I don't wanna name names.

Welcome!

In the spirit of Stove's Gem, here is one that occurs on forum a lot in various guises:

You used the word X, the meaning of the word X is a type, therefore the types exist in the manner I believe, Y. It's a particularly common form of gotcha argument, in which someone committed to the existence of X and its status as a Y uses that their opponent has to use the word X when disagreeing about the connection of X and Y.

This is obviously a bad argument, as in cases like this the use of the word X and its connection to the type existing in manner Y is what's at stake in the argument, and just because something can be referred to does not mean it exists in any sense relevant to the discussion (snarks, the shimblybib, Santa Claus, gods).

Example:

You used the word "red", the meaning of the word red is (red sensations, classes of red objects...), therefore there are really red sensations existing (in the mind, as platonic abstractions instantiated in tokens...)

It will also show up in disagreements regarding the nature of abstract objects, and any time someone can take a noun referring to a class and mistake it for a substantive.

Are there any philosophers who tried to go beyond Nietzsche's philosophy, especially about his transvaluation of values? is it passable? — Coryanthe

What do you mean by "beyond"? Do you mean what later philosophical problematics do Nietzsche's ideas impinge upon? I'll assume you do.

There's a series of lectures from Rick Roderick that are devoted to looking at Nietzsche's ideas and cultural relevance here. Existentialism and post structuralism as movements were both heavily influenced by him, and Rick Roderick also has an introductory lecture series on those here.

A potted and hopelessly confused answer to that "beyond", that I nevertheless believe, is that the two strands broadly run with different aspects of Nietzsche's ideas. Existentialism takes the mythical norm upheaving aspect of the individual (pace Zarathustra in the myth) and turns that doubt on previous systems of meaning into questions regarding freedom and meaningful life. Post structuralism notes the shattered systems of meaning (the death of God as socio-cultural phenomenon) we live in and studies how they behave.

Definitely not a textually motivated history, but yeah. I think it's a reasonable summary of the relationship between the two lecture series. Though partial, as there are other chains involved:

Nietzsche->Freud->post structuralism (Lacan) is one chain of influence that doesn't quite fit that.

Nietzsche->Heidegger is another mediating relationship there, as Heidegger was influential with the post structuralists Foucault, Derrida.

Also doesn't include "structuralism" at all, which is where post structuralism gets its name.

(The real cost of Empire. Notice how high the defence spending is and how large the military is prior to the 1960's.) — ssu

x% GDP on military spending doesn't translate too well to its effect on the long term differences in total GDP per capita between colonised and coloniser countries though does it?

I based my own answer on nozicks belief that ownership must satisfy all 3 principals therefore one is not more important than the others. This however
is the first philosophy course I have taken, and am still learning to think critically and am asking the question here to see other peoples opinions in a philosophical discussion to try and broaden my critical thinking. — Jasmine

If you're just starting out, there are a couple of online peer reviewed philosophy encyclopaedias that are amazing. SEP and IEP. Here's a link to SEP's article on Nozick and here's a link to IEP's article on Nozick. Both contain sections on his theory of distributive justice.

Given what you've said:

Nozick believed for a person to be entitled to their property, the ownership must have satisfied all 3 principals. — Jasmine

Do you believe that Nozick thinks that it is possible for someone to satisfy all three conditions regarding one item of property but still fail for that being a "just holding" of it, or do you believe it's the case that if someone satisfies all three, they are therefore entitled to hold it and they must satisfy all three? In other words, are all three independent necessary conditions or are all three independent necessary conditions and when they all apply to the same holding they are jointly sufficient?

How that might relate to the "are they more important" question, for one understanding of importance anyway, is that failing each (if Nozick is right) stops a holding being just, so none is more important than the other on that basis alone.

I based my own answer on nozicks belief that ownership must satisfy all 3 principals therefore one is not more important than the others. This however — Jasmine

So it seems we have the same intuition regarding that bit; in terms of the logic, it seems that none is more important than the other.

