Ep. 400: Dennett Rejects Qualia (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life episode 400 part 2. Finishing up our discussion of Dan Dennett's consciousness explained, we were right in the middle of considering the really his response to the Nagel article, what is it like to be a bat? Which was Nagel's proof that there is something qualia, the subjective experience that even if you knew you studied bats, you know all from the outside about their brain chemistry, their physiology, their abilities, how can they echolocate, how far away, how fast can the thing be moving? You could know all that stuff and yet you would still never know what it is like to be a bat. There is that kernel of qualia that is is forever inaccessible and therefore science can't know everything there is to know because there's the, you know, the thing that only other bats would understand.

1:02 Christopher: Yeah.

1:03 Mark: And so can we sum up what so far Dennett's response to that has been?

1:07 Christopher: I mean one, he just flat out rejects it.

1:08 Seth: Right.

1:09 Christopher: He says, look, there are all sorts of ways we can talk about what it might like to be a bat. Especially like negative ways like saying like, well, we know that they won't have the. I think he used like children's stories as an example. We know they're not going to like be going to school and thinking about their math homework or something like that. Seems silly, but there are all sorts of things we could immediately eliminate from what a bat experience might be like. He says once you have enough information, you can pretty much get there. Especially because he thinks all what it's like to be a bat is just whatever discriminant or dispositional states the bat would have. Does that sound right?

1:40 Dylan: Yeah. And our access to it is heterophenomenology. He even walks into. I mean he refers to von Uexküll about and the notion of Umwelt and an Innenwelt, a surround world and an inner world, which to me, as soon as you agree that there is such a thing as an inner world of a bat, unless you want to go and take Nagel's point in saying, ah, because there's an inner world that's an inner world of a bat. There's a. What it's like to be a bat that you don't have any access to and therefore there is consciousness. And that's the proof of consciousness. That's the part that Dennett won't go for. But the notion that there is a inner world for a bat, that isn't a crazy one for Dennett.

2:20 Christopher: Yeah, I think that's part of. I mean, Seth was even talking about selfhood and its being related to linguistic behavior. I think a little bit too when we last left off. And that struck me a little bit because I was the one earlier who was saying we want to be careful here about what we mean by self. Because I agree that qualia is just like a confused term and I kind of hate it. But I almost want to make room for a kind of minimal qualia and I want to make sure that Dennett's okay with that. But I can't tell. Sometimes one of the like, obviously the bat is a.

It's a situated evaluating point of view, like as an organism. Right. It has. It's got boundaries between itself, its environment. It has a feedback loop from taking in senses and acting. When he talks about qualia, he wants to say that he doesn't like that it's constituted by it being ineffable, being private and all these things. And I'm okay with that. But he does also mention he doesn't want to talk about it being subjective. That's one of the criteria he uses as well. And I don't understand that part about why there couldn't still be an agentive point of view that would have been, I mean, selected for early in animal history where in which you have this situated, evaluating point of view and it feels like something to be exhausted, to be in pain.

Does that make sense? Sometimes I feel like he's okay with this and sometimes I feel like he wants nothing to do with it. And I can't tell where. I know I've said this before, but relate that to the bat for me. Dylan, like, he's okay with all that

3:41 Mark: stuff I just said.

3:42 Dylan: So I think he would be the part that 4:47 I think that we get to something like this. He says so before this he's talking about. This is towards the end of the what is it like to be a bat? And he brings up language. This is after the reference to von Uexküll. And you know, and he brings up Wittgenstein. You know, he says, quotes Wittgenstein, if a lion could talk, we could not understand him. I think, on the contrary, that if a lion could talk, that lion would have a mind so different from the general run of lions minds that although we could understand him just fine, we would learn very little about ordinary lions.

4:20 Seth: That made me laugh out loud.

4:22 Dylan: Yeah. And then he goes on, I said, when we imagine what it is like to be a languageless creature. And this, I think, is a really good place to try to be at. Right. Because that's what I think you're sort of getting at, Chris, that even if I can't talk to this creature, even they don't have language, even if they don't even have a way of talking to them themselves, there is a way for them to be that is experienced by them. And so what he says is we start naturally from our own experience, and most of what then springs to mind has to be adjusted mainly downward.

The sort of consciousness such animals enjoy is dramatically truncated compared to ours. A bat, for instance, not only can't wonder whether it's Friday, it can't even wonder whether it's a bat. There's no role for wondering to play in its cognitive structure. While a bat, even like the lowly lobster, has a biological self, it has no selfie self to speak of, no center of narrative gravity, or at most a negligible one. No words on the tip of its tongue, but also no regrets, no complex yearnings, nostalgic reminisces, no grand schemes, no reflections on what it is like to be a cat or even on what it was like to be a bat.

This list of dismissals would be cheap skepticism if we didn't have a positive empirical theory on which to base it. So.

5:37 Christopher: But even that to me feels like you're talking about its metacognitive abilities. Right? Its ability to take itself as an object. I agree. Bats don't do this. There's some animals that do, elephants, apes. But that doesn't imply that it doesn't have a valence point of view, an experience of a center, a sort of nexus of causal powers where in which it's able to act on the world, take in information and be a subjectivity itself. Like, is he okay? Like, I think there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why you would have subjects develop alongside with agency.

