Extra Reading: Whose Qualia Is It, Anyway?
Investigating Common and Formal Approaches
Hello! Welcome to Extra Reading, which I’m reserving for posts in between my most formally presented and structured posts for Dissolved Distinctions. These posts will be a bit more casual, a bit more reactive to reader feedback and personal interest, and will serve as conceptual supplements or bridges in between main posts.
Noted Bluesky AI person – A tough crowd over there, but somebody’s gotta do it – SE Gyges commented:
“fwiw you should define qualia mega carefully when making arguments about it, nonspecialists mean one of six things none of which are necessarily the nagel or chalmers ones [...] like if I were writing about qualia at this point I would simply explain the definitions in one article and then separately make my argument about qualia without using the word”
(You can find Gyges’ own blog here.)
And he makes a good point. People are not particularly consistent with these things. If anything, philosophers themselves aren’t even consistent with how they conceptualize and apply qualia. To make a good, comprehensive argument or position about it – you’ll see what this might mean on my end as this article progresses – we need a more comprehensive survey of the landscape.
So let’s break this down. I won’t necessarily be adhering to Gyges’ “six things,” since I’m a big boy and have my own arbitrary number of boxes to use.
I’ll start with the formal viewpoints first. We can imagine this as something of a spectrum, as there’s often degrees of overlap and questions of focus rather than completely incompatible differences.
1. Qualia is the subjective and experiential qualities within mental states. They’re what gives red “redness,” why pain has that particular character of being painful. In this sense, philosophers talking about qualia aren’t just ignoring naturalistic or biological understanding of what happens – they’re inferring what presumably has to exist that bridges the gap between objective and subjective states.
2. Qualia is what explains the “what it’s like” of an experience. This is often considered to be Nagel’s viewpoint in “What It Like to Be a Bat?”, though the specific word isn’t in the paper. He’s explicitly skeptical of the idea that we’ll ever find an objective, scientific account for such things like qualia. In fact, since he argues that we’ll never be able to fully adopt and embody the unique point of view from other beings in which to gather experience, there must be limits to the human mind.
3. Qualia is something that has various technical properties: things like intrinsic nature, ineffability, private function, and direct apprehensibility – but there’s no agreement on which are essential and which aren’t
4. Qualia within the space of information integration or computational properties. This edges into IIT, naturally. In this conception, the “redness” of red is instantiated as a certain shape of mathematical structure, which constrains past and future states within an abstract space.
In addition to this, there’s various more colloquial ideas of qualia. Sometimes people use it just to mean:
Subjective experiences or feelings
All the qualitative bits of sensation and perception
Consciousness writ large
Reportable subjective states, particularly in more neuroscientific domains
Then you have skeptical critiques of qualia as traditionally defined – that is, as a sort of fundament underlying subjective experience. Daniel Dennett is probably the most notable figure in Western philosophy when it comes to this skepticism. His viewpoint is thoroughly deflationary; he argues that what has been called qualia is really a lot of dispositions and discriminative abilities that we’ve mistakenly framed as a “something” with discrete properties. In fancier terminology, Dennett argues that we’ve been reifying all these dispositions into an assumed ground, and without good basis.
Deconstructing Dennett
Dennet is, in my opinion, quite clever in these regards, and he deserves a full account. Let’s unpack.
Dennett identifies various properties as vital to how we come up with qualia, and offers his own alternatives:
First, there’s our dispositions to discriminate. Dennett argues that rather than having a private access to ‘redness’ and ‘blueness’ qualia, what we really have are dispositional and semantic tendencies to sort objects into various buckets, even relatively arbitrary ones so long as a certain productivity is maintained. That discrimination is itself the big deal; there’s no need for qualia to be involved as a concept.
Second, there’s our reactive dispositions. When you touch your hand to a hot stove and pull it back, it creates reactive memories and alterations of behavior, as well as the obvious pain sensations in the first place. Dennett, again, finds the concatenation to itself be meaningful, and rejects qualia as performing any additional explanatory work.
Third, along with our dispositions to discriminate we have dispositions in reporting – underlying discriminative states and accretions of those states dispose us to say that a strawberry tastes sweet or that the color red looks like red.
Fourth, Dennett argues our dispositions toward memory and recognition entrench an illusion of qualitative properties. When we recognize the same color consistently and compare experiences across time, we mistakenly presume that there must be a “there” underneath.
