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Continuing from ep. 399 on Dan Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991), now focusing on ch. 12-14, and again featuring Mark, Seth, Dylan, and Chris Heath.
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We’ve given the basic outline of Dennett’s positive view of what consciousness is: By advocating the multiple drafts model, he’s argued that consciousness is essentially a matter of information availability, and that it’s very much a matter of degree. There is no special stream of consciousness that phenomena either make it into or are excluded from: Instead, there are many barely noticed phenomena that, e.g. allow us to successfully steer around all obstacles as we move, and if one were to call attention to them at that moment, we’d be able to answer questions about them, but typically these exit memory so quickly that according to Dennett, there’s no fact of the matter about whether the detail was in consciousness but then removed by memory, or was merely unconsciously registered for the behavioral purpose of moving.
But surely despite these fuzzy edges, there are things that we are actually focused on and unquestionably conscious of, right? Sure, says Dennett, but it’s still not the best metaphor to think of a spotlight that is focused on that one detail. Instead (in his later work), Dennett describes these unquestionably conscious features as having “fame in the brain,” which means they’re globally available for any kind of reaction, reflection, and reporting.
Still, say Dennett’s opponents, this description doesn’t capture the feel of the experience, the “what it is like” to have that conscious experience. We could imagine a creature that has information available for all of its reactions, yet has no “what it is like” at all, no real experience, no consciousness to speak of. For example, despite the sophistication of large language models, most of us still think of these as not having consciousness, but at most, simulated consciousness. Even if you program AI to have goals, novel strategies for meeting these, and reactions comparable to what we would call frustration, satisfaction, or even suffering depending on whether these goals are met, these are still simulations: No consciousness. An embodied AI (a robot) could even report on its own states and talk about the “feelings” of these sorts that it is “experiencing,” yet still, this is not experience. Ned Block calls the availability of information “access consciousness,” and accuses Dennett of only giving an account of that, entirely leaving out “phenomenal consciousness,” which is what each of us has in having a private stream of consciousness, an inner life.
The missing element, this “what it’s like” that characterizes phenomenal consciousness, is known as qualia: the red and the scent of a rose, the feelings of joy and pain, the experience of a symphony or a walk in the park on a sunny day… These are what we think makes us fully human and not mere mechanisms, unconsciously parsing data. A wine-tasting machine might be able to much more accurately detect the qualities of wine, but does it actually know the taste of wine? For Dennett, the failure of such a machine is not that it lacks information, but that it lacks some of the self-referential complexity and other evolutionary tricks that we humans have developed. For us to rule out in advance that any future machine must lack real consciousness, no matter how well it captures these more complex traits, is sheer chauvanism.
Ch. 12 is called “Qualia Disqualified,” and argues that private, ineffable qualities serve no function in a good theory of mind. We do want to be able to explain experience, of course, but we don’t want or need any irreducibly mental elements in our theory. If we give an adequate account of the functions and structures that yield consciousness, the task is done; this distinction between mere access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness, this metaphor about a conscious being having its “lights on,” and the quality of a psychic object of awareness over and above the judgments we make about it are all mere “folk psychology,” to be replaced by a properly scientific theory.
Ch. 13, “The Reality of Selves,” adds to this story the idea that we intuitively (or deductively, per Descartes, looking at the intuition that he is thinking) know we have a self. This is not, for Dennett, a basic and natural component of all awareness, but is a meme: a culturally developed (though not culturally relative; any speaking creature we know of employs this) strategy for organizing our behavior, including and especially our social behavior. As a basic biological fact, creatures acknowledge a difference between “me” and “not me” in deciding what invaders to fight off, though of course we’re all living symbiotically with many kinds of bacteria, and parent/child relations complicate the line between self and other, especially given that the child starts as literally part of the mother. And through language and social interactions, we have developed the need to account for people’s actions by assigning them to someone in particular; this extends to our evaluations of our own experiences, such that I regard some of these as mine and most of them (which I don’t directly see, but I see plenty of evidence of) as belonging to other people. But Dennett regards the notion of the self as a useful fiction much like the idea of “center of gravity” of a physical object. The idea of a center of gravity is highly useful (e.g. for knowing how to carry the object), but is in an important sense extrinsic to the thing itself. So the Buddhists (and Hume) are right: The self is in a certain sense an illusion (the same sense in which qualia are illusory): A scientific theory should show us why we think there are selves (the self is part of what is to be explained), but it does not include the self as a basic component of the theory.
Ch. 14, “Consciousness Imagined,” takes on several popular articles that would argue against his view, including Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel’s point in the article is that third-person knowledge can never replace first-person experience. Since we do not have the echo-location and other peculiarities of bats, we can never really know or even accurately imagine what it is like for a bat to have bat-ish experiences. Dennett clearly wants to deny the conclusion that bats (and we) have ineffable qualia that can’t be known from a third-person point of view. He also wants to deny that understanding a bat presents a fundamentally different challenge than understanding a human being from another culture and time-period. Earlier in the book, he considered how we might imagine what it was like for people in Bach’s day to hear his work for the first time. It would be insane and probably fruitless to train ourselves to listen in this way, e.g. by avoiding all music subsequent to Bach and instead steeping ourselves in the church and other music that his audience would be most familiar with. But just by describing these difference, we already have a foothold into imagining what it would be like. More knowledge about that audience = better imagination. Dennett points out that most people don’t actually understand the details of how echolocation works in order to adequately think about what it might be like for a bat to echolocate around obstacles, find food, etc. Learning more about bats is like learning more about people of Bach’s time. Of course, bats don’t have language, so it may really be difficult for us to imagine what anything is like for languageless creatures, and Dennett would at least argue that such a creature has no self in the sophisticated, human manner discussed in the previous chapter. Does all this constitute an answer to Nagel, or is Dennett merely missing the point?
Image by Charles Valsechi.
