I found Dennett's responses to Fodor to be spot on. I think Fodor simply could not grasp what Dennett was actually talking about--and Fodor was not the only one.
Dennett's response concedes all of Fodor's main points and proceeds via innuendo and ad hominem. But there you have it. Dennett was important and influential, and is worth reading, but his appeal as a philosopher has always been a mystery to me.
Dennett is a mainstream eliminitavist, his appeal is that he removes extra fluff around philosophical concepts like consciousness and the brain. In a world where half the consciousness gurus are talking about unproven quantum stuff, souls, ghosts, aliens, gods, we need a Dennett to keep us grounded in reality as we ponder these mysteries that nobody knows the answers to.
His only weakness was occasionally indulging in speculation himself (like his Multiple Drafts) - he was better at eliminating speculation rather than offering it, regarding consciousness at least.
I highly recommend his talks on Closer To Truth (on YouTube) and all those videos actually.
He is often described that way, and even used the term himself sometimes, but he was not (and was careful to say that he was not) an eliminativist about everything. For example, he was not an eliminitavist about consciousness or free will. He believed those things are real--they just aren't like what many people think they are like; they don't have the properties that many people think they have.
With regard to consciousness and free will, Dennett was a physicalist: he believed consciousness and free will are physical processes that obey physical laws. That does place limitations on what consciousness and free will can do, and I think an unwillingness to accept those limitations, to accept that those limited concepts of consciousness and free will are the only ones we can actually have, drove a lot of the opposition to Dennett, though his opponents did not explicitly admit it.
Feel like he is though, second only to maybe Michael Shermer, or AI investors (zing!) The definition:
> Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist.
There's no way I'll find the video, but he said at one point in some interview almost exactly this: That most of the mental states we think we have don't really exist. I think it's also in his book Consciousness Explained (1991), but I didn't read it so can't be sure.
I always thought this is what upset people so much about Dennett - the apparent total denial of experience.
Yet this is an incredibly slippery slope! Anyone familiar with Chalmers' Hard Problem should intuit that there are "primitives" of experience that when put together make up the total experience. I agree that the Hard Problem is an accurate assessment of the issue, but given this "primitives" concept I agree with eliminativism in that "most" of the mental states we believe we have never existed, we were somehow "filled in".
I'll namedrop 3 more philosophers: John Searle (Berkeley), Donald Hoffman (Irvine), Colin McGinn (London, Oxford) - all of whom have excellent content on YouTube that will blow your mind, and these are maybe the best I've heard from on the subject.
> he said at one point in some interview almost exactly this: That most of the mental states we think we have don't really exist. I think it's also in his book Consciousness Explained (1991), but I didn't read it so can't be sure.
I can't speak about whatever interview you saw, but in the book Consciousness Explained he does not say what you are describing. He says the same thing he says in one of his papers, I think it's "Real Patterns", which appeared in one of his later collections: Real consciousness does exist, but it is not like what many people think it is like. It does not have all of the properties that many people think it has. He does say that things with those properties don't exist--because nothing with those properties can exist. But he does not say that consciousness does not exist--just that it doesn't have those properties.
> the apparent total denial of experience
He doesn't say this either, although many of his opponents misdescribe him as saying that--because they cannot understand what he is actually saying. The only concept of consciousness they can grasp is the magical concept they have in their heads--I call it "magical" because it cannot exist if consciousness is a physical process working according to physical laws. And the latter kind of consciousness, the physicalist kind, is the kind Dennett describes and the kind he believed existed. So for opponents of his who can't even grasp that there is such a concept of consciousness, the only way they could interpret what Dennett was saying was that he was denying that consciousness existed.
But that is a gross misrepresentation of his views: he was not saying that people don't have experiences or thoughts. He was just saying that those real things, when you actually do the hard work of figuring out how they work in accordance with physical laws, turn out not to have some of the properties that people thought they had before that hard work was done. This is no different from any other concept once we try to build an actual scientific understanding of it.
> John Searle
Whose Chinese Room thought experiment was debunked in The Mind's I (though that's hardly the only rebuttal that has been published), and I suspect that chapter in the book was written largely by Dennett, since he published other similar rebuttals later on.
Starting to think you don't know Dennett, this is what he was all about haha.
> John Searle debunked
You're starting to reveal your lack of experience here. It's not something that can be debunked, it's just an observation and one that is widely considered foundational :)
Not only that, but that's like from his youth, he's done a lot more interesting stuff since Chinese Room - this seems like you just quickly googled.
I don't even agree with Dennett, just pointing out what his stance is in response to your weird attack. A stance that everyone knows except you apparently, didn't even know it was argued. He is eliminative of consciousness, and is basically famous as a philosopher for it, second to the religious stuff.
