Ep. 400: Dennett Rejects Qualia (Part One)
episode
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
52 min
3 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 11 hours ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is Dennett’s argument against the existence of qualia?
You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 400 is something like, Is there a subject of our experiences? And we are continuing to read portions of Daniel C. Dennett's Consciousness Explained from nineteen ninety-one For more information about the text on the podcast, please see partiallyexamined life.com. This is Mark Clintonmeyer, private and ineffable in Madison, Wisconsin. This
is Seth Paskin, wondering where the color is in Austin, Texas.
This is Dylan Casey copying to being an urbane verificationist in Madison, Wisconsin.
And this is Christopher Heath having no experience at all except for my discriminative states in North Hollywood.
And this is the absence of Wes Allwin. He he was gonna come back and spice up this second conversation of Dennett for us. But you know, actually he told me he first Dennett when he got into it was just as annoying to him as he remembered. So it's not a fun experience. And second, he has just gotten really deep into doing some clawed AI stuff. So all the episodes on our site now have transcripts in the posts themselves. If it's not there yet, it will be up there pretty quick. So that is something thanks to him and his working on it. So he's vibe coding. Yeah, I think that's a good exchange to not have him in this. Because we still have you here, Chris. Thank you for coming back. I'm still here.
Yeah yeah. I'll try to be um as contentious as Wes was for sure. Or would be.
I'd honestly I I I'm kinda disappointed he's not here because I mean Dennett's effectively arguing an emergent property, effectively, or emergent like kind of thing, and I would have expected Wes to be. all over it, but maybe he just finds it too annoying.
See, I already have a problem with that characterization, but I so yeah, maybe we'll have to get into
Well, well well, it's interpretive at the end and and then it might not even agree with it. But yeah.
So we read the end of the book. Some of us had read chapter twelve for last time and could not help but presaging some of the things that we'll now treat in some more detail here. But when we're adding that, like, well, let's add 13, which is the reality of selves. Like, okay, well that, you know, qualia and selves. And then Chris was just asking, like, are we reading twelve through fourteen? And then we're like, well, you know, fourteen is actually pretty good, pretty relevant too. And then I ended up finding some stuff in ten and eleven that I, you know, basically I just wanted to cover, you know, as much as we feel the need to, all the various group of thought experiments, famous articles, things, you know, saying that
There's something wrong with scientism in the area of philosophy of mind, that there's something you can't quite capture. And it is consciousness, right? The thing, the very thing that Dennis thinks he's explaining, well, is he actually explaining it or is he somehow missing the point? He's explaining something else. One of his interlocutors, Ned Block, calls it phenomenal consciousness. He says, access consciousness. Right? The organism knows things, can emit verbal behavior about it, can use it to drive other kinds of behaviors, can recall it later. That's you know, you're definitely conscious of something. You have access conscious, but is that the same as the lights being on? That you have that special phenomenal conscious and an actual experience of something.
So you can imagine, you know, creating a machine that. that has visual sensors and is conscious of the stuff in its surrounding area. And you could even give it the ability to report on its own conscious states. And this is how much I was seeing today. And this is, you know, maybe this the site was more acute today than yesterday because, you know, I'm running low on battery. It could have all this sort of self-conscious, I say in quote.
I'm just gonna interrupt you right there. No one would ever call that consciousness.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Dennett’s argument against the existence of qualia?
0:07–5:41
2
How do Dennett and Block differentiate between access and phenomenal consciousness?
5:41–12:40
3
Why do the hosts compare a thermostat or robot to conscious beings?
12:40–19:08
4
What role do ‘seemings’ play in Dennett’s critique of the Cartesian theater?
19:08–24:47
5
How does the discussion link primary/secondary qualities to the problem of qualia?
24:47–30:55
6
What examples (e.g., bat, pain, color) are used to test Dennett’s view on subjective experience?
30:55–36:56
7
How do the speakers address the ‘hard problem’ and the notion of a narrative self?
36:56–41:56
8
What conclusions do the hosts reach about Dennett’s denial of qualia and what’s left for part two?
41:56–52:15
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
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Ep. 399: Dan Dennett's Model of Mind (Part Two)