Chalmers says Too Hard ; Dennett says Too Easy

Transcription

1 Chalmers says Too Hard ; Dennett says Too Easy DENNETT DENIES these alleged troublesome features of conscious experience: DIRECT/RELIABLE/INTRINSIC/UNANALYZABLE/INEFFABLE/PRIVATE QUALIA, RICH, IMAGISTIC, also PRESENT(ED) (vs. retrospective; maybe vs. prospective, e.g., icy while expecting hot) Retrospective: Do we have dreams (conscious story-experiences during sleep)? Or do we only wake with mismemories as if we had dreams in the hours before (slapped into memory unconsciously like a cassette, but not played )? The cassette view would explain recurring dreams, and precognitive dreams. Either view can handle any introspective reports or brain evidence we can get. Maybe similarly during waking life we have no experiences either, but microcassette mismemories as if we had experiences a moment ago. Or maybe having and seemingly remembering experience is the same thing? SHARPly vs. vaguely distinguishable from brief mental states that aren t experiences.

2 JARGON If there is something it is like to be a creature, then there is something it is like for the creature to have certain of its mental states. Call these states experiences. The literature also calls them, equivalently, experiential, phenomenal or qualitative. Having what it is like features is one way for a state to be conscious what we might call experientially or phenomenally or qualitatively conscious. In that sense, the phrase conscious experience is redundant, and the phrase experientially unconscious simply means nonexperiential. For any particular experience, there is not merely something it is like to have the experience but some particular thing or things it is like. We sometimes try to describe these specific features, for example, by saying that an experienced pain is sharp or throbbing to some degree, or that an experienced visual image is blurry or moving. There is little uniformity in the philosophical terminology; these specific features are, more or less interchangeably, described as phenomenal or qualitative, or occasionally called sensational qualities or raw feels, and most frequently called qualia. I will tend to use the first and last of these terms, speaking of the phenomenal qualia of experiences.

3 Dennett s Argument against Directly & Reliably Accessed Qualia DIRECT (aka immediate, intimate, acquainted-with, noninferential): One can acquire evidence about the qualia of one s current experiences without the kinds of inference one needs about the mental states of others. RELIABLE (aka privileged, intimate; in the extreme, infallible, incorrigible): One has a source of evidence about the qualia of one s experiences that is more reliable than one s access to other empirical facts, or that is infallible. Dennett s Chase and Sanborn (#7): Chase may have a strongly held opinion about the degree to which his taste-perceiving apparatus has maintained its integrity but pending the results of... laborious third-person testing [Chase] would be a fool to claim to know especially to know directly or immediately.

4 Dennett s Arguments against Intrinsic & Unanalyzable Qualia INTRINSIC (aka nonrelational, nondispositional, reaction-independent): Only things that are part of an experience help constitute which qualia it has not the stimuli that may cause the experience nor the behavior and further mental states that it may cause. Dennett s cauliflower cure (#11): [T]he taste is (sort of) the same [not] like chocolate cake but I resist saying that cauliflower tastes the way it used to taste. [M]y cauliflower experiences have [no] intrinsic properties behind, or in addition, to their various dispositional, reaction-provoking properties. UNANALYZABLE (aka atomic, simple, homogeneous, grainless): Having certain qualia e.g., perhaps, color-at-a-point qualia is not wholly constituted by having other qualia. Dennett s guitar string (#15): The homogeneity and ineffability of the first experience is gone, replaced by a duality as "directly apprehensible" and clearly describable as that of any chord. The difference in experience is striking, but the complexity apprehended on the third plucking was there all along (being discriminated).

5 Dennett s Argument against Ineffable Qualia INEFFABLE (aka inexpressible, incommunicable): Only subjects who have had (perceptual or imaginative) experiences with a given (unanalyzable) quale understand what it is for an experience to have that quale. It is impossible for one to understand what it s like without having undergone what it s like, and impossible for a subject to specify what it s like verbally or otherwise. Dennett s osprey cry (#13) Why does it seem that our conscious experiences have ineffable properties? Because they do have practically ineffable properties. My perceptual experience has pinpointed for me the location of the osprey cry in the logical space of possibilities in a way verbal description could not. But from a single experience of this sort I don't--can't--know how to generalize to other osprey calls. I don't and can't know, from a single such experience, which physical variations and constancies in stimuli would produce an indistinguishable experience in me. I can refer to the property I detected: it is the property I detected in that event. My experience is practically ineffable both because it has (as yet for me) an untested profile in response to perceptual circumstances, and because it is informationally very sensitive.

6 Dennett s Argument against Private Qualia PRIVATE (aka subjective): It is impossible for one to confirm adequately the hypothesis that someone else s experience has a given quale, even when one is in a position to form the hypothesis (i.e., even neglecting or overcoming the alleged ineffability of the quale). One might know that two subjects are having the same qualia by knowing that they are in the same brain (machine, soul) state. But even this would merely give one knowledge that the subjects have two sets of qualia that are the same or different, whatever they turn out to be, specifically. Privacy allows comparative external tests, but rules out noncomparative ones. Dennett s blue (or middle C) vs your blue (or middle C) (after #14 jello box): [W]hen we seem to ostend, with the mental finger of inner intention, a quale or qualia-complex in our experience [w]e refer to a property--a public property of uncharted boundaries--via reference to our personal and idiosyncratic capacity to respond to it. That idiosyncracy is the extent of our privacy. If I wonder whether your blue is my blue, your middle-c is my middle-c, I can coherently be wondering whether our discrimination profiles over a wide variation in conditions will be approximately the same. But that is empirically discoverable by all the usual objective testing procedures.

7 Dennett s TV and Fame Analogies PRESENT(ED) (vs. retrospective; maybe vs. prospective, e.g., icy while expecting hot) Retrospective: Do we have dreams (conscious story-experiences during sleep)? Or do we only wake with mismemories as if we had dreams in the hours before (slapped into memory unconsciously like a cassette, but not played )? The cassette view would explain recurring dreams, and precognitive dreams. Either view can handle any introspective reports or brain evidence we can get. Maybe similarly during waking life we have no experiences either, but microcassette mismemories as if we had experiences a moment ago. Or maybe having and seemingly remembering experience is the same thing? If whether something is experienced is similar to whether it is on TV (or in a Cartesian Theater ): there would be a difference between having experience (being on TV) and seemingly remembering it (seeming to have been on). This would depend only on the time of experience (the time on TV), not later times. famous: there might not be. One s fame can spread by description, w/o one s being experienced (by those getting the descriptions), & can depend on later memories. SHARPly vs. vaguely distinguishable from brief mental states that aren t experiences. If whether something is experienced is similar to whether it is on TV (or in a Cartesian Theater ): even briefly, it would be sharp (on or off a TV). famous: it might not be. Whether one is famous (vs. near- or not-) can be vague.