However, it's also obvious that the Dennett I agree with is not the Dennett that you disagree with. And what's more, it's obvious that we're not going to resolve that here. We agree he's a famous philosopher. That's enough for here.
This pdonis is a jackass - here are direct quotes from Dennett:
- "There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory)." - from Consciousness Explained, page 132.
On page 113 he says:
- "Unlike mental states taxonomized folk psychologically, "content-fixations" are each precisely locatable in both space and time".
^ he is saying mental states are not locatable in space and time.
Page 138:
- "There are no fixed facts about the stream of consciousness independent of particular probes"
An interview:
- "The reason [consciousness] is so puzzling is that people think they ought to be able to study it from the inside, using pure phenomenology, those give you hints but they are illusory. That's not what's really going on."
From David Rosenthal's Content, Interpretation, and Consciouness:
- "There is good reason, in any case, to construe Dennett's pandemonium model as positing only subpersonal events of content fixation, rather than full-fledged intentional states. Thus he writes:
"We replace the division into discrete contentful states-beliefs, meta-beliefs, and so forthwith a process that serves, over time, to ensure a good fit between an entity's internal information-bearing events and the entity's capacity to express (some of) the information in those events in speech. [10]
10: Dennett speaks throughout Consciousness Explained of such nonconscious, subpersonal events
Wikipedia on Multiple Drafts:
- "Dennett argues that [consciousness theories] share a common error in supposing that there is a special time and place where unconscious processing becomes consciously experienced, entering into what Dennett calls the "Cartesian theatre".
A couple more Dennett quotes:
- "There does not exist ... a process such as 'recruitment of consciousness' (into what?), nor any place where the 'vehicle's arrival' is recognized (by whom?)"
- "the Multiple Drafts model goes on to claim that the brain does not bother 'constructing' any representations..."
I could go on forever because this was his main jam. I find it hilarious this pdonis person has such a high karma/score/whatever on this site after such awful takes.
I won't even get into Searle who pdonis just Googled for the first time, bringing up Chinese Room (1980) as if it's a scientific theory. What a joke, I wish he could be downvoted.
Quoting Dennett out of context is the go-to move for people who can't be bothered to actually engage with what he's actually saying. I've read all of his books on consciousness, going all the way back to Content and Consciousness, published in, IIRC, 1969. And I've also read enough of his critics to understand the games they play. Sorry, not buying it.
> Wikipedia
So you consider Wikipedia to be a reliable source about a complex topic. It is to laugh.
Their his own words from his own books - including the book you said he never said that in. Why some of you on this site speak so confidently about that which you have no experience is beyond me.
> his own words from his own books - including the book you said he never said that in.
Sure, read and quote him out of context all you want. Still not buying it.
> that which you have no experience
Nonsense. I've already told you my experience.
> The fact you think Dennett is not eliminative about consciousness is all I need to know.
And the fact that you think he is is all I need to know. We're not going to resolve that here. Nor am I trying to; I'm not trying to convince you. I'm just putting on record my disagreement with your wrong and uncharitable description of one of the central areas of Dennett's work--one which unfortunately is made by many of his critics. They don't know what they are talking about and neither do you.
I'm a fan of Dennett (and the other horsemen) - Dennett's critics are almost all Christian apologists since he's widely known as being an atheist author. I'm not a critic at all.
But I can still disagree - I disagree with Dennett on is his dismissal of mental states and experience. Before you deny this again, here's direct evidence:
Interviewer: "This is the difference between having a phenomenal quality of blue instantiated in my brain and having the quality of blue represented by my brain"
Dennett: "The latter exists and the former doesn't"
Note in particular item (ii) on p. 2, which speaks directly to the distinction drawn in the video. And note that Dennett has no problem at all in the article with referring to "experiences" as real things, for example in item (iii) on p. 2:
"All the comprehension, appreciation, delight, revulsion, recognition, amusement, etc. that human beings experience must be somehow composed by the activities of billions of neurons that are myopic in the extreme, cloistered in their networks of interacting brethren, oblivious to the larger perspective they are helping to create."
He does not say that all those experiences aren't real--indeed they must be real in order to be "composed by the activities of billions of neurons".
Note also this comment on p. 1, describing a position with which Dennett did not agree:
"The hard problem, they surmised, will only be addressed by a return to some form of dualism, or panpsychism, or some yet to be articulated overthrow of what might be considered normal science."
This is the kind of viewpoint I was referring to by the word "magic" in my previous response.
