7 ms·

Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

55 points by danielam 9y ago

mrmyers 9y ago
This is a really terrible review. I really want to say something that contributes more, but my god, this person does not understand or even care to understand Dennet. Again and again, he elides over all of Dennet's reasoning only to seize suddenly on the conclusion, which prima facie he disagrees with, as an apparent absurdity or contradiction. I don't intend to write an elaborate dissection of the article, but just as a particularly egregious example: "Similarly, when Dennett claims that words are “memes” that reproduce like a “virus,” he is speaking pure gibberish. Words reproduce, within minds and between persons, by being intentionally adopted and employed." The review can be summarized, in brief: "Dennet gives some 'ingenious' arguments that I do not particularly care to follow, but for all the effort, he does not seem to grasp the fundamental flaw - namely, that he disagrees with me."
- marcoperaza 9y ago
  Dennett’s arguments are very frustrating because he refuses to engage with the fundamental problem of explaining the existence of subjective experience, and how it could arise from physical processes. In dismissing this problem, he doesn’t do much more than simply refuse to engage with it. “Consciousness Explained”? More like consciousness denied. For example, he insists that our consciousness isn’t quite as broad as we think, and presents ample evidence to show the we are aware of much less than we think we are. Great, but totally irrelevant for explaining the fundamental phenomenom of subjective experience. And yet it is presented as evidence that the phenomenon is really not a problem at all. What makes this even more frustrating is that the existence of subjective experience is really the only thing one can be absolutely sure of in this world (see Descartes and also the brain in a vat thought experiment). And yet it is the one thing that Dennett refuses to acknowledge.
  - abiox 9y ago
    > the fundamental problem of explaining the existence of subjective experience (honest) why is this a problem? what's the difference between my "experience" and the experience of, say, a film camera?
    - lawpoop 9y ago
      If you don't think it's a problem, then it's not. There's no real way, presently, to prove there isn't a difference. Likewise, I could say there is no difference between my experience of satiation after eating, and the experience of a garbage can being filled full. If you don't think there's a problem with that, fine. No way to show there isn't. However, people inclined to agree with your film example might not be inclined to agree with my satiation example. Is there any difference between light falling in your eyes and your experience of vision, and light falling in a corpses eyes, and its experience of vision? Does a corpse experience vision as much as you do?
      - jldugger 9y ago
        > Is there any difference between light falling in your eyes and your experience of vision, and light falling in a corpses eyes, and its experience of vision? One would argue that there's more chemistry going on in neurons feeding to the optic center, but I'm not well versed in neuroscience to tell you where the signal stops.
        lawpoop 9y ago
        Is the amount of chemistry, then, or length of signal transmission, the measure of consciousness? What is the implication for the conscious experience of the camera?
        jldugger 9y ago
        > Is the amount of chemistry, then, or length of signal transmission, the measure of consciousness? Sure, but we're gonna limit ourselves to neurons and the degree of connectivity between them. A camera has none, QED. The more challenging comparison is between a comatose patient and one with locked-in syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome. There, we can't exactly come up with some 'an agent capable of sensing the world, and responding to changes in its environment' that an outside observer might use.
  - dcre 9y ago
    Consciousness Explained Away!
  - ci5er 9y ago
    We absolute can be aware of subjective experience/awareness. Hawkins posited in "On Intelligence" that consciousness is simply the feeling of having a neo-cortex. While I am as baffled as any/many at having subjective qualia appear so "real", I really don't have any basis for believing/thinking that they could arise from anything else other than from physical quanta hitting my senso-sphere and being interpreted by a biological machine. I also have no basis for not thinking/believing that this is not nonsense. How you you break the conundrem of primary-physics vs primary-mind?
    - lawpoop 9y ago
      > While I am as baffled as any/many at having subjective qualia appear so "real" Appear so real compared to what? Are you claiming that your experience of your own thoughts are subjectively more real than your experience of your sensory perceptions?