Transcript
0:00 Mark: Foreign. You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 400 is something like, is there a subject of our experiences? And we are continuing to read portions of Daniel C. Dennett's consciousness explained from 1991. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, private and ineffable in Madison, Wisconsin.
0:33 Seth: This is Seth Paskin wondering where the color is in Austin, Texas.
0:38 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey copping to being an urbane verificationist in Madison, Wisconsin.
0:45 Christopher: And this is Christopher Heath having no experience at all except for my discriminative states in North Hollywood.
0:52 Mark: And this is the absence of Wes Alwan. He was going to come back and spice up this second conversation of Dennett for us. But, you know, actually he told me he. First, Dennett, when he got into it, was just as annoying to him as he remembered, so it was not a fun experience. And second, he's just gotten really deep into doing some Claude AI stuff. So all the episodes on our site now have transcripts in the post themselves. If it's not there yet, it'll be up there pretty quick. So that is something. Thanks to him and his working on it.
1:23 Dylan: So he's vibe coding.
1:25 Mark: Yeah, I think that's a good exchange to not have him this, because we still have you here, Chris. Thank you for coming back.
1:31 Christopher: I'm still here. Yeah, I'll try to be as contentious as Wes was for sure. Or would be.
1:36 Dylan: And honestly, I'm kind of disappointed he's not here because then it's effectively arguing an emergent property. Effectively emergent, like kind of thing. And I would have expected Wes to be all over it, but maybe he just finds it too annoying.
1:52 Christopher: See, I already have a problem with that characterization, but I. So yeah, maybe we'll have to get into.
1:56 Dylan: Well, well, it's interpretive at the end and then it might not even agree with it.
2:00 Mark: But yeah, so we read the end of the book. Some of us had read chapter 12 for last time and could not help but presaging some of the things that we'll now treat in some more detail here. But when we're adding that like, well, let's add 13, which is the reality of selves, like, okay, well that you know, Qualia and selves. And then Chris was just asking like, are we reading 12 through 14? And I'm like, well, you know, 14 is actually pretty Good, Pretty relevant too. And then I ended up finding some stuff in 10 and 11 that I, you know, basically I just wanted to cover, you know, as much as we feel the need to, all the various group of thought experiments, famous articles, things, you know, saying that there's something wrong with scientism in the area of philosophy of mind, that there's something you can't quite capture and it is consciousness, right?
The thing, the very thing that Dennett thinks he's explaining. Well, is he actually explaining it or is he somehow missing the point? He's explaining something else. One of his interlocutors, Ned Block, calls it phenomenal consciousness. He says access consciousness, right? The organism knows things, can emit verbal behavior about it, can use it to drive other kinds of behaviors, can recall it later. That's, you know, you're definitely conscious of something, you have access conscious. But is that the same as the lights being on, that you have that special phenomenal conscious and actual experience of something.
So you can imagine, you know, creating a machine that has visual sensors and is conscious of the stuff in its surrounding area and you could even give it the ability to report on its own conscious states. And this is how much I was seeing today. And this is, you know, maybe this, the sight was more acute today than yesterday because, you know, I'm running low on battery. It could have all this sort of self conscious. I say in quotes.
3:51 Dylan: Just going to interrupt you right there. No one would ever call that consciousness. That characterization by block. No one would ever. And Dennett wouldn't call that consciousness, right? He wouldn't call what Mark was just describing. I've not read the block, but I'm a computer and I am going to report on my sensory states about whether or not my battery is low. That is not what Dennett is talking about and that's not what anybody would ever recognize as consciousness. And so Ned Block, if he's, that's what he's characterizing it as, would say, well this is manifestly not consciousness. And we say yes, of course it's not consciousness, but that's not what someone like Dennett is talking about. Not even close. So I don't know what to.
4:30 Mark: Well, do you think like a snake? Well, so the very thermostat, that's the simplest possible one, you could say that it is in a metaphorical sense conscious of the temperature in that it registers the temperature. So in that sense it is conscious. Even though. Yes, so no.
4:47 Dylan: So this kind of reductionism of what you mean by consciousness to L delta states on physically able Measurements is not sufficient to talk about what consciousness is. And Dennett would not would also agree with that.
5:00 Mark: Correct.
5:01 Dylan: Okay. And so to try to say that a thermometer is by your definition of a functional distinction, a conscious entity and therefore you're crazy because it's not conscious, it's just a poor understanding of the reduction, it's a false reduction.
5:19 Mark: But Dan is going to want to say consciousness is something that comes in degrees. So yes, the thermostat is conscious in the lowest possible degree. And forget about thermostats, talk about cockroaches, you know, just anything that has sensors, maybe a Venus fly trap is reacts. But for Dennett, when you add in the self looping, the self stimulation, you get something that's complex enough, it's still made of these dumb little conscious homunculi. Conscious in the dumb sense that adds up to full consciousness. Whereas for Block we'll know that's all still access consciousness. In other words, information is available. But for Dennett puts his as well. If information is globally accessible to the organism, then it is conscious in the full sense. And, and that's where Right. Block would still say no, that's only access consciousness. You need the light going on, something beyond that.
6:19 Dylan: So I just want to play foul on this. We didn't read any Block. I, we read him years ago. I did not think about Block at all. So I don't want to try to understand access consciousness the distinction. We can pursue it along and try to make this distinction so that it makes a difference with it. The name doesn't matter to me. So what is the distinction that you're trying to make that pertains that bears exactly on what Dennett is saying? Block calls it access consciousness. I don't understand what that is, but tell me what the thing that is missing.
6:54 Mark: Qualia.
6:55 Christopher: Yes. Okay, so phenomenal consciousness.
6:57 Dylan: Why don't we get to Qualia and talk about why Dennett says that qualia are a distinction that doesn't make a difference.
