It’s the opening paragraph of the article - Dennett’s words, not mine. But go off. — Luke

How is this consistent with Dennett’s claimed acknowledgement that conscious experience has properties? — Luke

addit=function(x,y){
thesum=x+y
return(thesum)
}

addit(1,2)

internal/external distinction — fdrake

I think you're pretty off the mark here exegetically Kenosha Kid, — fdrake

307. “Aren’t you nevertheless a behaviourist in disguise? Aren’t you nevertheless basically saying that everything except human behaviour is a fiction?” — If I speak of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction. — Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

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. — Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

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

There is a strong temptation, I have found, to respond to my claims in this paper more or less as follows: "But after all is said and done, there is still something I know in a special way: I know how it is with me right now." But if absolutely nothing follows from this presumed knowledge--nothing, for instance, that would shed any light on the different psychological claims that might be true of Chase or Sanborn--what is the point of asserting that one has it? — Dennett

the physiological facts will not in themselves shed any light on where in the stream of physiological process twixt tasting and telling to draw the line at which the putative qualia appear as properties of that phase of the process. — Dennett (intuition pump #8)

Do you correlate introspection/reflection and equilibrium with a particular organ (e.g. seeing with eyes or feeling with skin)? — Merkwurdichliebe

The vestibular system, in vertebrates, is part of the inner ear. In most mammals, it is the sensory system that provides the leading contribution to the sense of balance and spatial orientation for the purpose of coordinating movement with balance. Together with the cochlea, a part of the auditory system, it constitutes the labyrinth of the inner ear in most mammals.

Neural pathway of vestibular/balance system
As movements consist of rotations and translations, the vestibular system comprises two components: the semicircular canals, which indicate rotational movements; and the otoliths, which indicate linear accelerations. The vestibular system sends signals primarily to the neural structures that control eye movement; these provide the anatomical basis of thevestibulo-ocular reflex, which is required for clear vision. — Wikipedia

Self-awareness is immediacy itself, and not a faculty that mediates existence — Merkwurdichliebe

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.

How can he possibly dislike something that by his own reckoning doesn't actually exist? — Olivier5

Translation of talk about nothing into talk about something often takes some trouble... — Nelson Goodman: Sights Unseen

OK, what is your explanation for how non-conscious stuff, when assembled the right way, can produce consciousness? Because that seems like magic to me — RogueAI

(1) ineffable (2) intrinsic (3) private (4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness Thus are qualia introduced onto the philosophical stage....Theorists of the contrary persuasion have patiently and ingeniously knocked down all the arguments, and said most of the right things, but they have made a tactical error, I am claiming, of saying in one way or another: "We theorists can handle those qualia you talk about just fine; we will show that you are just slightly in error about the nature of qualia." What they ought to have said is: "What qualia?"

... the source concept, the "pretheoretical" notion of which the former are presumed to be refinements, is so thoroughly confused that even if we undertook to salvage some "lowest common denominator" from the theoreticians' proposals, any acceptable version would have to be so radically unlike the ill-formed notions that are commonly appealed to that it would be tactically obtuse--not to say Pickwickian--to cling to the term. Far better, tactically, to declare that there simply are no qualia at all. Endnote 2

"Qualia" is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us

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.

This is his issue with the intrinsic qualities of qualia: that you can meaningfully compare two. But this is not demanded by our conscious experiences. It is not our rational minds that generally determine that the car is the same colour as it was yesterday, rather the colour of the car is part of how we recognise it as ours. — Kenosha Kid

Translation of talk about nothing into talk about something often take some trouble — Nelson Goodman: Sights Unseen

if the error arises ultimately from treating experience as an entity which bears properties, how is it any better to treat it as an entity which bears relations (or other high order predicates)? — fdrake

The salient point in the devil's advocate is that the "fundamental error" seems to be claiming that or acting as if we experience experiential entities (which have or may be experiential properties), rather than experience itself being a mode of our interaction with entities.