Btw, I found the above article on this page which gives a fairly comprehensive list of Dennett's published papers and articles:
> He does not say that all those experiences aren't real
Yes he does, and has said it a lot, it's one of the main things he's known for, second to atheism. In the video I linked he literally says phenomenal states "don't exist". I've also seen numerous other interviews where he's said that. You're the only person I've ever come across who describes Dennett as someone believing in rich conscious experiences.
> indeed they must be real in order to be "composed by the activities of billions of neurons"
No that's the distinction - he says only the activity of the neurons are real that there is not an additional "mental state" or what he calls "double transduction". He simply dismisses that it happens.
Figure 7.1 shows a conscious observer seeing a red light and letting us
know that he's seen it by saying "Red light!" Some people think that
consciousness is a fundamental division in nature, which divides things
that are conscious from things that are unconscious. The things that are
conscious (sentient) engage in this very special sort of transduction. Of
course, just saying "Red light!" under this condition does not guarantee
that a person is conscious. After all, we might have an experimental subject
who stands all day saying "Red light, red light, red light, red light."
The fact that after someone flashes a red light in the subject's eyes, the
subject says "Red light!" is no indication that the subject is conscious of
the red light.
...
If you are tempted to think that way (and if you are not, I think you are a
very rare individual) you are making a fundamental mistake, the mistake I
call Cartesian Materialism. This idea is that there is a second transduction
somewhere in the brain (that is why this is a form of materialism). The idea is
that a privileged medium exists in the brain where and when the consciousness
happens, a place in which all the various features of a conscious experience
become "bound" - and then, most importantly, are appreciated.
He very clearly does not believe in the phenomenon of consciousness. At times he even conflates experience with self/identity (2 different things) at which point people usually ask him to clarify, and often he will confirm his stance by outright denying that mental experience happens. That's Dan Dennett.
He should have loved panpsychism, since it would coincide with his idea that there is no second transduction - that there's not a fundamental difference between the conscious and the unconscious - however, because he is an eliminative materialist he sticks with physicalism.
I'm sorry, but I strongly disagree. You are reading things into his writing that he is not saying.
> he says only the activity of the neurons are real
No, he says that the activity of the neurons is your conscious experience--that the real conscious experience you have is the activity of the neurons--or, if you like, the conscious experience is "made of" the activity of neurons. That's not the same thing as saying your conscious experience isn't real. It's just saying your conscious experience is not "made of" what many people think it's made of. It's not made of magic "consciousness stuff" or "mind stuff" or "soul stuff".
> that there is not an additional "mental state" or what he calls "double transduction". He simply dismisses that it happens
No, he looks at the actual evidence from cognitive science about what actually goes on in the brain, and concludes from that evidence that there is no such "double transduction"--because there is no evidence for any such thing. In other words, "double transduction" is a testable hypothesis about how our minds work, and we've tested it, and found it to be false.
> He very clearly does not believe in the phenomenon of consciousness.
Nonsense. I gave an explicit quote from a paper of his that describes various kinds of conscious experience. He believed all those things were real. What he didn't believe is that they were magic.
> He should have loved panpsychism
No, he shouldn't have, because he is, as you say, a physicalist.
> he is an eliminative materialist he sticks with physicalism.
Physicalism is not the same thing as "eliminative materialism" about everything. You are simply misrepresenting Dennett's actual position.
At this point I am wondering whether you are a physicalist or not. If you are, you should be agreeing with Dennett, because his views about consciousness are the only viable option if you are a physicalist.
If you are not a physicalist, on the other hand, then of course you will disagree with Dennett, but you should be clear about what you are disagreeing with him about. You are not disagreeing with him about whether consciousness exists. You are disagreeing with him about what kind of thing consciousness is. His position was that consciousness, really existing consciousness, is a physical process that goes on in (at least) human brains. Your position, if you are not a physicalist, is that consciousness, really existing consciousness, is some kind of non-physical thing. But his critics were simply unwilling (or perhaps unable) to frame their disagreement in these simple terms, so instead they misrepresented his position.
> You are reading things into his writing that he is not saying
I linked a video where he says it in full HD with audio: "The latter exists and the former doesn't" - did you watch it?
Not like it's the only time he's said it either, the downplaying of consciousness and the denial of a rich inner experience are things Dennett is known for.
> he says that the activity of the neurons is your conscious experience
Finally you said something that reflects reality. Yes he does say that. And more than one interviewer (don't make me find them, but I think they are Louis Godbout and Robert Lawrence Kuhn, or maybe Donald Hoffman) have asked for clarification in asking something like:
But the activity of the neurons are not identical with the redness of red, the aroma of coffee, the taste of chocolate, the blueness of the door in Godbout's example. The activity of the neurons are the activity of the neurons, little electro-chemical excitations. That's not, for example, the aroma of coffee.
