Simply because we lack direct access to PAST qualia (because of possible memory fallibility) does not mean we lack direct access to the felt experience, or qualia, of the PRESENT. Similarly, we may not know HOW our qualia have changed (whether like Chase or Sanborn), but we can still be certain that they have indeed changed. Understanding the qualia's physical, causal correlates in the brain, taste buds, retina, etc. and which of these correlates change IS NOT required to have access to the qualia itself.
These are interesting arguments, but I don't find them at all convincing. The first two arguments only show that we don't have direct access to or incorrigible knowledge of qualia that we experienced in the past. This doesn't seem to have any bearing on any conception of qualia that I've ever heard of. No one thinks we have direct access to qualia that we are no longer experiencing - we can only access those through memory, which everyone knows is fallible. At any given moment, we only have direct access to the qualia that we are experiencing at that moment, and Dennet's argument that we can't reliably compare these qualia to ones we've had in the past doesn't seem to undermine this direct access at all. The second argument shows that we don't always experience the same qualia after drinking beer, but I don't see how this is supposed to prove that qualia themselves change or are relational. All it shows is that "the qualia you experience when drinking beer" doesn't refer to the same thing in every situation, which is completely commonplace and doesn't disprove the reality of anything.
Dennett does not take into account that our qualia are part of an integrated system. If your taste of beer changes, it simply means that your neural activity is now accessing a different set of qualia. So the fact that the taste changed did not change the fundamental nature of that qualia just which one is being accessed. He also does not consider that qualia can "blend". E.g. Blueness and Redness can blend into an emergent experience of Purpleness. Getting back to the taste of beer it means that the taste is a collection of qualia, not just one, which gives us a range of different possibilities in terms of experience. He also does not take into account that qualia can be experienced in different magnitudes. E.g. from feeling mild pain to severe pain. So within the collection of qualia making up the taste of beer, you would have even more variability as the intensity of the different blended qualia shifts due to you state of mind. It's not a rigid, on/off, super simplistic system, child-toy system as Dennett makes out.
But the point is that you wouldn't be able to tell if the qualia being accessed were different or if your disposition toward the same qualia had changed. Indeed, at any given moment we wouldn't be able to tell if a qualia were new or different or if the issue as one of memory or a new attitude toward the very same qualia. It is better to admit that all that exists is the verbal and conceptual behavior we exhibit that employs intuitions about this supposed qualia as an inarticulate concept that just substitutes for our lack of physical understanding of what is going on. That I am 100% convinced that I experience qualia doesn't make it true. I could be just an unshakable fantasy or intuition....after all one could in principle program a robot to insist and defend its own inner life to the point of writing poetry about it and saying all the same things we do. Personally if an articulate intelligent robot insists it feels pain and and begs me to not hurt it, I will avoid doing so and I don't need a theory of qualia for that. The robot cares and this is a behavioral fact. Any, I read Dennett's book Consciousness Explained 3 times before changing my mind. I had all the objections you do and that Chalmers has. But there was a flip one day.
@@jefflee4001 You're missing the point, just because a person's taste changes doesn't mean that they can't taste anymore. They still have the underlying capacity to taste things even if they have a different input compared to everyone else. Our ability to see, hear and taste doesn't come out of nowhere. We integrate various different senses via sensory organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, nociceptors and mechanoreceptors etc.) which then send signals to the CNS which are then integrated further to give us the experience you and me are having now.
Dennett got everything so wrong I don´t understand how this article became famous. It was painful for me to read how he thinks qualia doesn´t exist for reasons like not being able to have perfect memory via direct access, duh. Thanks for the video! louder volume would be awesome.
The implicit idea underlying Dennett's argument is that if you can't make empirically verifiable statements about a thing, then that thing must not exist. He is begging the question. If qualia are indeed private, ineffable, etc., then it shouldn't be expected that we can make empirically verifiable statements about them.
@@Sam-hh3ry Yes, I agree with both of you. His thought experiments all invoke memory of experiences, in order to compare past with present qualia. Our inability to reliably compare qualia across time, however, tells nothing about the qualia we experience at any one time. It just tells us that we have no way of checking whether our memory of past experiences is dependable. I think a rather more compelling argument would be that we can be deceived by optical illusions. A familiar one is the Rubik's cube portrayed under different lighting conditions. A square that looks bright orange in one image looks deep brown in the other, even though the same colour is used to show each. Therefore, it seems that we are unable at any one time to decide which sort of quale the square is producing. Indeed, are we actually experiencing two distinct qualia, or are we just misjudging the one we experience in both images? In this case, the reliability of our quale-identification, rather than our memory, is called into question. Again, though, I can see no reason therefore to reject the existence of specific qualia. Our comparative judgement is impossible to verify, but we still experience qualia.
