Your point is that humans and animals can both perceive or consciously experience red, but it requires language to identify the colour as “red”?

You’re saying that conscious experience involving red objects is not necessarily conscious experience of red objects (or of the redness of those objects)? Why isn’t it?

Immediately apprehending [...] the property of redness requires already knowing how to use "red"...

...Not all conscious experience involving red cups, balls, and tulips requires language. — creativesoul

Is this not contradictory?

Wittgenstein was railing against the idea of private meaning/language, not private experience: — Luke

In music, there are microtones: notes between the named notes (e.g. between C and C#). I'm not sure whether these "extra" notes also have names, but I doubt that all of them do. Think of a trombone player continuously sliding up a continuum of notes. The same could be said of colours. It seems likely that we see more shades of colour than those we have names for. This is before any consideration of how these things may be seen or heard. Lots of folks are making this about language instead of conscious experience.

Properties of consciousness would be more like the pattern of signals it has, the causes and consequences of it,...etc — Isaac

In that case, I think you and I each mean something different by "conscious experience".

If conscious experience is no more than a "pattern of signals" or "neural activity", and if seeing things is just "a convenient fiction", then how are you able to read what I've written? By your logic you are unable to show me any proof or experimental evidence to support your claims because there is no seeing/showing.

On the other hand, I could interpret you as saying that the parallel case is true, namely that Putin is both corrupt--the top silovarch who has used his power to become mega-rich--and dedicated to the security, stability, and prosperity of his country, as he sees it. — jamalrob

It would not surprise me.

Unless you've read back over the past couple of pages — jamalrob

Not in any great detail.

it's actually implied in what I wrote — jamalrob

Sorry for any misinterpretation.

...it makes it look as if Hitler was just a greedy sado-racist. His invasion was a form of colonialism... — jamalrob

Maybe it was both? I really don't know much about it, but it seems like a fine distinction to draw between killing Jews because he wanted to, and killing Jews because he wanted to make more room for the Aryan race by having less Jews.

I don't really agree or disagree here. I think the concept is too poorly defined. If by 'reality of conscious experience' we merely mean that some mental goings on can be referred to as 'conscious experience' then I'd agree that, being real, they'd have properties. — Isaac

Can you give an example of one (or more) of these properties. I assume redness is out. Bitterness?

I also reject that there is such a thing as the 'redness' of a flower. — Isaac

Do you disagree with Dennett that there are properties of conscious experience?

Aren't you just expressing the hard problem with that question: why do we have qualia if they make no functional difference?
— Luke

No, that question assumes we have qualia. I'm saying that we don't. That nothing ontologically answers to that description — Isaac

Dennett seems to allow for qualia, insofar as they do not have the four special qualities he cites of being:

(1) intrinsic
(2) ineffable
(3) private
(4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness

In other words, he allows for properties of conscious experience (i.e. qualia) as long as they do not possess these four special qualities. I assume you reject qualia because you take "qualia" to refer to properties of conscious experience which do possess these four special qualities. And therefore, like Dennett, you would allow that we do e.g. see the redness of a flower or taste the bitterness of coffee.

Which idea of qualia am I trying to extirpate? Everything real has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. That is to say, whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time, but these properties are so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia. Qualia are supposed to be special properties, in some hard-to-define way. My claim--which can only come into focus as we proceed--is that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special. — Dennett

Talk of qualia serves only to obscure such conversation. "You can never know what the coffee tastes like to me"...well, yes I can; I know it tastes bitter. I can surmise that another coffee, even nuttier to me, might well be more bitter to you.

I know what the coffee tastes like for you. — Banno

Just like the problem of the inverted spectrum, how do I know that what you call "nutty" is the same as what I call "nutty"? Paraphrasing Dennett: "Since we both learned [flavour] words by being [fed] public [flavour] objects, our verbal behavior will match even if we experience entirely different subjective [flavours].

Even if we experience the same subjective flavours, how do I really know what you mean by "nutty"? Does it taste like a particular type of nut? Do all peanuts taste the same, for example? And what sort of bitterness are we talking about? There are many shades of difference here which language cannot easily capture. We could go on endlessly trying to refine it. I think this is what Dennett criticises (or what qualia advocates are referring to) when he speaks of the ""homogeneity" or "atomicity to analysis" or "grainlessness" that characterizes the qualia of philosophical tradition." A picture is worth a thousand words in other words, and language has difficulty doing justice to the sight before our eyes (or the taste on our tongue, etc.), especially when attempting to convey it to others in high fidelity.