To which Dennett will explain away that experience - it doesn't exist - often conflating raw experience with self/identity (different things) in doing so. It's a kind of rigid, ultra physicalist stance that you apparently really dig, but it's ultimately wrong because as Chalmers says it denies the datum of experience - we know there's an experience happening because we observe it ourselves (even though the self is illusory, the experience isn't). Empiricism means to be based on observational evidence - in this case it's your direct first-person observation or "experience".
I've gotten off track - the reason I'm arguing with you is because you grossly misrepresent the late, great Dan Dennett and I'm trying to figure out A) Why you think this or B) If you're just a hobbyist arguer.
> At this point I am wondering whether you are a physicalist or not. If you are, you should be agreeing with Dennett
> as Chalmers says it denies the datum of experience
Chalmers is a particularly ill-chosen example for this, because Chalmers also claims that his zombie twin--an atom-by-atom duplicate of him that is indistinguishable in all its physical properties and actions but lacks consciousness--is a coherent concept. But by his own definition, since Chalmers says his conscious experience is a direct "datum", so would zombie-Chalmers. And since zombie-Chalmers is an atom-by-atom duplicate of Chalmers, on what basis would Chalmers say that he is right when he makes this claim, but somehow zombie-Chalmers is wrong? If physicalism is true, this is simply false reasoning: zombie-Chalmers, since he is physically identical to Chalmers, must also be identical with respect to consciousness. So either Chalmers is simply denying physicalism--he has some mysterious non-physical property, in principle unexplainable in terms of the physical state of him, that zombie-Chalmers lacks--or he is simply failing to think clearly about his own position, and therefore believes that the concept of zombie-Chalmers as he defines it is coherent, when in fact it isn't.
Similar remarks could be made about other concepts that are trotted out by Dennett's critics, such as "qualia", but Chalmers makes the incoherence of such positions particularly obvious.
>And since zombie-Chalmers is an atom-by-atom duplicate of Chalmers, on what basis would Chalmers say that he is right when he makes this claim, but somehow zombie-Chalmers is wrong?
This isn't quite the right question to get at the issue. Zombie Chalmers is wrong by definition as he's a hypothetical creature defined not to have any conscious experience. Real Chalmers is right iff he has conscious experiences.
I think what you're getting at here is Chalmers' epiphenominalism about consciousness and its possible implications for whether or not Chalmers' belief that he has conscious experiences can be justified according to his own lights. Chalmers is well aware of this issue. It is rather a subtle one, as it is not so obvious on further examination that the belief that one has conscious experiences must necessarily be caused by conscious experiences in order to be justified. Thus, even though zombie Chalmers' belief has the same cause as real Chalmers' belief, it is conceivable that one belief may be justified while the other is not. It all depends on one's theory of justification – and it's probably an understatement to say that there are a lot of those to choose from. There is some summary of Chalmers' and others' takes on this here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/#SelStu
More broadly, I would say that if you are willing to indulge Dennett in some of his more counterintuitive speculations, you could stand to be a little more generous to Chalmers here, who is certainly no fool.
Only if you accept that Chalmers's definition of Zombie-Chalmers is consistent. But if you are a physicalist, it is not consistent, and any claims based on it are simply invalid. See further comments below.
> Chalmers' epiphenominalism about consciousness
Yes, that's part of the issue, but not the only part. It is true that I personally have never been able to make sense of epiphenomenalism about consciousness: the idea that my consciousness has literally nothing to do with any of my physical behavior (and remember that this doesn't just include easily observable things like the sounds I utter or the movements my body makes, but things like what can be detected in my brain in an fMRI scanner) to me seems daft. Furthermore, it doesn't make sense from an evolutionary perspective: why would organisms evolve consciousness if it had no effect on anything else?
However, over and above all of that, there is the issue that, as i said above, Chalmers's definition of Zombie-Chalmers is simply inconsistent with physicalism. If physicalism is true, then the idea of a physical duplicate of you, who are conscious, that is not conscious is a contradiction in terms. As I said in an earlier post, physically identical necessarily implies identical in everything, including consciousness, if physicalism is true.
> if you are willing to indulge Dennett in some of his more counterintuitive speculations, you could stand to be a little more generous to Chalmers here
Nothing I have said in support of Dennett anywhere in this discussion is "indulging" him in "counterintuitive speculations". I am simply describing the basic implications of Dennett's physicalism about consciousness. For example, I have not said anything about the "Multiple Drafts" model that he propounded in Consciousness Explained, which he himself said was speculation, but I think he expected it to get more traction than it has apparently gotten. I have tried to limit myself to just the basic things that have to be the case if physicalism is true at all.
