[Attention conservation notice: Rather long, and contains no mathematics. Should we desist?] On Thursday 26 March 2009, Dan Asimov wrote (about Daniel Dennett):

He is not, in my opinion, "at pains" to say he defines qualia in a new and different way from how virtually all other philosophers define it.

I'm not sure that he is defining it in a new way different from all other philosophers'. In particular, I don't think anything like all philosophers use "qualia" synonymously with "conscious experience", and in any case Dennett says absolutely explicitly that he doesn't deny that people have conscious experience. From the essay you cited, for instance: | Which idea of qualia am I trying to extirpate? Everything real | has properties, and since I don't deny the reality of conscious | experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. | I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness | have properties in virtue of which those states have the | experiential content that they do. That is to say, whenever | someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, | this is true in virtue of some property of something happening | in them at the time, but these properties are so unlike the | properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would | be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia. "I don't deny the reality of conscious experience", he says. Do you think he's lying? Or so stupid that he simply can't understand the obvious truth that "qualia" == "conscious experience"? His position, as I understand it, is that when people use the word "qualia" they generally aren't in fact just saying something interchangeable with "conscious experience", standard though that meaning may allegedly be; that it carries with it a bunch of tacit and dubious assumptions (e.g., that one could in principle somehow isolate the qualia of an experience from the other things going on when one has it); that those tacit assumptions are a Bad Thing; and that the best way to stop them creeping in unnoticed is to get rid of the word "qualia". He could, of course, be wrong, but no part of that seems crazy or stupid or dishonest to me; in particular, I think it follows that someone need not be crazy or stupid or dishonest (nor deny the reality of conscious experience) in order to say "there are no such things as qualia".

And if he does use a standard word in a different from the standard way, he deserves every bit of misunderstanding he may get from it.

What I think he thinks he's doing is pointing out that whatever the "standard way" of defining "qualia" may be, in practice the use of the word almost always brings with it a set of ideas that aren't part of the allegedly standard definition. It isn't obvious to me (to say the least) that this means he deserves every bit of misunderstanding he gets. * By way of justifying my claim that "qualia == conscious experience" is not "how virtually all other philosophers define it", see e.g. the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which (1) defines multiple senses of the word and (2) gives the following as its broadest and allegedly standard sense: | Consider your visual experience as you stare at a bright | turquoise color patch in a paint store. There is something | it is like for you subjectively to undergo that experience. | What it is like to undergo the experience is very different | from what it is like for you to experience a dull brown | color patch. This difference is a difference in what is | often called "phenomenal character." The phenomenal character | of an experience is what it is like subjectively to undergo | the experience. If you are told to focus your attention upon | the phenomenal character of your experience, you will find | that in doing so you are aware of certain qualities. | These qualities — ones that are accessible to you | introspectively and that together make up the phenomenal | character of the experience are standardly called ‘qualia’. Notice that this explanation of what "qualia" are is not nearly as simple as "qualia == conscious experience"; and, in particular, it involves some assumptions that it doesn't seem to me unreasonable for the likes of Dennett to question: - that at the heart of what-it-is-like-to-experience a thing lie "certain qualities" ... (OK so far, I guess, though it's not at all obvious to me that "qualities" is the right way to describe what's going on with conscious experience) - which are "accessible to you introspectively" ... (rather than, e.g., being to some extent artefacts of the process of introspection; and rather than there being aspects of conscious experience that are themselves inaccessible to introspection) - in the strong sense that when you focus your attention on your experience you become "aware" of them ... (rather than, e.g., being things you're really making inferences about and which you could be wrong about in the same sort of way as you can be wrong about the size of an object you're looking at) - and which together *make up* what it's like to experience whatever-it-is (rather than, e.g., being just a part of it) It seems to me that someone could deny lots of those details without denying the reality of conscious experience and without being crazy, stupid or dishonest. -- g