Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness
thenewatlantis.com
thenewatlantis.com
"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."
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.
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?
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?
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'.
EDIT: If you are a physicalist. Some people are not.
EDIT2: "The Truth" has nothing to do with whether one is a physicalist or not, but the interpretation of some various sub-sets of the facts inform various ... schools of thought.
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/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.
>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.
(honest) why is this a problem? what's the difference between my "experience" and the experience of, say, a film camera?
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?
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.
What is the implication for the conscious experience of the camera?
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. 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.
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.
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.
(Sorry, couldn't help myself.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
However, I'm not sure the poster I was responding to would agree with allowing that distinction. Certainly many commentators on Dennett have interpreted "denying the existence of qualia" as "denying the existence of subjective experience", which Dennett does not do. For a person who refuses to allow the distinction, I think one has to simply disagree that Dennett denies the existence of qualia; he just says they aren't what most people think they are.
Another way of looking at this is to ask what, exactly, the word "qualia" refers to. If it refers to subjective experiences themselves, then of course they exist; but, as Dennett says, they might not be what most people think they are. But if the word "qualia" refers to something else, then what it refers to might indeed not even exist. Many philosophical arguments come down to people using words to mean different things and talking past each other.
I read a lot of his back and forth with Chalmers & co. (and philosophy of mind in general), and no one argues that Dennett doesn't think subjective experiences exist. But subjective experiences are not qualia. Qualia are phenomenal properties of experience. Presumably, one could have subjective experiences without these phenomenal properties. Indeed, that is what Dennett argues, see the IEP[1]
PS: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted -- guess the materialists have a bone to pick ;)
Care to elaborate on this? From my angle, arguments if this sort tend to veer towards wild speculation. I understand others feel differently.
I usually can't help but read it as unnecessary leaps of logic spurred by some presupposed metaphysics. I hope I'm not projecting too much here -- you may have a more considerate take on things.
Elaborate on what, exactly? Qualia being phenomenal properties of experience? I think that's a pretty atomic claim.
Basically, your experience E (a headache, for example) has some physical properties attached to it (maybe being caused by blood vessels expanding and putting pressure on certain nerves), but also some phenomenal properties (the feeling of getting a headache). The instance of this feeling is a quale. It's debated whether or not qualia are the same across people[1] (but my intuition is yes). Empiricists like Dennett argue that you don't need qualia and that they are a sort of unnecessary hand-wavy magic.
[1] http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/gradmind01/newpap...
Hmm. Does the nature of this particular "headache quale" depend in any way on the totality of current conceptions the subject has built up over the years their life?
My understanding and intuition tells me such "quale" are nothing more than the current instantaneous sensations being filtered through the accumulated mental conceptions, associations, and patterns that the entity has acquired over time (caveat: there are likely some very basic "pre-installed" conceptions that new-borns have from their genetics).
What is the argument to differentiate "quale" from mere momentary, initial perceptions, the raw sensation + initial neural processing? E.g. the first actual conscious awareness of some stimuli, framed and grounded by some initial mental conception of the sensation?
At the risk of being redundant: I have trouble imagining what it would mean, or that it is possible, or makes any sense at all, for a sentient being to be aware of some raw stimuli without it being grounded in some pre-existing conceptual framework. To me, that sounds like trying to play a video game by looking at the raw bits, the 1s and 0s, of the game data.
I realize that my interpretation of qualia doesn't provide a way to distinguish between the initial perception and any immediately subsequent integration/contemplation/reflection that may happen in the first second or two after the perception. I would argue that it may never be possible to draw a clear line, at least when talking about anything that has reached the level of conscious awareness. My view of the fundamental nature of conscious awareness does not seem compatible with any clear line between conscious sensation and conscious perception. I haven't read Dennett, but maybe this is similar to what he is getting at.
Edit: Almost forgot. Memory, especially short-term, plays a critical role here. My most immediate perception should "fit" with all of the perceptions that occurred over the past few seconds. I imagine that the initial neural processing which attempts to ground the stimuli and integrate it with the brain's acquired conceptual framework is also seeking to preserve "continuity". I think we all have experienced the jarring and sometimes unpleasant effect of when that process goes astray.
I don't know if anyone has stated that directly. But I've seen plenty of responses to Dennett that basically amount to saying that the only way they can make sense of his statement that qualia don't exist is that he means subjective experiences don't exist. So even if they don't think he actually believes that, they certainly seem to be unable to interpret his philosophical claims any other way.
The broadcast of qualia models element that you include feels debatable to me; the transmission of concepts and ideas is surely very new and anomalous in the history of the development of aware and experiencing entities if one accepts that consciousness is something that has developed and evolved.
"Materialism: 1a: a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter. scientific materialism" [1]
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/materialist
Materialism became the guiding philosophy of Science in ~1845. Reductionism was all the rage.
I think materialism is losing its stranglehold on scientific progress ('science advances one funeral at a time'). There was a submission a few days ago titled "physics has demoted mass" [3]
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15679150
My experience is that the universe is probably more intricate than we can imagine.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-mass-an...
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.
To me, it seems immensely unlikely.
If consciousness is the machine itself (the most higher level representation), once you build an AGI with this self-talk, self-decide, self-observe mechanism, it'll be there by design.
Voila, there's nothing to explain here :) Move on?
(Move on as in let's engineer the machine itself, rather than discuss the philosophy of it).
What?
[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)