Certainly Zombie-Chalmers is inconsistent with physicalism. Chalmers is not a physicalist, and the logical/metaphysical possibility of zombies forms part of his argument against physicalism. If you want, you can just stamp your foot down and insist on physicalism (and thereby dismiss whole swathes of the philosophical literature on consciousness), but from Chalmers' point of view you'd just be begging the important questions.
My point regarding Dennett is that his overall picture of consciousness also contains highly counterintuitive elements (such as e.g. his denial of any form of privileged access [1], which is not just an ad-hoc speculation tacked on to his main theory but a necessary consequence of it). I agree that Chalmers' epiphenominalism is counterintuitive too. I don't think anyone has succeeded in arriving at an overall philosophical account of consciousness that is entirely satisfying and free of implausible or counterintuitive elements. I think it's important to have a certain amount of empathy here and understand that people genuinely differ in their plausibility judgments in this domain. For example, I personally find epiphenomenalism, though implausible, to be less implausible than the denial of privileged access; I suspect you have the inverse judgment. It is unclear how to weigh these sorts of considerations against each other.
[1] > I see no other way to force this issue into the open than to defend an admittedly counterintuitive theory and await enlightenment on what, exactly, I have left out. The view that I wish to defend is that our privileged access extends to no images, sensations, impressions, raw feels, or phenomenal properties at all. There are indeed all sorts of interesting things going on in our heads that have characteristics or play roles that might tempt us to call them images or sensations or impressions, but our access to these events is not only not privileged; it is highly indirect, inferential and uncertain. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-9479-9_...
I've already rebutted your claims about this video multiple times. Your response has been to repeat the same assertions without even bothering to address my rebuttals.
> the reason I'm arguing with you is because you grossly misrepresent the late, great Dan Dennett
Apparently we're never going to agree on who is misrepresenting Dennett. But I'm curious: how much Dennett have you actually read?
> I'm trying to figure out A) Why you think this
Because, as I've already told you, I have read every book Dennett ever published on consciousness and free will, and a fair portion of his papers on those topics that never got put into one of his books, and based on all of that reading, I think you are misrepresenting Dennett's position. What's more, the counter arguments I see you giving are the same ones Dennett responded to for several decades. I see nothing new whatever in anything you've posted that would change my mind about who is misrepresenting what.
Then please don't misrepresent what he's actually saying.
In the video you linked to, for example, he is not saying that your conscious experience of looking at the blue door doesn't exist. He's not saying that your mental state when you perceive the blue door doesn't exist. He's saying that what underlies that conscious experience and that mental state is not some magical "phenomenal quality of blue" in your brain but functional processes in your brain that represent blue (and a host of other concepts) in a functional way. In the video he even calls himself a "functionalist" with respect to "mental properties" like blue--those properties are functional properties, not "phenomenal" properties. But functional properties exist, and so do the conscious experiences and mental states they underlie.
Why does Dennett say that "phenomenal properties" don't exist? Because, to put it as briefly as possible, they're magic. Your mention of Christian apologists among his critics is quite apt, because, to a physicalist like Dennett (and like me), the Christian apologist's view of how minds work in general is magic. Why do you experience blue? Because God endowed you with a magical "mind" and "soul" that experiences blue--blue is a "phenomenal property" of your mind/soul. Whereas Dennett, as a physicalist, spent his career talking to experimentalists in cognitive science who were actually figuring out the physical processes that go on inside brains when people are experiencing blue (or anything else), and explaining them in functional terms.
If you go back to Dennett's earlier work in the late 1960s and 1970s, you find that he actually tried to use terms like "phenomenal qualities" (and "qualia", another term that pops up a lot in his writings) to mean functional properties--i.e., he tried to say something like: yes, "phenomenal qualities" exist, but they're functional properties, they're not magical. But he found that whenever he tried to do this, people would object: they would read his description of what functional properties are and say, No! That's not what "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" are! And they would go on to list properties that, to them, "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" must have--and they were properties that no physical process, no non-magical entity, could possibly have. So eventually Dennett decided that it was pointless to try to convince people to use terms like "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" to mean functional properties--they just wouldn't accept that. And that is what led him to take the line he took in his more recent work, and in the video you referenced, where he just says point blank that "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" don't exist--by which he means what I have just described, that no physical process, no non-magical entity, could possibly have the properties that proponents of "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" insist that those things must have. But that doesn't mean conscious experiences and mental states don't exist; it just means they are "made of" functional properties of brains, not "phenomenal properties" or "qualia".
In short, Dennett decided that the best place for him to draw a line in the sand was not at the meaning of terms like "phenomenal properties" and "qualia"--he found no useful alternative to simply letting proponents of those terms define what they mean and accepting their definitions, however useles he found them. He decided that the place to draw the line in the sand was at the claim that "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" are what underlie our conscious experiences and our mental states: no, he said, that's not what underlies them. Our conscious experiences and our mental states are not magic. What underlies them is functional processes in our brains. Those processes, and the conscious experiences and mental states they underlie, are perfectly real. They just aren't "phenomenal properties" or "qualia" as proponents of those terms insist on defining them.
