Since Dennett takes care to deny that there is anything that is actually colored, even in the mind, and that there are only words, dispositions to classify, and so forth, he arguably wishes to deny even that there is a “color feeling”, though it’s hard to be sure.
Citation or he didn’t say it. Daniel Dennett coined the phrase “greedy reductionism”—partially to emphasize that he does not deny the existence of color, consciousness, etc. Unless you know of some place where he reversed his position, I would argue that you have misinterpreted his remarks. My understanding is that his position is that color is an idiosyncratic property of the human visual perception system with no simple referent in physics, not no referent at all.
(I normally wouldn’t make such a big deal of it, but Dennett is one of the major figures on the physicalist side of this debate, and a mischaracterization of his views impedes the ability of bystanders to perform a fair comparison.)
Here is a full quote that makes clear in exactly what sense he doesn’t believe in qualia:
So when we look one last time at our original characterization of qualia, as ineffable, intrinsic, private, directly apprehensible properties of experience, we find that there is nothing to fill the bill. In their place are relatively or practically ineffable public properties we can refer to indirectly via reference to our private property-detectors — private only in the sense of idiosyncratic. And insofar as we wish to cling to our subjective authority about the occurrence within us of states of certain types or with certain properties, we can have some authority — not infallibility or incorrigibility, but something better than sheer guessing — but only if we restrict ourselves to relational, extrinsic properties like the power of certain internal states of ours to provoke acts of apparent re-identification. So contrary to what seems obvious at first blush, there simply are no qualia at all.
Originally in Quining Qualia, 1988, by Dennett, and quoted on Multiple-Drafts Model.
The Taboo of Subjectivity is a book by B. Alan Wallace. It appears that Dennett wrote a review for that work, but I couldn’t find it online. Are you referring to that review, or to something else?
I see what you meant now. Dennett was quoted in Wallace’s book, on p.139. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
The quote, with some context, is:
Paul Churchland, one of the most prominent advocates of this view [eliminative materialism], declares that commonsense experience is probably irreducible to, and therefore incommensurable with, neuroscience; and for this reason familiar mental states should be regarded as nonexistent or at most as “false and misleading”^18. For similar reasons, philosopher Daniel Dennett bluntly asserts: “[t]here simply are no qualia at all.”^19
18 . Paul M. Churchland, 1990, Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, p. 41 & 48.
19 . Daniel C. Dennett, 1991, Consciousness Explained, p. 74.
I think the reference on p. 28 is pointing out that the brain doesn’t turn purple (and a purple brain wouldn’t help anyway, as there are no eyes in the brain to see the purple). The remainder of the page is extending the example to further elaborate the problem of subjective experience.
I cannot find the reference to qualia quoted in The Taboo of Subjectivity at all—p. 74 is before Dennett even defines qualia, and p. 374 does not have those exact words—only the conclusion of a thought experiment illuminating his rejection of the concept.
Upvoted. I searched Google for about 15 seconds looking for the quote and didn’t find it, but I remember seeing or hearing Dennett say once how flabbergasted he is about being “oh yeah, that guy who thinks we don’t see color.”
He does not use the expression “color feeling”, but here’s a direct quote from Consciousness Explained, chapter 12, part 4:
You seem to be referring to a private, ineffable something-or-other in your mind’s eye, a private shade of homogeneous pink, but this is just how it seems to you, not how it is… what it turns out to be in the real world in your brain is just a complex of dispositions.
He explicitly denies that there is any such thing as a “private shade of homogeneous pink”—which I would consider a reasonably apt description of the phenomenological reality. He also says there is something real, a “complex of dispositions”. And, he also says that when we refer to color, we think we’re referring to the former, but we’re really referring to the latter. So, subjective color does not exist, but references to color do exist.
That still leaves room for there to be “appearances of pink”. No actual pink, but also more than a mere belief in pink; some actual phenomenon, appearance, component of experience, which people mistakenly think is pink. But I see no trace of this. The thing which he is prepared to call real, the “complex of dispositions”, is entirely cognitive (in the previous paragraph he refers to “innate and learned associations and reactive dispositions”). There is no reference to appearance, experience, or any other aspect of subjectivity.
Therefore, I conclude that not only does Dennett deny the existence of color (yes, I know he still uses the word, but he explicitly defines it to refer to something else), he denies that there is even an appearance of color, a “color feeling”. In his account of color phenomenology, there are just beliefs about nonexistent things, and that’s it.
So, subjective color does not exist, but references to color do exist.
