Ep. 400: Dennett Rejects Qualia (Part Two)
episode
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
51 min
3 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 11 hours ago
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What is Dennett’s response to Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
You're listening to The Partially Examined Life, Episode 400, Part 2. Finishing up our discussion of Dan Dennett's Consciousness Explained, we were right in the middle of considering really his response to the Nagel article, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, which was Nagel's proof that there is something, qualia, the subjective experience, that even if you knew... You studied bats, you know all from the outside about their brain chemistry, their physiology, their abilities. How can they echolocate? How far away, how fast can the thing be moving? You could know all that stuff, and yet you would still never know what it is like to be a bat. There is that kernel. of qualia that is is forever inaccessible and therefore science can't know everything there is to know because there's the you know the thing that only other bats would understand
yeah
and so can we sum up what so far what dennis response
to that has been i mean one he just flat out rejects it right he says look there are all sorts of ways we can talk about what it might like to be a bat especially like negative ways like saying like well we know that they won't have the I think he used like children's stories as an example. We know they're not going to like be going to school and thinking about their math homework or something like that seems silly, but there are all sorts of things we could immediately eliminate from what a bat experience might be like. He says, once you have enough information, you can pretty much get there, especially because he thinks all what it's like to be a bat is just whatever discriminant or dispositional states the bat would have.
Does that sound right?
Yeah, and our access to it is heterophenomenology. He even walks into, I mean, he refers to von Uxel and the notion of umwelt and inwelt, a surround world and an inner world, which to me, as soon as you agree that there is such a thing as an inner world of a bat, unless you want to go... And take Nagel's point in saying, ah, because there's an inner world that's an inner world of a bat, there's a what is like to be a bat that you don't have any access to. And therefore, there is consciousness. And that's the proof of consciousness. That's the part that Dennett won't go for. But the notion that there is a inner world for a bat that isn't a crazy one for Dennett.
Yeah, I think that's part of it. I mean, Seth was even talking about selfhood and it's being related to linguistic behavior, I think, a little bit too when we last left off. And that struck me a little bit because I was the one earlier who was saying we want to be careful here about what we mean by self. Because I agree that qualia is just like a confused term and I kind of hate it. But I almost want to make room for a kind of minimal qualia. And I want to make sure that Dennett's okay with that. But I can't tell sometimes. Obviously, the bat is a situated, evaluating point of view, like as an organism, right? It's got boundaries between itself, its environment. It has a feedback loop from taking in senses and acting.
When he talks about qualia, he wants to say that he doesn't like that it's constituted by it being ineffable, being private, and all these things. And I'm okay with that. But he does also mention he doesn't want to talk about it being subjective, right? That's one of the criteria he uses as well. And I don't understand that part about why there couldn't still be an agentive point of view that would have been, I mean, selected for early in animal history, where in which you have this situated evaluating point of view, and it feels like something to be exhausted, to be in pain. Does that make sense? Sometimes I feel like he's okay with this. And sometimes I feel like he wants nothing to do with it. And I can't tell where, I know I've said this before, but relate that to the bat for me, Dylan, like that he's okay with all that stuff I just said.
So I think he would be. The part that, 447, I think that we get to something like this. He says, so before this, he's talking about, this is towards the end of the, what is it like to be a bat?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Dennett’s response to Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
0:07–6:38
2
How does Dennett argue that qualia are unnecessary for explaining bat consciousness?
6:38–11:58
3
What role do language and narrative play in understanding non‑human animal experience?
11:58–19:36
4
How do the hosts define a “point of view” and its relation to consciousness?
19:36–25:48
5
What ethical implications arise from treating animals as having minimal or no subjective experience?
25:48–30:24
6
How does the discussion of pain and suffering connect to Dennett’s view on philosophical zombies?
30:24–36:37
7
What are the main disagreements about the existence of a “self” in lower animals like snakes and insects?
36:37–42:39
8
What conclusions do the hosts draw about Dennett’s overall approach to consciousness and its moral significance?
42:39–51:30
Speakers
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