6:08 Dylan: Yeah, I don't see him just denying that. In fact, the way you just said it, which is the way in which Tomasello would say it as well, is that that agency is really in sort of collinear with the development of self.

6:24 Christopher: Oh wait. So let me read this. He says here, does this mean that languageless animals are not conscious at all as Descartes insisted? This question always arises as this moment as a sort of incredulous challenge, but we shouldn't feel obliged to answer it. As it stands, notice that it presupposes something we have worked hard to escape. The assumption that consciousness is a special all or nothing property that sunders the universe into two vastly different categories. The things that have it, things like something to be Nagel put it, and things that lack it. It's unclear to me that necessarily splits the world into mental and physical. I don't think there's anything over and above the physical processes that are going on. I just think the physical processes, what it feels like from the inside to be that organizing system is a thing is a real biological phenomenon. That's subjectivity.

7:09 Dylan: Did you think Dennett's denying that?

7:10 Christopher: I don't. I can't. I can't quite tell.

7:13 Mark: Well, he. It is a thing to be explained at least. Sure we claim that we have. But is the claiming the same as the analogy of the center of gravity that we say we don't? So if you're Hume, there is no real self. The self is a construction exactly the way. But it seems like Hume still isn't going to deny the basic Cartesian picture of there are appearances in front of quote unquote me. I don't know what the me is. So Hume just shakes his head like I don't know the me is. I can't say it's a thinking thing. I can't make any of those positive. But there's still the phenomena of stuff is seeming to me that I then have to interpret. And it seems like there is no way for anybody that is at all likes phenomenology, likes introspection, likes the first person point of view. But Dennett seems to think that that is it is data to be explained. It is not itself the scientific image of the world.

8:13 Christopher: Yeah, I don't think it's over and above the physical. I don't want to give it qualia that quality, if you will. I'm okay with it.

8:20 Mark: So there's matter and then there's points of view on the matter. That would be a form of dualism, a property dualism. That's explicitly what Chalmers view is, but

8:29 Christopher: I don't want to have that view is what I'm saying. The mode of being of point of view is perfectly. That's why I want to deny the hard problem. I think that's perfectly explainable and we can give a kind of biological and evolutionary explanation for why agency and subjectivity sort of co evolve together. I think that that's perfectly reasonable to think you could come to that. You could slowly chip away at the problem of why there are subjectivities or why there's felt experience or something like that. Sometimes I think Dennett's okay with this and he's just not talking to me that he's talking to the tradition, understanding qualia again as ineffable and private and not explainable by the physical and all that stuff.

I agree with him when it comes to philosophical zombies, right? That yes, if you had something that was identical, you would get the subjectivity. I don't think it makes any sense to talk about those things. I think you can imagine them as separate, but I don't actually think that makes any sense. But sometimes I think Dennett's saying, well actually there is no phenomenal quality that goes along with the processes as well. It's just the process. And there's no. You are a philosophical zombie. And I don't know how to take that.

9:29 Mark: Sometimes I'm just looking at the term point of view doing a search.

9:34 Christopher: I think he even says qualifies as it but says something about us, we are philosophical zombies. And mind you, he doesn't want to. He purposely says don't take it out of context. But I want to know what he means exactly like that.

9:44 Mark: So chapter five, right? This is the multiple drafts versus the Cartesian theater. Whenever there is a conscious mind, there is a point of view. This is one of the most fundamental ideas we have about minds or about consciousness. A conscious mind is an observer who takes in a limited subset of all the information. For most practical purposes we can consider the point of view of a particular conscious subject to be just that, a point moving through space time. What happens when we try to close in on the observer and try to locate the observer's point of view more precisely as a point within the individual.

So in other words, a point of view is exactly the kind of thing like a self, like the center of gravity. That is a theoretical construction that it is not a fundamental datum given indubitably by experience. Right. For Descartes it is I exist. I am here having these potentially delusionary wrong headed thoughts. But I'M having the thoughts that that is just absolutely central. But then it seems to think that we can eventually get beyond that to say that, yeah, okay, that is part of our, the social baggage that comes with creatures like us and is something that we'll report that we'll say that we have, but it is merely a seeming.

11:01 Seth: Okay, I could be high on the butyrol right now, but I'm floored that it's taken me. I mean, I wouldn't have appreciated this book if I had read it in the 90s.

11:13 Dylan: Yeah, me neither.

11:14 Seth: And I doubt if it was written by anybody other than Dennett. Like if it was written by a young up and coming philosopher, probably would never made the scene because people would. They had to take him seriously. There's something I have been thinking about this very. You guys have heard me talk about self consciousness and consciousness and this I, you know, Chris, you haven't been privy to my march through the history of genocide and you know, trying to explain why human beings are so destructive. And you know that what I've laid on these guys before.

But there's something fundamentally powerful about this idea that then it's pushing, which is that the seeming, the feeling, as if the feeling to me, right, this is essentially a linguistic or a narrative layer that is laid on top of the physical phenomena. So he's not going to deny that there's actual things happening in a bat. But without the bat being capable of creating a narrative that centralizes those things and attributes them to a single continuous entity using memory and imagination and metaphor and all these sorts of things, then what's happening is just the happening of it.

