But the point I made about Dennett - that his concept of philosophy actually undermines or completely destroys what philosophy was always understood to mean - is important. If you're studying political theory, how much time do you devote to the study of anarchism or terrorism? Are they legitimate forms of political organisation? If you think not, then why include them? Dennett's corpus, which is, again, the work of a small clique of mainly American academics, is analogous to terrorism or anarchism in respect of politics.

Or is qualia just a throwaway term for the throwaway notions of people who do not know what they're talking about? Clarity? Anyone? — tim wood

You do understand that David Chalmer's well-known paper, Facing up the Hard Problem of Consciousness, was specifically about 'the problem of qualia'? Basically he argues that the first-person nature of experience (awkwardly termed 'what-it-is-like-ness') is something that cannot be described in objective, third-person terms:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel ( 'What is it like to be a Bat',1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. — David Chalmers

The point Chalmers makes seems abundantly obvious to me. Yet that is just what Dennett denies. In fact his entire philosophy rests on the denial of just this point. So it is the very essence of an interminable debate. The only way to deal with it is to walk away from it, which I hereby do.

I definitely find that qualia is an aspect which is used to explain aspects of reality which cannot be explained easily by idealism, realism or materialism. — Jack Cummins

Could you say who it is who uses it that way? As I said, in philosophy of mind and science of consciousness, it's a thing to explain, not an explanation.

:rofl:

I understand. Btw, I don't see what "qualia" (perceptions) have to do with metaphysics (categorical constructs).

'We are aware of things', 'we experience phenomena' or however else you might want to describe perception; these are ways of thinking and talking. While we are aware of something can we aware of ourselves being aware of it, that is can we simultaneously be aware of the experience, as well as experiencing whatever it is we are experiencing?

Let's say, for the sake of argument that we can; then what would be the qualities of our awareness or experience other than the qualities of what we are aware of or experiencing? Perhaps we can also be aware of our feelings about what we are experiencing. But then what would be the quality of those feelings other than the feelings themselves? What exactly are these elusive quales? Perhaps they are reifications generated by our abstractive reflections on our experience. Or,,,?

I probably came with some kind of bias against Dennett, but I am trying to read his ideas and see strengths as well as weaknesses. Part of the problem for me in evaluating his ideas may be seeing how his ideas developed over time, rather than in one book. Somehow, I have often thought that he was the thinker who suggested that consciousness was an illusion, but having made half way through, 'Consciousness Explained', it seems here that he regarded consciousness as an aspect of the inner life of human beings. But, I probably need to finish the book in order to evaluate, and look at some further developments of his ideas.

I may be wrong in my understanding of qualia, but I have understood it to be more about questions arising about perception and objectivity. For example, does each person experience colours identically, or what lies beyond subjective perception, and the nature of 'objective' aspects which are underlying individual human experiences. I guess that shared experience does point to the possibility that there may be some metaphysics behind human experiences.

Dennett is a considerable philosopher; even if you might disagree with his conclusions. I think it's always a bad idea to reject a thinker out of hand on account of having prejudicially formed a bad impression.

That said you are under no obligation to read any particular philosopher; there are way too many for any of us to be able to read any more than a tiny percentage of all the philosophical works in existence.

If you have read and understood a philosopher and you agree or disagree with her, then you will be able to identify your points of agreement or disagreement and explain why you agree or disagree on those points.

I think wholesale rejection of a philosopher, which would only occur to you if you hadn't read their work, is bad form.

Basically he argues that the first-person nature of experience (awkwardly termed 'what-it-is-like-ness') is something that cannot be described in objective, third-person terms — Wayfarer

That's only if you think the world is as you experience it (naive realism) while at the same time believing the idea that the experience itself is causally segregated from the world itself. It's an inconsistent position.

It just amazes me that people are still asserting that qualia are an illusion when the only way they know of the existence of brains in bodies and their behaviors is via their subjective experience of such things. If the way you know the world is an illusion, then your observations, understanding and explanations of the world are an illusion.