    - escape_goat 9y ago
      It's a bit tricker than it sounds, though. We cannot be aware of the absence of awareness. This could imply that we can only be aware of a sense of 'awareness' insofar as it was in fact differentiated from awareness itself, though a missing second step that is probably familiar to you (but it's a bit late at night for me to articulate it coherently).
      - ci5er 9y ago
        Are you referring to nothingness? I think that most of us can remember being 'nothing' (this might be wrong), and it baffles me why people are afraid to die, which is simply returning to 'nothing'.
        marcoperaza 9y ago
        That’s a preposterous claim. You obviously can’t remember not existing. Memory is not magical, it is a biological process that records information during your life and allows you to reexperience it.
  - mrmyers 9y ago
    In Consciousness Explained, Dennet is deliberately not dealing with that problem because he had already written his thesis, a book, and several papers on the subject of content and qualia and that sort of argument. He was also a student of Quine, who had his own rather extensive criticisms of the notion of intentionality and subjective experience. As such, he decided to leave that particular sort of discussion out, and just focus on his main objective (as he remarks in the appendix). The following papers represent I think a pretty good summary of his response to the sort of objection you raise. They might not be the best, but they seem to be the ones that come to mind at least for me. https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/JCSarticle.pdf https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/JCSarticle.pdf The first is an extensive attack on the notion of qualia as a useful notion. The second explains the methodological approach implicit to rejecting this sort of notion, especially in the social/psychological sciences.
    - erasemus 9y ago
      https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm >What are qualia, exactly? Sets of associated ideas? For example, a door knob might be associated with (1) wood, (2) black, (3) grasping, (4) turning, (5) my right hand. All these ideas are activated to some degree when I contemplate the door knob, and to a greater degree when I contemplate myself contemplating the door knob.
      - pygy_ 9y ago
        I'd say: subsets of the perceptual/cognitive space.
  - bhouston 9y ago
    I agree with Dennett though. Our consciousness is fairly limited compared to what our brains do automatically for us. I guess I do not think qualia is an important thing. Remember they have figured out how things of things in the mind works -- it just stimulates the higher level recognition cells itself rather that letting them be stimulated by our senses. The hard stuff to understand it the more abstrwct thoughts like numbers, math and things that are a few steps awqy from senses, this is also something we havent got our deep neural networks to do either.
- whiddershins 9y ago
  I don’t know if I disagree with you, but I certainly don’t agree. His point is that Dennett and any philosophers who ignore all philosophy before the 17th century are and always will be running in endless circles with arguments that are intrinsically unsolvable by nature of the way they are framed. I just got through about 1/2 of Feser’s The last Superstition which basically makes the same argument. That claim to me seems more an objection to hand-wavvy philosophy rather than an application of it.
  - mrmyers 9y ago
    That was the point of the first few paragraphs at least, but unfortunately the actual review is much longer. The point doesn't seem to be especially fair to me for two reasons: First, what one is aware of is not necessarily what one regards as relevant to the topic at hand, and the statement was only that Dennett did not think anything before Descartes was especially relevant to his own view of the matter. In an earlier work, Consciousness Explained, Dennett discusses at numerous points some of the models of the mind entertained in the platonic dialogue Theaetetus for inspiration and comparison, so he's clearly not completely unaware of all philosophy before the 17th century. From reading several of his papers and books, there are other examples to this effect, but I don't want to belabor the point. It does not seem at all unreasonable for someone to judge a number of approaches or prior developments irrelevant to present concerns. Second, this sort of accusation is fundamentally unfalsifiable, and can be made about any field. From the current front page, you might perhaps run across someone who claims "Anyone trying to study compilers without having studied the history of the Oberon Compiler will be running in endless circles". I would not be unsympathetic to such a person. The Oberon Compiler seems to have embodied quite a few really interesting and innovative new ideas, even ones that haven't been followed up on since. However, such a person would still be being fairly silly. It is a generally tolerated delusion for one to assume that one's own field of knowledge, domain, and preferred schools of thought are absolutely crucial to correct thinking on some matter. Nonetheless, the history of the human intellectual edifice is one of continual reinvention and independent development of numerous important innovations. There comes a point when any professional, must start developing their own arguments and responses rather than just playing field historian.