Take the example of the wine tasting machine at intuition pump #2. Dennett describes it as:

A computer based "expert system" for quality control and classification is probably within the bounds of existing technology. We now know enough about the relevant chemistry to make the transducers that would replace taste buds and olfactory organs (delicate color vision would perhaps be more problematic), and we can imagine using the output of such transducers as the raw material--the "sense data" in effect--for elaborate evaluations, descriptions, classifications. Pour the sample in the funnel and, in a few minutes or hours, the system would type out a chemical assay, along with commentary: "a flamboyant and velvety Pinot, though lacking in stamina"--or words to such effect. Such a machine might well perform better than human wine tasters on all reasonable tests of accuracy and consistency the winemakers could devise, but surely no matter how "sensitive" and "discriminating" such a system becomes, it will never have, and enjoy, what we do when we taste a wine: the qualia of conscious experience! — Dennett

What would it take to really invent this machine? How would we go about matching the machine's verbal reports with the chemical compositions of various wines? In particular, how would we obtain the verbal reports to input into the machine? From human wine tasters who actually taste wine, of course! These would be what an expert wine taster would say, because they taste wines and say these sorts of things (give these sorts of descriptions). The wine tasting machine may be indistinguishable from a human (once it is up and running) from a behavioural or functional perspective, but I doubt anyone would say - given the current level of technological sophistication - that the machine does actually taste wine. But another problem is how many different adjectives or scripts could be programmed into the machine without it sounding like a 1980s computer game with a limited range of responses. Furthermore, tastes change and language/descriptions/expressions evolve with them. Can we really imagine such a machine being indistinguishable from humans, and if we could imagine it, could we then doubt whether it did have taste qualia?

He's talking about the word itself. The word exists. I suppose on way to put it if you want to maintain that all words we use must, by that use, have a meaning (a position I have some sympathy with), then you could say the Dennett was showing that we do not mean any single identifiable thing when using the word. — Isaac

Seems like you mean to say that the word "qualia" has no referent, rather than no meaning.

Have a read of the Farrell paper — Isaac

Thanks, I'll take a look.

Because they have backward-acting neurons which suppress signals from more primary cortices before they get processed in the models of cortices higher than them. All the while that's happening, these higher level cortices are not on idle, waiting for the results, they're still processing the previous data and this affects the backward acting signals. So basically, before a signal has even left a primary area it is out of date, it has been interpreted post hoc on the basis of a model from a few seconds ago (or a long as a few minutes ago as you go higher up the cortices). — Isaac

I take all this to mean that it takes some time for a signal (e.g. sense data) to travel (e.g. from the skin) to the brain. Without wanting to derail the discussion too much, the question becomes: when is "real time", or with what is "real time" synchronous? You seem to suggest it is (e.g.) when light hits the retina. But why then? And whose retina?

I assume the response will be that it might mislead us to think that such properties are subjective rather than objective, and that if the flower is perceived as red or if the coffee is perceived as bitter, then each of them really are red and bitter. Except that's not how everyone perceives them?
— Luke

What do you mean by subjective and objective here? How are the two distinguished? I'm asking because Dennett's position is taken as undermining the distinction between those two, so it should be hard to understand in those terms. (Edit: though I do recall him using the phrase "objective properties" in a paper!)

If you're using "objective" as a placeholder for "all property types", I'd agree with you. If "objective" imputes constraints on the types of property considered and our access to them, I guess I wouldn't. — fdrake

The idea of "objective properties" may be something I erroneously inferred from your earlier comments (e.g. here) regarding 'extrinsic relational properties'. My assumption was that if perceptual properties are not subjective, then they can only be objective. I took 'objective properties' to mean that one perceives an object to be red because the redness inheres in the object, not in the perception. But if there were such objective properties, then everybody should perceive the object in the same way (namely, as red). However, conditions such as colour blindness and cerebral achromatopsia indicate that people have different perceptions and/or properties in relation to the same objects. This suggests that perception/properties are subjective, not objective. 'Extrinsic relational properties' seems like an attempt to have perceptual properties be neither subjective nor objective. However, while I understand that there is a relation involved in forming a perception, I have trouble understanding how a perception - together with its properties - could be anything but for a subject, i.e. subjective.