:up:

... the possibility that there may be some metaphysics behind human experiences — Jack Cummins

I can't make sense of what you mean by this. Apparently, we use "metaphysics" in different ways to mean different things.
.
Anyway, Jack, here's a follow-up summation of Consciousness Explained – Dennett's 2005 Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (especially the chapter on "zombies & qualia"). I've moved on from him, however, almost two decades ago when by chance I came across the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger's magisterial Being No One (however, I also highly recommend the less technical, much condensed summary version The Ego Tunnel).

Thomas Metzinger's magisterial Being No One (I highly recommend the less technical, much condensed summary version The Ego Tunnel). — 180 Proof

That I can agree with. :cool:

He's a very interesting guy. Not as well known as he should be.

Haven't seen popular work from him in good while though.

Somehow, I have often thought that he was the thinker who suggested that consciousness was an illusion, but having made half way through, 'Consciousness Explained', it seems here that he regarded consciousness as an aspect of the inner life of human beings. — Jack Cummins

His major work Consciousness Explained (1991) was mockingly referred to as “Consciousness Ignored” or “Consciousness Explained Away.” Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, Galen Strawson famously said that Dennett should be prosecuted under the Trades Description Act. — Julian Baggini

It just amazes me that people are still asserting that qualia are an illusion when the only way they know of the existence of brains in bodies and their behaviors is via their subjective experience of such things — Harry Hindu

:100:

Yet that is just what Dennett denies. — Wayfarer

No, Dennett doesn't deny that we feel, for example, orgasms; he's not as stupid as you imagine.

Dennett doesn't deny that we feel, for example, orgasms; he's not as stupid as you imagine. — Janus

You've never understood my criticisms of him so there's no point in discussing it with you.

It just amazes me that people are still asserting that qualia are an illusion when the only way they know of the existence of brains in bodies and their behaviors is via their subjective experience of such things. If the way you know the world is an illusion, then your understanding and explanations of the world are an illusion. — Harry Hindu

What are qualia, according to you?

You've never understood my criticisms of him so there's no point in discussing it with you. — Wayfarer

That's a typical response from you; anyone who disagrees with you must not have understood what you are saying. I understand your criticism of Dennett; it's not hard to understand given it's so simplistic; unfortunately it is misplaced, because you are not familiar with his work. In a moment of honesty you declared he was one of your bogeymen; of course this makes sense: a bogey man is a figure towards which one is incapable of rational thought.

My take on Dennett is that he's a perfectly nice guy, very approachable, apparently very smart, worked his way through college playing jazz piano - I have to respect that! - but none of this is on account of his philosophy (or what he calls 'philosophy'.) It's because he's the product of a liberal education. But what he says actually completely undermines and contradicts the liberalism that gave rise to his style of thought. In other words, that he's a nice guy and smart and all, owes nothing to the so-called 'philosophy' that he espouses.

We may still speak of human "souls," Dennett argues mischievously, as long as we understand them to be made up of tiny robots. And we may still speak of "free will" as long as we mean the way our genetically programmed selves react to the environment rather than the rational choice of ultimate ends.

None of this would be very surprising if Dennett followed his Darwinian materialism to its logical conclusions in ethics and politics. After all, scientific materialists have been around for a long time, attacking religion, miracles, immaterial causes, and essential natures. Think of Lucretius and his poem about the natural world consisting of atoms in the void, or Hobbes's mechanistic universe of "bodies in motion," or B. F. Skinner's "behaviorism," Ayn Rand's "objectivism," E. O. Wilson's "sociobiology," Darwin's Darwinism, and even Nietzsche's "will to power." But all of these materialist debunkers of higher purposes and soul-doctrines drew conclusions about morality that were harsh and pessimistic, if not cynical and amoral. Lucretius saw that a universe made up of atoms in the void was indifferent to man, and he counseled withdrawal from the world for the sake of philosophical "peace of mind"-letting the suffering and injustices of the world go by, like a detached bystander on the seashore watching a sinking ship, and treating the spectacle of people dying with equanimity as impersonal bundles of atoms in the void. Hobbes, Skinner, Rand, and Nietzsche saw humans as essentially selfish creatures of pleasure, power, and domination who in some cases can be induced by fear and greed to lay off killing each other. Darwin never spelled out the moral implications of his doctrine, but presumably he could not have objected to the strong dominating the weak or to nature's plagues and disasters as ways of strengthening the species. Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism - the survival of the fittest in a competitive world - is a logical conclusion of Darwinian natural science.