joe_the_user 9y ago
The title would be clearer if it implied that it was a review of a single philosopher - Maybe "Daniel Dennet - The Illusionist"
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
dvt 9y ago
Dennet is a reductive materialist. He'd probably disagree with my hardline depiction of him, but, in my opinion, if it quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, it's probably a duck. For what it's worth, he identifies as a 'teleofunctionalist' (???). The author of the piece doesn't seem to be a reductive materialist, so obviously Dennet won't jive with him. I'm also not a materialist, so I don't really find Dennet very insightful. For example, he denies the existence of qualia (and rejects everything that comes with that experience; see Nagel's famous What is it like to be a bat?). With that said, I think he's made some pretty big contributions to materialism, in particular with regards to evolutionary theory and by providing some pretty solid theories of an 'emergent' non-hand-wavy consciousness. I don't really agree with his points and I think he's being crudely reductive, but dismissing the man's life work is kind of unfair.
- pdonis 9y ago
  > he denies the existence of qualia No, he doesn't. He just says that qualia aren't what we intuitively think they are. Denying the existence of qualia would mean denying that we have subjective experiences. Dennett doesn't deny that. But he does deny that many of our usual intuitions about qualia are correct, by showing how they lead to inconsistent and incoherent thinking about our experiences. It's quite true that Dennett's view of qualia is very different from that of many other philosophers. But to say he denies the existence of qualia does not come close to doing justice to his actual views.
  - dvt 9y ago
    > Denying the existence of qualia would mean denying that we have subjective experiences. Dennett doesn't deny that. But he does deny that many of our usual intuitions about qualia are correct, by showing how they lead to inconsistent and incoherent thinking about our experiences. I don't think you're right. See here[1]: > There is a limited use for such interpretations of subjects' protocols, I have argued (Dennett 1978a; 1979, esp., pp.109-110; 1982), but they will not help the defenders of qualia here. Logical constructs out of judgments must be viewed as akin to theorists' fictions, and the friends of qualia want the existence of a particular quale in any particular case to be an empirical fact in good standing, not a theorist's useful interpretive fiction, else it will not loom as a challenge to functionalism or materialism or third-person, objective science. According to the man himself, he thinks that they are "theorists' fictions" and "not empirical facts" -- that's about as "they aren't a thing" as you can possibly get. [1] http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm
yters 9y ago
It's impossible to objectively explain the subjective. To do so is a category error.
- lgas 9y ago
  Maybe objectively, but not subjectively.
- whatshisface 9y ago
  I claim that one property of the subjective is that it is a category error to claim that it has a property. What?
- erasemus 9y ago
  How about positing a one-to-one correspondence between our subjective experiences and patterns of neuronal firings in our brains?
  - yters 9y ago
    That would not explain why there is a matching.
    - erasemus 9y ago
      But that's a different problem.
      - yters 9y ago
        It doesn't explain whether the neuronal firings cause the subjective experience or visa versa.
        erasemus 9y ago
        Why can't they be the same thing? All my experience is processed information (see my other comment in this thread about qualia [1]); information processing requires hardware; the hardware is the brain. My report of my experiences is itself changes in a pattern of neuronal activity which is determined by changes in what it and other patterns are doing. I say 'changes' to emphasise that the precise medium I'm running on is not fundamentally important and I cannot perceive it (the neurons) without the aid of a brain scanner. In principle I could be scanned and modelled by a brain scientist whose 3rd person description of what's going on exactly matches my 1st person description. Would that convince you? [1] though I didn't mention it there, a quale can't usually be pinned down exactly because most of the associated ideas are inexplicit (cannot be reduced to propositions in English). I think this is why people consider their experiences to be ineffable in some way. Daniel Dennett's talk on Edge.org provides a discussion ("A Difference That Makes a Difference", Nov 2017)
