Wasn't he one of the first to raise the logical contradiction of some theory trying to undermine the reality of human subjective experience, from which all knowledge and theories spring? — Olivier5

Qualia as experiential objects with intrinsic (non-relational) properties are MMP's target of criticism in the opening sections of Phenomenology of Perception:

At the outset of the study of perception, we find in language the notion of sensation, which seems immediate and obvious: I have a sensation of redness, of blueness, of hot or cold. It will, however, be seen that nothing could in fact be more confused, and that because they accepted it readily, traditional analyses missed the phenomenon of perception. — MMP

Compare the above to the declaration of confusion regarding qualia Dennett expresses in the opening paragraphs of Quining Qualia. Further, consider the following skepticism towards "pure experience" in light of the idea that people do not experience qualia...

Pure sensation will be the experience of an undifferentiated, instantaneous, dotlike impact. It is unnecessary to show, since authors are agreed on it, that this notion corresponds to nothing in our experience, and that the most rudimentary factual perceptions that we are acquainted with, in creatures such as the ape or the hen, have a bearing on relationships and not on any absolute terms — "MMP

MMP highlights the co-constitutive relationships of agent, environment and context in perception. Compare this to the cauliflower tasting intuition pump in the paper; Dennett alludes to the idea that "a" taste is a complex of relations between the tasting agent, the environmental context, and the cauliflower rather than a subjective raw feel.

What counts as the way the juice tastes to x can be distinguished, one supposes, from what is a mere accompaniment, contributory cause, or byproduct of this "central" way. One dimly imagines taking such cases and stripping them down gradually to the essentials, leaving their common residuum, the way things look, sound, feel, taste, smell to various individuals at various times, independently of how those individuals are stimulated or non- perceptually affected, and independently of how they are subsequently disposed to behave or believe. The mistake is not in supposing that we can in practice ever or always perform this act of purification with certainty, but the more fundamental mistake of supposing that there is such a residual property to take seriously, however uncertain our actual attempts at isolation of instances might be. — Dennett

The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field’. A really homogeneous area offering nothing to be cannot be given to any perception. The structure of actual perception alone can teach us what perception is. The pure impression is, therefore, not only undiscoverable, but also imperceptible and so inconceivable as an instant of perception.. — MMP

Another correspondence between the two thinkers in this context is the attitude of skepticism towards "pure impressions" - raw feelings, subjective states of redness, "the taste of the cauliflower" and so on -, MMP denies that they are even conceivable as instances of perception.

Later MMP makes comments to the effect that people believe that these are instances of perception because they are attending too much to the object and the properties imputed to the perception by reflection upon the object. Those alleged properties of perceptions are instead results of insufficiently attenuated common biases of thought.

The alleged self-evidence of sensation is not based on any testimony of consciousness, but on widely held prejudice. We think we know perfectly well what ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’, ‘sensing’ are, because perception has long provided us with objects which are coloured or which emit sounds. When we try to analyse it, we transpose these objects into consciousness. We commit what psychologists call ‘the experience error’, which means that what we know to be in things themselves we immediately take as being in our consciousness of them. We make perception out of things perceived. And since perceived things themselves are obviously accessible only through perception, we end by understanding neither. — MMP

The skepticism towards what seem like natural intellectual moves in analysing experience that Dennett has? MMP has it too. I doubt anyone could come through any serious study of the Phenomenology of Perception and still believe, somehow, that MMP was writing about "subjective experience" and "qualia".

Yep.

Cool post :up:

I suspect you also know something about your own mental phenomena, and this knowledge is based on a capacity for introspection. The distinction between knowing and sensing is weaker than you seem to think: you know because you sense. — Olivier5

I know about my own mental phenomenon from introspection, reflection, abstraction, but never has it become directly accessible to my senses, or anyone else's for that matter.

The distinction between knowing and sensing is about as antithetical as it gets. To quote Leibniz: "Nothing is in the mind that was not first in the senses, except the mind itself."