I'm struggling to wrap my head around Dennett's arguments. Our inability to adequately explain the nature of qualia in meaningful first-person language doesn't mean that we should eliminate qualia from our theories of the human mind, or that qualia does not exist in any way. The contents of consciousness are clearly present in a way that is distinguishable from a state of unconsciousness, whether or not we can successfully communicate anything meaningful about those contents. This just seems so obvious from introspection that I cannot see how it could possibly be false. Someday I hope to understand Dennett's illusionism.
I fought against Dennett in my own mind for years sometimes quite irritated or angry with Dennett. But I kept reading and thinking. He finally won me over. By the way, Jackson himself has essentially crossed over to Dennett's side on this.
Good for you, I guess. Jackson thought epiphenomenalism was the only viable option given his other physicalist commitments. Of course epiphenomenalism doesn’t work.
I read his book in 1991 it was astonishing his arguments were extraordinary and counter intuitive but I'm now in the eliminative materialist camp though it seems incredible to many I enjoy listening to him lecture he's a very much a sophisticated thinker 😊
@@danbreeden8738 I’ve read his stuff and contended with his arguments. I don’t think he’s right at all. Others in this comment section have pointed out why.
I think the problem of understanding consciousness is semantics. There are things that we perceive that are not necessarily in our immediate ‘consciousness’. The word itself is confounding. Multiple elements are necessary to understand the thing we finally call consciousness. First is perception. This gives us the raw evidentiary data (not unique to us). Next is the fundamental mental activity of naming or classification of all this sensory input (not unique but rare). We do this ‘subconsciously’ and while dreaming. Next introduce the concept of imaginative memory, the process of integration by way of creative narrative development (the difference maker). We have the ability to remember sensory input and then creatively manipulate it into the narratives we perceive as real time awareness.
Dennett is expecting too much from things that have qualia. If you take the role of the surgeon and mess around with someone else's qualia by injecting them with a series of new mystery drugs, you could observe a change in their outward behaviour, but you could never have any idea of their internal private experience unless you took the same drugs yourself and had comparable physiologies.
I believe that the 'inner private experience' is Shallow. There is nothing about it from one person to another that could be different. This is based on a relativistic view of what mind is and further it is based on us all living in the same world. For the most part. My pink quale is the same as yours assuming we both have the standard visual receptors.
@@AnswersInAtheism For me, what makes it 'private' is that two people can agree that they are having the same experience, but there's still no way to observationally confirm that. It's still a matter of inference or analogy. For most humans, we can reasonably say that it would be the same, but then you have things like the black and blue dress or wildly varying experiences on psychedelics that really shake up that view.
@@AnswersInAtheism We generally ignore outliers, but I think it's the very spaces in between 'things' which are the most insightful. Psychedelics could be interpreted either way imo.
~ 25:30 - I'm not sure why this shows that qualia aren't private. The outside help would be investigating your memories and visual system wiring but couldn't your qualia detector be separate from those? Therefore, figuring out the cause of your strange experiences could be a combination of the knowledge given to you by the outside helper and your private qualia of your experiences of the world. Or maybe I'm not understanding it properly...
But when you drink beer you do not experience the qualia "beerness" but you experience a qualia that you experience when drinking beer which changes according to your history. You might at some point taste something which tastes exactly like the first beer you drank, this is the same qualia but it is not related to a specific object.
How can they be well-ordered bijective functions (perceiving subject object, and even subject subject) if they're subjective and different for everyone? Chances for this well-ordering are 0. Well-ordering is required or else there would be multiple or missing sensations for certain stimuli - or very odd cross-sensations. Or one person describing a sensation would represent an entirely different sensation for someone else. Using colours in painting wouldn't work. Therefore every person who can physiologically perceive red, perceives the same red. Your red is my red, and your pepper taste is my pepper taste by virtue of using the same physiological mechanisms and the same brains to evaluate those signals (except in the presence of deformities or injury, etc.)
he seems to try and designate empirically induced categories contingent on time to an inherently a priori state both spontaneous and immediate and potentially incongruous with time.