Evans_Steven 9y ago
David Bentley Hart and Ed Feser, who is also mentioned in a comment here, are theist cranks who have both developed evasive "metaphysical arguments" which apparently tell us the universe has a "light of being" (DBH) or a "prime mover" (EF) which turn out, shock horror(!), to be the Christian God that they already believe in and their "arguments" tell us nothing else (e.g. they don't tell us if the universe had a beginning or not, because, of course, they don't want to go toe-to-toe with physics). DBH and EF are the latest in a long line of "philosophers" paid directly or indirectly by the corrupt church to provide sophistries to make the billions of peasant believers continue paying their tithes. Let them, with their oh-so-deep metaphysical arguments, predict something true about the universe that physics doesn't yet know and then we might listen. I'm surprised the utterances of a crank like DBH would reach the pages of HN.
- smithkl42 9y ago
  As it turns out, Daniel Bennett is an atheist materialist crank who has developed evasive "materialist arguments" which apparently tell us that the universe has no cause of existence, which turns out (shock, horror!) to be the standard atheist cant that he already believes, and so his arguments tell us nothing else... (Sorry, couldn't help myself.)
  - Evans_Steven 9y ago
    ;) Let's see DBH review a book on neuroscience rather than shooting a fish in a barrel like Dennett's book - oh, hold on, he's not qualified to, because DBH doesn't actually know anything apart from what side his bread is buttered on.. Also, of course, physicists would accept the universe was created if evidence were found. The contorted metaphysical nonsense that DBH and EF espouse in a political defense of the church will only ever lead to the conclusion that the "Christian God exists". That is why they are cranks and not academics - they start with the answer. They and their ilk are making very nice money out of lying.
starchild_3001 9y ago
What's the big deal with consciousness? Isn't it an obvious trait of any human like, animal like, robot like semi-intelligent being? I'd expect it to emerge automatically, once correct base instincts & abilities are programmed.
- xyzzyz 9y ago
  The big deal is that there's no observable difference between the world where your robot is conscious of itself and has subjective experience of its surroundings, and between the world where your robot merely behaves as such, speaks to you trying to convince you that it indeed has subjective experience, but in fact it has none, its experiences are just a movie screened in an empty cinema where nobody is watching. This unobservable difference goes the most basic axiom of science -- if there's no observable difference, then there's no difference. Yet, somehow I have subjective experience. You might also have it, though there's currently no way you can convince me that you do.
  - red75prime 9y ago
    Why do you think those worlds are different in a meaningful sense? You can distinguish them in your imagination only. If you were the God, I would believe you.
    - xyzzyz 9y ago
      The meaningful sense is that I have subjective experience, yet I can imagine a world where there's no subjective experience of being me -- it is exactly the world _you_ are living in.
  - dwaltrip 9y ago
    Why is the philosophical zombie a useful thought experiment? What reason is there to believe such a thing could actually exist in our universe, any more than 2+2 could ever equal 5? To me, it seems immensely unlikely.
- OvidNaso 9y ago
D700 9y ago
We cannot know the limits of our thinking because we cannot think beyond those limits (or something like that) - Wittgenstein
ygmelnikova 9y ago
What is it with academics and purple prose?
bhouston 9y ago
Has anyone read this article? It is pretty horrible. It argues against explaining mind as a pure physical process that evolved by adaption. I am not sure what it is advocating instead but it isn't hard science but something else. This author elevates the idea of consciousness significantly. And dismissing Dennett attempts to reduce it. Now I am not saying there may be weirdness in consciousness such as possible quantum processes which makes it hard to simulate on a traditional computer but it is still physical and ultimately reducible given sufficient technical understanding. I do not support this articles approach at all. That said I find Dennett long winded and boring to read. But ultimately he is right. I guess I buy his argument at the beginning thus reading his thousands of pages is very unrewarding.