7:05 Seth: So I mean basically what Dennett in order to introduce what the concept of qualia and to try to, as Dennett says, he's not going to try to untangle it because it's become this decades long debate in philosophy. But he starts with talking about primary and secondary qualities. So you know, he says basically qualia in some sense have a legacy here in primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities being size, shape, motion, number. Right. Things that could be in some meaningful sense, I guess attributed to objects in the world. And then his secondary qualities are Things which involve, obviously involve objects with primary qualities, but ultimately we would say are located in the subjective experience of those objects.
So those would be things like color, smell or aromas, taste and so on. And we can go through the argument in more detail, but in essence what Dennett says is that if you dig yourself out from underneath all of the stuff about qualia, it's ultimately just a recapitulation of the idea of secondary qualities and that there are a number of things that are challenging about that particular concept. Secondary qualities. That he's ultimately not just going to accept some of the objections to secondary qualities, but also say that ultimately the whole concept of a secondary quality or a qualia requires this Cartesian theater thing that he set up, which we talked about in the last episode.
8:47 Dylan: Yeah. And that's the money shot for him, Right. Is that he links up secondary qualities with having to include the Cartesian theater.
8:58 Seth: Right.
8:58 Mark: So the color is not out there in the world. What's out there in the world are really just shapes and light bouncing off shapes. And so what makes it, you know, if we want to say, you know, that Locke, who came up with this idea, in a sense you could say, yes, this physical object is this color. But what does that mean? Well, it means that normally if you're looking at it in normal lighting and you have a typical visual system with the typical ways that people can decode colors, then you will see that as red.
9:32 Dylan: In your typical set of receptors you have that. So basically you put all the qualifications in that. In a particular kind of environment that takes care of all the external factors and a particular configuration of receptors that take care of all of the receiving portions, then you will all agree on the same color. And I think basically that what Dennett is saying is the multiple drafts model and the account that I've given of how multiple drafts models provides a simpler and more straightforward explanation of the experience and the phenomenology of color and the way at which it works amongst us as both human beings as well as our account for how it works amongst other creatures.
10:17 Seth: Yes, that's ultimately where he's going to get. There are a couple of steps and one I think. So I'm going to try to recite this. I don't have specific notes on this, but I'll recite it and you can tell me if I remember it correctly or not. So he's kind of setting up this idea of qualia, the way it's used as this. It is supposed to give you something more than a so called materialist or quote unquote scientific explanation. Right. Like so to explain my experience of red, you can't explain my experience of red by just saying, oh, light, frequency, wavelength, blah blah, bouncing off of surface, yada di ya, and hitting.
None of that captures what the experience. I'm using scare quotes for listeners in the audio section here to explain or capture a describe. It's unclear to me, but the experience of seeing red, you have to add something to the mechanics of what biologically, physically is actually happening when you see red.
11:25 Dylan: So who would say that?
11:26 Christopher: He's saying the qualia people would say that.
11:27 Seth: The qualia people would say that.
11:29 Christopher: They would say there's something else to over and above the sort of discriminatory state that he wants to point to, then that they would say quality is supposed to be this ineffable, private, almost extra piece of that you experience of red. That's what they want to like hang on to that notion. And he understands why.
11:47 Seth: Right.
11:47 Christopher: Even in the beginning he says, like it makes sense they might start from this point of view. Right. We seem to illusionism here. We seem to have those kinds of ineffable private experiences and it makes total sense why philosophers would start there. But he wants to sort of therapeutically massage us out of that thinking.
12:02 Seth: Yeah, drink lots of water.
12:03 Mark: After reading this book, and I think last time I was trying to describe quality as merely a technical term that maybe involved something over time. But he makes it clear on page 372. Philosophers have adopted various names for the things in the beholder or the properties of the beholder that have been supposed to provide a safe home for the colors and the rest of the properties that have been banished from the external world by the triumphs of physics. Raw feels, sensa, phenomenal qualities, intrinsic properties of conscious experience, the qualitative content of mental states, or qualia. There are subtle differences in how these terms have been defined, but I don't care about any of them, he says. So he's not trying to use a technical term. He's trying to just capture this sense that we all have that there is a way that things appear.
12:52 Christopher: To me, yeah, they all imply the Cartesian theater. That's for sure what connects them all.
12:56 Dylan: Yeah, yeah. And that's in his understanding, the downfall of them. And at the end of what you just read, Mark, he says he is denying that they exist, but he wholeheartedly agrees that there seems to be qualia because it really does seem as if science has shown us that the colors can't be out there and Hence must be in here. So he's sort of turning. Part of this is him turning and saying, well, look, the reason why people talk about qualia is it seems manifest by our experience that we perceive color. But science seems to undermine the notion that color exists.
And so how do I get to there being something agreement between what feels like my manifest experience and my scientific account and the qualia people? He would say, add it as a feature of our intrinsic capabilities, our raw fields that give us color. And he's going to provide a different account that also allows us to talk about color.
13:53 Seth: Right. And you know, the move which I think to me is a reasonable thing to assert if you get that far with him, as he says, all right, if it seems to us that we have this kind of subjective experience that cannot be explained through the materialist. What did you say, Chris? I've forgotten the term. It's the, the conditions, the dispensable conditions or the. What did you say that was.
14:15 Christopher: Yeah, dispositional states are discriminatory states.
14:17 Seth: That's what he'll use a lot, the discriminatory states. So you have this discriminatory state and all of the external scientific explanation of that discriminatory state cannot account for or explain this seeming experience that you have. Then he says, okay, if you agree with that, the next logical thing would be to say, okay, where is that experience taking place? And that's the immediate trap. He says, ah, we've already done away with this notion that there's a Cartesian theater where this kind of experience can be represented to us, that we can quote, unquote, have it. So immediately there's something suspicious here, or there's something that we should question. Even if you say, and that's why it says it seems like we have it, but we just can't possibly have it.