That looks to me one way of fleshing out it being okay to say "The coffee tasted sweet today" but not "My subjective experience of today's coffee was partially constituted by a quale of sweetness". — fdrake

I kind of panicked as my post wasn't at all driven by Quining Qualia itself. I should have just brought it back to the text. — Kenosha Kid

It's really difficult to stick completely to exegesis when so much of the question of what Dennet might have been getting at requires some external 'rounding out' of what the issues are, so I sympathise with your posting dilemma. — Isaac

Although it is important to note the cases you alluded to where we're conscious of our processing ("is that a car over there?") because in these cases we're still having an experience - so what is it an experience of? We haven't identified the object yet. Are we experiencing the quale of {some vague grey shape in the distance that we can't quite make out}? Possibly, but 1) that rather detaches quale form the object of experience, and 2) deciding what the thing is is definitely part of the experience, so what happens when we realise it's a car? — Isaac

Proof of this is quite surprising (summary here). — Isaac

The cascade of effects triggered by your interaction with that picture (and the environment you're in at the time, and any other neural processes which were half-way complete when they were interrupted by seeing that picture) will have, by now, had consequences, other than the triggering of your 'car' neuron many of which you could be consciously aware of. — Isaac

your post hoc story is "I saw the car then all these other responses followed". That, provably, is not what really happened. — Isaac

All of this goings on were associated with what I finally decided was a car — Isaac

In fact all the evidence seems to point to there being nothing but a series of responses to the final object, of which it's colour is only one aspect. — Isaac

again, we could call these stories qualia, but since they are in a constant state of flux, it seems incredibly difficult to get any useful function from doing so - "Which qualia ar you referring to? The one just now...or now...or now..." — Isaac

there still exists an object of subjective experience as tagged by its outline. — Kenosha Kid

Here the 'car' quale means nothing more than that the image is presented for conscious appraisal with the 'car' tag, i.e. the 'car' neuron having fired with some degree of certainty. — Kenosha Kid

I'm not sure what responses you mean. — Kenosha Kid

Again, not sure what all these goings on means. — Kenosha Kid

Yes, I agree, this is Dennett's rejection of the intrinsic nature of qualia. I'm with you, and Dennett, on this, and I agree that this is what philosophers usually think of as qualia, incorrectly. — Kenosha Kid

But how is "What it is like to see red" distinct from "Seeing red"? — Banno

Dennett also has a response to the "Mary the color scientist" thought experiment. He argues that Mary would not, in fact, learn something new if she stepped out of her black and white room to see the color red. Dennett asserts that if she already truly knew "everything about color", that knowledge would include a deep understanding of why and how human neurology causes us to sense the "quale" of color. Mary would therefore already know exactly what to expect of seeing red, before ever leaving the room. Dennett argues that the misleading aspect of the story is that Mary is supposed to not merely be knowledgeable about color but to actually know all the physical facts about it, which would be a knowledge so deep that it exceeds what can be imagined, and twists our intuitions. — Wikipedia

(sorry if my writing's not clear - in my defense I'm recently writing on a phone on the train and so I don't do as much overarching editing as I should — Isaac

Much of what's going on, even consciously, is going on before the car tag. You later (perhaps even seconds later) re-tell the story as happening in a better order (saw a thing->worked out it was a car->thought 'I could drive that'). Expermenting on this is really difficult because of the time lag in fMRI and the non-specificity of EEG and the like, so take this with the very large pinch of salt attached to small sample sizes (neurosurgery patients). — Isaac

To me qualists want to say that there is something it's like to experience red, there's the 'redness' experience, or the 'car' experience. To do this, they invoke the 'way it feels' in response to sensing 'red', or 'a car'. What I'm trying to show is that we cannot, even in principle, distinguish the 'way it feels' in response to red, or cars, from 'the way it feels' just right now in general. The cascade of neural responses is continuous, there's no break in higher level backward suppression at the point of seeing red, so the conscious 'feelings' are unattached. We attach them later in retrospect. — Isaac

What I meant about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater is that there still remain objects of subjective experience, such that I can see a car without consciously determining it to be a car (even if 1 ms ago I didn't see a car), and that this object is private (internal processing from my raw sensory input to instantaneous apprehension by me) and immediate (I see car as car object is presented to me, which may be some while after I see light from car), but not intrinsic or ineffable, and that these objects and the processes that yield them (e.g. neuron that recognises car) underlie our pre-theoretical conceptions of what theorists call qualia. — Kenosha Kid

more scienticially-grounded ideas of objects of subjective experience, i.e. how we actually appraise such objects as car, taste of coffee, sound of gunshot, etc. — Kenosha Kid

you've removed the idea perceptions obtain properties in the manner we introspectively ascribe them — fdrake

you've removed the privacy — fdrake

you've removed the certainty — fdrake

what actually remains of ascribing "subjectivity" to a perception — fdrake

Consciousness is just the tendency to be able to report on mental activity and it's caused by the neurons which produce language, movement and other awareness-mediated responses being stimulated by the neurons constituting the processing of sensory inputs to which that awareness relates. — Isaac