What use are they for what? Qualia are "the way things seem to us". Why do they need to have a use?
— Luke

Because they're a word and words without uses are meaningless — Isaac

If the word "qualia" has no use, then what are we talking about? What is Dennett talking about?

Can "the way things seem to us" be theoretical?
— Luke

It is only theoretical. We can only tell the story of how things were, not how things are. Our brains simply don't work in real time. and that story of how things were is filtered through several theories. — Isaac

Perhaps our conscious minds "don't work in real time", but why do our brains not work in real time?

I take a sip of coffee from my cup, and I taste coffee. That's a relationship between me and the coffee. Phrased generally, that's a perceptual relationship between me and a perceptual stimulus.

Another way of parsing that is that I took a sip of coffee from my cup, and I experienced a coffee taste quale. That's a relationship between me and and the coffee taste quale. — fdrake

Thanks for clarifying. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I take the "perceptual relationship" to be the perception itself, and I further assume that the perception has properties, such as seeing a red flower, or tasting bitter coffee. Would it be problematic to refer to these properties of perception as the qualia?

I assume the response will be that it might mislead us to think that such properties are subjective rather than objective, and that if the flower is perceived as red or if the coffee is perceived as bitter, then each of them really are red and bitter. Except that's not how everyone perceives them?

The main sticking point for me is the definition of privacy that I gave earlier. Qualia or not, conscious experience is surely private in the sense that nobody else can experience (or "see") your conscious experience. Nobody can look into your skull and compare whether you see red the same as they do.

(5) Qualia as Dennett's attacking them are (I think) subjective state properties ("my experience of the red quale") that are dependent upon a perceptual intermediary (The "Cartesian Theatre" metaphor). — fdrake

Can you explain the difference between seeing red and experiencing a red quale? If we eliminate the supposed Cartesian Theatre, does it imply that we don't/can't really see red? In other words, why must qualia advocates be committed to perceptual intermediaries?

Not my definition. I borrowed it in order to show that it is a nonsense - literally, it has no sense; except in extending philosophical threads beyond endurance. — Banno

If the nature of conscious experience is not amenable to philosophical discussion, then so be it.

Since you're invoking Wittgenstein, what do you make of his remark that I quoted earlier?:

78. Compare knowing and saying:

how many metres high Mont Blanc is —
how the word “game” is used —
how a clarinet sounds.

Someone who is surprised that one can know something and not be able to say it is perhaps thinking of a case like the first. Certainly not of one like the third.

Indeed - so which is Albert?

SO much bad philosophy comes form folk 'effing the ineffable. Keep going - you are making my point better than I could. — Banno

You've already defined it: "how this coffee tastes to me, here, now", at one point in time. I'm saying that the taste of a cup of coffee can change from the first sip to the last. How is this making your point? What is your point?

Yes. So identifying Albert fails. — Banno

No, the point is that, even in one cup of coffee, the taste can change from start to finish. But it still tastes like coffee, overall. Just like I can distinguish between two different brands of coffee, but can't explain that difference in flavour.

And if Albert is ineffable, then I can't talk about Albert - at least not in great detail.
— Luke

I agree. So, to be consistent you should stop posting to this thread. — Banno

I shouldn't defend the claim that qualia are ineffable, because qualia are ineffable? Interesting argument. :brow:

Albert isn't the taste of coffee; it's how this coffee tastes to me, here, now... right?

So with my next sip of coffee, I won't become reacquainted with Albert. That will be a new, different something it’s like to taste coffee. — Banno

A cup of coffee usually tastes pretty much the same throughout for me, unless I forget to stir it, then it tastes sweeter at the end of the cup than at the start (I have mine with sugar).

By definition, Albert is only yours. You can talk about Albert, but like the beetle, what role can Albert possibly play in a language game? — Banno

What difference does it make? My conscious experience is not a language game. How things seem to me is not a language game. And if Albert is ineffable, then I can't talk about Albert - at least not in great detail.

How exactly do you individuate Albert? — Banno

The same way you individuate any of your tastes - unless you think there are none?

So the question regarding "the sensation itself" I have is: what makes a sensation be more than relational, dispositional and functional properties?