So when the eliminative materialist formulation or explanation is complete, we will no longer need the ontological category which is occupied by qualia? So when can we expect that to happen? I have an idea, how about NEVER. What Dennett is putting forth as his "Quining" is actually more like whining. That is, Dennett is whining about the inescapable fact that qualia do not fit into his eliminative materialist ontology. So he reasons, that because he can't account for them, nobody else has a rational foundation to find the concept of qualia to be a useful category of ontological "reality". Lame, lame, lame and unconvincing nonsense Mr. Dennett
17:10 Dennett always appeals to intuition to make arguments. “This wine machine doesn’t have qualia does it? Of course not! That’s ridiculous!” This is not open minded at all, and immediately closes off an entire line of inquiry.
#3 at 12 minutes...He is saying I believe in experiential content but not qualia. Qualia = experiential content! Its all a semantic game. He redefines terms. There is a great joke that illustrates the absurdity of Dennett's position. Dennett does not believe in first person narratives. He wakes up in bed with his wife and asks her, " It was good for you, was it good for me?" OK lets temporarily assume with Dennett that pain is and only is C fibers firing. There are tortures that do not cause any physical damage. But if Dennett is correct, they do not exist. OK, so I ask Dennett if I can torture him in that way. If he is consistent in his beliefs since he thinks such tortures are a myth he should not object. Obviously he would strongly object! Therefore Dennett contradicts himself and so therefore cannot be correct! His quining qualia argument is pointless 1. Qualia are defined as ineffable. 2. Nothing ineffable can exist.3. Therefore qualia cannot exist. He never proves 2!
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Excellent! Thank you!
(louder volume next time please)
Simply because we lack direct access to PAST qualia (because of possible memory fallibility) does not mean we lack direct access to the felt experience, or qualia, of the PRESENT. Similarly, we may not know HOW our qualia have changed (whether like Chase or Sanborn), but we can still be certain that they have indeed changed. Understanding the qualia's physical, causal correlates in the brain, taste buds, retina, etc. and which of these correlates change IS NOT required to have access to the qualia itself.
These are interesting arguments, but I don't find them at all convincing. The first two arguments only show that we don't have direct access to or incorrigible knowledge of qualia that we experienced in the past. This doesn't seem to have any bearing on any conception of qualia that I've ever heard of. No one thinks we have direct access to qualia that we are no longer experiencing - we can only access those through memory, which everyone knows is fallible. At any given moment, we only have direct access to the qualia that we are experiencing at that moment, and Dennet's argument that we can't reliably compare these qualia to ones we've had in the past doesn't seem to undermine this direct access at all.
The second argument shows that we don't always experience the same qualia after drinking beer, but I don't see how this is supposed to prove that qualia themselves change or are relational. All it shows is that "the qualia you experience when drinking beer" doesn't refer to the same thing in every situation, which is completely commonplace and doesn't disprove the reality of anything.
Turns out that neuroscience is proving Dennett's argument more precisely accurate than anyone else's.
@@deanwurm7655 What neuroscientific evidence are you referring to?
Dennett does not take into account that our qualia are part of an integrated system.
If your taste of beer changes, it simply means that your neural activity is now accessing a different set of qualia. So the fact that the taste changed did not change the fundamental nature of that qualia just which one is being accessed.
He also does not consider that qualia can "blend". E.g. Blueness and Redness can blend into an emergent experience of Purpleness.
Getting back to the taste of beer it means that the taste is a collection of qualia, not just one, which gives us a range of different possibilities in terms of experience.
He also does not take into account that qualia can be experienced in different magnitudes. E.g. from feeling mild pain to severe pain.
So within the collection of qualia making up the taste of beer, you would have even more variability as the intensity of the different blended qualia shifts due to you state of mind.
It's not a rigid, on/off, super simplistic system, child-toy system as Dennett makes out.
But the point is that you wouldn't be able to tell if the qualia being accessed were different or if your disposition toward the same qualia had changed. Indeed, at any given moment we wouldn't be able to tell if a qualia were new or different or if the issue as one of memory or a new attitude toward the very same qualia. It is better to admit that all that exists is the verbal and conceptual behavior we exhibit that employs intuitions about this supposed qualia as an inarticulate concept that just substitutes for our lack of physical understanding of what is going on. That I am 100% convinced that I experience qualia doesn't make it true. I could be just an unshakable fantasy or intuition....after all one could in principle program a robot to insist and defend its own inner life to the point of writing poetry about it and saying all the same things we do. Personally if an articulate intelligent robot insists it feels pain and and begs me to not hurt it, I will avoid doing so and I don't need a theory of qualia for that. The robot cares and this is a behavioral fact.