The references to red together definitely form a physical network in my brain, right? I have a list of 10,000 things in my memory that are vividly red, some more vivid than others, and they’re all potentially connected under this label ‘red’. When that entire network is stimulated (say, by my seeing something red or imagining what “red” is), might I not also give that a label? I could call the stimulation of the entire network the “essence of red” or “redness” and have a subjective feeling about it.
I’m certain this particular theory about what “redness” occurs frequently. My question is, what’s missing in this explanation from the dualist point of view? Why can’t the subjective experience of red just be the whole network of red associations being simultaneously excited as an entity?
Above you wrote
Some people are at the stage of saying, color is a neural classification and I don’t see any further problem.
So I guess I’m just asking, what’s the further problem? (If you’ve already answered, would you please link to it?)
What are in those ellipses? In what you quote, I see that he’s denying that it’s “a private, ineffable something-or-other in your mind’s eye”. From what else I’ve read of Dennett, I’m sure that he has a problem with the “private” and “ineffable” part. Is it so clear that he has a problem with the “component of experience” part?
In the book, a character called Otto advocates the position that qualia exists. The full passage is Dennett making his case to Otto once again:
What qualia are, Otto, are just those complexes of dispositions. When you say “This is my quale”, what you are singling out, or referring to, whether you realize it or not, is your idiosyncratic complex of dispositions. You seem to be referring to a private, ineffable something-or-other in your mind’s eye, a private shade of homogeneous pink, but this is just how it seems to you, not how it is. That “quale” of yours is a character in good standing in the fictional world of your heterophenomenology, but what it turns out to be in the real world in your brain is just a complex of dispositions.
“Dear Dan—the shade of pink is real. In denying its existence, you are getting things backwards. The important methodological maxim to remember is that appearances are real. This does not mean that every time there is an appearance of an apple, there is an apple. It just means that every time there is an appearance of an apple, there is an appearance of an apple. It also does not mean that every time someone thinks there is an appearance of an apple, there is one. People can be mistaken in their auto-phenomenology—but not as mistaken as you would have us believe.”
Husserl, who was only concerned with getting phenomenology right and not with any underlying ontology, had a “principle of principles” which expresses the first half of what I mean by “appearances are real”:
everything originarily offered to us in “intuition” is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.
In Husserl, every mode of awareness is a form of intuition, including sense perception. He’s saying that every appearance has an element of certainty, but only an element.
Appealing to Husserl may be overkill, but the point is, there is a limit to the degree one can plausibly deny appearance. Denying the existence of color in the way Dennett appears to be doing is like saying that 0 = 1 or that nothing exists—it’s only worth doing as an exercise in cognitive extremism; try believing something impossible and see what happens.
However, people do end up believing weird things out of apparent philosophical necessity. I think this is what is going on with Dennett; he does understand that there is nothing like that shade of pink in standard physical ontology, so rather than engage in a spurious identification of pinkness with some neural property, he just says there is no pink. It’s just a word. It’s there to denote a bundle of cognitive and behavioral dispositions. But there is no pink as such, outside or inside the head.
He’s willing to take this drastic step because the truth of physics seems so nailed down, so indisputable. However, there is a sense in which we do not know what physics is about. It’s a black-box causal structure, whose inputs and outputs show up in our experience looking a certain way (looking like objects distributed in space). But that doesn’t tell us how they are in themselves.
If you take the Husserlian principle ontologically—conscious experience is offering us a glimpse of the genuine nature of one small sliver of reality, namely, what happens in consciousness—and combine it with a general commitment to the causal structure of physics, you get what I’m now calling Reverse Monism. Reverse, because it’s the reverse of the usual reductionism. The usual reductionism says this appearance, this part of consciousness, is actually atoms in space doing something. Reverse monism says instead: this appearance must be what some part of physics (some part of the physical brain) actually is.
If the usual reductionistic accounts of conscious experience were plausible as identities, reverse monism wouldn’t introduce anything new; it would just be looking at the same identity from the other end of the equation. However, the only thing these alleged identities have going for them, generally, is a common causal role. The thing which is supposed to be the neural correlate of blueness is in the right position to be caused by blue light and to get a person talking about blueness. But the thing in itself (e.g. cortical neurons firing) is nothing like blueness as such.
Now as it happens, all these theories about the neural correlates of consciousness (such as Drescher’s gensyms) are speculative in the extreme. We’re not talking about anything as well-founded as the Krebs cycle or the inverse square law; these are speculations about how the truth might be. So we are not under any obligation to consider the mismatch between subjective ontology and neural ontology which occurs in these theories as itself an established fact, that we just have to learn to live with. We are free to look for other theories in which an ontologically plausible identity, and not just a causally adequate identity, is posited. That’s what I’m on about.