15:02 Dylan: Yeah. And the way he analyzes this, this is on 373 through 375. Right. Is that he basically goes through. We could talk about colors and discriminative states, and we're just going to talk about green, what the different colors of red are. And you can compare the states of the colors of things in the world by putting them side by side and looking at them to see what judgment we reach. But we can also compare the colors of things just by recalling or imagining them in our minds. And then he gives these examples about comparing the red of the American flag is the same or lighter or darker than the.
Or less orange than the standard red of Santa's suit, or so forth and so on. Basically doing discrimination comparisons. And we can do that by looking at two things or do them in our mind's eye. And then he does this comparison with how you would do this with a computer sensor and which you had. He gave a simple, simplified example of where it distinguishes the colors between red number 163 and red number 172 and characterizes the distinction between those two colors. And his assertion is that the way in which we talk about and the way in which we experience color is no different than that.
And it doesn't take anything away from the experience of color to have it be that way.
16:22 Mark: So let me just throw in the terms that you didn't want me to throw because it just describes what you just said. So the computer discriminating, the color discriminating robot has, you could say, access consciousness in that it can use the information in some way, it can make the discrimination, and it can use it. And we intuitively think access consciousness is not enough. You also need qualia, which phenomenal consciousness is the other way of putting that. So if you only, you know, if Dennett is going to claim that actually we are just like a more complicated version of the color discriminating robot, that of course we have more layers and we have.
I was throwing in the idea of being able to report on your own states and to be able to do this in a very, very flex still, you would think, if you are a neural chauvinist, as they sometimes put it, that no matter how complicated you made the color distinguishing robot, that it could tell you about the colors. It could even muse about, you know, compare this color to the last time it saw the color and what was going on and just, you know, really pass the Turing test. We still intuitively would want to think, but it's still not actually conscious.
It still is not phenomenally conscious, still doesn't have any qualia.
17:40 Dylan: So the problem that I have with the way you're accounting for is you're not telling me what is the thing that's missing.
17:45 Mark: You're being Dennett, so that's great, because Dennett cannot understand.
17:48 Dylan: I just want to hear one example of one thing that is possibly missing about the experience and the social experience, the interpersonal experience, the individual experience of color. It could be in a poem. Give me one example that isn't involving discrimination. Comparison to memory, comparison to your mind's eye, verbal exchange with somebody else. Give me one example.
18:17 Christopher: I agree with you, Dylan, insofar as I might even go as far as to say is if you have a Sufficiently if you have a computer that's doing the same thing we are, it's going to have this kind of. It is going to have an experience. But this is why I think color is a really bad example. I think there are better examples of felt experiences. And I think that that might capture what someone. So I don't think color. I think this.
18:36 Dylan: Okay, so you think he cherry picked color as a really rich example of this kind of controversy?
18:42 Christopher: No, no, no, no, no. I don't think he cherry picked.
18:44 Dylan: Well. Okay.
18:45 Christopher: Color is a commonly used in the philosophical intellectual history. It is common. So he's just responding to the long history of using color. I just think that maybe there are better examples that might try and point to or capture people's intuitions towards felt experience. Something like being mentally exhausted. Something like. Like valence states. Right. Positive states, negative states. I think these are better examples of what does that make sense?
19:07 Mark: So pain.
19:08 Christopher: Yes.
19:09 Mark: Which he talks about pain.
19:10 Dylan: He does talk about pain. And he would put pain in exactly the same category.
19:13 Christopher: Yes, he would. Which I think maybe I don't. Yeah, I don't know. This is where I get. It gets murky for me and.
19:19 Mark: Yeah. And this is why I brought in Block or Chalmers is just as good. Or Nagel. Right. Or Wes. We could just say Wes is his opponent. Is somebody that believes that there is. When you have a first person experience of a pain. I mean, is there any other. I could see that you are in pain by you riding the ground. But it seems like, yes, experiencing pain is not just a matter of me claiming I'm in pain. Right. We don't want to be behaviorist about this. It's not just a matter of me saying ow, ow, ow. Because maybe I don't say Ow, ow, ow. Presumably there is something neurological going on at the same time that could be measured.
20:00 Dylan: There absolutely is.
20:01 Mark: But do we want to say that the feel is somehow reducible? That if you knew all the physical facts about pain. So you knew the neurological thing. You knew how people normally yell, you know, how this, this. Do you know pain? If you had a robot that, you know, you could even.
20:21 Dylan: Yeah, it's absolutely true and Dennett's absolutely clear about this in conscious robot section, that if you built a robot, let's call it a non organic based automaton, that had sufficient complexity in terms of memory, in terms of sensory production, in terms of discrimination that we could imagine getting to the point where that entity experienced pain that you would have to recognize as pain.
20:51 Christopher: Yeah, I agree with. I think you could do that. So I agree with Dennett in a lot of ways. I'm just nervous sometimes that Dennett talks like he wants to reduce everything to just dispositional states. So it sounds a lot like behaviorism. Like, I agree.
21:05 Dylan: I think that disposition or discrimination, discriminatory
21:09 Christopher: states are a species of dispositional states for Dennett.
21:11 Seth: Okay.
21:12 Christopher: Because to me, I'm just nervous. He's saying all the ways in which you could react and act to this state is all there is to consciousness. And I want to say that I agree with you. The robot could. We could sufficiently design it or create it such that it does have experience. And for me, experience would just be what feels like from the inside of those processes. But I don't know if Dennett's okay with talking about it like that. I can't tell sometimes.
21:34 Dylan: Yeah. So Mark just gave an example of several other philosophers. And I think that one way of putting Dennett's point of view is he just fundamentally denies that the hard problem of consciousness exists.
21:43 Mark: Yes.
21:44 Christopher: Yes. Okay.
21:45 Dylan: Just fundamentally there's no such thing as that hard problem.
21:48 Christopher: And I'm on board with that. So I. Me and Dennett are in the same place. I'm just nervous. Dennett wants to say there is nothing over and above just dispositional states like discriminatory states. There's no. What it feels like, what it's like to be a particular animal. Let's say a fish or a bat. I'm nervous. He sounds a lot like he's saying that's not sensible.
