I don’t care whether we use qualia, I just don’t agree with Dennett’s quining the phenomenonal in total, such that the seeming isn’t really. But sure, for sake of this discussion I’ll say the seeming is qualia.

If you can't tell me in basic terms what externalism is, we're done. — frank

About mental content? Roughly the idea that the content of mental states of an agent is differentiated by that agent's (history of) agent-environment relationships. As I read Dennett, he's an externalist with regard to mental content, and broadly some kind of representational functionalist with respect to that content.

Roughly the idea that the content of mental states of an agent is differentiated by that agent's (history of) agent-environment relationships. — fdrake

An internalist wouldn't disagree with this.

An internalist wouldn't disagree with this. — frank

I guess I failed your test then.

Dennett argues fairly convincingly(by my lights anyway) against the ineffability, intrinsicality, privacy, and direct apprehensibility of the properties of conscious experience, and in doing so effectively grounds his rejection of qualia. It's worth noting that he does all this by offering physicalist explanations of actual counterexamples(intuition pumps) that are germane to historical notions of qualia/quale. In doing so, he shows that the properties of personal experience that make personal experience what it is, are not special in the sort of way that proponents of qualia claim. — creativesoul

Okay, a brave attempt at a summary, but you stayed at safe distance from Dennett's actual argument, only evoking his "intuition pumps" without trying to summarize any of them, so the argument is not transparently described. Let me try and fill in some blanks.

First, I agree that the broad intent of Quining Qualia is to disqualify qualia as a useful concept. This implies that according to Dennett, philosophical concepts can have clear-cut qualities, and that these clear-cut qualities are accessible to our consciousness, that we can assess them logically and objectively. In other words, it assumes that concepts can be unambiguously defined, assessed and critiqued, which is a false premise. No philosophical concept worth its salt can be defined without ambiguity, and the concept of Qualia is no exception. (And in fact the paper later recalls Wittgenstein's skepticism regarding the possibility of a private language…)

Which is why concepts are hard to kill. They resuscitate in far less than 3 days. The zombies here are not us but them concepts. Which is interesting because you can crucify them again and again, usually on a cross made of other concepts. Such as the concept of intuition used by Dennett here. But these other concepts are no less likely to be doubted and poked around, they have not been vetted as well-defined by anyone…

For Dennett, intuition is evidently some kind of humor or juice that can get pumped up. So let’s scan through his pumps.

Intuition pump #1 (watching you eat cauliflower) openly pleads for the existence of qualia. Dennett says he cannot “isolate the qualia” but still hates that taste of steamed cauliflower…

IP#2 pleads for the qualia of wine taste to be an important enough motivation to conceivably drive the design and construction of wine tasting machines. I hope Dennett is not suggesting that the machine could enjoy wine, nor that we should produce wine so that machines can drink it?

The moral of IP#3 and #4, as per Dennett himself, is that no intersubjective comparison of qualia is possible, even with perfect technology, and therefore qualia are ineffable and private after all.
IP#5 and 6 (the neurosurgical prank and alternative neurosurgery) plead for our capacity to notice a discontinuity in qualia. If qualia did not exist, the subject would perceive no difference at all.

Intuition pump #7 (Chase and Sanborn the coffee tasters) seem to imply that qualia are subjective and private, but that memories of qualia are often unreliable, and that tastes changes over time.

In IP #8 (the gradual post-operative recovery) some scientists have objectively and verifiably inverted poor Chase’s qualia. When Chase reports otherwise, they insist that they did so even and that Chase is incorrect. Therefore the scientists affirm the objective existence of qualia, because you cannot change something that does not exist, and then insist that you did change it... That Chase reports otherwise is neither here nor there; it could simply be due to him trying to fool the scientists.

Intuition pumps #9 and 10 are closer to everyday experience. #9 is about acquired tastes like beer and IP #10 is about that fact that phenol-thio-urea tastes very bitter to some, and is tasteless as water to others. This proves that tastes can evolve, and they can depend on people: I don’t find bitter what you find bitter, apparently. But IP 10 also proves that tastes are genetically mediated, and hence have been selected throughout evolution. This means that a qualia such as “bitterness” are a product of our biology, which is an objective fact, and this fact lends them objectivity. Qualia can be studied through genetics, for instance, as in the case of phenol-thio-urea.

IP#11 (the cauliflower cure) is equivalent to IP#7 (Chase and Sanborn). Dennett’s experience of cauliflower is dramatically affected (for the better) after he eats a pill. He feels a strong qualitative change but since he cannot say if he was wrong before or what, he concludes that the taste of cauliflower does not exist (but now he likes it a lot…).

