Dennett Denies Qualia: Color Is Neither Out There Nor In Here
Dennett doesn't deny that we seem to have qualia; he denies that qualia, as a reified thing, exist — just as the center of gravity is an abstraction, not a point in the body.
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The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
Consciousness comes in degrees, not all or nothing
Dennett would say consciousness is a matter of degree: a thermostat is "aware" of temperature at the lowest degree, because it registers temperature. Cockroaches and Venus flytraps count too. The key mechanism is self-looping and self-stimulation — a bunch of clumsy little homunculi each making distinctions, and stacked together they become full consciousness. For Dennett, as long as information is globally available to the organism, that is consciousness in the full sense. Block would counter: that's only access consciousness, you still need the "lights coming on." Host Dylan protests on the spot: we haven't even read Block, don't wave that name around.
— MarkQualia are a relic of the Cartesian theater
Seth recounts Dennett's genealogy: primary qualities (size, shape, motion, number) can be attributed to objects in the world; secondary qualities (color and the like) end up lodged in the subject's subjective experience. Dennett's key move is to bind secondary qualities to the Cartesian theater — once you say color isn't out there and can only be in here, you've presupposed an "inside" theater where experience is presented to someone. That is what he wants to tear down.
— SethHe doesn't deny the seeming, only the being
On page 372 Dennett lines up raw feels, sensa, phenomenal qualities, intrinsic properties of conscious experience and a pile of other terms, saying he doesn't care about any of their fine distinctions. He denies these properties exist, but fully agrees that "there seem to be qualia" — because science does seem to prove color can't be out there, so it can only be stuffed inside. Dylan sums it up: this is exactly the inference Dennett wants to dismantle.
— DylanA color robot doesn't need a screen
On pages 373 to 375 Dennett compares color: you can look at things in the world side by side, or you can merely recall or imagine them in your mind. Mark throws out the term: a color-discriminating robot has access consciousness, can use information to make distinctions, but we intuitively feel that isn't enough, that qualia are still needed. Dylan pushes back: you still haven't told me what exactly is missing. He demands an example that doesn't involve discrimination, comparing memories, a mind's eye, or verbal communication. Christopher says color is a bad example; better ones are mental fatigue, valence states, pain.
— DylanThe self is a center of gravity, not an observer
Seth describes Dennett's analogy as "the law of universal gravitation"; Dylan corrects him: it's the center of gravity. The center of gravity is an abstracted, centralized organizing principle that explains what happens around an object, but the closer you get to that center the more it breaks down. Dylan says this is exactly what he finds persuasive: the failure of measurement matches "we don't have continuous experience, only chopped-up discrete experience stitched back together." Drill down and you won't find consciousness at every level; consciousness emerges from the assembly.
— DylanThe self isn't a judge, it's the activity itself
Dylan says Dennett doesn't deny you have a self, he denies that the self is the witness sitting above all experience passing judgment. The self is the assembly of this pile of stuff. Christopher adds a better word: the self is an activity. Dylan picks it up: that's why it's so tightly bound to the narrative model — the self is the event of these distinctions and discriminations continuously happening at this location, on this entity. Dennett uses multiple personality, divided selves, and split brains — "nature's bad experiments" — to argue that the self is a kind of unity, and that this is consistent with the multiple drafts model.
— DylanQualia can't live only inside an illusion
Seth runs a live experiment: he has everyone look at the device with the cord on the table behind Dylan and asks what color it is; everyone says blue. He asks: did you pull up a blue from memory to compare against? No. Dylan rebuts the experiment: when we're uncertain we say "it looks blue to me," and that's a qualifier, used in cases where you might be deceiving me or where there might be an optical illusion. Seth says that isn't his point: qualia can't exist only in epistemically uncertain hypothetical cases, and that just-now blue experience, shared by everyone and utterly uncontroversial, can no longer be adequately captured in the language of scientific materialism.
— SethThe bat is as unreachable as a Leipzig audience
Dennett reinterprets the bat through the Leipzig example: imagine what it was like to hear a Bach cantata for the first time — you'd have to reconstruct the context, history, environment, religious state, do a great deal of work to get as close as you can. Seth says this is a good example, because even a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century human of the same species can't get inside it, let alone a bat. Dylan cites page 442: what we should care about is what we can know about the bat's consciousness (if it has one), not whether we can temporarily or permanently turn our minds into a bat's mind. Mark points out that qualia lovers will seize on exactly this: bats have echolocation, you don't, so you'll never know what it's like.
— DylanIn their own words · checked verbatim
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, he says.
Mark12:52
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.
Dylan13:53
I just want to hear one example of one thing that is possibly missing about the experience and the social experience, the interpersonal experience, the individual experience of color.
Dylan17:40
I don't think that he denies that there's a like to be something. He just denies that it's inaccessible.
Dylan24:03
The self is the assembly of all this stuff. That's what the self is.
Dylan31:01
When someone says, I know that the ring isn't really pink, but it sure seems pink, the first clause expresses a judgment about something in the world, and the second clause expresses a second order judgment about a discriminative state about something in the world.
Dylan33:35
Don't our internal discriminative states also have some special intrinsic property, the subjective, private, ineffable properties that constitute the way that things look to us.
Christopher39:00
We should be interested in what we can know about the bat's consciousness, if any, not whether we can turn our minds temporarily or permanently into bat minds.
Dylan45:40
Glossary
- qualia
- The subjective, private, ineffable properties of experience, such as the feeling of seeing red.
- Cartesian theater
- Dennett's satirical name for the picture in which experience is presented to an observer somewhere inside the brain.
- access consciousness
- Block's term: information globally available to the organism, usable for reasoning and action.
- multiple drafts model
- Dennett's theory of consciousness: parallel editing in the brain, with no single final draft or central audience.
- center of gravity
- Dennett's analogy for the self: an abstracted organizing principle, not an entity.
- heterophenomenology
- Dennett's method: treat subjects' reports as neutral data, without presupposing that their experiences really exist.
How to listen
Engineers and founders who have read a little philosophy of mind and want to pin down what exactly Dennett is denying; people with an intuitive interest in whether subjective experience can be reduced.
The first five minutes of podcast small talk and chatter about Wes's absence can be skipped.