Obligatory reference: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/zombie-movie.html -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://math.ucr.edu/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com

[Attention conservation notice: Once again, quite long and no mathematics other than one brief analogy. Will stop if asked.] On Tuesday 31 March 2009, Dan Asimov wrote: [about Dennett, when he says he doesn't deny the reality of conscious experience]

No, I don't think he's lying, at least not deliberately.

When I originally posted about this, I had not, by the way, grasped that Dennett claims he is not denying the existence of conscious experience.

Hmm. He says it quite explicitly, in a not-all-that-long article that you pointed at yourself! (He also says it in "Consciousness Explained", though I think he never puts it quite so briefly and explicitly there.)

But I still maintain that no matter how many words one uses to describe what qualia means, it still boils down to conscious experience. (Qualia is the plural of quale.)

Dennett, who has certainly read more philosophers' writings about qualia than either of us, clearly disagrees. The passage I quoted from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, also written by someone who has certainly read more such things than we have, also has "qualia" meaning more than "conscious experience". I have always had the impression that "qualia" is a word pretty much owned by the philosophers, in the same sort of way as "abelian" is owned by mathematicians. Why do you think you know better than Dennett and Tye (the author of the SEP article) just what the word means? This seems to me a bit like saying "But I still maintain that no matter how many words one uses to describe what geometry means, it still boils down to the properties of plane figures" and therefore rejecting (say) Connes's work on noncommutative geometry or

People talking about qualia are trying to decompose conscious experience into little pieces that typically make sense (the commonest example being the experience of a color).

That's certainly one thing they're doing, yes. (So, right there we have an assumption about the nature of conscious experience that might not be correct: that it's possible to decompose conscious experience into little pieces without losing what's essential about it. I think Dennett might actually mostly agree with that one, as it happens. But, again, more evidence that "qualia" doesn't just mean "conscious experience" and that it's possible to deny the one without denying the other.)

Of course, conscious experience has subtleties that transcend language's ability to describe things, but I would not disqualify qualia from existence on that basis.

I don't think that's the basis on which Dennett claims that there are no such things as qualia. (Though part of his complaint is that people talk about "qualia" without having a sufficiently clear idea of what it is they mean.)

So what if people experience colors differently? I know they must, since even my two eyes experience the same color a bit differently. That just means you can't necessarily predict one's experience purely on the basis of the apparent stimulus.

I don't think "people experience colors differently" forms any part of Dennett's argument against qualia.

I would like to know just what Dennett claims he is disproving, however.

Well, you could try reading the article you cited :-). -- g