55 points by danielam 9y ago

This is a really terrible review. I really want to say something that contributes more, but my god, this person does not understand or even care to understand Dennet. Again and again, he elides over all of Dennet's reasoning only to seize suddenly on the conclusion, which prima facie he disagrees with, as an apparent absurdity or contradiction. I don't intend to write an elaborate dissection of the article, but just as a particularly egregious example: "Similarly, when Dennett claims that words are “memes” that reproduce like a “virus,” he is speaking pure gibberish. Words reproduce, within minds and between persons, by being intentionally adopted and employed." The review can be summarized, in brief: "Dennet gives some 'ingenious' arguments that I do not particularly care to follow, but for all the effort, he does not seem to grasp the fundamental flaw - namely, that he disagrees with me."

marcoperaza 9y ago
Dennett’s arguments are very frustrating because he refuses to engage with the fundamental problem of explaining the existence of subjective experience, and how it could arise from physical processes. In dismissing this problem, he doesn’t do much more than simply refuse to engage with it. “Consciousness Explained”? More like consciousness denied. For example, he insists that our consciousness isn’t quite as broad as we think, and presents ample evidence to show the we are aware of much less than we think we are. Great, but totally irrelevant for explaining the fundamental phenomenom of subjective experience. And yet it is presented as evidence that the phenomenon is really not a problem at all. What makes this even more frustrating is that the existence of subjective experience is really the only thing one can be absolutely sure of in this world (see Descartes and also the brain in a vat thought experiment). And yet it is the one thing that Dennett refuses to acknowledge.
- abiox 9y ago
  > the fundamental problem of explaining the existence of subjective experience (honest) why is this a problem? what's the difference between my "experience" and the experience of, say, a film camera?
  - lawpoop 9y ago
    If you don't think it's a problem, then it's not. There's no real way, presently, to prove there isn't a difference. Likewise, I could say there is no difference between my experience of satiation after eating, and the experience of a garbage can being filled full. If you don't think there's a problem with that, fine. No way to show there isn't. However, people inclined to agree with your film example might not be inclined to agree with my satiation example. Is there any difference between light falling in your eyes and your experience of vision, and light falling in a corpses eyes, and its experience of vision? Does a corpse experience vision as much as you do?
    - jldugger 9y ago
      > Is there any difference between light falling in your eyes and your experience of vision, and light falling in a corpses eyes, and its experience of vision? One would argue that there's more chemistry going on in neurons feeding to the optic center, but I'm not well versed in neuroscience to tell you where the signal stops.
      - lawpoop 9y ago
        Is the amount of chemistry, then, or length of signal transmission, the measure of consciousness? What is the implication for the conscious experience of the camera?
        jldugger 9y ago
        > Is the amount of chemistry, then, or length of signal transmission, the measure of consciousness? Sure, but we're gonna limit ourselves to neurons and the degree of connectivity between them. A camera has none, QED. The more challenging comparison is between a comatose patient and one with locked-in syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome. There, we can't exactly come up with some 'an agent capable of sensing the world, and responding to changes in its environment' that an outside observer might use.
- dcre 9y ago
  Consciousness Explained Away!
- ci5er 9y ago
  We absolute can be aware of subjective experience/awareness. Hawkins posited in "On Intelligence" that consciousness is simply the feeling of having a neo-cortex. While I am as baffled as any/many at having subjective qualia appear so "real", I really don't have any basis for believing/thinking that they could arise from anything else other than from physical quanta hitting my senso-sphere and being interpreted by a biological machine. I also have no basis for not thinking/believing that this is not nonsense. How you you break the conundrem of primary-physics vs primary-mind?
  - lawpoop 9y ago
    > While I am as baffled as any/many at having subjective qualia appear so "real" Appear so real compared to what? Are you claiming that your experience of your own thoughts are subjectively more real than your experience of your sensory perceptions?
  - escape_goat 9y ago
    It's a bit tricker than it sounds, though. We cannot be aware of the absence of awareness. This could imply that we can only be aware of a sense of 'awareness' insofar as it was in fact differentiated from awareness itself, though a missing second step that is probably familiar to you (but it's a bit late at night for me to articulate it coherently).