I take it you'll agree that sensations are relational, dispositional and functional to some degree. Or have those as a component. Let's take as an example putting my hand on something too hot and reflexively withdrawing it. The sensation of heat derives from a relationship between my skin and the hot thing (relational), the reflex (a behaviour) of withdrawing my hand is coincident with treating the hot object as a threat to withdraw from (dispositional), and detecting sufficient heat serves as a cause of the reflex of withdrawal to end the threat that I have (functional).

It seems to me if I removed the relational component from the experience, I'd no longer be talking about the same thing at all. If I removed the behavioural component of it, I'd have had a different experience - my hand possibly would not have withdrawn in the reflex. If I removed the dispositional component, I'd no longer have unconsciously appraised the gathering sensation of heat as a threat. Furthermore, I removed that dispositional component, it seems to me I'd be removing the components of my experience that coincide with its character as a threat triggering a reflex - the stress, the panic, the pain, the unpleasantness - and removing those things also removes a substantial component of "what it was like" for me. If I remove the composite of these things and their functional relationships, I'm no longer talking about the experience at all - or I would have both done and felt nothing and burned off my finger. — fdrake

The relational, dispositional and functional aspects you describe appear to be reflexive and automatic; in other words: unconscious. You withdrew your hand as a reflex and "unconsciously appraised" the heat as a threat. It seems that the body could have done this without any additional feeling.

So it seems if there are phenomenal properties in that experience, they cannot be independent of relational, functional, behavioural, and dispositional properties, as if I changed all of those I'd change "what it was like" for me and even the scenario I was considering in the first place. Given that, why should someone commit themselves to an independent "phenomenal" type associated with the experiences, when the elements of the phenomenal type ("what is it likes") vary with changes in the type they are supposed to be independent of? — fdrake

I don't think that phenomenal properties are independent of the physical, but I do think they are private and inaccessible from a third-person (purely behavioural/functional) perspective. Phenomenal properties can be assumed or inferred from behaviour, but Dennett seems to want to go further than this.

Amazingly (I find), the upshot of this intuition pump for Dennett is "that no intersubjective comparison of qualia is possible, even with perfect technology". This only supports privacy! Otherwise, intersubjective comparison would be possible.
— Luke

Yep, that's right. This is what Dennett is trying to show here, but - crucially - this is only possible under the second model of experience. If we were to adopt the first model it would not be the case. Again, he's showing us how qualia (as conceived) must follow the second model (which he will later demolish) in order to have the properties we ascribe to them. — Isaac

Why is it only possible under the second model of experience (sensory input->qualia.....then....b)qualia->(via some judgement/assessment)->response)? Are you saying that an intersubjective comparison of qualia would be possible under the first model of experience (sensory input-> response)?

Basically, if we cannot tell whether the causes of qualia, or the responses to qualia have been tampered with, we cannot access qualia independently - so what use are they? — Isaac

What use are they for what? Qualia are "the way things seem to us". Why do they need to have a use? Aren't you just expressing the hard problem with that question: why do we have qualia if they make no functional difference? If we don't have them, then it's an illusion of an illusion.

It's not so much the independent property of privacy that's been banished. The argument is more like - in order to have the four properties ascribed to qualia they must be conceived of like this, but when conceived of that way, we can neither access them, nor talk about them, nor do we have any neurological evidence for them, so what the point in theorising their existence? — Isaac

Can "the way things seem to us" be theoretical? Anyway, pumps 7-12 is where most of the "demolition" occurs?

he's laying out how qualia (as conceived) must be in the form of

a)perception->qualia.....then....b)qualia->(via some judgement/assessment)->response — Isaac

I thought qualia were a property of perception, rather than a product of perception. If I perceive a blue door, the blue isn't something that follows from the perception, it's a part of it.

What sort of response do you mean?

His paper sets out in quite some detail, the problems encountered when treating Qualia the way in which they are treated here.

This conversation is not going to get anywhere if you don't actually address one of those issues. — Isaac

I'm going to restrict my comments to privacy, as I think most qualia advocates would agree with Dennett that this is one of the properties of qualia.

According to a common definition of privacy, it is "the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively."

My definition of private qualia, or the reason I would consider qualia to be private, is that nobody else can experience your conscious experience. More poetically, nobody else sees the world through your eyes (unless, perhaps, it's via a transplant). In other words, nobody else has the conscious experience produced by your particular body.

I consider it quite clear that in some cases other people have very different conscious experiences to mine, because they are blind, deaf, colour-blind, synaesthetic or one of many other well documented differences. I also expect there could be more minute differences in other cases simply because no two bodies tend to be identical, but this becomes more about ineffability or intriniscality than privacy. This does not rule out that there may be a range of similarity shared by those whom Dennett refers to as "the class of normal observers".