And yes, mental phenomena are subjective by definition. But MRI of brains can detect emotions, so self-reporting is not the only tool we have to study these things. — Olivier5

Either way, self reporting or MRI scans, neither give our senses direct access to mental states.

Have you read PoP in French? Is it the same in French as in English? — frank

It was 30 years ago... I remember very little of the book, except that the text made more sense to me than Husserl. I actually never came back to phenomenology after that. Probably should.

I know about my own mental phenomenon from introspection, — Merkwurdichliebe

I consider introspection as a sense.

Either way, self reporting or MRI scans, neither give our senses direct access to mental states. — Merkwurdichliebe

Do we have direct access to anything?

The alleged self-evidence of sensation is not based on any testimony of consciousness, but on widely held prejudice. We think we know perfectly well what ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’, ‘sensing’ are, because perception has long provided us with objects which are coloured or which emit sounds. When we try to analyse it, we transpose these objects into consciousness. We commit what psychologists call ‘the experience error’, which means that what we know to be in things themselves we immediately take as being in our consciousness of them. We make perception out of things perceived. And since perceived things themselves are obviously accessible only through perception, we end by understanding neither.
— MMP — fdrake

Sorry (but also rather smug) to see I wasn't being at all original here,

If I'm wrong, and the appropriately confused machine might still be unconscious, I need alerting towards features of my own conscious thoughts that I am leaving out of consideration. However, I don't think the usual claim of unreflective and immediate certainty will be one of those features. Indeed, the confusion hypothesis suggests a reason for that kind of claim: certainty arose in our assessment of the status of the tree itself, but we mistakenly ascribed it to our confused (e.g. pictorial) characterisation of our thoughts. — bongo fury

I consider introspection as a sense. — Olivier5

Then, I suppose, you don't subscribe to the five senses tradition. How many senses have you identified?

Do we have direct access to anything?

Yes. To our own sensing, to our own perceiving, and to our own thinking. Everything else is always experienced indirectly - that is to say, anything that can be apprehended through those faculties must be mediated from what it is in-itself, to what it is for-me, viz. a sensation, a perception, or a thought.

One need not deny the existence of sense data properties to deny that calling them qualia is of any use, or to deny that they then exhibit any of the additional properties associated with qualia. — Isaac

What distinction are you drawing between sense data properties and qualia? You say that there are "additional properties associated with qualia", so what are the (non-additional) properties that you appear to indicate are shared by both sense data and qualia?

Third option; which I take to be Dennett's (then we can get back to the thread).

(1) People feel stuff. (Dennett agrees)

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... — Dennett — fdrake

Firstly, apologies if I have derailed the thread in any way.

Secondly, if Dennett grants that conscious experience has properties, yet he is trying "to illustrate and render implausible" the notion of qualia, then it seems that Dennett considers qualia to be something different from the properties of conscious experience. However, he does not explain how qualia differ from the properties of conscious experience, and he offers no alternative to qualia in order to better describe the properties of conscious experience.

If we say that someone is an eliminativist about qualia, that will mean they believe that qualia do not exist. Qualia the theoretical concept. That does not have to mean that "People feel stuff" is false, it simply means that the kind of thing qualia tries to refer to does not exist in the manner it is theorised or intuited. — fdrake

Understood, but how are qualia distinct from the properties of conscious experience? If Dennett is happy to grant that conscious experience has properties, yet qualia are not those properties, then what are the properties of conscious experience? Or are they ineffable?

One need not deny the existence of sense data properties to deny that calling them qualia is of any use, or to deny that they then exhibit any of the additional properties associated with qualia. — Isaac


What distinction are you drawing between sense data properties and qualia? — Luke

When we take in sensory inputs it sets off a large set of reactions in the brain, like a cascade. Most of those reactions are immediate feedback loops with the sensory apparatus themselves, the majority of which take place without any conscious awareness. Those that do have conscious awareness are always in review, post hoc constructions to model what just happened and prepare a response aimed at minimising the errors in that model. So to say that the properties of sense data are anything like qualia is to say that one of the properties of flags is missed busses (sometimes a flag flaps in the wind, which sometimes catches a person's eye, which sometimes causes them to trip, which sometimes means they twist their ankle, which sometimes means they walk slower ,which sometimes means they miss their bus). We can draw a line from the flag to the missed bus, but we'd be considered insane to regularly talk of missed busses as being one of the properties of flags.