Time and again you sweep aside the “bundle of cognitive and behavioral dispositions” Dennett refers to in his reply to Otto, in your appeal to the primacy of “redness” or “pinkness”.
This has some intuitive appeal, because “red” and “pink” are short words and refer to something we experience as simple. Your position would be much harder to defend if you were looking for “the private, ineffable feeling of reading Lesswrong.com″ as one commenter suggested: people would have an easier time denying the existence of that.
Yet—even though I’m not entirely sure that’s what this commenter had in mind—I would say there is only a difference of degree, not of kind, between “the feeling of redness” and “the feeling of reading Lesswrong”. The feeling of seeing the color red really is a complex of dispositions, something cobbled together from many parts over our long evolutionary history. The more we learn about color, the more complex it turns out to be. It only feels simple because it’s a human universal.
The “feeling of reading LessWrong” can be analysed in great detail. There’s a classic work of phenomenology, Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art, which goes into the multiple “strata” of meaning which turn the examination of small black shapes on white paper into the imagination of a possible world. Participating in a discussion like this involves a stream of complex intentional experiences against a steady background of embodied sensation.
Color experience is certainly not beyond further analysis, even at the phenomenological level. The three-dimensional model of hue, saturation, and intensity is a statement about the nature of subjective color. The idea that experiences are ineffable is just wrong. We’re all describing them every day.
No amount of intricate new knowledge about the way that color perception varies or the functions that it performs can actually abolish the phenomenon. And most materialists don’t try to abolish it, they try to identify it with something material. I think Dennett is trying to abolish phenomena as realities, in favor of a cognitive behaviorism, but that is really a topic for Dennett interpreters.
Instead, I want to know about your phenomenology of color. I assume that in fact you have it. But I’m curious to know, first, whether you’ll admit to having it, or whether you prefer to talk about your experience in some other way; and second, how you describe it. Do you look at color and think “I’m seeing a bundle of dispositions”? Do you tell yourself “I’m not actually seeing it, I’m just associating the perceptual object with a certain abstract class”?
I’m not sure I ever “look at color” in isolation. There are colors and arrangements of color that I like and that I’ll go out of my way to experience; I’m looking forward to an exhibition of Soulages’ work in Paris, for instance.
When I look at a Soulages painting my inner narrative is probably something like “Wow, this is black… a luminous black which emphasizes straight, purposive brushstrokes in a way that’s quite different from any other painter’s use of color I’ve seen; how puzzling and delightful.” It’s different from the reflective black of my coffee cup nearby, the matte black of my phone handset or the black I see when I close my eyes. When I see my coffee cup I’m mostly seeing the reflections, when I see the handset it’s the texture that stands out, when I close my eyes the black is a background to a dance of random splotches and blobs.
When I think about my perception of black in all the above instances I am certainly thinking in terms of dispositions and of abstract tags. There isn’t a unitary “feeling of black” that persists after these various experiences of things I now call black.
Citation or he didn’t say it. Daniel Dennett coined the phrase “greedy reductionism”—partially to emphasize that he does not deny the existence of color, consciousness, etc. Unless you know of some place where he reversed his position, I would argue that you have misinterpreted his remarks. My understanding is that his position is that color is an idiosyncratic property of the human visual perception system with no simple referent in physics, not no referent at all.
(I normally wouldn’t make such a big deal of it, but Dennett is one of the major figures on the physicalist side of this debate, and a mischaracterization of his views impedes the ability of bystanders to perform a fair comparison.)
In Explaining Consciousness, chapter 2, p. 28, Dennett says there is no purple in the brain when we see purple. That may be what he means.
I also heard Dennett quoted as saying there is no such thing as qualia, allegedly in “The taboo of subjectivity”, p. 139, which I don’t have.
Here is a full quote that makes clear in exactly what sense he doesn’t believe in qualia:
Originally in Quining Qualia, 1988, by Dennett, and quoted on Multiple-Drafts Model.
The Taboo of Subjectivity is a book by B. Alan Wallace. It appears that Dennett wrote a review for that work, but I couldn’t find it online. Are you referring to that review, or to something else?
I see what you meant now. Dennett was quoted in Wallace’s book, on p.139. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
The quote, with some context, is:
18 . Paul M. Churchland, 1990, Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, p. 41 & 48.
19 . Daniel C. Dennett, 1991, Consciousness Explained, p. 74.