I base my remarks below on the definition of qualia-privacy given above.

intuition pump #3: the inverted spectrum... Since we both learned color words by being shown public colored objects, our verbal behavior will match even if we experience entirely different subjective colors.

This seems problematic for Dennett's argument against the property of privacy. Unless another person's experience can be accessed and verified (i.e. unless it can be experienced), then it remains private to that person.This seemed to be the purpose of Dennett's next intuition pump, which I consider to be a potentially good argument against privacy, although he does not address it directly:

intuition pump #4: the Brainstorm machine...some neuroscientific apparatus that fits on your head and feeds your visual experience into my brain. With eyes closed I accurately report everything you are looking at.

Does this imply that if I wear the apparatus then I can experience another person's experience? No. Because I wouldn't be seeing (via my eyes) what another person sees via their eyes. That would be double transduction. Regardless, this is not Dennett's focus. Instead, he worries about the "correct" orientation of the plug:

With eyes closed I accurately report everything you are looking at, except that I marvel at how the sky is yellow, the grass red, and so forth. Would this not confirm, empirically, that our qualia were different? But suppose the technician then pulls the plug on the connecting cable, inverts it 180 degrees and reinserts it in the socket. Now I report the sky is blue, the grass green, and so forth. Which is the "right" orientation of the plug?

Shouldn't the technician already know the "right" orientation and be able to faithfully transmit every detail including colour? Anyhow, whatever colour/rotation the Brainstorm wearer "sees", the experience remains private to them. Amazingly (I find), the upshot of this intuition pump for Dennett is "that no intersubjective comparison of qualia is possible, even with perfect technology". This only supports privacy! Otherwise, intersubjective comparison would be possible.

intuition pump #5: the neurosurgical prank...You wake up one morning to find that the grass has turned red, the sky yellow, and so forth. No one else notices any color anomalies in the world, so the problem must be in you. You are entitled, it seems, to conclude that you have undergone visual color qualia inversion...There are (at least) two different ways the evil neurosurgeon might create the inversion effect described in intuition pump #5:

(I) Invert one of the "early" qualia-producing channels, e.g., in the optic nerve, so that all relevant neural events "downstream" are the "opposite" of their original and normal values. Ex hypothesi this inverts your qualia.

(II) Leave all those early pathways intact and simply invert certain memory-access links--whatever it is that accomplishes your tacit (and even unconscious!) comparison of today's hues with those of yore. Ex hypothesi this does not invert your qualia at all, but just your memory-anchored dispositions to react to them.

Dennett concludes: "Since ex hypothesi the two different surgical invasions can produce exactly the same introspective effects while only one operation inverts the qualia, nothing in the subject's experience can favor one of the hypotheses over the other. So unless he seeks outside help, the state of his own qualia must be as unknowable to him as the state of anyone else's qualia."

Dennett is looking in the wrong place again. Whether the subject's qualia are inverted or whether the subject can determine the "right" source of his qualia is irrelevant. Infallibility about the origin of one's qualia is not one of the four properties that Dennett claims to be arguing against. While I might claim to be the only one who can know how my qualia seem to me, this does not imply that I am the only one who knows the causes of my qualia. The unconscious processes that cause qualia are irrelevant to the properties of one's conscious experience, especially privacy.

If there are qualia, they are even less accessible to our ken than we had thought. Not only are the classical intersubjective comparisons impossible (as the Brainstorm machine shows), but we cannot tell in our own cases whether our qualia have been inverted--at least not by introspection.

All the more support for privacy, then? None of this helps overcome the intuition of pump #3, that "our verbal behavior will match even if we experience entirely different subjective colors". Our experience remains private unless we can do something to disconfirm the existence of different subjective colours.

I find the rest of the intuition pumps, including the coffee tasters, are mostly about infallibility, which is not one of the four properties Dennett claims to be arguing against.

And that is just what we do when we seem to ostend, with the mental finger of inner intention, a quale or qualia-complex in our experience. We refer to a property--a public property of uncharted boundaries--via reference to our personal and idiosyncratic capacity to respond to it. That idiosyncracy is the extent of our privacy.

This seems like an admission of privacy.