    - ci5er 9y ago
      Are you referring to nothingness? I think that most of us can remember being 'nothing' (this might be wrong), and it baffles me why people are afraid to die, which is simply returning to 'nothing'.
      - marcoperaza 9y ago
        That’s a preposterous claim. You obviously can’t remember not existing. Memory is not magical, it is a biological process that records information during your life and allows you to reexperience it.
- mrmyers 9y ago
  In Consciousness Explained, Dennet is deliberately not dealing with that problem because he had already written his thesis, a book, and several papers on the subject of content and qualia and that sort of argument. He was also a student of Quine, who had his own rather extensive criticisms of the notion of intentionality and subjective experience. As such, he decided to leave that particular sort of discussion out, and just focus on his main objective (as he remarks in the appendix). The following papers represent I think a pretty good summary of his response to the sort of objection you raise. They might not be the best, but they seem to be the ones that come to mind at least for me. https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/JCSarticle.pdf https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/JCSarticle.pdf The first is an extensive attack on the notion of qualia as a useful notion. The second explains the methodological approach implicit to rejecting this sort of notion, especially in the social/psychological sciences.
  - erasemus 9y ago
    https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm >What are qualia, exactly? Sets of associated ideas? For example, a door knob might be associated with (1) wood, (2) black, (3) grasping, (4) turning, (5) my right hand. All these ideas are activated to some degree when I contemplate the door knob, and to a greater degree when I contemplate myself contemplating the door knob.
    - pygy_ 9y ago
      I'd say: subsets of the perceptual/cognitive space.
- bhouston 9y ago
  I agree with Dennett though. Our consciousness is fairly limited compared to what our brains do automatically for us. I guess I do not think qualia is an important thing. Remember they have figured out how things of things in the mind works -- it just stimulates the higher level recognition cells itself rather that letting them be stimulated by our senses. The hard stuff to understand it the more abstrwct thoughts like numbers, math and things that are a few steps awqy from senses, this is also something we havent got our deep neural networks to do either.
whiddershins 9y ago
I don’t know if I disagree with you, but I certainly don’t agree. His point is that Dennett and any philosophers who ignore all philosophy before the 17th century are and always will be running in endless circles with arguments that are intrinsically unsolvable by nature of the way they are framed. I just got through about 1/2 of Feser’s The last Superstition which basically makes the same argument. That claim to me seems more an objection to hand-wavvy philosophy rather than an application of it.
- mrmyers 9y ago
  That was the point of the first few paragraphs at least, but unfortunately the actual review is much longer. The point doesn't seem to be especially fair to me for two reasons: First, what one is aware of is not necessarily what one regards as relevant to the topic at hand, and the statement was only that Dennett did not think anything before Descartes was especially relevant to his own view of the matter. In an earlier work, Consciousness Explained, Dennett discusses at numerous points some of the models of the mind entertained in the platonic dialogue Theaetetus for inspiration and comparison, so he's clearly not completely unaware of all philosophy before the 17th century. From reading several of his papers and books, there are other examples to this effect, but I don't want to belabor the point. It does not seem at all unreasonable for someone to judge a number of approaches or prior developments irrelevant to present concerns. Second, this sort of accusation is fundamentally unfalsifiable, and can be made about any field. From the current front page, you might perhaps run across someone who claims "Anyone trying to study compilers without having studied the history of the Oberon Compiler will be running in endless circles". I would not be unsympathetic to such a person. The Oberon Compiler seems to have embodied quite a few really interesting and innovative new ideas, even ones that haven't been followed up on since. However, such a person would still be being fairly silly. It is a generally tolerated delusion for one to assume that one's own field of knowledge, domain, and preferred schools of thought are absolutely crucial to correct thinking on some matter. Nonetheless, the history of the human intellectual edifice is one of continual reinvention and independent development of numerous important innovations. There comes a point when any professional, must start developing their own arguments and responses rather than just playing field historian.