Interviewer: "This is the difference between having a phenomenal quality of blue instantiated in my brain and having the quality of blue represented by my brain"
Dennett: "The latter exists and the former doesn't"
Has nothing to do with God or theism - you can be an atheist like myself and still recognize that we see things in the way a camera doesn't, that there's a difference between unconscious detection and conscious experience - and importantly that we don't know what it is. Doesn't have to be God or magic. As Searle says, "it's a biological phenomenon", we just haven't solved it.
And as Chalmers says, "To deny that we have an experience is to ignore the datum of consciousness".
Anyway the larger point is that Dennett was definitely eliminative of consciousness, not sure why you argue that so passionately when it's what he's known for and he's happy to admit it and argue for it.
Your last few sentences... he never said they are "perfectly real" and he said the opposite several times.
> Dennett: "The latter exists and the former doesn't"
Which tells you nothing about the actual question at issue--whether or not Dennett was denying that we have conscious experiences--unless you know what "phenomenal qualities" meant to Dennett. You are assuming, based on nothing, that it must have meant "conscious experiences". But anyone who has read Dennett in context, or even viewed that statement in the video in context (where, as I have already said, Dennett called himself a "functionalist" about mental states and properties), knows that "phenomenal qualities" to Dennett did not mean "conscious experiences". It meant "magical properties that some people claim are necessary in order to have conscious experience, but which actual cognitive science research has shown are not". So when Dennett said that "phenomenal qualities" don't exist, he was only saying that those magical properties don't exist; he wasn't saying that conscious experiences don't exist.
> Very likely the mainstream philosophical meaning of phenomenal
Again, if you had read Dennett's work in detail, you would know that in this particular area of philosophy, "phenomenal qualities" has a particular meaning, and it's not just "conscious experience"--it's a particular assertion about how conscious experience works. And one that cognitive science has shown to be false.
> > phenomenal doesn't mean conscious
You're not quoting anything I actually said in my post, so I have no idea what you think you're responding to here.
"I don’t deny the existence of consciousness; of course, consciousness exists; it just isn’t what most people think it is, as I have said many times. I do grant that Strawson expresses quite vividly a widespread conviction about what consciousness is. Might people—and Strawson, in particular—be wrong about this? That is the issue."
I think it's in the it just isn’t what most people think it is which we've already been more specific about in other comments, is where we'll find those details that can say whether or not Dennett can be classified as an eliminative materialist.
> it's in the it just isn’t what most people think it is which we've already been more specific about in other comments, is where we'll find those details that can say whether or not Dennett can be classified as an eliminative materialist
Of course the answer is in those details--which I've read and which I've described small portions of, as you say, in other comments--but it's not the answer to the question you give. Dennett cannot be classified as an "eliminative materialist" about everything. That's a gross oversimplification. A better description is that he was a functionalist about some things (and one of those things is conscious experience), and an eliminative materialist about others.
There are even in-between things about which he was what one might call a "metaphorical functionalist"--for example, "mental images". Yes, we have the experience of having mental images and doing various things with them mentally, but when you dig down into the details of what is actually going on in our brains, the best correlates we can find for such experiences are only "images" in a metaphorical sense. So when people talk about their mental images and what they do with them mentally, while we can grant that they are describing their real conscious experiences, those conscious experiences are not authoritative about what is actually going on in their brains.
That last sentence, in fact, illustrates the kind of confusion Dennett's critics have about what he is actually saying. When he says things like the last sentence--that people's conscious experiences are not authoritative about what is actually going on in their brains--his critics claim he's saying that there aren't any conscious experiences at all. That is because his critics have an unstated assumption that our conscious experiences are authoritative about what is going on in our brains--that if we say we experience having a mental image, there must be an actual image somewhere in our brains, not just a metaphorical one. If we say we experience seeing blue, there must be an actual blue quale somewhere in our brains. And so on. But cognitive science, in many cases, offers no support whatever for such claims, and so in general we cannot take our conscious experiences to be authoritative about what is going on in our brains. We have to do the hard scientific work to check whether that is actually true in each case.
> you can be an atheist like myself and still recognize that we see things in the way a camera doesn't, that there's a difference between unconscious detection and conscious experience
Sure--but what kind of difference is it? Is it a binary, yes/no, all or nothing difference? Or is it a difference of degree? Is it a magical little light that goes on inside some entities but not others? Or is it a physical process that can occur in varying degrees?