If I wonder whether your blue is my blue, your middle-C is my middle-C, I can coherently be wondering whether our discrimination profiles over a wide variation in conditions will be approximately the same. And they may not be; people experience the world quite differently. But that is empiricially discoverable by all the usual objective testing procedures.

If I cannot confirm whether "your blue is my blue" or "your middle-C is my middle C", then something does remain of privacy. Dennett's acknowledgement that "people experience the world quite differently" also appears to indicate a remainder (non-elimination) for the other properties of intrinsic, ineffable and directly apprehensible.

We could speak of what Bieri would call "phenomenal information properties" of
psychological events. Consider the information--what Dretske would call the natural meaning--that a type of internal perceptual event might carry. That it carries that information is an objective (and hence, in a loose sense, intrinsic) matter since it is independent of what information (if any) the subject takes the event type to carry. Exactly what information is carried is (practically) ineffable, for the reasons just given. And it is private in the sense just given: proprietary and potentially idiosyncratic.

I agree: qualia are private because of propriety or ownership, i.e. only I (my body) can have/experience them. Nobody else (nobody else's body) can have my qualia. In other words, nobody else can experience my experience. Dennett responds:

We may "point inwardly" to one of the deliverances of our idiosyncratic, proprietary property-detectors, but when we do, what are we pointing at? What does that deliverance itself consist of? Or what are its consciously apprehensible proper ties, if not just our banished friends the qualia?

For those of us who have not fully accepted/understood this "banishment", where in the article does it occur with regard to privacy?

It's as if upon characterising perception as a relationship between a subject and an object, the properties of the relationship have been moved inside the subject. Rather than having those properties of perceptual events being of the relationship between the agent ("subject") and their environment ("object") and occurring in same scope as environmental and bodily events. — fdrake

Depends what you mean by "same scope". It seem obvious that the relationship is "inside the subject" if only in the sense that it is the agent's perception (i.e. for the agent, perceived by the agent).

Dennett and the interviewer here talk a bit about the relationship of Dennett's criticism of qualia and undermining the subject-object distinction. Undermining it, not collapsing it to one side. — fdrake

It only seems to make sense for it to "collapse" to the side of the subject. Barring panpsychism, it could not "collapse" to be a conscious experience or perception which is for, or had by, the object (except, perhaps, where the object is another subject).

Thanks for posting the interesting video. Judging from the article, I was under the impression that Dennett wanted to eliminate qualia or perceptions. However, judging from the video you posted, it seems he wants to eliminate the perceiver (or the 'I') instead. Transcribed from the video:

Interviewer: Is that the path out of this problem, is to say that just as the so-called qualia that I'm experiencing...the subject, the 'I' that's in there - or wherever - itself is an illusion that's created by the whole system...

Dennett: Absolutely.

Interviewer: And also with that, even the opposition of the subject and object dissolves if the 'I' is made to be another participant in the whole show. And if you do that, then maybe the difficulty of bridging the gap between the spike trains and the outside world also dissolves.

Dennett: Well... yes. A theory of consciousness has to include and explain at a microphysical level all of the abilities of the subject. And if you stop short of that - which is almost the standard practice for people working on consciousness - no wonder you're baffled, because you're not tackling exactly half the problem. If you still have "somebody home" in your theory, you haven't got a theory of consciousness yet. It's got to be a theory of machinery cranking away where none of it depends on consciousness.

However, I didn't find his eliminative account of qualia (e.g. seeing the colour blue) to be very convincing:

Dennett: So I look at the blue sky, and then what happens? Well, it all depends on who I am and what I know. And maybe what happens is the particular shade of blue together with the breeze wafting over my face as I lie in the grass in the woods or something looking up at the blue sky, it conjures up memories of other occasions when I've looked at the sky. Blue sky means good weather, it means it's not raining, it's not snowing. I have an inexhaustible fountain of associations, recollections, biases, which are all either triggered or triggerable by my looking at the sky. Now, we can start cutting those off piece by piece and suppose that the blue sky can no longer be recognised by me as a sign of good weather; suppose it no longer kindles recollections or memories; suppose it has no effect on my bodily state - on my heart rate, on my respiration, on my galvanic skin response. We're gonna subtract all of these things. At some point, it's not clear that I'm still conscious of the blue sky. My eyes are open...

Most of this seems to rely on the elimination of memory (he goes on to talk about a case of Alzheimer's). I wouldn't dispute that consciousness relies on memory.

I bolded the sense data bit, it's construing sense data as the output of senses to discriminatory systems - distinct from construing sense data as perceptual features presented to consciousness, as perceptual features are formed in an interaction between how the environment+body is sensorially sampled and discriminatory systems. — fdrake

I've noticed that Dennett's attack on the Cartesian theatre seems to be what you find strongest in his position. I wonder if qualia can be retained without needing to commit to a Cartesian theatre view. For example, might we say that perceptual features are present to consciousness, rather than presented to consciousness?

You asked me why people add sugar — Isaac

No, I asked why you add sugar.

What perspective did you want the answer from? — Isaac

Yours.

As I just said to Marchesk, there's little point in arguing against a essay suggesting our intuitions are incoherent by just referring back to our intuitions. — Isaac

What if we remain unconvinced by (or just want to question) the article and its implications? For example, does the article say or imply that we don't really see colours or taste tea? Does it say or imply that tea doesn't have a particular flavour or that red doesn't have a particular colour? Does it say or imply that we should jettison talk of qualia altogether, or that we should no longer trust our intuitions on these matters? Maybe I've misunderstood the point of this discussion.

I think he's saying the taste of tea isn't like a coin you drop in the slot on a machine and then it does something. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not saying that either. I'm just trying to get people to admit that they do, in fact, taste tea when they drink it. Non-qualists seem very reluctant to admit it.

The way we interface with and interact with our environment is way more complicated than that. — Srap Tasmaner

Depends which way you look at it. I take a sip of tea and taste it almost immediately. I don't need to know what's happening from a neurological or any other standpoint to have it seem that particular way. Scientific knowledge might help me to understand why it seems a particular way on a particular occasion, and that knowledge might even change how it would otherwise seem (without the knowledge), due to expectations. But it's still going to seem a particular way (barring exceptions).

This was the reason for my reference to cerebral achromatopsia in the article. Unless subject's reports are taken seriously - that they do, in fact, "see bright blue objects as black", for example - then what would cerebral achromatopsia even mean? @Isaac would have us believe that it can only be about what subjects say - about their verbal reports (or behaviour) alone. How things seem to a subject is supposedly irrelevant (or even non-existent). But if how things seem to a subject is irrelevant, then why elicit responses from subjects about how things seem to them? What if they were to answer only in, e.g., neurological terms? It would be like taking part in this discussion.

Does tea have some taste for you?
— Luke

No. — Isaac

I can taste tea. I don't believe there is a thing which answers to 'the taste of tea'. — Isaac

You appear to have changed your opinion between these two quotes. Otherwise, I don't understand the distinction. You can taste tea but it has no taste?

I want sugar added because I've learned such an action changes my internal states in a way that seems desirable
— Isaac

What internal states? How do you sense that it is desirable? How do you know that it will be again?
— Luke

Those are both massive questions. Short answer neural networks and predictive models. Perhaps if you could explain the relevance I could be.more specific, as it is you've just asked me for a précis of the whole of cognitive psychology. — Isaac

You mean to tell me you didn't notice that adding sugar changed your internal states in a desirable way until you learned about neural networks and predictive models? Did adding sugar have zero effect on your internal states before that?

Can you read this? Can you see this writing? If so, does it appear to have any colour?

I want sugar added because I've learned such an action changes my internal states in a way that seems desirable — Isaac

What internal states? How do you sense that it is desirable? How do you know that it will be again?

Again, if you want to call my entire mental state at the time 'the taste of tea' be my guest, it just seems to add unnecessary confusion. — Isaac

I don't want to call your entire mental state the taste of tea. I just want to know whether you can taste tea. It strikes me as abnormal that you can't.

Maybe I want sugar added because I'm hungry or tired and the story I tell to account for that is 'the tea was bitter' do you want to be describing my state of hunger and tiredness within 'the taste of tea'? — Isaac

I just want to know whether the tea tasted bitter to you (or seemed to), for whatever reason. From the outset, Dennett defines qualia as "the way things seem to us". You don't need to know all the reasons why things seem that way, only that they do.

More to the point, if I really didn't want to think there was smoke I would demonstrably be less likely to interpret chemosensory signals as indicating that there was. — Isaac

Okay, so our perceptions get coloured by stuff. I'm just trying to get at whether or not you can smell smoke at all, or whether you've ever smelled smoke.

