These discussions are always complicated by different people using different words in different words.
This post was written to argue primarily against a view that has cropped up in conversations I’ve had with people personally, none of whom were professional philosophers. Most of these people were scientifically minded and many of them have been influenced by Daniel Dennett. Nonetheless, I feel I should be slightly cautious of saying that I’m arguing against Daniel Dennett’s views as I have only been exposed to his ideas second-hand.
Keeping this in mind: Wikipedia says that Daniel Dennett “offers an argument against qualia”, so it sounds like he rejects their existence; however the quote you listed makes it sound more like he supports a thin version of qualia instead. In practise the actual label is mostly irrelevant; two people can have exactly the same underlying views with one person saying they don’t believe in qualia and the other saying they only support a thin definition.
So I’m not just arguing against people who say qualia don’t exist, I’m also arguing against those who assert a thin definition by denying a thick definition. Some of my arguments might only work against those who claim non-existence, but others apply to both.
At this point, it would be natural to ask what exactly I mean by a thick definition, but there is a sense in which you can already predict what I mean by that. I’m sure you can already guess that if you give me your definition of qualia, then I’ll respond that what I mean by qualia is not the mere arrangement of atoms or particular, but some feeling that exists beyond that. And that definition won’t satisfy you because I haven’t clearly stated what it is, but as I already argue in a comment below we should take the definition of qualia as primitive, so that we can only say what it is not, not what it is.
What is this business of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’? I am not familiar with these terms as applied to qualia, or definitions, or any such thing. Could you elaborate? I’m afraid I really can’t guess what you mean, and nor does your brief allusion to ‘not the mere arrangement of atoms’, etc., clarify things much.
Have you considered reading Dennett? He writes quite engagingly. In Consciousness Explained, for instance, he devotes an entire chapter to qualia. And if you find yourself frequently arguing against people who’ve been inspired by Dennett’s ideas, then why not go straight to the source?
A thin definition of consciousness would be one such as in the relabelling argument above. People start by taking a collection of atoms or quarks or part of a wavefunction. They view them in a materialistic sense, so no consciousness properties above and in addition to the physical properties. Finally they just declare that particular arrangements count as being conscious. I address this most directly in the relabelling argument above. Maybe I will read Dennett, but reluctant to buy a book just to read one chapter.
I confess that your relabeling argument makes very little sense to me. The rest of your comment, likewise. For one thing, it doesn’t seem to be a “definition” of “consciousness” at all, neither a “thick” one nor a “thin” one nor any other kind. For another thing, aren’t we trying to define “qualia” and not “consciousness”? Or are they the same thing (somehow)?
All in all, I remain very confused about what you are saying. (I certainly don’t presume to demand that you make any further attempts to explain it to me; perhaps someone else, who does understand your claims, can try their hand at an explanation?)
If somebody would insist that triangles need to be made of molecyles I could be hard pressed to talk about mathematical triangles if I can only effectively refer to triangle prototype objects. Or if someone insisted that floating point numbers were only real and real numbers were imaginary and took all statements about “reals” to “really” be claims that should be translated to be claims about floating point numbers for their actual semantics.
Some ontological stances hold for exmple that a atom can have a subjective experience. I believe these are called panpsychisist theories. It would seem a lot of people default to a ontology where you can have a single atom without any “psychisism”. If you build up with non-psychic building blocks it would seem that the only way to recover psychisim to the theory would be to have it as an emergent property. But having it as an emergent property would mean it’s implications for ontologcal basic being would be rather weak.
If people assume floating points trancendental numbers become inaccessible and it could seem that the question of whether existence contains “non-inert” components hangs on whether it is safe to assume that an atom is “dumb”.
So people could employ a logic of “I am psychisist, I exists therefore existence has a psychisist component, therefore a theory that has no psychisist component is neccesarily inadequte”. The trouble comes when you want to distuinguish this property from things like “being a computer/being able to be in complex computational states”. Some people seem fine with “dead clockwork computer” theories essentially p-zombie worlds where things definetely happen and are in certain positions. Any talk trying to adress the “deadness” part can easily convert into discussion how you get complex computers from simple computers. (and the worlds are “alive” in the sense that there are dynamics they are not “frozen”)
I have used almost every word except qualia, but out of the various angles I am starting to get the feeling that these kinds of things are trying to get pointed at. In phenomenology there are probably attempts in trying to understsand how “rich expereinces” get built out of “poor experiences” and it might be ontology ambivalent in that the background ontology is not terribly relevant. But I think there are a lot of people tha think there is strong correlation between poor experiences and simple computational states and rich experiences and complex computational states and the phenomenology can be understood as an attempt to get the computational state boundaries right in a very particular field which can be seen to be about very particular kinds of computers. But others might see it as being about new kinds of theories that are “alive” whose dynamics are poorly understood and the aliveness correlates with some exotic kind of ontological properties. Or that the bridge between “complex computational states” and “rich experiences” deserves recognition and theorization. That is when we explain experiences we give an explanation to a thing that other have not yet explained and can not explain and the kind of explanation is novel enough that why this type of explanation is even needed needs discussion and some might reject because it doesn’t fullfill the criteria for the old type of explanation.
These discussions are always complicated by different people using different words in different words.