But such conclusions are alien to Daniel Dennett. He is a Darwinian materialist in his cosmology and metaphysics while also strongly affirming human dignity as well as a progressive brand of liberalism in his ethics and politics. Herein lies the massive contradiction of his system of thought. He boldly proclaims that we live in an accidental universe without divine and natural support for the special dignity of man as a species or as individuals; yet he retains a sentimental attachment to liberal-democratic values that lead him to affirm a humane society that respects the rights of persons and protects the weak from exploitation by the strong and from other injustices. He also objects to B. F. Skinner and the sociobiologists for reducing man to the desires for pleasure, power, and procreation. And he condemns Social Darwinism as "an odious misapplication of Darwin's thinking" and expresses outrage at child abuse, the exploitation of women, and President Bush's attempt to rewrite the Geneva Convention's definition of torture as violations of personal dignity. In short, he is a conventional political liberal of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, type whose moral doctrine is a version of neo-Kantian liberalism that assumes the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. But none of this follows logically from his Darwinian materialism and it even contradicts it, which means Dennett's humane liberalism is a blind leap of faith that is just as dogmatic as the religious faith he deplores. — Robert Kraynak

What are qualia, according to you? — Janus

The components of knowledge. What form does your knowledge take? When you say that you know something what are you pointing to? How do you know you know something?

When I look at your brain, is my perspective of your brain first person or third person? Is my perspective of your mind first person or third person?

Why don't you quote Dennett himself?

Knowledge is conceptual, both qualitative and quantitative, so it doesn't consist in qualia. Your perspective on anything is your perspective of course, not mine. General knowledge of publicly available phenomena is not merely your perspective, even if your perspective accords with it.

When I look at your brain, is my perspective of your brain first person or third person? Is my perspective of your mind first person or third person? — Harry Hindu

First person.

Knowledge is conceptual, both qualitative and quantitative, so it is does consist in qualia. — Janus

The point being that at the most fundamental level, knowledge is composed of sensory impressions: colors, shapes, sounds, etc., aka qualia. Your experience of the words on this screen are composed of shapes and colors, not neurons firing in a certain sequence. Neurons and brains themselves are composed of particular shapes and colors. It is these varying shapes and colors that are used to compare and differentiate other shapes and colors, not a comparison of neural electrical currents.

Your perspective on anything is your perspective of course, not mine. General knowledge of publicly available phenomena is not merely your perspective, even if your perspective accords with it. — Janus

I'm not sure what you mean by "perspective" then if you seem to be attributing it to something independent of a sensory information processing system. There can be no such thing as a perspective independent of some sensory information processing system. In a sense, there are only first-person perspectives with perspectives being a informational structure composed of information about the world relative to the self. Third-person perspectives are simulated first-person perspectives.

lmost two decades ago when by chance I came across the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger's magisterial Being No One (I highly recommend the less technical, much condensed summary version The Ego Tunnel). — 180 Proof

All he does is talk about how the brain models the world without addressing how the model relates to the brain itself - why the model is composed of entirely different stuff from the first person perspective (the mind and its qualia) as opposed to the third person (the brain and its neurons).

Why don't you quote Dennett himself? — Janus

Human beings, Mr. Dennett said, quoting a favorite pop philosopher, Dilbert, are “moist robots.”

“I’m a robot, and you’re a robot, but that doesn’t make us any less dignified or wonderful or lovable or responsible for our actions,” he said. “Why does our dignity depend on our being scientifically inexplicable?”

Strangely, I am not stumped by this question, but I don't think I'll bother to try and explain why.