Denett believed it was the latter--on the basis of spending decades looking at actual research in cognitive science. Searle and Chalmers, among others, believe it's the former--on the basis of nothing except their bare assertion.
> we don't know what it is.
I understand why people like Searle and Chalmers take this position--because they simply haven't bothered to look at all the research that has been done to investigate what consciousness is and how it works, by looking at the underlying neural mechanisms. It's easy to believe we know nothing about a topic when you haven't actually looked at what we know. Dennett spent his career looking at such research and building his views on it, so he understood that, while we don't know everything about what consciousness is, we do know a lot of things about it.
> As Searle says, "it's a biological phenomenon"
Which, according to Searle, is some kind of magical "causal powers" that human brains have. Which he can't describe at all, can't say anything about, except that bare assertion. Which, as above, ignores all the things we do know about how brains work and how they do various things.
> as Chalmers says, "To deny that we have an experience is to ignore the datum of consciousness".
And in saying that he misrepresented Dennett's position, because Dennett never denied that we have experiences. He just didn't think they are magic. Searle's and Chalmers's positions, when you boil them down to their essence, are basically that consciousness is magic (but they use words like "causal powers" and "datum" to obfuscate what they are actually saying).
> not sure why you argue that so passionately
Because, as I've said multiple times now, you are misrepresenting Dennett's actual position. And the people you reference, Searle and Chalmers, did the same thing. And since Dennett is no longer around to defend himself against such misrepresentation, those of us who agree with him about these points need to do it.
Another comment with emphasis on the word "magic" so I guess let's dive in.
> Is it a magical little light that goes on inside some entities but not others?
Instead of magic, just say "consciousness", and let's identify it as things like: The aroma of coffee, the taste of chocolate, the sound of a drop of water, the feeling of warmth on your arm... those sensations are not nerve cells. Nerve cells are nerve cells. As you already know nerve cells are tiny biological structures that can pass on or mitigate electrical transmission in the body like in muscles and the brain. That's what a nerve cell is. None of that electrochemistry in a nerve cell is the aroma of coffee.
> Searle and Chalmers, among others, believe it's the former
Searle doesn't, and has said many times "it's a biological phenomenon". Chalmers went off the deep end with panpsychism - but since neither Chalmers or Dennett can tell the difference between conscious/unconscious I guess they ended up in mostly the same boat, didn't they?
> Searle hasn't bothered to look at the research
> according to Searle, is some kind of magical "causal powers"
Just a joke, worth a call out that you think this of Searle, but not worth a response
I mean bad take after bad take, it's too bad you don't brush up on this stuff, you seem interested in it.
> Dennett never denied that we have experiences. He just didn't think they are magic.
Nobody said it's magic, Searle specifically said it's not magic, and that it's a biological phenomenon (see his TED talk "I move my arm and the damn thing goes up" - that one).
> Instead of magic, just say "consciousness", and let's identify it as things like: The aroma of coffee, the taste of chocolate, the sound of a drop of water, the feeling of warmth on your arm... those sensations are not nerve cells
Of course not. Your voice is not vocal cords, but it is produced by them. Similarly, consciousness is not nerve cells, but it is produced by them. At least, that's what a physicalist like Dennett or myself says. Either you agree with that or you're not a physicalist. I don't really care at this point which it is, but I'm curious why you haven't said which.
> "it's a biological phenomenon"
Which is just a cop-out. It's the same as saying it's magic. Sure, it's a true statement in the sense that conscious beings, or at least all the ones we currently know about, are biological beings. But it tells us nothing at all useful about how consciousness works or how biological beings can have it.
> I move my arm and the damn thing goes up
Ok, but how does this happen? That's the important question. Dennett spent his career working on it. Searle, as far as I can see, has spent zero time working on it.
As far as the bare statement itself, Dennett has never denied it, and it's perfectly consistent with physicalism and with everything Dennett says about consciousness. So I have no idea why Searle thinks it's some sort of knock-down refutation of anything.
> Dennett's response concedes all of Fodor's main points and proceeds via innuendo and ad hominem
I strongly disagree, but I doubt we'll resolve that here.
> his appeal as a philosopher has always been a mystery to me.
Not to me, but again, we won't resolve that here. We agree that he was important and influential, and that's what matters for this discussion in his memory.
I don't think so. The person who you may be thinking of is likely Stephen Pinker, who has written on similar subjects: e.g. Dennett: Consciousness Explained; Pinker: How the Mind Works.
However, Professor Dennett's comments on twitter as linked by dmd apply to both Dennett and Pinker: One of Mr Epstein's occupations was basically getting close to many of the great and the good. Mr Epstein was skilled at it, and having large amounts of money to donate helped some. The bar for "involved" has to be higher than that.
