That's pretty much Dennet's position.
Intuitively, qualia is an attempt to get to the fundamental nature of experience. But its endless divisibility seems to indicate that there is no such animal. Does the debate exist simply because some can't grasp the notion of a concept without underlying fundamentals? Or am I missing something?
A qualia is, according to Wikipedia, an "individual instance of subjective, conscious experience." Individual means you can't subdivide it any more and still call the divisions experience. The canonical example is the "redness of red". So, you'd look at a sunset, and divide that experience up into qualia, individual instances of experience. You might come up with [redness of sky, yellowness of sun, roundness of sun] The question is, can you get to a point where you can't subdivide anymore, are there absolute elements of experience?
I have no idea. You had previously said:
>...But its endless divisibility seems to indicate that there is no such animal.
From where do you get this conclusion? Earlier, you described that the rod/cone balance in my eye is likely to be different than yours, and that this results in different qualia upon viewing the color red. That's variation -- not divisibility -- and I doubt that it's endless (lest we have infinitely many rods/cones).
'Qualia' is the name given to experience after everything else is stripped away. I view a sunset: I'm aware of it, I have certain emotional and physical reactions, memories are triggered, and so goes that functional account of my experience. Yet, we intuitively feel that there is something above and beyond those aspects of the experience. Dennett wouldn't argue against our intuition for qualia, he'd just say that it's some combination of material/functional phenomenon.
His view is not radical: it conforms to the mainstream scientific account of our world. The minority view is to say, "Wait, no! These qualia are actual. There is something about experience above and beyond the functional correlates of consciousness."
So, according to the mainstream view that Dennett holds, yes -- qualia (or rather, or illusion of qualia) can be cataloged and put into some framework of so-called "absolute elements".
Philosophers on the other side of the table, who hold that qualia are non-illusory (and not mere epiphenomena), have varying and incomplete accounts. The best frameworks, by my own judgement, involve some sort of neutral monism. [1]
'Stripping away' is just division in another form. You're dividing experience into that which your stripping away and that which you're keeping. You keep doing this division until you get to the qualia. I think you can keep going with this. Say you look at a red dot at noon for ten seconds. There's no individual 'redness of red', there's the red you saw for the first second, the red you saw for the second second, and so on. This just leads to your next point though...
> Yet, we intuitively feel that there is something above and beyond those aspects of the experience.
Right, intuitively, we feel there is something more to the process of experience. I get that. Yet many things we conceptualize don't work in an intuitive fashion. Why do we require experience to?
I certainly think that there's more to experience and consciousness than meets the eye, I just wonder if examination of the process and trying to individuate experience as qualia is actually helping towards that goal.
I think the reason rejection of qualia is the mainstream point of view right now is because most everyone believes consciousness works like a computer. Sure, there's this world of hardware underlying the operating system, in the same way that there's a biological brain underlying consciousness, there's still this entire world we can reason about and play in and theorize about even despite this. There's no reason to go "Oh, we're just robots" because much of our behavior can be deduced from our neurology. Dennett says this, but it's clear he doesn't really feel like a robot and is being a little tongue in cheek.
I'd say that the terms "stripping away" and "division" are being used in slightly confusing ways here, and I'm not sure if "stripping away" is "division in another form". But I guess that's not your point. Anyhow, you started off this thread by essentially saying something like "experience varies, so it can be endlessly subdivided", and someone else chirped in with "Yeah, that's basically Dennett's point of view." I want to emphasize that variation in experience doesn't lead to endless subdivision, nor does Dennett make this claim.
Regarding the idea of "qualia over time", I think that sounds like an interesting line of thought. Let's just assume that qualia have some atomic structure -- an experience particle, if you will. Maybe it exists in the other half of some Cartesian reality. Well, much like an electron persists over time (perhaps varying states along the way), I don't see why this imagined "qualia particle" cannot exist over time without requiring us to subdivide it indefinitely.
Of course, I find this idea of "qualia particles" to be ridiculous and I bet you do too. It's just a tool to point out that persistence over time doesn't require indefinite subdivision.
> Right, intuitively, we feel there is something more to the process of experience. I get that. Yet many things we conceptualize don't work in an intuitive fashion. Why do we require experience to?
I don't think that our intuition about experience is the last word on qualia. On this point, I'm in complete agreement with Dennett.
EDIT: This whole issue of divisibility is a massive red-herring anyhow. The stanford encyclopedia does a much better job of defining qualia: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/ .
Dennett argues (actually, he just asserts it over and over), that there is no such thing as subjective experience, so to speak. He argues that, whether or not my version of red is different than yours, we're sharing a common delusion -- the delusion of subjective, conscious experience.
(Of course, we're aware of an experience, but more along the lines of a webcam program that, upon sensing the color red, flips some boolean is_aware variable.)
I'd add that -- ok, qualia have many variations. From where do we deduce that it's a grand illusion? Matter has many different variations.
I don't think Dennett is arguing that we're all zimboes.
This is exactly what I meant by 'delusion'... that, according to Dennett, there are no "qualia", nothing above and beyond the ordinary physicalist/reductionist (and scientific) account of experience.
It's surprising from a personal view because experience seems so essential and real.
As for "mental properties supervene on physical properties" as a characteristic of materialism, even a dualist might consent to nomological supervenience.
That seems almost nonsensical to me. Certainly people feel pain, etc. The question is what pain amounts to, not whether pain exists.
There was a time, however, when some philosophers used the term "qualia" to refer definitionally to whatever parts of phenomenology could not be explained physically. Then other philosophers would deny the existence of qualia, but that way of speaking was rather muddled, so as far as I'm aware, this usage is uncommon these days.
As for some dualists consenting to nomological supervenience, yes that is certainly the case. Epiphenomenalists such as Chalmers would indeed. But when one speaks of supervenience in this context without qualification, it usually refers to metaphysical supervenience. Or at least that's been my experience.
Dennett's view (at least in the 1980s) is that, yes -- the weak (phenomenal) form of qualia you've described is coherent and obvious, but anything beyond that, particularly anything leading to an explanatory gap, is illusory. For example, he objects strongly to the existence of Nagel's intrinsic and non-representational qualia.
Are you saying that the term 'qualia' (without qualification) nowadays refers mainly to phenomenal qualia? I agree that it's nonsense to deny phenomenal qualia.
Some of them, known as "externalists" (last I checked) believe, for instance, that the qualia of redness that you feel when you look at a ripe tomato--that feeling that feels irreducible--is actually the property of redness that the tomato itself has.
That position seems completely nutty to me, but I guess one often becomes a famous philosopher for making nutty but interesting arguments.
The last time I studied philosophy seriously, the typical wording to deny dualism would be to assert that "there is no explanatory gap" or "no 'hard' problem of consciousness".
As for the different senses of qualia, when last I was studying philosophy, the primary sense of "qualia" used was that of phenomenal qualia. Sometimes other senses would be discussed, but I don't recall seeing many clear and compelling arguments being made based on these distinctions. Most of the debate at the time seemed to center around The Knowledge Argument.