Belatedly:
I think the reference on p. 28 is pointing out that the brain doesn’t turn purple (and a purple brain wouldn’t help anyway, as there are no eyes in the brain to see the purple). The remainder of the page is extending the example to further elaborate the problem of subjective experience.
I cannot find the reference to qualia quoted in The Taboo of Subjectivity at all—p. 74 is before Dennett even defines qualia, and p. 374 does not have those exact words—only the conclusion of a thought experiment illuminating his rejection of the concept.
Thanks for the page number—I’ll see if I can find it in my copy when I get home.
Upvoted. I searched Google for about 15 seconds looking for the quote and didn’t find it, but I remember seeing or hearing Dennett say once how flabbergasted he is about being “oh yeah, that guy who thinks we don’t see color.”
He does not use the expression “color feeling”, but here’s a direct quote from Consciousness Explained, chapter 12, part 4:
He explicitly denies that there is any such thing as a “private shade of homogeneous pink”—which I would consider a reasonably apt description of the phenomenological reality. He also says there is something real, a “complex of dispositions”. And, he also says that when we refer to color, we think we’re referring to the former, but we’re really referring to the latter. So, subjective color does not exist, but references to color do exist.
That still leaves room for there to be “appearances of pink”. No actual pink, but also more than a mere belief in pink; some actual phenomenon, appearance, component of experience, which people mistakenly think is pink. But I see no trace of this. The thing which he is prepared to call real, the “complex of dispositions”, is entirely cognitive (in the previous paragraph he refers to “innate and learned associations and reactive dispositions”). There is no reference to appearance, experience, or any other aspect of subjectivity.
Therefore, I conclude that not only does Dennett deny the existence of color (yes, I know he still uses the word, but he explicitly defines it to refer to something else), he denies that there is even an appearance of color, a “color feeling”. In his account of color phenomenology, there are just beliefs about nonexistent things, and that’s it.
The references to red together definitely form a physical network in my brain, right? I have a list of 10,000 things in my memory that are vividly red, some more vivid than others, and they’re all potentially connected under this label ‘red’. When that entire network is stimulated (say, by my seeing something red or imagining what “red” is), might I not also give that a label? I could call the stimulation of the entire network the “essence of red” or “redness” and have a subjective feeling about it.
I’m certain this particular theory about what “redness” occurs frequently. My question is, what’s missing in this explanation from the dualist point of view? Why can’t the subjective experience of red just be the whole network of red associations being simultaneously excited as an entity?
Above you wrote
So I guess I’m just asking, what’s the further problem? (If you’ve already answered, would you please link to it?)
What are in those ellipses? In what you quote, I see that he’s denying that it’s “a private, ineffable something-or-other in your mind’s eye”. From what else I’ve read of Dennett, I’m sure that he has a problem with the “private” and “ineffable” part. Is it so clear that he has a problem with the “component of experience” part?
In the book, a character called Otto advocates the position that qualia exists. The full passage is Dennett making his case to Otto once again:
And how would you answer that passage of Dennett’s ?
“Dear Dan—the shade of pink is real. In denying its existence, you are getting things backwards. The important methodological maxim to remember is that appearances are real. This does not mean that every time there is an appearance of an apple, there is an apple. It just means that every time there is an appearance of an apple, there is an appearance of an apple. It also does not mean that every time someone thinks there is an appearance of an apple, there is one. People can be mistaken in their auto-phenomenology—but not as mistaken as you would have us believe.”
Husserl, who was only concerned with getting phenomenology right and not with any underlying ontology, had a “principle of principles” which expresses the first half of what I mean by “appearances are real”:
In Husserl, every mode of awareness is a form of intuition, including sense perception. He’s saying that every appearance has an element of certainty, but only an element.
Appealing to Husserl may be overkill, but the point is, there is a limit to the degree one can plausibly deny appearance. Denying the existence of color in the way Dennett appears to be doing is like saying that 0 = 1 or that nothing exists—it’s only worth doing as an exercise in cognitive extremism; try believing something impossible and see what happens.
However, people do end up believing weird things out of apparent philosophical necessity. I think this is what is going on with Dennett; he does understand that there is nothing like that shade of pink in standard physical ontology, so rather than engage in a spurious identification of pinkness with some neural property, he just says there is no pink. It’s just a word. It’s there to denote a bundle of cognitive and behavioral dispositions. But there is no pink as such, outside or inside the head.
He’s willing to take this drastic step because the truth of physics seems so nailed down, so indisputable. However, there is a sense in which we do not know what physics is about. It’s a black-box causal structure, whose inputs and outputs show up in our experience looking a certain way (looking like objects distributed in space). But that doesn’t tell us how they are in themselves.