However (and this is a leftist criticism of Nozick), just because they're all necessary doesn't mean they're all as easy to fail. If you grant that all three must apply to a holding for that holding to be just, if it were the case that most chains of property transfer and initial acquisition began with an unjust initial acquisition event (say, forced expropriation), and it were the case that the whole chain needed to be just for a holding to be just, then any holding which derives from an unjust initial acquisition would be unjust by that metric regardless of whether the most recent transfer in that chain was just. EG: if you steal my computer at knifepoint then give it to a charity, the first is coerced but the second may not be. Is the charity's holding of my computer just by that metric? If so - the chain is very forgetful, it would be just for the charity to sell on stolen property, if not - then any acquisition which derives from a history of exploitation (slavery, colonialism), would be unjust. Or a theoretical problem regarding which parts of the chain are relevant, if it's not the whole chain.

Edit: that word "coerced" in the example I think is quite important, what counts as a coercive event in Nozick? What do you think of that notion of coercion (again, more left critical questions about him)?

One of my earliest memories is diving into a bath, fully clothed, with my brother. I was 3 at the time. With particularly strong memories, I get mental images vivid enough to see them.

The weird thing is the visual impression with that memory has changed over time. It still feels just as strong a memory. It used to be in first person, now it's in third person. The bathroom I have the memory in changed from one house I lived in as a kid to another, judging by the detail in the visual impression. How I remember it doesn't line up with the facts that I can independently verify.

I don't think memory is like a photograph of the past, it's more like a caricature.

Now that justifies loud and forceful pushback. — Baden

Is definitely happening. Corbyn's suspension from the party was ended, but his position in party hasn't been reinstated. If only publicly committing to reform for the antisemitism complaints process within Labour was enough...

And that's before we get into the conflicts of interest in the EHRC. Who refused to investigate Bojo's party for islamophobia despite being presented with much stronger evidence that it was happening.

I think the Dems need to move back to their roots representing working class people and deal with their problems and recognise class warfare is alive and well and show the GOP is selling them out at every turn they can. — Benkei

I think you know I don't think you're a nutjob. And it's not about what I think anyway, it's about what can and can't be done in a hostile political environment. My disagreement is not fundamentally with your principles but with your approach. — Baden

Can probably learn from what's happened to Corbyn in the UK. He's currently getting ratfucked
by a party schism. "The centre cannot hold" does not appeal to people whose career is holding the left of centre, their crisis of political legitimacy be damned.

Things like “P(X | Y)” are often phrased as “the probability of X given Y”, but that means the same thing as “the probability that X is true if Y is true” or “the probability that if Y is true then X is true” or “the probability that Y implies X”. “X given Y” = “X if Y” = “if Y then X” = “X implies Y”. It’s all the same thing. Just wrap a “the probability that” around any of those and you have what “P(X | Y)” means. — Pfhorrest

If you're willing to "pass up" the conceptual hierarchy to more everyday language use of the concepts, I think that's fine. So long as you're aware you're talking about different (but related in some way) concepts than material implication and probability.

Extremely doubtful.

I made similar posts in the "Quining Qualia" thread too.

Can you please elaborate on this? My adding of "probably" to the conditionals under discussion was not meant to be a formal thing at all, but a loose way of phrasing the idea that, as I said in the OP: — Pfhorrest

Let x be a real number between 0 and 1
(1) P( x is rational ) = 0
(2) x is not rational.
Does (1) materially imply (2)? It does not, x=0.5 is a counter model. It can be true that x is rational even when P( x is rational ) = 0.

(1) clearly does support (2) in some way. But it's not a material conditional (1) -> (2) as there's a counter model. If (1)->(2) is false, then the material contrapositive not(2)->not(1) is false too as they're logically equivalent. Clearly observing not(2) is amazing evidence that not(1) ("They said it could never happen but it did!"), but it's not a raw modus tollens refutation - it's some different form of inference.

To put a super fine point on it: from not(2) it should be inferred somehow that not(1), but not(2) does not materially imply not(1).

Aye. That is the rub.

Folk suppose that if they can't sensibly talk about qualia then the eliminative materialists have won. — Banno

Aye. This is back to the first 10 pages or so.

(1) There are no qualia as they are commonly theorised or intuited.
(2) People do not have minds, sensations, feelings.

(1) does not imply (2), but (2) does imply (1).