Intuition pump #12 (inverting spectacles) is about a well-known phenomenon: after wearing inverting spectacles (up is down and vice versa) for several days subjects make an astonishingly successful adaptation and seem to see things normally. It is similar to IP #8 where Chase's taste buds have been unethically inverted, but it is more real and less gross. Similarly to IP8, the scientists studying this know very well that the spectacles are inverting visual perception. So like IP8, IP12 proves only that qualia are real, objective, scientific phenomena.

Intuition pump #13 (the osprey cry) is about the difference between a verbal description of an osprey cry and hearing it. “So that's what it sounds like, I say to myself, ostending--it seems--a particular mental complex of intrinsic, ineffable qualia. … [but] from a single experience of this sort I don't--can't--know how to generalize to other osprey calls. Would a cry that differed only in being half an octave higher also be an osprey call? ” So first he understands a qualia then he wonders about how many of them ospreys he would need to hear to know the qualia of the osprey cry…

IP #14 (the Jello box) is a confused way to ask once again “whether your blue is my blue, your middle-C is my middle-C” and is thus similar to IP #1: qualia can differ from one person to the next, and are thus highly personal and subjective.

IP #15 (the guitar string) speaks of our capacity to disentangle harmonics in a guitar note or notes in a chord. “The difference in experience is striking.” And later: “you are still responding, as before, to a complex property so highly informative that it practically defies verbal description.” It’s is hard to leave this IP without an intuition that musical beauty is indeed complex and ineffable, even if it can be – as in this case – further broken down into sub-elements. And that’s the point he is trying to make of course, but you still cannot verbally describe fully the sound of a guitar, while you can still recognize it, even after this IP. Even if a sound can be broken down into its components, and perceived as such, even if a patch of color of your computer screen can be broken down in red, blue and green dots, even if qualia can be broken down in elementary qualia, that doesn’t make the elementary qualia any less ineffable.

So as per the paper’s “intuition pumps”, qualia are ineffable, subjective and personal, but also objective, scientific phenomena. They are economically important (and thus wine tasting machines are potentially profitable). They can be very beautiful. And they sometimes force even those philosophers who doubt their existence to give up forever on steamed cauliflower...

So the board appears to bulge, but does not really; and this is a private thing, despite our shared talk about it.

And this is the sort of thing you would call qualia.

Not disagreeing here - just checking if this is what you want to assert. — Banno

Correct. It is private in the sense that you cannot be sure that others see exactly what you see. But it is universal in the sense that we all report seeing something different from the objective image.

Experience is a synthesis, not an aggregate. Experiences cannot be disassembled, they may only be analyzed. — Mww

I agree with this. The proponents of qualia and quale are the ones who attempt to decouple, sever, and/or otherwise separate some aspects of consciousness from the ongoing process, which is what experience amounts to.

You want me to remove all the properties of language and then report my experiences to you? — Marchesk

No.

Which properties of your private experience are existentially independent from language use? Which ones exist in their entirety prior to your report of them? What do they consist of?

Which properties of your private experience are existentially independent from language use? Which ones exist in their entirety prior to your report of them? What do they consist of? — creativesoul

The various color, sound, taste sensations, but those are words used in language, so naturally you will complain that I'm using language.

The proponents of qualia and quale are the ones who attempt to decouple, sever, and/or otherwise separate some aspects of consciousness from the ongoing process, which is what experience amounts to. — creativesoul

Au contraire, it is the qualophobes who discard experence for the functional, dispisotional properties of the process.

Which properties of your private experience are existentially independent from language use? Which ones exist in their entirety prior to your report of them? What do they consist of?
— creativesoul

The various color, sound, taste sensations, but those are words used in language, so naturally you will complain that I'm using language. — Marchesk

No, I won't. We must use language.

So, let me see if I have this right...

Color, sound, and taste are - according to you - properties of private experience that exist in their entirety prior to language use.

Are you ok with that?

I've no idea how you arrived at that summary. I'm not equipped to disentangle it.

Yes.

Yes

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?

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?

Algorithms don’t cause outputs. — khaled

I never said they did. You asked about whether they provided knowledge of out puts. They do.