And I think Dennett literally means, yes, stuff is happening, but there's no what it's like to be a bat because there is no bat. There is no abstraction persisting through time to which all of this, there just is no bat.

12:57 Christopher: And but this makes me nervous.

13:00 Seth: Yeah, there's no bat from the bat's perspective. There's a bat from our perspective, but there's no bat from the bat's perspective. And I think he means, he feels like literally that means that there is no contiguous seeming connection because there's just no mechanism for that to actually take place.

13:21 Dylan: There's no what it's like to be a bat from the bat's perspective. That's what you're saying?

13:25 Seth: Yes, there's no what it's like to be a bat. There's us being able to say we can't know what it's like to be a bat. But the reality is the bat doesn't know what it's like to be a bat either. Because from the bat's perspective, there is no what it's like to be a bat.

13:39 Dylan: I would have said it a little bit differently. I would have said that we can of course talk about what it's like to be a bad. But that's a. Has a number of qualifications of the steps away from it that are tied to our own narrative experience about accounting for what it's like to be anything. And so it will always be sort of grounded in our own. And I take what Chris is saying is that there's actually something that I want to point to that I find that is. I take you to be saying that is inaccessible to me from a narrative perspective. That is what it's like to be a bat for itself. That it has its own set of experiences, even if they have no narrative content, even if they have no self awareness of the bat having its own bat experience. And to me, if I go down this route, I would say I have to be able to say exactly the same thing about an atom. Right.

14:35 Christopher: I don't think you need to go as far as Adam personally, but that sounds like panpsychism to me. Is what you're sort of pointing to is that there could be a perspective of anything that has any sort of dynamic activity, but maybe that's not what you're.

14:46 Mark: I have a relevant quote here.

14:48 Dylan: Just.

14:48 Mark: Could I throw this out? This is from considering continuing to just search the phrase point of view in the entire book from the chapter on evolution, which I think we are very much warranted in skipping. This is page 176. He says the point of view of a conscious observer is not identical to, but a sophisticated descendant of the primordial points of view of the first replicators who divided their world into good and bad and in parentheses. After all, even plants have points of view in this primordial sense. So point of view is a metaphor for. I mean, if something has eyes, a bat has eyes, it does have a point of view. And you can ask, can the bat see its prey from its point of view? Like this makes sense.

15:34 Christopher: Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, the way you can look at the development of sponges, the way, I mean, there's all sorts of animals and rudimentary systems that you can point to that are taking in information and then acting on it. And as this gets more complex, I still think. I don't think you get a kind of subjectivity from atoms because they're not sufficiently complex to. Basically there's a new mode of being that occurs when you have action and as a feedback loop with sensing that you wouldn't get from an atom.

16:01 Dylan: So I won't call it panpsychism, but I'll push you a little bit on this. Right. Is that physical? In fact, there's something about this that I think I'm going to have to cop to in general is that all discriminatory activities for senses are made up of fundamentally discriminating differences that exist in the physical world, which come down to differences that exist between atoms and fields and particles and stuff like that. And it's based upon those differences that you have any kind of change, okay, Differences in charges, differences in masses, differences that, that result in there being forces, let's put it that way, that lead to there being changes, changes in arrangement, changes in time, changes of the sorts that, that we would, that are very, very sort of basic.

And that if I say I'm going to imagine what it's like to be an electron and I'm going to go through that, or I'm going to imagine what it's like to be a particle of silver, the normal way I would talk about that is I was understanding as analogical is I am imagining and I'm using that point of view, as Mark put it, as a way to think very carefully about what the interactions are with me. And so when I say I'm going to be an atom of silver, then I am imagining interactions and how, you know, well, I have size, I have this kind of composition, and you start adding up all the different ways in which a silver atom interacts with the world.

And by making it an eye, it's a cognitive trick to be able to allow you to think very specifically and clearly about what is happening to that entity in that time and space. And it's not clear to me how that's different than talking about a bacteria.

17:52 Christopher: Well, it's. The difference would just be what its powers are. And once they get sufficiently complex and coalesce multiple various powers, when you have the elaboration of action, of sensing, the understanding of your own boundary of self, as they build, they sort of build towards a more complex subjectivity and it eventually reaches a threshold where we'd say, oh, that is the kind of subjectivity we're concerned about when we're talking about biology.

18:17 Dylan: So the distinction between living and non living becomes fundamental here as level of organization. I'm not going to quibble with it.

18:25 Christopher: Yeah, 100% there's a certain threshold that's being met.

18:27 Dylan: There's a self moving that is going on in an organized way with a living entity that is distinct from non living matter.

18:37 Christopher: For me it would be a gradualism. Yeah. The subjectivity would get gradually.

18:40 Dylan: Sure.

18:40 Christopher: More and More so. Yeah, 100%. You'd have, between a mantis shrimp and a human, you'd have this. I mean, I think there's still a subjectivity there. I just think it's thin and rudimentary and minimal.

18:50 Dylan: But the weather, which is a complex physiochemical self perpetuating system, doesn't qualify as a living entity the way a single cellular bacteria does. It doesn't. Well, well, no, I'm taking, I am understanding that that would be a bridge too far. The closest you would do is you would say that the earth is somehow an organism, maybe in some way that it's a living thing in this respect. Because the only thing the earth is missing is its own replication. And that might be the linchpin. Right. Of a self moving organism. That the living thing perpetuates itself, it replicates itself. And the weather doesn't do that. And it's a continuous system. It changes, it's dynamic, but it doesn't have a wholeness. And that wholeness is represented by it being able to reproduce itself. That's kind of the thread that I would go along the distinction.

19:47 Mark: This is all very Aristotelian. Can I throw in, can I throw in the snake? Can I add the snake?

19:53 Christopher: Yeah, snake's great.

19:54 Mark: So this is from. I tried to look at some of his articles after this book came out. Right. This is 1991. What are his final views? How did he adjust them? So I have a couple things, but one. So he had a 1994 paper just called Get Real. That is his responses to like 28 different authors who are crapping on his views. And he, he refers to this information from another guy's paper of why can't a snake think of a mouse? It seems a snake does not have a central representation of a mouse but relies solely on transduced information. The snake exploits three different sensory systems in relation to the prey.

A mouse. So to strike it, it uses its visual system or thermal sensors. When struck, the mouse normally does not die immediately, but runs away. To locate the mouse once the prey has been struck, the snake uses its sense of smell. So even if the mouse happens to die right in front of the snake, it will still follow the smell trace of the mouse in order to find it. And then finally, after the mouse has been located. The snake must find its head to swallow it. This could obviously be done with the aid of spell or sight. But in snakes, this process uses only tactile information.

So the snake uses three separate modalities to catch and eat a mouse. Can we talk about the snake? Its what the snake itself has access to or just about what its various parts have access to. Is any of that obviously sufficient for a phenomenal or any other kind of consciousness? What if anything, is it like to be a whole snake?

21:21 Christopher: Yeah, so I have serious problems with this, obviously, which I mentioned.

21:24 Mark: I write this because the whole idea, right, he's arguing that what we take to be a complex system in an eye is a bunch of little discriminating homunculi. So even you as a biological entities are packed full of bacteria and just these systems that are running of their own accord. So you're not one single, there's not one single Aristotelian form, one soul, one organization that is running you. We are all a legion of things. And with a snake, he's saying it's actually quite obvious, like there is a single genetic blueprint for a snake that is somehow makes it reproduce and makes it have this thing.

But in terms of it being a subject at least the idea here is maybe there's something it's like to smell a mouse and there's something it's like to feel the mouse's head and there's something. But there's no single entity, according to this at least that we, you know, we could imagine that there is nothing that it is like to be a whole snake, that these are discriminations that are happening in different parts of the organism. And just like, you know, I, and my digestion and my circulatory system don't all share the same sensory system. I don't have no idea what's going on with my digestion.

You know, then that snake is also multiple and maybe doesn't have the kind of global. Nothing arises to its, its global access that would make Dennett call it conscious.

22:48 Christopher: Yeah, I mean, describing one of its behaviors as having a non integrated information processing going on, where you have like these singular modules that aren't acting in accord, aren't integrating information, doesn't point to there being a lack of self. There could be. I mean we have this stuff like you just pointed out, Mark, in our brain all the time. I mean the split brain patient, there are certain elements that are going to be disconnected, but there could still be a minimal base sense of boundaries of evaluative experience that the animal could have that's much deeper in its evolutionary history.

That's just at a different part of the brain. You don't have to integrate all of your. The information processing for different behaviors to show that you have a singular feeling of self. If it's more minimal, like obviously there. Yeah. So I don't. I don't see why that shows that the snake doesn't have an understanding of itself as a whole just because one of its behaviors doesn't integrate all the information. Again, the split brain. Every patient is the same way. Right. Like there you can set it up experiments where the person's right or left hemisphere, they can't communicate with each other, but one of them will try to like, alert the other through like writing on the back of a hand or something like that.

But you might think that where we get the feeling of being an agent in the world responding to things, it might be at a lower part of the brainstem that's not split apart. And so it's just, it's more basic. So I don't, I don't see what the snake example does for us personally.

24:12 Dylan: I want to go back to what it is, is being denied or what is at issue. So I took most of the book. Dennett is basically making a big argument to deny the hard problem of consciousness and denying or grouping most accounts of consciousness as effectively Cartesian. That they are slightly more sophisticated views of Cartesian dualism that are summarized under the Cartesian theater. And that's basically how he lumps in basically every other kind of or most other kinds of accounts of consciousness, certainly any that would attribute themselves to the hard problem of consciousness.

It's just another form of Cartesian dualism. And I don't know the literature enough to say if there's another alternate. But basically he's grouping all of those in and he's taking a run against that in this book. And then when I get to this section at the end about selves and what we're able to talk about, we're getting into the kinds of things that are precious to us about the Cartesian dualist account of consciousness because it gives us a notion of self that we want to hold on to. And he acknowledges that he wants to deny that. So I'm trying to hear now understand where the problem is in saying that, well, look, a snake or a rat or a cockroach or an elephant are all agentic beings.

They move along in the world. They respond to their environment. They also make choices. They choose to Go after the mouse or not after the mouse or they choose to go towards this food or not towards that food. And there are degrees of being an agent and probably have pointed out to Tomasello more on this podcast than any other author. So that's where I would point to. That account of agency would seem to me to align pretty well with Dennett's account of consciousness. And so. But am I missing something in that alignment?

26:18 Christopher: I want to say that sometimes it sounds like Dennett is denying subjective consciousness. That's what I want to say.

26:23 Dylan: And what is the distinction of subjective consciousness that you're pointing to that is the distinction that makes a difference?

26:29 Christopher: Well, whether or not it makes a

26:31 Dylan: difference, I'm saying in that kind of obnoxious way because I want.

26:34 Christopher: No, no, the pragmatist way. I get it. I totally get it because I'm trying

26:38 Dylan: to understand what it is that I would know that it was making me. Allow me to tell. So this I would point back to the Orwellian versus the Stalinesque point that he makes. And he says that's a distinction that you cannot make a difference about. He doesn't say it exactly that way, but that's what he means is that I cannot tell the difference between those two ways of experiencing the world, of being mistaken about something. So the same thing I would go said that the version of subjective experience, because I feel like he is aligned with subjective experience of certain sorts.

27:14 Christopher: That's the thing is what he's attacking right now is if he would care. Because I agree, I'm not interested in subjective experience when it's talked about being constituted by private ineffable over and above the physical elements. And it's this separate from the processes. I mean, I think it is what it is to be that organism to that system. So I feel like I'm arguing with like a Democrat. We're on the same team. I 99% agree. But there's this little piece I'm not

27:39 Dylan: arguing, I'm trying to understand.

27:40 Mark: No, no, no.

27:41 Christopher: I mean with Dennett. Pardon me, Pardon me. I mean with Dennett I feel like we're on the same team and everything. But sometimes when he talks about when he wants to reduce everything to dispositional properties or dispositional states, it sounds a lot like behaviorism. It sounds like, I mean, we didn't do the Frank Jackson Mary experiment. But it sounds sometimes like he's saying all that it is to experience red, quote unquote, is to be able to discriminate red from non red, to be in that discriminative state.

28:04 Seth: So let me see if this would make you feel a little better about that. So what if, you know, Dennis says, yeah, you're right. I do think that's all there is, is discriminative states. However, subjective experience, the selfhood is this complex of memory and imagination and representation and conceptual, symbolically, representational language and all this that allows me to stitch. Stitch these discriminatory states together and give them descriptions and meaning and color and infuse them with this sort of thing to create the story that is me, the story that is my experience.

And so we still, in a sense, have to kind of understand that. But just trying to use this language that Dennett has of the narrative structure of things and so forth, it's like if we just get away from, you know, okay, fine, you know, and we had this conversation just recently. It wasn't Dennet, it was somebody else. It's, you know, the poverty of the description of perception. You know, the idea that perception is just this raw field of whatever, just the. The amount of complexity that it takes to even just generate the simplest experience, a sound.

Hearing a sound is like a massively complex operation that requires a shit ton of information and all this processing. And none of that is done consciously. None of that is part of the narrative center or anything like that. It's all just like the biological function, right? And then you say, okay, well, that is what it is. And then it really doesn't have any subjective content until it's woven into a bigger narrative or a bigger story. So independently, all of these things are just these discriminatory states. And in anything that can't stitch them together in a story, that's all they remain.

But then in us with language and all that, where we have memory and we have the ability to kind of create this meta narrative, so to speak, of what's actually happening, then we are able to say, like, yeah, so what is it like to be me? That's whatever I tell you it is. That doesn't mean that I can't. You know, they say, what is it like to be a bat? Well, the bat's not gonna tell me. I can imagine what it's like to have the bat's sensory apparatus. I can imagine what it's like to be deprived of my own sight and to have echolocation. I mean, I can't really.

But, you know, that's what we do.

30:22 Christopher: We picture with guardrails. You can imagine.

30:24 Seth: Yeah, but what I can't do is imagine what it would be like to give myself a narrative as a bat?

30:30 Christopher: Yes.

30:30 Dylan: I think you could go pretty far to say, ed, that narrative doesn't exist

30:34 Seth: and I can't even imagine it.

30:37 Christopher: I agree that that narrative is not there. I think that they don't have the metacognitive processing to be able to construct that kind of complex self. I'm just worried that, I mean, this might be attached to animal welfare insofar as we're going to say. I mean, they're obviously not just reflex machines, right? Of course they're not.

30:55 Mark: Right.

30:55 Christopher: They're situated, evaluating points of view, and they're not narrating anything to themselves. But they're plainly not just reflex machines. Right. If I want to know that a fish has a valence and I care about it having that experience, don't you

31:08 Seth: think that Dennett gives a decent response to that at the end of 14, talking about Bentham and the capacity to suffer?

31:14 Christopher: I think he does, yes.

31:16 Mark: But suffering is not. It can't just be a rough feel.

31:20 Christopher: Yes.

31:21 Mark: It has to be embedded in its behavior and its way of seeing the world. So it does seem like you have to have an overall point of view or a fundamental self or something in order to suffer.

31:32 Christopher: Yes. You couldn't get there without this.

31:34 Seth: Okay, so something can suffer, but it can't understand that. That suffering entails the shortening of its lifespan or its inability to achieve its goals of sending its offspring to Beaver Dam College or whatever it is that. Yeah, it's okay to just beat the shit out of it. Anybody who thinks that is a sadist fucking lunatic. Right? So, I mean, Dennett is a big part of what Dennett is saying here in this book is we're afraid to let go of the idea that there is a self of the sort that we need because we're afraid of moral agency. And it sounds. We're afraid of losing the ability to attribute moral judgments to actions like, oh, you're not an agent, you're just the story you tell yourself, whatever.

And that feels to me like the kind of thing that says, you know, like, without God, everything is permitted. And I'm like, that is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard. Now, I've heard a lot of stupid things, so I'm not going to say that I'll call it the third stupidest thing. But the reality of the situation is, and this goes back to Tomasello, and this goes back to a variety of other things is that even things that don't have the narrative capacity to create selves that are Capable that have some that have a complex of sensory apparatus and experience and are capable of suffering, are capable of feeling empathy, are capable of understanding the emotional states of other things of the same species and different species.

Now, they can't necessarily sympathize, meaning they can't represent mentally what's causing the pain in the other thing in order to try and alleviate that suffering or change the circumstances. But empathy is just part of what it is in even the animal kingdom. And that's a strong enough basis for moral agency and accountability and all that. We don't need all the rest of this stuff. So that doesn't scare me. I'm not worried about that particular aspect of it.

33:23 Dylan: I guess I would also go as far as to say that the thing that keeps us from, mostly from not being cruel to each other in the ways that we have been in our historical past. And maybe if you started telling me, well, people are being cruel in this exact way right now. But if I go back and look at the way the Assyrians treated their enemies and their friends, the level of like horrific physical cruelty and violence that we would consider somehow anathema right now, it's the fact that we don't do that or even just slavery from 170 years ago, our objection to that now isn't born out of this kind of. It's an active action of our own judgment that isn't drawn out of or isn't excluded by whether we call themselves or not.

34:16 Christopher: Agreed?

34:16 Seth: Yeah.

34:17 Christopher: I just want to, just to give like a little anecdotal thing. I read a book called the Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka. He's like the leading cognitive expert on bees and some other arthropods as well. And it fundamentally changed the way that I interact with bees. That might sound silly, but I mean, not that I was like going out torturing bees or anything, but I, I just didn't think about it that much. And some of it is just understanding the kind of cognitive, the rich cognitive abilities that they have and what it might be to, for a bee to experience stress, to experience these valence states.

And so when I think about it that way or characterize it that way, I'm just nervous when Dennett uses his language sometimes that it's all just dispositional states to act this way or that way. There isn't an experience of stress, an experience of suffering the deep. I just get nervous that he's not interested in that insofar as it can't a sufficient data point because it's not heterophenomenological because they can't.

35:14 Dylan: Well, it wouldn't it be heterophenomenological in that we would be the ones who would be constructing that internal experience for them.

35:20 Christopher: I see what you're saying, that we're the language provider here for the.

35:24 Dylan: Yeah, we're the language bearer, language providers.

35:26 Christopher: I understand that. But it still feels in some sense like the heterophenomenological sort of attitude that he takes when he, for example, breaks down his own experience of experiencing the branches and listening to the. That that would be non human animals would become a kind of secondary data point insofar as they don't have the ability to be linguistic. And so I just get nervous about the implications for that. But I understand your point that we just end up sort of being a stand in for their lack of linguistic ability insofar as we characterize what based on our own understanding of their neural architecture, their behavior, blah, blah, blah, because. Yeah, so that makes sense to me. But I didn't think about it like that, to be quite honest.

36:03 Dylan: I mean, I had a friend who also stopped eating octopus after they watched a show about octopi. Right. And that distinction, I think in the relationship that you might have, what you recognize this goes into to me would be the relationship that we have as individuals and communities to certain kinds of animals would go directly to the way in which we choose to treat them or not treat them.

36:24 Christopher: Right.

36:25 Dylan: You know, my relationship with mice is such that as long as they stay outside my house, I don't care. But if they come inside my house, I kill them. And that's just my relationship with them. Now, I would not do that to a dog who wandered into my house. I would have a different relationship with that dog. And the same thing, you know, like the distinction between the moths that come in my house. Actually, sometimes I catch the moth because it's convenient and I throw it outside. But I think that we make those kinds of moral distinctions in very understandable ways about.

And maybe it's hard for us to recognize the fact that things that are closer to us matter more to us and we'll defend them more. They'll have a higher moral meaning to us. This is. What's the altruistic guy that Peter Singer? Peter Singer. He would say that I'm a total moral reprobate for saying something like that. But that's true. And the same thing's true for the animals, you know, that we interact with and how we identify with. Maybe as a category.

37:20 Christopher: It doesn't, I guess I just feel like their valence experience is a potential anchor for us caring about them as moral agents in some sense. And I don't think Dennett necessarily died.

37:30 Mark: This is not where I expected this conversation to end up, but.

37:32 Christopher: Sorry, sorry.

37:33 Mark: I think it's a fine place to, you know, what is the humanistic upshot of all this? Because on the one hand I really like the metaphor of everybody is a world. This is like Levinas, you know, everybody's a whole world. And so it's, you know, to murder somebody is the worst possible thing. But I also know, you know, I think this is a defined moral fiction. I think it's something we should operate under. But I don't even given that I don't know how to apply it to animals because if they have. I think this is what Chris is putting it, you know, a subjective sphere, maybe it's much dumber, you know, it's much thinner in some ways.

But they still have access to so much richness and just, just the fact that they are a point of view. Should we have inherent respect for that? But then how far down does it go? Probably all the way down that a beetle does not have anything more sophisticated than a thermostat does. And I don't give a shit about how many beetles I step on. That is at least somewhere where I draw the line. And I think he brings this up like that. A snake, due to its internal divisions, there is probably nothing it is like to be a snake. I don't care how many snakes I kill.

I feel like there are so many like between the warm blooded and the cold blooded animals. That is a cutoff for me and it doesn't.

38:54 Seth: That's because you're a horrible person.

38:55 Christopher: I think that's wrong. Yeah, I think I get what you mean. Yeah, I think that's the wrong view.

38:59 Mark: I think iguanas, I think that whole like Florida has too many iguanas and we encourage you to go out and brain them. I think that is totally fine and humane. Whereas with bunnies I would not like that.

39:11 Seth: I think this leads to. There's an aspect of. Again, something I didn't take detailed notes on, but I remember distinctly. But I could be mistaken because we all know how memory works. After reading chapters one and five, obviously these types of motivations or feelings are evolutionarily developed. And so it makes perfect sense that we would feel differently about animals that have been domesticated over tens of thousands of years versus wild animals and reptiles. Primates feeling that way about reptiles and you know, Various sorts of other things.

Now, I could make a joke here about Chris and I being evolved in the sense that Dylan was talking about, that we've moved beyond this, you know, since we've transcended. We've transcended in you guys being stuck in your hominid ways. But I think that when Dennett is talking about suffering as the basis for. And I'm not going to talk about suffering, but he says he talks about the woman whose name was. It's worth a mention, page 451, if anybody happens to be on there. So, anyway, I'll just read this. Suffering by the emotional mind is revealed by animals that have enough of a rational mind to be able to do something about the conditions that make them suffer.

And she says it's likely that organisms without the capacity to do anything, to remove themselves from the source of danger would not evolve the capacity to suffer. There would be no evolutionary point in a tree which was having its branches cut off, having the capacity to suffer in silence. So Dawkins was talking about the color. The idea that color, the ability to distinguish colors in the way in which we distinguish colors, is an evolutionary trait that essentially part of the consequence of there not being colors, quote, unquote, out there in the things, is we have evolved the ability to discriminate colors in nature because that serves some evolutionary purpose, perhaps identifying food, perhaps identifying threats, dangers, whatever, and probably various other sorts of motivations.

And so it's not. It's absolutely responsible and useful to take an evolutionary approach to if our cognitive abilities and our perceptual abilities developed evolutionarily in response to the environment and other species did as well in the ways that they did. Right. It is perfectly natural then to say that the narrative center of gravity, which is an evolutionary trait that we have, serves some kind of purpose. Did or does, I don't know. But that we can treat it as a phenomenon in exactly the same way we talk about the ability to distinguish colors.

You know, a forked tongue, what have you, that it serves some kind of purpose and that there's nothing mystical or special about it with respect to a demarcation line between us and other species. It's just simply another evolutionary advantage. And as Chris pointed out and we talked about earlier, if it's on a continuum because there have been other hominids, we Homo sapiens won, but there were, there's what, about 15 or 16 different homo something species. Right. You know, that they just didn't win out because of whatever reason. And we know that dolphins have the ability to work collaboratively to achieve goals.

And they have a lang. They have aspects of language. Right. It's clear that this capability is latent, at least. Or perhaps some form of this capability is latent in other species. So starting to think about it. And as a phenomenon like that, instead of some kind of transcendental, mystical thing that gives us a status, you know, like we have opposable thumbs and we are able to. It seems to us like there's something that it's like to be us. Okay, now let's figure that out. Let's talk about it. But let's not raise it to some kind of exalted status that it doesn't belong and then start patting ourselves on the back because of it.

43:17 Dylan: Yeah, I guess you're articulating something, Seth, that I just feel very similar about. Is that understanding the self as a narrative center of gravity and being able to talk about what it's like to be that entity, what it's like to be me or any other entity without invoking it, being having some transcendent quality to it. It doesn't lose any of the moral or singular entity aspects to me. So this is where I get back to, you know, what is the thing that I'm. What is this distinction that makes a difference here when it feels like actually I get everything I need and more.

In fact, understanding myself or my dog as a complex that moves through time that is constantly interacting and changing actually explains a lot more. More about our capabilities to change as well as the constraints on our ability to become different kinds of people. I think it actually enables you to have something like a transformational experience and be the same person, but a different person. Dennett's account makes that possible in a way that. In a natural way that I think it's just. I've not heard anything that explains. Provides the force to make that even possible.

So to me, it opens things up. It makes us more. It makes us and all entities that are imbued with souls where here a soul is a center of gravity, which I'm just happy to use that word in this context because I don't have to have it be something that is the part of me that is left over when I die. Right. Is. That is a fantastic thing.

45:02 Christopher: Yeah, I guess we're. I'll close my thoughts. I am 99% on board. I don't think I'm down with dissolving the Cartesian theater. Confused attitudes about qualia being over and above the physical or somehow a special ingredient that can't be Accounted for by the. All that stuff I'm on board for. I just. As I've reiterated before in the conversation, I wish I could just text Daniel and ask him for some clarifying questions just about whether he's okay with. With a subjectivity that has evaluative properties that through developing different abilities of understanding itself as a boundary feedback loops with its environment in action and how those coalesce to produce, I guess the seemings that are phenomenal consciousness and why we wouldn't.

If he's okay with talking about those things divorced of Cartesian theater ideas, ineffable, private, metaphysical. Like if we can just cut all of that off, can we still talk about a minimal thin qualia if we just mean felt experience? I want to know if that's okay with him. I guess so.

46:10 Mark: I looked at so many of his subsequent articles that I don't even remember where this came from. But you know, we started talking about pain at the beginning and somewhere he does talk about pain specifically and just asks what is it about pain? What is its functional relationship to everything else? And if you took all these things like part of, you know, you care about pain, you want to avoid pain. So if you took the caring and wanting to avoid pain away and you took everything out and you were only left with the feel of pain, there's nothing left. Like the fact that you don't like pain is part of what makes it pain.

46:48 Christopher: That's the philosophical zombie case. You say you take everything else away except leave felt pain. You can't do that because you've taken away. Because the feeling of pain is just what it is to. To have all of those neuronal activity.

46:58 Mark: Yes, exactly. So that is his whole point. I read a bunch more of him talking about how what a ridiculous idea. He thinks philosophical zombies are right. The idea that you have all the same reactions, you not only pass the Turing test, but you have all the same even inner relations. So you know the entirely the same biology. But yet maybe you could not have consciousness. You could have it. Maybe the light could be on or the light could be off. He just thinks this is absolutely ridiculous, such that he has even trouble explaining this to scientists.

And Dylan, being a scientist, I can see why he would have trouble with this. But this is something that a number of philosophers. So you know, Dennett compares it to philosophers asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. He thinks it is that stupid a debate of whether and even Chalmers will say, well, in this world the mental is supervenient on the Physical. So if you change anything physical, you will change something in the mental. Or you can't simply take. So there can be no zombies in this world, but in all possible worlds. So we're getting into this whole Putnam Kripke, you know, we've given these examples of when you bring in possible world semantics that is there a law like connection?

This was what we were talking about in the Davidson between the mental and the physical, right. This is just stuff that Dennett has no patience for. So in that we're really talking about a kind of philosophy that really takes science seriously versus one that takes itself to be the arbiter of science. Those scientists are just, they're fiddling with mechanics and they don't understand the conceptual logical layers upon which you know. So that's where somebody like Davidson or most of these Chalmers and most of these other folks are going to come in.

I mean the absolutely insane book that we read by Chalmers where he considers mental facts and physical facts to just be different kinds of fundamental stuff and ne' er the twain shall meet because for the very conceptual reasons that we've talked about as recently as the Davidson episode, right this, the logic of mental talk where I can have motivations and reasons that get me to do something is different than the logic of physical talk which is all about strict causal law, connections between things. So that is hard to deny. But the question is, does that then drive you to something like Chalmers view of property dualism that like.

No, the mental and physical are just different ways of talking about things or are we driven to, you know, Dennett where okay, the, the mental. Yeah, it's a different way of talking because it is a cultural construction that is, it's not like a just. It's just a different point of view on the physical. Like he's not Spinoza, Dennett is not Spinoza, that if you can have this mental talk and we can do the kind of stuff we do. Like why did you do that? Well, because I had this belief in this desire and stuff and that's. That language game is fine.

But don't think you're doing science when you're doing that you are. Again, we really need to read Sellars, one of Dennett's primary about the scientific image that we have the folk psychology, we have the scientific image and he's interested in doing science and he doesn't think that that will make it. So you can't also do ethics or you can't value the subjectivity of animals or any of this stuff. He just thinks that It's a different. It's almost irrelevant, like, so he brings these things up in his book only to say, to sort of psychoanalyze his potential adversaries.

Oh, you don't want to explain consciousness because you think consciousness is magic. And if we dispel the magic, then we'll all just treat each other like sacks of meat. Well, that's a pretty irrational overreaction, maybe. You know, and they're not the most sympathetic parts of the book because he doesn't care about his interlocutors, except insofar as you know. Would you just stop talking about things that are irrelevant of what I'm trying to do? All right, we gotta wrap this up. Thanks, everybody. I'm sure we'll talk more in this area and.

And we'd love to see you again, Chris. Next time we have an episode on Mind brain identity, reading two papers from the 50s by UT Place and JJC Smart. Let us know what you want us to cover, whether in this area or any other area. Pl. Partialexaminedlife.com or you can come onto the blog post associated with this episode@partiallyexaminedlife.com or reach out via Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, LinkedIn. Whatever. Good night, everybody.

51:29 Seth: Good night.

51:29 Christopher: Good night, guys.