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: "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.