You say that there are "additional properties associated with qualia", so what are the (non-additional) properties that you appear to indicate are shared by both sense data and qualia — Luke

Here I was referencing Dennet's position that...

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 — Dennet

The additional properties being...

qualia are supposed to be properties of a subject's mental states that are

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

In exegetical sense I think ti's clear that he is not denying conscious experience has properties, but only that these properties are not of the nature associated with qualia.

I would go further to say that conscious experience does not have usefully definable properties at all. There's nothing it is like to eat cauliflower. There is only the entire sum of your current model at the time you happen to be eating cauliflower (as well as doing and sensing a hundred other things). It is unhelpful to talk about this process of inference as an 'experience' of something. The something here is part of the experience, not the cause of it. We make up 'the something' as part of our guess as to the cause of all the hidden states (including our own interception) that we have messages from, and constantly refine that model as new errors are found.

To put it another way, there's no such thing as a cauliflower for it to have qualia associated with it.

(sometimes a flag flaps in the wind, which sometimes catches a person's eye, which sometimes causes them to trip, which sometimes means they twist their ankle, which sometimes means they walk slower ,which sometimes means they miss their bus). We can draw a line from the flag to the missed bus, but we'd be considered insane to regularly talk of missed busses as being one of the properties of flags. — Isaac

:grin:

True story (the flag and the bus).

Here I was referencing Dennet's position that... The additional properties being... — Isaac

Where does he say that they are additional properties? In addition to what?

I would go further to say that conscious experience does not have usefully definable properties at all. — Isaac

And yet, you stated earlier:

One need not deny the existence of sense data properties to deny that calling them qualia is of any use, or to deny that they then exhibit any of the additional properties associated with qualia. — Isaac

Your position is that you don't need to deny sense data properties in order to deny qualia. But you deny sense data properties (without explaining the difference) anyway? Okay.

Where does he say that they are additional properties? In addition to what? — Luke

In addition to simply being properties of conscious experience. He says

Traditional analyses suggest some fascinating second-order properties of these properties. — Dennet

I'm taking that to be equivalent to 'additional'?

And yet, you stated earlier:

One need not deny the existence of sense data properties to deny that calling them qualia is of any use, or to deny that they then exhibit any of the additional properties associated with qualia. — Isaac


Your position is that you don't need to deny sense data properties in order to deny qualia. But you deny sense data properties (without explaining the difference) anyway? Okay. — Luke

Yes. (Except, of course, I think I have explained the difference). If there's something about my explanation of the difference you're still unclear on, I'm happy to expand, but the thread's not about my approach. I just wanted to clarify (as there seemed some confusion) that I was talking about Dennet's position in the quote you referenced, not my own.

Another correspondence between the two thinkers in this context is the attitude of skepticism towards "pure impressions" - — fdrake

Thanks, good points. I'll read it again. I agree that Merleau-Ponty criticizes the concept of 'elementory' sensations with arguments similar to Dennett, but he does so from a very different perspective. He finds eliminativism intellectually dishonest and absurd. What he is trying to do is perceive perception, so as to improve his understanding of it, not to deny it.

Unlike many here, Merleau-Ponty realizes that all knowledge and all science comes from human consciousness and perception, and that science cannot effectively deny the minds that produce it.

In other words, Dennett says: qualia are magical and thus do not exist, while MP says: qualia are too simplistic, because perception is always a whole, a gestalt, and what animals perceive is not individual qualities ("red") but nuances and differences and contrasts between qualities (eg a "red" vs a "green"). Hence perception is systemic, not an addition of discrete, independent elements.

Note the similarity with Saussure, who posited that in language, concepts have relationships and differences between them from which they derive their meaning. "In language there are only differences."