It’s not tasting specifically that’s just an example. Dennett said that qualia cannot be a logical formulation, but must be an empirical fact to satisfy its defenders (your quote). But in the intuition pump designed to prove this (8) he did nothing to actually prove it. — khaled

But it’s worth noting that I don’t agree that it was ever intended to be used that way. So his “opposition” here is meaningless. — khaled

This seems a common theme of misunderstanding, also in @Marchesk's view that just 'seeming' can be called qualia

Fortunately, Dennett's argument in this respect can be really simplified -

1. Proponents of qualia need p-zombies to be distinguishable (or wine-tasting machines as used in the article), they cannot have it that p-zombies and wine tasting machines have qualia. So a model of experience which goes

sensory input-> response

has to be ruled out, otherwise the wine tasting machine and p-zombies have no different an experience to use (both take inputs and produce input-appropriate responses

2. So, in order to salvage us fro p-zombiehood or from being replaced by wine tasting machines, the model of experience has to go

a)sensory input->qualia.....then....b)qualia->(via some judgement/assessment)->response

3. But Dennett's third set of intuition pumps show that if we make neurological changes to path (a) - from object to qualia, or path (b) - from qualia to response, we cannot tell which change has been made. We cannot examine our 'qualia' independently to tell if they've been changed by a modification to path (a) or if instead we've simply been subject to a modification of path (b).

4. So if we can't access our qualia introspectively - to do psychological or philosophical work with them, and we can find no evidence of them from external investigation (by neuroscience), then why are we persisting with them?

Or to put it even more simply - qualia are a theorised step in a perception-response process which we cannot access independent of either input (perception) or output (response) and for which there is no other evidence - so what are they are they theorised for?

Having finished rereading Quining Qualia, I'll answer the question one post at a time.

(1) What do you think Dennett's position is in Quining Qualia? — fdrake

That conscious experience is the dispositional, relational and functional properties of the biological systems responsible for conscious experience, and nothing additional. This part is key:

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. — Qunining Qualia

And this part right after:

The standard reaction to this claim is the complacent acknowledgment that while some people may indeed have succumbed to one confusion or fanaticism or another, one's own appeal to a modest, innocent notion of properties of subjective experience is surely safe. It is just that presumption of innocence I want to overthrow. — Qunining Qualia

Which includes my attempt to avoid any sort of strong statement about qualia properties which might be subject to quining, although I did defend privacy.

So what is being left out in my view after accounting for dispositional, relational and functional properties, that science can discover? The sensation itself of colors, sounds, feels, etc.

(2) How do you think he argues for that position? — fdrake

A series of intuition pumps meant to walk the reader through disabusing them of the intuition that conscious experience has any sort of qualia-like properties (ineffable, intrinsic, private, direct). It should be noted here that Dennett is doing the intuition pumping. He has constructed the pumps to arrive at his conclusion.

I've no idea how you arrived at that summary. I'm not equipped to disentangle it. — creativesoul

I just summarized each and every of his 15 "pumps", and then examined it... I am aware it is hard to do, it took me the evening. But now I can prove than none of these pumps amount to a serious conceptual critique, that the idea that scientists could invert one's qualia attracts attention to the fact that qualia are objective, scientifically studied phenomena, for instance.

I predicted that you won't be able to summarize the argument followed. And indeed you couldn't, and now that I have summarized it for you, you cannot even deal with it... :-)

(3) How does that relate to the maxim "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality" (Searle) assertion you've been using your photos to intuition pump for (as I've read them anyway). — fdrake

Here is the crux of the matter, for me anyway. Dennett does not think the appearance of having sensations can be considered qualia in any meaningful sense. Therefore, it's a faulty intuition. Thus why elsewhere he thinks illusionsim is a good guess or starting point for dissolving the hard problem, or answering the hard question as he calls it. It's a magic trick in the brain, and the only thing left is for neuroscience to show how the trick is performed. Or something along those lines. I believe he's offered up several possibilities, but at any rate, there is nothing ineffable, intrinsic, private or direct to the appearance of seeing colors, etc.

And since that's the case, the appearance can entirely be understood from a third person perspective, when the science advances enough. What I take from this is the appearance of consciousness is not really an appearance. It only seems like it on reflection. Keith Frankish in his paper is careful to point out that the illusion itself must not lead to qualia.

It is a denial of phenomenalism.

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

The first section of the article does seem to cause a lot of confusion, maybe Dennett could have been clearer. What he does in intuition pumps one to six si 'steel-man' the arguments for qualia. So your reading of them is basically spot on. He's showing how the concept of a private, ineffable, accessible, irreducible quale comes about - what intuitions lead us to think such things might exist. He litters the discussion of these intuition pumps with forewarnings of the paradoxes to come, but they are not, on their own, meant to show qualia are not any of those four things, they're really meant to show how it is that we come to think they are (put in a way which foreshadows later problems).