The long and short is, there are no 'beings' as such. What we take to be 'beings' are really just the co-ordinated output of massive numbers of impersonal, unintelligent processes that emulate 'being'.

Dennett, in one of his characteristic remarks, assures us that “through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ … There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.” Then, after describing a marvelous bit of highly organized and seemingly meaningful biological activity, he concludes:

"Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe." (from Darwin's Dangerous Idea)

So, again, why this is regarded as 'philosophy' continues to elude me, but then, large numbers of people seem to think Trump won the last election.

Trump has a lot more fans than Dennett. His is very much a minority view.

Try actually reading Metzinger.

"According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience."

How on earth is this supposed to suggest that there's no qualia? Qualia is conscious experience.

Really, I thought it was an incredibly simple idea.

Qualia is what a philosophical zombie doesn't have, any interior experience (likeness?) of existence. — Nils Loc

Qualia is defined as something that a thing that perhaps doesn't exist doesn't have? That's the opposite of simple. It's elusive, if anything.

Qualia add nothing helpful to the conversation:

What is gained by talk of the-qual-of-the-flower that is not found in talk of the red flower? — Banno

I like Dennet, and the consensus among the contributors here I'm most aligned to/admiring of seems to be against qualia, but I've never quite grasped the landing of the argument.

When I refer to the red flower, I am doing so as a shorthand for my experience of the red flower. Even in saying "red", I'm not speaking of the energy levels of molecules in the flower, nor the dominant frequency range of light emitted by the flower. I am explicitly referring to something that is caused by (commitment to reality) but not found in the object.

How we get from photons destroyed by retina and currents pumped along optic nerves to my experience is nowhere near fully known. Collapsing the distinction between a thing and my experience of it eliminates the language to ask interesting and relevant questions. We can commit to reality and still ask questions about how it works.

When I refer to the red flower, I am doing so as a shorthand for my experience of the red flower. — Kenosha Kid

Is there some benefit for you, in the shorthand over the experience? What does the shorthand do, that the experience hasn’t already done?

How we get from photons destroyed by retina and currents pumped along optic nerves to my experience is nowhere near fully known. Collapsing the distinction between a thing and my experience of it eliminates the language to ask interesting and relevant questions. We can commit to reality and still ask questions about how it works. — Kenosha Kid

What does the shorthand do, that the experience hasn’t already done? — Mww

Aside from saving me from prepending every reference to an object with "my experience of", acknowledging the shorthand allows me to ponder how we get from currents along optic nerves to experienced images. (Ditto for all senses.) You cannot do that if you limit yourself to talking about the referent of 'the red flower' only. The flower is well understood. My experience of it is not.

For good measure, here's a measure:

From the PhilPapers Surveys
Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?

Other 393 / 931 (42.2%)
Accept or lean toward: representationalism 293 / 931 (31.5%)
Accept or lean toward: qualia theory 114 / 931 (12.2%)
Accept or lean toward: disjunctivism 102 / 931 (11.0%)
Accept or lean toward: sense-datum theory 29 / 931 (3.1%) — Banno

So there's no consensus among professional philosophers regarding the nature of perceptual experience. I guess Dennett would fall under Other as he probably would consider the five listed choices to be some version of the mistaken Cartesian Theater. But that would put him in the minority.

No, Dennett doesn't deny that we feel, for example, orgasms; he's not as stupid as you imagine. — Janus

He doesn't, nor does he deny that we're conscious. But what matters is the meaning of the words he uses. Consciousness and feeling for Dennett do no not mean the same thing as they do for Chalmers.

Did you know Dennett used to defend coming-to-seem-to-remember regarding dreaming? It's not a very tenable position considering dream research, particularly with lucid dreaming, but Dennett used to argue that dreams where created as a kind of fake memory as one was waking up.

And why was he drawn to such a position? Because dreams are a great example of a cartesian theater in the brain. You can't simply export the movie to the external world as Dennett likes to do with perception.

One of philosophy's greatest mysteries, even more mysterious than the hard problem, is the mystery of how Daniel Dennett ascended to prominence in anglo-american philosophy.