I'm not sure I follow him all the way there, because in system thinking (and biology is systemic), elements do exist objectively and can be disentangled from the whole system, even though their full meaning is given by the whole. For instance you can cut a finger off, but then it dies. So do the colors described as "red" die when not compared to other colors? I'll keep reading PoP and chew on it.

Another important point, perhaps the central point of PoP is that perception is by the body and for the body, seen as far more than a machine: the body is not a mechanism to which a mind has been affixed (as in Descartes), but a part of the subject, and influencing the mind. I see this as very important, for two reasons.

1, because Merleau-Ponty takes biology seriously, unlike Popper for instance, who only thinks about physics as the 'queen science'. And biology imposes a whole series of constraints that can help understand the biological phenomena called "thoughts". Physics and chemistry are too distant from thoughts to offer much clues. Biology is much closer; brains are biological, and biology is most probably where a scientific resolution of the mind-body problem will come from, not quantum physics.

2, because what MP says is that there is no life without intentionality, without a fear or a desire or a goal. Perception is not a static, passive "impression" of an external object in our mind, it is dynamic, opportunistic capture. Perception grabs stuff, it is always a living body seizing what it needs to seize. There is an intention, a desire, in every perception. Because we are not passive machines but living bodies.

This last point helps a lot. For instance it explains why when you try to analyse a perception from a purely logical standpoint, you kill it, you morph it into something dead. It also explains why the same dish will taste much better if you are hungry then if you're not. "Hunger is the best sauce" as we say in French. It's all a matter of desire.

Dennett says: qualia are magical and thus do not exist — Olivier5

Dennet says absolutely no such thing.

Dennet says absolutely no such thing. — Isaac

Give us your interpretation then.

1, because Merleau-Ponty takes biology seriously, unlike Popper for instance, who only thinks about physics as the 'queen science'. And biology imposes a whole series of constraints that can help understand the biological phenomena called "thoughts". Physics and chemistry are too distant from thoughts to offer much clues. Biology is much closer; brains are biological, and biology is most probably where a scientific resolution of the mind-body problem will come from, not quantum physics. — Olivier5

The idea here (as I faintly see it) is that the mind-body problem appears intractable if the body is seen as a dead machine, because a machine and a mind are too far apart, as Descartes noted. But the picture changes if the body is seen (as MMP does) as already intentional, already infused with information-for-the-purpose-of-living, information-with-intention. If this is the case then conscious perception can be seen as a mere extension of this fundamental biological tendency to "grab information for a purpose". The hiatus between a living body and its own consciousness is easier to bridge than between a dead machine and its ghost. So this perspective makes the hard problem a little less hard.

I already gave an example. You can say that waves propagate through space but you cannot say "Red" does. But I assume you want something that goes the other way around. For that maybe this works?: You can talk of "Red" meaningfully without knowing anything about wavelengths or light. Which shows that there IS something that can be said about qualia.

And there are things you can only say meaningfully about "Red" and not about "700 nanometer wavelength electromagnetic wave". Such as "I like Red". When people say that they explicitly mean "I like the experience produced when a 700 nanometer wavelength electromagnetic wave enters my eye" NOT "I like 700 nanometer wavelength electromagnetic waves"

In addition to simply being properties of conscious experience. — Isaac

What are the first order properties?

Yep, there's a difference between red and a certain frequency. No problem. What about the qualia?

When we take in sensory inputs it sets off a large set of reactions in the brain, like a cascade. Most of those reactions are immediate feedback loops with the sensory apparatus themselves, the majority of which take place without any conscious awareness. Those that do have conscious awareness are always in review, post hoc constructions to model what just happened and prepare a response aimed at minimising the errors in that model. — Isaac

You're best placed to cast this in more exact terms, so stop me at any point, but some of that stuff the brain is doing includes:
- interpreting optical data as images;
- correcting the colour of images for ambient temperatures and adjacent colours;
- outline recognition;
- pattern recognition (oh, it's Isaac!)
and similar for other kinds of sense data (smells, sounds, etc.).

When I have a perception of my car, that is optical data that is imaged and preprocessed such that objects within that image are already discerned (with error), colours and distances discerned (likewise), kinds of object discerned (that is a car) and precise objects identified if possible (that is my car) by pattern recognition, and so on, all prerequisites for consciousness of my car.