Not that I’m aware of, and it seems unlikely. You may be thinking of his agent John Brockman who was indeed involved. The only connection I found after 10 min of googling was when Dan Dennett went with other clients of Brockman (Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins; I know, weird trio, but this was back in 2002, well before Dawkins’ outing as a right wing weirdo) that attended a TED conference at Epstein’s island in 2002.
This is well before Dawkins was an active Eugenicist and before it was known that he was an Islamophobe. Also while Pinker certainly has problematic views on colonialism and class, as well as suffering from euro-centrism, I wouldn’t claim he is in scientific racism. Also this is in 2002 and Pinker hasn’t come out as a liberal democrat (i.e. capitalist ideolog) either. I think it was only in 2005 when he first sided with an anti-feminist on the gender equality issue (aside, that anti-feminist was ultra-capitalist Lawrence Summer, who was also involved with Epstein).
I think the only connection here is with Brockman, however, Brockman represented a lot of successful science writers, including in addition to Dennet, Pinker and Dawkins: Jared Diamond, Daniel Kahneman, David Gelernter, Brian Greene, Marc Hauser, Alan Guth, Jordan Pollack, Jaron Lanier, Lee Smolin, Martin Rees, Craig Venter, John Maddox, Chris Anderson, and Rupert Sheldrake.
Could you expand on this? I've googled around and can only find two supporting bits of info:
- In 2006 he tweeted "If you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability?". He immediately followed up with "I deplore a eugenic policy. I simply said deploring it doesn't mean it wouldn't work"
- In 2014 he told a woman pregnant with a baby with Down's that he thought abortion was the moral choice.
Neither of these make him an "active eugenicist" imo!
> In the first quote he's promoting eugenics as effective
He's just saying it's possible. That's not the same as promoting or advocating it. He explicitly says that he deplores it!
> in the second he's recommending it as a concrete action
He's recommending an individual action but leaving it to individual choice. That's different to recommending a broad, enforced, population-wide eugenics policy.
The thing that makes the first quote eugenicist is the fact that this possibility is a lie, and he—as a scientist—knows that. Eugenics “works” by preselecting “desired” traits. For breeding cows this is no problem as the desired traits are well defined, for eugenics, these “desired” traits pretty much boils down to upper class, white, man. What he is saying is a dog whistle and what he is promoting is scientific racism. This makes him an active eugenicist.
The second quote is a recommendation the same way as governments “recommended” the poor, the disabled, and the indigenous, to use birth control. These “recommendations” were always secret policies.
> for eugenics, these “desired” traits pretty much boils down to upper class, white, man
That's entirely your extrapolation. One can advocate for the "breeding out" of hereditary genetic diseases. Not that I would. But such a thing is certainly in the realms of possibility.
> The second quote is a recommendation the same way as governments “recommended” the poor, the disabled, and the indigenous, to use birth control.
Governments may have had such policies in the past to reduce certain populations. But Downs isn't a hereditary disease and is just as likely for "upper class white" people as the categories you mention. Such abortions would not have any measurable genetic effect on the population. He's only saying that he thinks bringing the child into the world would cause more suffering than it's worth. I'm not sure I agree 100% but I certainly sympathise. As recent parents, my partner and I had to have the discussion about what we'd do if the 20-week genetic screening revealed something like Downs. To be frank, we probably wouldn't have gone ahead with it. Many, many other parents would make that choice in that situation.
The thing that makes this eugenicist is the fact that it is none of his business whether other people do with their bodies. If he decided for him self not to give birth to a baby with Down’s syndrome, that is his choose, but if he is claiming to be a moral arbitrator of what other people choose, he may be dabbling in eugenics.
Apparently he elaborated his position a little later:
> Given a free choice of having an early abortion or deliberately bringing a Down child into the world, I think the moral and sensible choice would be to abort.
> For what it’s worth, my own choice would be to abort the Down fetus and, assuming you want a baby at all, try again.
> Given a free choice of having an early abortion or deliberately bringing a Down child into the world, I think the moral and sensible choice would be to abort.
How is comparing the number of Muslim nobel prize winners to that of Trinity Collage[1] a thoughtful criticism of Islam? How is sharing a silly video meme[2] (irony intended) of nonsensical comparison between Muslims and feminists thoughtful criticism?
Recently he even tweeted about the cultural importance of Christianity while continuing to attack Islam. He had been careful about this in the past, claiming to attack all religion equally.
His anti-religious views are at odds with the scientific consensus around culture, which is very ironic coming from the scientist that first described the meme. And the fact that he attacks Muslim culture more then others seems to suggest that he has a problem with Muslim people rather then the Islamic religion.