So

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. — Luke

Yes. That's right - hence the idea that qualia can't be something which can be explained by

sensory input-> response

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

a)sensory input->qualia.....then....b)qualia->(via some judgement/assessment)->response

in order to salvage our sense that the brainstorm machine would not give us the same experience.

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.

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. — Luke

Not irrelevant, no. But Dennett does not talk about the relevance here, he's saving that for later (pumps 7-12). It just needs to be bourne in mind that there must be an origin of qualia which is not part of qualia. Just re-affirming the first path of that second model - qualia are not perception, they must be the result of perception.

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". — Luke

Yep, again intuition pump 3 is not meant to be solved by pumps 4-6, it's part of a sequence of pumps which show how we got here (with paradoxes).

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. — Luke

These pumps are not about infallibility. The point of them is to show how fallibility on both paths of the second model I showed above make the concept of qualia useless as defined. 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?

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

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?

3. But Dennett's third set of intuition pumps show that if we make neurological changes to path (a) - from object to qualia, or path (b) - from qualia to response, we cannot tell which change has been made. We cannot examine our 'qualia' independently to tell if they've been changed by a modification to path (a) or if instead we've simply been subject to a modification of path (b). — Isaac

I think a problem here is supposing that qualia is supposed to be able to tell us something about our neurology. But maybe the qualia is just the result of whatever neurological mechanisms are responsible, and it doesn't matter whether it's (a) or (b). You end up with the same qualia.

maybe the qualia is just the result of whatever neurological mechanisms are responsible, and it doesn't matter whether it's (a) or (b). You end up with the same qualia. — Marchesk

That's the point of the though experiments. The only thing we can say we end up with is a relation between the sources of sensation and the response, but the wine-tasting machine has a reliable relation between sensory sources and response, yet we want to leave it without of qualia. If qualia are just the whole process from sources of sensation to response, then wine-tasting machine have it, so do p-zombies.

@Banno@Creative@Isaac@fdrake
Regarding privacy, one might say our mental activity is not radically private, in that an advanced enough science and technology could reveal the exact neural correlates for all mental activity, and from there infer exactly what is going on. It could even be piped into a monitor and speakers, or a VR device. Dennett mentions the Brainstorm machine.

And sure, I grant that much. The problem comes in with experiences we don't have the ability to experience. If bat physiology reveals that sonar creates a sensation in bats, but this is unlike any of our sensory modalities, then we can't know what that is. People born blind from birth, or who have suffered a neurological condition removing their ability to experience color, are presumably in this position with regard to vision. They understand many humans "see", but what that means to them isn't a colored in world, since they have no such experiences to compare to. They know the language of course, and learn how to use it, but they don't know the experience.

And that is what is radically private about consciousness that science cannot give us, without rewiring our nervous systems, or enhancing them.

If qualia are just the whole process from sources of sensation to response, then wine-tasting machine have it, so do p-zombies. — Isaac

Qualia are the resulting sensations that consciousness is made up of. But we only know that from first person experience. Solpsism is a difficult position to refute because of that.

So yeah, you could theoretically be a p-zombie, and the wine-tasting machine gives us no indication otherwise, so it probably is, unless one endorses panpsychism or functional qualia (Chalmers).

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?

And that is what is radically private about consciousness that science cannot give us, without rewiring our nervous systems, or enhancing them. — Marchesk

Yeah, I'd be tempted to agree with you here on a pragmatic level. But this doesn't show that such experience is 'necessarily' private. As you say, theoretically scientists could one day re-wire our nervous system such that we have the memories and stored neural pathways of a bat and then we would 'know' everything about the experience of sonar before we receive our first ultrasonic sound-wave because all that there is to the knowing is in those neural structures.

Qualia are the resulting sensations that consciousness is made up of. — Marchesk

Yes. That's what they're theorised to be in order to distinguish us from wine-tasting machines. But theorised that way, they can't also be private, ineffable, intrinsic and accessible.If

qualia is just the result of whatever neurological mechanisms are responsible, and it doesn't matter whether it's (a) or (b). — Marchesk

...then they're not accessible. Only the beginning and the end of those pathways are accessible.

But this doesn't show that such experience is 'necessarily' private. — Isaac

I should have added that science can't tell us that that bat necessarily has a sonar sensation, only whether it has recognizable neural structures (by comparison with ours).

It gets harder the farther from human you go. Ned Block goes into this in his The Harder Problem of Consciousness paper, using Commander Data as an example. Philosophers have imagined weirder scenarios, such as Chinese Brains and meteor showers that might instantiate analogous functions for conscious sensation.