This post was written to argue primarily against a view that has cropped up in conversations I’ve had with people personally, none of whom were professional philosophers. Most of these people were scientifically minded and many of them have been influenced by Daniel Dennett. Nonetheless, I feel I should be slightly cautious of saying that I’m arguing against Daniel Dennett’s views as I have only been exposed to his ideas second-hand.
Keeping this in mind: Wikipedia says that Daniel Dennett “offers an argument against qualia”, so it sounds like he rejects their existence; however the quote you listed makes it sound more like he supports a thin version of qualia instead. In practise the actual label is mostly irrelevant; two people can have exactly the same underlying views with one person saying they don’t believe in qualia and the other saying they only support a thin definition.
So I’m not just arguing against people who say qualia don’t exist, I’m also arguing against those who assert a thin definition by denying a thick definition. Some of my arguments might only work against those who claim non-existence, but others apply to both.
At this point, it would be natural to ask what exactly I mean by a thick definition, but there is a sense in which you can already predict what I mean by that. I’m sure you can already guess that if you give me your definition of qualia, then I’ll respond that what I mean by qualia is not the mere arrangement of atoms or particular, but some feeling that exists beyond that. And that definition won’t satisfy you because I haven’t clearly stated what it is, but as I already argue in a comment below we should take the definition of qualia as primitive, so that we can only say what it is not, not what it is.
What is this business of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’? I am not familiar with these terms as applied to qualia, or definitions, or any such thing. Could you elaborate? I’m afraid I really can’t guess what you mean, and nor does your brief allusion to ‘not the mere arrangement of atoms’, etc., clarify things much.
Have you considered reading Dennett? He writes quite engagingly. In Consciousness Explained, for instance, he devotes an entire chapter to qualia. And if you find yourself frequently arguing against people who’ve been inspired by Dennett’s ideas, then why not go straight to the source?
A thin definition of consciousness would be one such as in the relabelling argument above. People start by taking a collection of atoms or quarks or part of a wavefunction. They view them in a materialistic sense, so no consciousness properties above and in addition to the physical properties. Finally they just declare that particular arrangements count as being conscious. I address this most directly in the relabelling argument above. Maybe I will read Dennett, but reluctant to buy a book just to read one chapter.
I confess that your relabeling argument makes very little sense to me. The rest of your comment, likewise. For one thing, it doesn’t seem to be a “definition” of “consciousness” at all, neither a “thick” one nor a “thin” one nor any other kind. For another thing, aren’t we trying to define “qualia” and not “consciousness”? Or are they the same thing (somehow)?
All in all, I remain very confused about what you are saying. (I certainly don’t presume to demand that you make any further attempts to explain it to me; perhaps someone else, who does understand your claims, can try their hand at an explanation?)
If somebody would insist that triangles need to be made of molecyles I could be hard pressed to talk about mathematical triangles if I can only effectively refer to triangle prototype objects. Or if someone insisted that floating point numbers were only real and real numbers were imaginary and took all statements about “reals” to “really” be claims that should be translated to be claims about floating point numbers for their actual semantics.
Some ontological stances hold for exmple that a atom can have a subjective experience. I believe these are called panpsychisist theories. It would seem a lot of people default to a ontology where you can have a single atom without any “psychisism”. If you build up with non-psychic building blocks it would seem that the only way to recover psychisim to the theory would be to have it as an emergent property. But having it as an emergent property would mean it’s implications for ontologcal basic being would be rather weak.
If people assume floating points trancendental numbers become inaccessible and it could seem that the question of whether existence contains “non-inert” components hangs on whether it is safe to assume that an atom is “dumb”.
So people could employ a logic of “I am psychisist, I exists therefore existence has a psychisist component, therefore a theory that has no psychisist component is neccesarily inadequte”. The trouble comes when you want to distuinguish this property from things like “being a computer/being able to be in complex computational states”. Some people seem fine with “dead clockwork computer” theories essentially p-zombie worlds where things definetely happen and are in certain positions. Any talk trying to adress the “deadness” part can easily convert into discussion how you get complex computers from simple computers. (and the worlds are “alive” in the sense that there are dynamics they are not “frozen”)
I have used almost every word except qualia, but out of the various angles I am starting to get the feeling that these kinds of things are trying to get pointed at. In phenomenology there are probably attempts in trying to understsand how “rich expereinces” get built out of “poor experiences” and it might be ontology ambivalent in that the background ontology is not terribly relevant. But I think there are a lot of people tha think there is strong correlation between poor experiences and simple computational states and rich experiences and complex computational states and the phenomenology can be understood as an attempt to get the computational state boundaries right in a very particular field which can be seen to be about very particular kinds of computers. But others might see it as being about new kinds of theories that are “alive” whose dynamics are poorly understood and the aliveness correlates with some exotic kind of ontological properties. Or that the bridge between “complex computational states” and “rich experiences” deserves recognition and theorization. That is when we explain experiences we give an explanation to a thing that other have not yet explained and can not explain and the kind of explanation is novel enough that why this type of explanation is even needed needs discussion and some might reject because it doesn’t fullfill the criteria for the old type of explanation.
He certainly argues against a thick version, but does not present himself as arguing for any version.