22:07 Dylan: So what I would say that his response to that is that what it feels like is a combination of lived discriminatory states. That's what it means to feel like a bat. And that's what it means to feel like a human being. Sure.
22:24 Christopher: And we'd have to. I guess we'd have to get it. We can get into what a discriminatory. Because I thought that Dennett would be okay with saying the thermometer is in a discriminatory state when it's picking out the temperature. And that clearly doesn't.
22:34 Dylan: Maybe he would.
22:35 Christopher: So I'm not. Where's the line at? But I don't know.
22:38 Seth: I'd like to clarify something before we end up spinning our wheels too much about the thermostat or whatever. Dylan made a really important point earlier where we talk about. In order for this thing to potentially have this. What it's like, it has to have some kind of receptors. It has to have some kind of experience, quote unquote. So a better question or example would be the thermostat or the thermometer specifically. Just it has something in it that reacts to the temperature of the air. It's not actually receiving any experience from the. But something like a thermostat that maybe has some kind of a probe somewhere and then it receives that data and it translates that into a number that gets displayed on the screen or turns on the heat.
So if you imagine something as simple as a thermostat like that, or even something that's more complex, like a scientific, you know, like, for example, they send balloons up in the air every morning that have measuring devices on them. And that wind speed, it takes the direction, the speed, the temperature, the barometric pressure, yada, yada. So anything even that sufficiently quote unquote complex should in theory have the potential to have something that it is like to be it.
24:03 Dylan: I don't think that he denies that there's a like to be something. He just denies that it's inaccessible. So that there is something. We could talk about what it's like to be a bat, but the bat can't talk about what it's like to be itself. This gets to his definition of self and he. And one of the things besides accusing every. Denying the hard problem of consciousness and accusing everybody who talks about qualia as being trapped in the Cartesian theater, it's that everybody is anthropocentric and tries to view everything about the world in terms of human beings.
24:35 Christopher: Yeah, that's funny because I took his definition of the self as being particularly anthropocentric. But I get.
24:40 Seth: We'll.
24:40 Christopher: We'll get to that stuff.
24:42 Dylan: Yes. I think he would say that a cockroach doesn't have a self.
24:46 Christopher: Yeah, I mean, but I would say something like an octopus or an elephant does and it'd be more complex than
24:51 Dylan: I think he would agree.
24:52 Christopher: No, they don't have the narrative ability to sort of spin the self the way. I mean like again, that's what I mean is there's this region in between this basic instinctual self and this narrative center of gravity self. I think there's a large region in between where we can have these complex animals with complex selves who aren't able to linguistically. But yeah, maybe we're getting.
25:11 Dylan: I recall there be there being there being at least a nod to some levels of animals that have narrative capabilities.
25:18 Seth: So he basically says like clearly a horse. Right. He says a horse is much more conscious than a human infant is. We don't need to dolphins. And isn't he quoting someone. There it is. It's in, I think, chapter. It's when he's talking about the woman who does the. Did the research on, you know, about the morality piece. I think it's in 14, but doesn't matter. So, Dylan, I want to get back to what you said, because you said, I don't think he denied that there's something that it's like to be like. He just says it's inaccessible. I think he does deny that there's something that it is to be like in the sense that that thing is a thing. It's reified.
25:53 Christopher: Sure.
25:54 Dylan: Yes.
25:55 Christopher: Yes, I agree with that.
25:56 Seth: Yeah. He says it's an abstraction in the same way that we call the law of gravity. Now, gravity is a force. Gravity exists. But our representation that we call the law of gravity, which we use to solve equations and all that kind of stuff, is just an abstraction from all of this repeated physical data that we have that tells us that there's this regular behavior in the universe. And that may not be the perfect analogy or the perfect example, but it's similar where he says, when we create abstractions to help explain things doesn't mean that those abstractions actually exist.
It's just a way that we use to tie a bunch of things together and make sense of them. And he said, and that's why ultimately only a creature that has sufficient narrative capabilities to describe the abstraction that is itself is capable of even talking about it that way. But that doesn't mean there's any there there, so to speak.
26:50 Dylan: Yeah. Am I misremembering? I thought it was the center of gravity, not the law of gravity that he was referring.
26:56 Christopher: The analogy.
26:57 Mark: Yeah.
26:58 Christopher: Is center of gravity that.
26:59 Dylan: The center of gravity.
27:00 Seth: Oh, the center of gravity. Sorry. Okay.
27:02 Christopher: Yeah. For narrative. Center of gravity.
27:04 Dylan: Yeah. Yeah. It may be true that the law of gravity is another kind of abstraction, but I don't think it's the one that he meant, the one that he referred to. And I think that center of gravity is a really good example of the kind of extra abstraction that acts as a centralizing organizing principle for which you understand the behavior of gravity and you can explain all the sorts of things that happen around the thing that has the gravity.
27:31 Mark: Yeah.
27:32 Dylan: Okay. But interestingly, it also fails. It's going to fail on getting very, very close to that center in certain ways. And that's one of the things that is super interesting and, for me, persuasive about the way in which he talks about how there's a failure that aligns with Measurements. His explanation of various kinds of measurements of perception align with the fact that we have this not continuous experience. We have a very chopped up discrete experience in terms of our senses and our the way in which we gather information. There's no continuous reality. It's a chopped up sequence of reality that we pull together. And this is maybe a different component of his argument, but that you're not going to see consciousness as you drill down at every level there's going to be more consciousness. It's going to become from the assembly.
28:27 Mark: So I think we're sweating a little bit about the how Chapter 12 Quality Disqualified is related to the reality of selves. And I think already having read a bunch of philosophy, sort of poison for me why those should follow so directly. Because we've had Hume, Buddhism, denials of the self and Sartre in particular. I was thinking about how he distinguishes the objective self, right? The character, the public self. This is a self conception. When you think of what is me, you think of a whole bunch of things, of actions you've done and physical qualities of your body and different dispositions.
