Dennett's not an eliminativist though. He's a critic of it. — fdrake

But he is included in that same article as a representative of eliminative materialism:

Although most discussions regarding eliminativism focus on the status of our notion of belief and other propositional attitudes, some philosophers have endorsed eliminativist claims about the phenomenal or qualitative states of the mind (see the entry on qualia). For example, Daniel Dennett (1978) has argued that our concept of pain is fundamentally flawed because it includes essential properties, like infallibility and intrinsic awfulness, that cannot co-exist in light of a well-documented phenomenon know as “reactive disassociation”. In certain conditions, drugs like morphine cause subjects to report that they are experiencing excruciating pain, but that it is not unpleasant. It seems we are either wrong to think that people cannot be mistaken about being in pain (wrong about infallibility), or pain needn’t be inherently awful (wrong about intrinsic awfulness). Dennett suggests that part of the reason we may have difficulty replicating pain in computational systems is because our concept is so defective that it picks out nothing real.

(Personally, I think disputing the apodictic reality of pain, because of not being able to form a concept of it, is all the illustration needed of the shortcoming of this attitude.)

Again, Thomas Nagel summarizes the problem he sees with Dennett's views:

According to Dennett...the reality is that the representations that underlie human behavior are found in neural structures of which we know very little. And the same is true of the similar conception we have of our own minds. That conception does not capture an inner reality, but has arisen as a consequence of our need to communicate to others in rough and graspable fashion our various competencies and dispositions (and also, sometimes, to conceal them):

"Curiously, then, our first-person point of view of our own minds is not so different from our second- person point of view of others’ minds: we don’t see, or hear, or feel, the complicated neural machinery churning away in our brains but have to settle for an interpreted, digested version, a user-illusion that is so familiar to us that we take it not just for reality but also for the most indubitable and intimately known reality of all. "

The trouble is that Dennett concludes not only that there is much more behind our behavioral competencies than is revealed to the first-person point of view—which is certainly true—but that nothing whatever is revealed to the first-person point of view but a “version” of the neural machinery. In other words, when I look at the American flag, it may seem to me that there are red stripes in my subjective visual field, but that is an illusion: the only reality, of which this is “an interpreted, digested version,” is that a physical process I can’t describe is going on in my visual cortex.

I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.” — Thomas Nagel, Analytical Philosophy and Human Life, Chapter 23 - Dennett's Illusions

It is this conviction on Dennett's part that I think allows his views to be fairly characterised as 'scientism', that is, 'the view that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality', and then to exclude, or eliminate, as a matter of principle, the first-person perspective, because it is not something that science as currently practiced accomodates.

Nagel adds:

There is no reason to go through such mental contortions in the name of of science. The spectacular progress of the physical sciences since the seventeenth century was made possible by the exclusion of the mental from their purview.. To say that there is more to reality than than physics can can account for is not a piece of mysticism: it it is an acknowledgment that that we we are nowhere near a "theory of everything", and that science will have to expand to accommodate facts of a kind fundamentally different from those that physics is designed to explain. It should not disturb us that this may have radical consequences, especially for Dennett’s favorite natural science, biology: the theory of evolution, which in its its current form is a purely physical theory, may have to incorporate non-physical physical factors to to account for consciousness, if if consciousness is not, as he thinks, an illusion. Materialism remains a widespread view, but science does not progress by tailoring the data to fit a prevailing theory

.

Thanks. Do you subscribe to a particular model of consciousness? Idealism?

Do you subscribe to a particular model of consciousness? Idealism? — Tom Storm

The approaches that appear to me to be the most sensible are the Wittgensteinian quietism defended by Peter Hacker and the phenomenological approach of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Both of them exemplify the method of "descriptive metaphysics" that Peter Strawson advocated. The point of descriptive metaphysics, as contrasted with analytical metaphysics, is to elucidate concepts (or phenomena) by placing them in relation with a broad family of related concepts (or related phenomena) rather than seeking to provide analytical definitions of them, or seeking necessary and sufficient conditions for them to occur. As 'darth barracuda' (@_db) once said on this forum: "What something is is not simply a question of its material constitution but of its relationship to other things as well." But all of this would be a topic for another thread.

RIP Daniel Dennett.

Thanks. I do find this reply intriguing, particularly as someone outside of philosophy.It does sound (to a neophyte like me) as if the phenomenological approach essentially side steps the question. But as you say this belongs elsewhere.

Thanks. I do find this reply intriguing, particularly as someone outside of philosophy.It does sound (to a neophyte like me) as if the phenomenological approach essentially side steps the question. But as you say this belongs elsewhere. — Tom Storm

When I submit a philosophical idea to GPT4 and it says that my idea is "intriguing" (as opposed to "insightful") this is generally its polite way of saying "what a load of bullcrap!" ;-)

I'll reply to this since it's an opportunity to loop back Dennett into the conversation. If phenomenology is viewed as the (connective) analysis of first-personal experience, then its central relevance to consciousness should be apparent. One of Dennett's essay that was reprinted in his Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (and that I had mentioned earlier) is Where am I. You can easily find a standalone copy through Google. It's a very engaging and thought provoking little paper.