joe_the_user 9y ago

The title would be clearer if it implied that it was a review of a single philosopher - Maybe "Daniel Dennet - The Illusionist"

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

dvt 9y ago

Dennet is a reductive materialist. He'd probably disagree with my hardline depiction of him, but, in my opinion, if it quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, it's probably a duck. For what it's worth, he identifies as a 'teleofunctionalist' (???). The author of the piece doesn't seem to be a reductive materialist, so obviously Dennet won't jive with him. I'm also not a materialist, so I don't really find Dennet very insightful. For example, he denies the existence of qualia (and rejects everything that comes with that experience; see Nagel's famous What is it like to be a bat?). With that said, I think he's made some pretty big contributions to materialism, in particular with regards to evolutionary theory and by providing some pretty solid theories of an 'emergent' non-hand-wavy consciousness. I don't really agree with his points and I think he's being crudely reductive, but dismissing the man's life work is kind of unfair.

pdonis 9y ago
> he denies the existence of qualia No, he doesn't. He just says that qualia aren't what we intuitively think they are. Denying the existence of qualia would mean denying that we have subjective experiences. Dennett doesn't deny that. But he does deny that many of our usual intuitions about qualia are correct, by showing how they lead to inconsistent and incoherent thinking about our experiences. It's quite true that Dennett's view of qualia is very different from that of many other philosophers. But to say he denies the existence of qualia does not come close to doing justice to his actual views.
- dvt 9y ago
  > Denying the existence of qualia would mean denying that we have subjective experiences. Dennett doesn't deny that. But he does deny that many of our usual intuitions about qualia are correct, by showing how they lead to inconsistent and incoherent thinking about our experiences. I don't think you're right. See here[1]: > There is a limited use for such interpretations of subjects' protocols, I have argued (Dennett 1978a; 1979, esp., pp.109-110; 1982), but they will not help the defenders of qualia here. Logical constructs out of judgments must be viewed as akin to theorists' fictions, and the friends of qualia want the existence of a particular quale in any particular case to be an empirical fact in good standing, not a theorist's useful interpretive fiction, else it will not loom as a challenge to functionalism or materialism or third-person, objective science. According to the man himself, he thinks that they are "theorists' fictions" and "not empirical facts" -- that's about as "they aren't a thing" as you can possibly get. [1] http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm

yters 9y ago

It's impossible to objectively explain the subjective. To do so is a category error.

lgas 9y ago
Maybe objectively, but not subjectively.
whatshisface 9y ago
I claim that one property of the subjective is that it is a category error to claim that it has a property. What?
erasemus 9y ago
How about positing a one-to-one correspondence between our subjective experiences and patterns of neuronal firings in our brains?
- yters 9y ago
  That would not explain why there is a matching.
  - erasemus 9y ago
    But that's a different problem.
    - yters 9y ago
      It doesn't explain whether the neuronal firings cause the subjective experience or visa versa.
      - erasemus 9y ago
        Why can't they be the same thing? All my experience is processed information (see my other comment in this thread about qualia [1]); information processing requires hardware; the hardware is the brain. My report of my experiences is itself changes in a pattern of neuronal activity which is determined by changes in what it and other patterns are doing. I say 'changes' to emphasise that the precise medium I'm running on is not fundamentally important and I cannot perceive it (the neurons) without the aid of a brain scanner. In principle I could be scanned and modelled by a brain scientist whose 3rd person description of what's going on exactly matches my 1st person description. Would that convince you? [1] though I didn't mention it there, a quale can't usually be pinned down exactly because most of the associated ideas are inexplicit (cannot be reduced to propositions in English). I think this is why people consider their experiences to be ineffable in some way. Daniel Dennett's talk on Edge.org provides a discussion ("A Difference That Makes a Difference", Nov 2017)