This all ties into Dennett’s conception of “multiple drafts” within the brain. Dennett rejects what he calls the “Cartesian theater,” a claimed presupposition in dualist philosophy of mind of an inner seat, or a stage, where conscious experience occurs. Instead, he proposes that what’s really happening with the mind is a complex series of distributed and parallel processes that compete for influential dominance. There’s no convergence to any fixed point, and the processes that “win out” depend on how the brain as a system is asked to report. Basically, when you see and conceptualize a scarlet red dress, visual processes and dispositions predominate, influencing our discriminative and reporting dispositions toward all of the connections that ripple out from the pattern-matching to “scarlet,” “red” and “dress.”
We can observe a few things from Dennett’s approach. First is that it’s strikingly processualist, though he doesn’t believe in process to the metaphysical degree of reality being fundamentally processual, like Alfred North Whitehead once did. It’s also very much materialist and yet functionalist/computationalist – Dennett, crucially, doesn’t think humans hold some fundamentally special claim to consciousness and subjective experience. In fact, he’s quite unimpressed with phenomenology as especially meaningful or diagnostic to begin with. However, he does think that there really needs to be something like a multiple drafts model, regardless of whether the person operating through it is made of carbon, silicon, or anything else. This all puts him at a lot of fascinating odd angles to traditional analytic philosophy and beyond.
Thanks to these angles and his skill in expression, Dennett is both a very famous and influential philosopher of mind and one of the most controversial. In order to present a fairer account of qualia, we should go through the most common objections to Dennett’s trains of thought.
David Chalmers, the original proponent of the hard problem of consciousness – i.e. “why do we have phenomenal consciousness/subjective experience/qualia as traditionally considered?” – in his 1996 book The Conscious Mind considers this all to be a bunch of intellectual jumping through hoops. In fact, Chalmers accuses Dennett of effectively denying consciousness altogether by reducing it down to material processes. (Page 190, in the Oxford publication, for those curious.) In Chalmers’ eyes, there is an impenetrable barrier between third person physical and functional descriptions of the mind and the first person, phenomenal, experiential qualities that one recognizes within their own.
The late John Searle argued that Dennett’s disinterest in subjectivity as meaningful, and his primacy of computational approaches, is based on false assumptions. To Dennett, the scientific endeavor is objective in goal and mindset, and therefore phenomenology must be inherently unscientific. To Searle, this is a straightforward category error; science is epistemically objective, concerned with measurement to establish truth, but ontologically subjective, being happy to categorize whole fields around subjective experiences like pain, pleasure, anxiety, or grief. He reiterates Chalmer’s claim that Dennett is essentially denying consciousness as what it actually seems to be within the first person, which renders his whole reasoning as inapplicable to the subject at hand. (See: “’The Mystery of Consciousness’: An Exchange”, in the New York Review of Books.)
Dennett has also explicitly critiqued Thomas Nagel’s bat paper in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, and held that anything meaningful about a bat’s consciousness really rather must be capable of being observed in a third-person manner so long as there’s sufficient complexity of scientific understanding and measurement, which we may simply not happen to have yet.
So where does this lead us? Well, first off, this blog does need a practical way to treat the concept of qualia, even if I'm not inclined to think in a qualia-focused mindset. My position is that qualia can be a useful term for the experiential qualities of subjective experience but cannot be true when seen as a metaphysical or fundamental necessity of consciousness.
Why?
Mainly because if viewed metaphysically or fundamentally, qualia as traditionally considered by Nagel and Chalmers becomes logically incoherent. Our inference that there must be a bridge between subjective and objective experience is itself a dualist assumption that does not stand up to scrutiny. Pure objectivity in the world is impossible, because there’s no way to “step outside” of our own bundles of concepts and suppositions in order to have any idea what the world must “really” be. Yet pure subjectivity, absolute relativism, is similarly incoherent – I can’t walk into the street at a red traffic light just because I think vehicular traffic accidents are all just frames of mind. Reality can be said to occur at consistent patterns in which multiple minds, perceiving within their own first person, see various slices of.
Is this “just” dissolving the hard question? I think, to be honest, it’s rejecting the question as malformed. When we set up a problem like “how does objectivity lead to subjectivity?”, we treat the two poles as fundamentally opposed, mutually exclusive conceptual opposites. But if both subjectivity and objectivity have meaning, then they’re both must be correlative in some way, even if we can’t quite pinpoint what’s necessarily being correlated to. Classical logic can’t cover what we’re trying to cover when we speak of such things. So what can? That’s a topic for a future blog post.
Future Extra Readings will cover: the Hard Problem of Consciousness more directly; Dennett’s multiple drafts model of consciousness; and Searle’s Chinese Room.
- Chance Chapman
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