When you think of yourself as a self conscious entity, there is a clear sense of there being a place "here" where your experience is happening. This feature of phenomenology is something that Dennett investigates in Where am I. It is one of his most celebrated "intuition pumps". Gareth Evans refers to Dennett's paper it in his posthumously published Varieties of Reference (pp. 254-255):

"It seems possible to envisage organisms whose control centre is outside the body, and connected to it by communication links capable of spanning a considerable distance. An organism of this kind could have an Idea of itself like our own, but if it did, it would be unable to cope with the situation that would arise when the control centre survived the destruction of the body it controlled. Thinking like us, the subject would of course have to regard itself as somewhere, but in this case it would not make any sense to identify a particular place in the world as the place it thought of as here. The place occupied by the control centre is certainly not the subject's here; and even if we counterfactually suppose the control centre re-equipped with a body, there is no particular place where that body would have to be. Because its 'here' picks out no place, there is no bit of matter, no persisting thing, which the subject's Idea of itself permits us to regard as what it identifies as itself. Here, then, we have a very clear situation in which a subject of thought could not think of itself as 'I'; its 'I'—its habitual mode of thought about itself—is simply inadequate for this situation. (It forces the subject to think in ways which are no longer appropriate.) This case helps us to see that the reason we do not find the `disembodied brain in a vat' case very disturbing, conceptually, is that the brain is also the last remaining part of the subject's body. (The case is often presented as a limiting case of amputation.) A tiny foothold is thus provided for the idea that the subject is where the brain is, and hence for the idea that the brain is what the subject is."

(Dennett's paper is referenced in a footnote)

this is generally its polite way of saying "what a load of bullcrap! — Pierre-Normand

Ha! Not at all. I am genuinely interested in phenomenology and the snippets I have gleaned are tantalising and do suggest a way out of some of our dilemmas. Evan Thompson’s work in embodied cognition has interested me in recent times.

I’m old and tired. I have never privileged philosophy in my life, so much of what I read is incomprehensible and, I have to say, dull. But I’m happy enough to scratch around the periphery looking for shiny things I can use. Especially the things that go against my beliefs. I like ideas I would never have thought of. Thanks for your reply and the reference.

Evan Thompson’s work in embodied cognition has interested me in recent times. — Tom Storm

Yes, this is fun! You might also enjoy most books by Andy Clark written between 1997 and 2016 as well as Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds by Lisa Barrett.

Evan Thompson’s work in embodied cognition has interested me in recent times. — Tom Storm

Speaking of whom:

suppose we found that specific patterns of brain activity in Yo-Yo Ma’s brain reliably correlate with his playing Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. This finding wouldn’t be surprising, given his years of training and expertise. Although that information would presumably be useful for understanding the effects of musical training and expert performance on the brain, it would tell us very little about music, let alone Bach. On the contrary, you need to understand music, the cello, and Bach to understand the significance of the neural patterns.

Excerpt From
Why I Am Not a Buddhist
Evan Thompson

:up: There's something even more curious. I know some professional string instrumentalists. They experience something completely different to me even when they hear that Bach. Their experience seems to be even more embodied, even more specific, even more intense. As qualia goes, theirs seems to be of an entirely different order to mine. This I find fascinating.

'Intelligence is the ability to make distinctions'.

RIP DC Dennett. He was very much a public philosopher, and my impression (as a member of the public who occasionally peruses academic publications) is that he was received differently inside and outside his field. For those on the outside, he was a polarizing figure. He had his enthusiastic fans (e.g., Sean Carroll), but for the non-fans he was often their "favorite intellectual enemy", as one of them put it.

One reason, I think, (other than Dennett's provocative style) is that lay people often see the relatively few public figures like him as representative, if not wholly constituent of their field, whereas in reality, the field is both more crowded and more diverse than they realize. As a result, those public figures are seen as more significant and/or controversial on the outside than on the inside. Among his peers, Dennett is well-known and cited, but not nearly as much as one might assume if one were only reading philosophy of mind topics on this forum.

Take his views on free will, for example: though Dennett had original things to say on the subject, on the whole, he was neither as original nor as controversial in his compatibilism as many seem to think. Views that are broadly like his go back as far as GE Moore and AJ Ayer, and they have been in the philosophical mainstream for the last half-century at least.

One reason, I think, (other than Dennett's provocative style) is that lay people often see the relatively few public figures like him as representative, if not wholly constituent of their field, whereas in reality, the field is both more crowded and more diverse than they realize. As a result, those public figures are seen as more significant and/or controversial on the outside than on the inside. — SophistiCat

:up:

If there's still some amateur philosopher like me that hasn't either read a lot or all of Dennet (but just something) or doesn't have the he time to read Dennet and doesn't know much him, spend about 12 minutes of your time on him viewing a short video. Worth listening, especially about "truthiness" of the AI and "truth" what Dennet explains: