Dennett's Rejection of Qualia and the Self

One speaker introduces Ned Block's distinction between access consciousness, where information is available to drive behavior and report, and phenomenal consciousness, the further quality of experience. The group debates whether Dennett's multiple drafts model, which treats consciousness as information becoming globally accessible, captures anything beyond access consciousness.

One speaker explains that Dennett traces qualia back to Locke's distinction between primary qualities like size and shape and secondary qualities like color, located in subjective experience rather than in objects. Dennett argues that once the various names philosophers use for qualia are stripped away, the notion depends on a Cartesian theater he has already rejected.

Dennett argues, as reconstructed by the group, that comparing colors, whether side by side or in the mind's eye, is functionally the same kind of discrimination a sensor could perform. One speaker presses the others to name a feature of color experience not captured by discrimination, comparison, memory, or verbal report, and none is supplied, though one speaker insists this does not resolve the question.

One speaker worries that Dennett's talk of dispositional and discriminatory states sounds like behaviorism, denying anything it is like from the inside beyond how a creature is disposed to react. That speaker agrees the hard problem does not exist but is nervous that no room is left for a felt quality of experience, for instance what it is like to be a bat or a fish.

The group presents Dennett's view that the self is not a witness or homunculus but an abstraction, comparable to a center of gravity, that organizes and explains behavior without being a literal thing. Only a creature with sufficient narrative and linguistic capacity can construct such a self, which is why Dennett denies that cockroaches have one.

One speaker raises the worry that Dennett's position looks self-contradictory if it denies that anything seems any way at all, since a seeming with no content is not a coherent denial. Others argue Dennett is not denying seemings as such but denying that a seeming requires an inner mental screen, so that seeming pink just is a certain discriminatory or judgmental activity.

One speaker runs a real time demonstration, asking another to glance at a blue object and report its color, to test whether ordinary color perception involves comparing the object to a remembered swatch or simply issuing a judgment that it is blue. The group uses this to probe whether seeming requires anything beyond direct discrimination, with one speaker resisting the setup and another concluding that qualia claims add nothing discrimination plus judgment does not already capture.

Turning to chapter 14, the group discusses Dennett's claim that although we cannot become a bat, we can know a great deal about bat consciousness through researchable facts about its perceptual and behavioral systems, using the analogy of recovering what it was like to hear Bach's cantatas in Leipzig. Dennett flatly denies Nagel's claim that no amount of third-person knowledge could tell us what it is like to be a bat, arguing that whatever remains inaccessible is a distinction that makes no difference.

Part of the group works through Dennett's color discrimination argument as adequate to explain color experience, while one speaker worries that color may be a poorly chosen example and proposes pain, mental exhaustion, or valence states as better tests of what qualia advocates mean by felt experience.

Some speakers maintain that Dennett accepts that there are seemings and only denies that seeming requires a Cartesian mental screen, so that seeming just is a form of discriminatory activity from a first person vantage point. Others push back that this reading is hard to square with passages where Dennett appears to deny that there is any picturing or mental space at all, leaving the group visibly unresolved.

The group presents Dennett's flat denial of Nagel's claim that no amount of third-person knowledge could reveal what it is like to be a bat, arguing that whatever remains beyond third-person facts is a distinction without a difference. One speaker voices sympathy for the opposing intuition, associated with Nagel, Block, and Chalmers, that firsthand echolocation experience could never be captured this way no matter how much third-person data one has.