This seems like a qual to me: an object of my subjective perception of the world that has properties somewhat like metadata. Since this is all internal, nothing is particularly added; this simply describes the API of consciousness and the formatting that the brain must perform to satisfy it. But neither is it non-real, in the same way that base 64 encoding a PDF isn't non-real.

The argument against them having properties appears to lie with our inability to say that this consciousness of my car is the same as my previous conscious perceptions of it, but this seems besides the point to me. If my brain has identified it as my car then it is a conscious experience of my car. The fact that it's night so appears differently, or is from a new angle, or is further away, i.e. the precise details of the image that makes it identical or not to others, is irrelevant. It is my car because my brain has given it that property, i.e. has assigned it that meaning or metadata.

"Red" is qualia no?

e.g. pictorial) characterisation of our thoughts — bongo fury

@Luke

Yes! "Perceptions as pictures viewed by the mind. Qualia as picture properties." is the view I think's being criticised. Intuition pump (1) about the cauliflower looks roughly to be:

(1) Let's take an experience of the taste as if it's a picture of a cauliflower eating event.
(2) How did we take the picture?
(3) Look at consequences of taking the picture that way.

It seems appropriate to characterise intuition pump (1) as calling into question the step in (2) - trying to get at the methods of splitting up experience that result in describing any aspect of our perceptual acts as qualia.

Intuition pump #1: watching you eat cauliflower. I see you tucking eagerly into a helping of steaming cauliflower, the merest whiff of which makes me faintly nauseated, and I find myself wondering how you could possible relish that taste, and then it occurs to me that to you, cauliflower probably tastes (must taste?) different. A plausible hypothesis, it seems, especially since I know that the very same food often tastes different to me at different times. For instance, my first sip of breakfast orange juice tastes much sweeter than my second sip if I interpose a bit of pancakes and maple syrup, but after a swallow or two of coffee, the orange juice goes back to tasting (roughly? exactly?) the way it did the first sip.

So there's two steps to intuition pump 1, the first is a description of something that happened. Denentt watches someone reslishing cauliflower and wonders how it is possible that they could relish it when Dennett does not. That opens a space of questions regarding the variability of taste. That space of questions is dove into after Dennett writes "A plausible hypothesis". Dennett's initial foray into that space of questions begins with another observation regarding the variability of tastes, "the same food tastes different to me at different times". That invites the positing of an entity "the taste of a food" which is taken to vary over times and people.

Perhaps it is a subtle point, but it is an important one. The beginning of intuition pump (1) is an attempt to get us in the frame of mind that qualia proponents are in when they describe their experiences after introspecting upon them. That it seems unobjectionable to qualia proponents means that it's working exactly as intended. It means Dennett indeed has understood the experience describing habits of qualia proponents sufficiently well to vogue as one. But then there's a swerve:

Surely we want to say (or think about) such things, and surely we are not wildly wrong when we do, so . . . surely it is quite OK to talk of the way the juice tastes to Dennett at time t, and ask whether it is just the same as or different from the way the juice tastes to Dennett at time t', or the way the juice tastes to Jones at time t.

Dennett is inviting us to question the underlying experience describing habits that lead us to believe that carving up experience in that way is reflective of the structure of experience at all.

This "conclusion" seems innocent, but right here we have already made the big mistake. The final step presumes that we can isolate the qualia from everything else that is going on--at least in principle or for the sake of argument.

Note that "conclusion" is in scare quotes, that signals that the tacit inference Dennett is trying to draw our attention to is somewhere in the narrative progression between the first paragraph; in which Dennett describes his wonder that someone could relish cauliflower despite him hating it and links it to that things taste different over eating experiences; and the conceptualisation of the described content in the second paragraph; in terms of taste being a within-eating-event (time dependent) and between-people (person dependent) property. The conceptualisation arises from a natural and hitherto unexamined move in how the experiences are narrativised/described/packaged.

