claiming infallibility) when he asks rhetorically: “Do I not know, directly, and with a fair degree of certainty, that I mean plus by [the function I call ‘plus’)”? … Kripke … presumably means by this remark to declare his allegiance to what Millikan, [in Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1984)Google Scholar] attacks under the name of “meaning rationalism.”’ Whatever degree of confidence we may be entitled to about the meanings of our terms in general, it is an entirely separate question whether beliefs formulated in certain terms suffer additional uncertainty, as a function of their subject-matter (qualia, physical objects, and the like); it is of course the latter question which is important for us, and Kripke's remark, and Millikan's attack on ‘meaning rationalism,’ have no bearing on it. (Dennett's interpretation of Millikan is in any case not obviously correct. Compare: ‘How do [we] know that we really do end up meaning plus by “plus”? — Because if we meant quus then “plus” would mean quus, and the way to say that we all meant quus would be “we all mean plus” — which is what I said.’ See ‘Truth-Rules, Hoverflies, and the Kripke-Wittgenstein Paradox,’ The Philosophical Review 99 [1990)323-354; seen., 343-4.)

25 In Dennett's writings ‘CT’ can refer either to the view that there is ‘a place in the brain where it all comes together perceptually’ (sometimes called Cartesian materialism), or to the view that there is in each of us an internal observer who witnesses the succession of qualia which constitute the stream of consciousness. I have tried to insure in what follows that no use of the term, whether in quoted passages or in my discussion, is ambiguous.

26 See ‘A Model Devoid of Consciousness,’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1994), 176-7.

27 See his ‘Authors' Response,’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1994) 178-80, at 179.

28 Thus it is not to my purpose here to discuss various difficulties surrounding Dennett's positive views of the sort of ‘stream of consciousness’ he acknowledges. Among the matters that would have to be considered in a treatment of that topic is the fact that in CE Dennett adopts an ‘operationalist’ view of reports of subjective experience, along with its consequence that such reports are after all infallible: ‘[T]he MD model … denies the possibility … of consciousness of a stimulus in the absence of the subject's [presumably accurate — Author] belief in that consciousness.’ Further, he mistakenly portrays the fallibilist quale theorist as postulating, in contrast, ‘the bizarre category of the objectively subjective — the way things seem to you even if they don't seem to seem that way to you’ (CE, 132). Such a theorist holds that our judgments about how things seem to us may be mistaken, i.e., that things may not seem to us the way that we judge that they seem to us; whether things seem to seem to us the way they seem to us is another (and even more obscure) matter. I have proposed a new approach to these difficult issues in ‘The Given,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (1986) 597-613.

29 Dennett has disputed this claim: ‘We said what we meant the standard presumption breaks down — for quite mundane reasons’ (ibid., 179). But my intention here is not (nor was it there) to dispute the latter claim, but simply to make the tautological point that the question whether the events in two distinct sequences occur in the same order presupposes the existence of two sequences; arriving at the conclusion that the orders of events in the two sequences are mutually independent could hardly undermine that fact. In particular, I have no quarrel with Dennett's concluding remark: ‘The temporal sequence in consciousness is, within the limits of whatever temporal control window bounds our investigation, purely a matter of the content represented, not the timing of the representing’ (TO, 200).

30 Goodman, N. Ways of World making (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett 1978), 73.Google Scholar

31 Jackson, Frank ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia,’ Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982) 127–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In ‘Mental States’ I defend Jackson's claim against both Paul Churchland and David Lewis (who considers a parallel argument concerning what is required in order to come to know what Vegemite tastes like).

32 I owe this important point to my student John Lockhart.

33 In fact, of course, she would not come to know, because she would not come to believe, either (i) or (ii); rather, she would acquire (iii) a false belief about how yellow things look (to her), along with the false beliefs, derived from her misplaced trust in her deceivers, (iv) that the banana is yellow and (v) that the banana looks. the way yellow things look (to her).

34 An interesting example of one of the sorts of things I have in mind is to be found in Nikolinakos's, Drakon ‘General Anesthesia, Consciousness, and the Skeptical Challenge,’ Journal of Philosophy 91 (1994) 88–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 The verb ‘to quine’ is defined in Dennett's marvelous The Philosophical Lexicon, available from the American Philosophical Association, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware.

I am deeply indebted to M.G. Yoes, Jr. for the unrelenting and influential pressure he has exerted on my views of these matters over the years, and to James Garson, Anne Jaap Jacobson, and Ruth Garrett Millikan as well for helpful comments and criticism. This journal's editors and referees deserve unusual credit both for prompting substantial expansion of an earlier, more limited, version of this paper, and for suggesting numerous improvements in the present version.