PREMIUM-Ep. 400: Dennett Rejects Qualia (Part Three)
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What is the purpose of this episode and how does it fit into the Consciousness Explained series?
You're about to hear a preview of Partially Examined Life supporter exclusive content. To learn how to get the whole thing, check out partially examined life.com/slash support. You're listening to the partial exam in life episode four hundred part three, finishing up Dan Dennett's Consciousness Explain. the later chapters on qualia. I'm just here with Seth. Hey Seth. Hello. So we had talked a lot about he he kind of takes in this uh chapter twelve, Qualia Disqualified and goes through a number of the arguments that we have covered. In uh our original philosophy of mind episode, right? So the what is it like to be a bat we talked for for most of the second half. Somehow we got on I mean, he does talk about animal consciousness in here, so it's it wasn't crazy, but uh we skipped over some of the other stuff.
So Section five Epiphenomenal qualia. Frank Jackson the his uh article about Mary the color scientist. Would you wanna remind folks what that
says? So I'll just uh I'll just read from the the book. Not the whole thing, but this is Frank Jackson's much discussed case of Mary, the color scientist who has never seen colors. This is a quote from Jackson in Dennett's book. Mary is a brilliant scientist who, for whatever reason, is forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes of the sky, yadda yada. She discovers which wavelength combinations of sky stimulate the retina, how this produces via the central nervous system, the contraction of vocal cords, yadda yada, like that end up in the sky as blue.
So, what happens when Mary? released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor. It says, Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it, but then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. She had all the physical information. Ergo, there's more to have than that and physicalism is false. In essence, I think we said this a different way, Mark, on on the other episode, just that the idea that Even if you had all of the knowledge that was everything that was necessary to explain the how you are experiencing something. Oh, it's this temperature, you're in this latitude, the surface is made up of this level of this type of material that has this microscopic structure, and the light is coming from the sun at this oblique angle through the clouds, yada yah, reflecting off
And you c so you can explain how all that adds up to the experience of the color red. The idea is that this even if the scientist has all of that information but has never actually seen red, the seeing of red is something super added or epiphenomenal on top of the physicalist account.
Which elsewhere in this book, Dennett has said Look, if you are explaining consciousness and part of your explanatory language includes reference to consciousness, then you haven't explained it very well, have you? Mm-hmm. So, you know, this is a co I I remember um Davidson in the article that you were not on that episode to discuss, but you did read it, right? Right. You were pre Mm-hmm. You know, compared it to the normative descriptive distinction. Right, you could know all the descriptive information So in fact I think this word supervenience is something he he attributes to G. E. Moore, I believe, who is the guy who came up with this sharp distinction to say, I mean t certainly Hume talked about is and ought, right?
So this is clear but I think the way that is currently formulated might have been so that uh Moore in arguing about moral theories said you could know uh you know if you're trying to reduce what is good to what is pleasurable or what you know, to the utility principle, to something like that, then you are missing the point that good is a sui generis Irreducible quality, well, Jackson is saying the same is true of the mental.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What is the purpose of this episode and how does it fit into the Consciousness Explained series?
0:06–6:00
2
How does Frank Jackson’s Mary the Color Scientist thought experiment work?
6:00–9:54
3
Why does Dennett argue that having all the physical information isn’t enough to explain color experience?
9:54–10:51
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
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Ep. 400: Dennett Rejects Qualia (Part One)