If saying "this tea tastes bitter" to the waiter gets more sugar put in it, then it's done its job even if there's no referent. — Isaac

So there is a way that it tastes? Otherwise, why would you want sugar added?

In neurological terms... — Isaac

If someone asks you "how's the tea?", you respond in neurological terms and/or strategic terms? The flavour never enters into any of your responses? What if someone asks whether you can see, hear or smell something particular. "Can you smell smoke?" You either answer in neurological terms or say what they want to hear, which is presumably "no"?

No. I have a range of responses to drinking tea, a range of words I reach for if asked to describe it...

The argument that's been fairly exhaustively presented is that our intuitive sense that there's a way tea tastes to me (at time t) is mistaken, as many intuitions turn out to be. — Isaac

Then what informs your response, or your "range of words" you reach for if asked to describe it (to describe what?)

You are again pretending as if those qualia don't exist, yet that is what you are trying to account for by means other than introspection.

I saw a reality TV cooking show once where contestants were blindfolded and given small cubes of different types of foodstuffs and they were asked to guess what each foodstuff was. They later reported that identification was difficult due to being blindfolded and because each foodstuff was presented as the same uniform cube. However, several of them were quite good at it, getting through about 6 or 7 cubes each before giving a wrong answer. This would not seem possible if they did not have some flavours stored in their memories, and if there were not some constancy to those tastes in order for them to be able to correctly identify those foods.

Does tea have some taste for you?

Why does the person report that it tastes bitter? I mean, I get that qualia might not be necessary for scientific purposes, but this is philosophy. Don't you taste tea, whether or not that taste is constant or whatever, doesn't it have some flavour or taste when you drink it?

And yet we can make a complete account of chemosensation->talk without either requiring such a fact, nor finding evidence nor mechanism for one. So why would we continue to assume such a thing exists? — Isaac

What (else) is chemosensation supposed to account for if not taste?

So... which are you? — Banno

At the very least, I believe that things can be shown.

The actual idea that there's a way tea tastes to me which is stored somewhere in my brain (or mind, for any dualists out there), has, I thought, been discarded quite some way back. — Isaac

I wasn't referring to (and I thought you weren't referring to) a way tea tastes to you that is stored in your brain, but to a way tea tastes to you when you taste it; the fact that it tastes a certain way to you (that you perceive it to taste a certain way) in that particular instance.

Dennet's just taken an entire paper showing this, we've just taken 13 pages of discussion showing it. I mean this in the most polite possible way, but you need to counter one or more of the specific points raised which show that there is no such fact, returning to the assertion that there is just puts us right back at the beginning again. — Isaac

As Kenosha keeps pointing out, to apparently deaf ears, Dennett does not deny that conscious experience has properties.

And I did raise a similar point earlier in the discussion, with references to the article, here:

Object(s) are still filtered/perceived by the subject (or by the subject's brain/body) in a way unique to that brain/body, even if colour or sweetness are labelled as objective properties. If there were no subjective aspect, then you should expect to find that we all have the same subjective (objective?) experiences. However, many of Dennett's examples demonstrate that this is not the case. For example, the case of cerebral achromatopsia in which a subject reports that "everything looked black or grey". I have never had this type of experience before. If colour is an objective property then why does the subject report seeing (e.g.) "bright blue objects as black"? — Luke

Are you assuming that subjects are completely mistaken in how things seem to them?

Folk keep trying to set out the nature of the ineffable, and complaining when other folk point out that they can't. — Banno

Someone once observed that "what can be shown cannot be said", such as the colour red, or the Guernica painting. Others think that seeing a painting and talking about it are just two different ways of talking about it.

Trying to explain by what? — Isaac

Aren't you trying to explain something when you say, for example:

So the real issue is whether there's some intermediary step between the subconscious parts of the brain responsible for forming models related to taste, tea, cups, misty mornings, headaches, work stresses...and the resultant formation of words, or actions which we'd like to be able to say 'resulted' from that mix. The best candidate would seem to be something like the sensory memory or the working memory, but Libet's work (and others) seems to throw the latter into question, much of what's stored in the working memory is stored after the event it's supposedly initiating has already been initiated, It's there to explain the action we just took, not determine it. — Isaac

What are you trying to account for here?

Because there is no such fact. — Isaac

Then what are you trying to explain? The mistaken belief that we taste tea? Or that people make reports about the taste of tea (even though there’s no such thing)?