Evans_Steven 9y ago

David Bentley Hart and Ed Feser, who is also mentioned in a comment here, are theist cranks who have both developed evasive "metaphysical arguments" which apparently tell us the universe has a "light of being" (DBH) or a "prime mover" (EF) which turn out, shock horror(!), to be the Christian God that they already believe in and their "arguments" tell us nothing else (e.g. they don't tell us if the universe had a beginning or not, because, of course, they don't want to go toe-to-toe with physics). DBH and EF are the latest in a long line of "philosophers" paid directly or indirectly by the corrupt church to provide sophistries to make the billions of peasant believers continue paying their tithes. Let them, with their oh-so-deep metaphysical arguments, predict something true about the universe that physics doesn't yet know and then we might listen. I'm surprised the utterances of a crank like DBH would reach the pages of HN.

smithkl42 9y ago
As it turns out, Daniel Bennett is an atheist materialist crank who has developed evasive "materialist arguments" which apparently tell us that the universe has no cause of existence, which turns out (shock, horror!) to be the standard atheist cant that he already believes, and so his arguments tell us nothing else... (Sorry, couldn't help myself.)
- Evans_Steven 9y ago
  ;) Let's see DBH review a book on neuroscience rather than shooting a fish in a barrel like Dennett's book - oh, hold on, he's not qualified to, because DBH doesn't actually know anything apart from what side his bread is buttered on.. Also, of course, physicists would accept the universe was created if evidence were found. The contorted metaphysical nonsense that DBH and EF espouse in a political defense of the church will only ever lead to the conclusion that the "Christian God exists". That is why they are cranks and not academics - they start with the answer. They and their ilk are making very nice money out of lying.

starchild_3001 9y ago

What's the big deal with consciousness? Isn't it an obvious trait of any human like, animal like, robot like semi-intelligent being? I'd expect it to emerge automatically, once correct base instincts & abilities are programmed.

xyzzyz 9y ago
The big deal is that there's no observable difference between the world where your robot is conscious of itself and has subjective experience of its surroundings, and between the world where your robot merely behaves as such, speaks to you trying to convince you that it indeed has subjective experience, but in fact it has none, its experiences are just a movie screened in an empty cinema where nobody is watching. This unobservable difference goes the most basic axiom of science -- if there's no observable difference, then there's no difference. Yet, somehow I have subjective experience. You might also have it, though there's currently no way you can convince me that you do.
- red75prime 9y ago
  Why do you think those worlds are different in a meaningful sense? You can distinguish them in your imagination only. If you were the God, I would believe you.
  - xyzzyz 9y ago
    The meaningful sense is that I have subjective experience, yet I can imagine a world where there's no subjective experience of being me -- it is exactly the world _you_ are living in.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  Why is the philosophical zombie a useful thought experiment? What reason is there to believe such a thing could actually exist in our universe, any more than 2+2 could ever equal 5? To me, it seems immensely unlikely.
OvidNaso 9y ago

D700 9y ago

We cannot know the limits of our thinking because we cannot think beyond those limits (or something like that) - Wittgenstein

ygmelnikova 9y ago

What is it with academics and purple prose?

bhouston 9y ago

Has anyone read this article? It is pretty horrible. It argues against explaining mind as a pure physical process that evolved by adaption. I am not sure what it is advocating instead but it isn't hard science but something else. This author elevates the idea of consciousness significantly. And dismissing Dennett attempts to reduce it. Now I am not saying there may be weirdness in consciousness such as possible quantum processes which makes it hard to simulate on a traditional computer but it is still physical and ultimately reducible given sufficient technical understanding. I do not support this articles approach at all. That said I find Dennett long winded and boring to read. But ultimately he is right. I guess I buy his argument at the beginning thus reading his thousands of pages is very unrewarding.