Any, I read Dennett's book Consciousness Explained 3 times before changing my mind. I had all the objections you do and that Chalmers has. But there was a flip one day.
@@jefflee4001 You're missing the point, just because a person's taste changes doesn't mean that they can't taste anymore. They still have the underlying capacity to taste things even if they have a different input compared to everyone else.
Our ability to see, hear and taste doesn't come out of nowhere. We integrate various different senses via sensory organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, nociceptors and mechanoreceptors etc.) which then send signals to the CNS which are then integrated further to give us the experience you and me are having now.
Dennett got everything so wrong I don´t understand how this article became famous. It was painful for me to read how he thinks qualia doesn´t exist for reasons like not being able to have perfect memory via direct access, duh. Thanks for the video! louder volume would be awesome.
The implicit idea underlying Dennett's argument is that if you can't make empirically verifiable statements about a thing, then that thing must not exist. He is begging the question. If qualia are indeed private, ineffable, etc., then it shouldn't be expected that we can make empirically verifiable statements about them.
@@Sam-hh3ry Yes, I agree with both of you. His thought experiments all invoke memory of experiences, in order to compare past with present qualia. Our inability to reliably compare qualia across time, however, tells nothing about the qualia we experience at any one time. It just tells us that we have no way of checking whether our memory of past experiences is dependable.
I think a rather more compelling argument would be that we can be deceived by optical illusions. A familiar one is the Rubik's cube portrayed under different lighting conditions. A square that looks bright orange in one image looks deep brown in the other, even though the same colour is used to show each. Therefore, it seems that we are unable at any one time to decide which sort of quale the square is producing. Indeed, are we actually experiencing two distinct qualia, or are we just misjudging the one we experience in both images? In this case, the reliability of our quale-identification, rather than our memory, is called into question. Again, though, I can see no reason therefore to reject the existence of specific qualia. Our comparative judgement is impossible to verify, but we still experience qualia.
What Dennett proves is that he didn't understand concept of qualia
Volume is appalling - sorry to say
I'm struggling to wrap my head around Dennett's arguments. Our inability to adequately explain the nature of qualia in meaningful first-person language doesn't mean that we should eliminate qualia from our theories of the human mind, or that qualia does not exist in any way. The contents of consciousness are clearly present in a way that is distinguishable from a state of unconsciousness, whether or not we can successfully communicate anything meaningful about those contents. This just seems so obvious from introspection that I cannot see how it could possibly be false. Someday I hope to understand Dennett's illusionism.
I fought against Dennett in my own mind for years sometimes quite irritated or angry with Dennett. But I kept reading and thinking. He finally won me over. By the way, Jackson himself has essentially crossed over to Dennett's side on this.
Good for you, I guess.
Jackson thought epiphenomenalism was the only viable option given his other physicalist commitments. Of course epiphenomenalism doesn’t work.
I read his book in 1991 it was astonishing his arguments were extraordinary and counter intuitive but I'm now in the eliminative materialist camp though it seems incredible to many I enjoy listening to him lecture he's a very much a sophisticated thinker 😊
@@danbreeden8738 I’ve read his stuff and contended with his arguments. I don’t think he’s right at all. Others in this comment section have pointed out why.
I think the problem of understanding consciousness is semantics. There are things that we perceive that are not necessarily in our immediate ‘consciousness’. The word itself is confounding. Multiple elements are necessary to understand the thing we finally call consciousness. First is perception. This gives us the raw evidentiary data (not unique to us). Next is the fundamental mental activity of naming or classification of all this sensory input (not unique but rare). We do this ‘subconsciously’ and while dreaming. Next introduce the concept of imaginative memory, the process of integration by way of creative narrative development (the difference maker). We have the ability to remember sensory input and then creatively manipulate it into the narratives we perceive as real time awareness.
Oooh comments please open the comment section on all your videos thanks.
Great lectures BTW.