To the Greeks, zero didn't make sense. — TheMadFool

I remember reading somewhere that 0 didn't make a whole lot of sense to Greek mathematicians because they didn't think of magnitudes in the same way. Numerical magnitudes represented ratios of measurable (in principle) objects. You can't measure an object to have 0 size with a straight edge, something with zero size isn't "there" to be measured in the first place.

Though whether this kind of thing is interpretively valid is another question; "what would the Ancient greeks before the invention of zero thought of 0?"

contradicts our, my, intuition on nothing - it simply can't, rather shouldn't, possess properties for to posses properties is to be something and that leads us to the possible reason why the Greeks, mathematicians par excellence, were deeply troubled by the question, — TheMadFool

What I'm about to say is a throwaway troll comment: nothing is absent properties, you mean nothing is distinguished by the property such that for any other conceivable property it does not hold of nothing?

Regardless, if your "nothing" has no properties, it doesn't relate to the mathematical concept of 0.

However notice the regular zero, the whole number zero, it represents or even is nothing itself, right? Zero is nothing or do you disagree? If you don't then the problem resurfaces because when I say "nothing is bigger than infinity" I can't be talking about any other number but zero. The literal truth being that there's nothing in "...the set of numbers which is bigger than infinity..." — TheMadFool

You know, there are lots of concepts that a zero can refer to. Not all of the mathematical "ideas" associated with 0 are associated with it being the cardinality of the empty set. And I very much doubt that the philosophical ideas regarding nothing or nothingness are reflected in zero either.

Here's a few "zero ideas" which the cardinality of the empty set doesn't get at directly .

0's the additive identity. If you add 0 to a number, you don't change the number.
0's what's called a multiplicative annihilator (or an absorbing element), if you multiply something by 0 it turns into 0.

Apparently wikipedia has a list of ways of making things that work like 0!

"Nothing is bigger than infinity" means "There is no number which is bigger than infinity", the "nothing" there works as a quantifier. It doesn't mean "0" is greater than infinity, since 0 is a particular number.

But there is a 0 relating to the "Nothing is bigger than infinity" statement, equivalently "The size of the set of numbers which is bigger than infinity is 0"!

What could any of us do to change your mind that we're not Russian plants?

None of the staff pocket rubles, we give our generous KGB funding to anti-Russian internet troll farms to undermine the legitimacy of Western democratic institutions. It's a signal boost for the Kremlin at the same time as an invitation for us plants to appear neutral and reasonable defenders of Putin's regime.

I suppose one where you just look at probabilities and payouts to determine expected returns. If the expected returns are the same then there's no rational preference to play one way or the other, and if the expected return is the same as the bet then there's no rational preference to play or to not play. — Michael

Any preference to play, or to play one way over the other, will likely involve something like "hope" for a big win, which isn't a rational reason. — Michael

I think whether it's rational or not depends less on what someone does, but why someone does it. If someone's utility function is "negligible cost for exposure to relatively large gain", it becomes a rational decision to play the lottery as it's utility maximising. If being "utility maximising" is the sign of rationality, anyway.

So, given that the expected return is the same, is there a reason to prefer one way over the other? You're more likely to win if you place two bets on one game but you have the chance to win a bigger prize if you place one bet on each game. — Michael

↪Michael Without calculations I'd go with betting twice in two lotteries because there's a chance of winning 20 GBP if you win in both but only a maximum of winning 10 GBP if you bet in only one lottery. — Benkei

In commercial lotteries the expected return is much less than the bet, so if your utility function is just the expected return, then most lotteries are losers. And yet people buy lottery tickets. Which means that utility for those people is more than just the expected return. — SophistiCat

People's utility functions with the lottery can't resemble expected gain, then. Assuming it's a monetary return required, the cost of investing in any single bet is negligible but the possible return is comparatively huge. If you're spending $1 per week on the lottery and can continue that indefinitely, and it really is a negligible cost, then effectively you're paying nothing to be exposed to the small chance of a relatively large payoff.

None of them have their mutually assured destruction certificate!

Discrimination of perceptual stimuli into the types we perceive them as is a process component of the formation of perceptual features. The seeing of the cup. The feeling of hunger.

And you learned to identify it as hunger from your earliest interactions with your community in the form of your caregiver, as Lacan suggests. — frank

Yes. Here's the thing: seeing this as a cup, feeling that as hunger - the identification/categorisation/discrimination is a process component of it, of seeing and of feeling. The formation of perceptual features (the cup I've seen, the hunger I feel) is a discriminating process.

↪fdrake Problem is that when it comes to myself, I'm not positing anything theoretical when I taste spicy food. It just tastes spicy, red cups look red, and nutty coffee does taste a bit bitter to me. And that's prior to any philosophizing about internal states and "what it's like". Our sensations are not linguistic constructs or self-reports to make sense of behavior. They're just part of experience. — Marchesk

I don't think that an identity between mental content and signifiers of mental content is required for the intentional stance (as I've understood it). It's more that the intentional stance is a modelling behaviour an agent can adopt towards a system; more goes into adopting the intentional stance than writing a description. If my partner's voice sounds irritated, I'm already attributing mental states to her. If I have an empty feeling in my stomach, I'm attributing desires (hunger) to myself.

Language use will play a role in that, but it's not the whole thing. It's a way for an agent to track and predict another system. That system may be another person or oneself. If I have those interoceptive states in that context, I feel hunger - you see what I mean? Being able to write out a system model in intentional language is piggybacking off some modelling behaviour I'm doing, that "whole thing" is the intentional stance, I think.

@Luke, @Isaac, @Kenosha Kid

This is mostly taken from here, Dennett's summary of his Intentional Stance book.

I think the role mental entities play in Dennett's philosophy of mind is a tightrope walk. On the one hand, he does not want to deny the efficacy of explanation styles which use mental furniture, on the other he does want to deny some ontological commitments which may be taken to explain that efficacy.

So take "I enjoy spicy food", I believe Dennett would see that as quite unproblematic. I can taste things, I can have taste preferences. I have a taste preference for spicy food. But what he would see as problematic is an unrestricted commitment to the existence of tastes, spiciness feelings and so on. As if spiciness, enjoyment as we typically conceive of them are somehow instantiated in my mind and body.

But how can he see "I enjoy spicy food" as unproblematic if he also believes that there's no spiciness experience in some sense of the word? I think it is a difficult question, but he has written on it. It seems to boil down to the attribution of mental states to myself and others is effective at explaining, describing and predicting how we think, feel, sense, behave at a certain level of abstraction. That's the intentional stance idea.

The intentional stance is an explanatory style in which purposive states are attributed to systems in order to predict, explain or describe their behaviour. If I write "2+2" and hit return in the R software environment I have open, it will output "4", one way of explaining that is "my computer added the number 2 to the number 2 and outputted the number 4". That's not what the computer's internal systems did - which involved a lot of electronics and software-hardware interactions I just don't understand - but I can describe and predict its behaviour with that understanding. My computer never had the natural number "2" in it literally, but it did have some systemic pattern that behaves in a way sufficiently similar to having the natural number 2 in it that "my computer added the number 2 to the number 2 and outputted the number 4" works as a predictive explanation. You can tell it was a predictive explanation because I'm familiar with the software, think about it as if it is really adding the natural number 2 to the natural number 2, and it reliably produces the output of "4". The elements in my description correspond to functional patterns in the computer.

Another example is seeing the red light on a printer that signals it is out of paper, I've thought "oh, the printer wants fed" - "wants". Just to be super specific about it, attributing "wants" to the computer there makes a lot of sense as the procedure of printing requires paper, it currently has no paper, and in order for it to be able to print again its paper supply must be refilled. By attributing "wants" to the computer, I have summarized patterns in the printer and analogized it to having an unfulfilled desire (for paper, it is hungry).

Dennett's perspective seems to be that we take exactly the same approach in attributing mental content to people. If you took the intentional stance towards me in trying to understand why I've written this post, you might think some things like "fdrake wants to clear up an ambiguity he sees" or "fdrake wants to steer discussion in the thread" or "fdrake wants to contribute to the discussion" and so on. I'd describe my motivation as involving those and other things.

And in a similar way as I don't have to become committed to the printer having human desires and needs - hunger, wants - by reacting to its paper requirements for printing as "oh, the printer wants fed", why should I have to become committed to the literal existence of any constituent of an explanation I construct when adopting the intentional stance?

I'm not trying to say that "oh, the printer wants fed" and "fdrake wants to clear up the ambiguity he sees" use "wants" with precisely the same denotation and connotations - that is precisely the ambiguity of commitment leveraged in the intentional stance.

Even if we experience the same subjective flavours, how do I really know what you mean by "nutty"? Does it taste like a particular type of nut? Do all peanuts taste the same, for example? And what sort of bitterness are we talking about? There are many shades of difference here which language cannot easily capture. We could go on endlessly trying to refine it. I think this is what Dennett criticises (or what qualia advocates are referring to) when he speaks of the ""homogeneity" or "atomicity to analysis" or "grainlessness" that characterizes the qualia of philosophical tradition." A picture is worth a thousand words in other words, and language has difficulty doing justice to the sight before our eyes (or the taste on our tongue, etc.), especially when attempting to convey it to others in high fidelity. — Luke

I realise that what I'm about to say isn't directly about Quining Qualia's argument, but it is related to the above and the intentional stance. Adopting the intentional stance towards a system renders one relatively insensitive to fine grained distinctions between constitutive elements of the considered system for explanatory purposes. Take "fdrake enjoys spicy food", when I write that I've got a few memories associated with it, and I'm attributing an a pattern of behaviour and sensation to myself. I've made a whole type out of "spicy food", but in particular I had some memories of flavours from a vindaloo I'd had a few years ago and the burrito I'd described previously. The particulars of the flavour memories didn't really matter (I can give both more and different "supporting evidence" for the statement), as I'm summarising my engagement with an aggregate of foods, feelings and eating behaviours with discriminable characteristics (sensations, flavour profiles, event memories) etc.

Instead of attributing a quality of ineffability to a particular experience, it can be seen as a result of the indifference of intentional stance explanations to the particular details of their constituents. Ineffability of experience as a feature of the descriptive strategies we adopt regarding experience, rather than of the abstract entities we are committed to when using those strategies. Analogously, the computer's exact reaction to my call command for "2+2" is also practically ineffable; there are thousands of transistors coming on and off, there are allocation patterns for memory etc; and not because it's trying to express the natural number 2 added to the natural number 2 producing the natural number 4 through the flawed media of binary representations and changes in voltage states of transistors.

Have you heard of "aphantasia"? There are people out there who are really and truly different from other people when it comes to mental experiences. I don't see why different/lack of mental experiences can't be a hypothesis for why disagreements about stuff like qualia get so heated. — RogueAI

Imagine that only Spinozists have the conatus - a will/power to survive, grow, adapt.

Let's say I'm a Spinozist and you're not, and I start telling you that you have no will to survive, grow or adapt because you deny Spinoza's account of the conatus... That is what is happening here. Some advance the thesis that others experience the world totally differently in a manner that is convenient for one side of a philosophical dispute. You have no will to survive, you are not a Spinozist. I have no phenomenal character to my experience, because I am a qualia eliminativist.

People notice disparities in experience by looking at self reports. If we met in real life over alcohol, you'd have no reason to doubt that I feel stuff. Consider:

The last time I ate a burrito the mouth feel of the bread was extremely soft, the chilli inside was quite sour and moderately spicy. There were tingling sensations in my nose from the heat as I swallowed. I felt my cheeks flush too. The texture of the chilli was very smooth, contrasting the hardness of the cool lettuce wrapped in with it. The lettuce was very slightly wilted, having less crunch than I expected. There were sweet fruity notes from the pineapple diced and run through the chilli, that flavour of pineapple didn't permeate the chilli though, it came when my tongue found it.

And if you can't tell I have flavour and texture qualia from charitably reading my self report of taste, you couldn't tell for anyone else either!

One which has inspired multiple books and numerous articles? That dispute which we're having the thousandth thread about in the history of this forum? — Marchesk

Yes. It's a dispute about what human nature is, why should we bifurcate human nature to fit the disputing parties?

And it's really not condescending to wonder if people are different. — frank

It's not condescending to wonder and study the differences between people. The condescending thing is claiming that people who disagree with you over a practically irrelevant philosophical dispute literally lack a mental faculty when you've not presented evidence for it. Heck, the p-zombies we're allegedly closer to even existing is a disputed point! Perhaps we are simply poor-in-world ;)

A fair amount of what you just said about me is how I feel about you. I understand that I've been offensive, but I thought I was just being defensive. — frank

The troll cycle: I expect you to spend lots of words explaining your position and disagreements, you read my long form argument posts as dismissive and over-critical and respond briefly and amorphously, my expectation is frustrated and I write another detailed exegesis/rebuttal, your expectation is frustrated and you respond briefly and amorphously... Mismatch of respect standards.

I do think we're better off avoiding each other. — frank

Fair enough!

I keep coming back to something Chalmers said once about Dennett: that he might truly be different from the rest of us. If so, maybe Isaac, Banno, and drake are in that same category. Note that there really is this inability to conceive qualia. There tends to be emotion behind it (on both sides). I think there might be an experience gap here that only shows up in our inability to make sense of one another. — frank

I've told you this before: it's extremely patronising to assume people aren't conscious in the way you are. It's also highly implausible that there are different sorts of humans which are individuated by their stance on an obscure philosophical dispute that takes a lot of its popular form in the 1970s.

If you want an explanation for why I've responded emotionally to you, it's because I've perceived you as dismissive, unengaged and evasive. You've also doubted my basic competence to discuss the issue, and when I gave you a standard definition of externalism with respect to mental content:

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. — me

Externalism with regard to mental content says that in order to have certain types of intentional mental states (e.g. beliefs), it is necessary to be related to the environment in the right way. Internalism (or individualism) denies this, and it affirms that having those intentional mental states depends solely on our intrinsic properties. — SEP

In its most general formulation, externalism with regard to a property K is a thesis about how K is individuated. It says that whether a creature has K or not depends in part on facts about how the creature is related to its external environment — SEP

Individualism or internalism with respect to a property K says that whether a creature has K or not supervenes on its intrinsic properties only. — SEP

you chose to uncharitably read into it that I had no idea that internalists may allow mental states to have externally individuated properties, but not only externally individuated properties ("internalists wouldn't disagree with that"); internalists with regard to mental content align the phenomenal with intrinsic properties of mental content. Recall this is also disputed in the paper, and we've been talking about issues related to it since page 3 of the thread.

We can both play the "different type of human" game, I personally uncharitably suspect that qualia advocates do not have the capability for "second or third thoughts" in Pratchett's sense:

First Thoughts are the everyday thoughts. Everyone has those. Second Thoughts are the thoughts you think about the way you think. People who enjoy thinking have those. Third Thoughts are thoughts that watch the world and think all by themselves. They’re rare, and often troublesome. Listening to them is part of witchcraft.

Qualia advocates are unable to see patterns in their own thought, or notice generative patterns for their own agent-environment relationship operative within them. And if you find that over passionate, contemptuous and totally unpersuasive, remember that you have already accused me of having a limited form of consciousness when compared to you.

Would you accept yes/no questions about matters of taste as counter examples? Or are they irrelevant to you?

If you ask people "Do you like Marmite? Yes or no", either answer can be correct because "you" varies. Furthermore, for a given person, they might not know what Marmite is, so it might require an "I don't know", or if not then "no" changes interpretation to "No or I don't know".

...

The Orange Man fled across the desert and the Old Man followed.

Thanks for clarifying. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I take the "perceptual relationship" to be the perception itself — Luke

Yes, that's what I meant. I chose "perceptual relationship" over "perception" because it seems to me I have many perceptual relationships but only one aggregate of them. I wanted to avoid collapsing all of perception into my beholding of the coffee cup.

and I further assume that the perception has properties, such as seeing a red flower, or tasting bitter coffee. Would it be problematic to refer to these properties of perception as the qualia?

I don't think so? Care required though, there's all the stuff we've spoken about regarding the individuation of components of perception.