And that is something that other people can know perhaps almost as well as you. I mean you're there, you're a witness to all of your thinking in a way that thank God for them, they're not stuck in here with you. But in some ways it seems like that. So that is itself, that is the thing that is built up according to Dennett. But then for Sartre, there's also what he takes from Kant, the transcendental self, or at least just the self that accompanies every action. So there's this is happening to me, it makes that action mine as opposed to yours. And it seems like the fact that we have this stream of experiences and they're all mine would seem to just on basic Cartesian grounds means like, oh, there is a self.
There might be that's different than the reputation. But you know Descartes, that's why Descartes insists that his self is just the thinking, is just the stream of consciousness. All this other stuff that you call the self. My body, my reputation, my dispositions, that's all really body. But it's actually the Cartesian self that Dennett wants to chop off to say there is no witness. And I want to just even look at this argument that Dennett's view is fundamentally self contradictory. Because if you say, well, there's a seeming, right, Red seems a certain way to me, the sunrise seems a certain way to me.
Is Dennett actually arguing there is no seeming. Because it seems like that would be self contradictory, right? You're trying to explain the seeming. You can't. No seeming. Seeming is something that has no content to it. It has to be something more substantial. Tell me more about the seeming. Well, it's because I have a mind space in which I'm comparing the blue from the American flag with the blue from the Navy uniform. And that's what he's denying. He's denying the mental space of the mind's eye. He's not denying that seeming in the abstract exists.
31:01 Christopher: He thinks you have seemings, right?
31:02 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think he think. I don't see him denying that you have a mind's eye or even that you have a self. I think that he's saying that when the self is not the meaner or the witness, it means that the self isn't something that sits on top of or evaluating all the experiences and all the other things. It's not the adjudicator. The self is the assembly of all this stuff. That's what the self is.
31:29 Christopher: It's an activity. You might even say, for him, I
31:31 Dylan: think that's even a better word. The self is an activity. That's why it's involved deeply in this notion of a narrative model. The self is the ongoing event of these distinctions and discriminations that are being made in this location with this entity. So I'm an entity and you can, we can talk about what makes me an entity. And then as a self, it is made up of all those discriminatory activities. His going into a variety of nature's terrible experiments is going through multiple personality disorder, fractional selves, split brain, stuff like that are examples to try to get to the notion that the self is a unification that is consistent with the multiple drafts model for who we are.
32:21 Seth: Yeah, I just want to read something really quick because I think it kind of encapsulates addresses both Mark and Dylan. Your point just now, page 372. I am denying that there are any such properties. And what he means there is the qualia. But here comes that theme again. I agree wholeheartedly that there seem to be qualia. There seem to be qualia because it really does seem as if science has shown us that blah, blah, blah, colors can't be out there. It's like it seems what is in here can't just be the judgments we make when things seem colored to us.
It says what science has actually shown us is just that light reflecting properties of objects cause creatures to go into various Discriminative states scattering about in their brains and underlying a host of innate dispositions and learned habits of varying complexity. And then he goes on and says, okay, well, what are the properties of discriminative states, right? And that's when he's going to talk about dispositional properties and you know, saying like, I know it's not really this color, but it sure seems like that color, right? The judgment order, and so on and so forth.
But so again, you're right, he's not disagreeing about the seeming, that such things exist. But it's exactly as Dylan said, is that whatever's happening seems to generate the seeming, but the seeming itself is not what is actually happening.
33:35 Dylan: Well, it does generate the seeming, right? So let's just read this. When someone says, I know that the ring isn't really pink, but it sure seems pink, the first clause expresses a judgment about something in the world, and the second clause expresses a second order judgment about a discriminative state about something in the world. The semantics of such statements makes it clear what colors supposedly are reflective properties of the surfaces of objects or transparent volumes, the pink ice cube, the shaft of limelight. And that's just what they are.
In fact, though, saying just which reflective properties they are is tricky. So the second component, it sure seems pink. I would understand that second order judgment as talking about what we would typically agree with, or what I would communicate to another person, or my understanding of what pink is. And the reason they have the seeming is you're comparing to a model of what pink is. And so it seems pink. And then I have a question of whether it is pink and what it means to be pink has to do with it satisfying certain characteristics.
34:38 Mark: I feel like I need to read the intervening sentence between what you do, Seth, and what you read, Dylan, top of page 73. These discriminative states of observers brains have various primary properties, right? Their mechanistic properties due to their connections, their excitation states of their elements, et cetera. So in other words, when I'm seeing pink, my brain is doing something. And neurologists could potentially monitor that. And in virtue of these primary properties, they have various secondary merely dispositional properties. In human creatures with language, for instance, these discriminative states often eventually dispose a creature to express verbal judgments alluding to the color of various things.
So in other words, this might be actually playing on two definitions of the word seeming, right? We have the literal. I mean, neither of them is literal, but we have a visual appearance. So you might want to say I'm picturing the pink in my head right now. So there is a seeming pink in my head, even though clearly the brain itself is not pink. Whatever. And so that's the thing that the advocate of phenomenal consciousness says, that is qualia. And you cannot deny your experience right now. Just close your eyes and picture pink. That is basic. This is just the Cartesian basic thing.
35:55 Dylan: It's just your memory. Right, you finish.
35:57 Mark: But I still need to understand, it's just your memory. It seems as if it's not just recalling that there was pink in the world. It's not making a judgment, it's actually picturing. And so there's a picturing involved. And likewise, even when you look at
36:13 Dylan: the world, it's an activity.
36:14 Mark: Well, it's an activity, but that involves something that you are encountering.
36:21 Dylan: Me. Constructing, reconstructing, articulating, remembering, Putting in front of my mind's eye what pink is.