There is a strong temptation, I have found, to respond to my claims in this paper more or less as follows: "But after all is said and done, there is still something I know in a special way: I know how it is with me right now." But if absolutely nothing follows from this presumed knowledge--nothing, for instance, that would shed any light on the different psychological claims that might be true of Chase or Sanborn--what is the point of asserting that one has it? Perhaps people just want to reaffirm their sense of proprietorship over their own conscious states.

So, to summarize the tradition, 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.

I don't see how any processes acting on my raw sensory input to produce my conscious perceptions can be anything other than private. — Kenosha Kid

In their place are relatively or practically ineffable public properties we can refer to indirectly via reference to our private property-detectors-- private only in the sense of idiosyncratic. And insofar as we wish to cling to our subjective authority about the occurrence within us of states of certain types or with certain properties, we can have some authority--not infallibility or incorrigibility, but something better than sheer guessing--but only if we restrict ourselves to relational, extrinsic properties like the power of certain internal states of ours to provoke acts of apparent re- identification. So contrary to what seems obvious at first blush, there simply are no qualia at all. — Dennett

Consciousness is just the tendency to be able to report on mental activity and it's caused by the neurons which produce language, movement and other awareness-mediated responses being stimulated by the neurons constituting the processing of sensory inputs to which that awareness relates. I'm genuinely dumbfounded as to how or why anyone finds this in the least bit difficult to imagine.

There's a big difference between calling an experience private and saying that only one person has been so effected! — fdrake

How could you know whether anyone else has been “so effected”? — Luke

In their place are relatively or practically ineffable public properties we can refer to indirectly via reference to our private property-detectors-- private only in the sense of idiosyncratic. And insofar as we wish to cling to our subjective authority about the occurrence within us of states of certain types or with certain properties, we can have some authority--not infallibility or incorrigibility, but something better than sheer guessing--but only if we restrict ourselves to relational, extrinsic properties like the power of certain internal states of ours to provoke acts of apparent re- identification. So contrary to what seems obvious at first blush, there simply are no qualia at all. — Dennett

There's a big difference between calling an experience private and saying that only one person has been so effected! — fdrake

there is a big difference between saying that a person has a sense datum/experiential entity with a given structure that only they have any access to of any sort (privacy) and saying that the same person has had a unique (idiosyncratic) experience. — fdrake

The fact that that raw data is input to one person's senses, is processed by that same person's brain which is trained by that same person's past experiences, and is made available to that same person's conscious apprehension, makes it both private and idiosyncratic. — Kenosha Kid

Object->Perception -> Perceptual object -> conscious apprehension, with that last arrow being "making available"

Then we're in a situation where we have perceptual objects with private properties "presented to" the conscious apprehension. It's the same way of breaking up the stages as qualia:

Object -> Perception -> Qualia -> conscious apprehension

The only difference is qualia emphasises the properties of that intermediary perceptual object - between perception and conscious apprehension - in the first there is a perceptual object which has properties, in the second the properties have been split up before immersion into the chain. — fdrake

If instead it goes:

Perception -> conscious apprehension

Then we're not committed to perceptual objects with private properties. — fdrake

The qualia are the objects of subjective experience, so are not necessarily pre-existing objects provided to conscious apprehension but are the objects of providing data for conscious apprehension. — Kenosha Kid

And I think this is what is safe to rule out, although I expect rationalists will not like it. (Generally the idea that the brain is doing stuff that the mind is unaware of does not sit favourably, but that's just the way it is.) — Kenosha Kid

This is his issue with the intrinsic qualities of qualia: that you can meaningfully compare two. But this is not demanded by our conscious experiences. It is not our rational minds that generally determine that the car is the same colour as it was yesterday, rather the colour of the car is part of how we recognise it as ours. — Kenosha Kid