Can't hear what's being said
Dennett is expecting too much from things that have qualia. If you take the role of the surgeon and mess around with someone else's qualia by injecting them with a series of new mystery drugs, you could observe a change in their outward behaviour, but you could never have any idea of their internal private experience unless you took the same drugs yourself and had comparable physiologies.
I believe that the 'inner private experience' is Shallow. There is nothing about it from one person to another that could be different. This is based on a relativistic view of what mind is and further it is based on us all living in the same world. For the most part. My pink quale is the same as yours assuming we both have the standard visual receptors.
@@AnswersInAtheism For me, what makes it 'private' is that two people can agree that they are having the same experience, but there's still no way to observationally confirm that. It's still a matter of inference or analogy. For most humans, we can reasonably say that it would be the same, but then you have things like the black and blue dress or wildly varying experiences on psychedelics that really shake up that view.
@@Ndo01 The dress is an interesting outlier. Psychedelic experiences do not surprise me though. They in fact confirm for me that it is all physical.
@@AnswersInAtheism We generally ignore outliers, but I think it's the very spaces in between 'things' which are the most insightful. Psychedelics could be interpreted either way imo.
~ 25:30 - I'm not sure why this shows that qualia aren't private. The outside help would be investigating your memories and visual system wiring but couldn't your qualia detector be separate from those? Therefore, figuring out the cause of your strange experiences could be a combination of the knowledge given to you by the outside helper and your private qualia of your experiences of the world. Or maybe I'm not understanding it properly...
But when you drink beer you do not experience the qualia "beerness" but you experience a qualia that you experience when drinking beer which changes according to your history. You might at some point taste something which tastes exactly like the first beer you drank, this is the same qualia but it is not related to a specific object.
Sound is too low for my hearing deficit to be able to understand.
sound really sucks! cant watch this.. good paper though!! ;D
How can they be well-ordered bijective functions (perceiving subject object, and even subject subject) if they're subjective and different for everyone? Chances for this well-ordering are 0. Well-ordering is required or else there would be multiple or missing sensations for certain stimuli - or very odd cross-sensations. Or one person describing a sensation would represent an entirely different sensation for someone else. Using colours in painting wouldn't work. Therefore every person who can physiologically perceive red, perceives the same red. Your red is my red, and your pepper taste is my pepper taste by virtue of using the same physiological mechanisms and the same brains to evaluate those signals (except in the presence of deformities or injury, etc.)
he seems to try and designate empirically induced categories contingent on time to an inherently a priori state both spontaneous and immediate and potentially incongruous with time.
Your schedule link seems to be broken.
Thank you! Very helpful.
So when the eliminative materialist formulation or explanation is complete, we will no longer need the ontological category which is occupied by qualia? So when can we expect that to happen? I have an idea, how about NEVER.
What Dennett is putting forth as his "Quining" is actually more like whining. That is, Dennett is whining about the inescapable fact that qualia do not fit into his eliminative materialist ontology. So he reasons, that because he can't account for them, nobody else has a rational foundation to find the concept of qualia to be a useful category of ontological "reality". Lame, lame, lame and unconvincing nonsense Mr. Dennett
I__can’t__hear__you__!
17:10 Dennett always appeals to intuition to make arguments. “This wine machine doesn’t have qualia does it? Of course not! That’s ridiculous!” This is not open minded at all, and immediately closes off an entire line of inquiry.
Of course, Dennett wasn't saying that. He was pretending to be a qualophile during his "steelman argument".
why not open the mind a little bit more and let all the supernatural absurdities in?
most things which are labeled as open minded are nonsense.
#3 at 12 minutes...He is saying I believe in experiential content but not qualia. Qualia = experiential content! Its all a semantic game. He redefines terms. There is a great joke that illustrates the absurdity of Dennett's position. Dennett does not believe in first person narratives. He wakes up in bed with his wife and asks her, " It was good for you, was it good for me?" OK lets temporarily assume with Dennett that pain is and only is C fibers firing. There are tortures that do not cause any physical damage. But if Dennett is correct, they do not exist. OK, so I ask Dennett if I can torture him in that way. If he is consistent in his beliefs since he thinks such tortures are a myth he should not object. Obviously he would strongly object! Therefore Dennett contradicts himself and so therefore cannot be correct! His quining qualia argument is pointless 1. Qualia are defined as ineffable. 2. Nothing ineffable can exist.3. Therefore qualia cannot exist. He never proves 2!