36:28 Mark: Yes, putting in front of my mind's eye, that is. But then it could just be that. Well, it. As a hetero phenomenologist, in other words, I'm not in your head, but you report I am seeing pink in my mind's eye right now. And I can say, okay, it appears to me, and to you too, that you're doing that, but really you're not doing that. Really what you're doing is making a judgment about something. This is the view that. Right, we talked about this last time, what the color discriminating robot is doing. Even if he's comparing the blue from the American flag with the blue from a navy uniform or something, it does not require that there be a screen or something inside the discriminating robot in which these things are displayed.
No, they've already been discriminated and in fact they've been translated into, oh, that American flag. Blue is number two and navy blue is number four. And it just says two does not equal four, and therefore is able to tell you. And so Dennett wants to say that even though you, that you are actually in the same position as the color discriminating robot, you are reporting that you're comparing these things. But all we, all we know is that you are able to make the discrimination. So it's really a judgment and there is no seeming in the literal sense of picture something at all.
And that's the thing that is really hard to accept, but he wants to really bite the bullet on that.
37:49 Christopher: I'm so confused because, yeah, Dylan, this is where I get confused because I think Dylan agrees with me and he wants to say that the seeming just is the discriminatory activity from another.
37:59 Dylan: That's exactly right.
38:00 Christopher: But some people think that Dennett is
38:01 Mark: not saying that from another vantage point.
38:05 Christopher: Yeah, from a first person perspective. That's the seeming. It's right. But he says they're seemings. He says there are seemings. This is the confusing part about Dennett.
38:13 Dylan: I don't understand what the problem is with this. What is it that. So to me it seems utterly plain that there are seemings in the world that is in fact part of the activity of an entity of sufficient level of consciousness. Right. And there could be. I could even get on board with the notion that there are analogical seemings when you have entities making discriminations where they go move in one direction or another. In order to. I'd have to think about what a good experiment to distinguish just reaction versus choice between seemings. He talks about the chickens later. That would be one that is a kind of example of that. But Mark, I feel like I'm just not understanding how the existence of seeming is supposed to. Then give me qualia.
39:00 Christopher: Well, so I think there's a sentence just in the next paragraph that opens with. And I think this will help. Don't our internal discriminative states also have some special intrinsic property, the subjective, private, ineffable properties that constitute the way that things look to us. Right. He's going to deny that. Which is a little bit.
39:19 Dylan: Yeah, well, let's just keep going. Those additional properties would be the qualia. And before looking at the arguments, philosophers have devised an attempt to prove that we. We will try to remove the motivation for believing that these are here in the first place. Okay.
39:32 Christopher: All right.
39:32 Seth: I would like to do a quick little experiment. So everybody make sure that you're looking at zoom. Now, in my case, Dylan was highlighted. So go up there to Dylan's picture and put pin so that he's big in the picture there. Dylan, you can look at yourself.
39:48 Dylan: I'm going to pin myself.
39:49 Seth: Right. Okay. As quickly as you are able, I want you to glance over his shoulder and on the table behind them is a small device with a wire that looks like an Amazon Echo or dot or whatever they're called. What color is it? Blue.
40:04 Dylan: Sure.
40:05 Christopher: Yeah, blue for sure.
40:05 Dylan: Yeah, sure.
40:06 Seth: Yeah. Okay. Now you looked at it and you said, oh, blue. Did you compare that to some blue from your memory bank to go. Let me catalog and run by all the colors in my head and figure out which one this matches. No, not consciously.
40:22 Dylan: I deny your experiment.
40:25 Seth: Does it Seem blue to you? Or is it blue? Do you just say it's blue? Right.
40:30 Dylan: So in that case, and this might. I mean, I don't know if this is. As one of Mark's distinctions of the multiple means of seeming is that when we're unsure of something, we use it seems blue to me is that we would be using that as a qualifying term saying, well, I'm not sure you're not playing a joke on me or a trick on me where you might have changed all the light in that room. So I know you're a really wily dude there, Seth, and you might have been trying to make. Play a trick on me when it's actually blue, and you just made it look like it was blue, so it seems blue. You did an optical illusion.
41:03 Mark: It's actually gray. Whatever.
41:05 Dylan: Yeah, that's the way we would use the word seems.
41:07 Mark: You used a blue light on a gray. On a transparent or gray thing. Yeah.
41:11 Dylan: Yes. And I guess this is one of the things, I think, that Dennett walks up to this kind of thing, which is he. I think it was earlier. He acknowledges that this conversation where I would want to say, well, it's actually gray, but it only seems blue. And the presence of hallucinations immediately gets you into this conversation of, well, what is it actually? What is the truth of the matter? And he is very clear that the truth of the matter is something that we have to agree on.
41:39 Seth: Okay, So I don't disagree. But that's not where I was trying to take that little thought experiment, which is, let's call this uncontroversial in the sense of there's no trick being played or what have you. Qualia can't only exist in hypothetical cases of epistemic uncertainty. So the question is this notion of, oh, well, there's something. It's like for me to have the experience of the blue behind Dylan's shoulder that we all share, that we all can, simply because that thing that the experiment we just had could not be adequately captured in the language of scientific materialism already.
Right. There feels like a bridge too far. Like, yeah, there's lots of things. There's lots of reasons. There's lots of things that cannot be captured. There's lots of experience itself as an aggregate. And he'll talk about this later, about the complexity of just even the simplest human experiences of things. Right. What would you would have to be able to describe and capture in order to be able to explain what's happening when somebody has a very simple basic experience is just insufficient and that's why we have poetry and music and things like that, because you can't describe it, but you do want to be able to evoke it.
Right, and call upon memory or have people use their imagination or something like that. So I'm kind of on Team Dennett as far as this one goes. But I'm on Team Dennett because I keep asking myself, like, I really love the Nagel article. Like, I really think that it's, it's convincing in its way, but really, what is the point? What do you need to bring Qualia up for? What work do they do and when? You can just say, yeah, I see blue, it's blue. Doesn't seem blue to me. I don't have this. I'm not having an experience that requires some kind of validation because it cannot be validated objectively.