If you take the Husserlian principle ontologically—conscious experience is offering us a glimpse of the genuine nature of one small sliver of reality, namely, what happens in consciousness—and combine it with a general commitment to the causal structure of physics, you get what I’m now calling Reverse Monism. Reverse, because it’s the reverse of the usual reductionism. The usual reductionism says this appearance, this part of consciousness, is actually atoms in space doing something. Reverse monism says instead: this appearance must be what some part of physics (some part of the physical brain) actually is.
If the usual reductionistic accounts of conscious experience were plausible as identities, reverse monism wouldn’t introduce anything new; it would just be looking at the same identity from the other end of the equation. However, the only thing these alleged identities have going for them, generally, is a common causal role. The thing which is supposed to be the neural correlate of blueness is in the right position to be caused by blue light and to get a person talking about blueness. But the thing in itself (e.g. cortical neurons firing) is nothing like blueness as such.
Now as it happens, all these theories about the neural correlates of consciousness (such as Drescher’s gensyms) are speculative in the extreme. We’re not talking about anything as well-founded as the Krebs cycle or the inverse square law; these are speculations about how the truth might be. So we are not under any obligation to consider the mismatch between subjective ontology and neural ontology which occurs in these theories as itself an established fact, that we just have to learn to live with. We are free to look for other theories in which an ontologically plausible identity, and not just a causally adequate identity, is posited. That’s what I’m on about.
Husserl couldn’t know what Dennett knows about the biology, psychology and evolutionary history of color perception.
Time and again you sweep aside the “bundle of cognitive and behavioral dispositions” Dennett refers to in his reply to Otto, in your appeal to the primacy of “redness” or “pinkness”.
This has some intuitive appeal, because “red” and “pink” are short words and refer to something we experience as simple. Your position would be much harder to defend if you were looking for “the private, ineffable feeling of reading Lesswrong.com″ as one commenter suggested: people would have an easier time denying the existence of that.
Yet—even though I’m not entirely sure that’s what this commenter had in mind—I would say there is only a difference of degree, not of kind, between “the feeling of redness” and “the feeling of reading Lesswrong”. The feeling of seeing the color red really is a complex of dispositions, something cobbled together from many parts over our long evolutionary history. The more we learn about color, the more complex it turns out to be. It only feels simple because it’s a human universal.
The “feeling of reading LessWrong” can be analysed in great detail. There’s a classic work of phenomenology, Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art, which goes into the multiple “strata” of meaning which turn the examination of small black shapes on white paper into the imagination of a possible world. Participating in a discussion like this involves a stream of complex intentional experiences against a steady background of embodied sensation.
Color experience is certainly not beyond further analysis, even at the phenomenological level. The three-dimensional model of hue, saturation, and intensity is a statement about the nature of subjective color. The idea that experiences are ineffable is just wrong. We’re all describing them every day.
No amount of intricate new knowledge about the way that color perception varies or the functions that it performs can actually abolish the phenomenon. And most materialists don’t try to abolish it, they try to identify it with something material. I think Dennett is trying to abolish phenomena as realities, in favor of a cognitive behaviorism, but that is really a topic for Dennett interpreters.
Instead, I want to know about your phenomenology of color. I assume that in fact you have it. But I’m curious to know, first, whether you’ll admit to having it, or whether you prefer to talk about your experience in some other way; and second, how you describe it. Do you look at color and think “I’m seeing a bundle of dispositions”? Do you tell yourself “I’m not actually seeing it, I’m just associating the perceptual object with a certain abstract class”?
I’m not sure I ever “look at color” in isolation. There are colors and arrangements of color that I like and that I’ll go out of my way to experience; I’m looking forward to an exhibition of Soulages’ work in Paris, for instance.
When I look at a Soulages painting my inner narrative is probably something like “Wow, this is black… a luminous black which emphasizes straight, purposive brushstrokes in a way that’s quite different from any other painter’s use of color I’ve seen; how puzzling and delightful.” It’s different from the reflective black of my coffee cup nearby, the matte black of my phone handset or the black I see when I close my eyes. When I see my coffee cup I’m mostly seeing the reflections, when I see the handset it’s the texture that stands out, when I close my eyes the black is a background to a dance of random splotches and blobs.
When I think about my perception of black in all the above instances I am certainly thinking in terms of dispositions and of abstract tags. There isn’t a unitary “feeling of black” that persists after these various experiences of things I now call black.