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Comment by mrmyers | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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.

Consciousness Explained Away!

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?

> 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?

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).

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'.

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.

It's a boundary condition. I expressed myself badly.

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.

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/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.

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.

I'd say: subsets of the perceptual/cognitive space.

> 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?

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?

> 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.

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?

> 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. 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.

The camera doesn't have (1) an attentional system, (2) a model of the world in memory, (3) a model of itself within that model.

for humans with cultures (4) a way to create and impose narratives (5) narratives about the world

(4) and (5) are included in (2) and (3), aren't they?

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.

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.

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.

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