It just. It simply is.
43:32 Mark: Yeah, let's get into some of the. So this is, into chapter 14, consciousness imagined. So we've supposedly ruled out Qualia. We've thrown out the self, or not thrown it out, but explained how the self is a constructed fiction by. It's not something that is primary. It's not like a soul that comes in and is observing and has. It's something that is built out of the composition of a bunch of dumb homunculi making discriminations. And that for social purposes and for personal purposes, we, for evolutionary reasons, we construct ourself. We'll say more about that.
But then chapter 14, the last full chapter, he's talking about a conscious robot. He gets talks about Searle's Chinese room thing. And Section two is what is it like to be a bat? And it occurred to me that really a quality should be something that is individual. I'm sort of repeating something I said last episode, but that is momentary and individual. Just you right now. Like a quality is like a little snowflake. It can never be repeated. So as soon as you ask, what is it like to be a bat? You're saying, oh, there's a class of qualia that are like the, the echolocation kind.
You have the typically batty kind. And all the bats share these. And the question is, can we imagine what it's like to be a bat, given that we don't have those mechanisms? And Dennett wants to actually argue that, well, no, we can't imagine exactly what it's like to be a bat, but because we're already talking about a class of qualia, we actually can imagine quite a. You know, this is how we understand each other's I might not feel your pain that you're having right now, but I know what pain is. I've experienced plenty of pain. And you could describe it more vividly.
Maybe you could sing a song about it and evoke the pains such that we actually can communicate these things. And they are not private and ineffable. They are, if not actually conceptual. I mean, we have the word pain, but it seems like the feeling of pain is something beyond the mere word. You could teach the word to somebody who's never felt pain, I suppose, anyway. Yeah, take. Take it.
45:40 Dylan: So he gives a couple different examples besides the bat. He reanalyzes the bat in terms of the Leipzig singers. You know, trying to recreate what it was. Was like talking about what it was like to hear Bach cantatas for the first time and how it would move you if you were a resident of Leipzig and, you know, pointing out that that experience of what it was like to listen to Bach cantatas would be accessible for. But you would have to do a lot of work to do it, to get as close as possible to what that was like. And that has to do with the. The context, the history, the environment, the state of religion, all that kind of thing.
And he does a similar thing in analyzing the bat in that you can get really far with understanding how the bat works and understanding what it would be like to be a bat. I think that he acknowledges that you're going to end up just by the fact that you use language to do this and you are giving a narrative of it. It is going to be distinct from that from talking about what the bat, his experience is, is not going to be narrative and is going to end up being a set of experiences the bat has.
46:55 Seth: Well, so there's. Yeah, there's two things there, though, because you're using the Leipzig example, I thought was actually really good. Because it's like, look, we can say there's something it's like to be somebody from the 15th, 16th century, whatever that's of our same species, and we can't even access that. Right. Like, forget about a bat that, you know, just the. All of the received cultural things, like the way of thinking, the nutrition, you know, who knows, whatever, all the various things. So there's the distinction that has to do with the receptors and the discriminative situation, whether it be historical or ecological or what have you.
And then there's the use of language in order to be able to give a description. Because in a weird way, that seems like a pretty flat. It's like simultaneously obvious. But I think there's something deep in there which say, like, if you don't have language to describe your inner mental states, then there is nothing that it's like to be you. Because that's not something that can be described from the outside.
47:54 Dylan: Yes. And this question of described from the outside is equivalent to being inaccessible. So on page 442 he calls back to the Leipzig example and he makes the direct analogy. He says the same thing is true about imagining what it is like to be a bat. We should be interested in what we can know about the bat's consciousness, if any, not whether we can turn our minds temporarily or permanently into bat minds. In chapter 12 we undermine the presumption that there are intrinsic properties, qualia that constitute what it is like to have a one conscious experience or another.
And even if there were residual non dispositional, non relational properties of bat experiences, becoming intimately acquainted with them while remaining ignorant of the researchable facts about the systemic structure of bat perception and behavior would leave us ignorant of what it was like to be a bat. There is at least a lot we can know about what it is like to be a bat. And neither Nagel nor anyone else has given but. And neither Nagel nor anyone else has given us a good reason to believe there's anything interesting or theoretically important that is inaccessible to us.
Nagel claims that no amount of third person knowledge could tell us what it's like to be a bat. And I flatly deny that claim. So he goes on, he gives an example where in the end he basically says that the stuff that is inaccessible is our distinctions that make no difference.
49:14 Mark: Yes. So you are characterizing it as, well. The bat still has these experiences. And that's exactly what the, the qualophile, as he calls his opponents is going to key on that. Like, yes, they have these experience. You can know that they have echolocation. But since you don't have echolocation, you can never know what it's like. You can never have that.
49:31 Seth: Qualia, just even the way you said that is something that I think Dennett would take issue with. If you say, yeah, the bat's having those experiences. Well, that's. The bat is the self of the bat. And experiences are attributed to that self. It's like sensory organs and biological things are happening in that compact physical body. That's what's happening. And what I think is really meaningful here is that given what Dennett's saying about like the self being the center of narrative gravity, like the only way that there is an organizing principle that you can attribute.
The only way that anything can be said to have an organizing principle in order to be a self or a thing is if it's capable of self accomplishing or self describing that using language. And so literally speaking. Only things that have language the way we do are capable of even talking about themselves as selves or things to have the seeming to get confused about all of this in the first place.
50:34 Mark: Well, let's make that the last thought of part one. Come back for part two next week or become a Partial Exam in Life supporter. And it should be in your feed very soon. You will know what it is like to hear part two. Thanks.
50:47 Seth: Thanks. Thanks.
50:48 Dylan: Thank you.
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