I assume the response will be that it might mislead us to think that such properties are subjective rather than objective, and that if the flower is perceived as red or if the coffee is perceived as bitter, then each of them really are red and bitter. Except that's not how everyone perceives them? — Luke

What do you mean by subjective and objective here? How are the two distinguished? I'm asking because Dennett's position is taken as undermining the distinction between those two, so it should be hard to understand in those terms. (Edit: though I do recall him using the phrase "objective properties" in a paper!)

If you're using "objective" as a placeholder for "all property types", I'd agree with you. If "objective" imputes constraints on the types of property considered and our access to them, I guess I wouldn't.

The main sticking point for me is the definition of privacy that I gave earlier. Qualia or not, conscious experience is surely private in the sense that nobody else can experience (or "see") your conscious experience. Nobody can look into your skull and compare whether you see red the same as they do. — Luke

Yes, I find the privacy bit in the article the hardest to grok properly. I think Dennett's left a lot of conceptual work to the reader to understand the inferences he's making. I'll try and write something detailed about it. What I understand of it gestures in this direction:

Dennett wants to block the inference from "It only happened to me" to "Only I can have information about it", I think the latter is the aspect of privacy that Dennett's arguing against. And it's focussed upon the "can" rather than "Only I have information about it".

Like the mental image I get automatically when I feel a strong sense of disgust. It somehow superimposes itself over my vision and looks like dark cracks cutting across my visual field, but they have no depth or distance from me. It happens to me (private in that sense), but now you have information about it (you have some flavour of access to it, but not /my/ perceptual relationship to it).

Ah. I hope so! I was wondering if we'd get into experiential spatiality stuff (proximity, the experiential aspects of place etc) as a result of @Andrew M's post. I hope it went straight over my head!

In other words, why must qualia advocates be committed to perceptual intermediaries? — Luke

I don't think they must in general. I imagine it depends on the account. I've found references for people that don't (there are apparently people that view qualia as similar to extrinsic relational properties) but I haven't pursued them. That's a big rabbit hole.

I think the view of qualia Dennett is responding to is one that he sees as conjuring a perceptual intermediary which has properties that are then projected into consciousness. One of the ways this is done is to treat "I experience a red quale" as "I saw a red object".

So then to the distinction between the two, I'll go for coffee because @Banno has used coffee to make what I think is a similar point. I take a sip of coffee from my cup, and I taste coffee. That's a relationship between me and the coffee. Phrased generally, that's a perceptual relationship between me and a perceptual stimulus.

Another way of parsing that is that I took a sip of coffee from my cup, and I experienced a coffee taste quale. That's a relationship between me and and the coffee taste quale.

Then what's the quale? It's either a property of the coffee, or a property of the experience of the coffee. But on the account that the taste of coffee isn't some "objective property" - it's not in the coffee because it's not a property of the perceptual stimulus (the coffee), then it must be a subjective property - a property of my experiential state. Phrased generally, that's a perceptual relationship between the coffee and the experiential property of its taste, then a presentational relationship between that experiential property and my consciousness.

In the first, there's one step: perceptual stimulus -> me, where the arrow is the perceptual relationship.
In the second, there's two steps: perceptual stimulus -> experiential property -> me, where the first arrow is a perceptual relationship, and the second is a presentational relationship.

Dennett phrases this as a "double transduction" (from "The Myth of Double Transduction"):

The transduction at the retina, into neuronal impulses, has taken us, it seems, into an alien medium, not anything we recognize as the intimate medium we are familiar with. That activity in V1 is not in the Medium, you might say. It may be a medium of visual information in my brain, but it's not . . . moi. It's not the medium in which I experience consciousness. So the idea takes root that if the pattern of activity in V1 looks like that (and that's not what consciousness is like), there must be some later second transduction into the medium that is consciousness.

That second arrow is the second transduction. The status of the "experiential property" in the second scheme is as an intermediary phase between the perceptual stimulus and me. In the first, there is no intermediary phase; each instance of perception is a relationship between perceiving faculties and perceptual stimuli, and "what we experience" is part of that single transduction.

Putting an even more verbose spin on it: perception as direct representational relationship between how I am and how the perceptual stimulus is vs perception as a mediated relationship between how I am and how the perceptual stimulus is.