When we take this habit of description, the taste of cauliflower is deemed a time and people varying property of cauliflower eating experiences despite that the description of the experience alone lends no support for the theoretical act of positing such a time varying and people varying property. I believe the most important point is that "argument" for this metaphysical suturing on the manifold of our experiences is not stated, the positing is simply enacted in that description style.



Dennett's next comments are targeted at the description style which has been enacted:

What counts as the way the juice tastes to x can be distinguished, one supposes, from what is a mere accompaniment, contributory cause, or byproduct of this "central" way. One dimly imagines taking such cases and stripping them down gradually to the essentials, leaving their common residuum, the way things look, sound, feel, taste, smell to various individuals at various times, independently of how those individuals are stimulated or non- perceptually affected, and independently of how they are subsequently disposed to behave or believe. The mistake is not in supposing that we can in practice ever or always perform this act of purification with certainty, but the more fundamental mistake of supposing that there is such a residual property to take seriously, however uncertain our actual attempts at isolation of instances might be.

I bolded "counts as" as Dennett is precisely drawing attention to how our perceptions are sutured into components which become labelled as ("count as") components (properties) of the analysed perceptions .

The "supposing" is done by the descriptive style, and not the argument. I believe strongly that this is why it seems so obvious to people and why qualia proponents do not really understand Dennett - it's a question of him doubting that something is methodologically appropriate which they are so habituated to doing it's like breathing for them.

The issue of whether it's possible to always describe things in a manner that doesn't make the qualia positing moves is a separate one; in a discourse about the appropriate ways to analyse experience and see structures in it, the positing of qualia like theoretical entities should be able to be examined in that arena. We need to have different standards of rigour for an investigation into the structures of experiences and, well, day to day stuff.

Finally in pump (1), Dennett highlights that the fundamental mistake of conjuring a residual property is actually enacted by the description style. One becomes committed to the existence of such a residual property not by demonstrating its existence, but by enacting a mode of description which presumes without argument the existence of the residual property. Analogy: if I'm running away from a hallucinatory giant chicken, that I am running away from it does not mean it is really there, it means that I am behaving as if it were. The behaviour here is the descriptive practice that gives rise to the qualia hallucinatory chicken. The "supposition" that there is a giant chicken to run away from.

@Isaac - I think whether the "first order properties" or "second order properties" are called into question depends on which intuition pump we're talking about. Intuition pump (1) looks to me to be about first order properties and how they are ascribed. First order being eg. "the taste of this cauliflower to me now" and second order being eg. "(the taste of this cauliflower to me now) is private and subjective"

To "quine" something would be to dismiss it due to indeterminacy, right?

I take Quining to be the gross error that subjective processes can somehow be made objective and distinct for the purpose of quantization?

quine, v. (1) To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant. "Some philosophers have quined classes, and some have even quined physical objects." Occasionally used intr., e.g., "You think I quine, sir. I assure you I do not!" (2) n. The total aggregate sensory surface of the world; hence quinitis, irritation of the quine.

From Dennett's parody philosophical dictionary.

It says so in Quining Qualia in the second paragraph:

The verb "to quine" is even more esoteric. It comes from The Philosophical Lexicon (Dennett 1978c, 8th edn., 1987), a satirical dictionary of eponyms: "quine, v. To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant." At first blush it would be hard to imagine a more quixotic quest than trying to convince people that there are no such properties as qualia; hence the ironic title of this chapter. But I am not kidding.

Read the bloomin' thing!

To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant

But to deny the existence of qualia wouldn't there first have to be someone foolish enough to insist that qualia as mental processes actually 'exist' in a philosophical sense of having identity?

Read the bloomin' thing! — fdrake

Hey, you ended up in the lap of a phenomenologist and seemed to think you were where Dennett meant for you to be, so stop finger wagging.

BTW, also stop trying to wring meaning from the stuff Dennett says. He intentionally equivocates.

BTW, also stop trying to wring meaning from the stuff Dennett says. — frank

If you're going to respond to me without making an attempt to do any exegesis for the paper in question, I'm just going to ignore it from now on.