Since you're going over what I see as travelled ground in thread, I'll link you posts I've made in the discussion that I see as relevant:

See here,here,here and here.

Summary of relevant travelled ground:

(1) Dennett isn't denying that people feel all sorts of stuff.

(2) Dennett is denying that qualia are useful in describing how people feel stuff.

(3) The paper is an attempt to tease that out. Allegedly conceptions of qualia come with theoretical baggage.

(4) The thread touches on a lot of ground regarding Dennett's views of consciousness, a lot of it comes down to undermining the subject object distinction and the idea of perceptual intermediaries which bear properties of experiences.

(5) Qualia as Dennett's attacking them are (I think) subjective state properties ("my experience of the red quale") that are dependent upon a perceptual intermediary (The "Cartesian Theatre" metaphor).

(6) In the paper, he's especially attacking various second order properties imputed to those subjective states through the subject object relation. I'll write a list, and put a hidden precis of what I read as his supporting claim for the attack. Intrinsicality of mental content , infallibility of the experiencer's access to mental content , strict ineffability of the mental content and finally privacy (. There is also a less sustained attack on the individuation of first order properties of experience being reflected by the retrospective binning people do with qualia.

(7) Broadly, a lot of it comes down to trying to take a look at the individuating principles of experiences, and the role environmental/bodily context plays in that. Dennett finds qualia unsuited for the task of describing how people feel, so he believes they should be discarded. He settles down to characterising experiential properties as "extrinsic relational properties", rather than intrinsic ones. The externality puts subject/object into question, the mode of relation puts perceptual intermediaries into question.

Unless you're playing devil's advocate strongly, I'm quite surprised by your antipathy towards Dennett's qualia denial strategies; you can read them as undermining the subject object distinction!

Because people who don't like cauliflower try to avoid eating cauliflower independently of the circumstances. — Olivier5

Category error - confusing someone's flavour preferences with flavours.

That conscious experience is the dispositional, relational and functional properties of the biological systems responsible for conscious experience, and nothing additional. — Marchesk

That seems to be Dennett's position regarding mental content to me too. Up to some wrangling on that "responsibility" relationship anyway!

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. — Marchesk

Also @Luke because I'm trying to channel an "And then what?" argument.

So the question regarding "the sensation itself" I have is: what makes a sensation be more than relational, dispositional and functional properties?

I take it you'll agree that sensations are relational, dispositional and functional to some degree. Or have those as a component. Let's take as an example putting my hand on something too hot and reflexively withdrawing it. The sensation of heat derives from a relationship between my skin and the hot thing (relational), the reflex (a behaviour) of withdrawing my hand is coincident with treating the hot object as a threat to withdraw from (dispositional), and detecting sufficient heat serves as a cause of the reflex of withdrawal to end the threat that I have (functional).

It seems to me if I removed the relational component from the experience, I'd no longer be talking about the same thing at all. If I removed the behavioural component of it, I'd have had a different experience - my hand possibly would not have withdrawn in the reflex. If I removed the dispositional component, I'd no longer have unconsciously appraised the gathering sensation of heat as a threat. Furthermore, I removed that dispositional component, it seems to me I'd be removing the components of my experience that coincide with its character as a threat triggering a reflex - the stress, the panic, the pain, the unpleasantness - and removing those things also removes a substantial component of "what it was like" for me. If I remove the composite of these things and their functional relationships, I'm no longer talking about the experience at all - or I would have both done and felt nothing and burned off my finger.

So it seems if there are phenomenal properties in that experience, they cannot be independent of relational, functional, behavioural, and dispositional properties, as if I changed all of those I'd change "what it was like" for me and even the scenario I was considering in the first place. Given that, why should someone commit themselves to an independent "phenomenal" type associated with the experiences, when the elements of the phenomenal type ("what is it likes") vary with changes in the type they are supposed to be independent of?

Conversely, if "what is it like"s (elements of the phenomenal type) are posited to be dependent upon but separate from relational, behavioural dispositional and functional properties of my experiences, how could a strict distinction between the phenomenal and the composite type of the aforementioned other properties make any sense at all?

An internalist wouldn't disagree with this. — frank

I guess I failed your test then.